You can't be big in China if you don't have local contacts. If you are a small startup or a small company, you are fine. But if you are a big one, you will be blocked unless you have political contacts.
Then, once your company is blocked; a Chinese company is going to create the exact same service but with a lot of censure added to it.
Maybe it is now time for them to open the server side so we can run our own federated nodes.
They did say that they may open up the server side. Maybe this is the only way to keep the network from running and preventing governments from blocking it. [1]
I like Telegram and that's why I wouldn't want it to happen. This would result in a mess, similar to Blockchain currencies. Suddenly everyone thinks they need to roll their own. That is, unless everyone would still communicate on the same platform, but I don't think Telegram was built with distributed servers in mind.
I am not sure that this would result in everyone trying to roll out their own. The reason that is happening with bitcoin is because of the direct possibility of financial gain.
BitTorrent works well and has not split into hundreds of clone protocols.
The way skype used to work may also be a possibility where there are super nodes outside of the main cloud.
Those were the good ole days... I hate the new skype.
Also, it's 2015, can Skype stop leaking subscriber IP information? Someone can resolve your IP from your username without even messaging or adding you as a friend. Seems like a design flaw to me
To me the more interesting thing is that the Chinese government is making such a big deal about a relatively unknown app such as Telegram, but isn't saying or doing anything at all about iMessage, which is supposed to be end-to-end encrypted (by default even, unlike Telegram).
Are you telling me that those same lawyers don't have iPhones and don't use iMessage even more than they do Telegram? Because I don't believe that.
So either the Chinese government has just recognized there's nothing they can do about banning Apple's iMessage - or Apple already provides them with a way to look at iMessages.
Cause China gov heard that the so-called dissidents were using Telegram.
For the iMessage, it is just for iPhone, Telegram is all-platform. And in China, iPhone is still an expensive smartphone. Android phone is used more widely.
It's the latter - Apple will let the authorities access messages. Telegram will not. And simply blocking the Telegram website does not mean that the app won't continue to function in China. Which is why the authorities likely decided to launch a DDoS attack, so they could silence the human rights lawyers that were using it to communicate.
Well Apple backs-up iMessages by default anyway. So even if it is end-to-end, they still have a copy of everything on their servers, unless you disable the iMessage syncing.
Also, just like Whatsapp's "end-to-end" crypto, just because they use it now doesn't mean they can't disable it at any time without you being aware of it. That's the danger of proprietary closed-source software.
The United States censors links to foreign propaganda as well. They DDOS sites sometimes, especially ISIL-active forums, etc. I don't know if they DDOS state sponsored sites - they are probably more stealthy (something the Chinese don't care about).
A few citations would be nice, as would some explanation of how the conduct you allege in any way resembles the behavior of the Chinese government. I am aware of zero cases where the U.S. government has taken down a site just because it concluded that the site contained propaganda that the government did not want the U.S. populous to read. I seriously doubt such cases exist. The fact that I can pull up Wikileaks or RT without trouble tends to suggest that the U.S. government certainly does not do this regularly -- I think these sites certainly would be blocked under the Chinese approach, much as China has repeatedly blocked the New York Times, or specific New York Times stories. (https://www.google.com/search?q=china%20block%20new%20york%2...)
I don't doubt that it has the capability, and that the U.S. would use it if there were a compelling reason to do so (your assertion about ISIS forums, for example, strikes me as an attempt to suppress organization and recruitment by an active enemy of the United States in wartime [insert largely irrelevant debate about whether this is really a war, here]), but I seriously doubt there is any credible evidence that the U.S. government uses these tools in a way comparable to the Chinese government.
We have a lot of problems here in the U.S., but I think you'd be hard pressed to make a credible case that pervasive Internet censorship, equivalent, or even remotely similar to what is done by the Chinese government, is one of them.
The ISIS example is far more complicated. It's part of information warfare. ISIS is of course partially supported by the US government for the purposes of destabilizing the Assad regime. But we don't want it in Iraq - just Syria - and its message as proved to move it farther than we want it to.
Much of the information warfare has to do with controlling the movement - stopping it from spreading where we don't want it to and letting or encouraging it to spread in Syria.
The State Department's "War of Ideas" and Congress's "Jihad 2.0" are higher level concepts that round down to the use of these capabilities to direct movements. Of course nothing can get done without some sort of conventional capability as well.
I'm sorry that you aren't aware of it. The allegations, I hope, and there's plenty of both evidence and anecdotes and law that supports it, will pique your interest.
I don't think its right to compare to China. I do think it's important to note that both need to fight against one another's propaganda.
Again, if you drop the case that it's like the Chinese, and just ask whether it is done (especially overseas - it is done in huge amounts overseas) then yeah there is pervasive Internet censorship and propaganda.
(And if you hadn't caught it that's what the SONY hacks were all about).
I've also read quite a bit of scholarship on the Chinese program and it doesn't look so very different from the US side (from a technical perspective): http://gking.harvard.edu/files/censored.pdf
There are certain things that get thwarted. Facebook's 'anti-spam' feature blocked the organization of this past year's MayDay protests. Whoops.
Perhaps we're not really disagreeing about anything. I know, and have already agreed, that the U.S. can and does engage in so-called "strategic communications" overseas. This surely encompasses influencing the messages that reach targeted populations overseas in furtherance of certain strategic aims. I also agree that the U.S. might try to take down certain sites in particularly extreme cases (such as the U.S.'s targeting of ISIS forums that you allege).
What I strongly object to, however, is the equivalence you are suggesting between U.S. "strategic communications" and China's pervasive Internet censorship, both as a matter of raw degree, and also taking into account the different circumstances in which the two countries exercise these capabilities. When asking whether there is some sort of moral equivalence to be drawn between the Chinese and U.S. programs, the question to ask is when do the countries exercise their capabilities, not whether they have these technical capabilities, or whether they are sometimes used.
And I still don't see that you've provided any credible evidence that the two are comparable in these terms. (Though maybe we agree here too -- you say "I don't think its right to compare to China" but if this is true, I really don't know why your comments are relevant commentary on this article.) I certainly don't disagree that the U.S. and Chinese programs are likely similar "from a technical perspective," but I don't think the technical perspective is the perspective that should interest people here.
The US absolutely does censor group organization efforts in the US and political speech as well. What the US does is quite different than China and it faces quite a different set of challenges than China. It's an apples and oranges comparison. We agree here.
So to address why this is relevant has to do with China DDoSing content that is not a domestic product/service of China. Telegraph is not from China. China blocking Telegraph is like the US blocking stopfasttrack.ru and videos from warfighters in the Middle East. China blocking Telegraph is like the UK plans to take what they currently do and what they plan to do by law and block certain foreign tools for secure communication. The US, too, blocks (and sabotages) secure communication software - it has been defunding secure communication software with partnerships in the valley, has Comey talking to Congress about the need for software front doors, and the Snowden leaks showed us how comprehensively backdoored everything is including relationships between vendors and services with customers.
The US does this with foreign developed services and it thwarts secure communication capabilities both provided by foreign governments and its own private sector intended for domestic use.
>The US absolutely does censor group organization efforts in the US and political speech as well.
But this is precisely the claim for which you have provided no substantial support (though you have provided ample support for the uncontroversial assertion that the U.S. engages in strategic communications operations), other than 1) a single website that was temporarily blacklisted by private spam filtering organizations and ISPs, likely for some combination of factors including the absence of an SPF record, and which was promptly un-blacklisted upon request and 2) forums being used to support an enemy during wartime. What am I missing?
> China blocking Telegraph is like the US blocking . . .videos from warfighters in the Middle East.
No. It is not. It similar only in from a technical perspective. From the perspective of the government's motivations for blocking them, and the moral acceptability of those motivations, the two are entirely different. The U.S. blocked forums being used to publicize and support enemy activities in a war zone (by a terrorist group, by any definition, to boot), while China blocked communications tools being used by human rights lawyers to expose inequities in China's legal system. Whatever you may think about the legitimacy of the U.S.'s "war" against ISIS, it's not too hard to draw a line between these two situations.
The problem is not that, e.g., China censors communications. I think most would agree that this is sometimes necessary (though perhaps only very rarely). The issue, which you're glossing over, is when and why.
Yes. Sure. The US arrested hundreds of journalists from covering Occupy, leading to a sharp drop in it's Freedom of Press score (I don't trust that metric, but other people seem to like it). They also put a media blackout zone around Ferguson. Facebook has blocked individuals, myself included, from posting Wikileaks documents, Snowden documents and Manning Documents, as well as organizing May Day protests. The US Government infiltrated and disrupted operations at the Associated Press following the Benghazi scandal. The US knowly falsely linked investigative reporters with ongoing criminal activity to hold them from investigations and to get access to sources (Rosen), held whistleblower Binney and his family at gunpoint, blackmailed Joe Nacchio, persecuted and proscecuted journalists for unfavorable coverage (Jassam, Poitras, Greenwald, Risen, Brown), partnered with US domestic media to skew coverage (Dilanian, Miller, Gordon), manipulated US media to support the Iraq war (Fallujah, Zarqawi), coordinated the removal of journalists reporting unfavorable coverage overseas (Mohyeldin), has published false international cables to manipulate the domestic press on purpose (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/heroes-error?pag...), seeded fake journalists to ask softball questions at press releases (Gannon), have paid for positive coverage by US domestic media outlets (Williams, Gallagher, McManus), injected pro-war news stories into local news channels through the WCIA (leading the resign of Tomlinson), sent fake letters from the US Army to media outlets to get positive coverage, completely fabricated hero stories and trotted them about the media (Lynch), repealed restrictions on propaganda operations in the Smith-Mundt Act so that propaganda aimed ultimately at other audiences can now be legally consumed and need not be prevented from consumption by Americans, has used coerced testimony to justify policy goals (reporting them to media as fact - Bush torture programs in advance of Iraq), research on at least both vote manipulation and emotion manipulation to be weaponized against other countries were tested on Americans - one during the 2010 congressional elections), made it impossible in practical terms for third parties to get access to the presidential debates, astroturfed during elections, released press information at inconvenient times to discourage press coverage (e.g. NSA oversight report on Christmas Eve). Hell, politicians and policy makers often either have relatives in influential positions in the media or sit on a board of directors. When Hillary Clinton said that the Benghazi attacks were about a youtube video, did you believe her? Hell, Bush Jr. instanciated HSPD-5 that clarified the use of information support for civil affairs (domestic propaganda) during the use of states of emergency. Then again his administration also perpetrated international fraud to justify the invasion of Iraq by knowingly falsifying evidence: knowingly and falsely linking anthrax from US bioweapons labs, weapons of mass destruction and 9/11 to Saddam; coordinated with intelligence agencies under the cover the UN commission.
If you ask anyone from outside America whether its citizens exist in a media bubble they will tell you that it's true. It's like talking to a Russian and telling them that they have state sponsored propaganda. They are going to be skeptical - and it will seem like for good reasons.
> No. It is not. It similar only in from a technical perspective. From the perspective of the government's motivations for blocking them, and the moral acceptability of those motivations, the two are entirely different.
The motivations are pretty similar in this case, and the acceptability is the same.
I cited examples far beyond the ISIS/ISIL case. We're talking about those now. The 'tools by human rights lawyers' are state sponsored tools from Civil Society Organizations funded by the West. Like ZunZuneo and when the US criticized Cuba for blocking Cuban cell phone access.
>If you ask anyone from outside America whether its citizens exist in a media bubble they will tell you that it's true. It's like talking to a Russian and telling them that they have state sponsored propaganda. They are going to be skeptical - and it will seem like for good reasons.
What's amazing is that Americans can look at Russia and North Korea and "see how the people are being misled by propaganda" but refuse to believe that propaganda is used in the U.S.A
Telegram is like ZunZuneo and other initiatives by Western governments to force their adversary to choose to either censor something and take a PR hit or have their countrymen radicalised.
I ought to have made that link clear. I apologize.
Here's a FOIA document from the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications in general about their (mostly overt capabilities to engage the Middle East). They mention DoD covert hacking/DoS capabilities: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/cen...
> For references, here's an example of a website that was simultaneously blocked on a bunch of providers because it matched domain name patterns of a Russia propaganda site:
Not sure what this demonstrates. If you look at the comments it seems pretty clear that this was just an ordinary case of mistaken blacklisting, possibly because the administrator had never heard of an SPF record. And, worst case, it was blacklisted because it was mistaken for a Russian spam site. There is no credible allegation of governmental involvement at all, and no reason to think that there was. Moreover, it looks like the problem was long since corrected, through the usual means for becoming un-blacklisted.
Because people would like to think China as a single entity acting in a clear single minded way using a single method.
The fact is China is the largest bureaucratic country, the DDoS may or may not coming from any administrative authority layer, or just business strategy to spur your competition to anti-China side, so government will act accordingly and take care the competition for you.
Pour encourager les autres? If annoying "P""R"C means you hurt worldwide, perhaps the next company with evil foreign values will avoid trespassing into the only harmonious country or something.
Agreed, this news on TC put up a few facts and seemed to imply the link between them without a logical support, which is not a typical behavior I would expect from a good tech media.
They could use a hosting provider that has DDoS protection, such as OVH. OVH guarantee to mitigate all DDoS attacks no matter what size or duration. I've been using them, and their DDoS protection works really well.
Or, if they prefer to host themselves, they can spend the money to buy the bandwidth and Arbor (or other?) equipment.
The fact is that -- like github -- they are being DDoSed and have to do something about it if they want to stay in business. I'd be interested in hearing what github did to mitigate their attacks. I can't find any info on it (but I'm guessing that perhaps they want to keep it secret).
Not much they could do about this but it's resulting in a lot of bad reviews on the app stores. It would be in their interest to do better with communication to users. They are in the communication sector after all!
Maybe they should respond to the reviews directly in the app stores or put something in the app which explains what is going on. Not sure if they have the ability to broadcast message affected users but it could be as simple as implementing a better connection error message. Most of their users aren't going to read their blog or the tech press.
