Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

We changed the URL from https://www.tf1info.fr/justice-faits-divers/info-tf1-lci-le-... to an article in English. If there's a better article in English, we can change it again.

View on HN

Thank you! There was no English article yet when I first posted this.

There is now also https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/telegram-messaging-app-...

there is one from Lemonde in English: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2024/08/25/telegram...

One detail that's missing from the English article is why he got arrested.

The French article mentions:

Why was he under threat of a search warrant?

The Justice considers that the absence of moderation, cooperation with law enforcement and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable numbers, cryptocurrencies...) makes him an accomplice to drug trafficking, child-crime offenses and swindling.

> TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.

(From the reuters link)

Does this mean that according to EU, or France, E2E-encrypted platforms need to "cooperate" (provide backdoors)?

Or does it refer to public channels only?

> Does this mean that according to EU, or France, E2E-encrypted platforms need to "cooperate" (provide backdoors)?

No, not yet.

> Or does it refer to public channels only?

On Telegram channels and groups are not E2EE. I'd assume that's were most of the crap is spread.

Private messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted either. The so-called secret chats are end-to-end encrypted but are a major pain to use. I doubt that feature sees much use.

Yes, private messages can be E2EE. But as you say, they're a hassle (no sync between devices as an example).

It means the post office is next, followed by the phone company.

The post office and the phone company refuse to cooperate with law enforcement and offer disposable phone numbers and means to move money without trace/attribution?

The phone company has long cooperated with government. And while I’ve never heard of anything, the post office _is_ owned by the government in the US.

If you think the governments of the world do not have the metadata of every single phone call and at the very least an outside picture of every letter being sent by non-companies, then I have a boat te sell you.

There is a legal process, though, at least in the USA.

You can get a warrant (a court order) to open a piece of mail, and the USPS isn't going to refuse to hand it over.

[technically they could, but someone would get stuck with contempt of court charges]

It means complying with an order from a judge. Just like every other social media or really any form of communications (including emails, phone calls, letters) that operate in France (and in the EU) do.

As said before: the whole E2E, CSAM diskussion is not really the issue here. This is afaik about complying mostly to very specific takedown requests (as telegram offers no legal address inside the EU) and more general platform regulations that require mechanisms to prevent illegal content. Telegram does not offer any E2E encrypted group chat and actually actively interferes in groups by pushing advertisements, so they should be able to also block illegal content.

Having said that I am no fan of installing law enforcement inside private companies. However, telegrams noncompliance with court orders is problematic particularly related to protecting human rights of 3rd parties in the digital age.

So they're going for the ISPs too, then? Considering the drug traffickers, child crime offenders and swindlers were actually paying the ISPs, NOT telegram.

Just because he is the CEO doesn’t mean he is directly liable. The company is a separate entity. I don’t see anyone arresting Elon or other CEOs because of “not enough moderation.” Most actions are to block platform access. There must be something else for sure.

Twitter doesn't encrypt messages, so there is indeed no chance of that happening - after all the reasoning for this arrest is fundamentally inapplicable to Twitter.

It's however a very very very slippery slope to prosecute someone for providing the tools to hold encrypted communication, just because this is also used by criminals. A lot of privacy oriented services would probably have to exit France if this holds up

by default telegram doesn't encrypt anything. I'm not sure if you where implying that telegram had encryption and therefore hiding illicite activities.

The problems is the huge telegram channels spreading hacks and illicite tricks.

There is no such threats against Signal which is way more privacy oriented. (except for some new laws in UK where Signal said if they are applied, they would withdraw from the UK market:https://fortune.com/2023/07/13/signal-president-mass-surveil...

Elon Mustk is a very important person; Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Twitter. He provides services to the military with the Starlink and he is deeply connected to the state with SpaceX.

On the other hand Pavel Durov is "homeless". He is like a normal citizen.

CEOs can be liable for intentional or grossly negligent non-compliance, among other things.

Owning a company providing a secure communication product is not negligent nor non-compliance.

> non-compliance

It depends to what they're being asked to be compliant with.

Seems like that's just become up for legal clarification.

This is really out of scope for this case though. Most of what is discussed in this case is about public, unencrypted channels

I don’t know in France, but at least in Italy companies are not a shield for penal responsibility; crimes are always committed by persons. If a company does something criminal, someone is responsible for that decision within the company, and that could be the CEO.

If a court orders twitter to take down a tweet, and twitter doesn't comply, then I believe anybody that is responsible for that inaction, including Elon if he was aware and didn't act may be tried

TF1 was the primary source for this news apparently.

Maybe it's best to keep the original one. I think everyone here knows how to use Google Translate or ChatGPT.

>Billionaire CEO named namedson

This isn't Slayers X.

But on a serious note if he's a billionaire then he can drop the whole monetization schtick. Telegram has become unusuable in the last few years. There's crypto scam ads everywhere.

Billionaires don’t become billionaires by using their own money to solve problems

Whenever I open Youtube via an EU proxy, I see "a crypto scam" video at the front page, the first one. The title is "+35 ETH generated last month by effectively using the contract bot for trading" and the account name is "Web3 developer", and the label says "Sponsored". The thumbnail displays a happy bearded man's face resembling that famous Youtuber who gives away money, a fire emoji and words "+35 ETH in July personal bot".

So you cannot really blame Telegram.

Forgive my scepticism, but I’m going to have to ask you for a screenshot and which country YouTube thought you were connecting from.

I’m asking because, at least according to my understanding of YouTube’s ad policies, that shouldn’t be allowed: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/14009787?hl=en&r...

He said video not ad

It has a "Sponsored" label and doesn't match my interests at all, but is still displayed at the first place.

Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvlbunSGDmU

Screenshot (title has changed from what I wrote earlier or this is another ad): https://imgur.com/a/TX0xB9y

Country is the one in Europe.

Maybe this is not a scam and therefore is allowed? Maybe it is a joke video? I didn't watch the video, but the title and thumbnails looks like a "scam".

I don't know. I analyzed the code from below the video with GPT[0] and it flagged a bunch of stuff it considered shady.

[0] Every time I mention using AI my posts get downvoted to infinity, so take the above with a grain of salt :)

I don't know anything about coding crypto, but it looks to me like it has a bunch of functions which each return a little hex string which it merges together into a wallet address which it then transfers all your funds to. I could be totally wrong and it's all above board.

Here's the code from the video:

https://hastebin.com/share/paxisehuki.php

You can see that most functions deal with converting hex strings to bytes or parsing utf-8 despite their name. For example, checkLiquidity seems to just convert hex representation to binary and not what its name says.

The contract is payable, i.e. will accept ether as payment but doesn't actually do anything. From a glance looks like the withdrawal function is setup to generate the address of the scammer - through all of those obfuscated functions that have hex string slices - so ultimately only they can remove the funds.

It also looks like the contract requires the user to deposit 0.4 ETH for it to work.

The first wallet address in that file has a balance equivalent to $8m USD - dang.

https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead...

I think this might be not an address belonging to the scammer, but an address of an exchange or something like that. Why would he write his address in clear text.

I can corroborate GP's claim. I've used AdBlock at home, but at work my Youtube main page has a persistent ad that's like what GP described. Location: Hong Kong with an office network that presumably VPNs to USA.

[flagged]

Probably takes into account amount of flags, as well as points:comments ratio.

I have heard that YC alums have more voting power than others.

Not true — also, why would YC alums be less likely to upvote a post about Pavel Durov getting arrested?

I heard it directly from a YC alum who said he helped me push a post to the top. But this was several years ago. I didn't mean that YC alums would be less likely to upvote that particular article, but it does make the rankings much more unpredictable.

Another interesting thing is why my post was so heavily downvoted. Did I touch a taboo subject?

It's not taboo—this kind of repetitive meta-discussion is so common that users get tired of it and tend to flag it.

YC alums have never had more voting power than others. At least I don't remember any time when that was true.

Flame war detector. If a thread has too many comments (compared with upvotes), it gets downranked

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com