Pavel Durov and the Blackberry Ratchet | Hacker News Reader

Pavel Durov and the Blackberry Ratchet

oblomovka.com

82 pointsdannyobrien31 comments

For decades, the emperor had been complaining about tinfoil hats and their ability to block the imperial mind reading machines. In ever increasing bouts of frustration he even had his lawyers claim that Big Foil were directly responsibly for child abuse and terrorism, instead of the abusers and terrorists themselves.

Then one summer the emperor’s alchemists discovered a way to get radio vapors to pass through sheet metal, unabated. They kept their discovery top secret and patched their mind reading machines with the new technology. Once again the emperor could hear everyone’s thoughts and it no longer mattered if you were wearing a tinfoil hat or not.

Now that his problem had gone away, was the emperor so naive as to have his lawyers — expensive lawyers — stop their litigation against Big Foil? Should he pretend he had changed his mind and everything was fine now? Maybe even peddle some “anti-mind reading” hats of his own?

That would be silly and very suspicious. In fact, the emperor was so paranoid of any suspicion arising that he increased the intensity of the crackdown on foil hats, even going so far as to arresting the CEO a popular hat maker when he flew into the country on business.

He wouldn’t outright ban foil of course. Not only could the emperor now read everyone’s minds, but by comparing the new machines output with the old he could tell who was wearing a secret layer of tinfoil under their hats. It was these people that had the most fiendish thoughts, thinking that no one was listening.

Most people really, really do not understand the large amount of military traffic on Telegram, and the consequence of that during wartime... and how valuable that is to multiple nation-states around the world.

Strategic comms, soldier command and control, battlefield drone command and control, intel asset management.

Armchair analysts need to put on their big-boy military pants.

Are people actually running drones via Telegram channels?

Not that I’d be surprised. Very postmodern! But it just seems like HTTP(S) with extra steps.

russians do https://youchu.be/watch?v=mwtbTuLZXWw

Subtitles read to me like they coordinate operations on those chat apps rather than that makeshift guided missiles are running Android. Ukrainian Army is reportedly using Discord for the same purpose.

1: https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/126n9mp/picture...

Telegram bots do (what is effectively) simple firewall/LAN exfiltration over https.

So you can host a bot server even if no ports are open.

Isn't that the military's fault?

most software developers let alone military contractors can't build proper chat app. Telegram UI and UX is top notch.

Lots of military forces are growing dependence on these consumer chat apps from grassroots levels going up. The only saving grace is that preferred apps vary. Transition to self-hosted or at least majority nationally owned apps is happening across nations at most at geologic velocities.

Additionally, there also is a large amount military blogger traffic from both Russian and Ukrainian sides.

Telegram channels are quoted all over the place, even in serious press like Reuters.

France could have demanded extradition for "lack of moderation" from the UAE ages ago. Now Durov enters France voluntarily and gets arrested after allegedly trying to meet with Putin.

Witness protection program? Silly mistake?

>"I want to be clear: best practice, ideologically-pure end-to-end apps like Signal absolutely face the same ratchet. What I’m mostly trying to understand here is why Telegram and Blackberry get more publicy targeted."

IMHO it's mainly due to the popularity of the service/product. The concentration of bad actors and the vastness of the audience/userbase make the difference. If Signal was used in the same way, it would get the same attention.

Yeah, I almost put in a sentence or two acknowledging that -- as well as the fact that Durov is far more unprotected by a state from a geopolitical point of view. Would the French police arrest Mark Zuckerberg or another Facebook employee? It's not hard and fast (Italian and Brazilian courts have both put warrants out for the arrest of executives at major foreign tech companies), but it surely factors into how much political capital one would burn to pursue the case.

Curious: who was/is the tech executive with an Italian arrest warrant?

I can't find a description of an arrest warrant, but the case I was thinking of was this one from 2010 where three Google execs were found guilty and given suspended jail sentenced by an Italian court. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/feb/24/google-vi...

I didn't remember that case, thank you!

I think Blackberry was targeted to crush Canadian dominance and let American companies take over the smartphone industry.

I think telegram may be facing similar challenges.

This is an issue where the interests of big business and big government are aligned.

Except that in the case of Telegram, there is no French incumbent.

Element aka New Vector Ltd?

Doesn’t have to be French, just Western and willing to share the keys

I believe the first iPhone did the work of crushing [Canadian] Blackberry's dominance.

For a while I wanted Signal to get popular so I wouldn't have to use other less private and secure apps, but now... I use it with close friends and close family... and that's it. I don't even mention it to most... I fear that popularity would bring more attention to the app and, with it, political and legal issues.

Are you implying that there are backdoors in WhatsApp?

Well, we don’t see Mark arrested…

I'm more surprised by the subtle implication everyone makes that there's no backdoors in Signal. That would be weird assumption to make.

The main "backdoor" to Signal is that having access to the phone can leak all of Signal's data. If the phone OS is backdoored, then Signal is already compromised. Anyway, the point is not to make it impossible to exfiltrate data, but to make it as hard as possible.

That isn't a Signal exclusive flaw. If the phone OS is backdoored, everything on it is compromised.

No, although it used (not sure if it still does) to encourage people to enable backups. On Android I believe the default was Google Drive, so you'd have people send their chats to Google in plain text.

iMessages is another example of a secure service that lets users "break" encryption. As soon we enable cloud features for it to work across devices, the key is uploaded to iCloud, essentially making chats plain text to Apple.

There are claims that Signal has already been compromised by the Five Eyes Intel Agencies, albeit through bribery rather than the overt coercion we see here. The key change is that Signal can no longer guarantee end-to-end encryption based on a passphrase tied to the app itself, and known only to the user.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/8974

I mean is there a better source than this? It's extremely ranty and just speculation

I find people arguing e2ee around telegram missing the point.

e2ee is just the bait. The telegram UI, ease of use and rich functions makes people stay.

In fact I find myself deosn't bother do one-to-one chats in telegram, mostly I just shitpost in groups like Discord channels. Signal is a fine e2ee chat app but that's it.

The use case of encrypted, secritive private one-to-one chats, especially outside work, is pretty limited.

Are there any telegram/signal alternatives that's E2E with robust bot and application support (other than matrix)?

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