Telegram Disables 'Misused' Features As CEO Faces Criminal Charges (theverge.com) 33
Following the arrest of its CEO Pavel Durov last month, the encrypted messaging service said it has disabled some "outdated" and "misused" features used by anonymous users. The Verge reports: The first changes to the app following his arrest in France last month affect its built-in blog posts and a "People Nearby" location-based feature. [...] Durov's first post-arrest statement Thursday said, "Telegram's abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That's why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard." He also said that during the four-day interview after his arrest, "I was told I may be personally responsible for other people's illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn't receive responses from Telegram."
Telegram has since reworked some of its language surrounding private chats and moderation and followed up with these new updates. It's also adding Star giveaways and enabling a reading mode for its in-app browser. "While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities creates a bad image for the entire platform," Durov's message says. "That's why this year we are committed to turn moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise."
Durov says the service has stopped new media uploads to its standalone blogging tool, Telegraph, because it was "misused by anonymous actors." Telegram has also removed its People Nearby feature, which lets you find and message other users in your area. Durov says the feature has "had issues with bots and scammers" and was only used by less than 0.1 percent of users. Telegram will replace this feature with "Businesses Nearby" instead, allowing "legitimate, verified businesses" to display products and accept payments.
Telegram has since reworked some of its language surrounding private chats and moderation and followed up with these new updates. It's also adding Star giveaways and enabling a reading mode for its in-app browser. "While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities creates a bad image for the entire platform," Durov's message says. "That's why this year we are committed to turn moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise."
Durov says the service has stopped new media uploads to its standalone blogging tool, Telegraph, because it was "misused by anonymous actors." Telegram has also removed its People Nearby feature, which lets you find and message other users in your area. Durov says the feature has "had issues with bots and scammers" and was only used by less than 0.1 percent of users. Telegram will replace this feature with "Businesses Nearby" instead, allowing "legitimate, verified businesses" to display products and accept payments.
use Signal instead (Score:5, Informative)
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It doesn't really matter if you use it from a cell phone because the platform is backdoored for the carrier out of the gate.
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Stick your head in the sand if you want but end-to-end encryption is worthless if your endpoint is compromised. If you really need something mobile then ditch the phone and install a cell modem hat on a raspberry pi. Then there are no backdoors because you'll have built no backdoors.
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That depends on what one needs it for.
Signal is very featureless compared to Telegram. The closest alternative, almost on the same level of functionality, would be Discord, but at the same cost of not being end-to-end encrypted, and also overall more expensive, as some features available in Telegram's free tier require payment on Discord.
If one uses Telegram knowing full well its content is stored in plain text on their servers, and not using it for anything they want to keep secret, seeing it more as an op
Whatever he can do to flee France, he will. (Score:2, Interesting)
One wonders what kind of backdoor and other kowtowing t
Re:Whatever he can do to flee France, he will. (Score:5, Informative)
If it'd been some basement hacker the guy would have already been thrown in the deepest dungeon
Example of sentencing of basement hackers in France. You can see that French justice is not overly repressive; those who did not flee the country before trial were sentenced to parole.
* "Prosox" sentenced to 4 months of parole for defacing a website https://www.dalloz-actualite.f... [dalloz-actualite.fr]
* "Y4nn0x" "Yannox" (Yanni O.) sentenced to 3 years of parole for swatting Ubisoft, attacking Fuse III (Minecraft owner), and attacking the remote classroom system used in French schools https://gettotext.com/imprison... [gettotext.com]
* "Ulcan" (Grégory Chelli) sentenced in absentia to 2 years in jail for quite a number swattings and defacings. One os his phone hoax victim died of a heart attack (I think, upon learning that his son was dead -- the hoax). Currently lives in Israel (he's free). https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
* Augustin Inzirillo, author of NuclearBot, TinyNuke (sextorsion / medical malwares) sentenced in absentia to 1.5 year in jail and 1.5 years of parole. Currently lives in Abkhazia (the Russian-controlled secessionist region of Georgia) (he's free) https://www.securitynewspaper.... [securitynewspaper.com] https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/... [lemonde.fr]
I put some context links in English (but not all include the sentencing, which was only reported in French news).
Re: Whatever he can do to flee France, he will. (Score:1, Redundant)
Vandalism and swatting are one thing, but in Europe, thought crimes are another matter.
Besides, vandalism is usually used to mark certain celebratory events in France. Like for example, the French celebrate New Year's by setting other people's cars on fire:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]
As you can see, it's a decades-old tradition.
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What through crime has Durov been accused of?
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What through crime has Durov been accused of?
Enabling the lower-classes to communicate without the supervision of the ruling class. Also known as Child Porn.
It used to be a crime for slaves to learn to read, for fear that they could be influenced by information the master did not want them to know, or have thoughts the master did not want them to have. Like having sex with white women.
Replace slaves with non wealthy citizens and white women with children, and now you have the justification for the global
Re: Whatever he can do to flee France, he will. (Score:2)
Not sure what any of the property crimes have to do with Durov. This vandalism is generally not deadly. France is generally a much more peaceful country than the US when you consider all forms of violence.
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Unless you happen to be an elderly Jewish holocaust survivor. In which case you've got a great chance of being murdered and your killer being allowed to go free.
Re: Whatever he can do to flee France, he will. (Score:2)
"used by criminals" (Score:3)
Re: "used by criminals" (Score:2)
All those can be tapped, videotaped, tracked, etc. Not that I'm defending either party, just pointing out the difference.
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It is one thing for it to be possible to follow the delivery driver and quite another to force the delivery driver to carrying tracking so a police state can easily invade the privacy of those eating pizza on a whim.
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I assume you mean another good thing since privacy is good and any failures at law enforcement are just the cost of living in a free society.
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What a ridiculous notion. To pretend that all law enforcement is good and just doesn't merely fly in the face of examples in recorded history it runs counter to EVERY historical government in recorded history.
Our nation [the US] wouldn't exist if criminals hadn't found the tools to evade law enforcement and organize resistance. A government should be tolerated only to the degree is needed to prevent enough chaos to enable someone to accumulate power and become [de facto or de jure] government. Beyond that i
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"A place where they freely rape all the women and take their kids for soldiers."
In such a place; those are the actions of government and those they shoot for resisting them are the criminals. It is you who is claiming that shooting them 'law enforcement' is good and the ability to successfully resist them is bad.
Government is collective force used to infringe on the freedom of individuals. Law enforcement is the means by which government imposes it's will upon individuals. Anyone who does something other th
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Who said anything about 'wrong?' Most of what the state does and therefore has police enforce is 'wrong.'
Personally, since I'm doing nothing wrong I'll stick with assuming all parties who consider using force against me hostile and reserve all my options by actively securing, protecting, and obscuring all my information and communications so I can reserve judgement on what is right or wrong and I wish to cooperate with for myself.
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"Except you enjoy their protection just the same, because it's their job."
Indeed but I'm talking about law enforcement as a force and function to build a free society house of cards, not police officers.
Police officers ARE just doing their jobs for the most part and have gotten way too hard a time for it lately. At least here in the US. I'm looking at an example of some NFL player for the Dolphins who was completely out of line with police just today.
I'm saying there are good reasons jaywalking isn't legal.
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"Imagine machines mining through communications for the last 20 years and charging every mother who sent a grandmother a pic of her baby's wrinkly bum being charged with federal crimes for child pornography and every associated crime of using communications networks to facilitate a crime/etc."
Machines don't have common sense and our legal system would convict those moms and grannies. They are guilty under the law. You certainly don't see any common sense from toll enforcement and traffic cameras.
We currentl
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As compared to... the postal service (Score:3)
After thinking long and hard about it, the government view in a lot of countries is that a Internet message app should be viewed as a postal service.
Which include police scanning, drug forfeiture, customs and toll, and end to end being under national claim.
The tl:dr of this case is that by making a P2P message app, making it mainstream, you end up in a situation where you could upset some rather lumbering and slow organizations.
Its also easier to take on high profile targets, than to deal with the culture that causes a lot of the scandals to take hold in society.