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rdri

rdri@lemmy.world
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No, just personal experience (I use telegram for many years) and absence of server data implications anywhere across the issues in the past (at this time too). You can find questionable or illegal businesses in telegram with a few words, they are all public channels. Hence “no moderation” accuses mentioned in every article.

There are of course darknet-like private communities, but I assume they are not a subject of interest at this time. Authorities would need to dig very deep past all the obvious illegal stuff, and telegram shouldn’t care about resources consumed by such a small chunk of user base. Those groups will stay, as they are, private and safe, I assume, for quite some time.

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Assuming things should work that way is ignorant. According to you, service owners should design and redesign their services to not store any data in order to avoid arrests. Also that a service owner should invent stuff they might not had a plan for if they have even a theoretical possibility to help identify individual users, in other words go against policies they designed at some point.

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That’s a wild way of twisting the logic. Just because the platform doesn’t fall under your e2ee definition doesn’t mean they had to do something that is only possible on purely cloud services.

The reason for arrest doesn’t even have anything to do with encryption. All content that facilitates mentioned crimes is public. Handling it shouldn’t involve any backdoors or otherwise service-side decryption.

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Wording is confusing. Here are some better takes that sound valid and are true:

  • Telegram’s e2ee is only available for chats of 2 people, and only on official mobile client.

  • Telegram’s e2ee is a feature you have to enable whenever you need it (called secret chats).

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It’s barely anonymous, and poorly encrypted. The latter is the reason Durov is in custody

There is no logic here. If it was poor it would be very easy to track anyone including criminals. You can check the news to find the reasons.

There have absolutely been cases where a backdoor/weakness/lack of encryption used to catch criminals before

I meant telegram related cases.

Some are staying safe, others are being caught precisely because of this.

I didn’t see any proofs of that.

Using better encryption schemes is definitely part of that.

Part of what? I don’t get the point here.

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is not any different from just having TLS for transport

Yes, in simple terms, all encrypted transfer protocols are similarly protected from mitm attacks.

That just means that they store both your data in some encrypted way and the key. They can still read it trivially.

They can and they said the decryption keys are always kept separately (there are probably more layers than I can describe) from the data to make sure the servers are not used to decrypt the data locally. They can be lying for all I care. The bigger problem is that people somehow assume this a huge threat, while all previous cases didn’t involve anything like that. People are getting into trouble for their public content - protected by some encryption but visible to anyone interested (who then report it to oppressive authorities).

While some go extra mile to explain to you how you should use e2e for your family group chats, real criminals do their stuff everywhere (especially on telegram) for years, staying safe. Problem is not how weak or strong the encryption is, but that once you are under oppression and do opposition activities, you’re going to learn by yourself how to deal with it. Signal will not save you from people in your group chats if they are there to report on you.

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That’s not correct. Toy may call it TLS but it’s a custom protocol. Data is not kept unencrypted on their servers, according to their docs.

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the messages are decrypted on the server

What you said means they can be decrypted on the server. But there is no proof of that happening in the past. People got into problems not because someone uncovered their content in telegram, but because that content was effectively public from the beginning.

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You switched the topic of the discussion. My original comment stands, as it corrects some part of your first comment.

I didn’t suggest anyone to use telegram.

They have repeatedly worked with governments and worked against the interests of their users.

Even though those allegations are arguable, I know what you mean. And those cases don’t involve compromising the actual encryption from what I understand.

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