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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.
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
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?