Brazil judge orders temporary suspension of Telegram
apnews.comGood luck. They tried to block it in Russia, but it simply broke their own internet for a while and the effectiveness was spotty until they gave up. To this day I believe there is quite little cooperation between the Russian government and Telegram, despite not being E2EE by default, if we don't consider conspiracy theories, unlike all the other services used in Russia which are basically all backdoored by the state directly. I don't think Telegram has a legal presence in Brazil though. How are they going to enforce the fine?
> I don't think Telegram has a legal presence in Brazil though. How are they going to enforce the fine?
You're commenting on the news of their enforcement. They are completely fine with blocking Telegram nation-wide until they reveal the user data and pay the fine.
Don't give me that "good luck" speech either. The article mentions the same judges blocked Telegram last year. I submitted news of that here and people here gave me the exact same "lol good luck telegram didn't even submit to Russia" response. A few days later I got the news that Telegram paid the fine.
Paying the fine could be a reasonable decision, depending on their priorities.
Paying the fine and providing the user data basically renders the whole service pointless, right? It is better to be blocked in Brazil than to be useless everywhere I guess.
Although Telegram still claims
> To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments. https://telegram.org/faq
and the Telegram transparency bot states when queried from Germany
> No transparency report is available for your region. If any IP addresses or phone numbers are shared in accordance with 8.3 of the Privacy Policy, we will publish a transparency report within 6 months of it happening and will continue publishing semiannual reports.
German prosecutors seem to have received such information
> There were then some direct talks between representatives of the Ministry of Interior and the Telegram founder and boss, the Russian Pavel Durov. It was said that a willingness to cooperate was signaled. Telegram even named a direct contact person for the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). ... The BKA has requested such data as email or IP addresses in "230 exemplary cases" so far. Only in slightly more than 60 cases was there even a response, and only in 25 cases was data actually transmitted. translated from https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/wdr/telegram-justiz-1...
So someone is lying and I doubt it's the German government which is trying to pressure them to give up even more data.
That's shady. The court order is very clear about what data was disclosed (IP address and registered phone number of the group admin), and why the court deemed it "not enough" (they wanted the data for all the group participants). https://www.conjur.com.br/dl/telegram-decisao-suspensao.pdf
> Paying the fine and providing the user data basically renders the whole service pointless, right? It is better to be blocked in Brazil than to be useless everywhere I guess.
I would hope so. Apparently not.
Last year when something like this happened, it came out that there's a legal representative in Rio: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2022/0...
So they can talk to the representatives. They cannot make them remove the app.
> They cannot make them remove the app
From the article:
> Later, several Telegram users said they could no longer use the messaging app after local carriers complied with the ruling. Google and Apple were also ordered to block the app.
So yes, apparently they can. Or did you think it needed Telegram's cooperation?
Even if it is possible to install apps manually, most users are not "power users" able or even just willing (or willing to learn) to do that. Another aspect of the much more curated software world of Android or iPhone vs. PCs, where blocking would indeed be mostly useless even for regular users.
Can't they also throw the representative in jail (etc)?
They can, and they have. Big Tech representatives in the country have been jailed for not fully complying with court orders.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-executive-released-fro...
Google representatives too, if I remember correctly. Something to do with Google not erasing some celebrity's leaked nude photos from search results.
Jailing people for that is beyond horrible. Why would anyone want to appoint a legal representative in a country that does things like that, I have no idea.
I have no idea why these corporations come here either. Only reason I haven't left this place behind is my family refused to leave with me. They must be making truckloads of money if they put up with this.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/brazilian...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/arrest-google-brazil-head-sti...
https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/26/3413476/google-brazil-you...
https://observer.com/2012/09/brazil-google-president-mayoral...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/google-exec-detained-in-braz...
https://thenextweb.com/news/googles-president-brazil-operati...
Governments taking hostages aside - risking your employees security like that is extremely irresponsible from Google.
It’s what happens when you break the law. I don’t know what you expect.
To be able to "do business" there, whatever it may entail. Contrary to the popular held opinion on certain online communities, businesses must respect local laws and regulations to be able to conduct their activities.
The only "law" the executive broke was making the judge angry. Even the other judges acknowledged he was wrongly detained and released him. Says so in the article.
> I don't think Telegram has a legal presence in Brazil though. How are they going to enforce the fine?
I'm sure they are banking on the idea that Telegram cares more about having users in Brazil than about the money. The Brazilian government can decide not to unblock Telegram until they pay the fines.
Of course, if it's that difficult to block Telegram as you suggest, they may eventually give up on both the fines and the blocking.
It's not about the money. The fines are because Telegram won't reveal who's operating (neo-Nazi) accounts on their platform, with an added bit of political shenanigans to muddy the waters on top of it.
It's a nice story, the founder in exile fighting to keep his unrestricted messaging service, even against the fangs of an authoritarian government that regularly outright murders people around the world. A history of some technical sloppyness, we overlook it as "growth hacking". I'm afraid believing in that is about as smart as those criminals were trusting EncroChat.
> To this day I believe there is quite little cooperation between the Russian government and Telegram
I find it fascinating that Telegram is (and was back when they tried to block it) the most popular messenger and possibly even social network in Russia. Dmitry Medvedev, for crying out loud, writes his thuggish notes on Telegram, from which they then get propagated by mass media. Ramzan Kadyrov, too, posts to Telegram. It's so embarrassing to see after their attempt to block it for some reason.
They can and they have blocked it.
There's a law for the internet in Brazil, called Marco Civil, which literally states that ISPs can be blocked and forbidden from providing services if they don't comply with takedown requests issued by the authorities.
They were blocked quite a few times in the past 4-5 years. If I remember correctly there was a time that it was blocked for up to 2 days because they were deciding if they should pay the fine and hand over the data, or remain blocked.
I totally disagree with these rulings in favor of blocking social media apps (even though it could do us good by banning or difficulting disinformation from reaching people), but you do realize that Telegram is not the app it used to be or should be anymore, right? Pavel Durov, its CEO, is an absolute weirdo that tries to play god because he owns huge social media platforms, one of them being VK, which is heavily monitored by the Russian government.
So, if you think you are safe using Telegram, think again.
> Pavel Durov, its CEO, is an absolute weirdo that tries to play god because he owns huge social media platforms, one of them being VK, which is heavily monitored by the Russian government.
VK was stolen from him and given to people who were friends with the regime.
So yes, VK is heavily monitored and controlled by Russian authorities and it seems a good deal of effort went into preventing that from happening again.
Since last year Telegram has a legal presence in Brazil.
"Blocking" in Russia was nothing else than an internal drill by KGB to check robustness to possible blocking in the target fields of operations, e.g. Brazil.
If Russia TRULY wanted to block Telegram, then Mr. Durov, who accidentally operates from and resides in Russia, would have been kidnapped and tortured until Telegram goes down or he hands the keys over to KGB.
Since Durov is still alive and free... the conclusion is kind of obvious.
Telegram is operated from UAE. Durov left Russia in 2014.
Durov don't operate from Russia and wasn't operating during those "blockings", so this theory does not hold up.
Durov was seen in StPetersburg for years after the "exile" [1], and Telegram was being developed from exactly the same office it was before the "exile", one floor below Vkontakte. The story Durov tells is at the very least incomplete.
[1]: here's Durov breaking someone's phone for making his photo in a shopping centre in 2017 https://360tv.ru/news/proisshestviya/pavel-durov-razbil-tele...
Durov operates from the UAE which is a strong ally of Russia (despite them spending a lot of money to convince people otherwise). It's not like he emigrated to Europe or something.
Calling the UAE a Russian ally is a massive stretch. They're not allied with the US nor Russia, they're allied with their big neighbours, Saudi Arabia, and have good relationships with many important countries (US, Russia, India, etc.) but don't follow anyone's line (outside of Saudi Arabia and it cost them dearly in Yemen, so they probably don't anymore) near-automatically.
Lots of Russians in the UAE, including running away from Putin's folly/conscription.
> Calling the UAE a Russian ally is a massive stretch.
No, it is not. Of course they look out for themselves first. However, in this time of war and international sanctions they are one of the countries who are deepening their ties with Russia.
They are spending a lot of money on PR to make it seem like they are on the side of the west, but in actual fact they have been profiting massively from Russia over the last few years.
They may not be a military ally but they are certainly an economic ally of Russia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93United_Arab_E...
> Even though Russia invaded Ukraine, business between the two countries strengthened and many Russian businessmen has flocked to Dubai to purchase properties and invest in the region. Trade between the two countries has doubled to $5 billion over the last three years and they are approximately 4,000 companies with Russian roots that are operating within the country.[8]
> According to the leaked confidential US documents,[9] titled “Russia/UAE: Intelligence Relationship Deepening”, the Russian intelligence officials were engaged in strengthening their relations with the United Arab Emirates. The document stated that Russia had convinced the Emirates “to work together against US and UK intelligence agencies”. It also concluded that the UAE viewed it as an “opportunity” to diversify its partnerships, while the US was gradually parting ways from the Emirates. However, the UAE government had dismissed the accusations that they were maintaining close ties with Russian intelligence.[10]
They're looking out for themselves and have profited greatly from the Russian government's folly...good riddance. After all, every country including the US is out for their own interests; none of them are moral beacons.
"Anyone who is not for us is against us" is sheer Western arrogance going back to the days of warmonger George Bush.
Yes, that's what it means to not be on anyone's side, you take advantage of whomever is most desperate to make money from them (Russia right now). Then switch to doing the same from the other side if the tides change.
Eh, the Emirates are more of a wild west than an ally of anybody; kind of like Switzerland back in the cold war. Honestly if there's a single foreign interest in charge it's the Lahore/Mumbai underworld.
Durov lives in Dubai.
It's funny how such trivially obvious things may cause so much hate and denial. No free media in Russia?! Shocker!
This has happened several times before with other services:
https://bloqueios.info/en/timeline/
Unfortunately this site hasn't been updated since 2016, but I don't think that's because these kinds of orders have stopped being issued. They've previously been issued on various occasions by a state judge when a company either ignores or says it can't technically comply with a subpoena or injunction in a court case, and have so far usually been overturned by Brazilian appeals courts.
This time the DNS block was ordered directly by a supreme court judge. No one can overturn that. Also, the political scenario was different. Brazil used to at least pretend to be a democracy with a constitution and rule of law. Since then, these supreme court judges have done far worse than block some messaging service. This is literally nothing to people like them.
> This time the DNS block was ordered directly by a supreme court judge. No one can overturn that.
I think you're mistaken, unless there was an incredibly rapid sequence of events in this case.
https://static.poder360.com.br/2023/04/decisao-telegram-grup...
Seção Judiciária do Espírito Santo 1ª Vara Federal de Linhares [...] assinado por WELLINGTON LOPES DA SILVA
That would be a first instance (trial) court, not any kind of appellate court. (Though in the Federal judiciary rather than the state judiciary.)
Yeah, looks like I'm mistaken. I think I read "federal judge" and mentally substituted supreme court. I apologize.
> Brazil used to at least pretend to be a democracy with a constitution and rule of law
What do you mean? Didn't they have an election that the incumbent lost (for very good reasons I might add, anyone who bungles the Covid response that bad doesn't deserve to remain in power regardless of anything else (and there was a lot of "else")) recently, implying democracy and all that?
Order was issued by a trial federal judge (1a instância). Please stop spreading conspiracy misinformation.
Telegram indeed handed over IP address and phone number to the court. https://download.uol.com.br/files/2023/04/657265820_telegram...
I am more disturbed by the fact that the infrastructure was already in place to instantly block Telegram as soon as a judge ordered it.
It's been in place for decades. Nearly a decade ago I posted here on HN about brazilian judges blocking WhatsApp nationwide.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/05/03/whatsapp-...
Hm? Every ISP is able to block websites. This happens constantly, specially with piracy-related websites.
Yes sure. It's just very efficient apparently. More than expected for government technical stuff.
When I worked at an ISP we had standard procedures to follow when receiving requests from legal authorities. All our contacts were strictly mediated by our legal team, who filtered requests and prevented any direct contact with the authorities (which could lead to complying to illegal requests).
Pretty much the same in my country. And, as I've heard, there was surprisingly non-zero number of "invalid" requests.
Happens all the time in the UK.
The UK, along with our other closest allies (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) should be representing the position of the United States with regard to free speech. It almost seems as though our own (US) government is now opposed to free speech, even though it was identified as the top most important (ratified) right.
Note: The original first amendment was: "WE DECLARE, That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that all power is inherent in the PEOPLE; and that all free governments are, and of right ought to be, founded on their authority, and instituted for their peace, safety, and well being. For the advancement of these ends, the PEOPLE have, at all times, an indefeasible right to alter and reform their government."
That one was never ratified.
Supposedly it's about the children. Sao Paulo solved the problem:
> Many Brazilian states didn’t wait for the federal response. Sao Paulo, for example, temporarily hired 550 psychologists to attend to its public schools, and hired 1,000 private security guards.
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-school-violence-guns-attac...
This is what disgruntled poor people did in China, too, used a $5 hatchet. You don't even need to be able to afford a gun .
I don't see a (neo)Nazi angle in that crime, though. There's no clear motive for the attack yet and no connection to Telegram either (based on coverage in DW and The Guardian), so I'm guessing Lula is simply trying to crack down on free speech.
Users who want private comms with encryption and metadata cleansing can use decentralized blockchain based services such as xx Network's xxMessenger. xxMessenger can be blocked by the ISPs by blocking outgoing connections to xx gateways, but desktop-only Speakeasy Tech can use Tor Network (Tor Browser's Socks5 proxy or Arti) so it's likely to work better when telcos and ISPs are ordered to block connections or DNS lookups. There are other, similar networks, I just don't know enough about them to make specific recommendations.
Disclosure: I own xx coins.
You are correct.
Brazilian had a CIA backed dictatorship during cold War, and when it ended people made sure to make a constitution that would prevent another one.
Sadly the constitution is being ignored for a while now, the current government is strongly against free speech, the previous government also had issues.
Meanwhile the Supreme Court are the ones that really hate the constitution, for example a guy was arrested for saying in an airplane near a judge that he is ashamed of being Brazilian. The last president pointed out our constitution doesn't allow lockdowns without a special council ordering one (to prevent the president from declaring curfew and arresting dissidents) the Supreme Court then ordered lockdowns to be made anyway. (And the media called the president genocidal for pointing out lockdowns were illegal if not done correctly)
I remember that "freedom" speech by bolsonaro.
It was something to behold. Took a lot of guts to take the entire cabinet of ministers to task for failing to protect brazilians against errant bureaucracy. Too bad the video seems to not be in youtube anymore
Strongly against free speech... They are discussing a "fake news" law literally right now. It contains terms like "internet supervision entity".
Please clarify whether you are referring to some proposed law in Brazil or the RESTRICT act being proposed in the USA?
Proposed brazilian law against "fake news".
[flagged]
Could you please stop using HN for ideological battle and flamewar? You've unfortunately been doing a lot of that. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we end up having to ban accounts that do it (regardless of what they're battling for).
Edit: also, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35760334 - that kind of comment is a bannable offense.
Ok, got it. I can see how my comments were inflammatory in this thread and will refrain from that in the future.
On the other hand, I think a thread like this one also fits your description of ideological battle and flame war. It is very political and deeply biased, including inflammatory comments about imprisoning and killing people for their political ideology. We see that in threads about religion as well, which are very lightly moderated but contain uncivilised content. If you allow trash and ban the pushback, eventually HN will devolve into Truth social or equivalent when it comes to politics.
HN actually has a guideline to address just that: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
We can't exclude divisive topics altogether—that would not be consistent with the mandate of this site (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... for lots of past explanation about why). So we ask users on all sides of divisive topics to respect the site guidelines, and each other, by posting thoughtfully and not collapsing into flamewar.
Everyone with strong passions feels like the other side is posting inflammatory trash and they themselves are merely providing pushback. This feeling is part of the standard equipment that everyone brings to a flamewar, so you can't let yourself be guided by it.
What you need to do instead (<-- I don't mean "you" personally, I mean all of us) is hold yourself to a higher standard and not break the rules even if other people are breaking them badly. If you make a good faith effort to do that, then you can just about compensate for the default bias of feeling like "the other side started it and did worse" and approximately level the field.
I see your point of course, it's easy for me to think I'm right and these guys are wrong and they do probably think the same. That doesn't mean that neither of us is correct though. And you do draw the line somewhere. You would not allow a discussion to emerge here on whether pedophilia should be allowed, how Ukraine is actually an aggressor or about how the American elections were stolen - at least it seems that you moderate these topics swiftly. When similarly unhinged political topics emerge from more marginal countries like Brazil or India, I find that the discussion tends to be polarized by the interaction of users who really care about the topic, while most of the community stands aside. The problem is that most of these users are extremists. As a result, these threads devolve into toxicity and are very far from the standards we are used to seeing.
From my part I also contributed to that in this instance. I understand what you're trying to say and in the future I'll try to keep in mind your larger point - even if I firmly believe I'm right and I would like to convince someone, being rude or dismissive does not actually help, and certainly does not foster a good sense of community. So, I'm not trying to excuse the two comments you correctly called me out for.
On the other hand, perhaps you should consider that your own personal bias about what is legitimate discussion and what isn't is obviously limited by your own knowledge pool and bias. I would not expect you to know how close Brazil came to an actual military coup, or that this "Supreme Court dictatorship" discourse is the backdrop of the justification for a possible coup which is still a threat. I don't think much would be lost at all if these discussions are simply suppressed in HN, in the same way I see you delete submissions about the Ukraine war that are very clearly deranged. And if not, you really should not expect a calm, rational discussion starting around a perspective that defends dictatorship or war.
I completely agree with you about how little I know, but I don't need to know much to moderate this site according to its guidelines. It's the other way around: people who do know are welcome to comment (and we hope they will!) but only if they stay within HN's rules.
> you really should not expect a calm, rational discussion starting around a perspective that [...]
I don't know about calm or rational but following the site guidelines is exactly what we expect, regardless of how divisive a topic is. As I said in the GP, a divisive topic makes that more important.
Doesn't this sound like a dictatorship?
Taken case by case, no. The absolute majority of those cases are used to get ISPs to block pirate streaming sites, or sites selling personal data.
However, once every few years, a high profile case suspending something like Whatsapp, Youtube, LinkedIn or Facebook appears. They are usually thrown out of appeals court so fast there's no time for the block order to actually reach the ISPs.
The ones that actually do result in a block have a police investigation behind it, making the whole bureaucracy more slow as there needs to be some back and forth between the police and the company. The fact that Telegram's entire team in Brazil is one lawyer might make this worse.
For example, this particular incident may have come from a misunderstanding. The police asked for all available data on all users of a group chat called "Movimento Anti-Semita Brasileiro" and another with a similar name. I hope the translation should be obvious.
What did Telegram deliver? The requested data of the group admin, not all users.
So now they get blocked until they deliver all the data.
Source for this incident, that is, the legal order for the block: https://www.conjur.com.br/dl/telegram-decisao-suspensao.pdf
No, it sounds like a civil law country dealing with a recalcitrant business. I think the judge is reaching a bit but I don't know much about Brazil's legal code. Common law countries tend to be extremely accommodating of business entities because they're obsessed with procedure (imho) to the detriment of doing any enforcement. Civil law jurisdictions take the approach of 'we need compliance up front, we can quibble about legal liability afterwards.' Common law countries demand high levels of personal accountability but have elaborate mechanics for distributing accountability across organizations that (again imho) allow the creation of private quasi-sovereignty, and they maintain this in part because it attracts capital to those countries.
> No, it sounds like a civil law country dealing with a recalcitrant business.
That's assuming the judge actually followed the law and the constitution, which isn't obvious at all in this case.
It is. We brazilians are living under a judiciary monarchy of sorts. The supreme court basically does whatever it wants.
I think I once read an interesting term for "rule through courts" in reference to Islamic/sharia courts (which also had some tribal significance iirc) in Somalia who acted as the de facto after the central govt collapsed. I can't find it again.
Kritarchy. Both the phenomenon and the word are pretty rare.
> judiciary monarchy of sorts
Do they have mandates for life?
Yes. Supreme court judge mandates are essentially lifetime. There's no fixed term, only way they leave is when they're forced to retire at 75 years old. They're just now trying to limit it to 8 years.
The word "dictatorship" doesn't actually mean anything. Its sole purpose is to attack certain institutions and/or governments, while excluding other institutions and governments from criticism even though they share most or all of the same characteristics.
Instead of asking whether or not XYZ is a dictatorship, ask "are they following their own laws and constitution?", "are they respecting universal human rights?", and "in whose interests are they acting?". The answers to those questions are absolutely enlightening and make the differences between countries commonly considered dictatorships and countries commonly considered democracies almost vanish.
> Instead of asking whether or not XYZ is a dictatorship, ask "are they following their own laws and constitution?"
They are not. Censorship is unconstitutional in Brazil, especially that of a political nature. Yet I don't think it's been a month since I last saw news of some politician being banned from holding office because they posted "fake news" online or something.
Basically the strategy now is to criminalize "fake news", accuse your opponents of spreading it and deplatform them because criminals can't hold political office. Show me the man, I'll show you the crime.
You make many good points but this is absurd: The word "dictatorship" doesn't actually mean anything.
Of course it does, you can quantify the degree to which a country is authoritarian even if it has nominally democratic institutions like North Korea or Iraq under the Ba'ath party. To be sure, the word is bandied about a lot in political discourse as in the comment you replied to, but it is well-defined.
> Of course it does, you can quantify the degree to which a country is authoritarian
Really? How?
I mean of course without resorting to what amounts to political opinions.
Measure legislative independence, frequency of regime changes, election margins, concentrations of executive authority and so on. Sure, it's a 'political opinion' that nobody is so cool they are naturally re-elected over and over with 97%+ majorities, but you can certainly measure the number of standard deviations in election results.
This book is readable and essays a rigorous approach to the topic, albeit within an existing political science/international relations framework whose axioms are not universally agreed upon.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262524407/the-logic-of-politica...
Most of these things cannot be "measured", and weighing them to produce some kind of aggregate score is inherently a biased process. There isn't any remotely agreed upon method to determine what constitutes an authoritarian government (or even where a specific government falls on a scale between authoritarian and democracy, when compared to others).
In some aspects, Switzerland is more authoritarian than Saudi Arabia. For example, in Switzerland there are strict building codes everywhere that restrict what kind of house you are allowed to build for yourself; in most of Saudi Arabia, you can build your house however you want. The very idea of a scale that somehow "measures" such things, and adequately incorporates them into a coherent picture of the whole, is absurd.
Any evaluation process is subject to accusations of bias, including yours above:
Instead of asking whether or not XYZ is a dictatorship, ask "are they following their own laws and constitution?", "are they respecting universal human rights?", and "in whose interests are they acting?"
Instead of just nay-saying and trying to redirect the argument, you could try engaging with the question of what a dictatorship is as a political structure. Or not, as you prefer.
Not yet but Congress is trying to approve a "fake news" package which tries to put more responsibilities on the hands of Big Tech regarding monitoring online content.
When I put it like that it doesn't sound so bad, but then you read the text and find out the government and its judiciary institutions have the absolute power of determining if something is deemed as fake news or not.
Then you can say it's actually good because it will prevent or reduce disinformation from spreading. Okay, I wouldn't mind anti-vax statements being blocked, but what if I have information that an authority is corrupt? They would try to censor me, it happened in the past, in 2018 I guess, where a reputable newspaper wrote an article that one of the Supreme Court judges was implicated in the major corruption scandal in Brazil, and a few days later the Supreme Court ordered the takedown of said article. When other mainstream outlets heard about this they just shared the original article to make it more difficult to censor this information.
A couple of weeks later the Supreme Court initiated a long process in which it's the judgy, jury and executioner, a thing that lots of citizens protested, but if you did it back then you'd be called a "bolsonarista" or people would say you're supporting fake news.
> reputable newspaper wrote an article that one of the Supreme Court judges was implicated in the major corruption scandal in Brazil
> a few days later the Supreme Court ordered the takedown of said article
What scandal are you referring to? I'd like to read about it. Let's make some Streisand magic happen!
https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2019/04/15/stf-censura...
https://www.intercept.com.br/2019/04/15/toffoli-crusoe-repor...
Globo even called it censorship. How times change.
Thanks.
It doesn't, really. It's specifically because Telegram failed to deliver all the requested information on certain nazi propaganda spreader groups.
Who defined nazi propaganda spreader groups?
Who draws the line? First Nazi propaganda spreaders, then gay rights activists?
Sounds extremely dangerous to have this kind of centralized control.
The Telegram group is literally called “Brazilian Anti-semite Movement”. I don’t think they were sharing pot pie recipes there…
Sorry, but if one is directly stating nazi ideals, symbols, denying the ocurrence of hate crimes, spreading information on how to create weapons and more effectively invade schools to "go for the high score", one isn't a gay rights activist. It's a nazi.
It's not a situation where people who just didn't get enough information (or downright wackos) can try and relativize the contents. It's quite, quite clear.
'First they came for the nazis', really?
Ah, the great slippery slope argument.
Assuming good faith, most developed countries have hate (and similar) speech laws, with Nazism being explicitly banned in most (all? maybe Spain/Portugal/Switzerland are exceptions) of Europe. Same goes for antisemitism, or in general racial/religious hatred/discrimination to various extents. It's not a slippery slope "oh what will they ban next", it's "this kind of thing has proven itself to be extremely dangerous and is detrimental to everyone, hence it's banned". And it has been for decades, and nobody has just added gay activists, including in very anti-LGBTQ countries like Poland.
You might also want to look up the paradox of tolerance, it's a fun read.
> You might also want to look up the paradox of tolerance, it's a fun read..
I often see 'paradox of tolerance' cited as meaning something like: "if you're intolerant, I don't have to tolerate you".
But, as Popper put it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
"""In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise."""
The threshold can be as high as 'would society collapse if these people are tolerated', and not as low as 'they're intolerant, so I don't have to tolerate them'.
[flagged]
Oh come on, now I want to make a similar app and name it Disbelief.
I'm fairly certain it is deeply connected to Russia. People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats. They have money when Telegram is expensive to run, not to mention they can easily threaten Durov's life.
The Russian network block and letting people use Telegram again was the government squeezing their biggest source of users and income until they acquiesced.
> I'm fairly certain it is deeply connected to Russia.
Just as Signal, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp are deeply connected to the USA?
> People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats.
The cloud and E2EE encryption of Telegram have already been audited by independent researchers.
> They have money when Telegram is expensive to run
They literally raised money (a billion dollars) by selling bonds last year and to make Telegram self-sustainable, introduced Telegram Premium.
> not to mention they can easily threaten Durov's life
Which is why Durov (and his whole dev team) moved to the UAE in the first place!
I'm all for healthy skepticism, but there must be a limit. Unproven conspiracies aren't helping anyone, especially from people who have no issues with apps like WhatsApp. Telegram has time and again tried to fight government intervention, and yet that's not enough. The clients are open-source, everything audited by independent researchers and yet, people aren't afraid to make claims that they can't prove.
Yeah people keep trying to push the "Russian connection" when it isn't being supported by Durov's actions. It almost feels like a conspiracy theory encouraged by users of competing apps.
There are legitimate reasons to doubt Telegram like the lack of default end-to-end encryption but the Russian thing as a criticism of the app itself is overblown.
There's reason to believe that specially when you realize VK is actively monitored by Russia and Pavel doesn't care about it at all.
Pavel has no control over VK. He sold all his stake when he left Russia.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/1/31/5363990/how-putins-cronie...
> The cloud and E2EE encryption of Telegram have already been audited by independent researchers.
Yes, and they all agree it's crap. Just look at this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6915741 (Feel free to ignore Moxie, but listen to tptacek). In addition, it doesn't even matter since (a) it's not turned on by default and (b) it can't be turned on for group chats.
That said, I agree that Durov probably is not closely collaborating with the Russian state.
The thread you linked is talking about a totally different algorithm, not relevant to our discussion.
MTProto 1.0 had flaws and proven vulnerabilities. Telegram ditched the algorithm after 2013.
MTProto 2.0 is much secure and has been audited multiple times already without fail. The security is solid, that's the consensus.
Also, there are 2 types of MTProto 2.0 algorithms. One is cloud encryption and the other is end to end encryption.
Cloud encryption is enabled by default on all chats but for those who need end to end encryption, they can use secret chats.
You can read more about it here: https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-does-server-client-e...
Apparently they didn't learn much, given that MTProto 2.0 still uses IGE. Or still derives the IV from a hash of the message.
The article you link does not mention "cloud encryption". What is that? TLS?
The cloud encryption is what I linked, the Server-Client encryption. Just below it, you can see E2E.
E2E is not available on all platforms, is hidden in obscure menus and the whole UI discourages users from using it. Telegram is a data-harvesting social goolag-oriented network after all. :-/
That would be a pessimistic way to see it.
The greatest feature that telegram offers is cloud sync. Everybody knows the limitations E2EE comes with. There's no way you could have thousands of members in a group on Signal.
Along with that, the ability to manage device sessions and to login on multiple devices with full chat sync is extremely unique to Telegram.
You're asking them to ditch that in favor of inferior UX, which they simply cannot do at this point.
But I do hear the valid complaints. I do believe they should improve MTProto 2.0 to work on multiple devices and in groups. Their implementation is fine for 1-1 chats but having something better than that is always welcome.
The server side is still proprietary. They could have just given "dummied" source code to "independent researchers".
Chances are ALWAYS against regular people.
> The server side is still proprietary
Open sourcing it would make no difference. Signal's server is open source, yet the sources are always released late. For a whole year, Signal was running a totally different server code than the one they had made public, they even injected some crypto stuff and not a single person knew what the server was running.
This is the nature of servers. Backend is always unverifiable, even if it's got the latest code available to the public. The only thing open source backend is useful for is self-hosting, not verification.
If it's encryoted E2E, then you don't need to inspect the server side to verify that. And the client is FOSS, anyone can inspect it. (It is my understanding that group chats are not encrypted; I have not cared to verify that one way or the other, but I could.)
How would that make any difference if the traffic is end to end encrypted, though?
Maybe they do something with the metadata, but so can every other messaging service.
This paranoia that everything is linked to Russia is just nuts.
Right. If you speak Russian and actually look at what is happening in Telegram, you'd know better. If I was a dissident there and my adversary would be SVR/GRU, I surely wouldn't call it paranoia.
Literally everything can be faked. Independent researchers, etc. Especially by the government. I don’t have an iota of trust in govts.
Most Telegram messages are group chats, they are not E2EE at all since Telegram doesn't support them.
Sorry but this sounds like conspiracy theory stuff. It is encrypted client-server so your message is misleading. And Durov as far as I'm aware is in Dubai. Russia blocked Telegram in the past and because they actually failed (it was still most popular messenger in there despite the block), so they decided to give up the block and started pumping their own propaganda on their own channels.
Maaan, don't you see? This was a controlled move: hook up people to a social network, pretend to clumsily ban it (while also testing and upgrading ISP abilities to do it), control reaction, pretend to unban it (oh, we do what peoples asked! we care! we not baddies! we cool!)
While in the same reality aggressively fight TOR, block VPNs, enforce passport registration, etc. etc. There's even a man jailed for running a tor node!
They just couldn't win and gave up. They accidentally crippled Github, large portions of google cloud and even their own government services while trying to blacklist Telegram and figured it was not worth the risk and getting laughed at.
The Skripal affair and other fuckups highlighted that Russia can't get away with threatening even a retiree's life, let alone millionaire's with some security.
Why couldn't they do DPI and block the protocol?
Because SSL is SSL. They sure tried to block a lot of it. I guess they could collect public keys and block them, but blocking itself is still done by ISP on Roskomnadzor's orders, and they didn't include this capability. That would be another cat and mouse game anyway, you can cut new keypairs faster than you can block them.
India does DNS and SNI (which exposes the hostname) based TLS blocking, I wonder why Russia couldn’t do the same.
Domain fronting used to be quite effective at getting past SNI blocking. Extracting github.com out of a TLS packet is trivial but actually verifying the certificate requires compute power.
Major cloud providers have stopped making domain fronting an option (mostly because it was never supposed to happen anyway) but ISPs are never going to try to validate every single TLS certificate to see what traffic to block and what traffic to let through. The overhead would be enormous and people using custom certificate authorities (businesses and private persons) would get their communication blocked for no good reason.
It's also possible to get around SNI by using session resumption instead of doing a full handshake. 0-RTT TLS needs special attention because of replay attack risks, but it can speed up the network while at the same time avoiding SNI blocking once a session has been set up. QUIC offers a similar solution.
As far as I can tell, the tools normally used for traffic interception don't grow as fast as the tools for new communication. Support for certain protocols can take days to implement on the client side but weeks on the middlebox side, and that assumes your middleboxes get regular updates.
Worst case scenario, people just turn on a VPN to a place that doesn't block their apps and you lose all visibility of their network traffic. Implementing this stuff at scale isn't easy.
I'm pretty sure Telegram runs their own dns with dynamic addresses and you can create a bunch of certificates for weird host names to dupe SNI. Russia dedicated quite some resources to it and couldn't win. I don't think it had any chance unless they're willing to DPI 100% of traffic China style, but even then it's fundamentally impossible to tell random google cloud/aws website api traffic from telegram.
State-controlled DPI couldn't process 0.1% of traffic at the time.
> People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats.
Did they already adopt a proven published alogithm for encryption, or still using a homegrown KGB-Krypt algorithm? Sorry for a trivial question, I am not a user.
> Did they already adopt a proven published alogithm for encryption, or still using a homegrown KGB-Krypt algorithm?
Their algorithm itself is proven and published, has been audited multiple times already.
It is not as good Double Ratchet in terms of features but security wise, it's solid.
It's still homegrown.
Q.E.D. Thank you!
This has nothing to do with Russia.
It is imperative to enforce the law and block internet platforms that fail to comply with legal regulations. The internet cannot serve as a sanctuary for promoting neo-Nazi groups and other illegal activities, as it must remain subject to legal jurisdiction. All individuals and organizations, whether online or offline, must be held accountable to the law. It is unacceptable to allow hate speech, homophobia, and the promotion of heinous crimes, such as child murder, to proliferate unchecked. The platform Telegram, for example, was rightfully blocked for refusing to provide authorities with phone numbers. It is essential that this platform and others that violate legal standards be severely punished to ensure compliance with the law.
I'm not a digital privacy dogmatist and in like general terms I agree that sometimes states have legitimate powers to wiretap or whatever. And I agree that the idea that any group of people anywhere can communicate in near perfect secrecy about whatever they want is a little scary. But technology has put us in a challenging position wherein it seems like our only two choices are living in a perfect surveillance state all the time, where everything can be, in principal, observed by the state at a whim and the former reality, where people can have genuinely private communications.
When I think of it in those terms, I'd rather humans continue to have privacy, even if it allows ne'er do wells to conspire secretly.
It's a politico-technological arms race. Government makes laws, people make technology to circumvent those laws, government makes new laws, people make new technology. With every iteration, government must increase its tyranny to enjoy the same level of control it had before. Governments get worse and worse in a desperate attempt to hold on to their power. We'll either end up in a totalitarian state or with an uncontrollable population, whichever comes first. Who'll reach their limits first?
Brazilian government is already speaking of giving judges and politicians total power to censor things on the internet. They're speaking of "autonomous internet supervision entities". Yeah.
I'm not so sure its so zero-sum.
> And I agree that the idea that any group of people anywhere can communicate in near perfect secrecy about whatever they want is a little scary
The problem is, short of banning encryption altogether, you cannot prevent people from communicating in near perfect secrecy. If a criminal (or neo-Nazi, or homophobic, or whatever scapegoat you want to use) organization wants to communicate secretly, they will have means of doing so. All it takes is single programmer to write the custom application, and a single AWS instance to relay the data.
By banning Telegram or enforcing government rules, you're only taking away privacy from ordinary folks, while doing effectively nothing to those who you're claiming to fight against.
...and no, this is not an argument for banning encryption. I hope that part is obvious.
It is pretty easy to imagine a world where all manufactured hardware is compromised by default so that the state can access it. In some ways were close to that already. That said, you're point is good. The dedicated person can probably achieve pretty good privacy except in the most powerful regimes.
Even that wouldn't stop the most dedicated, which are most likely exactly the ones you're trying to stop.
As long as embedded devices exist, you can write a QR reader/writer + encryptor/decryptor on an embedded device with a camera/display, and use the compromised devices as just a transport layer for encrypted QR coded messages.
Would you also agree to this ban, if it was to expose a group of homosexual men having consensual sex, assuming it was illegal?
Honestly, I don´t know what this type of post is doing on HN. Very strong political bias and misinformation being spread in the comments, feels like I'm on Reddit.
No company should think it's above the national laws
You and JP Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace can have words.
There's 195 nations on this planet. Should every company lower themselves below every nation? Without question? There's far more provinces with some lawmaking capability. How logistically do we even begin to figure out how to obey each & every single local rule?
These nations are on the internet. It's an unplace to connect all places. If your area has stupid beef, it's on you to handle your shit & make it so. The whole world doesn't bend to your local rules, it doesn't alter the rules of the entire internet.
The inevitable result will be the destruction of the internet as we know it today. The international network will fracture into multiple regional networks with heavy filtering at the borders as nations seek to impose their laws on it. Regnet, if you will.
I'm glad I got to experience the true internet. It was great while it lasted. Truly a wonder of humanity.
> There's 195 nations on this planet. Should every company lower themselves below every nation? Without question?
My honest response to this would be: “yes, if they want to do business in said country”. Otherwise we end up where we’ve been, with Facebook being the sole way to access internet in some places. Why should an organization seeking to make a profit hold more sway than the institutions that allow such a profit to be made in the first place (not to mention the protection of their citizens).
To be clear, I realize that in practice, many governments don’t operate in as much good faith as I’d like. But I’d also argue that’s largely due to business holding outsized sway across the globe.
> There's far more provinces with some lawmaking capability. How logistically do we even begin to figure out how to obey each & every single local rule?
There is no inherent right to do business internationally. Requiring that companies adhere to the laws wherever they choose to operate is hardly unreasonable. If they cannot comply — if the logistics are too expensive — then obviously they’re not successful enough to expand into these new countries.
But the idea that companies — where the ultimate goal is profit — should outrank governments — where the ultimate goal is a functioning society — seems ludicrous when stated plainly. The fact that our current society is largely modeled by outsized corporate influence is proof of that.
One can argue that not all governments, or even most, seek a functioning society in the way I’ve described. But even then, one must realize that the governments in question are beholden to corporate interests.
All the way back to the East India Company and beyond, one can demonstrate that globalized corporate influence harms society. So these are hardly ridiculous questions to ask.
To me it's up to nations to determine whether they want to be connected to the rest of the planet. If you want to make a bunch of rules for yourself, you get what we have here, I hope: your country having to shut off that part of the internet.
You phrase it as doing business. But to me, these people in these other places are coming to us. They are connected to us. The onus is not on the rest of the world to adapt ourselves to these pilgrims. That's not what interconnection implies. We cannot flatten ourselves to be a lowest common denominator to all.
The East India Company feels entirely inapplicable here & is a gross & toxic countersuggestion. That was a case of a nation expanding outward. This is the opposite. This is visitors from afar, visiting us across the internet, a system begat of a free & democratic people.
That all said I am interested in some kind of cooperation. But I have a hard time imagining what a usable basic framework would be. It has to start with realizing sovereignty across boundaries is weak, enormously weak, a supplicant. And working from that start.
In your scenario, you’re calling this the opposite of an expansion. But aren’t the companies literally “expanding” into these countries? Otherwise, what’s the issue? Unless you’re saying they should have sway regardless of whether they’re doing business there or not?
And to be clear it is “doing business”. Nobody is forcing companies to ship anywhere they don’t want to. Nobody is forcing them to allow IP connections from countries they do not operate in. The internet connects us all, sure, but to accept payment for any service, that company must have a financial relationship in place within that country — or with another country that’s already doing business with the first.
And I must disagree about the EIC being inapplicable. There is not so great a difference between weaponizing dopamine and transporting opium.
I’m truly not trying to be inflammatory here, fwiw, and I appreciate your perspective and the way you’ve gone about conveying it. I just disagree with your premises on a fundamental level.
If I don't have any servers in your nation, I don't see how you could possibly even begin to regard me as having expanded into your nation. Your people are leaving your nation to come to me. That seems quite factually rooted.
> If I don't have any servers in your nation, I don't see how you could possibly even begin to regard me as having expanded into your nation.
Simple — by making sales and/or servicing customers for profit in my region, your business has “expanded” into my region. Server location is irrelevant — as you’ve pointed out, the internet is everywhere.
You need to disconnect yourself if you are going to have authoritarian stances over every place your people can connect to. Your fake dominion over others will never happen nor should it. What a trash fire impossible facetiously crap un hackable perspective you offer. Complete egocentristic imposition, that those who connect can dictate terms. A joke. Absolutely the hell not.
Do you have even a single token offering to make? Is there any limit whatsoever in any way that anyone connecting from afar should have? Or should theirocal laws immediately apply in full force wherever they connect? That seems to be the stance here.
Gotta say, I think we’re speaking past each other here. I don’t understand what is authoritarian about believing a business entity wishing to sell their goods and services to a region should do such business by the laws of said region. After all, you’re using the region’s public infrastructure to do business.
I’m also a bit disappointed this is where your line of argument has ended up. I have many, many flaws, but a desire for absolute power is not among them.
Indeed, advocating for respecting a diverse range of locales, with a diverse range of laws, would seem to me to provide far more freedom than a system of centralized control under a single, for-profit structure. Isn’t that what free market advocates are always harping about? Competition of the marketplace?
I agree my fake dominion over others will never happen, nor should it! But I remain puzzled as to why you’re so stridently coming after me in defense of a system that prioritizes the right of the ruling class to make money over all other concerns. Historically, such systems tend heavily and inevitably toward the authoritarianism you so eloquently rage against.
I don't understand why voltaireodactyl's comment was downvoted because he or she is pretty much on the right track with respect to the current legal regimes. Those still promoting Barlow's ideas in 2023 are living in a fantasy world.
It's because the legal regimes are absurd wrong & on a crash course for unsustainable conflicting tangles of lawmaking, and don't recognize the international kerfuffle created by letting any nation anywhere apply se I tree rules to any business. Each nation thinks it has the right, but doesn't consider that that implies every other nation also has fiat right to do make up whatever rules it wants against any other company, purely because said company can be reached over the internet. The nations are insane & power drunk.
And voltaireodactyl phrased it as someone doing their shit in the US being an invader & colonizer of other nations, just because other people can so happen to connect to the US. Which is further absurd & unsustainable madness.
I didn't down vote. But down vote to the nations of the earth, who are idiots, making mockery of themselves & the law itself by planting the seeds of tyranny by giving themselves arbitrary power over everywhere on earth. These nations are in the wrong. I agree with you that this resembles the current legal climate, but the legal climate is being actively hostile to humanity, is being absurd, is wrong, and in a number of cases we have gotten right up the brink of nations having to disconnect services to actually have any power, to maintain their laws, and alas the major nations tend generally to keep backing down. This is their only real power, to disconnect, and this untenable situation will lead to more and more breakdowns over time, and I hope we see more disconnects, rather than the constant spread of every random ration having arbitrary power over everyone.
I was around for the DoIoC the first time and while there's a lot to recommend that document, it's also pompous and arrogant in many respects, to the detriment of reasonable discourse since.
If your area has stupid beef, it's on you to handle your shit & make it so
Yeah yeah, nothing is ever our problem, it's always someone else's problem and other people's problems are stupid. Do you not realize how head-up-the-ass that sounds? A lot of regular people hate techies because they celebrate disruption and software 'eating the world' (including many people's livelihood and communities) while shrugging off any kind of collective responsibility.
What about when some group of people have legitimate beef?
Have you read the American Declaration of Independence? It is definitely pompous and arrogant -- and also full of lies. It is genre requirement.
So they should also hand out the names and locations of people organizing anti-war protests in Russia if ever requested.
If they want to do business in Russia? Absolutely.
Fortunately, nobody is forcing them to do business in Russia. But doing so entails acceptance of whatever local rules there are, including rules the vast majority of people might consider wrong.
I can promise you that Facebook & Co happily hand information on any individual to US law enforcement as long as there is a court order. They don't look at the person in question and then decide based on their own sense of morality whether they "should" supply that information. They simply do it.
Does Telegram have servers or offices in Brazil?
Good point, that’s why this conversation has more nuance. In this case, a single judge from one of the Brazilian states has decided to take down an app for the entire country.
Man the judicial systems of the world keep seeming like the new unchecked off their rockers loonies. Definitely feeling like the weekest link in democracy.
Advocacy groups have gotten very good at forum-shopping the most extreme district court judges and convincing them to issue nation-wide injunctions. That practice probably does need to be curtailed. We saw it with the recent abortion pill issue but it was also happening with Trump's immigration restrictions, for example. No matter which side of the aisle it is coming from, some random judge in Hawaii or Texas should not be able to block nation-wide legislation without an exceptionally good reason.
I mean, presumably that reason will be violation of the law?
It's not like the judge just wakes up one day and decides "Hey, I'm going to fuck this up for everyone". There's a case for the judge to hear, and actions based on rulings. Higher courts can decide if they stand up to scrutiny (and there are often ways for effects to be stayed pending the rulings of these higher courts - see for instance Elizabeth Holmes staying out of prison again today).
Personally I think it's great that judges can make rulings that affect the operations of large multinational companies and services - remove that and we're even more in thrall to big money, with even less scope for legal remedy.
Now when law is applied flippantly, corruptly, poorly, with bias etc and the country does nothing to fix it, that's on the country to fix itself and run better, not by removing the power for the 'little guy' to have any influence at all.
No national laws should think they are above freedom of expression and the right to privacy.
OK, now define those things in an unambiguous way such that countries can come together in agreement over what constitutes expression, where the lines are with respect to slander/libel, what constitutes incitement, harassment... is money expression? Are lies in advertising protected?
These simple declarations of what people feel is true and right are ... I dunno, is the right expression "charmingly naive"?
Actually, it's not that hard to define these things pretty unambiguously. I hashed this out in a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35508978
I think that thread actually nicely shows how hard and how contentious the issue is.
Brazilian politicians are introducing "fake news" laws literally right now.
Unabridged, borderline irresponsible freedom of expression is granted only in the US. Some Canadian truckers found this out the hard way
Somehow, despite all the incorrect opinions and unsanctioned thoughts, we still get by.
Neither should any nation think it has the right to enforce its will on foreign entities.
Couldn’t agree more.
"Every company should implement mass censorship and encourage countries to overstep"
This is a really weak defeatist position.
Brazil's administration is attempting to silence opposition voices, this has nothing to do with Nazis. Much like the EU uses "hate speech" laws to silence mass immigration skeptics, this is a political measure to silence people.
Are you saying all the opposition are nazi?
Because this was literally a nazi group called ""卐 Frente Anti-Semita 卐""
And? The opposition organizes on Telegram, and it's a way bigger target.
Even the current government has telegram channels lol. This has nothing to do with it. It was done by a judge, not the government.
You appear to be implying Brazilian judges are not politicized, which seems laughable given the Supreme Court as well as the message leaks.
Brazilian judges are not even in the same realm of impartiality as some first world countries. This appeal to authority falls flat, as it would if you implied Venezuelan judges were impartial.
The group has nazi symbols, and is called "Anti-Semitic movement". This is not even remotely political.
Nah, it has all to do with nazis this time.
The current government isn't like the last one, that actually used the intelligence machine to attack opposition voices.
Law kind of exists.
No government should think it's above its national laws
Stockholm syndrome is a bitch
No company should give up it's user data without a fight
It's not even clear that who they were looking for had broken any laws