Airborne_Again wrote:
They’re not democracies in my book.
Exactly 
They don’t even know so far if they can do something legally or technically to prevent Telegram from happening in Germany.
But perhaps these German politicians and officials are not as stupid as they would have us think. German technical and engineering excellence did not stop with the printing press.
If I was sufficiently tolerant of authority to work for the German MAD or the BfV (or any of its state counterparts), and if my fellow spooks had quietly prised open a back door into a centralised messaging app like Telegram, I would arrange for exactly such an announcement. I would have the “stupid” politicians shout and scream that these irresponsible encrypted message service providers are gnawing at the very entrails of civilisation.
In doing so, I would hope to encourage the people on whom my agency wished to eavesdrop to carry on using Telegram etc., believing it to be secure.
I would keep very, very, quiet about open-source centralised messaging apps like Signal or (even worse) apps like Sphinx Chat which provide decentralised messaging over a peer-to-peer “layer 2” cryptographic payment protocol.
It is probable that the Western security agencies have a crack for public key crypto. The UK GCHQ have “revealed” that they invented RSA internally long before RSA came up with it.
But if they have, it would be of such world shattering importance that it would be difficult to make use if it. It would be like Enigma in WW2: whenever you actually acted on it, you had to arrange some cover story (a surveillance aircraft just happened to be in the right place, etc).
The telegram crypto is open source and if there was something obvious like a limited key space, or key leakage, somebody would have been onto it by now.
BTW a friend who worked at Cisco said to me that porn videos make up around 1/3 of total internet traffic, and that the distributors were among their biggest customers
One thing which is quite interesting however is the presumption that a service like Telegram is more of a concern than the massive disinformation campaigns and fake news generators which are on the open on streaming platforms like Youtube, not to speak of cable and satellite TV.
Seeing that a lot more people take their “news” from such sites plus social media, I think the concern should rather be there than trying to suppress certain messagers.
At the same time, who is naive enough the believe that any of the messengers are “safe” for communication? I use all of them mostly because these days you can not really reach all the contacts we have with one (e.g. it was impossible to create a common group even for our kindergarten parents, as we could not find a single messenger they all have….) as everyone has their pet suspicion against one or the other. I’ve used Skype for telephony and IM since it exists and particularly for video telephony I still think it is the one yielding best and reliable quality, followed by Whatsapp, which I use extensively for workgroups such as the Mooney pilots/maintenance/e.t.c or even forum management at some fora i sysop. I use Viber for my contacts in BG (as Whatsapp basically does not exist there) and Telegram so far only for the autorouter bot. Some people are only reachable over FB messenger and in Switzerland Treema has become the “trusted” IM for those who mistrust all the others.
By the looks of it, one page of my phone only has all the different messengers… and some of them (Viber in particular) keep sending nuissance announcements all the time.
For telephony, it is sometimes really frustrating to hear people shout into their mobile phones trying to get a connection you can actually understand using those messengers. Apart from Skype, all others in terms of telephony in my experience bring up memories of the 1980ties where long range phone calls mostly consisted of “Hello?? Can you hear me?” rather than substantial conversation…. for the sake of “free” communication, lots of people appear to be ready to put up with apalling coms quality.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
One thing which is quite interesting however is the presumption that a service like Telegram is more of a concern
Nobody is saying that. It’s not about relevance or concern but only about political activism.
If German politicians would announce that they shut down Youtube or Fox News if they don’t stop spreading fake news, even the dumbest moron would realize how unrealistic this is. But telegram is a great target because the majority of people a) doesn’t really know what it is but b) has a firm belief that this is bad.
I have already a clear idea what will be happening: in some weeks even the German politicians will realize how unrealistic this idea is and then will start blaming either Russia or Dubai (depending on who is the most opportunistic target geopolitically) for not making it happen …
What is tg’s business model, long term?
It’s a free app, with no adverts, so what can they sell?
Peter wrote:
It’s a free app, with no adverts, so what can they sell?
They already announced that they will introduce ads this year (not in private channels but in the social network part) plus they are very vaguely talking about “value added services”.
So in the end I’d expect the same monetization as Facebook.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Nobody is saying that. It’s not about relevance or concern but only about political activism.
Well, it may be that and seeing the current government there no wonder.
But that does not really change the fact that most of whatever communications of concern may be going on on IM systems stem from garbage posted on print and video media. The post-factual climate we are living in imho is a bigger threat to society than terrorism and even crime.
Malibuflyer wrote:
If German politicians would announce that they shut down Youtube or Fox News if they don’t stop spreading fake news, even the dumbest moron would realize how unrealistic this is.
Shutting them down is not the answer, but media in general should be held responsible for what they report or tolerate on their platforms. Some streaming services like Youtube and other video platforms are at least trying to do some of this but focus on pornography rather than conspiracy and other fake news, because in the US it is a bigger issue to blank out certain body parts rather than to stop vicious and even criminal misinformation and propaganda. And this does not only concern youtube e.t.c. but basically all the media these days, as quite a few of them copy garbage off the internet including social media if it promises to generate clicks. The truth does not matter. Clicks do. That is the problem.
Clearly, people are generally opposed to censorship, but this has resulted in the current situation where superstition has largely replaced rational thinking in way too many people… and this clearly is the result of the internt being what it is. Who ever thought the internet would ring in a new age of enlightenment was about as wrong as it gets.
Peter wrote:
What is tg’s business model, long term?It’s a free app, with no adverts, so what can they sell?
The announcement was they are to start monetising with ads, initially with the channels with thousands of subscribers first, mostly the commercial channels (the ones that provide some info as well as showing you their own ads – Telegram promises to use a more fine-tuned approach in terms of target audience).
porn videos make up around 1/3 of total internet traffic
My day job is building traffic management/monitoring appliances for ISPs, so I get a bit of insight into this via our customers’ systems. In terms of traffic, porn (pornhub etc) is significant but more like 10-15%.
Little anecdote: a few years back I met with the management at one of our customers. Their CTO’s previous gig was as CTO for an internet porn outfit. I asked him whether it’s true that people watch porn for an average of no more than 7 minutes, which I’d heard. He laughed and said “more like 30 seconds”.
