To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data.

Thanks to this structure, we can ensure that no single government or block of like-minded countries can intrude on people’s privacy and freedom of expression. Telegram can be forced to give up data only if an issue is grave and universal enough to pass the scrutiny of several different legal systems around the world.

To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.

This proves Telegram has been (intentionally?) misleading in their FAQ. The “multiple jurisdictions” gibberish has turned out to be, well, not true. A court doesn’t care about the place where you store the data: if requested, as long as you can access the data, you are required to disclose it. The article mentions that Telegram tried to justify their initial refusal by saying that their data center is located in Singapore, but their argument was dismissed by the court:

On August 30, the court had rejected Telegram’s argument that it cannot share the data relating to the creators or users of the channels, as the said data is stored in its data servers in Singapore and the law there prohibits such disclosure.

No idea what kind of consequences these people will face right now, but in this specific case the court just needed their number/IP to identify them - in the future, it might happen that the subject of the request will be private correspondence.

Telegram has always had a good record when it comes to opposing government’s requests for their users’ data, but this time they decided that the issue was not serious enough to risk to lose a huge market such as the Indian one. The existence of the premium subscription also makes things way more complicated. How should Telegram deal with active subscriptions, in case it gets blocked in a country? Will they suspend them and give up on the revenue? Will they ask their users to cancel them? Will they do nothing and keep them active even if their users can’t access the service? As a reference, this summer Telegram was almost blocked in Germany, and they decided to delay the introduction of the premium subscription in the country, which is still not available (afaik)

Sorry, I used the wrong word. I meant to use “calques” instead of “loanwords”

it’s “je partage admirablement”, monsieur. Gardeis ces neologismes dehors de ça filetage!

While some expressions find obvious translations – “pro-gamer” becomes “joueur professionnel” – others seem a more strained, as “streamer” is transformed into “joueur-animateur en direct”.

I can try to imagine a similar situation in Italy. I would rather get fired than call streamers “giocatori-animatori in diretta” or cloud gaming “videogiochi su nuvola” because “anglicisms could act as “a barrier to understanding” for non-gamers”. “giocatore-animatore in diretta” is no less confusing than an English word, and definitely more prone to misinterpretation - because these words already have meanings people will instinctively attach to them. Loanwords Calques would have been more effective and less chaotic, no idea why the Academie Francaise decided to go down this road instead of making words up, as they usually do. The French are getting a little taste of neocolonialism and they just can’t swallow it

You’re right, I wanted to open it or post a suggestion in some meta community, but after setting up the filter I totally forgot about that box and ended up never doing it

Agree. I’m currently using an uBlock filter to hide it :)

deleted by creator

I can fit an entire medium-to-large sized slice of cake in my mouth using my bare hands without the aid of chopsticks

In my experience, OpenBoard has the best auto-corrector with fuzzy word finding

“This has been a long battle”, said Dr Johnny Ryan of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. “Today’s decision frees hundreds of millions of Europeans from consent spam, and the deeper hazard that their most intimate online activities will be passed around by thousands of companies”.

This comment kinda implies that things are going to change, but it’s not outlined how they are going to change. The article mentions how the framework fails to inform users which data will be collected and how it will be used, but also that it “fails to properly request consent, and relies on a lawful basis (legitimate interest) that is not permissible because of the severe risk posed by online tracking-based “Real-Time Bidding” advertising”. This suggests that the framework must be reworked to be more accessible/friendly to users, and that some of options that usually fell under the “legitimate interest” category maybe shouldn’t be enabled by default.

My main issue with the cookie consent popups is that many of them are ridiculously long to configure, and are very clearly designed to be misleading and ambiguous. Sometimes they even take you to a new page or need to load additional stuff when you decide to disable non-essential cookies. People have just given up on mangling with these toggles and just click on “accept all” as soon as the cookie alert pops out.

Two years ago they said it was going to be ready by the end of that year, but there has been no news since then. My personal guess is that they’re waiting to finish the rewrite of the app, and don’t want to spend resources on the current version besides bugfixies

Anonymous boards can be a pleasing experience. I’ve been active on 4chan during my late teen years (and on 8chan for a few months), the comfort of anonymity and the impossibility to develop bias toward specific online identities help people to express their mind openly and without fear of being judged or having your shit takes stickied on your front head for the rest of you online persona’s life - which is something I’ve always liked about these places. How ephemeral their content is. Forming a bond with the board’s hivemind and having a place to vent without the fear of being judged is truly a weird and liberating experience, if it wasn’t for all the trash this setup inevitably attracts. I stopped hanging on there for the vitriolic, racist, bigoted posts popping out every two threads, which luckily didn’t radicalize me, they rather had the opposite effect. And also because I was loosing my ability to tell legitimate opinions from overly articulated propaganda ops and well-masked uninformed takes

Every now an then I still have a look at what some anonymous Telegram chats are up to, they’re the only place that offer an anonymous board-like experience and that are moderated. I too wonder what 4chan would be like without the userbase that makes it what it is

Unless you use secret chats, Telegram can theoretically access all your conversations, as they are stored in their cloud. It should be a no-brainer, but there’s a couple of cool privacy/anonymity-related things that Telegram has over Signal:

• you can chat with people and join groups without having to share your phone number
• in private chats, you can delete messages for both sides, anytime, and even those that were sent by your chat partner (or directly wipe the entire conversation for both the involved parties)
• in group chats, you can delete your messages without time limit (some forks of the Android app allows to delete your entire messages history in one click, such as Forkgram (it’s on f-droid)). As far as I remember, Signal has a 3 hours threshold
• it’s not based in the US, and it has a good record when it comes to protect their users’ data from governments attempts to sneak into their inbox

You might have a look at the Tolino reader, it’s not really libre, but is one of the few e-reader that support Readium LPC (it’s definitely better than any competing DRM, but it’s still a DRM)

Also have a look at The Open Book project, it explains how to build an e-reader on your own

You can also consider to attach an e-ink display to a raspberry with Calibre installed

Hunter-gatherer before behavioral modernity /s

does it even have a name? 🤔

Can disagree and prove that, join Telegram, check the mirror channels and other groups. They mirror anything, gore, live leak, CCTV cams, etc.

What? Do you think that ATMs security footage are just available in the wild or are uploaded to public spaces on Telegram or Mega or whatever?

Self-hosting is more expensive than cheap cloud, otherwise everyone would self-host which is not the case

Storage is cheap. The company I work for handles the security cams installed by some local town administrations (around 400 cams in total), and the entirety of the footage we collect is stored on our proprietary infrastructure. Of course you need some terabytes of storage at hand, but it’s not an ever-increasing amount of data because footage is erased every week to free up space and comply with the law. We work for third-parties so we have no interest in breaking the law and keeping footage past its expiration date, so I have no idea of what happens with banks and the footage they collect, but I’m pretty sure these kind of things are often handled on a local infrastructure, usually with the support of specialized IT companies (I don’t work for such a company but we somehow offer this service just to publicly-administrated entities and compete in the market with specialized companies) which are liable for what happens to the collected data. It’s not always so obvious that large amount of data = google or amazon-hosted. For what I’ve been able to see (keep in mind, this is anecdotal experience), it’s the opposite

deleted by creator

This makes me think about that banksy artwork that says you’re allowed to dispose as you wish of any ad you’re shown in public spaces

My mom gave it to me