Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by arihant 1629 days ago
My guess would be (given the size of that array) that this is done to prevent rate limits rather than cost. It could be that this was advised by Google themselves because they could not provision the correct rate limits due to end of year. It's hard to imagine a client of this size isn't in direct contact with Google Cloud engineers. Pretty sure they're paying for it too. Also, this may have been done just for the open source commit of the project to prevent leaking token? Can't jump to conclusions here.

Google does the same thing in Google Pay Indian version. Government mandated that no one app can have more than 25% transaction volume of the country for UPI. So Google partnered with 4 banks, essentially having 4 UPI apps in the eyes of government.
2 comments
green-eclipse 1629 days ago
I think you're looking at this all wrong. If Telegram did this officially with Google, would they have had to craft this klunky workaround for breaking up RPC strings and randomizing the user agent? I don't think so.

Also the Google Pay analogy seems off. Telegram backdooring free access to Google Translate is not at all the same as Google partnering with 4 banks for transaction processing. One is totally unofficial, the other is an actual partnership.

link
arihant 1629 days ago
Yes the string split is a very odd. I agree with you there. Very confused that Google can't catch this. It's adding to the same string it should look same in the heap anyway? Simple college plagiarism programs like MOSS will catch this.

For Google Pay, what Google is doing is actually not legal. Government wanted each third party (non bank) app to be restricted to 25%. Google will get in trouble when government actually starts cracking down (and when they get close to the 25% mark). We don't know how government is looking at them, because they're under threshold anyway. The legal way for GPay to handle over 25% of total transactions is to register at least as a Payment Bank.

link
chagaif 1629 days ago
This sounds very reasonable and it's the only comment I found in a see of people talking about how Telegram is doing this illegally. Would be curious to see how this turns out.
link