The founder of Telegram has just put this in his public Telegram channel - https://t.me/durov:
"For the last 24 hours Telegram has been under a ban by internet providers in Russia. The reason was our refusal to provide encryption keys to Russian security agencies. For us, this was an easy decision. We promised our users 100% privacy and would rather cease to exist than violate this promise.
Despite the ban, we haven’t seen a significant drop in user engagement so far, since Russians tend to bypass the ban with VPNs and proxies. We also have been relying on third-party cloud services to remain partly available for the rest of our users.
Thank you for your support and loyalty, Russian users of Telegram. Thank you, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft – for not taking part in political censorship.
Russia accounts for ~7% of the Telegram user base, and even if we lose that entire market, Telegram’s organic growth in other regions will compensate for this loss within a couple of months. However, it is personally important for me to make sure we do everything we can for our Russian users.
To support internet freedoms in Russia and elsewhere I started giving out bitcoin grants to individuals and companies who run socks5 proxies and VPN. I am happy to donate millions of dollars this year to this cause, and hope that other people will follow. I called this Digital Resistance – a decentralized movement standing for digital freedoms and progress globally."
A few months ago I read an article about Telegram and their related companies and individuals. [1]
The article read like a mix between a nerdy James Bond story, a bad Law and Order episode, a Mexican soap opera and a Russian episode of Cribs.
It was written by an ex-employee so I took it with a grain of salt.
Nevertheless, the article brings up a lot of red flags and shady behavior. Combined with their (alleged) connection with the Russian government, roll-your-own-crypto and the recent >billion dollar ICO it doesn't really make me all that willing to use Telegram any time soon.
This reads like FUD, there are reasons for and against telegram and I won't get into them here. But truth is often stranger than fiction[0] and there are actors with something to gain from making telegram look poor.
Why block Telegram and not .. all the others? Whatsapp, Signal, Viber, ... Are they objecting to the use of encryption? Because everyone uses encryption almost all the time for everything everywhere. The cat has been well and truly released from that bag. Are they just going to turn off the internet altogether?
Telegram is not the most popular messenger in Russia. It's not even in top-3 as far as I remember. But it is widely used by people who tend to be opposite to the current government (young professionals). Also, there are a lot of anonymous Telegram channels curated by the opposition.
Telegram was reported by one of three russian cellular network companies as 2nd after Viber by number of clients (both each day and simultanious peak) nearly a week prior to blocking.
Russians do make up a huge list of telegrams overall userbase. But most importantly, whatsapp and viber are end to end encrypted. Whatsapp uses signal. Viber uses a signal inspired encryption format. The common ground between both is that every single message is encrypted using a different secret key that is deleted after the message is received and decrypted on the device. Whatsapp and Viber have no way to give chat details even if they wanted to. Provided that they follow the protocol, and all accounts seem to point to the fact they do, then there is no backdoor or secret key they can give to any government.
Telegram in contrast uses a set of master keys to encrypt the conversations using RSA and aes256 as they travel through the servers. The keys are split across multiple servers residing in multiple jurisdictions so that legally, a government would have to seek permission to obtain each part of the key from a separate state.
Basically, this means that at the end of the day, if telegram ever forgoes its integrity (based off its public statements), every message will suddenly become decryptable.
That last point is what seems to really make telegram worth targeting.
Not yet. Moreover, the head of russian regulatory says this year Facebook probably might be blocked as well if they will not receive all data they need.
That's what's going to happen. Various localities will shut off encrypted passageways altogether because they control the pipes. They will create a corporate-like intranet where they monitor everything.
they know how bad an open internet can hurt them because they do it themselves to other countries. can't blame them that they don't want to be on the receiving end of the weapon they created.
It's just that Telegram is the most used one in Russia so they proceed by targeting this one first but don't worry they will target the other ones after.
The FSB wants encryption keys. Telegram won't share, so is blocked. Therefore, Whatsapp and Viber gave up their keys, I suppose. Or provided backdoors.
We know from Snowden leaks that Microsoft (Skype) & Facebook (WhatsApp) are already freely handing info to any government that asks. Search Wikipedia for: PRISM (surveillance program) Other programs have probably superseded it (and include Japanese ecom giant Rakuten who owns Viber), but you can be sure the user info still flows.
Telegram's independence is what separates them from other services, what allowed them to deny the demand for crypto keys, and why they were targeted.
Because the Russian government can read all non-E2EE conversations (so 99% of them) on Telegram and is hoping to drive adoption overseas with this PR stunt.
None of the other messengers you mentioned are designed to work like this (not 100% sure about Viber), the ability of operators to read most of the conversations on the platform is very much unique to Telegram.
It's really not a coincidence that the Russian government is choosing to ban the worst "encrypted messenger" on the market.
And they also ordered Apple and Google to remove the app from their stores. I understand there are workarounds, but I'd really like them to respond with "f*ck yourself". It's a shame they won't do that, though.
And here is another yet problem with walled gardens. It creates a single failure point because Apple and Google are forced to comply with local law, regardless of how absurd it is, if they want to continue doing business there.
In an open environment, you would simply change the mirror urls and run apt-get update.
Whether they respond with process and patience or not, I’m hard pressed to think of powerful states that abide “f*ck yourself” once they’ve started to think national interest/security.
They already blocked it once. As they normally block domain and IP, they ran into issue when owner of blocked domain set the A record to 127.0.0.1.
The same "hack" was used to block Google and other huge sites. Once they found out this "hole", they introduced a white list of resources which shouldn't be blocked.
Maybe the goal of the Russian government was to block the Amazon and Google APIs in the first place, and they used Telegram as a convenient excuse. Just a thought.
It would actually seem like an ideal way to force the adoption of native cloud service replacements (regardless of quality or competitiveness of the offering). Russia has tended to go that way with most things, whether Mail.ru, VK or Yandex. Russia has a very long history of being insular like that and the powers that have dominated Russia the last century have a vested interest in keeping it that way.
Readit News
"For the last 24 hours Telegram has been under a ban by internet providers in Russia. The reason was our refusal to provide encryption keys to Russian security agencies. For us, this was an easy decision. We promised our users 100% privacy and would rather cease to exist than violate this promise.
Despite the ban, we haven’t seen a significant drop in user engagement so far, since Russians tend to bypass the ban with VPNs and proxies. We also have been relying on third-party cloud services to remain partly available for the rest of our users.
Thank you for your support and loyalty, Russian users of Telegram. Thank you, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft – for not taking part in political censorship.
Russia accounts for ~7% of the Telegram user base, and even if we lose that entire market, Telegram’s organic growth in other regions will compensate for this loss within a couple of months. However, it is personally important for me to make sure we do everything we can for our Russian users.
To support internet freedoms in Russia and elsewhere I started giving out bitcoin grants to individuals and companies who run socks5 proxies and VPN. I am happy to donate millions of dollars this year to this cause, and hope that other people will follow. I called this Digital Resistance – a decentralized movement standing for digital freedoms and progress globally."
[1] https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/pavel-durov-sued-senior-...
[0]: The story of Karl Koch for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Koch_(hacker) who's death was ruled a suicide, and his history is... "colourful".
https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2017/project/19.pdf
https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf
Russians do make up a huge list of telegrams overall userbase. But most importantly, whatsapp and viber are end to end encrypted. Whatsapp uses signal. Viber uses a signal inspired encryption format. The common ground between both is that every single message is encrypted using a different secret key that is deleted after the message is received and decrypted on the device. Whatsapp and Viber have no way to give chat details even if they wanted to. Provided that they follow the protocol, and all accounts seem to point to the fact they do, then there is no backdoor or secret key they can give to any government.
Telegram in contrast uses a set of master keys to encrypt the conversations using RSA and aes256 as they travel through the servers. The keys are split across multiple servers residing in multiple jurisdictions so that legally, a government would have to seek permission to obtain each part of the key from a separate state.
Basically, this means that at the end of the day, if telegram ever forgoes its integrity (based off its public statements), every message will suddenly become decryptable.
That last point is what seems to really make telegram worth targeting.
Not even close. Whatsapp and Viber are much more popular. Telegram was barely 3rd before the ban. [1]
Viber moved their data to Russia, they won't get a ban.
Not sure about Whatsapp.
[1]: https://leonardo.osnova.io/bf345b20-423b-c508-cbc2-15963a7af...
Telegram's independence is what separates them from other services, what allowed them to deny the demand for crypto keys, and why they were targeted.
None of the other messengers you mentioned are designed to work like this (not 100% sure about Viber), the ability of operators to read most of the conversations on the platform is very much unique to Telegram.
It's really not a coincidence that the Russian government is choosing to ban the worst "encrypted messenger" on the market.
In an open environment, you would simply change the mirror urls and run apt-get update.
More like Putin's interest/security.
https://github.com/zapret-info/z-i/pull/10/commits/8394b2026...
Wonder if they'll merge it.
The same "hack" was used to block Google and other huge sites. Once they found out this "hole", they introduced a white list of resources which shouldn't be blocked.
These guys are really "smart" )
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