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."
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...
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.
Never getting tired of this!
..."
Then if Trump and the GOP do something really bad voters will think, "Oh hey! We can trust the news media just like we did with the Russian interference stories
People might be immoral, but they are smart. They know when they are being lied to.
That's why 20% of the general population believes the NY Times is unbiased (that's a large portion of Democrats !!)
Just let me know. Because this internet is all a big mess as of now.
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!
" 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
The funny thing is that liberals used to make fun and mock us for warning of the Russian threat claiming we were afraid of a communist hiding under every bed. Now look at them.
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?
There are IRS agents working in the same building as my company.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum. My company is a secret IRS informant!
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.
Written truly like someone who has zero clue.
Some years ago I had a startup company (storage). We had a number of Russian developers that worked with/for me. Why? Because they were *awesome*. We got a lot of cool shit done, contributed a lot of good things back to open source. Today in the current climate we couldn't do this -- because "Russia". Everyone so anxious to blame Putin (and the rest of Russia) for every damned thing, it's getting quite old -- it's really the ultimate in intellectual laziness, and not any better than blaming any other national, religious, or other group.
My closest friends are Russians. Frankly, I think Russian *people* have more in common with Americans than most of the rest of Europe, and I've travelled some and worked with a lot of people from other nations (Europeans, Asians, etc.) so my opinion is not entirely uninformed. (I've also spent quite a few months in Russia, at one point I made so many trips back and forth that the Aeroflot personnel in Sheremetyevo knew me by name.) Americans (and I'm a proud patriot) are too often acting like sheep to see their own intellectual laziness.
Putin is no saint, but he's not the villain that everyone portrays him to be. He's a selfish greedy bastard yes. Sort of like another prominent head of state. (Unfortunately, Russians still don't have a functional democracy, so they're stuck with Putin or 2nd face Medvedev.... we hopefully get a chance to ditch ours in a few years.) Russian people have come to see this, and he's not as devoutly revered as people here seem to think.
St. Petersburg, especially, is a progressive city, where people are more willing to look to European ideals and the west. Of course, every time they hear us blaming them for every bad thing that happens, it pushes them a little farther away; it also helps Putin reinforce his own demagogue domestically.
So if you all would just shut up about Russia for a bit, it would be nice.
I'll leave the idolization of Putin to people like you. The kremlin remains a geopolitical opponent to the West. I'm done even buying even the slightest bit into the idea that Putin is nothing more than an aggressive leader who, while showing some mastery at turning his nation's fundamental economic weakness into an advantage via cyberattacks, is someone who needs to be contained now more than ever.
The Russian people I have a great deal of admiration for. Putin earns my grudging admiration for his skill at taking advantage of Western weakness, but there's enough of his hand showing now to demonstrate that he's no friend of the West, and I think every measure should be taken to both severely punish Russia and mitigate its cyberpropoganda strategies.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ok.
Don't use Telegram. Use Whatsapp. Be a patriot, use American violation of your privacy!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
If you're trying to minimize the threat Putin represents, then it's little more than attempt to whitewash the actions of he and his government. This is a man who ordered a piece of a sovereign state's territory to be annexed, and ordered his military's soldiers, out of uniform, to invade other areas of that sovereign state. He is a major opponent of the West, and I refuse to buy the whole "he's not that bad a guy" routine. Yes, he is very much that bad a guy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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 guy who stood up to a coup in Russia had difficutly winning?
Only against dictator wannabees trying to cheat, maybe.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
.. 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.
Yes, bipartisan, right-wing imperialistic warmongers. What about them?
Yes, containment. On one side you have a country that overthrew dozens of democracies during the Cold War and got six million people killed just between the Korean and Vietnam invasions....and over there was the USSR.
And them some people scratch their heads when the US overthrows another democracy, this one right on Russia's doorstep.
Yes, because if you don't support starting World War 3 over issues entirely of your own making, you must be a Putin fanboy. Because reasons.
You're kidding, right? The Left wanted to ally with the Soviet Union. They were the good guys in the Cold War. The containment doctrine was pushed through by the hard right and they were willing to start a nuclear war to see it through. The Left was horrified by the entire idea of nuclear war and urged immediate disarmament, even to the point of the West giving up its nukes to be left helpless before the Soviets. This happened.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
No, they didn't. Millions of Russians killed themselves by themself, so they can blame Germans for that later
What part of the word "evidence" are you having a hard time with? You guys are as full of shit now as you were in 2003, when you ran around smearing anyone who questioned the Iraq war as Saddam supporters.