Fun fact: Recently FSB database on border crossings from 2014 to 2023 was leaked online and Durov visited Russia 50 times since 2015. In fact, he was in Russia the day the telegram was unblocked. I wonder why?
On a similar note, i always wanted to contribute to Firefox, but every time i looked at how to compile it i noped the fuck out of it. It's probably is doable on linux but it's sounds like a nightmare on windows.
Yep. The way you do it on Linux is to grab your distro's package build script and use that. It will specify all of the build- and run-time dependencies (which you use your standard package manager to resolve), and contain whatever commands are required to build it. Usually you just install dependencies and run one command, and you've got a package you can install like any other.
Just install the dependencies listed there, run "makepkg", and boom, Firefox pops out the other end. If you're doing active development, you can probably figure out a quicker change/build/test loop, but that'll get you started.
> but it's sounds like a nightmare on windows.
I wouldn't wish the hell of software development on Windows upon my worst enemy :)
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.
i'm pretty sure ALGOL allowed spaces in identifiers. Probably some other old programming languages too. For the most part, it's just a tradition at this point.
Fortran up to 77 (well, technically still everything in fixed-form, a.k.a. punch-card-style source files) ignores spaces.
And AFAIK there still exist both versions of e.g. "goto": "go to" and "goto" are both valid Fortran 90 and later.
This, and the fact that variable names are allowed to be implicitly defined, lead to the famous bug:
DO 10 I = 1.100
declared the variable `DO10I` with a value of 1.1, instead of the loop from 1 to 100 and declaring the "statement label" 10:
Also older versions of FORTRAN, according to Crockford at least :)
> It is good to have names containing multiple words, but there is little agreement on how to do that since spaces are not allowed inside of names. There is wun [sic] school that insists on the use of camel case, where the first letter of words are capitalized to indicate the word boundaries. There is another school that insists that _ underbar should be used in place of space to show the word boundaries. There is a third school that just runs all the words together, losing the word boundaries. The schools are unable to agree on the best practice. This argument has been going on for years and years and does not appear to be approaching any kind of consensus. That is because all of the schools are wrong.
> The correct answer is to use spaces to separate the words. Programming languages currently do not allow this because compilers in the 1950s had to run in a very small number of kilowords, and spaces in names were considered an unaffordable luxury. FORTRAN actually pulled it off, allowing names to contain spaces, but later languages did not follow that good example ... I am hoping that the next language does the right thing and allows names to contain spaces to improve readability.
>Which would use that money to invest in things, like always.
No, people only invest if they see a return. If the return is too low they will simply hold onto the money since interest rates can't go negative too deeply. Your idea only works in a fantasy land with mandated equilibrium. In the real world people don't care if there is an equilibrium or not.
> I'm talking about banks. That's literally their business. You know, to lend money.
Their business is to make money. If the economy is in the toilet, it is usually because there is no demand, and if there is no demand businesses and individuals do not need loans to expand and operate, so no one is asking for credit, so banks have no one to lend to.
The banks don't want the/your money: while a savings account is an asset to you, the other side of the ledger is a liability for the bank. And if they are to provide x% to the saver, they have to earn >x% to break even (adding overhead), never mind make money.
Just a little while ago in Europe, there was all sorts of excess savings (especially in Germany) with no places to invest the piles of cash piling up, so you get negative interest rates on savings accounts:
An excellent description.
I suggest that money is fundamentally a debt. An I.O.U. if you will.
Over decades these I.O.U.'s(money) on a nation state wide basis become too numerous for the population as a whole (including government) to pay back.
In ancient times the two ways to solve this inability to pay debt were for the King to wage war and steal money from another nation (tribute) or to cancel the nation's debt using a debt jubilee.
In the post modern times we live in these options are not politically viable or conscionable. Therefore Governments only have options that involve the use of controlled deflation or inflation of the money supply using tools like interest rates, quantitative easing/tightening or fiscal spending/reduction.
These post modern 'tools' only have a certain amount of efficacy and when that manipulating ability loses its power the masses suffer austerity. As in this present era. In ancient times this suffering would lead to political unrest therefore a new leader or King would announce a war or debt jubilee as the only solution.
Ultimately issuing a new money (debt system) and cancelling the old is the only solution like a new king issuing a new currency with his image on it.
The discussions above mine in my view are about how to manage the effects of the onerous national and private debts with the hope that economies will be able to suffer the effects of austerity until such time as the economy grows out of the debt. This might never happen and often doesn't.
In conclusion then a peaceful solution is a debt jubilee where mortgage holders have their debts cancelled and those without debt enjoy a commensurate income boon.
(*many of the above original ideas are not mine but collated and interpreted from various professorial sources)
> I'm pretty sure Japan never had big unemployment problems, so your claim is
Japan is solving unemployment by essentially creating BS jobs, like people standing on a corner and holding a sign saying that there's a corner nearby.
Meanwhile, good high-paying jobs are extremely hard to get into, and are very stressful.
Remember when it turned out during Fukushima accident that lots of people normally hired to work on the power plant, were essentially unqualified day laborers? That's why.
Japan is NOT in a good place economically. They are essentially wasting millions of lifetimes of human capital.
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