Founder and CEO of Telegram messaging service arrested in France

But this is intentional. TG's ToS forbids alternative clients with their own E2EE.

Also he's the VK founder, which kills any idea of "trustworthy" immediately.

It's part of TG's business model, I think, something in the price list for governments. And the way they treat alternative clients in reality also hints that maybe backdoors are as well. Say, a new message format of the day (they add them really often) arrives in a new official Telegram version, somehow it's nowhere to be seen in the channels and groupchats you're in, but some day a DM arrives with harmless text and some code runs on your client machine.

I use Telegram, but trusting it would be asinine. Even trustworthy services can be abused, and TG doesn't even pretend to be that.

I think he got arrested because happening to be in Baku for a couple weeks and then still be there at the same time with Putin-Aliyev meeting, and their agreements apparently having intersections with Durov's activity, is openly weird.

Useless. Current allegations are related to the absence of moderation. Moderation of public content, in public channels or chats. As you can guess, end to end encryption does not protect public content.

E2E is just one part of the puzzle, you got to have a open source P2P or federated architecture as well, otherwise you have to trust a nebulous company or person intrinsically. People change and companies can be bought, but you will be stuck with their platform in order to contact your acquaintances, and changing that means loosing your contacts.

That is why the DMA is important. But you will be even better off just directly choosing a chat platform, where the users are in control.

From translating TFA:

Justice considers that the absence of moderation, cooperation with law enforcement and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable number, cryptocurrencies, etc.) makes it complicit in drug trafficking, child crime offenses and fraud.

Same reason Russia wanted to arrest him, failure to do the government's bidding.

Told Russia to fuck off, and now France is complicit.

Tells us a lot about how governments view Telegram.

From the article

The Justice considers that the lack of moderation, cooperation with the forces of law and order and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable number, cryptocurrencies, etc.) makes it complicit in drug trafficking, paedo criminal offences and fraud.

But a lot of people are speculating they just fabricated claims to arrest him because Telegram is russian.

As the CEO he should be responsible for anything he was facilitating as part of his business, and that would include crimes committed using telegram that he was aware of and both did nothing to remove from his service and made it harder for law enforcement to prosecute. You know, like how a warehouse owner who knowingly sells space to pedos and does what he can to keep the police from searching the warehouee is complicit.

There are some circumstances where they are unaware or only take halfhearted measures, but in this case it looks like he is being investigated for actively working to enable criminals, including pedos. As the head executive, he doesn't have to do it personally if he is directing staff to make it happen.

Edit: explaining the logic behind something isn't the same as agreeing with that logic

French law enforcement wants a police state

Not at all.

But by tradition in this country, the police has a more "robust" way of doing things. Makes no sense to judge that by other countries' ways.

I have not followed this at all. Seems okay at face value. Is that the point, that "protect the kids" a is pretext to creep towards eventual screening of everything?

The meme says the big internet companies are already doing this. Isn't it a legit problem that this sort of harmful child sexual abuse material just moves around the internet like whack-a-mole?

The Democratic nations of the world have all gone to Telegram and begged for help to address human trafficking, to address terrorism, to literally prevent wars, and they are told to fuck off. Seems criminal to me.

"criticism from X owner Elon Musk who said that free speech in Europe was under attack."

Comes from the guy who bans certain words and anything negative about him on X. Oh the irony.

Unlike other chat services Telegram has a “social” aspect and search capabilities for locating public discussion channels.

That's the good part. I hope something else takes the niche.

But it being very insecure and positioned as secure is bad.

If somebody runs a market hall and allows stalls to be set up where narcotics and CSAM is being sold, and profits from it, and ignores police requests to stop it, I would like something to happen against that person. That person is complicit.

What I can’t understand is why telegram doesn’t just set up the some moderation systems. Most of their growth surely doesn’t come from drug dealers and pederasts? It feels like it would be a tiny element of it and not worth the hassle.

I suspect Durov doesn’t like dealing with big teams and can’t be bothered.

I’m a heavy user of Telegram (average about 1h of screen time every day, and pay for Telegram Premium) entirely because all my friends are on it and that’s because it is the best messaging client BY FAR. I’d love not to share this platform with criminals.

Since when did fighting crime become a “totalitarian state” thing to do?

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're wrong.

I refuse to use it because it feels like I’m talking with human traffickers

I, too, prefer spending my time on subs related to things I neither own, used nor enjoy!

So never used the app, but flat out make that assumption. Check. lol