Russian authorities have begun restricting access to Telegram, one of the country’s most popular social media apps, as the government continues to push everyday Russians toward its own tightly controlled alternatives to foreign tech platforms.

On Tuesday, the government said it was restricting access to Telegram for the “protection of Russian citizens,” accusing the app of refusing to block content authorities consider “criminal and terrorist.”

Russia’s telecommunications regulator Roskomnadzor said in a statement that it would continue to restrict the operation of the Telegram messenger “until violations of Russian law are eliminated.”

    • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      They tried (and failed) before the war too. Telegram has no privacy, poor security, but they are really good at evading blocks.

      • eleitl@lemmy.zip
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        22 hours ago

        You can configure a proxy in the client, though it’s a game of cat and mouse. Cheburnet will only grow in its traffic filtering capabilies. It’s a stupid move since it prevents western audiences from learning what’s going on in a less censored environment. People who bother installing MAX will be a tiny minority.

        • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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          20 hours ago

          It still works without proxy for my family (as of earlier today), except for calls. I don’t know if this is telegram doing some block evasion or the block hasn’t kicked in fully yet.

          In any case, unless they ban like 80% of outside internet, there will still be a few obfuscated VPN servers & tor bridges working. Everyone who knows their stuff will be able to access the outside, same as in China.

          • eleitl@lemmy.zip
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            2 hours ago

            Yes, but the majority will be locked out and move on to MAX. I expect that most contries will be moving to a Great Firewall Internet model. In case of Cheburnet for a wholly autonomous mode of operation, in case of a hostile disconnect.

    • lad@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      Yeah, it was before the war and heard they recently published a press release stating that not blocking them all these years was illegal, because they technically never stopped blocking. If that sounds stupid, I think that’s about right

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        1 day ago

        because it has the best (not one of the best, the best) UX of any of its brethren and normal people are super forgiving about them non-important things once they get used to the fluidity and glitz of weirdov’s app.

        I have first hand experience with forcing (apt term) normies to use XMPP and Matrix clients in a corpo setting and am witness to the abject horror they experience when they clash with the dogshit apps these lunatics claim are production ready.

      • eleitl@lemmy.zip
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        22 hours ago

        Right, and forcing Russians to MAX renders the entire platform distinctly less interesting for us in the West.

      • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        14 hours ago

        Bruh people sell drugs on Snapchat. That doesn’t mean Snapchat’s “security” (they have none) is “good.”

        Very stupid people sure, but they’re there, and the ones doing the same on Telegram are just as dumb. If you want to find the real ones you’ll need to learn about Tails, Dread, and XMR.

        • hexagonwin@lemmy.today
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          22 hours ago

          that looks like the control panel(?) has full access to the target device already. usually when talking about security of communication softwares we don’t consider this kind of attacks…

          • sakuraba@lemmy.ml
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            21 hours ago

            yeah, if they get full access to your device no amount of end to end encryption will avoid that

            no matter how secure the chat app protocol is, as long as one of the users in the chat is compromised they can access to those chats

          • Solrac@lemmy.world
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            21 hours ago

            Only the federated networks, no one controlling entity nor country, best part is open source, because we the people, get to say what goes, and what doesn’t.

      • Lytia @lemmy.today
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        2 days ago

        There is a reason every illegal operation runs on Telegram, not Signal. The security is good.

        Or it’s because the platform is nearly unmoderated and has benefited greatly from the network effect.

        • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          14 hours ago

          It’s actually because that claim is flat out false. People sell drugs on Snapchat for starters, back in the day it started on IRC (afaik) if you knew the right spots, Silk Road is closed (and all those using the name since are scams) and I think WHM (last I knew) exit scammed, but someone took up the job (idk who, check Dread.)

          There’s a reason some (not nearly all, not even most) illegal operations run on Telegram and not Signal, and it has absolutely dick to do with security.

          There, fixed that for them lol.