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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
well, no, it could be 22.5% +/- 7.5%
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Elections matter in Russia because they are contested by the technocracy that has taken over. No denying Putin is their man but they are now tens of thousands up there all holding power and influence and it is spreading from Federal government level down to state and country, a definitive shift to a technocracy and elections do count, a least amongst the technocrats, the plebes just vote they way they are taught, by technocrats but it is very much democratic amongst the technocrats and you must perform or you are removed. It seems it will spread, the growth of a multi-polar technocracy, it will be interesting.
As for banning aps, the Russian government kind of stuck themselves in it from the silly point, trying to control the ap, a mistake, you only ever target the revenue, the ap is meaningless, it could be replaced by a FOSS ap and you have nothing to ban but code, good luck with that. So you simply target the revenue upon an increasing scale, targeting all employees income sources as well as investor returns and of course advertisers served, they'll pay twice for that ad. Target revenue and oh look you have generated a revenue source for government. Ban enough things, quite a revenue stream to tap into.
To ban an app, you have to charge people with the device who are running that ap, an on the spot fine. Use the ap to identify them, track them to a location with the cell network and at transport choke points, inspect their phone, make them pay a fine and delete the ap or confiscate the phone but to do this would be nuts.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.