[greatgib]

Since forever I stay suspicious but so far Telegram as an impeccable track record. Never there was a single instance of case where there would be even a suspicion of proof that insider knowledge of conversations was accessed/used.

Also, it is clear that Durov is a dissident and personally experienced and run away of the dictatorial state. So I think that it is probably one of the tech personality that I trust the most in the world.

[Glacia]

Obviously FSB is not going to make a press release and be like "We have the keys LOL" so there would never be definitive proof.

Fun fact: Telegram at some point was blocked in Russia for not giving FSB access to data. Later telegram was unblocked and is used extensively in Russia. It's not hard to figure out why it was unblocked.

[roveo]

Telegram wasn't fully blocked in Russia even for a single day. They tried to block it and failed miserably. The team actively circumvented the blocking by deploying to new IPs faster than they were blocked, and in addition to that every IT guy in Russia had a tgproxy instance running for family and friends.

After a while they just stopped trying and decided that it's less reputational damage to just let it be.

[Glacia]

>After a while they just stopped trying and decided that it's less reputational damage to just let it be.

That's not true. It's legally unblocked. the reason why it was unblocked was never published. "It was unblocked because they gave up" is just your interpretation of the events. Pretty naive one, in my opinion.

[k1ndl1]

It was unblocked because of the backlash from people, incl. Russian politicians who are heavy Telegram users. FSB has nothing to do with it.

[Glacia]

>It was unblocked because of the backlash from people, incl. Russian politicians who are heavy Telegram users. FSB has nothing to do with it.

Saying Russian government would give a shit about people opinions, funny joke.

[perchlorate]

This is pure FUD. They're still trying to block it, the latest three attempts happened this week. Two of them were done in the middle of the night as training exercise, maybe for 3-4 hours each, and the last one then happened in the middle of the day. All three broke large parts of the internet and were quickly reverted.

When something newsworthy happens in some region, all messengers get blocked in that region for days, Telegram included. They don't care about collateral damage to other websites then.

[CoastalCoder]

I'm curious how the people attempting news blackouts reason about it.

I doubt they explicitly say to themselves, "Today I do evil for fun and profit.". I wonder what their rationalization is.

[Glacia]

You're the one who is spreading FUD. Telegram was officially (legally) unblocked in 2020. There is 0 evidence there is an active force trying to block Telegram in Russia. Which is very busy blocking every non-russian platform btw. As you yourself pointed out, most likely the reason why TG was down is because of attempts to block other platforms.

[cactusplant7374]

What is an example of something that is newsworthy?

[perchlorate]

Here is a couple of typical examples when blocking is limited to a single region:

https://storage.googleapis.com/gsc-link/cbe9d20e.html

https://t.me/agentstvonews/4973

https://t.me/meduzalive/94295

[ivanmontillam]

> It's not hard to figure out why it was unblocked.

If you're implying it's backdoored, that's a wild mental gymnastics you made there.

No hate, but your comment is speculative in nature.

[hamilyon2]

The latest evidence of wide cooperation of telegram and Russian officials: https://roskomsvoboda.org/ru/post/shutdown-v-baymake/

[codedokode]

The article doesn't contain the evidence though; it claims that someone changed access to private for a Telegram group that covered the protests. However, as the article says, it could be done not only by Telegram, but by one of the administrators.

[Glacia]

Except there were multiple different groups that magically happen to go private at the same time.

I'm not even going to mention how many people were arrested over telegram messages in russia.

[codedokode]

By the way, Dropbox had a person from the govt (Condoleezza Rice) on the Board of Directors, and people still entrusted their data to it.

[lxgr]

“Track record” is an incredibly poor indicator for the lack of a government backdoor, thinking back to Snowden, for example.

[ceinewydd]

https://x.com/filosottile/status/987376021589692416?s=21

I'm not sure that counts as an impeccable track record.