Russia tries more precise technology to block Telegram messenger
reuters.com
reuters.com
So even if hosting providers like Amazon or Google will refuse to work with Telegram (because they don't want to get blocked in Russia for this), it will be difficult to find and ban all people hosting proxy servers.
Sadly, these proxy servers can be used only for connecting to Telegram.
The link looks like tg://proxy?arguments
Proxy uses MTProto, the same protocol that client uses to talk to the server. It is described here: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto The client connects to the proxy as if it were a server, and proxy just relays encrypted packets to the real server. Also, the client may wrap packets with an obfuscation layer (described below) to prevent signature detection. In exchange, the server tells the client to display a channel of the proxy owner in the contact list while proxy is being used.
Proxy source on Github (with Docker image link): https://github.com/TelegramMessenger/MTProxy
Bing-translated Russian article about this proxy: https://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=&to=en&a=ht...
Bing-translated review of methods Telegram uses to bypass filtering by an independent researcher: https://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=&to=en&a=ht...
And a little more on obfuscation: https://blog.susanka.eu/how-telegram-obfuscates-its-mtproto-...
This article mentions that Telegram uses modified version of obfuscated2 protocol. To detect it the DPI just needs to decode all packets using AES but that would require a lot of CPU power which ISPs currently don't have. Initially all encrypted packets had fixed length so some ISPs started filtering packets by length (of course accidentally filtering non-Telegram packets too but who cares), and Telegram added random padding to prevent this.
My prediction for near future is that Russia become as restrictive as China or even worse.
I don't think VPN is viable long-term solution. Look, where are VPN servers might be hosted? Amazon or Digital Ocean? Well, this year Russia just showed that they can block 20 million IP-addresses on a whim.
And I see no signs of massive public demand for free internet. Why? Because if it's popular site in Russia, then it might be unblocked in the case of accidental blocking. If it's just random site in English, it will never be unblocked. And vast majority of Russians don't speak or read English at all.
In other words, Russia has absolutely no future as a country with free internet. RIP.
My advice to fellow Russians with brains: get out of Russia, run away as fast as possible from this goddamn place.
Not always on option. It's easy to leave when you have no family to take care of or parents, or other relatives with needs etc.
We need to hide services properly and make the cost of blocking a single service very expensive.
In case anyone is curious to see what sites are interesting to the authorities, here is a copy of the registry in Russian [1] and a machine-translated version [2].
The first ones added to the registry in 2014 were a dating website (mamba), Russian social network VK, email services (Yandex and Mail.ru) and IT news websites Habrahabr and Roem. Probably developers and sysadmins are considered dangerous people so they need supervision.
Also there is a website snap.com operated by Snap Inc.
[1] https://reestr.rublacklist.net/distributors/
[2] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev...
Telegram has channels - it is like a microblog where the owner can post messages and images, and everybody else can only read them.
And in Russia Telegram is well known (unlike Signal) because its founder (Durov) is also a founder of social network VK.
Judging by screenshots, Telegram and Signal UI look similar (well, almost every IM app looks the same).
As I understand Signal, as Telegram, requires a phone number for registration and therefore doesn't provide much privacy (the government can easily track your location and identify you). I wouldn't give a real phone number to any of them.
He is a kind of a rebellious figure in modern Russia, and, as younger generation generally dislikes the regime, he is viewed favorably, and a lot of Russians use Telegram because of that.
So blocking Telegram would be a "we're stronger than you" move by the government.
This is a big overstatement.
Telegram received an initial traction from the vk.com userbase. It has very little to do with either the functionality (except may be the channels) or an ideological stance of he creators. VK simply advertised the messenger actively at launch.
Practically all other IMs (except the earlier WhatsApp and Viber) have almost no userbase in Russia.
By the way, how do you exactly know where the user got to know about your service, and, specifically, that this spread didn't involve VK?
Initial source was never VK and Russia. Russians is ~1% of Telegram userbase or something like this.
How? By the number signups with russian phone numbers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%9318_Iranian_protes...
As far as I've heard VK and Telegram have never had a very cozy relationship, certainly never going as far as VK actively promoting Telegram.
Telegram is in the news because the Russian government picks on them so much. Russian government concentrates on Telegram because it's popular with the generation of Russians born after the collapse of USSR.
Russians are the very best at memes, the memes get spread by Telegram.
Telegram has this concept of 'Channels', which are basically an easier to use Twitter.
A person makes a channel, a Telegram user can easily subscribe to it.
Many popular Russian politicians, entertainers and media figures have Telegram channels that are subscribed to by 10s of thousands of users.
I don't know how Telegram makes money, I cannot remember ever seeing an ad in Telegram.
The updates you get in your Telegram channel are easier to deal with than just following someone on Twitter.
1) Telegram Channels has channels among other features. This is like streaming rss feeds right to your IM. Channels quickly became a most useful thing for media that is opposed to the regime or just shares the information that would be censored otherwise
2) Telegram has no censorship, the do not block those channels either
3) Their security might not be perfect, but it was enough for the said media to deliver information withough being caught in any way. Some of the media actually switched to Telegram Channels completely.
All of this (and some other minor things) goes agains the will of the regime obviously.
Not being able to see or hear what people say about you is on thing, they can deal with this like they did years ago. But they can't stand the fact that they can't controll the flow of systematized information.
Anyone who can shed some light on how they might be doing this? I'm curious.
If Telegram traffic has a specific signature or predictable pattern of packet sequences and sizes married with known IP addresses, quite a lot can be done at the packet inspection level (but not « deep » per se).
There's an outcry for them to use TLS but I didn't see that they said anything about that.
Here's a nice article for more info: https://blog.susanka.eu/how-telegram-obfuscates-its-mtproto-...
If they also used anything with TLS 1.3 or HTTPS with TLS 1.2, the plaintext SNI would've been enough to detect Telegram.
This my comment contains more links about protocol and obfuscation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17888241
Unfortunately, most major CDNs like Google and Amazon have stopped offering domain fronting capabilities. I think Azure is one of the major services that stills supports it however.
DIAF = die in a fire
Anyone who can shed some light on how they might be doing this? I'm curious.
If you want to find Telegram traffic, you're probably looking at fairly small packets, often sent in bursts. If you're observing the sender and the receiver, you might be able to correlate the the outgoing messages from one user with the corresponding incoming messages of another user.
Of course, there are corresponding countermeasures Telegram could take: pad messages, combine messages, split messages, introduce random delays, distribute messages among a number of different endpoints. It's an endless game of cat and mouse.
Ever felt patriotic, proud of your country? That's how it starts.
Instead we had this ridiculous escalation causing the disruption of the normal internet communications for a while, and promising even more sinister problems in the future.
And Gitbooks still don't work properly here :-(
More positively, not going quietly into the night when faced with state repression is pretty much in line with their ideals. I can totally see why they'd want to fight it out.
On the cynical side, grand standing here is great for PR.
Totally, I get this. Pavel Durov even issued a statement at some point saying that Telegram's will keep defying the Russian authorities having the best interest of their users in mind. A veritable Robin Hood, wouldn't you know. I can't imagine how breaking of half the Internet that ensued could have been in the best interest of the public.
I mean, we know that the government (the Russian government in particular, or the government in general) is evil. Do we want to unleash their evil upon ourselves, that's what I am asking.
Yes we, who are not slaves, do want this if this is what it takes to get freedom.
I am Russian and I like this escalation because it makes more people to hate Putin making overthrow of his regime more likely.
Stockholm syndrome is a feeling of affection towards your captor.
I do not feel the slightest bit of affection towards our government. I despise them. But I do feel it may be in the captive's interest not to annoy the captor too much; better yet, not to attract his attention at all.
>But I do feel it may be in the captive's interest not to annoy the captor too much; better yet, not to attract his attention at all.
Only if there is an expectation that they will be released. If you are in the death camp then rebellion is your only actual chance.
Because we have nuclear weapons no foreign government will interfere just to bring us democracy.
Is there any chance of that happening? I am not Russian but my impression is that a large majority of Russians favor Putin and it's hard to imagine how he could be overthrown.
A massive peaceful protest that the leader is powerless to suppress and that forces him to step down is just one (and very happy) scenario of overthrowing a leader. This indeed is not very likely to happen.
There always remains a military coup, however, which does not require a support of the population.
But overthrowing a government is a scary business. Who is going to come in their stead? Will their be a power struggle? Will it turn violent? Will their be a civil war (a very real prospect in a country such as Russia, where the provinces have historically been exploited by the metropolis and strongly despise it). I am astonished people here talk so lightly of overthrowing Putin, as if he is the only villain and the only obstacle to the better future, and once he is removed from the scene everything is hunky-dory.
It is not Telegram's fault that the Russian government decided to ban it. This unfortunate decision is wholly on the government.
But it is not entirely clear to me whether it shares the blame for what happened next, namely for the collateral damage that occurred during their grand stand against the Russian government. I think it might actually be an interesting question worth pondering about.
I'd see thinking otherwise as a form of Victim Blaming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
It is a very strange logic.
Telegram did something that no longer was legal under the Russian law. Yes, it may be a stupid law, and yes, it may be very selectively applied, and yes, it is the government that gets to write the law and thus define the rules of the game. I get all that, and I share the hatred towards the Russian government and its legal system.
Nevertheless, if we step aside and look at the situation disinterestedly, Telegram could no longer operate in Russia according to the laws of the land. So, according to the twisted Russian legal system, Telegram was in the wrong.
It could have just acknowledged the fact and stopped operating in Russia.
Instead its position was that it does not recognise the Russian ruling and will keep operating in the country where it officially was no longer welcome.
The Russian authorities tried to enforce the law, but due to the lack of either grace or expertise made a mess out of it.
Look, I am not arguing from a legalistic perspective. I do not worship the law, nor do I tell others to respect it. I would break it as likely as the next guy if I could get away with it. But what I am saying is that the Russian authorities were within their right.
As for victim blaming, you would have been correct if we were discussing Telegram as the victim. But in my analysis, the victims are the public who had to endure broken internet, because a company and an enforcement agency were both making a point.
This other position tells me that if we disregard for a moment that Telegram is a tech company championing privacy (and therefore a protagonist in most retellings of the story) and the Russian government is an embodiment of thuggishness (and therefore a likely villain of the piece) and just look at the situation as if it occurred elsewhere, we will see that Telegram might also have its share of blame in this story. It's as if a policeman ordered a suspect to freeze, but the suspect ran, and the policeman opened fire and wounded a bystander - well, it sure was the policeman who shot the gun, but is the fleeing suspect completely innocent of the situation? Would it be called victim blaming to suggest that he shares the blame for what happened? Can one be censured for saying that it would have been better if the suspect meekly obeyed the policeman?
A Russian company filed an action against Roskommnadzor demanding to compensate a loss of 5,000,000 RUB (~$75 000). The court dismissed it though.
Here is another example: [2]
[1] https://www.gazeta.ru/tech/news/2018/08/27/n_11956687.shtml
[2] https://www.rbc.ru/society/06/08/2018/5b6848b39a794769383b9e...
But when the Russian company filed an action against RKN, the Prosecutor's Office representative said that they didin't order to block unrelated IP addresses; it was RKN's own decision [2] [3]. And this is not according to the law. Doing everything according to the law would be too slow.
[1] https://reestr.rublacklist.net/rec/518267/
[2] https://roskomsvoboda.org/40800/
[3] https://www.gazeta.ru/tech/2018/08/06/11885923/i_snova_pro_t...
I found a site with the documents about the particular case that you referenced (articles in the news media are so superficial). There aren‘t yet materials available about the defendants’ legal position or about the justification of the judge’s decision, but I hope they will be uploaded soon enough:
https://kad.arbitr.ru/Card/f268f6cc-0fa2-4d48-b325-5ae3b7a4d...
I'm going there and saying that this is exactly the logic that nazi apologists use to blame SS reprisals against civilians on resistance fighters.
Sigh. You could have pointed at collective punishments that were practiced in schools (some students misbehave, the whole class is punished), or in the military (the whole platoon is punished for the actions of an individual), but no, you would rather invoke the Godwin’s law and drag the Nazis into discussion.
In any case, it’s not even a fair analogy with my example. My example was about collateral damage happening as a result of baiting the authorities; yours is about deliberate hostage-taking.
As for "propaganda for being a coward", well, to each their own. Call Joseph Heller ("Catch-22") or Terry Pratchett (novels featuring Rincewind) propagandists of cowardice then.
(And it is not even a story about heroism or cowardice. Telegram is not being a hero here; it's not as if it is risking anything by defying the Russian government — it is well outside of reach of the Russian law enforcers.)
By leaving the Russian market Telegram wouldn’t have submitted to censorship and spying. They wouldn't have collaborated with the Russian special services. They would have kept their integrity. Much as what LinkedIn did when the Russians demanded they keep the information about the Russian citizens on the Russian soil and LinkedIn refused. It could all have been peaceful and quiet and dignified.
And the problem of privacy vs censorship and spying is by no means limited to Russia. It will resurface in the progressive world. It will be interesting to see what the reaction will be then.
The blocking was not done according to the law. If the Government followed its own laws, there would be a lot of paperwork for every new blocked IP address and they would play cat-and-mouse game with Telegram spending a lot of resources while Telegram could cheaply create new proxies instead of blocked ones. Effectively you cannot block Telegram if you follow the law.
So the Government started blocking large networks (like, 256 000 IP addresses at once or even more) whenever it found a single Telegram proxy server there. This is obviously against the law but who cares.
If you think I am wrong please point to the article that allows blocking 20 millions random IP addresses.