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Russia Demands Apple Remove Telegram From Russian App Store (macrumors.com)
The Russian government is asking Apple to help it block Telegram by removing it from the country's App Store. Mac Rumors reports: A Russian court in April ordered carriers and internet providers in the country to block Telegram back in April, after Telegram refused to provide Russia with backdoor access to user messages. Despite issuing the block order back in April, Russia has only been able to disrupt Telegram's operations in the country by 15 to 30 percent. Given the government's inability to block the app, Roskomnadzor, the division of the government that controls media and telecommunications, has demanded that Apple remove the Telegram app from the Russian App Store. The group first asked Apple to remove the app in April, but is appealing to Apple again.
"In order to avoid possible action by Roskomnadzor for violations of the functioning of the above-mentioned Apple Inc. service, we ask you to inform us as soon as possible about your company's further actions to resolve the problematic issue," the regulator wrote. Roskomnadzor has given Apple one month to remove the Telegram app from the App Store. Roskomnadzor's director Alexander Zharov said he did not want to "forecast further actions" should Apple not comply with the request following the 30 day period.
"In order to avoid possible action by Roskomnadzor for violations of the functioning of the above-mentioned Apple Inc. service, we ask you to inform us as soon as possible about your company's further actions to resolve the problematic issue," the regulator wrote. Roskomnadzor has given Apple one month to remove the Telegram app from the App Store. Roskomnadzor's director Alexander Zharov said he did not want to "forecast further actions" should Apple not comply with the request following the 30 day period.
Hillary For Prison!
"Didn't want to forecast further actions" - because what are they going to do, block the Apple app store in Russia? That would punish Russia as much as it punishes Apple (modulo what the haters think).
Nothing stops Rooskis from getting App Store accts in any country they choose. Telegram is my messaging app of choice.
-ex-Rooski
In Soviet Russia, garden walls you!
It doesn't seem their usual approach to be so lenient. It's like they are trying to get Apple to blink first. I would have thought that any warnings would be made very clear behind closed doors.
So why make the warnings public at all? It must be a popularity problem, as in the wealthy are being told to prepare for no more iPhones.
Which probably makes the Russian iPhone market quite valuable to Apple also. So I guess it follows that Apple might actually cave on this one. Hence the mind games.
Can Apple count on enough support to change the government's mind? I doubt it, this is obviously driven straight from the top.
I note this action has probably been held off until after the recent elections.
Somehow this reminds me of Dr. Strangelove.
"The whole point of the doomsday machine...is lost if you keep it a secret!"
Perhaps they only want the public to believe they don't have access to user messages.
Thou doth protest too much?
Arkadiy Babchenko is a Russian journalist who was living in Kiev, Ukraine.
He was shot a few hours ago at his home, in Kiev Ukraine. Most likely by Russian govt. agents.
Babchenko used Telegram.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/29/russian-journalist-arkady-babchenko-shot-dead-in-kiev
Why is Telegram being treated different from Apple? Did Apple provide a back door?
I foresee an increase in jailbroken iPhones in Russia over the next few months.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
How does this do anything for the ~90% using Android (non-Apple) devices? Were they able to get Google to comply too? (And side-loading on Android is built-in).
Apple is one of those companies you'd be stupid to block (politically). Actually I think it would be smart for Apple to be blocked for other reasons, but mainly because they are a threat to Russia's independence and security. Not so much because of this though. Russia should be demanding source code be release for any company wanting to sell products in its country. And that should really be the rule everywhere.
This does a lot to blow Kaspersky's claim to be completely independent of the Russian government out of the water. If their Bureau of Information Control is going to try to control Apple - a company that exists well outside the Putin sphere of influence - why wouldn't they demand the same control of software installed on millions of computers worldwide? It's more and more obvious that Kaspersky did bow down and kiss Putin's ring long ago. Gee, what's next? We find out that the Chinese Bureau of Information Control really does have backdoors in ZTE and Huwei gear? What a surprise.
When you say "Russia has only been able to disrupt Telegram's operations in the country by 15 to 30 percent." the numbers in there are off by 100%. That makes it difficult, at the very least, to identify how accurate the numbers were.
For example, when the polls say "Trump is loved by 50% of the people. Poll has a margin of error of 4.6%." we know that somewhere between roughly 45% and 55% of the people love him and vice versa. It is vital to quantify the value of the numbers.
Being told "by 15 to 30 percent" means we have a margin of error as big as our initial data. In both directions that means 0-30%. If something is 0-30% disruptive it's impossible to tell how disruptive it is... if at all.
If the news media continues to allow organizations to give it wildly-varying ranges, that's fine, but don't publish them. The disservice to us (the readers) is obvious. Sure, we read the article. Sure, we think this could be disruptive. Up to 30%. Or not at all. Maybe just half of that...
E
The inevitable result of a walled garden is that you, the maintainer, are held responsible for the actions of the apps, people, and data within that garden. Any country can pass a law that makes this very bad for you. This is a very real problem with walled gardens and non-open hardware, though I imagine it will take quite awhile before this plays out enough for most people to even notice it as an issue.
Is either of those the reason Roskomnadzor hasn't blocked it, because they already have access? Do Apple publish any info about requests for data access in Russia?
Reply. No. Simple enough. Likely Apple's business in Russia is small compared to their global net. So tell them to fuck off.
The countermeasures against the blocking have been interesting.
Telegram got lots of servers so the Russians blocks milions of ip addresses. Iran also began trying to block telegram.
People in the west started helping by running socks5 proxies. Some of the proxies that people put up allowed all traffic, not just telegram, so they got used for forum spamming, torrents etc and got shut down after a day or two when the companies that the servers were rented from got lots of complaints.
There is a socks5 proxy written in python that is set up to only connect to telegram ip addresses.
Now it is reported that deep packet inspection is being used in some countries to detect socks5 protocol.
Telegram has created a new proxy protocol called MTPROTO to try to get around that. The android and iphone versions of telegram messenger can use MTPROTO but the desktop software can't, it's only in the beta versions that are not available to everyone. Voice calls currently don't work with an MPROTO proxy.
There are now several different bits of MPROTO server software on github in python, golang and javascript.
There are various telegram bots and twitter accounts listing proxy ip addresses.
http://www.techort.com/telegram-mtproto-proxy-everything-we-know-about-him-habr/
Since Telegram is open source and you can get both it and Xcode for free then removing it from the App store doesn't really prevent it from being used on legit, un-jail broken, iOS devices.
Yes, yes, I know you won't get APNS, and if you can't sign it with a developer account, it needs reloading every week.
But it's a by-pass none the less.
Anyone with anything to hide will no doubt find a way around Apple's compliance with the country's legal requirements and in this case it's relatively easy.
My question is how far with Russia go to stamp out encrypted messaging? Can they? Can anyone?
It's not a win or lose calculation, it's about maintaining strong popularity. Avoiding a campaign that could have included taking away more sparkly things would be worth the wait.
Keep privacy concerns firmly in the helpless camp, will be the attitude.
Seriously Appleâ(TM)s reaction should be to consider Russian laws.... if the law say you must follow the order... then follow it. If the Russian law doesnâ(TM)t explicitly say it is binding then fuck it.... donâ(TM)t follow.
Just like how they need to follow US law if it is binding but if itâ(TM)s just some request from a government agency that has no legal standing then fuck it.
If the US law say you canâ(TM)t follow other countries law (e.g. like how sanctions work) then you have to decide if you want to operate in US or Russia. If US citizens want to stop Apple they have to vote in someone who will sanction Russia for violating our standards of human rights. If not.... and there is no law... then fuck off.
..Required. Seriously, please post relevant links.
When the Russian Taxman along with 125 guys in uniforms and Kalashnikovs show up at Apple Moscow, they cannot do "business as usual".
Maybe even the FSB shows up, because the whole Telegram thing is apparently a National Security Thing for Russia. They will bring 3x125 guys with Kalashnikovs.
We know you paid top dollar for Hillary and we know your sale was not successful. Get over it.
Then see what the GRU can do to the guy who ordered this. Anywhere, any time, including Israel.
Russia has been running a quite shrewd strategy of cooperation with ALL international players, including Apple for the last 15 years or so.
It has been highly successful, making Russians much better off than they were under the drunkard Jelzin.
Russia is by now the largest exporter of grain, a major player in advanced weapons and materials such as Titanium.
Of course they do not have the breadth and depth of industry as the soviet union had, but they have successfully jump-started quite a few sectors of their economy. Food production certainly is much better than during soviet times. Russia is a major supplier of software and other engineering services to the rest of the world. Probably Apple is a major customer, too.
Why risk that successful strategy by making unreasonable demands against powerful players such as Apple ? Successful negotiators don't overplay their hand. They want good deals, not a paradise.
The Russian government knows full well that the demands of national security must not suffocate the economy. Full security in a country which is an economic graveyard makes no sense. So they politely ask Apple to help them with their national security issue. Telegram has apparently been used in terror attacks and they cannot read the messages. Unlike NSA, it must be said.
Russia wants to BAN ONLY Telegram because they DIDN'T COMPLY with a BACKDOOR.
So... does that mean that Facebook Messenger, WhatsAppp, etc. HAVE PROVIDED ONE to Russia?
Problem is, banning the app doesn't remove the app from user's phones. Apple hasn't even demonstrated they can do that - they can potentially disable apps that use location APIs, but that's it.
So banning it just means new users can't install the app, or reinstall the app if they delete it. Existing app works just fine.
And new users can always use the well-documented way to side load the app onto their phones... something easy to do since Telegram is open-source.
Telegram and other companies that gets asked to create back-doors for police should say "Sure!" and then give the police access to a special version of their admin software that makes it appear as though the user is going into people's accounts and viewing their messages, but in actuality the "messages" they see are just randomly generated, innocuous notes about mundane things (kitten GIFs, unicorn memes, fart jokes, etc).
I would expand this to -all- companies, and -all- countries. Would someone trust their tanks on a battlefield to run on an engine that nobody hows how it works, be it the cylinders in it, the type of setup, compression ratio, etc.? Nope. But that is what is done with software.
China does this. Microsoft, Apple, and other companies hand them over their source code because it is either that, or being banned from the Chinese market. This might be the wise thing for -any- country's national security, if only to prevent hidden logic bombs and Trojans, and to ensure code in critical use can be patched without trying to hunt down the vendor or reverse-engineer it.
This can be done. The only real thing on the Internet that can't be duplicated by open source is Active Directory and GPOs, because there just isn't any other solutions that have the ability to scale as much as AD. Exchange comes to mind as well.
On the last day, Apple will fold, just like they did in China.
Russia is a big market.
It is Apple's only real play. They owe it to the stockholders.
Another body that is going to learn, the hard way, about the Streisand Effect. Bunch of morons.
You get an A grade for proper logical reasoning.
Are the Russians asking, or are they demanding?
As far as I can tell from a quick web search, there are *no* Apple Stores located in Russia, never have been. I don't know if Apple has any employees in Russia at all. Iphones are available, but they're sold through local retail outlets.
If Apple has any guts they will say: look, this is the product we made, it is designed to run apps like Telegram-- if you don't like our product, you can just make it illegal to sell them in your country. The result would be this: a billion or two in lost sales (if that), and one of the greatest public-relations triumphs in the history of public relations. If they do it with any panache, they could easily make the front page of the New York Times with this story.