The head of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has been charged by the French judiciary for allegedly allowing criminal activity on the messaging app but avoided jail with a €5m bail.
The Russian-born multi-billionaire, who has French citizenship, was granted release on condition that he report to a police station twice a week and remain in France, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement.
The charges against Durov include complicity in the spread of sexual images of children and a litany of other alleged violations on the messaging app.
His surprise arrest has put a spotlight on the criminal liability of Telegram, the popular app with around 1 billion users, and has sparked debate over free speech and government censorship.
If you want to continue using Signal, you should fight for the right of others to use Telegram. “First they came for them and I said nothing”. The EU and others are trying hard to control people’s private messaging.
It’s not a fight, it’s logic. The world governments can do nothing to OpenWhisperSystems (the makers of Signal), because they don’t store any communication.
Telegram however thought they were smart, by storing data and splitting that data up in to several different pieces around the world, assuming governments wouldn’t collude together to get it.
But they didn’t foresee the litigious nature of nation states, and that’s what we’re seeing now. If these nation states also start to collude with one another, everyone who thought they were safe are gonna get fucked.
Signal does not store any communication data. They only facilitate handshake between clients and the clients manage the data between themselves.
This is why Telegram isn’t safe, but Signal is.
They World governments want to ban Signal and make it illegal to use it. That’s the problem.
The wOrLd GuBmInTs is such a huge umbrella that it must mean it’ll rain the Atlantic Ocean.
WESTERN GOVERNMENTS are allowed to go against privacy and encryption because of stupid Karen’s screaming “won’t somebody please think of the children” and old fops going “basically terrorists” and not a single one of them have considered the decentralisation principle as an actual barrier, because their constituency allows it, because their constituency is technically illiterate.
EASTERN GOVERNMENTS are largely authoritarian. Sorry, world, but I’m not in the mood to piss about here.
THE GLOBAL SOUTH gets bundled together as well, because no one there has the resources to actually prevent the spread of encryption software, much to the shegrin of western governments, who tried to sanction that shit, but got overridden by people who took a plane ride with aa USB stick.
Again, PGP over email is still unbreakable and can be used as well, incl with private email servers, or even Matrix servers. You don’t need Telegram or Signal. The “whose next” problem relies on the idea that you and I are the only people who know of these problems, and that’s kind of arrogant.
M’buru Ufufu is on that plane right now, with tons of encryption software on a USB stick, the UN be damned. UMA LELE, UMA LELE~!
Just a side note: PGP doesn’t use any form for forward secrecy so if someone gets your keys you are hosed.
Better encryption out there these days.
True, but if you lose your keys you’re sort of screwed anyways. But yeah, forward secrecy ftw.
With forward secrecy the keys are destroyed after decryption. The messages then live on your device. If you delete those messages they are gone. Eve (the evil eavesdropper) can not decrypt stored encrypted messages even if they steal your device. The keys rotate and you can not generate previous decryption keys.
Even better: tell people about Briar. It isn’t for everyone but if people are really concerned it is the right answer. Briar has issues with convenience but that can be mitigated somewhat.