this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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An anonymously-run Russian Telegram channel known for sharing leaks from the Russian security services was removed from the platform without warning on Monday, sparking fears that Telegram’s management is cooperating with the Kremlin and meeting its demands to censor certain channels.

In an editorial statement posted on its backup channel, VCHK-OGPU, which had over 1 million members, said that it believed the channel had been deleted by Telegram following a Russian court order requiring its removal for “discrediting the actions of Russian state bodies and the Russian armed forces”.

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[–] doodledup@lemmy.world 15 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Telegram was subordinate to the Kremlin the whole time. You have to be stupid to not realize that.

[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 hours ago (2 children)
[–] doodledup@lemmy.world 6 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Telegram was banned in Russia for a short time and for some inexplicit reason unbanned. Russia has made no attempt since then to ban them. The founder of Durov explained that they managed to force Russia to unban them becauye they kept buyint changing IPv4 addresses to evade the ban. But everyone who knows the technology knows this is a stupid reason and completely unbelievable. IP addresses are very expensive and the connections in the app need to change to the new IP. At the rate that Russia and everyone else is able to block IPs (thousands per second) you simply cannot implement such a strategy. What Telegram is saying is dumb propaganda for the gullible.

Telegram insists on not having end-to-end encryption for default chats and group chats and profile and contact data. They use E2EE for Secret Chats but they use MTProto, which is a custom key exchange and encryption algorithm that is doing some fairly questionable stuff according to leading experts in the field. Telegram being insecure is no problem in itself. But they explicitly advertise it as being secure and private and mislead the users to believe no government can spy on them.

They are based in the UAE with their main office being empty and essentially only a mailbox. Nobody actually knows where they are.

Their servers (with unencrypted chat data) are hosted in questionable authoritarian countries all over the world. They do not have any servers in Europe or the US. This is a huge problem since nobody knows what server software they are running and your chats are not encrypted.

Somehow they have infinite funding for infinite fast cloud storage. They don't disclose any financial data. The founder always says it comes from his liquidated assets of VKontact. But that's impossible as he would have run out of money years ago already. Hosting cloud storage like they do is very very expensive.

If you want to be sure that nobody gets and uses your data use an end-to-end encrypted messenger like Signal. If it's end-to-end encrypted and open-source then no other questions need to be asked.

[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 hour ago

Thanks. I've never used or recommended Telegram since Signal appears to be the obvious answer, though at least unlike Signal they actually take ownership and publish their own app themselves to places like Flatpak and provide aarch64 builds. Been waiting for Signal to do this for... forever.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

The creators are incapable of flying when thrown out windows.

[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

Pavel Durov doesn't live in Russia, so I don't see this insinuation has to do with anything.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 1 points 32 minutes ago

Borders never stopped Russia from killing someone they didn't like. Especially if it's a Russian citizen.

[–] x00z@lemmy.world 7 points 4 hours ago

His family doesn't have wings either.

[–] jackalope@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago

Durov is the world's most obvious asset lmao

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 5 points 5 hours ago

They had already agreed to share information with the Kremlin years ago. Have people been living under a rock?

[–] pogmommy@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Isn't Telegram owned by Facebook? Why the hell would anybody trust it for any level of security?

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 hours ago

You're thinking of whatsapp

[–] BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago

As if any Russian business could have operated otherwise, this is why I never trusted Telegram