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Telegram will now hand over phone number and IP for criminal suspects
- DavideNL 2y agoWhat will prevent Durov from reversing his “false promises” as soon as he is released and can leave France / the EU? I have a feeling he will continue on the same path as before, as soon as he can travel outside of the EU.
- ElonChrist 2y agoPreviously posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41629437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41629437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41628467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41628467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41628381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41628381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41628019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41628019
- metadat 2y agoThe only relevant link with discussion is the last one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41628019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41628019 - 3 hours ago (6 comments) And it's not a dupe, only a related submission (different article / link).
- ElonChrist 2y ago[dead]
- akira2501 2y ago[flagged]
- tjoff 2y agoOf Signal?
- weirdflex68 2y ago[flagged]
- ajsnigrutin 2y agoThe problem lies in "what is a crime?" here. If you can get arrested for organizing a protest (that didn't even start that), do you still think that those people are criminals? Just look at all the people that got arrested recently in UK... It's sad, and telegram, not being a UK company (imho) shouldn't be forced to give UK government/police peoples ip addresses and phone numbers.
- petesergeant 2y ago> telegram, not being a UK company (imho) shouldn't be forced to give UK government/police peoples ip addresses and phone numbers They absolutely should if they want to operate in the UK.
- switch007 2y agoDefine operate in. Does HN operate in the UK because I can access it here? Should they be subject to UK law?
- Jaepa 2y agoShould the same rule exists in more authoritarian countries like China, North Korea, or Belarus? If so should the government be allowed access to non-nationals outside the country? How about if a non-national is inside the country communicating with those outside? How about if those folks are journalist reporting where journalism is illegal (see Russia's laws on "fake news" on Ukraine). I'm not saying your point of view is wrong, but I think its easy to jump to that conclusion as this is probably the least sympathetic case to set principle. But this _does_ set principle.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
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- AStonesThrow 2y agoYes how strange that a DARPA project, handed off to the National Science Foundation and then awarded to Sprint, would be torn from the common man and wrested from its rightful owners into the heartless clutches of government authority
- akira2501 2y ago> that a DARPA project How much of what you use today has anything to do with DARPAs original design goals or funding? > handed off to the National Science Foundation and then awarded to Sprint The NSF handled links between Universities and their funding not the Internet in general. Sprint was a primary contractor under this system. None of this should be understood as "the Internet." > would be torn from the common man You do appreciate precisely how much open source software underpins everything we're doing, even in typing these comments to each other, over the internet, yes? I mean.. show me the government plan to build a web browser. > from its rightful owners Do you pay taxes? Congratulations. You are the rightful owner. > into the heartless clutches of government authority Yea. Hacker News. Typical bastion of mindless worship of "government authority." Then again, if it has the natural right to exist, why does it need my taxes?
- AStonesThrow 2y agoPony Express, telegraph lines, railroads, a national highway system: what purpose and goals do you think were in mind here? So you could jaunt down Route 66 for a burger, and send back a 5c postcard??? Haha! > How much of what you use today has anything to do with DARPAs original design goals or funding? 100% The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States.[1][2] NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,[3] and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation,[1][4] [5] [6] the state of Illinois,[2] the University of Illinois, business and industry partners,[7] and other federal agencies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_httpd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_httpd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_Mosaic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_Mosaic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_HTTPd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_HTTPd Are you even serious rn? If you're right then I shall take out my equity in the form of SAM batteries. How many will fit on my balcony.
- GaggiX 2y agoHow is enforcing subpoenas a form of terrorism?
- Hydenty 2y ago[flagged]
- GaggiX 2y agoYeah I'm sure it was better in the good old days ahaha
- AndrewKemendo 2y agoNo it’s just that now it affects everyone not just certain groups which is the tipping point for Society to reorganize This is what is called out by Polybius, Socrates, Jefferson, Strauss/Howe as the socio-political cycle.
- vel0city 2y agoThe good old days when governments represented people, like before the 17th Amendment when states picked the Senate in smokey backroom deals. Wait that can't be right, maybe like before the 19th Amendment. Wait no, during the Jim Crow era. No, the McCarthyism era. Wait...uhh...hmm... I don't know what time period you're thinking of with "It's not the good old days any more. Your government doesn't represent you." Seems like the government represents more people better today than it did in the past given before so many couldn't even vote at all and the government was far more active in suppressing minority rights. And if its about them snooping in on conversations, these days they have to actually ask a lot of communication providers for data. Back in the day there was only one company providing electronic communications and the government was absolutely listening in to the conversations. Tons of those communications were happening over the air for anyone with the right antenna to listen in. US v. Miller was in 1976 and established what we now know as third-party doctrine.
- vel0city 2y agoThe CEO of Signal has not been arrested. Also, Signal does supposedly comply with all lawful warrants. They give over what data they do have when properly requested. It is just they don't normally have much useful data to give. Meanwhile, Telegram supposedly hasn't been properly handling lawful warrants in many countries and does have interesting data on their servers as only private secure messages are (meaningfully) encrypted and not most messages most users send on the platform
- bediger4000 2y agoAbout time. Criminals hiding behind some technicalities!
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41628019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41628019
- anigbrowl 2y agoDupes are submissions of the same article. I thought this one was better than the others I had seen on this topic.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoYou can't submit the same article twice for the most part. Dupes are duplicate discussions. There's an earlier article with some discussion and eventually maybe mods will merge them. No need to split up the discussion. Share your thoughts over there! You could even suggest this link in that thread as a better article option.
- anigbrowl 2y agoYou totally can, the HN dupe detector is less than reliable. Submit something interesting at night and you'll often see it submitted the following day by someone else. As a more general point, the fact is that if a discussion doesn't take off while an item is on the front page shortly after submission, it probably never will. The page sorting algorithm ends up prioritizing recency and traction. I agree this isn't ideal.
- Cody-99 2y agoThis shouldn't surprise anyone. If a company collects info about some user and the government comes to them with a legitimate warrant they have to handover the information about that user (or risk going to jail/other action by the court) . There is a reason other companies like signal go out of their way to collect as little as possible.
- lostlogin 2y agoUser data is a liability, not an asset. However this is untrue when breaches, leaks and misuse aren’t prosecuted. It’s a shame we have ended up here.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago> User data is a liability, not an asset. Yeah Google and Facebook are all losing money in those liabilities. No theyre not, they're printing money because user data is an asset. Stop repeating silly sound bytes.
- sonofhans 2y agoUser data is only an asset if your business model demands it, like Google and Facebook. If you don’t have, and won’t create, a way to monetize it then yes, it’s strictly a liability.
- idle_zealot 2y agoIt's not that it is a liability, it's that it should be. Likewise, it currently is an asset, but shouldn't be monetizable.
- lostlogin 2y agoWhen you quote part of my comment, it give a different message. Clever!
- BadHumans 2y agoThis is only true if the cost of storing user data is greater than the profits it generates. When companies are allowed to sell out users and punishment for data leaks are just seen as the cost of doing business then why would you not store whatever data you can get your hands on?
- TZubiri 2y agoSounds good to me
- sharpshadow 2y agoGood that the company is able to continue functioning with the CEO being trapped and under charges. Shame on France for pulling a nasty warrant mid air.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y agoWell, the fact that Telegram wants to cooperate to me suggests that they previously could have been cooperating but weren't, which makes a charge of complicity make a lot more sense now. Thanks France!
- maipen 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- rmbyrro 2y agoIt looks like we need tyranny from time to time so that people learn why lots of people died to earn basic rights... It's always tempting. "We're only doing it to get the bad criminals!" Sounds great. Until a tyrant decides you're bad.
- harryf 2y agoIt’s sad to see HN become so full of bots. > prompt: There’s an article on Hackernews titled “Telegram will now hand over your phone number and IP if you’re a criminal suspect”. Generate a comment in Hackernews style that supports this decision, implies that it’s because they didn’t encrypt the messages and uses Signal as an example of doing it right because “look! They haven’t had problems” Not surprised. Telegram doesn't encrypt by default, so of course they're handing over phone numbers and IPs. If you don't lock things down like Signal does, you're going to have problems. Signal can’t hand over what they don’t have—encrypted end-to-end, no metadata. Simple as that.
- handity 2y agoI guess I'm a bot then. Yes, channels and groups are most likely what makes Telegram a threat where Signal isn't. That's an excellent argument for decentralized social media. You're probably exasperated that others don't see what to you seems like an obvious truth. Rather than mocking the opposing argument, it's probably still worth rehashing yours when the topic comes up, even if it feels like banging the same drum with nobody listening.
- handity 2y agoThis was entirely predictable and inevitable. I don't understand what Durov thought would happen nor why he rejects E2EE as a liberating technology. Policy will never be the key to digital privacy, it must always be accompanied by cryptography. The status quo of allowing a third party read and store your messages forever, slurping up all the metadata along the way, is insane.
- inquirerGeneral 2y ago[dead]
- enedil 2y agoI think it is pretty obvious why Durov did not opt for universal E2EE. His main purpose of making Telegram was to make the chat app that is the most usable of all. E2EE comes with a cost on user experience which was for him too high. Example: Signal can't handle more than one phone logged in, and if for some case you don't open the desktop app for more than 30 days, it logs you out there and you can never get these messages to the desktop.
- akimbostrawman 2y agothat is a limitation of signal not E2EE for an example see matrix although E2EE chats do take more computing and storage especially with very large groups
- enedil 2y agoIndeed this is. For some reason, all the implementations that I can recall suffer from some usability problems. I expect that if a solution that is acceptable for Durov is discovered, they will roll it out. Of course, my prediction might be wrong.
- pier25 2y agoHonestly you have to be a bit dumb to write incriminating stuff on popular messaging apps like Telegram, Whatsapp, etc. I would imagine any serious criminal org will have their own messaging infra by now.
- quesera 2y ago> I would imagine any serious criminal org will have their own messaging infra by now. I'm guessing they do not -- that would be inconvenient, expensive, unreliable, insecure, and/or conspicuous. [Edit: "serious" criminal orgs run, e.g., custom-built submarines, so private comms infrastructure is clearly within their technical abilities. But having all org members communicating to a private centralized mothership seems risky from a surveillance perspective]
- LinuxBender 2y agoI'm guessing they do not -- that would be inconvenient, expensive, unreliable, insecure, and/or conspicuous. Some do run their own platforms or share a self hosted platform set up by people in a non cooperating country. Sometimes the platform admins find out they were being MitM by mistake tech or law enforcement make. [1] Or not using the MitM detection Jabber is capable of. Jabber scales to millions of users per cluster, big enough for probably most criminal organizations. I doubt the cluster in question was specifically meant for criminals, but the smart criminals will find solutions best suited for their needs. In this case I think they chose poorly given VM's can be live migrated and snapshot including memory contents without interrupting the platform or raising suspicion. In my humble opinion the big shared corporate platforms will attract the ultra-lazy arrogant and cavalier criminals and I'm sure law enforcement are fine with it. Easy busts still look good to justify big budgets. There are probably people that say they don't know anyone that's been busted on those platforms but they are probably not moving enough volume of illicit goods to warrant immediate attention. That information would be quite useful for getting a warrant however if the target was suspected of something else or if they were an influencer thinking or saying the wrong thing in public. [Edit] Updated link to the snapshot describing potential mitigations including SCRAM PLUS which was not configured in this incident. [1] - https://archive.ph/4wi5t https://archive.ph/4wi5t
- janmo 2y agoIn a sense the surveillance in the "west" and in particular in the EU is worse than what you have in China. At least the Chinese they know that all their conversations are being monitored and read by the government. In the EU many people still live under the illusion of GDPR, data privacy, democracy etc...
- sub7 2y agoThey are coming for you Tether
- cb86 2y agoWarrant canary removed: https://opentermsarchive.org/en/memos/telegram-expands-forbidden-uses-data-disclosure-authorities/ https://opentermsarchive.org/en/memos/telegram-expands-forbi...
- yieldcrv 2y agoHm, given how many requests Meta and Google disclose annually I dont think a warrant canary is really useful, it implies “we just got 1!” instead of “we just got an additional pile of 200 secret requests from G-7 national governments, one of which is already trying to incarcerate us for not being so forthcoming about compliance”
- jacobgkau 2y agoGiven that you won't know the details of the 1 or 200 requests anyway, I think knowing the difference between 0 and >0 is useful. We do know what 0 means, and anything other than 0 means the platform's got the attention and jurisdiction of outside parties.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sirolimus 2y agoWell that's a shame...
- greatgib 2y agoNow the question is, to which government Telegram will comply to share your info. If I live in Germany, and I do a channel with offensive content against the government of an Arabian shitty country, let's say UAE for example. The content might be legal here but illegal there. Will the UAE gov be entitled to get my IP address and other info? Leading them to be able to use that to harass me, like targeting me with Pegasus for example?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- oloila 2y agoI think, firstly you will be punished by DE, because of hate speech, hehe
- guadalupe4151 2y ago[dead]
- ein0p 2y agoRubber hose cryptanalysis works every time, unless you design your protocol to not have any visibility into the data. Which is impossible in the case of Telegram feeds at the very least.
- RadixDLT 2y agohaha Durov is singing like a bird now that he go apprehended
- oloila 2y agoThis is not "haha". It's a pity. Even Russia haven't forced Telegram to do things that now they need to comply because Pavel became hostage of this situation
- oloila 2y agoGovernments are enemies of freedom I miss old 200x years, when Internet was so free and there was no any problems, lol