Element is one of fourteen messaging apps blocked by Central Indian Government
element.io
element.io
> While investigating one of these channels, it was discovered that the app did not have a representative in India, making it challenging to monitor activities on the platform.
This is basically an indirect validation that most non listed messaging apps supposedly offering e2e encryption such as Whatsapp or Signal have backdoors with access from any government asking for access.
Not really. At least, I'm not convinced. Signal for instance does not have public channels like Matrix has, maybe that's the big difference. Signal's code can also be audited if in doubt (well, actually, Signal could always provide altered binaries on the App Store and Google Play Store, you'd have to build it yourself to be sure - though they do have reproducible builds for Android [1]).
I remember a blog post from signal showing how to build a compilation environment to validate the source but it was itself relying on docker images that you should first rebuild yourself to make sure the compiler and any other dependencies are the same as the upstream ones.
There was this statement that what's happening more or less proves that Signal & co has backdoors.
That's a guess but the good thing is that we can check.
It takes one person to do it. Not everybody has to do it.
If I remember correctly, binaries sent to the Play Store are signed by the developer so Google can't really temper with the binary themselves, or they would need to modify Android so it ignores the problem. But at this point, this means Android itself is backdoored.
(Which I don't exclude, btw - we need to trust a whole host of binaries for the phone drivers, and the hardware itself. At this point the issue is deeper than just signal though)
I don't remember the details but I believe it is their intention to eventually remove the ability for developers to sign their own packages.
Reproducible builds, combined with Android's developer-signed binaries, means that you don't _need_ to be super-vigilant to detect backdoors. You can investigate binaries after the fact (especially since virtually every version of popular apps is archived on third-party apk sites), and see that the signed build is not reproducible and at that point you can very easily dig into the binary to see which changes were made.
But all that is a moot point. Indian government wants a representative in india for all the apps which they can throw in the jail or fine or arrest or beat up if their app is used to disseminate information the ruling party finds unpalatable. There is no terrorism threat. If whatsapp is e2ee, why aren't criminals using it? one would argue that it is being monitored and anyone doing any terrorist activity gets auto reported so where is e2ee in this? what happened to that?
the government wants element/threema/telegram/whatsapp/signal to have a rep who will give them backdoor access and dance to their tune or they will cut off their money supply viz a viz, ban from the huge indian market. Telegram and whatsapp have bowed down to the supreme clown so they are after the rest of the apps now.
reproducibility is nothing if the government can't push down on someone's neck. They want a totalitarian state where any dissent is seen as a criminal offense and people are today in jails for doing that.
public channels is nonsense argument. the boogeyman terrorists wont use public channels will they?
second thing, there is no requirement of using a mobile number with matrix. That is an amazing tool with the indian government. They just need the account holders' mobile which whatsapp and telegram are happy to share to save their asses and it takes a matter of seconds to find the person. They then employ the "xkcd $5 wrench attack" and the game is over.
These apps don't mandate the use of a mobile number so that is what they are after.
To find backdoors?
> what is this signal fanboyism online when there are competing products doing the same thing?
You are completely misreading me. I actually prefer Element/Matrix than Signal (and I use both). But that does not matter one bit, so I hadn't mentioned it so far.
I'm a fanboy of nothing, that's not how I work. Take it easy.
> if whatsapp is using signal protocol then by effect isn't it as secure as signal?
WhatsApp is closed source. We only have Facebook's words for trusting it. Which is a bit weak if ask me.
my matrix access has not stopped but i guess it probably will in the next few days. There are thousands of matrix servers so being connected isn't an issue.
The issue is specifically making the government understand that e2ee is necessary for the very reason they do not want it in the first place.
terrorism is never an issue. the target, like china is on dissent and these are just propaganda
I would agree with you if the terrorism problem was more like that in the west. But people are killed by terrorists almost every week in India.
https://scroll.in/article/954711/in-kashmir-a-spree-of-arres...
Few years who when India unilaterally changed the status of Kashmir so they just banned the while internet. For like 6 months.
Then when it was allowed, the boogeyman of "misuse" which was a dirty word for dissent.
People have been arrested for posting dissent, for having VPN apps on their phones.
Their only aim is to obtain complete control. Dissent is not allowed.
Element does not give them a punching bag rep nor gives them backdoor access. Both things are mentioned in the original news.
WhatsApp does both so their e2ee is irrelevant.
My question on the terrorism is, did terrorism not exist before e2ee? Were they able to stop them completely before now that they are unable to?
You must not know how laws work. Kashmir agreed to join India in 1948. It was given a special status, enshrined in Article 370 of the Constitution of India. Now, that "special status" has always bothered a lot of Indians; what's so special about Kashmir? Why not any of the other 537 states that formed India in 1947?
There were certain conditions on which Article 370 could be removed. Those conditions were met in 2019 and the Central Government took the decision to remove Article 370 to much rejoicing in areas like Ladakh and Jammu. This was challenged in the Indian Supreme Court (the final arbiter of things Constitutional) and found to be valid.
What you are saying seems to be factual true, but for context one should probably add, that the only other option would have been Pakistan. Whose troops were already inside Kashmir. Independence, which is what most Kashmiris likely would have preferred, was not on the table offered to them, by any of the bigger empires around them. And the Kashmir independence movement in its whole, seems to be considered terrorism by india since day one.
Kashmir as a independent state is also destroyed in the current timeline.
"What makes Kashmir special. "
Lot's of things. But yes, other states are also special.
I am open for them, to go for independence, or at least local autonomy as well, if they like.
But India has several "union territories". Kashmir is not unique.
On the other hand, citizens of Jammu and Ladakh were overjoyed, so there lots of people who supported it.
Now Kashmir is getting tons of investment. They'll be spending nearly a billion dollars on building metros in Srinagar. Such progress would not have been possible under the old regime.
This is only going to get worse, and spread to other countries.
We need a real, reliable, decentralized solution, but we also need a solution that allows plausible deniability.
So if some cop looks at a phone, they can't see anything that would arouse suspicion.
A custom rom masquerading as an official Android release, with some kind of secret set of actions to launch an app, and a way to instantly hide all traces of it like a boss key.
Terrorism is not allowed. FTFY.
No stoppage of service is happening for now. Even matrix.org is working.
All clients are working, all servers are working
EVERY government does this (well OK, except for the really small ones).
Why do you think the US wants to ban TikTok?
Why do you think Al-Jazeera America exists?
And let's not even talk about regimes like Russia and China.
> if whatsapp is using signal protocol then by effect isn't it as secure as signal?
You are incredibly naive.
Tiktok is about information control. Tiktok which is a China based org is gaining ground in USA is threatening american control over the narrative.
Remember how everyone voted to boot parler suddenly?
Doesn't China do same for american companies?
The point here is about e2ee and backdoors. Nothing else.
Your points about al Jazeera america are why?
Tiktok?
Does matrix work in China and russia? Do they comply there?
Does american govt access other nations data with american companies which forced gdpr rules among others?
Aren't signal fanboys claiming "no data to share" so why isn't that app used by terrorists in america? Why isn't that blocked there
Sigh.
Did you know TikTok was forced to form a company in America so it could comply with American rules?
And BTW: the reason America does not care as much about these apps is because they have deeper hooks into phones and can get the data without worrying about encryption. They get their hands on the messages before they're even encrypted. I know, magic, right?
This is the case for any e2ee solutions. For instance my company develops CryptPad [1], which is a full open source office suite with e2ee. The server admins can't access your content and you don't need to trust the backend, which just passes messages and store encrypted messages. This is the whole point. e2ee has drawbacks: it's very difficult, if not impossible, to provide indexed search for encrypted content on the server, the client needs to do it which might be impractical.
I have used it a few times in a professional setting even when there is no need for end-to-end encryption, and it is a good experience so far.
I encourage others to try it .
That still does not change anything though. The backend is unverifiable, that's a fact. Why talk about E2EE, I wasn't really talking about that.
Signal for a whole year was running a different server code and nobody even could tell that they added some cryptocoin stuff. On top of that, metadata, server connection and anything other than the message content is all at the mercy of the server owner.
Of course it does. Just like PGP works fine over untrusted channels - like if I posted a gnupg ascii-armored message here.
e2ee makes all the difference - if two trusted and mutually authenticated clients are communicating with proper e2ee - the best an attacker can do is traffic analysis and denial of service...?
That's already a lot. If the evil secret police knows when and with whom you texted, then they don't even need to know the text of the messages, to link you to the opposition. And then just extract you and then the password with force to get the rest.
But almost by definition, if you have a back-end, there will be meta-data.
There's been a few attempts at getting around it, with "one-to-many" (eg opaque PGP posts to Usenet groups), Mixmasters (remailers) or onion routing. None are AFAIK truly practical with a state-level adversary.
e2ee is a good start, that doesn't mean you don't need to analyse the risks.
Second, some sensitive parts of Signal backend are verifiable, assuming Intel is not compromised, because they use Intel SGX.
E2EE is only useful for content that is encrypted. Not the API calls themselves.
Use whatever backend you want to store that.
Except to the extent that the client is explicitly designed to minimize what metadata is exposed to the server.
The server can log your IP, origin of request, client details and everything related to an API call. That's what I'm mainly talking about.
It has your IP, but of course it needs that, as well as every piece of network gear along the route. If you want to hide that you'd need Tor or a VPN.
For a while I did run a fork of the Signal Server. Beyond the sheer difficulty getting it to run without the server being updated for a year during the mobilecoin launch, it was extremely disconcerting to see PHONE NUMBERS spread throughout the log messages. It doesn't take much imagination to see how you can build a network of who you are talking to (etc.) from this log information.
While it is quite possible that they had some non-default log configuration (and hopefully the metadata leaking in the logs is fixed), if you can't run the server you can't check what data is being leaked.
Take the E2EE claim with a grain of salt if it is difficult to run a server.
The intent of Signal is to provide confidentiality of message content, not any sort of anonymity. This covers like 90+% of user's threat models and it's focusing on one problem makes it very effective at solving that problem. If one also needs anonymity then communication should happen over something like Tor or I2P.
The server can not only log IPs, but also locations, client details and a lot more. The API calls aren't proxied, they're more or less direct.
More likely: the government doesn't want to cause 'too much' discomfort among ordinary citizens. The decision to not block popular apps such as WhatsApp is probably purely political.
This! I've yet to meet an Indian who doesn't have WhatsApp and we all know that pretty much every Indian with a phone uses it. We're not talking about a little discomfort, we're talking a lot. There's almost half a billion users. Government can't bad WhatsApp without a major freakout, so they're going after small players. It wasn't long ago that even Signal AND WhatsApp were pushing back against these laws and what resulted is more Signal downloads (tens of millions of users in India)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/289778/countries-with-th...
Literally everyone in India is using WhatApp. If the government decided to shut it down, all government offices would be on fire within hours.
Isn't that what I am saying too? We accept the huge discomfort because we feel it is important and in our national interest! However important WhatsApp is, it is just a platform. If it is killed by a ban, people will just migrate to another platform and that's a lot more easier to do than give up on the benefits of flying by air. The only reason WhatsApp is allowed to function is because they are willing to provide a backdoor to the indian government - and that's easy to do when all the communication goes through their server and they handle the keys.
In today's context with WhatsApp, The sun never rises without a billion GOOD MORNING messages and another billion GOOD MORNING TO YOU TOO replies on WhatsApp in India /s
You propose to abandon them?
Which is to artificially maintain the duty free market.
Spot the user who thinks the Christian apologist must be on to something because if the story doesn't make any sense that means it must be true...
"Monitor activities" can also mean police investigators writing Telegram or whatever "hey, we found evidence that <illegal activity> is regularly occurring in channel ID X, here are the permanent links/IDs of example posts, please consider closing the channel or barring access to it from India or otherwise we will enforce compliance against the legal representative".
It's basically the same stuff that the German NetzDG or the upcoming EU DSA/DMA laws are.
Whatsapp is the bread and butter of this government. That's their biggest propaganda machine.
I hope they lose in Karnataka and other states in coming months.
These comments from this post:
>> EVERY government does this
>> Pretty sure Cong will do the same.
>> And do you think that is different from politicians in other countries?
>> Interestingly the US is busy pushing the EARN IT act again right now.
I hate Congress too.
Hindutva may be more about culture than biology but the best descriptor I can find is "völkisch nationalism" which doesn't have a good English translation ("Volk" being a more abstract idea than ethnicity but more tangible than cultural identity): the idea of Muslims as a residual contaminant of Islamic colonialism that must be excised to restore the purity of a Hindu India strongly resembles the "blood and soil" ideology of Nazi Germany which sought to restore the "birthright" of the "Aryan race" despite the majority of Germans not being considered "pure Aryans" (and declarations of "Aryan-ness" often being more pragmatic than scientific because the entire idea was based on mythology not actual history).
I could have called them fascist as many scholars agree that Hindutva should be considered a fascist ideology in its structure and application despite having no direct lineage from Italian fascism but then someone would have pointed out that "it's not actually fascism" and we could have debated that definition instead.
It's a nationalist populist movement that attempts to displace one cultural and ethnic minority it deems as invasive by empowering another it deems pure while maintaining a pretense of secularism and democracy and it does so by promising to restore an imagined historical greatness and a return to "tradition". Call it ethnonationalist or fascist, either way it would be the obvious bad guy in any piece of historical fiction. That other bad guys exist at the same time doesn't negate this point (after all, we don't need to defend 1930s/1940s Japan, Italy or Spain to point out that Germany was bad or vice versa).
No one ethnic group makes up more than 10% of their supporters. They are religious populists.
I might be totally wrong by the way
You would rather have that fool at the helm with rampant corruption, I am glad the majority thinks otherwise.
Isn't corruption slightly better than potential genocide and religious hate?
I grew up in India. I have seen first hand how shitty INC and the Gandhi family are.
Tell me something: why don't they have democracy in INC itself? Who made the Gandhi family the head of INC? Why isn't there any challenger to them? The last person who challenged them in a tiny fashion was Narasimha Rao, who was cast away like a leper and died unsung, even though he was an ex-PM of India.
Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln. Parties change through their life.
Himachal Pradesh - the state a significant portion of my family is from - only got the INC in 2022 because the party grassroots had an internal revolt against having a Gandhi apparatchik made CM (Prabhita Singh) and selected Sukku+Agnihotri instead.
In neighborhing Punjab, Gandhi family meddling to undermine Amrinder Singh+Sunhil Jakkar and attempt to put their lackey Navjot Singh Sidhu in charge lead to the INC losing Punjab to the AAP and grassroots Mazahbi+Punjabi Hindu INC members to join the BJP.
In neighboring JK, where the other half of my family is from, internal bickering between the Gandhi family's clique and their opposition lead the former CM of JK (Ghulam Nabi) to quit the INC and he will probably join the BJP out of spite.
The INC lost the entirety of Northeast India because conflicts with Rahul Gandhi in 2014 caused the current CM of Assam (and current contender for heir to Narendra Modi) - Himanta Biswas Sarma - to defect to the BJP and help organize the BJP in Northeast India to completely decimate the INC there.
Personality clashes between the Gandhi family and mid-level INC members has hollowed out the INC, as members either start their own parties (eg. National Congress in Maharashtra, Tiramool Congress in West Bengal, YSR Congress in Andhra Pradesh, Janta Dal United in Bihar, Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh) or defect to the BJP (eg. Amrinder Singh in Punjab; Bommai, the BJP CM of Karnataka, is the son of a major ex-INC politician who started the Janta Dal after a fight with Sonia Gandhi; etc).
If INC wants to succeed at national elections again, they will need to drop the Gandhi family and bring back internal democracy within the organization. Lots of BJP politicians are half hearted in their support of the party and are only doing it out of spite against the current INC.
Alternatively, INC members are increasingly defecting to the AAP as well now too, but they have no shot at National Elections for 20 years at least.
India needs a healthy multi-party electoral system at the national level to prevent Authoritarian Democracy from taking hold, but the internal bickering within the INC is only enabling the BJP further.
We are talking about grey stuff and you claim to see black and white things. There’s no way I or anyone else can convince you otherwise
So please tell us what are the differences? I don't see many. It's the same dynastic party that was 120 years ago.
But BJP coming 3 terms in a row is not good for India. IMO
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India
Just recently the government has ordered all last mile ISPs in Manipur to turn off the internet for the whole region.
https://www.google.com/search?q=manipur%20internet&ie=utf-8&...
The Kashmir internet shutdown is also very well documented.
https://www.google.com/search?q=kashmir%20internet%20shutdow...
This is the country that will threaten to imprison you for bringing in a handheld Iridium phone, as a journalist.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/twitter-takes-down-po...
It should go without saying that enforcing every state-requested takedown worldwide would be a complete shitshow. A social media site where you can't post anything that angers any government, even the most authoritarian, would be unusable for many purposes.
Legitimate criticism is the cornerstone of improvement. The only people who don't want criticism to be aired are those who are not genuinely interested in making things better, but rather benefit from them remaining bad.
Also, on how media is weaponized, here's some more context: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2021/6536...
I also agree with the second link that you shared. Media is weaponized against democracy. All the mainstream TV channels in India are busy attacking opposition, or dis-crediting any protests against government or promoting Hindu-Muslim hatered. Most of the channels are owned by crony capitalists which have ties to the government.
The Indian government has blocked 14 messenger mobile apps that were used by terrorists in Pakistan to transmit information to Jammu & Kashmir.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/centre-blocks-14-m...
Not the best way to tackle the problem, but I think it's important to know exactly what happened. Also - I think the ban's gone - I just downloaded VLC yesterday. Probably because VideoLAN took the government to court.
The most important thing country needs to do is to protect it's citizens and that is what India is doing.
So if someone creates few fake currency notes, will they ban all the original currency notes instead of catching the culprit?
Oh well, on that note, I remembered they did ban all currency notes of Rs.500 denomination to fight corruption, and then released new notes of "Rs.2000 denomination".
The legitimate application's developer cannot do anything if their application is being trojanized by malware authors. Even if Modi himself releases a piece of software, anyone can just create a malicious version of that and distribute it on various platforms.
> The most important thing country needs to do is to protect it's citizens and that is what India is doing.
The important thing the country had to do was to sensitize people about the malicious versions being distributed and urge them to use only the application from the legitimate VLC website. Instead, they went ahead and banned the legit VLC website which just makes people to go to shadier websites to download VLC.
I agree politicians would not have this level of knowledge, but for the officials who assist the policy makers, this should be a basic 101 in security. Now what would you call the official in Cert-IN who issued the VLC ban ? A clown? definitely.
How did it solve the problem? Don't you think that after they banned the original, there would have been even more illegitimate versions?
And do you think that is different from politicians in other countries?
You are not alone - it is kinda similar in other countries. The only thing worse than a politician is someone that voted for them.
Of course, true believers in Democracy will say, "We'll just vote out the bad ones". How is that working out?
Better than no democracy at all. I think anyone can see the problems with it.
Politicians distribute huge sums of corrupt money to poor and lower middle class population just before elections.
And your average Indian would love to get a government job that has scope of corruption.
All in all you have culture where corruption in normalized.
We’ve voted out charismatic leaders, we’ve voted in huge coalitions, we’ve ignored sympathy waves after political assassinations, power transfers have been uniformly peaceful since we gained independence.
If this cultural/endemic corruption at work, I think most people in most countries would prefer this to whatever oligarchy, junta, theocracy, ruler-for-life-god-on-earth-ocrasy they suffer under.
It does feel like they would just move to the next app/protocol or even roll their own or use VPNs... so why are governments still penalizing 99.9% of the population which use these only to communicate normally (and use privacy protocols because they don't like the idea of being surveilled)?
Are governments trying to funnel non-criminal people towards apps they can surveil completely to be able to control them even more? To what end?
As per the source, the GoI has banned a total of 14 apps and they are as follows:
Crypviser
Enigma
Safeswiss
Wickrme
Mediafire
Briar
BChat
Nandbox
Conion
IMO
Element
Second line
Zangi
Threema
Over the past decade many public figures were targets of IT raids, right after criticising BJP.
Currently, all of these are still available on the app stores.
Element/Matrix is growing up. Element/Matrix is making a dent in the universe. Congratulations!
I'm assuming at least Google and Apple are demanded to take them off their stores. What are are consequences if they don't?
What about users? Would you be in trouble of LE caught you red-handed using a banned app?
> We assume that this ban on Element is a result of a misunderstanding around decentralised and federated services such as Matrix (an open standard for real time communication). The Element app is just one of many apps that give access to the Matrix network. A simple parallel is that banning Element because it gives access to the Matrix network is the equivalent to blocking Google Chrome because it gives people access to the web, or Gmail because it gives people access to email.
Instead their are clues scattered around the post in messaging directed at political influence,not problem solving.
Although I'm using element and it working fine.
Outlook would have been a better example than Gmail for email.
Did these clowns miss the memo on how the internet works & what sort of business/applications can be made without needing to be physically present anywhere Jesus.....
Now, whether that is good or bad is a different matter altogether
If free speech, independent media, lack of corruption, the right to privacy and the right to fair treatment by the law are not requirements to call something a democracy, then you are just making up your own definition of the word.
I’m not saying India isn't a democracy, but it’s not black and white, it’s a scale.
The Economists 2022 Democracy Index ranks India at #46 as a “flawed democracy”, together with countries like Poland and Italy. There’s no shame in that. Don’t let your own pride in your country blind you to the problems it has — no country is without them.
Btw, I don't have to agree to your definition of democracy. India has its own culture and history of citizen representative governance that is thousands of years old. And I definitely don't have believe what ranking Economist gives India. The trust in old media is at an all time low.
Really? Rahul Gandhi (Opposition) was jailed for free speech? Governemnt banned BBC documentary and raid their offices in Delhi? Jailed comedian for free speech? Journalist visiting victim was jailed for 6 months is free media/free speech? Thretening to jail twitter employees if they don't remove tweets critical of this government is a free speech?
> Corruption
Didn't this government bought as many as MLAs as previous 5 government combined?
Did anything happened to Adani?
Demonetization? 5G Spectrum? PM Cares? are not scams?
No he is being prosecuted for a law his party created. He looses the MLAship by a law created by his party. He has been tried in a court of law. He wasn't plucked from the clutches of his mother and thrown in jail.
> Governemnt banned BBC documentary and raid their offices in Delhi?
It was a propaganda piece. Modi was tried in court by opposition and you should read the remarks by supreme court on the nature of the allegations against him.
Not commenting on the others since I don't know about it.
> Didn't this government bought as many as MLAs as previous 5 government combined?
Yes along with residential plots on Venus.
> Did anything happened to Adani? What should happen to him?
> Demonetization? 5G Spectrum? PM Cares? are not scams? No?
> Demonetization? 5G Spectrum? PM Cares? are not scams?
Explain please. I'm genuinely curious to know what these scams are.
5G Spectrum sold for as much as 2g. But 2g was a huge scam. Since 2g, Indian wireless usage increased by 10 folds. So either 2g was not a scam, and genius or 5g auction was a bigger scam. You decide.
Demonetization - UP had a state election. Gujarat had panchayat election. Since Modi/Shah knew about it, they converted their cash. It wasn't about the black money. It was about reducing oppositions cash holding during the election. I was in India, and I saw how BJP was able to distribute liquor & money in the villages while everyone was standing in line.
Thanks for agreeing with me about the all the other issues.
During Covid, Modi created a fund with the name "PM Cares" pretending that it was a government fund by using national emblem of India in the Fund's documentation. And it is illegal for the national emblem to be used for private entities. They took money from government organizations, and their staff salaries. The government banks showed banners on their websites to asking people . On demands of an CAG Audit, they backtracked and said this is a private fund and not subjected to government oversight.
Petitions filed under the Right to Information Act 2005 by the Indian Express to 32 public sector undertakings (PSUs) in India indicated that a total of ₹21050 million had been transferred to the PM CARES Fund, primarily from their corporate social responsibility budget allocations for 2019-20 and 2020–21. A petition for the same information that was made to the Prime Minister's Office was denied, with the Government of India stating that the Fund was not a public authority and did not have to account for the funds under the Right to Information Act. In December 2020, the Indian Express reported that a total of 101 public sector units had transferred ₹2,400 crore (US$300 million) from their corporate social responsibility funds, and a total of ₹155 crore (US$19 million) from staff salaries, to the PM CARES Fund.
Edit: A quick search got me this: https://www.pmcares.gov.in/en/web/page/about_us with the audited financial statements. Is this still a scam? Genuinely curious.
It is indeed one of the biggest scam by Modi BJP government where they siphoned off over 10,000 crores of money on the name of providing coronavirus relief.
1. Why they used national emblem of India in the Fund's documentation while it is illegal for the national emblem to be used for private entities?
2. If it was a private fund, why they took thousands of crores of money from government organizations?
3. If it was a private fund, why they forced donations from government employees' salaries? [1]
4. Russian arms firm to donate $2 million to PM CARES Fund [2]
5. Instead of getting it audited by "Comptroller and Auditor General of India" why they are auditing it through a private Chartered Accountants firm that is closely linked to BJP? [3]
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/coronavirus-pm-cares-...
[2] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/russian-arms-firm-to-...
[3] https://www.indiejournal.in/article/exclusive-pm-cares-fund-...
Mr. Gandhi was convicted by a court of law, not the executive or the legislature. If you call all Modis criminals, be prepared to backup such a statement.
It is after all a reasonably large thing to be called a thief and a criminal if you are a merchant yes?
> The trust in old media is at an all time low
You can't pick-and-choose the free media to your liking. You either get all of them, or none.
This is news to me. Citations please.
where :) ? They have become zombies.
>> Btw, I don't have to agree to your definition of democracy. India has its own culture and history of citizen representative governance that is thousands of years old.
This reminds me of the dialogue from Swades, which is so apt. Be proud but don't hide behind the ancient past. You are not living in the past, but here and the now, and that culture is once again being shackled not by outsiders this time but people you have anointed yourself.
Please Explain.
Next general elections aren't too far away
I agree with your point though
Many Westerners have seen Modi's name along with the year 2002 so they assume he has been the sole dictator of India since 2002.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-narendra-modi-was-banned-fr...
Interestingly the US is busy pushing the EARN IT act again right now.
my submission prior to the blogpost.
its funny how element wrote the blog and i was unable to access the page 3-7 times during today. the site doesn't work, then it works 10 minutes later.
BTW, AMA.
So why are they not included in this ban?
As for banning things in practice: forcing ISPs to do IP and DNS level blocking as a start, combined with fining companies or imprisoning their legal representation if they do not comply with national laws. If IP blocking doesn't work, there are things like SNI inspection that can do the trick.
If the business in question has no legal representation within the country, blocking payment providers and other services operating within the country from doing business with them is often an easy way to cut off access. This is probably not going to affect Element much, but if such restrictions come from a more economically influential trading bloc (USA, EU, etc.) international companies may be in more trouble.
An example of this is trade with Iran; in many countries there aren't many noticeable sanctions, but doing trade will put you on the naughty list of the USA and that can be a significant problem with the American influence on things like payment providers and the internet.
They don't have to make it impossible to get the app, they might not even want to make it impossible! Because now instead of surveillance or not, dissidents (well, everyone) have the choice between surveillance and being a criminal that they can Protect and Serve(tm) at their discretion.
This is what the politicians mean when they say the laws of mathematics are below the laws of the country, and they're absolutely right. Don't bring tech to a legal fight, you will lose.
As for other alternatives, there's a nice list here: https://matrix.org/clients/
Edit: this seems to be a peer-to-peer alternative chat client. I'm not sure you'll want to use peer-to-peer messengers under a government that issues such bans as the peer-to-peer nature exposes exactly who you talk to and how often. I think the federated model is a lot stronger in preserving privacy (though the Matrix team is running experiments on running peer-to-peer, which would create a very similar model and a similar threat).
- Element (the company) represents the entire federated network
- Users can't access the network if just one point of contact is blocked?
Official representation doesn't make sense for matrix, briar, etc.
0: https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/army-jawans-killed-ter...
Did terrorism start in India since e2ee became available? Was there no terrorism 5 years ago? 10? 20? 30? 40? Years ago?
G20 meeting is scheduled for september so what does a random action months ago mean anything?
Wasn't there such things last year or 2 years ago?
So you are saying Pakistan is suddenly relying on the generosity of element to orchestrate their terror plots? Why are they using off the shelf products and not their own?
Your reading is flawed because its painted by the propaganda machinery of the state wanting you to think in that way.