Telegram will start moderating private chats after CEO's arrest | Hacker News Reader

Telegram will start moderating private chats after CEO's arrest

theverge.com

41 pointscglong72 comments

This is fake news. Verge journalist wrote the news based on a single tweet that now contains Community notes.

Telegram just had moved the FAQ item discussed to a different location.

Talk about high quality journalism.

The statement from Telegram https://twitter.com/telegram/status/1831976606081953870

The report button always existed. That's not what French police wants from him - they want to be able to listen to private (group) chats and to get IPs and phone numbers of participants.

Why is the first sentence this then:

> Telegram has quietly removed language from its FAQ page that said private chats were protected from moderation requests

Was the FAQ incorrect? Is the Verge lying about what the FAQ said?

In 1:1 chats the report button is for reporting spam, not for human moderation. In anybody wrote to you first, you could press the report button and the sender would get an automatic 1 week ban.

Verge is lying what FAQ said and says today, because they did not check the source.

This seems pretty different to me?

From https://telegram.org/faq

July 17 2024 from Wayback Machine

> Q: There's illegal content on Telegram. How do I take it down?

> All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them. But sticker sets, channels, and bots on Telegram are publicly available. If you find sticker sets or bots on Telegram that you think are illegal, please ping us at abuse@telegram.org. You can also use the 'report' buttons right inside our apps, see this post on our official @ISISwatch channel for details.

[Emphasis mine]

Today

> Q: There's illegal content on Telegram. How do I take it down?

> All Telegram apps have 'Report' buttons that let you flag illegal content for our moderators — in just a few taps. On Telegram for Android, tap the message and select Report from the menu. On iOS, press and hold the message. On Telegram Desktop, Web or Telegram for macOS, right-click the message and select Report. Then choose an appropriate reason. You can also use our automated takedown email address abuse@telegram.org. If you're sending an email takedown request, please make sure to include links (like t.me/... or @...) to the content on Telegram which you think needs attention from our moderators. Users from the EU are welcome to study the User Guidance for the EU Digital Services Act for the relevant reporting options.

Here is from Telegram

https://twitter.com/telegram/status/1831976606081953870

The question of whether the buttons are there or whether the code changed is irrelevant. The FAQ said that reports aren’t processed, not that you can’t make them.

“Private chats are still private” doesn’t mean the same thing as “reports will still be ignored,” nor does it mean “reports will be processed.”

Unsurprisingly, it looks to me like a deceptive company caught in a legal predicament is acting deceptively. The FAQ was unambiguous about NOT moderating private chats. Now the FAQ (and this tweet) are, at best, ambiguous as to the moderation behavior.

Shill somewhere else.

Did it also exist on non 1-1 chats and groups?

It did

Also in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/sep/06/t...

It's unclear what's meant by "private" chats here: I assume Telegram is not planning on breaking the encryption of E2EE Secret Chats and that the non-E2EE Cloud Chats will be subject to greater controls?

They do not have E2EE on 99.9% of chats.

1. E2EE is not available on desktop clients at all

2. E2EE must be explicitly enabled for each chat on mobile

It appears to work as a report button that chat members can use to flag content they can see.

E2EE is only as secure as the Ends are.

They'll just keep the keys like any other "end to end" service.

A group chat cannot be E2E encrypted, or new members would not be able to see previous messages.

So, this should demonstrate to you that Telegram private group chats are not E2EE.

> A group chat cannot be E2E encrypted, or new members would not be able to see previous messages.

Why? Any member of the group can send the messages to the newcomer.

Not that I trust closed and centralized services anyways. But it should be possible.

New messages yes, but old messages no..

The typical way group chat encryption is done is the client generate a key per message, it use that key to encrypt the content of that single message.

Then it will encrypt the message key with personal key for each member of the group, and it can only do that for current members of the group.

Once you receive a message the client will use your personal key to decrypt the copy of the message key encrypted with it, then use the message key to decrypt the message.

The problem with this is that, first it does not escale, the larger the group gets the harder it is to encrypt the messages because you need to encrypt the message key with more and more personal keys, this make the work load bigger and the message size bigger as well. Telegram support very large groups that make encrypting groups not practical.

Also Telegram allow you to see older messages sent before you join the group as those get stored in the servers, if you join the group later then for older messages the per message key will not have being encrypted with your personal key so you cannot decrypt it, thus cannot decrypt the message.

You would need to either store the per message key unencrypted in the server and make encryption useless as the server would be able to decrypt it, have the client from some older member of the group re-encrypt the per message key for older messages and send to new members or the simpler approach that Telegram took to not encrypt it at all.

You're overcomplicating it. The existing members of the group have the plaintext of the older messages. So they can totally send those messages to new members of the group. If I can copy/paste the history of the group chat and send it to a new group member, then the application itself can do the equivalent behind the scenes.

Sure, but that would defeat the purpose of the encryption since anyone could join at a later date and have other clients snitch out whatever was said in the past.

Might as well use Telegram at that point ^_^

In a public group that anyone can join without an invite it’s unclear why you’d even want E2E in the first place, so we’re presumably talking about invite-only groups. In that case, sending old messages to new members may or may not be a desired behavior, but it doesn’t defeat the purpose of E2E.

Because of how E2EE is implemented, data must be encrypted for you to decrypt. This can't work after the fact for obvious reasons.

> or new members would not be able to see previous messages

On Matrix it's somehow not a problem.

> or new members would not be able to see previous messages.

that's a feature.

yeah, signal/ws/matrix don't have e2ee group chats... oh wait, they have...

They have, but the limit of people in a group is significant lower then Telegram, at least for signal\ws, dont know how matrix handle this.

Telegram allow 200000 members in a chat group.

Signal on the other hand allow only 1000 and ws limit is 1024.

It is possible to have group chat encrypted, but this does not scale very well and allowing new members to see older messages also is trick, although both are possible.

EDIT: i just checked for matrix and while they do not impose an limit their docs do indicate that there are performance problems for very large groups with tens of thousands of members, that while much bigger then signal\ws it is still much smaller compared to telegram.

I assume they mean that Telegram does not have the option to have encrypted E2E chats not that it isn't possible to implement

"or new members would not be able to see previous messages." - this sounds more like he really thought group chats can't be e2ee

Current title:

>Telegram changes its tone on moderating private chats after CEO’s arrest

RIP Russian comms