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Comment by drbig | Hacker News Reader

> Interestingly Telegram is still not blocked in Russia.

Could that be taken as a sign that it is not blocked _for a reason_, or is it already too much tinfoil on the head?

It caused a lot of issues for Russians when they tried to block it, because they basically blocked entire sections of AWS and GCP.

The real tinfoil hat is assuming that they allow it because it's compromised; the founder of Telegram has absolutely no love lost for the Russian state, they basically seized his company (VK; a hugely popular facebook-like which also has a music player and such) and all his assets that were in the country after trying to exert control over him (and his desire not to be controlled); that's why telegram was founded in the first place.

Of course, I have no first-hand account except watching as my video game became unplayable for Russians while the Telegram blocking was happening and my GCP rep explaining it to me, and that I had an Estonian girlfriend for 7 years who was giving me the play-by-play on what was happening.

While he maintained an office in Russia, for everyone to see, while denying that publicly.

Possibly the easiest thing to exist in error or for the state to fabricate and yet you didn’t even provide a citation.

tsk

Dude is literally living in exile, yet you claim allegiance by him being affiliated with Russia, when his only crime here was being born in there and thus having some ties.

Seems crazy to me. Like, cold-war propaganda crazy.

this idea that Telegram is somehow nebulously “the enemy” and signal is “the virtuous” is so patently and clearly a propaganda campaign and we fall right into it.

The point of Signal having end-to-end encryption is to avoid trust. Telegram, on the other hand, relies on trust. Obviously that's going to attract more criticism.

That argument doesn't work when you cant reliably distribute and run your own clients and given that they (Signal) have hidden updates for over a year to work on mobilecoin in the dark (proving their willingness and ability to do this) it leaves little left for that argument; theres also a bunch of other stuff but that is meaningless to get into. The point is that Signal mostly also boils down to: “trust us”.

On the other hand, while you are totally right about Telegram being quite a bit “trust us”; but they have better UX and are not at all hostile to third party clients and alternative implementations of their “secure” messaging protocol.

Which is also the subject of a lot of controversy of course, because (*puts on tinfoil hat*) it was originally handrolled and not US cryptographer approved.

(always get downvoted when I point out that Signal is doing weird stuff which only serves really to solidify my stance)

> the founder of Telegram has absolutely no love lost for the Russian state

No need to have any love, strong-arming people is usually where mafias shine.

It's likely a government honeypot with backdoors, the French have reportedly access to the convos:

https://archive.is/1LGkG In french but you translate it.

It can also be a case of convenient incompetence from the telegram team.

For reasons, yes, but not the nefarious ones you seem to imply. They tried multiple times in the past and created lot of problems for other services as a side effect. Also, a large portion of the Russian population and military use telegram for communication.

To clarify: I did not intend to to imply nefarious reasons. I guess using the "tinfoil" implied it?

I had the impression Telegram has also, even if not fully official, "state" users.

Thanks for point out the "...and we have broken other stuff too" angle!

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