And Russia’s veto in the UN Security Council has helped undermine the enforcement of sanctions imposed on North Korea. The most astonishing thing is that, in terms of profit/loss, friendship with Russia has proven to be much more beneficial for North Korea than friendship with the US/EU has been for Ukraine.
Anyone who reads the article may be surprised to find that it contains literally no evidence to support the claim made in its clickbait headline. The author of the article comes to pretty different, much more limited conclusion:
Based on the analysis of packet captures above, I believe it is clear that anyone who has sufficient visibility into Telegram’s traffic would be able to identify and track traffic of specific user devices. Including when perfect forward secrecy protocol feature is in use.
This would also allow, through some additional analysis based on timing and packet sizes, to potentially identify who is communicating with whom using Telegram.
This is way more different thing than claiming and proving that Telegram is somehow FSB honeypot.
Furthermore, the author of the article does not even attempt to somehow prove a Telegram/FSB connection and takes this claim for granted based on the article published on websites of OCCRP and its Russian affiliate Istories. Let’s check this article and the evidence it presents:
Reporters obtained the company’s internal accounting documents for 2024 which show that one of its most important government clients is the FSB.
The documents show that Electrotelecom installs and manages equipment for a system that is being used by the FSB offices in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region for surveillance.
Unlike the conclusions made in the rys.io article, which have a vast evidence base and can be verified, in this case we are simply asked to take the word of the so-called “investigative journalism outlet”.
And what do we know about OCCRP?
In 2024, it was reported that OCCRP receives nearly half its funding from USAID
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_Crime_and_Corruption_Reporting_Project
I think that’s enough.
TLDR:
Telegram uses a suboptimal method of handling user IDs in its packets, which allows to track which user ID is sending messages to which user ID.
The Telegram/FSB link claim is based solely on unverifiable statements made by shills on USAID payroll.
The entire original article is nothing more than a mixture of propaganda and incompetence. Even where it doesn’t lie, it tells half-truths.
I love that it even uses a variation of the good old “when you pirate MP3s, you’re dowloading COMMUNISM” poster as an illustration.
What many users do not know: The website provides users’ data to Russia.
You don’t even have to do much research to come to this conclusion, since the owner of archive.today openly states that he uses Yandex for the search function.
Proof: https://blog.archive.today/post/673695282217762816/just-realized-that-i-can-search-for-keywords-in
It’s quite funny that the author of the original article somehow ignores this.
A look at the website with Webbkoll shows the following Russian domain names: privacy-cs.mail.ru r.mradx.net rs.mail.ru top-fwz1.mail.ru
For some strange reason Webbkoll now shows “No third-party requests”.
Proof: https://webbkoll.5july.net/en/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Farchive.today
This is definitely not true, since if you opened devtools in your browser and loaded archive.today, you would see that it loads some trackers and counters from top-fwz1.mail.ru
I tried many times, but could not get requests to other mentioned domains.
By the way, the screenshot in the article also shows a request to Google servers - a fact that the author of the article happily ignores. In my case, I do not receive any requests to Google servers, perhaps it was already removed by the owner of archive.today along with requests to the other 3 mentioned domains.
First and foremost, top-fwz1.mail.ru/js/code.js is integrated. Further code from Russia is then loaded.
That’s fair, and that’s what I got. But it’s not some random “further code from Russia”, what’s loaded are mail.ru counter and vk.com event trackers:
Proofs: https://top.mail.ru/help/en/code/https & https://ads.vk.com/en/help/general/sites/offline_events
Also, you need to disable your adblock to make these scripts load. As funny as it sounds, the adblock plugin with default settings saves you from the KGB.
It is not just about the full possession of the largest social network (VK) and the largest payment service (Mail.ru), but in the case of Yandex also to influence the entire output of Yandex News.
Mail.ru is not “the largest payment service”, it owns payment service VK pay, which is so big that you won’t find its page even in the Russian wiki. Both the outdated statista and the fresh AI-slop don’t even mention it among the most significant contenders:
Proof: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1056296/most-popular-online-payment-services-russia/
Proof: https://sergioespresso.com/2024/06/16/which-is-the-most-popular-online-payment-service-in-russia/
Also, there is no such thing as “Yandex News” for almost 3 years. It’s not owned by Yandex and it’s rebranded to Zen News: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_News
The data collected show which Paywall content is particularly popular in western media, but could also provide insight about their users. One can speculate about the importance of such data in the hybrid Russian war against Europe and the rest of the West.
One can laugh at such speculations. Like: “the hybrid Russian war against Europe and the rest of the West: expectation vs reality”.
Expectation: cyber attacks on critical systems, hacking of military IT infrastructure.
Reality: providing free access to paywalled articles.
In any case, it is difficult to understand which valuable insight you can get from knowing the popularity of pirated paywalled articles.
Incidentally (and in addition), anyone who pays for the paid media content must also expect for user data to go to Russia:
The whole passage is nothing more than propagandistic filler as it has nothing to do with archive.today at all, and the owner of archive.today has no reasonable way of knowing who exactly paid for the article.
The operators of «Archive.Today» do not open their identity. Neither an impressum nor a data protection declaration can be found on the website.
I think that the owner of website with pirated content has no other reason to hide his identity than working for the KGB. Literally no other reason.
I feel I should also quote one sentence from the comments section of the original article. It was written by the author of the article, and it clearly shows his intentions and his goodwill in this case: “but one might wonder whether it’s really necessary to circumvent the corresponding paywall”.
TLDR: archive.today uses mail.ru counter and vk.com event tracker, which are blocked by ad blockers. So if you use any kind of ad blocker, none of your data will be sent to Russian servers.
I don’t understand why this was downvoted, if such a proposal had been made in 2022 during first Istanbul talks, it could have prevented another three years of meatgrinder. As during those talks Russia openly discussed getting troops back to pre-2022 border as possible option, and European alliance instead of NATO (i.e. no US troops and nukes in Europe) is also offer that is hard to ignore. So after some negotiation it might become a deal; sadly noone offered that.
Wow, that’s the real reason why the deleted comment isn’t quoted in the original post. That’s clear YDI case, the moderator did a good job by kicking out the bad faith troll.
No one speaks like that be it online or in IRL conversations.
Yeah, literally no one speaks like that be it online or in IRL conversations. You’ve just failed to recognize a fairly popular local meme (especially popular in previously predominantly Russian-speaking regions like Donbass). That’s okay, because the country you actually live in isn’t Ukraine.
Wherever you are
Wherever I am, I support an immediate end to the war through peace negotiations. Wherever you are, you preach the continuation of the war until your “hometown” too becomes the occupied (and bombed to the ground) territory. This is simply because you have nothing to do with Donbass, you have no relatives or acquaintances there who could die in the process, these are just some random words you read on Wikipedia. You are just some shithead troll sitting thousands of kilometers away.
The champagne bottles are waiting for you!
Ты же знаешь теорему Тарана, желаешь мне одну, а по итогу сам получишь две. Не знаешь, конечно, как и русский, как и украинский, как и ничего про Донбасс. Не страшно, через Google Translate переведешь. В общем, иди на хуй, я уже понял, что ты просто пиздобол.
You should be aware that despite his claims, Skiluros is not from Ukraine, and more precisely, not from the region he claims to be from. Most likely, he has never been there, as he fails to recognize some basic local jokes (check our conversation in this thread). He’s just a NAFO troll who pretends to be Ukrainian so that some unaware people will take his crap more seriously.
I freely admit that I (luckily) don’t live in Ukraine now - and neither do you, but you’ve never lived there either, and are now trying to hide that fact.
After your rants about web translators, I’m sure of it, because the very first time I asked about a pretty specific thing in a pretty specific way. If you really are from one of the cities that are currently under Russian control (as you’ve been trying to claim in posts in other communities where no one has been able to call your bluff), you’d recognize it easily. Moreover, I used some other local political memes that you didn’t catch. Since you’re not from Ukraine, you can’t speak Ukrainian, you don’t know common local stuff and you have no connection to Ukraine at all. You’re doing your “online roleplay”, but you’re failing miserably at the most easiest checks.
I have no idea where you actually live - in the EU or the US, in any case, for you, Ukrainians are some random aboriginals from a country that you couldn’t point out on a map a few years ago, you don’t really care how many Ukrainians will die tomorrow, as for you it’s no more than a some online moniker, and that’s why your comments at all instances are full of some kind of shithead warmongering propaganda.
And the funniest thing is that if you would start your roleplay at .world or shitJW, their users would happily upvote your crap and eagerly consume misinformation from fake Ukrainian. Because they are not at all against the misinformation if it suits their tastes.
Що, не розумієш рідної мови, рагуль?
Well the fact here is that you don’t speak Ukrainian (while i do) and you’ve never lived in Ukraine (while I did as a kid). You’re just NAFO scum from some other country posing as Ukrainian to promote your bullshit propaganda. It’s obvious that all your knowledge of Ukraine comes from the media, not from your own life experience. Now, once you were exposed, you can get fucked.
Чому не державною, лайно?
I bet that at best you are a troll posing as a Ukrainian, and at worst one of those shithead clowns who managed to cross the border and are now gathering in the centres of Western capitals, protesting against ending war through negotiations so that other Ukrainians would continue to die while they are chilling in Berlin, Paris or Warsaw. Or worse, you’re one of those guys who wears a woman’s wig when going grocery shopping to avoid getting caught by TCC, and then returns home to continue his crusade in the comments of Telegram or Facebook for the glory of the Great Democratic Leader Bonevtik Zelensky. Anyway, you’re shit in either case.
This is PTB, sure, but you’re not new to Lemmy and you should already know that the average .world user has no problem with Ukrainians being used as proxy cannon fodder, so there’s a strong BPR vibe here too. You’re literally diving into the cesspool of Western narratives and then being shocked that it stinks.
However, let it be noted that the post is in violation of the sidebar rules
This is certainly a valid point, however, your words are equally true of PhilipTheBucket’s original report where they are also fully a third-party.
Are you also claiming that PhilipTheBucket acted in bad faith? Would you report both posts (if you’ll finaly decide to take an action), not just this one? Could you please clarify your position if your answer is “no”.
There’s nothing wrong with posting as much as you want, as long as the moderators are willing to accept your posts and don’t reject them.
There’s nothing wrong with a moderator kicking someone for personal attacks, so Ghyste’s ban was completely justified and is certainly an example of YDI.
The only PTB I see here would be admin of ponder.cat, if they’d actually delete someone’s account for adding more content to Lemmy; but cat deleted their account themselves, so it’s not like that. They are PTB anyway, since that acronym can also stand for PhilipTheBucket, lol.
This apt observation helps to understand why no one takes this “free world” seriously anymore and why the Global South and BRICS are on the rise.
The article’s headline falsely equates Russian dissidents with shills on USAID payroll.
Try debunking Western narratives on Tienanmen Square or the Uyghurs on db0 or bunch of other instances. You will quickly find that echo chamber that exists on the other side is not just a fantasy.
And so what? The fact that Lemmy is a decentralized community, with instances owned and populated by people from all over the world with different worldviews, is actually the main advantage that Lemmy has over Reddit. The tendence of Lemmyverce to split into a few separated echo chambers is actually a cancer that is slowly killing Lemmy, and it doesn’t matter whether what is enforcing that cancer is pro-China or pro-EU.
Literally the same words said in December 2021 could possibly prevent:
The Trump administration is just saying loud what all the other NATO governors have been hiding. No one ever planned to fight Russia for Ukraine and the only destiny for Ukrainian aboriginals is to be used as proxy cannon fodder to fight one of NATO’s bogeymen.
NATO countries never cared about Ukraine’s casualities to the point that they decided that Ukrainian lives were worth less than a signed piece of paper with the aforementioned statement: ‘No NATO for Ukraine’. Everything that happens to the people of Ukraine is just collateral damage on the way to the main goal – to harm Russia. The colonizer mentality (so well known to many NATO countries) never changes.
You can fill in any random information you want. I have domains that were registered over 10 years ago that were registered to some random credentials. But if you want to sell such a domain in the future or transfer ownership of it somehow, this decision can cause you serious problems.
You’re in the world news community, the world is not limited to Western countries or Western media.