This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Why arrest him? Why not threaten to block the app in France or something like that?
And why only arrest him? Should the discord creators also be arrested for some shady channels? Should Elon Musk be arrested because twitter is the equivalent of fhe fifth circle of hell?
So they can make a very convincing case for a backdoor, in exchange for his release. And maybe some compensation for continued cooperation. Both come out winning and they get to claim nothing happened.
Government cyber security dealings as usual. or not. who knows?
It's one of the most popular social media apps in Russia that is not banned or blocked. I would bet they already have a backdoor for the Russian police and intelligence agency...
That conspiracy theory is so dumb.
The government almost certainly doesn't need a backdoor as telegram is almost completely unencrypted (only one-to-one channels can be but aren't by default). The real (but more boring) conspiracy theory is that governments generally don't mind Telegram because its willfully terrible security model allows them to keep an eye on terrorists and activists' communications (I have a hard time believing that the NSA or even DGSE don't have their own backdoors already).
However the EU does have laws mandating the moderation of said unencrypted messages, especially when it comes to CSAM, which Telegram is notoriously poorly moderated. It's certainly reason enough to arrest and question this guy, at least until formal charges are brought or he walks free. Maybe there are additional political considerations, but there doesn't have to be.
Also how would arresting this guy help with backdooring. He doesn't have access to the source code. Whoever he calls to get that done is out of reach of the French police. He has no reason not to disable that backdoor as soon as he gets out of the EU. If he can be bought off he already has been (Crypto AG style except way lamer because no-one clever&important trusts Telegram), you don't need to arrest someone to pay them. I'm no DSGSE bigwig but pressuring lower level engineers to backdoor their code seems like a 1000% more effective approach.
Clearest difference I can see is:
In other words: A high profile person in tech being threatened with arrest / being arrested by western countries is a pretty good sign that they were not cooperating with our totalitarian overlords & providing us with ways to preserve our privacy.
And why only arrest him? Should the discord creators also be arrested for some shady channels? Should Elon Musk be arrested because twitter is the equivalent of fhe fifth circle of hell?
Stop asking question and go back to work
you're right, I forgot about the shareholders!
[French media] said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.
Europe defending its citizens against the tech giants, I'm sure.
There's a lot of really really dark shit on telegram that's for sure, and it's not like signal where they are just a provider. They do have control the content
So does Facebook and twatter
I don't recall CP/gore being readily available on those platforms, it gets reported/removed pretty quickly.
You're young. It really was a thing. It never stayed up long, and they found ways to make it essentially instantaneous, but there was a time it was easy to find very unpleasant things on Facebook, whether you wanted to or not. Gore in specific was easy to run across at one point. CP, it was more offers to sell it.
They fixed it, and it isn't like that now, but it was a problem in the first year or two.
And there are still informal networks of Pedos and other pests operating on these platforms to this day.
I don't use Telegram because I don't think it's secure, but this is still bullshit.
Yea, no way I'm giving them my number
You don’t have to, you can use telegram with username only
You still need a phone number to sign up
What do you use?
Signal.
He is being charged with W R O N G T H I N K.
Hell yeah. I always hated Telegram, because of its countless false promises, misleading claims, bad encryption (which isn't even enabled by default) and shady background.
That bad encryption was not cracked for now. The other one, that is used to process chats between 2 users in end to end mode, can't be enabled by default because it assumes no history is kept and no support for group chats.
Also, the arrest doesn't seem to be related to any of the things you mentioned. If anything it shows there are no ways for (certain) governments to affect the messenger, for now.
That bad encryption was not cracked for now
There is no encryption by default if you haven't noticed. There only the pseudo-E2EE which has been proven to have critical weaknesses: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf
can't be enabled by default
Yes it can, every proper E2EE messenger works like that. Signal, Threema, hell even WhatsApp uses E2EE by default.
no support for group chats
Signal has had group chats for many years now. WhatsApp uses the same encryption protocol and it also works just fine. Stop spreading misinformation, and use Signal if you want an actual secure, end-to-end encrypted, open and transparent messenger.
has been proven to have critical weaknesses
Those are not critical, just some aspects being below some arbitrary expectational values. Also it seems there is still no proofs those vector attacks are being used at all.
Yes it can
They chose to target convenience over max security. Shoving strongest options to every user by default is agaiantt that. Reasons include: no history is being saved in this mode, and the desktop client doesn't support it.
Signal has had group chats for many years now
Just because it was implemented by others doesn't mean it's a way to go for everyone. From what I understand, e2e in group chats means that there is going to be a transaction of keys between all members of the chat on adding any new member, and/or on new message, which excessively increases the burden on clients and servers in case of big active chats.
You can ask telegram to implement that, but you can't blame it for keeping it behind some gates. Telegram got implemented e2e between 2 users before other messengers got it working in any form of group chats.
and use Signal
I'll think about it if they ditch electron.
That bad encryption was not cracked for now.
There's no need if you control the server.
End to end encryption was created specifically so that the server could not access the data.
So how many people use E2EE with Telegram?
And their ToS forbids alternative clients doing that. Say, using Pidgin with PGP or OTR. Since Pidgin plugins for TG and these exist, it's not a limitation for me, but most people, again, don't use Pidgin to chat in TG.
You haven't read the article or the summary from the comments, have you?
I don't really know much about this topic even after reading the article. It does bother me however that there's so many channels/server on Telegram full of spammers that seem to offer drugs and prostitution. It's almost like those were the only things that exist in this world. Which is such a huge waste of a chat program.
Also who the hell listens to any of the nonsense influencers/politicians write in their heavily biased channels, seriously, I can't find a sane reason to join those, yet strangely that seems to be the only reason the masses use this tool. It's all just confusing.
