Russia Smashes Telegram

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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If you recall, the Russian government had recently demanded encryption keys be shared with it for services that were encrypting content. Telegram is one such encrypted service, and it decided to give the finger to the Russian government, instead of handing over the encryption keys so that its users could be surveilled. Russia has responded by blacklisting nearly 1.7M IP addresses on Amazon and Google services that Telegram uses....or used to.



Russian authorities are attempting to crush messaging platform Telegram. After refusing to hand over its encryption keys so that users can be spied on, last week a court ordered the service to be blocked. Yesterday broad action was taken, with ISPs blocking more than 1.8 million Telegram-utilized IP addresses belonging to Google and Amazon.
At the end of March, authorities suggested that around 15 million IP addresses (13.5 million belonging to Amazon) could be blocked to target chat software Zello. While those measures were averted, a further 500 domains belonging to Google were caught in the dragnet.
 
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Looking at the half empty side, could it be that they already have such keys for whatsapp?

Or how about the US gov, do they have Telegram's keys?

*edit* #1300!
 
Fuck russia,

Give them fack all

Anyway, now that they have telegram in their sights, does anyone know a good encrypted im app that will keep my child porn secure ?
 
This also blocked a massive amount of non Zello and Telegram IPs. Things such as Star Citizen (Uses AWS) is currently blocked in Russia.
 
How do you blacklist 1.7 IP addresses? I can see 1 or 2, but not a partial address.

OK, that typo got fixed.
 
How do you blacklist 1.7 IP addresses? I can see 1 or 2, but not a partial address.

OK, that typo got fixed.

telegram likely uses these IPs as part of larger subnets under their own ASN. ASNs are used in conjunction with BGP which is the routing glue of the internet.

forcing all ISPs to block routes to a particular ASN will essentially prevent users from getting to Telegram's services.
 
That seems a rather inelegant and ham-fisted way to go about blocking a service.

Oh. Russia. Right. Ham-fisted and inelegant is their MO.
 
if the call goes to or originates from Russia... if the russian gov asks then give it to em. Just make sure it's noted that big brother may be listening so dont bad mouth the gov. that is true for China or US or any gov.
 
Just need to keep rotating through all the cloud services until everything is blocked for maximum lols.
 
Since most of these companies are American, it's only natural for the Russians to be pissed as they don't get to use the backdoors American services enjoy, no matter how "annoyed" they are with Google/Apple/whatever.
 
So Russians have to use VPN to access. Maybe they can even add VPN/tor support in the next versian of the app.
 
Didn't some encrypted email service shut down, because they refused to provide decryption for NSA? So how is this any different?
 
Since most of these companies are American, it's only natural for the Russians to be pissed as they don't get to use the backdoors American services enjoy, no matter how "annoyed" they are with Google/Apple/whatever.
This of course.
US government, of course theres plenty more rights than plenty more countries, but also we do things so you 'feel' you are listened to, or in this case so you 'feel' you have privacy... I understand this has been canon since the beginning. So yeah be sure all those keys are bowtied and given to US agencies, but so long we feel we have privacy and keep making fun of Russia, it is mission accomplished for politicians.
 
This of course.
US government, of course theres plenty more rights than plenty more countries, but also we do things so you 'feel' you are listened to, or in this case so you 'feel' you have privacy... I understand this has been canon since the beginning. So yeah be sure all those keys are bowtied and given to US agencies, but so long we feel we have privacy and keep making fun of Russia, it is mission accomplished for politicians.

That is the English way. As long as you are polite, anything goes.

Some are not so... refined... or, as others would say, dishonest.
 
Looking at the half empty side, could it be that they already have such keys for whatsapp?

Or how about the US gov, do they have Telegram's keys?

*edit* #1300!
All software is a few keystrokes away from simply encrypting absolutely every channel of communication on every level with little overhead. If a government feels they have the right to see into these communications, they will demand keys. If that fails, they will force vendors to include backdoors for privileged access. So for every app you use, which of those two circumventions do you think is more likely? It's definitely one of the two.

edit: also the third option, provide chip-level privileged access. (IME, PSP, NIC jitter encoding)
 
All your base has to be the greatest meme of all time. Still remembering seeing the all your base song on this site back in the day
 
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