Telegram

Just reporting here an exchange between Durov and the French government that happened in the past few days

It started with Durov posting this message in his telegram channel:

A Western European government (guess which 🥖) approached Telegram, asking us to silence conservative voices in Romania ahead of today’s presidential elections. I flatly refused. Telegram will not restrict the freedoms of Romanian users or block their political channels.

You can’t “defend democracy” by destroying democracy. You can’t “fight election interference” by interfering with elections. You either have freedom of speech and fair elections — or you don’t. And the Romanian people deserve both.

...statement which received a reply by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs Twitter account: https://x.com/francediplo_EN/status/1924138188722815052

Durov later tweeted a few more information (explicit name of the official from which the request was received):

This spring at the Salon des Batailles in the Hôtel de Crillon, Nicolas Lerner, head of French intelligence, asked me to ban conservative voices in Romania ahead of elections. I refused. We didn’t block protesters in Russia, Belarus, or Iran. We won’t start doing it in Europe.

Musk replied twice to durov's tweets

Just leaving this here for the record

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/33036963

Telegram is one of the most popular messaging tools, chosen by many online services to stay connected with their audiences. Major shadow libraries Z-Library and Anna's Archive used Telegram until this week, when both accounts were terminated for copyright infringement. While these websites offer infringing content, both were cautious to avoid copyright troubles on Telegram.

This is similar to how FaceTime and other calling apps work, allowing you to switch apps while keeping your friend in a little PiP (picture in picture) floating window

Note this currently only works for one on one calls, which are also e2e encrypted

Banned from telegram with no explanation.

I made a comment on one telegram channel about Ukraine. And almost immediately got permabanned from telegram.

Like wth. Why so heavy handed? They could have just banned me from the channel, why entire telegram?

Is there any recourse other than getting a new phone number?

❤️ Thanks everyone for your support and love!

Last month I got interviewed by police for 4 days after arriving in Paris. I was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram.

Telegram announced on Wednesday that it's adding new ways for creators to make money on its platform.

complete with tabs, bookmarks, history, page zoom and find on page

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/31431894

Here's what he said in a post on his telegram channel:

🤫 A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly “secure” messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad 🥷

🥸 The US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption, and today the exact same encryption is implemented in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages and even Skype. It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕‍🦺

🕵️‍♂️ An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media. But whenever somebody raises doubt about their encryption, Signal’s typical response is “we are open source so anyone can verify that everything is all right”. That, however, is a trick 🤡

🕵️‍♂️ Unlike Telegram, Signal doesn’t allow researchers to make sure that their GitHub code is the same code that is used in the Signal app run on users’ iPhones. Signal refused to add reproducible builds for iOS, closing a GitHub request from the community. And WhatsApp doesn’t even publish the code of its apps, so all their talk about “privacy” is an even more obvious circus trick 💤

🛡 Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github. For the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private 💪

Original post: https://t.me/durov/274

I completely broke my phone screen and attempted to log into my Telegram account from my secondary phone. I downloaded the APK from telegram.org, entered my phone number, but the app sent the code to another device with no option to receive it via SMS. Then, I tried to create a new account using a new physical SIM card, but Telegram still showed 'code sent to other device' as if the account was already registered on that SIM card. When I tried to add the phone number to my Telegram account, it displayed 'this number is not in Telegram.' It seems like Telegram blocks any attempts to send verification codes via SMS or call on Android. Want to know how I finally created a new account? I had to ask my friend to log in from his iPad. Unfortunately, that account got banned and deleted within 5 days, even though I wasn't doing anything wrong or suspicious.

Got an offer for 39% discount for Premium in the app. Is this only for the first year or is this also for the following years? Can't find anything about that. I have 2 accounts in the app, is Premium for both accounts or only the account where I do the payment?

Title. Everyone who called them out for this (including myself) were banned or muted a week. Likely they're going to be selling ad space which is why they're being aggressive about this. You can't even archive it which means this was on purpose. Forcing something down user's throat and saying "you'll eventually be allowed to hide it" is what I expect from Meta, EA or Microsoft.

What 3rd party app do you use? Plus Messenger is enshitified and I'm looking to get rid of it ASAP

interesting choice, or business as usual?

#WTF 🇪🇸 High Court orders temporary suspension of #Telegram's services in Spain @telegram

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/high-court-orders-temporary-suspension-telegrams-services-spain-2024-03-23/

Instant View is now available for Telegram Desktop on Windows and MacOS.

I'm so excited for this feature because I use Unigram as my main client for IV. It's one of the most requested feature on bugs.telegram.org. I hope they add support for Linux.

(paywall bypassed)

Every update from the @telegram 's website gets me an worse experience...