I did not see the info anywhere else, but it was just broadcasted by the main French tv channel.
Pavel Durov, the Telegram founder was just arrested out of his airplane in the Bourget airport in France near Paris.
There is no info about why exactly he was arrested but it looks like that French police had a warrant for him.
But it looks like it is because that he is accused of being an accessory of a lot of things like traffic, drugs, pedopornography, anything bad you can image because he would not have done anything to combat that on Telegram.
If it is real, it would really be the same kind of political crime abuse on an individual of the same level as what happened to Julian Assange.
I can easily guess that assholes in secret service would probably like very much to use that to blackmail him to add backdoors to telegram. So sad.
Since forever I stay suspicious but so far Telegram as an impeccable track record. Never there was a single instance of case where there would be even a suspicion of proof that insider knowledge of conversations was accessed/used.
Also, it is clear that Durov is a dissident and personally experienced and run away of the dictatorial state. So I think that it is probably one of the tech personality that I trust the most in the world.
Obviously FSB is not going to make a press release and be like "We have the keys LOL" so there would never be definitive proof.
Fun fact: Telegram at some point was blocked in Russia for not giving FSB access to data. Later telegram was unblocked and is used extensively in Russia. It's not hard to figure out why it was unblocked.
Telegram wasn't fully blocked in Russia even for a single day. They tried to block it and failed miserably. The team actively circumvented the blocking by deploying to new IPs faster than they were blocked, and in addition to that every IT guy in Russia had a tgproxy instance running for family and friends.
After a while they just stopped trying and decided that it's less reputational damage to just let it be.
>After a while they just stopped trying and decided that it's less reputational damage to just let it be.
That's not true. It's legally unblocked. the reason why it was unblocked was never published. "It was unblocked because they gave up" is just your interpretation of the events. Pretty naive one, in my opinion.
This is pure FUD. They're still trying to block it, the latest three attempts happened this week. Two of them were done in the middle of the night as training exercise, maybe for 3-4 hours each, and the last one then happened in the middle of the day. All three broke large parts of the internet and were quickly reverted.
When something newsworthy happens in some region, all messengers get blocked in that region for days, Telegram included. They don't care about collateral damage to other websites then.
You're the one who is spreading FUD. Telegram was officially (legally) unblocked in 2020. There is 0 evidence there is an active force trying to block Telegram in Russia. Which is very busy blocking every non-russian platform btw. As you yourself pointed out, most likely the reason why TG was down is because of attempts to block other platforms.
And? I use TG everyday. I know about the times when TG is down. as YOUR OWN links show, usually it's not just telegram who is down, so it's clear it's mass block.
The article doesn't contain the evidence though; it claims that someone changed access to private for a Telegram group that covered the protests. However, as the article says, it could be done not only by Telegram, but by one of the administrators.
Durov was notorious in Russia for refusing to cooperate with FSB (successor to KGB), too. I remember when FSB asked him to give access to protester communications on VK (in 2011 during mass protests), he mockingly responded with a picture of a dog with its tongue out (showing your tongue means "I won't give it to ya" in Russian culture). That's why he left Russia, because he felt he'd get arrested soon. Quite ironic that he ended up getting arrested in the "free world", not Russia. Telegram was also banned in Russia for a few years.
> Telegram was also banned in Russia for a few years.
And how exactly do you think it got unbanned?
Their "encryption" used to use an in-house algorithm (in house algorithms almost always are vastly inferior to standard ones) and even today encryption stores the keys on their servers (in Russia...) and E2EE has to be enabled per-conversation by hand.
And my intuition is that Telegram is going to become banned in Russia soon, as Youtube is being banned now and Telegram is the last popular application where you can find the content about war, protests or elections that govt doesn't like.
Telegram has also large Russian pro-war communities, and it's extensively used by soldiers deployed in Ukraine for communication. If pro-war channels outnumber opposition channels (and they probably do), Telegram probably won't be banned as long the government has no alternative.
The fact of Durov getting arrested could be also used for propaganda purposes (no free speech in the West).
> And my intuition is that Telegram is going to become banned in Russia soon
It had already happened with extreme humiliation of responsible agencies.
> as Youtube is being banned now
It's not banned, it's throttled because google kept abusing backbone networks once their CDNs had started to burn down and claiming that this is totally fine and fixable with direct BGP peerings with ISPs (yeah, right)
It works just fine on mobile internet connection where traffic shaping is an inherent feature and it only works like shit on broadband where ISPs are only capable of sending TCP RST once the queue is over the limit.
> Telegram is the last popular application where you can find the content about war, protests or elections that govt doesn't like
Clearly you are not in touch with people in Russia and have never actually seen their social media. Or just being dramatic.
Do you have any confirmation for what you are claiming? E.g. the claim that all ISPs simultaneously voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube to reduce foreign traffic? It seems to me that you either don't know the details or are simply trolling.
> It's not banned, it's throttled because google kept abusing backbone networks once their CDNs had started to burn down and claiming that this is totally fine and fixable with direct BGP peerings with ISPs (yeah, right)
> It works just fine on mobile internet connection where traffic shaping is an inherent feature and it only works like shit on broadband where ISPs are only capable of sending TCP RST once the queue is over the limit.
This is not true. The connections to googlevideo are throttled by government-operated DPI, not by ISPs. You can verify this by sending following request from a Russian residential or mobile IP address to a Russian hosting provider Selectel:
The request above is not send to Youtube, it doesn't even leave Russia, but it will be throttled because curl uses "googlevideo.com" in SNI field in ClientHello TLS record. DPI detects the SNI and drops the packets. The download speed will be very low, in the range of kilobytes/sec. However, if you remove googlevideo.com domain from SNI and write
Then the file will be downloaded at full speed, megabytes/sec. It is a request to the same host, to the same IP address, but it is not throttled anymore.
Also the information about mobile connection not being throttled is outdated and incorrect. Nowadays mobile connections are throttled as well.
The information that all ISPs voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube is implausible. Why would they throttle the speed to allow their competitors to lure away their clients?
> E.g. the claim that all ISPs simultaneously voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube to reduce foreign traffic
> The information that all ISPs voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube is implausible
> Also the information about mobile connection not being throttled
Why are you trying to build a strawman? That's not what I said. I've said "google kept abusing backbone networks" (e.g. IEXPs), which obviously means it's a matter of the Main Radiofrequency Centre, since it involves nation-wide infrastructure - not some "ISP volunteering".
And I’ve never said that “mobile connection is not being throttled”. In fact, I am stating exactly the opposite, pointing out that traffic shaping is an inherent feature for a mobile ISP. In contrast to broadband, where no one bothered with deep traffic manipulation before, so an ad-hoc throttling solution (yes, typically simply reusing existing law enforcement integrations) works like shit.
> This is not true. The connections to googlevideo are throttled by government-operated DPI, not by ISPs. You can verify this by sending following request from a Russian residential or mobile IP address to a Russian hosting provider Selectel:
One does not need a synthetic test such as yours. One can simply try playing a video from the same browser, switching connection between broadband connected Wi-Fi and a mobile hotspot and notice that broadband doesn’t seem to be working properly, but mobile actually works, even if it’s not Full HD. How come? Does your hypothesis regarding “not by ISPs, but by government-issued DPIs” explain the variance in ISPs behavior? No, it doesn’t. Just as it doesn’t explain why “blocked” YT seems to be “blocked” completely different from your typical weed growers forum. It works differently from how you imagine it.
> Why would they throttle the speed to allow their competitors to lure away their clients?
Speaking of which, apparently some broadband ISPs are now trying to implement throttling properly to give them an edge over the competition: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6919868
IIRC the bans weren't successful because the Telegram client had a system which announced new servers/IPs via push notifications. So they easily evaded it. Plus, the agency responsible for the bans got a bad rep after accidentally banning lots of unrelated services, ruining random businesses in Russia.
Maybe they also understood that if you can't defeat them, lead them. Currently, Telegram has a lot of pro-war, pro-Kremlin channels.
The procedures and setup for censoring the Internet were significantly improved; no need to go to the court, no need to exchange data with ISPs, black boxes with DPI are installed at every large ISP, compared to blacklists of IP/hostname hat were sent to ISPs before.
I think this might become a future for most of the countries; China and Russia are just several years ahead.
Nitpick: USSR was never officially a communist state, it was a "socialist" state. I remember the Soviet government had slogans like "we will build communism by 1980" etc. No one thought they already had communism. IIRC their idea was that, to build communism, you must have some kind of transitional state/ideology first. But something went wrong :)
Why don't you post it yourself. And why should I care about what he says when telegram has some of the worst default encryption settings among commonly used messaging apps in the west?
Except Telegram is considered one of the most secured apps around. Obviously it cannot stop people from being stupid when they expose themselves.
The very reason why France is not happy is that because they cannot get access to private chats and stuff. EU was (and is) pushing for the end of E2E encryption after all (it failed this time, but they will try again).
Durov created Telegram because the russian government was trying to take over his original social network - VK (basically imagine USA gov taking over Facebook). Thus he sold his shared and left the country.
I do find it hilarious to see apologists of government over-reach like you.
What about group chat encryption? You can not possible say telegram is more secure than signal or WhatsApp.
What did I say that made me an apologist for government overreach? I recommend users use Signal? Your accusation is unfounded when I was complaining about a lack of encryption.
With Whatsapp it is pretty obvious at this point that it is in cahoot with governments in regards of backdoors and stuff. With Signal? Who knows? Maybe too.
Governments don't go after services that they can access freely.
I know that TuckerCarlson is a polarizing character. My posting of this link is not any kind of statement for or against him or his politics. That being said, the interview really gives an interesting picture of Pavel Durov IMO. If you can ignore Carlson's annoying tangents into American politics, you get to hear a good bit of Durov's life story straight from his mouth in reasonable detail. I came away from it with a more positive picture of Durov and Telegram.
> Do you unironically believe it's not already backdoored for Russian government?
To people arguing against this, Russia's Sovereign Wealth Fund RDIF has an ownership stake in Telegram after co-raising with Abu Dhabi's Mudabala in 2021 [0]
Either way, Telegram is at the whims of MbZ, and if the UAE ever needs something from Russia, they'll use Durov and Telegram as collateral. The UAE's done the same thing with Pakistan (Musharraf, Nawaz Sharif), India (Dawood Ibrahim), Israel-Palestine (Mohammad Dahlan), Serbia (Belgrade Waterfront Project and Mohammad Dahlan), Turkiye (Mohammad Dahlan), etc.
If the Telegram founders were truly opposed to Russia, they would have immigrated to Israel, the UK, Germany, Netherlands, or the US like most business dissidents in Russia. If VK wasn't stolen by an oligarch, they would have remained in Russia to this day.
Telegram has, by design, message content accessible to whoever runs the servers. WhatsApp has gone to great lengths to not have that.
Obviously there’s client security, potential backdoors, unencrypted backups, and many other things to worry about. But I don’t see a scenario where it fares worse than Telegram, and many where it’s significantly better.
Whatsapp has to have some kind of escape hatch if not back door simply because of the amount of heat it doesn’t get (think of all the regimes who are ok with it).
I believe that escape hatch to be cloud backups, which are heavily encouraged by the UI and not end-to-end encrypted by default. iMessage has made the same compromise.
As long as enough people click that checkbox, law enforcement has access and Meta/Apple are out of the news without having lied about or hidden anything.
My understanding is that WhatsApp has never made claims comparable to Telegram or Signal.
I also can’t tell if you’re being sincere. I was under the impression that Telegram was considered significantly less secure than Signal and that the matter was mostly settled. I’ve been seeing the following talking points repeated for years now.
That is absolutely not how it works. If you offer a platform for public discourse you are required by law to moderate it or face the consequences. Telegram group chats are technically open to moderation, yet the company has done nothing to put any kind of moderation in place.
This is in contrast to Facebook or Twitter. Those platforms will absolutely take down content that is offensive or criminal in nature.
Actually, there is a moderation within Telegram; it is not at the scale of Meta & X in terms of the head-count. Telegram probably has 100x less employees than Meta (I don't know the actual number)
https://telegram.org/tos/eu-dsa
>Telegram group chats are technically open to moderation, yet the company has done nothing to put any kind of moderation in place.
This is not even remotely true. I have reported content many times and when I come back to check it, it's gone. This includes account of spammers, some sellers (or pretending to be) of illegal goods, etc.
Facebook does not generally take down content that is offensive or criminal in nature.
The have moderation teams because they are required by law.
These are outsourced to the lowest bidder. They are so overwhelmed by the amount of that content.
Watch those documentaries about the psychological traumas inflicted to those that moderate Facebook content.
The political establishment doesn't want the proletariat having journalism that reports against the wishes of the powerful or of regular people having free speech to be used against the government.
No ethical person should take part in enforcing these laws.
That’s good, while prosecutors and law enforcement are wasting time building a car against him, the drug dealers and pedophiles will just carry on elsewhere.
> "I can easily guess that assholes in secret service would probably like very much to use that to blackmail him to add backdoors to telegram. So sad."
Telegram is a backdoor by design. The server has complete access to all your messages, they can do whatever they want with those.
Goole Translate works good enough for this article, there is also one from "FiloSottile" but I haven't read it and iirc it still references this one, it's called "The most backdoor-looking bug I have ever seen"
Note that America has been caught spying on EU countries politicians and manufacturers so many times and nobody got ever punished for this. While the backdoor talks are purely hypothetical, and Telegram's client and protocol are open source: you can just study the code.
I hate the way Telegram always gets flak for crime when WhatsApp and Signal can be used for it just as well and they are even harder to track things down on because they have E2EE. Telegram by default doesn't and it doesn't even support it in group chats!
So if these things happen in WhatsApp or Signal we simply don't know about it.
> There is no info about why exactly he was arrested but it looks like that French police had a warrant for him.
> But it looks like it is because that he is accused of being an accessory of a lot of things like traffic, drugs, pedopornography, anything bad you can image because he would not have done anything to combat that on Telegram.
This very article says that it's because Telegram doesn't cooperate with authorities in handling illegal content (which it is legally obligated to, to operate in France) and provides services to facilitate illegal activities (crypto or throwaway numbers).
There’s a world of a difference between refusing to hand over data you have to the authorities, and plausibly not having stored them in the first place.
By end-to-end encrypting messages, but uploading backups to Google Drive and iCloud, and in a non-end-to-end encrypted way by default, WhatsApp (and iMessage, which does largely the same) have quite cleverly maneuvered themselves out of that potential source of legal problems without cutting off law enforcement access entirely.
There is no info about why exactly he was arrested but it looks like that French police had a warrant for him.
But it looks like it is because that he is accused of being an accessory of a lot of things like traffic, drugs, pedopornography, anything bad you can image because he would not have done anything to combat that on Telegram.
If it is real, it would really be the same kind of political crime abuse on an individual of the same level as what happened to Julian Assange.
I can easily guess that assholes in secret service would probably like very much to use that to blackmail him to add backdoors to telegram. So sad.