Telegram Allows Private Chat Reports After Founder's Arrest (techcrunch.com) 48
An anonymous reader shares a report: Telegram has quietly updated its policy to allow users to report private chats to its moderators following the arrest of founder Pavel Durov in France over "crimes committed by third parties" on the platform. [...] The Dubai-headquartered company has additionally edited its FAQ page, removing two sentences that previously emphasized its privacy stance on private chats. The earlier version had stated: "All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them."
So I guess (Score:1)
My question is, is this about CSAM, or copyright? While they take down copyrighted content, it's not scanned like Facebook. Copyrighted content is definitely on their platform. TV Shows, Movies, etc. have been found in various groups.
Hopefully this is all it takes, because channels and groups having CSAM should require good old fashioned police work. They also should be nipped
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So you think it is that simple, It seems like this is about censorship. They (Telegram) don't enforce the censorship that the western governments want so lets do what we did to Assange.
Would you fucking shut up about censorship, Yuri. Your country won't even tell its people it's been invaded for the first time since World War II. Putin won't let his minions mention that Ukraine is now occupying Russian territory he's so terrified of looking weak. People aren't allowed to mention their son or husband was
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Agreed and underrated.
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Searching for uploaded CSAM (Score:3)
I don't know how to scan for copyrighted works but scanning for CSAM that is uploaded is not a big deal at all.
Sure a person can flag CSAM, or report it when/if they come across it, but there's another way too. Known CSAM images are hashed and those hashes are distributed. [inhope.org] So searching for it is kinda like running a virus scanner that way. [iwf.org.uk]
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It turns out that platforms are more interested in sowing division & discontent for profit than making any kind of positive contribution to societies.
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Our children are not the price we pay. As the Spanish Republicans put it in the 1930s when fighting against the despotic Francisco Fran
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and the fact that you yourself need Telegram for news (and I do too)
And by news you mean crap. If you're getting your "news" from Telegram you obviously aren't being informed by real journalists, or even people who know what they're talking about.
No one "needs" Telegram for "news" since it doesn't provide "news". The only ones suppressing journalists are countries such as North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, and Israel, to name just a few.
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Re:So I guess (Score:5, Interesting)
My question is, is this about CSAM, or copyright?
Copyright is a civil matter when it comes to taking down or reporting content. If you're not the primary distributor then no one is going to jail. It's nothing to do with copyright.
If it's other boogeymen you're looking for you're missing the "t" word. Terrorism. Actually you're missing a whole lot of other words related to illegal activities which Telegram has refused to acknowledge. Chat messaging apps in Europe are major hubs for organised crime as well which is why there's so much focus on them by the Dutch Police (I say police, but they are more akin to the FBI's cybercrimes unit).
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That's going to be the next spin, isn't it?
First it was "Telegram has no encryption, don't use it". Then it was "We grabbed Durov because it has too much encryption and he won't give us the keys". And now it's "oh it was reporting child porn, nothing to see here, move on".
Meanwhile Durov is still stuck in France and they're going to get him to make this into another whatsapp where "it's point to point encrypted (and we have all the keys, and so do all the spooks). And while we can't read any of it because i
Jail sucks, news at 11 (Score:1)
That was fast. I guess it's hard to remain true to your principles of free speech when the lifestyle you're accustomed to gets taken away. As I've said in previous discussions, I'm not even sure where on Earth he wouldn't have some government coming after him because his platform has a few criminals among its userbase. Even Apple, with its massive amount of wealth, is still in the government's crosshairs for providing device and chat encryption.
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I guess the problem is that this is a service. Nobody ever arrested Phil Zimmermann for PGP.
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That was fast. I guess it's hard to remain true to your principles of free speech when the lifestyle you're accustomed to gets taken away.
Telegram has surrendered [tech.co] data [livelaw.in] before. WIll do so again. The claims of not ever having done so are bogus.
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Telegram is an easy-button solution for dumb criminals and terrorists who don't know any better. And yes there are plenty of more secure alternatives, telegram doesn't apply E2EE by default, can't use it for groups, and uses a homebrew cipher.
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Actually I don't think anything would be different. Law enforcement's problem with Telegram isn't that it allows one-on-one E2EE chats, plenty of mainstream apps do that, their problem is that the group chats are working like a no-rules forum on a bulletproof central host. They've never tolerated such things.
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That is one possibility.
Another is that this is all Kayfabe.
Another is an excuse to harass the Russians.
Re:Why dwell on telegram? (Score:4, Informative)
It's possible they are more secure than telegram
Signal, or rather OWS, is proven more secure. Has been for some time. Not 100% perfect in all use cases but none of them are. (Issues like contact discovery owing to use of real numbers to pin participants). On the plus side, Signal also enabled domain fronting in order to bypass local restrictions when the more oppressive governments put effort into blocking the domain.
Signal, the service, has zero access to the content - Unlike WhatsApp, (Meta retains access in order to distribute chat history/media to new devices at sync), and Telegram, which does similar. The downside with Signal being,if you don't backup, you're losing your chat history - which is a good thing.
Telegram was always security-from-obscurity in that the underlying magic math was never independtly reviewed because "reasons".
WhatsApp uses OWS but breaks pretty much all the rules rendering it pointless.
So where does this stop? (Score:3)
Re:So where does this stop? (Score:5, Informative)
The justification for the arrest was made possible by the very loose moderation that Telegram seems to practice - according to reports, investigators found CSAM material easily in publicly accessible groups, which suggests that moderation is entirely possible but that Telegram is doing a terrible job of it. Investigators also said that when they reported illegal material, it wasn't removed.
Durov isn't necessarily culpable for just allowing crime to occur on the platform, but under EU law he's culpable for not detecting crime that is easily detectable, and not removing illegal material when notified. It's a fine distinction, maybe, but an important one. There's obviously a geopolitical component too, with Telegram being especially popular in Russia.
The same companies you mentioned would also face criminal investigations if they didn't properly moderate their platforms and remove illegal material when notified.
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Good job twisting the argument into something nonsensical and reactionary. Never seen you do that before... *sigh*
No, obviously phone companies aren't required to moderate their users. However, if someone s reasonably suspected of using the phone service to commit a crime they have to hand over the data they have about that customer, same as in the US.
OTOH, if a phone company was told to hand over data about, let's say someone making unwanted sexual calls for example, and they refused and they also refused
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Then EU is a dystopian hellhole if a phone company is required to 'moderate' their customers' conversations. They absolutely have the ability to do that.
And their cops are stupid if they know where illegal materials are and want to shut down the system rather than trace and arrest the perps.
Stupid or complicit.
And you're a complete idiot if you think a telephone company is in any way comparable.
A telephone company will turn it's records over to the cops if given a warrant and comply with orders given by a judge. That's the first difference between Telegram and a phone company. The second thing is, and something the Russian Trolls like to gloss over is that Durov wasn't arrested for the private chats, rather the quite public parts of telegram where people were selling drugs and trading kiddie porn.
Phone comp
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under EU law he's culpable for not detecting crime that is easily detectable
An unfunded mandate, while governments allow crime though they collect protection money.
French doing an Assange on Pavel Durov (Score:1)
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Re:So I guess (Score:-1, Flamebait) [slashdot.org]
“So you think it is that simple, It seems like this is about censorship. They (Telegram) don't enforce the censorship that the western governments want so lets do what we did to Assange.”
“Telegram is the platform of choice to publish free from censorship. Want to post Ukraine attacks in Kursk then go to Telegram, want to post that you think Ukraine is losing and it is Telegram. Remember when Assange posted the video
WhatsApp (Score:2)
Why is WhatsApp allowed to host CSAM loaded chats while Telegram is made out the villain?
Might have more to do with who owns the company than the actual actions of the company?
Terrible... and so are the changes here. (Score:2)
Ever since Slashdot was sold off to the Chinese the tone has drastically changed around here. Freedom [the technical capability to tell the man to fuck himself no matter what society decided was best] used to be a core moral imperative for most folks around here.