Comment on Founder and CEO of Telegram messaging service arrested in France
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 months agoBut this is intentional. TG’s ToS forbids alternative clients with their own E2EE.
Also he’s the VK founder, which kills any idea of “trustworthy” immediately.
It’s part of TG’s business model, I think, something in the price list for governments. And the way they treat alternative clients in reality also hints that maybe backdoors are as well. Say, a new message format of the day (they add them really often) arrives in a new official Telegram version, somehow it’s nowhere to be seen in the channels and groupchats you’re in, but some day a DM arrives with harmless text and some code runs on your client machine.
I use Telegram, but trusting it would be asinine. Even trustworthy services can be abused, and TG doesn’t even pretend to be that.
I think he got arrested because happening to be in Baku for a couple weeks and then still be there at the same time with Putin-Aliyev meeting, and their agreements apparently having intersections with Durov’s activity, is openly weird.
WhatYouNeed@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Reminds me of the Anom phone. E2E encryption, but the whole thing was run by law enforcement.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Well, yes.
The idea was fine, until it spread to normies which don’t understand that “proprietary software” means a whole city or factory which they won’t be able to study and understand in 10 years, while “free and open source software” means the same, but with a map. And that in the latter case there is at least a category of interested people who’ll look for traps there, and it’s built by such people, while in the former it’s all commercial company’s property.
And that TG desktop’s sources being open doesn’t mean that there’s a confirmed lack of traps.
People severely underestimate the complexity of what they use. Maybe they just shouldn’t, if valuing privacy.
I really think there’s a niche for some “luddite machines” running Forth with an operating system a normie can grasp.
Or we are going to have something worse than most examples of anti-utopia I’ve read\seen.