Slashdot Mirror
What Isn't Telegram Saying About Its Connections To the Kremlin? (theoutline.com)
The supposedly secure messaging app Telegram has employees in St. Petersburg in the same building as Kremlin-influenced social network VK, news outlet the Outline reported on Friday citing multiple sources. William Turton, reporting for The Outline: Anton Rozenberg, a software developer and former employee of Telegram's parent company, is saying that there are Telegram employees working out of the historic Singer House in St. Petersburg, Russia's former imperial capital, a claim that has since been corroborated by others. That's significant because the Singer House is also home to VK, which is now owned by the oligarch and Putin ally Alisher Usmanov. (It's also the building where in 2012 Durov and coworkers infamously folded 5,000 ruble notes, worth about $150 each, into paper airplanes and threw them out the window, sparking violence in the street below.) The revelation casts doubt on Durov, who denies Telegram has an office in Russia, and continues to style himself as a rebel at odds with the complex Russian power structure that includes the government and oligarchy. It also raises questions about how safe Telegram is from Kremlin interference, given that VK is owned by a Kremlin sympathizer and that the Kremlin has an obvious interest in monitoring and controlling popular social networks. "As a security specialist, I have some questions about how their office isn't physically protected from the offices that surround it," Rozenberg told The Outline. "VK employees, for a long time, have had access to Telegram offices."
This Russian interference conspiracy theory stuff is getting old
Is Russia Russia Russia.
And that's fine. KEEP DIGGING.
But why is NOBODY looking into CHINA CHINA CHINA?!
We have proof they meddled in our elections in 1996. Does everyone think they just magically stopped?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In between you know... stealing our nuclear secrets in 1999?
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03...
And weapon secrets... in 2009?
http://www.popularmechanics.co...
BUT SURELY they stopped right before the 2016 election! So don't worry guys, we don't need to look anymore.
You know, if I was China, I'd actually be pushing for Russia investigations to keep people from looking into all my dirty laundry...
This Russian conspiracy theory stuff is getting old
Hallo fellow internet commentators! I am here to assuring you that of course the Kremlin is having nothing to do with such nonsense. Why would a vengeful former world power that does this kind of thing all the time and is run by a KGB agent, do this kind of thing at *this* time, and I assure you I am no agent! I and my and my fallow detractors simply grow tired of such conspiracy theories, I ask them because they are sitting right next to me at the Internet Research Agency, a perfectly normal office building in St. Petersburg where 'journalists' such as myself and Mischa pass along the 'news' to your 'Democracy'.
The run up to the Iraq war taught me that the mass media will lie shamelessly and in concert, and the opposition points to those lies will be buried or completely ignored. The anti-war protests were the largest in history, and completely ignored by the media
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Now compare this to the coverage of some facebook ads paid for by people or a group believed to be connected to the Russian government. $100,000 in ads promoting various causes, over a period of 2 years. They're not even willing to show the ads themselves, but they've trotted out that at least one of them was promoting BLM, and they've made sure that this story has reached far and wide, and everyone has heard about it. This is the drum-beats of war at work. Most likely another cold war now that the War on Terror is dying down. If you really want an eye-opener compare the owners of the mass media with the owners of the big military arms industry.
Just let me know. Because this internet is all a big mess as of now.
What's the deal there? It was obviously a bribe; where's the outrage there?
This kind of editorializing is why I didn't really miss this site that much during the outage earlier this week.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
All the comments are "Russia this" and "US that" and "but what about the Chinese". Someone with some knowledge and an opinion please say something helpful like "don't use telegram, use...." and then maybe a useful discussion on the merits of various messaging platforms can take place.
The oligarch probably made sure he wasn't using the same building as Putin does for his army of social network trolls spewing their lies
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
" folded 5,000 ruble notes, worth about $150 each, into paper airplanes and threw them out the window,"
Can't be Russia. In Russia, airplane throw you out the window.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
What isn't msmash saying about Slashdot's downtime?
Earlier this week, Slashdot went into read only mode and was all sorts of broken. This went on for an extended period of time. Slashdot and its editors, including msmash, have remained mostly silent on the matter. What aren't they saying? Just how deeply was Russia involved? Which Slashdot editors colluded with the Kremlin? Why haven't they turned over the details about the ad buy?
This Russian conspiracy theory stuff is getting old
Here is my bots reply to your Kremlin bot. Putin is a dictator who routinely kills his political opponents and who is very much capable of being complicit in killing his own people as a politically expedient as he did for Boris Yeltsin before he came to power.
very slow news not for geek
There are IRS agents working in the same building as my company.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum. My company is a secret IRS informant!
Now the Russians are even spying on our furries? It has gone too far.
So...He's a lot like Hillary Clinton?
about their relationship to the U.S. government? Eric Schmidt having so many connections to the DoJ? Apple ignoring critical security issues for months?
The whole every-Russian-is-working-for-Putin bullshit is so god damned long in the tooth.
Russian analog site for geek , stupid politicans , not geeks , reads Russian Encyclopædia Dramatica http://lurkmore.to/Habr
It’s not the fact that they’re in the same building that’s the problem, it’s they denied they were even in the same country.
If only there were a Non-Profit organization whose sole mission were to create and maintain a highly secure, private encrypted messaging system with minimalistic recordkeeping and metadata, and they would just share all their code with the public for inspection and have several security audits of it and then freely share that code with anybody who wants to improve their users' security or set up their own wholly independent system, even Google and Facebook... oh yeah, that's Open Whisper Systems and their Signal Messenger.
Just use Signal. They accept donations.
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/why-i-asked-my-friends-to-stop-using-whatsapp-and-telegram-e93346b3c1f0
"given that VK is owned by a Kremlin sympathizer and that the Kremlin has an obvious interest in monitoring and controlling popular social networks"
This one sentence here is kinda ridiculous. Would you describe any US company as being a "White House sympathizer" just because they take the occasional meeting with WH staff to discuss legislation?
And since the US government is the absolute worse at trying to undermine privacy protections, you could also say they have an obvious, and evidenced desire to monitor and control social networks (and indeed have done... remember Cuban Twitter...?) Basically, you've made the "other side" sound all shadowy based on supposition when "our side" is already doing all of this stuff anyway.
when the Red Site reveals what really happened on the Green Site, and why these suspicious color choices really are allegorical to the relation between Nvidia and ATI/AMD...
The Telegram case is almost certainly unimportant to what /. is endlessly pushing, the fake news that Russia had a significant impact on Trump's election. Credible evidence is apparently unnecessary to Slashdot's campaign, so at some point the lies get tiresome.
...Russian really exists or if Russia is just a construct of the DNC used to impugn the reputations of The President.
WTF is Telegram, and why would we care if they were completely owned by Russians?
If the elections are so easy to sway with a few social media posts, do we not have an argument to set voting standards? (And the uproar is not necessary. The number of Dsn are Rs eliminated will be approximately the same.)
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Fake news, eh? Mueller, the FBI and the various Congressional Committees don't think so but obviously we should accept the expert and not at all biased opinion of an anonymous coward on Slashdot.
What Isn't Telegram Saying About Its Connections To the Kremlin?
Hmm probably the same stuff that Facebook and Twitter don't say about connections to Washington.
Trump didn't get bought by Goldman Sachs et. al before the primaries so Jeb Bush financed peepee gate. Fake News
Trump win the presidency so he's a Russian spy because he's suspicious of NATO and TPP etc.
Telegram refused to accept bribes from US intelligence agencies (already coverd by slashdot), so they have links to the Kremlin.
It's all deep state smear. Wake up and smell the sumatra
The Russian Tea Room is in the same space as Carnegie Hall - what are the musicians not telling us about that waltz.
Russian Embassies in Australia - what goes on down under?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
It is a virtual certainty that invisible spy-rays have infected all Telegram employees!
In other news, the most dumb story on /. today has been identified, and it has something to do "Telegram". Seriously, stop this utterly demented crap.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Almost a year of investigation and what have they come up with? Sweet fuck all. Pretty soon they'll be down to "Trump was caught sipping RUSSIAN vodka! Gasp!1!1! Look at the Russian connection!"
It's no sceret that Durov had to sell his creation - vk.com (the #1 social network in Russia) and leave the country because he didn't want to cooperate with Kermlin. Mr. Rozenberg has been fighting with him for quite a while in courts and media over various matters. Which is why this story is probably total nonsense.
They'll accuse Trump of farting in the Oval Offfice.
Heh, no doubt they'll find something with which to crucify Trump; I have no illusions that he's been totally honest all his life. But they'll get nothing on the central issue of alleged Russian hacking of the previous election -- because that is fake news.
.. who has a daily diet of cable TV news. Russia propaganda? You mean RT? Please, as if that has any sway. Or are you deluded such that you would call wikileaks russian propaganda?
Shit, I used to work in the same building as Velocity Networks. The only connection I had to them was to use the connection they supplied to the entire building, and the one time I had to de-pwn someone else's network and found that the pwners were likely Velocity employees based on the very much in-house IP addresses of the attackers. (Either that or Velocity itself was pwned, which I don't rule out.)
Does that mean I'm somehow "connected" to Velocity Networks, one of the more notorious (at the time) spammer-friendly ISPs? Of course not. The closest I got to them was befriending one of their techs (whose license plate read H4XOR3D).
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
You are right, and Putin is evil. That doesn't have anything to do with the election. Did he kill any voters? Kidnap any candidates?
No, he bought ads.
Wait, did I just dream about those thousands of fake social media profiles and all the advertising on social media that has been traced to Russia directly? Or are you just refusing to accept any facts that disagree with your world view?
But of course you would say something like that, eh tovarishch?
Traced to Russia directly, or just "analyst judgement"? Because if you read Reality Winner's leak, it's clear that the Russian narrative is pure conjecture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/NSA_Report_on_Russia_Spearphishing.pdf
Anyone with even the slightest understanding of the Internet knows that you can find a proxy server from any country. And then you have the obvious fake broken English coming from a "Russian", which anyone who understands anything about the Russian language can clearly see isn't actually coming from someone who speaks Russian. If you're going to mascarade as a Russian hacker, at least study the Russian grammar and put some effort into getting the "mistakes" right...
Is this sarcasm? So hard to tell these days. The Russiagate nonsense is nothing more than Democrats having their turn at bullshit partisan witch hunts. They have just as much evidence as the Birther nutjobs who spent the late nineties insisting that Bill Clinton had Vince Foster shot, because reasons.
Wow.. Idiots like you really do exist.
This is a pretty weird news overall because the Telegram team wants to relocate to Finland in order to avoid pressure. https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/tuesdays_papers_telegram_trouble_energy_cluster_and_stockmann_complaints/9703741
I would doubt that they deny having people working in SPB
Use an open source messenger like https://github.com/tinode/chat and be secure.
Open source is the only way to be sure the communication is secure.