It is basically the part of the current politics in EU where they are trying to force access to all encrypted traffic across devices.
Since they’re not, this doesn’t seem much different from e.g. an email provider refusing some court access to somebody’s mail archive (i.e. a very bad idea if your executives ever want to set foot in that country).
I’m really having a very hard time finding much sympathy for an operation that kept endangering users by spreading misinformation about its own security model, while at the same time building a jurisdiction-hopping warrant evasion machine to protect data they arguably shouldn’t even have if that security model were accurate.
There have been govt commissions in the UK, France, the EU, and the Netherlands about getting Telegram to act on their reports.
All of this while Durov is bragging in Russian press that he doesn't need more than 3 moderators.
If you're not aware of what's really happening here, I'd recommend not commenting.
This guy is a legit a-hole. There's bots on Telegram where you enter women's names or social media URLs and you get back if someone ever posted revenge porn about her. Those bots remain online until a journalist covers them. Unless the company is publicly humiliated, no Telegram channel is ever taken down. Telegram has been the go-to platform for hosting malware and stolen data for half a decade. Nothing... NOTHING has ever been taken down even if it's a blatant TOS violation. So yeah, fuck Durov!
The accusations are serious enough that it’s probably reasonable to assume that they have some serious evidence for this and if that is true then this is a good outcome that should be celebrated.
Isn’t it equally reasonable to assume the accused is innocent until proven guilty?
Presumption of reasonability in political prosecutions doesn't exactly have a great track record.
I remember when the GoF tried to blackmail a Wikipedia admin with prosecution threats, to coerce them to censor Wikipedia entries it didn't want people to read,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5503354 ("French homeland intelligence threatens a sysop into deleting a Wikipedia Article (wikimedia.fr)")
Assumes facts not in evidence.
I’m just saying to slow down and wait for details to come out. This thread is turning into a paranoid fever dream based on nothing as far as I can tell.
