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Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app

229 points by noxer 5y ago

noxer 5y ago
There was recently comments about this with questionable reasoning. There is an official statement now so everyone can make their own educated opinion. Please don't start a "telegram is not encrypted by default" shitstorm like in every other comment section about anything related to Telegram.
- peakaboo 5y ago
  100% this. People sitting in their WhatsApps and Facebook messangers, not understanding why someone would like to use a better chat client because it's actually better, and also because your data doesn't end up at Google or Facebook. Probably ends up at the nsa though. But I care more about not being a product of Google.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    WhatsApp does have pretty good E2E encryption though. Its weak point were the backups. They were encrypted but the key was with WhatsApp and the data with Google or Apple. All a friendly secret government request away. Of course you can turn off backups but you don't know whether everyone in your group does. However they have recently started to shore this up too. You can now choose to keep the key yourself. Of course you still don't know whether everyone in your chat group does this.. But even the alternative password method is much safer than before. According to FB it's stored in a HSM. Yes, we have to take their word for it. But if you use the numeric key only you will have it (and thus no way to recover the data which is a normal consequence of good encryption) WhatsApp still leaks data for sure. Like all your contacts (even non WhatsApp users), and all your metadata, like when you're talking to whom. But the content is pretty safe there IMO. Surprisingly so for Facebook. I don't like using it very much either but I'm Europe we simply don't have a choice. I limit its access to my contacts and photos by running it inside a 'work profile' on Android. Messenger is a different story of course.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  I think for open group chats it doesn't really matter. Because anyone can join anyway. Nobody complains that IRC isn't E2E encrypted and still many people use it every day :) That usecase doesn't benefit from it at all. For closed (invite only) group chats and 1:1 chats I think it should be encrypted by default though. Like WA and Signal. There's the secret chats of course but they only work on one device and not on group chats. Of course key management is hard in those cases but the others have worked around this very well. I agree that encryption issue doesn't really have any bearing on this bot ban though. This thing wasn't really about surveillance. But the best way to make this appear in the comments is Telegram fixing it :) Edit: FWIW I really like Telegram because they're open to integration with other networks (eg Matrix) and that they actually allow and embrace bots. But it would be so much better if they did have E2E.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    I trust Telegram E2E implementation more, than Whatsapp. I'm sure that there are no cloud backups (for me and for other person), I'm sure that there's no sync happening (any sync is potential threat to security). All data stays on device and that's about it. It's true end-to-end. Whatsapp and Signal implementations are not End to End. They're something like User to User or Account to Account, with some encrypted copies floating around. They have many ends. That blurs responsibilities. I hope that their implementation will stay as it is. I'm all for implementing better security for ordinary chats, but they should keep secret chats feature as a restricted high-security channel.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      The 'many ends' are really needed to make E2E viable IMO. It's the #1 reason I rarely use the secret chats in Telegram. And if a security feature has so many drawbacks that nobody uses it, you end up with less security. I'd rather have a flawed E2E implementation than one that is not used at all. For example I recently sent passwords to our Makerspace users in secret chats but half of them didn't see them because they were either on another device or they weren't online (also seems to be a requirement for secret chats). So many of them asked to 'stop being difficult' and send them in a normal chat. This is what I mean. And those people are mostly geeks. If they give up on it, what will normal people do? If it's not seamless enough, only us crypto geeks will use it and the rest will roll their eyes. It has to work for grandma just as easy as it does for us. And Signal and WhatsApp do really pull that off. I agree that backups were WhatsApp's weak spot but they are making some good modifications that allow users to store the key themselves. It would help if the key management could be checked though.. I totally agree with you there. Right now it's not transparent enough, even for those of us who know what they're doing it's not really possible to check with WhatsApp. Signal is another story as it's open source.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
webmobdev 5y ago
> First, without support from Apple and Google, any fight with a local regulator is lost before it starts ... Our website that hosts Telegram Web and the standalone Telegram app for Android would be blocked by local telecoms in a matter of minutes. Even existing users would lose access to Telegram once Apple and Google turn off notifications for the app (which are used not only to deliver messages to users, but also to distribute unblocked IP addresses and dodge censorship). > Some users wish Telegram was 100% independent from everyone and could ignore Apple, Google and national laws of all countries. I also wish it was possible. But the reality we live in is different. I have warned the public many times of the danger that the Apple/Google duopoly poses for freedom of speech. And, as I wrote in August, the world is becoming more pro-censorship in general, with even democratic countries changing their definitions of free speech due to concerns of election interference from geopolitical rivals. This is the main issue - BigTech have grown too big and have too much influence now on politics since the US decided to sub-contract intelligence gathering and surveillance to them (as Snowden revealed). The author is right that democratic countries are now increasingly becoming pro-censorship and have an anti-privacy attitude.
- echelon 5y ago
  Who is downvoting you? We should never support censorship or the erosion of privacy. Preservation of these two is essential for our democracy and freedom.
  - echelon 5y ago
    I've just lost the ability to edit posts. I was in the middle of an edit to add more commentary, and it failed. This hasn't ever happened to me on HN before. Can a moderator explain what is going on or why I'm being targeted? Edit button is completely gone on the above post. https://i.imgur.com/BnYuqx6.jpg https://i.imgur.com/BnYuqx6.jpg
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      HN has a time limit on how long you can edit posts after they go up - its not special its for everyone. You'd know about it but HN also has terrible design in terms of telling users what the heck is going on.
echelon 5y ago
This is why apps suck. Steve Jobs got us into this mess by trying to monopolize the iPhone processor (and only allowed the web to bootstrap his platform). Complete control can be strong armed by dictators, and our spineless capitalists will bend to their will. The W3C needs to develop a standard for non-DOM, immediate mode painted, fully WASM apps that can access all of a device's hardware. Storage, cameras, network, GPS, multithreading, gyros, all of it. Native apps over web. We need a web-based drive by app that we can run sandboxed and install without the Apple/Google duopoly, and the US, EU, and Asia need to mandate support. Edit: downvoters, seriously, we need to talk. You're walking the evil line.
- Labo333 5y ago
  Totally agree. Web apps are actually more efficient in the long run because there are so many apps people use infrequently and yet use storage and receive updates.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  I could go along with the idea of it, but the idea of the US mandating what I'd have to include in a browser is a bridge too far for me. If the US, EU, and Asia (like, all of Asia, en bloc?) want features, they can develop 'em themselves.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  What's even the point in making native apps work over the web? Just use native apps, period. You can install native applications on most operating systems already (iOS notably lacking support for persistent "sideloading"). If you want, I'm sure you can cross-compile WASM into some kind of native application or even just leverage a WebView component to make your "app" an HTML page with just a <canvas>. All of this is already possible today, and yet this problem still persists. Open access to your own hardware is important, but it doesn't solve political problems like these. Web applications can quickly be blocked by censors as China and Russia have shown. The technology arms race doesn't solve the political root cause of the problem.
  - echelon 5y ago
achikin 5y ago
Second, this particular demand of the Russian authorities wasn't obviously unconstitutional, as they referred to a law that restricts campaigning after people start casting their votes. The problem is that according to the recent federal law - campaigning ban does not apply in case when voting lasts for several days.
- twelve40 5y ago
  yes it does, they just removed an extra day before that, here is a link: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4800223 https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4800223
atomicusit 5y ago
As HN'sers would say, "Google/Apple are private companies and allowed to deplatform whomever they wish. Just start your own App Store"
cnst 5y ago
A very objective article, actually, and goes well to explain how this request to block the "voting app" isn't at all as controversial as portrayed in the Western MSM: > Second, this particular demand of the Russian authorities wasn't obviously unconstitutional, as they referred to a law that restricts campaigning after people start casting their votes. Laws against political campaigning while voting is underway exist in many countries and the Russian counterpart had been introduced a long time ago. Had we received a similar demand from any European country, we would have complied with it. On the contrary, had Russia or any other country demanded something that is in clear violation of human rights, we would rather face an outright ban of Telegram in that country than compromise our values.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  But Telegram doesn't distribute apps, they blocked a "user" related to the app from using their network. The article does seem very reasonable, but I'd disagree that it's objective, since the author, Durov, runs Telegram and is writing to justify their actions.
  - raman162 5y ago
    Not the OP but I would say it's "objective" from telegrams perspective. They shared their decision making process which I agreed with, not too sure what would have been a better choice in that situation.
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      > it's "objective" from telegrams perspective. that's another way to say subjective if you aren't willing to admit it. the whole point of objective/subjective is that its supposed to be POV neutral.
      - cnst 5y ago
        How's it not objective, though? What if the request came from the EU or the US, to ban an account that was campaigning in local elections in violation of local election finance laws? Note that the ban is not even permanent! It's only for the last 2 days of the 3-day voting window. Campaigning was supposed to have been illegal throughout the whole 3-day period.
jefftk 5y ago
This is why the web is so important: no app stores to pressure. It looks to be like this particular telegram bot could have been a web site?
- raman162 5y ago
  The web is not open for everyone some countries block certain traffic. I guess one can use a VPN, thankfully that's becoming more mainstream.
- timmit 5y ago
  If the app is a website or a webapp. I am pretty sure the pressure will be given to the host and domain register.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  A website which would get blocked instantaneously. Russia has an extensive censorship toolset available. They've blanket blocked a whole range of Cloudflare IPs at some point because they wanted a certain website behind Cloudflare shut down and didn't care about the collateral damage. Of course, such a block is easy to circumvent with a VPN, but if you need a VPN to access it then the service is essentially unavailable to non-techs, greatly reducing its effectiveness. There is a website[0] and I don't know why they didn't just launch a similar web app. Running on Google's appspot.com, the website would probably be dealt with the same way the apps were dealt with. No big hosting company (Amazon, Google, OVH, you name it) wants to risk being banned from the Russian internet, after all. A TOR hidden service would probably survive attempts at censorship, but at that point the whole effort is probably not worth the effort because you're not reaching many people locking the information behind TOR. [0]: https://votesmart.appspot.com/ https://votesmart.appspot.com/
  - jefftk 5y ago
    If your adversary is happy to block arbitrary network requests, why do they need to get the app removed from the app store? Can't they just block all requests it makes?
raman162 5y ago
I understand their choice, their hands were tied by the distributors; apple and Google. At least for Android phones they make it easy to sideload an apk so I'm little less empathetic on that end but for iOS, you're pretty much at the mercy of apple.
keleftheriou 5y ago
Twitter is currently blocking the sharing of this post: https://twitter.com/keleftheriou/status/1441875098810519558?s=20 https://twitter.com/keleftheriou/status/1441875098810519558?...
- tandav 5y ago
  Twitter blocks telegra.ph links for the last 3 years
  - keleftheriou 5y ago
    Thanks. Turns out graph.org links are not blocked and can be used instead.
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    A friend recently wanted to post something anonymously. Turns out that finding a webhost depends on having an email address, and email hosts depend on having a phone number, and phone numbers depend on a payment mechanism and - in case of prepaid - a government ID needs to be shown. Telegra.ph seems to be one of the few places where you can (with a reasonable amount of markup) just post things at will. I didn't know it was censored on popular media, that's an interesting twist to the degree to which you can still anonymously post things online.
    - cnst 5y ago
      Looks like telegra.ph link are shadowbanned from Reddit, too.
    - noxer 5y ago
      You can use use one of the web archive services to get a url to share if Telegraph is blocked. By combining the 2 services you can get what you want without identification.
- deleted 5y ago
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axpy906 5y ago
From the looks of it both Android and Apple have a great deal of power, even for Telegram.
vldchk 5y ago
Here is the thing: Durov lies. There is no law in Russia which forces him to ban that channel, and no concept of “silent days” anymore. Russian authorities has NEVER asked Telegram to remove anything. They pushed Google and Apple to remove links to Navalny application from search and from Apple Store (and Apple removes it only for Russia users, btw, unlike Telegram removes it for everyone), and Telegram was absolutely never in the picture and never asked to do a thing publicly. Just search Russian authorities speakers. They never bring Telegram into the picture. Durov shamelessly lies. He pretends his application is a speech freedom, but it is not. When there was a Telegram channel posting information about Belarus policemen who torture their own people — they ban it. When there is still a channel where white men posting personal details of women and attack them — no action. Why Durov lies? Because after SEC issued a claim that TON is a security and killed TON as a project, he owed ton of money to investors, including American. He had a real risk of being sued. Where did he find money to pay investors back? He found them in Dubai, Qatar and Russia. He issued Telegram bonds and buyers of those bonds are affiliated with Russia structures like VTB Capital bank or Russian Government investment fund named “Russian Fund of Direct Investments”. Moreover, few years ago, Russian authorities tried to ban Telegram. There was a massive campaign against the application, but then all things I mentioned happened, and SURPRISE Russia officially removed Telegram from the list of inappropriate applications and stoped attempts to ban it. Even now after the election, Russia published a list of websites whom they are going to ban because they didn’t stop spread of Navalny information. There WhatsApp and Viber in the list. But no Telegram. For me it sounds very very directly: Durov lies. He takes money from Russia government to cover his costs from TON failure and in return he, for example, bans Navalny Telegram Bot even while he a) wasn’t asked; b) Apple and Google wasn’t asked to ask Telegram; c) law he mentioned doesn’t exist anymore. There is no more free Telegram. Remove it now and stay safe
- seniorivn 5y ago
  >and buyers of those bonds are affiliated with Russia structures like VTB Capital bank or Russian Government investment fund named “Russian Fund of Direct Investments”. As far as i know, it's not true(meaning there are no signs/proof of that). It's entirely possible, durov does have connections in russian elite, after all he was the creator of vk.com russian most popular social network. Vk was owned by russian oligarchs most of it's life at least partly. At the end of durov involvement with vk, he had some harsh clashes with oligarchs/regime, but ended up making a deal(and got paid well, even if not as well as he should've been). So he certainly knows how to deal with them, but i seriously doubt he enjoyed it, so he must have been really desperate if he got in bed with them again. The biggest promise of telegram was that it would become a point of entrance to a decentralized economy based on TON blockchain and it's masternode hosted services. If they succeed to launch and than move telegram itself onto ton masternode hosting, telegram would've become the greatest/freest/(and potentially most secure, if they would implement e2ee key synchronization) messaging service ever End of TON project, ment an end of telegram's future as a not data harvesting company.
saurik 5y ago
Apple pushing requirements on apps is also (supposedly) why a lot of apps (such as Instagram, which had explicitly come out to blame Apple for this) banned content of women breastfeeding, as Apple (due to Steve Jobs: there is some interesting stuff you can find on this) is so puritan. You can also find tons of other examples of Apple's influence making decisions about what large numbers of people can experience, often without even realizing it is Apple pulling the strings, whether it be content about drugs, guns, or the use of sweat shops in the manufacturing of smart phones (a category of app I find particularly egregious for Apple to be censoring as it is so self-serving). The core problem is really that there is no alternative: if your app isn't allowed to be accepted by Apple, you simply don't get to address something like half of Americans with your product. Users generally don't own multiple phones and they can't take an extra trip to "visit" another phone for your product, so attempts to draw analogies to supermarkets or Walmart tend to be unhelpful. It is more akin to a physical region of the country... imagine more as if all Apple users happened to live West of the Mississippi River or whatever and you weren't allowed to sell there because they had a monopoly, and for users to use your product they have to take on massive switching costs (of moving across the country). This centralized bottleneck on software development and distribution then plays out in tons of ways, and tends to make Apple a patsy for local government interference. People like to claim "they have to follow local laws!"... but they didn't have to build a product that puts them in so much centralized control in the first place, as except for in the most authoritarian of regimes (such as North Korea) pretty much everywhere is ok with relatively open devices (such as computers or phones that support sideloading). Apple has thereby made an active choice to build a product that is bad for democracy around the world (including here in the west!) in no small part because it makes them a ton more money than one that they would have less centralized control over (and thereby manage to charge their extreme overheads on all use cases for)... this profits before people approach should be familiar, as it is also similar to the playbook used by Big Oil and Big Tobacco. And, as we see in situations like this, maybe that Google merely allows sideloading isn't sufficient, given how they actively discourage it with functionality barriers (alternative stores not supporting automatic updates), discouraging messaging (telling users that side loading is dangerous), complex activation paths (sometimes requiring switches in hidden developer-only settings panels), and even stronghanding users back into their happy path (such as with their anti-virus-like tool that tends to flag alternative stores as if some kind virus). We need to stop allowing this sort of behavior. If a company is doing something that puts them in a situation where they are making decisions to support authoritarian regimes, we should not only be morally judging them--and of course this includes everyone who works at these companies on these products: you don't get some moral pass for "merely" being a foot soldier if you have the skills to take on another job--but maybe putting in place laws that prevent our companies from tolerating these kinds of decisions. And again: this is not to say that "you are asking Apple to violate the laws of Russia" or "you are requiring Apple to not sell to Russia"... the laws in Russia or China or wherever we tend to be talking about when these issues come up do not make it illegal to sell a device that lets users install this software: Apple, and in a different (though I do think lesser, if only for being more indirect) way Google, have gone out of their way to build a product that puts them in that position. (To the extent to which anyone finds any of these thoughts interesting, I gave a talk at Mozilla Privacy Lab back four years ago on "That's How You Get a Dystopia", citing numerous examples of how centralized systems lead directly to the problem of gatekeepers either themselves becoming corrupt over time or being forced to corrupt themselves to satisfy external pressures, with numerous concrete examples--every slide is a citation--across the entire industry. The saddest part is that it feels like I am constantly writing down new examples of the issue I could use to make this long talk even longer, as this is a never-ending problem.) https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
That's an excellent article. I would love to see it used as a "template" for transparency articles by other providers.
deleted 5y ago
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Kinrany 5y ago
Regardless of whether these are the true reasons, Telegram being forced to ban a bot means Telegram can no longer be relied upon as a messenger. They have two options: 1. Find a way around relying on Apple and Google's blessings 2. Make it technically impossible for themselves to ban someone like this again
- noxer 5y ago
  They ban bots all the time. Bots are consider public and have to comply with telegrams ToS and to an extent with Apple/Googles ToS. Problems here mostly are related to illegal data, copyright infringement and adult content. If they could not remove such stuff Telegram would have long been shut down or at least kicked from all app stores. The same rules apply to any other app on the stores. No technical solution (encryption or whatever) would make this go away.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    > The same rules apply to any other app on the stores. So you can't sell a web browser that can access illegal copyright infringing adult content? I think they should remove all browsers then.
    - noxer 5y ago
      The browser does not host or provide content. Messengers like Telegram however do. Public telegram content can be found direct with telegrams in-app search. Also everyone knows that browsers are excluded form most of these store rules because reasons. Browsers dont have to pay a fee for ads shown either for obvious reasons. BTW you can use web.telegram.org to circumvent apple blocked content on telegram because this runs in a browser they dont have to comply with app store rules (for now). And you can use F-Droids Telegram Fork or the APK form telegram.org to circumvent googles blocked content. In case of a bot that is turned off however this does not help because its turned off at the backed.
deleted 5y ago
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cunidev 5y ago
While Telegram is seen as a "wild west" of free speech by many, its centralization and worrying lack of encryption for most "non-secret" chats is something to keep in mind when reading Durov's passionate claims. - https://www.wired.com/story/telegram-encryption-whatsapp-settings/ https://www.wired.com/story/telegram-encryption-whatsapp-set... - https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/amp/multiple-encryption-flaws-uncovered-in-telegram-messaging-protocol https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/amp/multiple-encryption-f... Also, the optional E2EE encryption is way more limited (e.g., single-device, rather than having a key sharing mechanism) than most other, possibly more genuine, alternatives (Matrix, Signal). - https://telegram.org/faq#:~:text=Remember%20that%20Telegram%20secret%20chats,same%20contact%20as%20you%20like https://telegram.org/faq#:~:text=Remember%20that%20Telegram%....
- EGreg 5y ago
  I would pick encrypted Telegram over Signal anyday, but I believe that decentralized solutions with open source backends, like MaidSAFE, Freenet, and to some extent Matrix.org are the future.
  - vfclists 5y ago
    Matrix share metadata by default. Count them out. And they have no desire to switch from their Python based server.
    - bilal4hmed 5y ago
      arent they building servers in Go and Rust ? https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/conduit https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/conduit https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite
      - vfclists 5y ago
        Dendrite is their own project. Conduit is the project of another guy they don't get on with it. The Python server is a memory hog, and instead of rewriting it in a more performant language they have decided to scale horizontally instead. How is that feasible for the average guy who wants to run it on the their own server? https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-scalability https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-sca... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16747174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16747174 After a $30 million funding round we should be seeing a lot better from them in the next few years. That python server ought to go.
areoform 5y ago
I am somewhat confused by the argument offered here. Providing an application that helps voters to decide whom they can choose to vote for, or who the alternative candidates are in an election is not the same as campaigning. From what I've found so far, I disagree with this interpretation. It's as if saying that publishing a list of people with their stances on a particular policy is the same as campaigning for them. It's not. By this metric, a website like isidewith is campaigning, https://www.isidewith.com/ https://www.isidewith.com/, as are voting guides that help voters pick out candidates who back action on Climate Change, https://voteclimatepac.org/voters-guide/ https://voteclimatepac.org/voters-guide/, or who are pro/anti-2A, https://www.nrapvf.org/grades/ https://www.nrapvf.org/grades/ / https://gunsensevoter.org/ https://gunsensevoter.org/ . Are these campaigning as well? Admittedly, the application differed from isidewith by focusing on a single issue - anti-totalitarianism, it did not do anything different that voteclimatepac, the NRA-PVF, Gun Sense Voter etc don't do. It was meant to match voters with candidates who already offer their preferred position - anti-totalitarianism. I don't see how this is campaigning. Further, the app wasn't affiliated with most of the people it was recommending. While it was designed by Navalny, it recommended people across multiple parties. This fact weakens the argument even further. Here is the app for you to judge for yourself, https://votesmart.appspot.com/ https://votesmart.appspot.com/ English translation: https://votesmart-appspot-com.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB&_x_tr_pto=nui,elem https://votesmart-appspot-com.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=auto&... As you will see, it doesn't advocate for a party or a candidate, but across parties and candidates based on a single issue - anti-totalitarianism. - While Telegram has taken a stand against the Russian govt. in the past, I do not believe that past action is necessarily predictive of future results in this regard. Given that the new Kremlin, in particular, is famous for bringing its opposition under their thumbs and turning them into controlled opposition. > With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern-art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hidden-author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hi... This assertion may seem conspiratorial. And it is. Though not guaranteed, it is well within the realm of possibility that the state leader bred by the KGB found ways to turn the screws on M. Durov to keep his hold on power. Given that he kills regularly for it. Should we consider it unlikely that he's willing to coerce others for it?
vfclists 5y ago
They should simply develop the app for the PinePhone
intricatedetail 5y ago
That's why we don't have side loading as a first class citizen. Our phones become leashes
xchip 5y ago
TL;DR: Apple and Google banned a Russian voting app due to local laws. Telegram has to follow rules set by Apple and Google in order to remain available to users on iOS and Android.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Were they threatened by Apple and Google directly? No. Are they much different from a web browser in the regard that you can access a web page (strike that) bot by navigating to a link?
mensetmanusman 5y ago
At least we can sleep peacefully knowing that Tim Cook will make another million by improving the lives of oppressive governments thwarting change by knee-capping the only modern tool of communication.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Also Pichai and of course Durov
nixpulvis 5y ago
> First, without support from Apple and Google, any fight with a local regulator is lost before it starts. More evidence of the problem plaguing our current era. These two companies simple should not be authorities above all local regulators.
- stiltzkin 5y ago
  Just as the era of Windows and OSX we need a good smartphone linux alternative.
igor_akhmetov 5y ago
What I don't get is why not make the blocked channel available for sideloaded APKs only? Telegram could then show an explanation on how to sideload the app and still comply with Google rules.
RostiB 5y ago
shame.
SergeAx 5y ago
This is at least partially bullshit. I have a sideloaded version of Telegram for Android, which is capable of auto-update itself and promoted as even more free speech compared to stores version. I also have a Windows desktop client, which works normally with adult content blocked on iOS client. Both of those clients blocked Smart Vote bot because my phone number is in Russia. At the same time all my non-Russian friends was able to freely use the bot all of the time.
kuschkufan 5y ago
uhhh, if I go to https://telegra.ph/ https://telegra.ph/ right now, I can publish a new post there without any authorisation. Heh. I guess I'd want to let them know, but how..
- neoromantique 5y ago
  You'd want to let them know that their service is functioning as expected? Okay.

229 points by noxer 5y ago

There was recently comments about this with questionable reasoning. There is an official statement now so everyone can make their own educated opinion. Please don't start a "telegram is not encrypted by default" shitstorm like in every other comment section about anything related to Telegram.

peakaboo 5y ago
100% this. People sitting in their WhatsApps and Facebook messangers, not understanding why someone would like to use a better chat client because it's actually better, and also because your data doesn't end up at Google or Facebook. Probably ends up at the nsa though. But I care more about not being a product of Google.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  WhatsApp does have pretty good E2E encryption though. Its weak point were the backups. They were encrypted but the key was with WhatsApp and the data with Google or Apple. All a friendly secret government request away. Of course you can turn off backups but you don't know whether everyone in your group does. However they have recently started to shore this up too. You can now choose to keep the key yourself. Of course you still don't know whether everyone in your chat group does this.. But even the alternative password method is much safer than before. According to FB it's stored in a HSM. Yes, we have to take their word for it. But if you use the numeric key only you will have it (and thus no way to recover the data which is a normal consequence of good encryption) WhatsApp still leaks data for sure. Like all your contacts (even non WhatsApp users), and all your metadata, like when you're talking to whom. But the content is pretty safe there IMO. Surprisingly so for Facebook. I don't like using it very much either but I'm Europe we simply don't have a choice. I limit its access to my contacts and photos by running it inside a 'work profile' on Android. Messenger is a different story of course.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
I think for open group chats it doesn't really matter. Because anyone can join anyway. Nobody complains that IRC isn't E2E encrypted and still many people use it every day :) That usecase doesn't benefit from it at all. For closed (invite only) group chats and 1:1 chats I think it should be encrypted by default though. Like WA and Signal. There's the secret chats of course but they only work on one device and not on group chats. Of course key management is hard in those cases but the others have worked around this very well. I agree that encryption issue doesn't really have any bearing on this bot ban though. This thing wasn't really about surveillance. But the best way to make this appear in the comments is Telegram fixing it :) Edit: FWIW I really like Telegram because they're open to integration with other networks (eg Matrix) and that they actually allow and embrace bots. But it would be so much better if they did have E2E.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  I trust Telegram E2E implementation more, than Whatsapp. I'm sure that there are no cloud backups (for me and for other person), I'm sure that there's no sync happening (any sync is potential threat to security). All data stays on device and that's about it. It's true end-to-end. Whatsapp and Signal implementations are not End to End. They're something like User to User or Account to Account, with some encrypted copies floating around. They have many ends. That blurs responsibilities. I hope that their implementation will stay as it is. I'm all for implementing better security for ordinary chats, but they should keep secret chats feature as a restricted high-security channel.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    The 'many ends' are really needed to make E2E viable IMO. It's the #1 reason I rarely use the secret chats in Telegram. And if a security feature has so many drawbacks that nobody uses it, you end up with less security. I'd rather have a flawed E2E implementation than one that is not used at all. For example I recently sent passwords to our Makerspace users in secret chats but half of them didn't see them because they were either on another device or they weren't online (also seems to be a requirement for secret chats). So many of them asked to 'stop being difficult' and send them in a normal chat. This is what I mean. And those people are mostly geeks. If they give up on it, what will normal people do? If it's not seamless enough, only us crypto geeks will use it and the rest will roll their eyes. It has to work for grandma just as easy as it does for us. And Signal and WhatsApp do really pull that off. I agree that backups were WhatsApp's weak spot but they are making some good modifications that allow users to store the key themselves. It would help if the key management could be checked though.. I totally agree with you there. Right now it's not transparent enough, even for those of us who know what they're doing it's not really possible to check with WhatsApp. Signal is another story as it's open source.
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webmobdev 5y ago

> First, without support from Apple and Google, any fight with a local regulator is lost before it starts ... Our website that hosts Telegram Web and the standalone Telegram app for Android would be blocked by local telecoms in a matter of minutes. Even existing users would lose access to Telegram once Apple and Google turn off notifications for the app (which are used not only to deliver messages to users, but also to distribute unblocked IP addresses and dodge censorship). > Some users wish Telegram was 100% independent from everyone and could ignore Apple, Google and national laws of all countries. I also wish it was possible. But the reality we live in is different. I have warned the public many times of the danger that the Apple/Google duopoly poses for freedom of speech. And, as I wrote in August, the world is becoming more pro-censorship in general, with even democratic countries changing their definitions of free speech due to concerns of election interference from geopolitical rivals. This is the main issue - BigTech have grown too big and have too much influence now on politics since the US decided to sub-contract intelligence gathering and surveillance to them (as Snowden revealed). The author is right that democratic countries are now increasingly becoming pro-censorship and have an anti-privacy attitude.

echelon 5y ago
Who is downvoting you? We should never support censorship or the erosion of privacy. Preservation of these two is essential for our democracy and freedom.
- echelon 5y ago
  I've just lost the ability to edit posts. I was in the middle of an edit to add more commentary, and it failed. This hasn't ever happened to me on HN before. Can a moderator explain what is going on or why I'm being targeted? Edit button is completely gone on the above post. https://i.imgur.com/BnYuqx6.jpg https://i.imgur.com/BnYuqx6.jpg
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    HN has a time limit on how long you can edit posts after they go up - its not special its for everyone. You'd know about it but HN also has terrible design in terms of telling users what the heck is going on.

echelon 5y ago

This is why apps suck. Steve Jobs got us into this mess by trying to monopolize the iPhone processor (and only allowed the web to bootstrap his platform). Complete control can be strong armed by dictators, and our spineless capitalists will bend to their will. The W3C needs to develop a standard for non-DOM, immediate mode painted, fully WASM apps that can access all of a device's hardware. Storage, cameras, network, GPS, multithreading, gyros, all of it. Native apps over web. We need a web-based drive by app that we can run sandboxed and install without the Apple/Google duopoly, and the US, EU, and Asia need to mandate support. Edit: downvoters, seriously, we need to talk. You're walking the evil line.

Labo333 5y ago
Totally agree. Web apps are actually more efficient in the long run because there are so many apps people use infrequently and yet use storage and receive updates.
kstrauser 5y ago
I could go along with the idea of it, but the idea of the US mandating what I'd have to include in a browser is a bridge too far for me. If the US, EU, and Asia (like, all of Asia, en bloc?) want features, they can develop 'em themselves.
jeroenhd 5y ago
What's even the point in making native apps work over the web? Just use native apps, period. You can install native applications on most operating systems already (iOS notably lacking support for persistent "sideloading"). If you want, I'm sure you can cross-compile WASM into some kind of native application or even just leverage a WebView component to make your "app" an HTML page with just a <canvas>. All of this is already possible today, and yet this problem still persists. Open access to your own hardware is important, but it doesn't solve political problems like these. Web applications can quickly be blocked by censors as China and Russia have shown. The technology arms race doesn't solve the political root cause of the problem.
- echelon 5y ago

achikin 5y ago

Second, this particular demand of the Russian authorities wasn't obviously unconstitutional, as they referred to a law that restricts campaigning after people start casting their votes. The problem is that according to the recent federal law - campaigning ban does not apply in case when voting lasts for several days.

twelve40 5y ago
yes it does, they just removed an extra day before that, here is a link: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4800223 https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4800223

atomicusit 5y ago

As HN'sers would say, "Google/Apple are private companies and allowed to deplatform whomever they wish. Just start your own App Store"

cnst 5y ago

A very objective article, actually, and goes well to explain how this request to block the "voting app" isn't at all as controversial as portrayed in the Western MSM: > Second, this particular demand of the Russian authorities wasn't obviously unconstitutional, as they referred to a law that restricts campaigning after people start casting their votes. Laws against political campaigning while voting is underway exist in many countries and the Russian counterpart had been introduced a long time ago. Had we received a similar demand from any European country, we would have complied with it. On the contrary, had Russia or any other country demanded something that is in clear violation of human rights, we would rather face an outright ban of Telegram in that country than compromise our values.

Y_Y 5y ago
But Telegram doesn't distribute apps, they blocked a "user" related to the app from using their network. The article does seem very reasonable, but I'd disagree that it's objective, since the author, Durov, runs Telegram and is writing to justify their actions.
- raman162 5y ago
  Not the OP but I would say it's "objective" from telegrams perspective. They shared their decision making process which I agreed with, not too sure what would have been a better choice in that situation.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    > it's "objective" from telegrams perspective. that's another way to say subjective if you aren't willing to admit it. the whole point of objective/subjective is that its supposed to be POV neutral.
    - cnst 5y ago
      How's it not objective, though? What if the request came from the EU or the US, to ban an account that was campaigning in local elections in violation of local election finance laws? Note that the ban is not even permanent! It's only for the last 2 days of the 3-day voting window. Campaigning was supposed to have been illegal throughout the whole 3-day period.

jefftk 5y ago

This is why the web is so important: no app stores to pressure. It looks to be like this particular telegram bot could have been a web site?

raman162 5y ago
The web is not open for everyone some countries block certain traffic. I guess one can use a VPN, thankfully that's becoming more mainstream.
timmit 5y ago
If the app is a website or a webapp. I am pretty sure the pressure will be given to the host and domain register.
jeroenhd 5y ago
A website which would get blocked instantaneously. Russia has an extensive censorship toolset available. They've blanket blocked a whole range of Cloudflare IPs at some point because they wanted a certain website behind Cloudflare shut down and didn't care about the collateral damage. Of course, such a block is easy to circumvent with a VPN, but if you need a VPN to access it then the service is essentially unavailable to non-techs, greatly reducing its effectiveness. There is a website[0] and I don't know why they didn't just launch a similar web app. Running on Google's appspot.com, the website would probably be dealt with the same way the apps were dealt with. No big hosting company (Amazon, Google, OVH, you name it) wants to risk being banned from the Russian internet, after all. A TOR hidden service would probably survive attempts at censorship, but at that point the whole effort is probably not worth the effort because you're not reaching many people locking the information behind TOR. [0]: https://votesmart.appspot.com/ https://votesmart.appspot.com/
- jefftk 5y ago
  If your adversary is happy to block arbitrary network requests, why do they need to get the app removed from the app store? Can't they just block all requests it makes?

raman162 5y ago

I understand their choice, their hands were tied by the distributors; apple and Google. At least for Android phones they make it easy to sideload an apk so I'm little less empathetic on that end but for iOS, you're pretty much at the mercy of apple.

keleftheriou 5y ago

Twitter is currently blocking the sharing of this post: https://twitter.com/keleftheriou/status/1441875098810519558?s=20 https://twitter.com/keleftheriou/status/1441875098810519558?...

tandav 5y ago
Twitter blocks telegra.ph links for the last 3 years
- keleftheriou 5y ago
  Thanks. Turns out graph.org links are not blocked and can be used instead.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  A friend recently wanted to post something anonymously. Turns out that finding a webhost depends on having an email address, and email hosts depend on having a phone number, and phone numbers depend on a payment mechanism and - in case of prepaid - a government ID needs to be shown. Telegra.ph seems to be one of the few places where you can (with a reasonable amount of markup) just post things at will. I didn't know it was censored on popular media, that's an interesting twist to the degree to which you can still anonymously post things online.
  - cnst 5y ago
    Looks like telegra.ph link are shadowbanned from Reddit, too.
  - noxer 5y ago
    You can use use one of the web archive services to get a url to share if Telegraph is blocked. By combining the 2 services you can get what you want without identification.
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axpy906 5y ago

From the looks of it both Android and Apple have a great deal of power, even for Telegram.

vldchk 5y ago

Here is the thing: Durov lies. There is no law in Russia which forces him to ban that channel, and no concept of “silent days” anymore. Russian authorities has NEVER asked Telegram to remove anything. They pushed Google and Apple to remove links to Navalny application from search and from Apple Store (and Apple removes it only for Russia users, btw, unlike Telegram removes it for everyone), and Telegram was absolutely never in the picture and never asked to do a thing publicly. Just search Russian authorities speakers. They never bring Telegram into the picture. Durov shamelessly lies. He pretends his application is a speech freedom, but it is not. When there was a Telegram channel posting information about Belarus policemen who torture their own people — they ban it. When there is still a channel where white men posting personal details of women and attack them — no action. Why Durov lies? Because after SEC issued a claim that TON is a security and killed TON as a project, he owed ton of money to investors, including American. He had a real risk of being sued. Where did he find money to pay investors back? He found them in Dubai, Qatar and Russia. He issued Telegram bonds and buyers of those bonds are affiliated with Russia structures like VTB Capital bank or Russian Government investment fund named “Russian Fund of Direct Investments”. Moreover, few years ago, Russian authorities tried to ban Telegram. There was a massive campaign against the application, but then all things I mentioned happened, and SURPRISE Russia officially removed Telegram from the list of inappropriate applications and stoped attempts to ban it. Even now after the election, Russia published a list of websites whom they are going to ban because they didn’t stop spread of Navalny information. There WhatsApp and Viber in the list. But no Telegram. For me it sounds very very directly: Durov lies. He takes money from Russia government to cover his costs from TON failure and in return he, for example, bans Navalny Telegram Bot even while he a) wasn’t asked; b) Apple and Google wasn’t asked to ask Telegram; c) law he mentioned doesn’t exist anymore. There is no more free Telegram. Remove it now and stay safe

seniorivn 5y ago
>and buyers of those bonds are affiliated with Russia structures like VTB Capital bank or Russian Government investment fund named “Russian Fund of Direct Investments”. As far as i know, it's not true(meaning there are no signs/proof of that). It's entirely possible, durov does have connections in russian elite, after all he was the creator of vk.com russian most popular social network. Vk was owned by russian oligarchs most of it's life at least partly. At the end of durov involvement with vk, he had some harsh clashes with oligarchs/regime, but ended up making a deal(and got paid well, even if not as well as he should've been). So he certainly knows how to deal with them, but i seriously doubt he enjoyed it, so he must have been really desperate if he got in bed with them again. The biggest promise of telegram was that it would become a point of entrance to a decentralized economy based on TON blockchain and it's masternode hosted services. If they succeed to launch and than move telegram itself onto ton masternode hosting, telegram would've become the greatest/freest/(and potentially most secure, if they would implement e2ee key synchronization) messaging service ever End of TON project, ment an end of telegram's future as a not data harvesting company.

saurik 5y ago

Apple pushing requirements on apps is also (supposedly) why a lot of apps (such as Instagram, which had explicitly come out to blame Apple for this) banned content of women breastfeeding, as Apple (due to Steve Jobs: there is some interesting stuff you can find on this) is so puritan. You can also find tons of other examples of Apple's influence making decisions about what large numbers of people can experience, often without even realizing it is Apple pulling the strings, whether it be content about drugs, guns, or the use of sweat shops in the manufacturing of smart phones (a category of app I find particularly egregious for Apple to be censoring as it is so self-serving). The core problem is really that there is no alternative: if your app isn't allowed to be accepted by Apple, you simply don't get to address something like half of Americans with your product. Users generally don't own multiple phones and they can't take an extra trip to "visit" another phone for your product, so attempts to draw analogies to supermarkets or Walmart tend to be unhelpful. It is more akin to a physical region of the country... imagine more as if all Apple users happened to live West of the Mississippi River or whatever and you weren't allowed to sell there because they had a monopoly, and for users to use your product they have to take on massive switching costs (of moving across the country). This centralized bottleneck on software development and distribution then plays out in tons of ways, and tends to make Apple a patsy for local government interference. People like to claim "they have to follow local laws!"... but they didn't have to build a product that puts them in so much centralized control in the first place, as except for in the most authoritarian of regimes (such as North Korea) pretty much everywhere is ok with relatively open devices (such as computers or phones that support sideloading). Apple has thereby made an active choice to build a product that is bad for democracy around the world (including here in the west!) in no small part because it makes them a ton more money than one that they would have less centralized control over (and thereby manage to charge their extreme overheads on all use cases for)... this profits before people approach should be familiar, as it is also similar to the playbook used by Big Oil and Big Tobacco. And, as we see in situations like this, maybe that Google merely allows sideloading isn't sufficient, given how they actively discourage it with functionality barriers (alternative stores not supporting automatic updates), discouraging messaging (telling users that side loading is dangerous), complex activation paths (sometimes requiring switches in hidden developer-only settings panels), and even stronghanding users back into their happy path (such as with their anti-virus-like tool that tends to flag alternative stores as if some kind virus). We need to stop allowing this sort of behavior. If a company is doing something that puts them in a situation where they are making decisions to support authoritarian regimes, we should not only be morally judging them--and of course this includes everyone who works at these companies on these products: you don't get some moral pass for "merely" being a foot soldier if you have the skills to take on another job--but maybe putting in place laws that prevent our companies from tolerating these kinds of decisions. And again: this is not to say that "you are asking Apple to violate the laws of Russia" or "you are requiring Apple to not sell to Russia"... the laws in Russia or China or wherever we tend to be talking about when these issues come up do not make it illegal to sell a device that lets users install this software: Apple, and in a different (though I do think lesser, if only for being more indirect) way Google, have gone out of their way to build a product that puts them in that position. (To the extent to which anyone finds any of these thoughts interesting, I gave a talk at Mozilla Privacy Lab back four years ago on "That's How You Get a Dystopia", citing numerous examples of how centralized systems lead directly to the problem of gatekeepers either themselves becoming corrupt over time or being forced to corrupt themselves to satisfy external pressures, with numerous concrete examples--every slide is a citation--across the entire industry. The saddest part is that it feels like I am constantly writing down new examples of the issue I could use to make this long talk even longer, as this is a never-ending problem.) https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

That's an excellent article. I would love to see it used as a "template" for transparency articles by other providers.

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Kinrany 5y ago

Regardless of whether these are the true reasons, Telegram being forced to ban a bot means Telegram can no longer be relied upon as a messenger. They have two options: 1. Find a way around relying on Apple and Google's blessings 2. Make it technically impossible for themselves to ban someone like this again

noxer 5y ago
They ban bots all the time. Bots are consider public and have to comply with telegrams ToS and to an extent with Apple/Googles ToS. Problems here mostly are related to illegal data, copyright infringement and adult content. If they could not remove such stuff Telegram would have long been shut down or at least kicked from all app stores. The same rules apply to any other app on the stores. No technical solution (encryption or whatever) would make this go away.
- deleted 5y ago
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- foxfluff 5y ago
  > The same rules apply to any other app on the stores. So you can't sell a web browser that can access illegal copyright infringing adult content? I think they should remove all browsers then.
  - noxer 5y ago
    The browser does not host or provide content. Messengers like Telegram however do. Public telegram content can be found direct with telegrams in-app search. Also everyone knows that browsers are excluded form most of these store rules because reasons. Browsers dont have to pay a fee for ads shown either for obvious reasons. BTW you can use web.telegram.org to circumvent apple blocked content on telegram because this runs in a browser they dont have to comply with app store rules (for now). And you can use F-Droids Telegram Fork or the APK form telegram.org to circumvent googles blocked content. In case of a bot that is turned off however this does not help because its turned off at the backed.

deleted 5y ago

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cunidev 5y ago

While Telegram is seen as a "wild west" of free speech by many, its centralization and worrying lack of encryption for most "non-secret" chats is something to keep in mind when reading Durov's passionate claims. - https://www.wired.com/story/telegram-encryption-whatsapp-settings/ https://www.wired.com/story/telegram-encryption-whatsapp-set... - https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/amp/multiple-encryption-flaws-uncovered-in-telegram-messaging-protocol https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/amp/multiple-encryption-f... Also, the optional E2EE encryption is way more limited (e.g., single-device, rather than having a key sharing mechanism) than most other, possibly more genuine, alternatives (Matrix, Signal). - https://telegram.org/faq#:~:text=Remember%20that%20Telegram%20secret%20chats,same%20contact%20as%20you%20like https://telegram.org/faq#:~:text=Remember%20that%20Telegram%....

EGreg 5y ago
I would pick encrypted Telegram over Signal anyday, but I believe that decentralized solutions with open source backends, like MaidSAFE, Freenet, and to some extent Matrix.org are the future.
- vfclists 5y ago
  Matrix share metadata by default. Count them out. And they have no desire to switch from their Python based server.
  - bilal4hmed 5y ago
    arent they building servers in Go and Rust ? https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/conduit https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/conduit https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite
    - vfclists 5y ago
      Dendrite is their own project. Conduit is the project of another guy they don't get on with it. The Python server is a memory hog, and instead of rewriting it in a more performant language they have decided to scale horizontally instead. How is that feasible for the average guy who wants to run it on the their own server? https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-scalability https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-sca... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16747174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16747174 After a $30 million funding round we should be seeing a lot better from them in the next few years. That python server ought to go.

areoform 5y ago

I am somewhat confused by the argument offered here. Providing an application that helps voters to decide whom they can choose to vote for, or who the alternative candidates are in an election is not the same as campaigning. From what I've found so far, I disagree with this interpretation. It's as if saying that publishing a list of people with their stances on a particular policy is the same as campaigning for them. It's not. By this metric, a website like isidewith is campaigning, https://www.isidewith.com/ https://www.isidewith.com/, as are voting guides that help voters pick out candidates who back action on Climate Change, https://voteclimatepac.org/voters-guide/ https://voteclimatepac.org/voters-guide/, or who are pro/anti-2A, https://www.nrapvf.org/grades/ https://www.nrapvf.org/grades/ / https://gunsensevoter.org/ https://gunsensevoter.org/ . Are these campaigning as well? Admittedly, the application differed from isidewith by focusing on a single issue - anti-totalitarianism, it did not do anything different that voteclimatepac, the NRA-PVF, Gun Sense Voter etc don't do. It was meant to match voters with candidates who already offer their preferred position - anti-totalitarianism. I don't see how this is campaigning. Further, the app wasn't affiliated with most of the people it was recommending. While it was designed by Navalny, it recommended people across multiple parties. This fact weakens the argument even further. Here is the app for you to judge for yourself, https://votesmart.appspot.com/ https://votesmart.appspot.com/ English translation: https://votesmart-appspot-com.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB&_x_tr_pto=nui,elem https://votesmart-appspot-com.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=auto&... As you will see, it doesn't advocate for a party or a candidate, but across parties and candidates based on a single issue - anti-totalitarianism. - While Telegram has taken a stand against the Russian govt. in the past, I do not believe that past action is necessarily predictive of future results in this regard. Given that the new Kremlin, in particular, is famous for bringing its opposition under their thumbs and turning them into controlled opposition. > With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern-art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hidden-author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hi... This assertion may seem conspiratorial. And it is. Though not guaranteed, it is well within the realm of possibility that the state leader bred by the KGB found ways to turn the screws on M. Durov to keep his hold on power. Given that he kills regularly for it. Should we consider it unlikely that he's willing to coerce others for it?

vfclists 5y ago

They should simply develop the app for the PinePhone

intricatedetail 5y ago

That's why we don't have side loading as a first class citizen. Our phones become leashes

xchip 5y ago

TL;DR: Apple and Google banned a Russian voting app due to local laws. Telegram has to follow rules set by Apple and Google in order to remain available to users on iOS and Android.

lostmsu 5y ago
Were they threatened by Apple and Google directly? No. Are they much different from a web browser in the regard that you can access a web page (strike that) bot by navigating to a link?

mensetmanusman 5y ago

At least we can sleep peacefully knowing that Tim Cook will make another million by improving the lives of oppressive governments thwarting change by knee-capping the only modern tool of communication.

lostmsu 5y ago
Also Pichai and of course Durov

nixpulvis 5y ago

> First, without support from Apple and Google, any fight with a local regulator is lost before it starts. More evidence of the problem plaguing our current era. These two companies simple should not be authorities above all local regulators.

stiltzkin 5y ago
Just as the era of Windows and OSX we need a good smartphone linux alternative.

igor_akhmetov 5y ago

What I don't get is why not make the blocked channel available for sideloaded APKs only? Telegram could then show an explanation on how to sideload the app and still comply with Google rules.

RostiB 5y ago

shame.

SergeAx 5y ago

This is at least partially bullshit. I have a sideloaded version of Telegram for Android, which is capable of auto-update itself and promoted as even more free speech compared to stores version. I also have a Windows desktop client, which works normally with adult content blocked on iOS client. Both of those clients blocked Smart Vote bot because my phone number is in Russia. At the same time all my non-Russian friends was able to freely use the bot all of the time.

kuschkufan 5y ago

uhhh, if I go to https://telegra.ph/ https://telegra.ph/ right now, I can publish a new post there without any authorisation. Heh. I guess I'd want to let them know, but how..

neoromantique 5y ago
You'd want to let them know that their service is functioning as expected? Okay.