Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/technology/telegram-apple-russia.html

by Anon1096 • 8 years ago

413 245 8 years ago

dang• 8 years ago

Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17195072.

Edit: actually that article contains much less information and the discussion is correspondingly less substantive, so I've taken the 'dupe' marker off the current post. Carry on.

cocktailpeanuts3• 8 years ago

I'm surprised that nobody is talking about how Telegram raised pre-ICO of billions of dollars even when it was obvious that this type of censorship will be possible.

Mobile apps should not do ICO, period. It's irresponsible for someone to try stealing uneducated people's money while promising something that's impossible to achieve.

Realistically speaking there are only two players in the market: Google and Apple, both of which will happily comply with governments and regulators since they have no business in allowing gray area businesses, and that's a good thing.

However when you raise ICO, you're basically promising the censorship resistant future while fully knowing that it's impossible to achieve what you promised because your app is built on top of these centralized platforms.

This is on a completely different level in terms of scam factor when compared to naive idiots promising things like "putting grass-fed cows on the blockchain", because literally it's impossible to build a censorship-resistant, decentralized mobile app and they are the ones who know this the best.

I point this out because it looks as though all the press coverage seem to be focused on how Russia and Apple is censoring Telegram and Telegram is the victim, when Russia and Apple did nothing different from what they used to do. Russia has always been this way, and Apple has always tried its best to fight for user privacy but did make compromises when they really had to. It's great that Apple is doing its best to fight for user privacy but to be frank, Apple shouldn't be the one to blame here.

It's Telegram who decided to promote itself as a "censorship resistant decentralized blockchain application" to raise billions of dollars, and they got to this position because of this stance they had to take in order to raise the money. The only losers in this case are the idiots who invested in Telegram's ICO.

scosman• 8 years ago

"you're basically promising the censorship resistant future" where did telegram say anything remotely like that? They did an ICO for a utility coin. They have been honest about being centralized. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you're putting words in their mouth and accusing them of theft for not meeting your fabricated expectations.

cocktailpeanuts3• 8 years ago

ICO is short for Initial Coin Offering. And the coin is cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are only valuable when they are not censorable. This is why there's a controversy around coins like XRP (from Ripple) because most of the coins are owned by Ripple and their architecture is designed in a way that they can very well censor transactions.

But even Ripple pales in comparison to something like Telegram, because Telegram is a mobile chat app, which is as centralized as you can get. Not only does it depend on iOS and Android, but also all push notifications must go through APN (Apple Push Notification) or FCM(Google Messaging). In fact, messaging apps are arguably the most centralized apps out there because of these features. And this is why it's so easy to censor these apps.

So if your app can easily be censored, and if your coin is useless if your users can't use the app, what else do you think they were claiming?

vhbit2• 8 years ago

They did an ICO for a utility coin.

One of the major selling points of that utility coin was that it'll be automatically available for 200M active users of Telegram. Frictionless entry point into coins is a huge step forward.

taurath4• 8 years ago

Realistically speaking there are only two players in the market: Google and Apple, both of which will happily comply with governments and regulators since they have no business in allowing gray area businesses, and that's a good thing.

I don't really consider that a good thing. Having government controlled gatekeepers that take 20-30% off of every app with platform lock-in is not a great thing. We rail constantly about FBI/NSA enforced backdoors, especially people in Europe that are potentially having all their data harvested.

cocktailpeanuts3• 8 years ago

I'm on the same page with you. I guess i should rephrase.

I said "That's a good thing" from Apple and Google's point of view. They are public companies with shareholders who don't want them to contribute to potentially illegal behaviors. So it's a "good thing" for them to have the companies comply with the governments.

But this phenomenon itself is not a good thing, so I do think decentralized projects should fix this problem. But centralized companies should not advertise themselves as being able to tackle this type of problem because it's not possible.

This brings us back to the original issue I pointed out. Telegram knows Very very well that they have this issue. Ask anyone who has built a mobile app if building a decentralized ecosystem on top of Apple appstore is possible and they would laugh at you. But Telegram did. And they raised billions of dollars for that false vision which they knew was impossible to achieve as a centralized organization with a product that depends on a centralized platform.

Jyaif• 8 years ago

You can side-load apps on Android. I'm afraid this makes your rant false.

madeofpalk2• 8 years ago

Mobile apps should not do ICO, period.

really, should anyone?

ex3ndr2• 8 years ago

Wat? ICO was private and only accredited investors was allowed.

JumpCrisscross6• 8 years ago

This is presently an accusation by Telegram, nothing more. Sample of reasons why Apple may be doing whatever they are doing:

1) Telegram is prevalently used by Syrian fighters [1]. (Why they chose Telegram over Signal beats me.) As the Syrian conflict winds down, these fighters are returning home. That creates a security imperative for many governments, including in the EU.

2) Telegram recently ran an ICO that, at the very least, probably runs afoul of American securities law.

3) All of the reasons any app gets held up in review that are not "the Russian government pressured Apple."

TL; DR We have no evidence this is because of Russian meddling.

[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/isis-telegram-app_us_59...

anderber2• 8 years ago

All this points to me is the risks of owning a phone whose only way to add apps is to go through one company's own discretion. Unlike in Android where you can easily install apps from other app stores or just download the file.

jonknee3• 8 years ago

Installing apps outside an app store also introduces other risks, it's not exactly one better than the other. Personally I'd love to sideload apps, but seeing how big of a mess that was on desktops leads me to believe most users are better served by a gatekeeper.

ocdtrekkie2• 8 years ago

Android is almost as locked to Google Play as Apple is to the App Store, to the effect that no vendor has made a successful business selling phones without the Play Store. While they've finally fixed it, for years, they used scare tactics to prevent sideloading by insinuating it as a security risk, requiring you allow "less secure apps" in order to sideload. Most applications won't run without Play Services even if you do sideload them, and Play Services can remote uninstall an app from every device anyways, should they choose to employ it.

Yes, you can roll your own with a ROM and limit yourself to the tiny selection on F-Droid, but you enter an increasingly niche area. While it's "technically possible", it isn't really supported well enough to justify holding it as a benefit over a competing platform from a mainstream sense.

Bear in mind, when faced with a technical question revolving around making a backup of APK files, a core Android engineer said they "didn't support piracy", which was... a pretty hefty accusation to throw around for an innocuous backup of apps for being able to sideload should they be pulled from the then-called Android Market.

wafflebear• 8 years ago

Not applicable to Telegram, but if the app is open source and you have a Mac (!) you can install it using Xcode.

Since Signal is actually open source, you can install it even if Apple decides to block it in the future (if you have a Mac).

djrogers2• 8 years ago

Based on history, it’s by far more likely that it’s #3. Have we ever seen Apple prevent updates to an app globally due to government request (any government)? No... What we have seen are plenty of other reasons that Apple has rejected updates - like including new features that violate policies.

This really makes no sense on its face - if this is real Apple responding to Russian demands, why is Televram even available in the App Store at all?

madeofpalk2• 8 years ago

We've also seen Apple just pull apps all together from countries at the request of the government, so I don't understand why Apple would only reject updates at the request of a government, rather than pull the app completely.

codedokode14• 8 years ago

Telegram is prevalently used by Syrian fighters

So Apple is afraid that they will start killing people in Europe using newer Telegram versions?

Russian propaganda says similar things, that Telegram is used by terrorists and drug dealers and that is why government needs to be able to read your messages.

Telegram recently ran an ICO that, at the very least, probably runs afoul of American securities law.

Telegram is a British company.

letsgetphysITal• 8 years ago

Telegram is used by those people. As is Facebook, Twitter, Tor, the road network, cash, credit cards, Walmart supermarkets, mobile phones, electricity... That one bad person, or group of bad people, use a technology in support of their wrongdoing does not make the technology bad.

(I'm agreeing with you, just stating the point more obviously).

freshfey• 8 years ago

2) Telegram didn't run an ICO. They wanted to but raised enough funds in the private markets that there was no need to continue with an ICO.

csomar2• 8 years ago

Telegram is prevalently used by Syrian fighters [1]. (Why they chose Telegram over Signal beats me.) As the Syrian conflict winds down, these fighters are returning home. That creates a security imperative for many governments, including in the EU.

BS. There is exactly 0 reasons why they should infringe on your rights. Remember that. 0 reasons.

y_molodtsov11• 8 years ago

"Telegram recently ran an ICO that, at the very least, probably runs afoul of American securities law.” Their ICO is absolutely compliant with the securities laws. There wasn’t a sign of general solicitation and the investors were required to be accredited.

Shank• 8 years ago

Honestly, I don't understand why there are still details missing from this story. Durov is willing to share that Telegram hasn't been able to ship updates, but not the full reason.

Have they been actively rejected (and thus, provided a rejection reason)? Or have Apple just stopped approving their updates silently?

If it's the former, I don't know what app store guideline says "well, Telegram is banned in Russia, and so no more updates." If it's the latter, then I can understand the frustration -- but we don't know which it is. This nuance is important.

For all we know, the answer is the former, and the app store rejection reasons are for completely unrelated issues. But as per usual, we don't know the full story.

taurath4• 8 years ago

The certification process tends to only look for things that are Bad for Apple or Google, as almost anyone who's tried getting a big app update certified. Meanwhile, 1000 iterations of shareware calculators that you have to pay $4 to unlock the number 9 are accepted frequently. There's so many clearly crap apps out there that don't get a second look.

ReverseCold• 8 years ago

shareware calculators that you have to pay $4 to unlock the number 9

This is probably made up/for comedic effect, but just in case it isn't, do you have a link?

duskwuff• 8 years ago

I've certainly never heard of Apple rejecting an app update without giving a reason. I'd agree that it feels like there's something that Durov isn't telling us here.

zapt02• 8 years ago

Apple often cites entire paragraphs from their TOS as reason for app rejection without giving specific reasons.

sigmar• 8 years ago

Perhaps he added more domain fronting? And apple is trying to decide on their position of that technique?

zzzcpan3• 8 years ago

I'm sure you understand that Apple can always find some excuse to disable updates for "unrelated" reasons. It's never going to be an honest reason, they can never give political reasoning publicly.

Telegram is right to call them out on it, they should have done it earlier. But I guess they were hoping for Apple to re-enable updates and didn't want to make the gatekeeper look bad.

sebleon2• 8 years ago

This is likely a false accusation.

If Apple acquiesced to Russia’s demands, Apple would have: 1) removed Telegram from the App Store in Russia, and 2) prevented Telegram from using the Apple Push Notification Service to distribute non-blocked IP addresses to clients.

More likely, updates are being rejected for another infraction. Telegram should publish the App Store reviewer’s criticisms publicly, and provide more context before making public denouncements.

wetpaws• 8 years ago

Knowing Apple I would be very surprised that it is a false accusation.

sebleon2• 8 years ago

Interesting, you don’t think this is an odd punishment if this was about Russia?

majidazimi• 8 years ago

More likely, updates are being rejected for another infraction. Telegram should publish the App Store reviewer’s criticisms publicly, and provide more context before making public denouncements.

Well, that's one of Durov's powerful weapons. Cry in public and blame others, while he is the one who messed it up.

vhbit2• 8 years ago

Or Apple not decided yet how to proceed and is buying some time.

codedokode14• 8 years ago

Telegram is now implementing new sponsored Telegram proxies. This is a well designed system that motivates individuals and channel owners to provide proxies in exchange for promotion. So blocking updates prevents it from working and making Telegram less vulnerable.

jfornear4• 8 years ago

If anyone here is interested, I started on a new project called Chatdog (https://chat.dog) to create an alternative to Telegram, et al. Telegram forces you to download their app and provide your phone number to join a room. Chatdog doesn’t require any personal data and can even be used anonymously!

huangbong• 8 years ago

What UI library are you using if any? Looks great on mobile!

jfornear4• 8 years ago

Thanks! No UI library—I just wrote the CSS from scratch.

ryanlol• 8 years ago

So, like Telegram but without false promises of security? Awesome!

egeozcan• 8 years ago

But you require scripts from a lot of 3rd parties, which may or may not respect my privacy.

Maybe consider using a CDN or hosting necessary scripts on your server?

jfornear4• 8 years ago

All scripts are on Cloudfront except for when someone shares a YouTube video or Twitter tweet. Google Analytics and Typekit are the only third-party scripts that are always loaded. I do need to add UI to allow users to disable these.

eganist3• 8 years ago

I'd given this challenge some thought in the recent past, specifically the challenge that the big app store owners are each generally susceptible to coercion by large nation-state actors in spite of being multinationally distributed.

There was a project I was involved in rather heavily (cyph // resulted in a pair of neat conference talks) where we'd accounted for the risks of apps being banned by making the entire application operate exclusively in a web context. To at least somewhat mitigate the related risks stemming from having to trust the cryptographic logic delivered by a web server every time you use the service, trust-on-first-use was achieved by mangling the living daylights out of HPKP in tandem with service workers in order to persist barebones codesigning logic used for validating cryptographic packages delivered from the web service. Alas...

All of this is to say that there have been multiple parties involved in addressing this challenge, each one thinking from novel angles in an effort to mitigate the risks posed by the threat of sanctions against secure messaging. As it stands, it appears there's now a rather glaring weakness: if a nation-state decides as much, they can just twist the arms of the walled gardens supporting your secure messaging client in order to:

1) deny access generally, reducing or eliminating the growth of the target space and improving target acquisition,

2) persist known vulnerabilities just long enough to exploit against a target.

Telegram has been criticized again and again for their security hygiene and for their architectural decisions. Signal's seen some of that heat quite recently, and I raise both of these because they speak pretty strongly to the bullets above: there's a chance we're seeing a live demonstration by a preeminent world power against one of the few tools dissidents are using to literally stay alive.

If this demonstration succeeds without any sort of significant blowback (in the form of corporate or popular resistance or some other subversion or mitigation of the attack), there's nothing to stop any other major party from trying it, regardless of whether they're a nation-state.

---

Anyway, I'm keen on a deeper discussion here. Maybe the tinfoil hat's been a bit corrosive to my brain; counter-arguments are welcomed.

lifeisstillgood5• 8 years ago

I guess my brain is too small to grok this all in one go but are you saying that

Russia is applying pressure to Apple (what pressure?) that prevents Apple App Stores in all countries from accepting a new update of Telegram

I don't get this - why is Telegram not releasing updates in a UK or Japanese region? What pressure (besides the local russian court system) is being applied here

---

In general yes I expect that app stores are the / a weak point in mobile encryption messaging, but it is only at the level of major player threat model. These things are good enough for use against all but a State level actor targeting you specifically (at which point leaving the country is probably good, if tardy, advice)

JumpCrisscross6• 8 years ago

We don't have any evidence, apart from Durov's allegations, that Telegram's situation with Apple has anything to do with Russia.

DyslexicAtheist• 8 years ago

anytime someone says "only nation player threat model" I say in my mind "and also internal threats". I believe this gives a more complete picture of the actual risk.

zzzcpan3• 8 years ago

Russia is even making public threats to block Apple services for everyone in Russia because of Telegram. Do you not consider this a form of pressure?

I presume earlier Apple just gave in a bit to the pressure and stopped updates to help them censor the app.

codedokode14• 8 years ago

Maybe Apple just doesn't have a system to block updates in one specific country?

wellboy• 8 years ago

Skywire to the rescue. Can't wait dor it to go live.

wavefunction• 8 years ago

I'd be interested to see any slides or "work product" containing your conclusions if it's available and you don't mind.

I'm working for a startup that has had to pivot to web-only applications specifically because of Apple and their frustrating nervousness around anything involving applied blockchains.

j16sdiz• 8 years ago

I think you can skip mentioning blockchain in the app description.

If it is "applied blockchain", you don't have to tell everybody it's blockchain. App should look like natural (or, sometimes, magic) to non technical users. They couldn't care less.

Just show them what your app can do.

eganist3• 8 years ago

Well the basic premise was to use a security protocol to deny service locally to a domain after that domain will have loaded client-side code into the browser as a service worker. It's described with more detail near the end of the deck: https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2024/DEF%20CON%2024%20pre... -- but the practical implementation of the aforementioned is to cause local DoS by means of rapid key rotation on a domain protected by HPKP. By rotating keys (cyph.ws does this just about once every twelve hours, for instance), you can trap a service worker in the browser for up to 60 days, the length of time pins are permitted to be valid with supported browsers. I'm pretty sure we coined "HPKP suicide" for publicity's sake, but should any other ultra-footgun-prone client-side TLS-impacting security protocols emerge, this same pattern should be feasible with those as well. Local DoS was briefly described as a risk in the HPKP RFC, and we further fleshed it out and reduced it to practice as a tool for engineers to achieve the goal described in my last comment (equal credits to Ryan Lester and Jann Horn as well).

The specific device we put into production (and patented because of its criticality to Cyph) worked through the use of localized denial of service to pin signature validation logic into the local store of the browser to verify payloads received from other endpoints; in our case, we pin bad keys for the maximum permitted duration. That said, there are many different ways to use HPKP suicide that don't have to do with adding signature validation for client-side application logic, and they still come fairly close to achieving the goal of reducing how often you have to trust the server. The pattern described in this paragraph allows for Cyph to deploy new builds of the full messaging application whenever by just signing new builds such that they're validated by the pinned service worker, but if that flexibility is not a necessity, keep reading.

Since you can effectively pin any code into the browser through HPKP suicide, one different approach might be to pin a key for a more reasonable amount of time, such as two weeks, in order to stick e.g. critical application logic in the browser and rest assured that each user will use a certain build for at least two weeks time. This has the effect of reducing the exposure of an application's userbase in the event of a service compromise—at the expense of possibly committing some users to a bad build (or possibly even a compromised build) unless they manually clear pins. If you're writing a light application, this'll serve you pretty well. If you're writing a heavier application, you can outsource most of the heavier dependencies through SRI (the code pinned as the service worker would use SRI to validate the supporting libraries). The nuance here is that you're not implementing signature validation; you're just relying on that local DoS to ensure that certain code stays in the browser for as long as the bad keys are pinned and just confirming that any separate resources hash as what you'd expect them to. You're still certain to see that code--and any hashes you bake into it for SRI, should you choose to go this route--persist for as long as the invalid pins are live in your users' browsers.

HPKP still works in Firefox, so we intend to continue to research this pattern and related implementations of it. However, considering the browser with the largest market share just deprecated it while publicly mentioning the risk of footgunning via the standard, I'm not sure how much you stand to gain by implementing anything like the pattern we fleshed out two years ago. I'd love to build support to keep/fix the protocol rather than bin it, but the team that created is the team that gave up on it.

If you're curious, the private reason I've heard voiced to others by a person closely connected to the standard is that the protocol was not anticipated to be used in any manner other than what was documented, hence why termination of support for HPKP was preferred in Chrome over revision of the standard. I'm deliberately delicate with my words here because 1) it's hear-say, 2) it was expressed both off the record and in confidence to someone other than myself, and therefore 3) I can't be certain that it was expressed at all. However, key pinning--or any other TLS DoS--should always support what I described above as long as the DoS doesn't interrupt local code from executing in-browser, a behavior I doubt will change for the foreseeable future. You wouldn't want a TLS error to forcibly refresh an offline Google Docs instance just to show you said TLS error (resulting in loss of data from that offline GDocs instance), would you?

TL;DR: you can research alternatives based on the general pattern we described, but using HPKP specifically might be a dead-end for you.

But if you're keen on talking about it in more depth, I'm on keybase.io/bryant

mirimir2• 8 years ago

If users could install Telegram from third-party sources, without rooting their phones, this issue wouldn't be so serious. Or if users could install from trusted friends, even. That is, if iOS apps could be shared. There's a similar issue for Android apps. But it's my understanding that it's easier, and doesn't require rooting.

But of course, this would break Apple's "we are the only app source, because you can only trust us" security model. Or maybe it's "... because we can only trust us, and we don't want increased support load".

Zak2• 8 years ago

Installing apps from third-party sources is trivial on most Android phones. It only requires turning on a setting that's off by default and exposed in the regular settings app.

lysp• 8 years ago

On android it's very easy. Settings, developer, "allow installation from 3rd party - on".

Alternatively on my phone when I try to install an app, it'll allow me to change that setting just for that single installation and then turn it off again.

nicky02• 8 years ago

If Telegram released the source code, people could compile and install it on their own iOS devices.

driverdan2• 8 years ago

This is why I will never own an Apple phone. No one should have the power to decide what can and can't be installed on your devices.

jonny_eh• 8 years ago

So you've never owned a game console either?

dingo_bat• 8 years ago

That's not very far fetched.

Qwertie6• 8 years ago

Many don't for that exact reason. Restrictions is one of the main arguments for pc gaming.

driverdan2• 8 years ago

The last console I owned was a PS2, which could run Linux. No reason to own a console anyway, PCs are such a better game platform.

laveur2• 8 years ago

From all the articles I have read about this Telegram seems to offer no evidence to supports its case. Further more it claims its only iOS, and not macOS. And I personally have gotten at least several updates for at least the mac version over the past month.

laveur2• 8 years ago

IF they really are not letting them update I would at least expect a rejection letter from Apple as evidence.

erikb2• 8 years ago

Why? If they make it so obvious of course there will be outrage. What everybody with some brains would actually do is slow down the approval process and really look for all kinds of unimportant small details that the update doesn't fulfill "yet".

Bud• 8 years ago

I keep seeing a lot of iffy reporting on this. Has anyone actually run this down and done a solid article on it?

Semirhage• 8 years ago

Read the comments here, and it seems like Telegram is being pretty shrewd from PR perspective, since everyone is willing to blame Russia and Apple. Admittedly Russia is a deservedly easy target, and Apple has some vocal critics. If enough people want to believe the accusation, and are willing to at face value (and that seems to be the case here at least) then it’s already “mission accomplished” for Telegram.

askvictor2• 8 years ago

On a Mac you have the option of downloading and installing the app directly from the Internet rather than from the app store. On iOS you don't, so there is a clear difference.

bouvin• 8 years ago

My macOS Telegram updated, from the AppStore, 2018-05-31.

Angostura• 8 years ago

Is Signal reporting any issues?

giodamelio• 8 years ago

Signal is down for me right now. I am also seeing lot's of people mentioning the same thing on Twitter.

mnm1• 8 years ago

What else do people expect from a closed ecosystem? Vendor bowing down to disreputable nation-states' requests. Check. Out of date apps with vulnerabilities. Check. Impossible to verify security of said system or apps. Check. Complete opaqueness from the vendor. Check. And this is from a vendor that supposedly values both security and privacy ... not that any others are any better.

masonlee• 8 years ago

Does this dispute imply that Apple backdoors its own iMessage end-to-end encryption on states' request?

amatecha3• 8 years ago

It's entirely possible, I'd speculate. I once called Apple tech support for help with my iPhone. So they could see what was going on right on my phone, they were able to remotely request a "screen sharing" session, which I had to click "Allow" on a dialog on my phone to approve. One can imagine that such an approval dialog is not actually required in a technical sense, and _theoretically_ a screen share could be remotely started without any such dialog/notification.

robotkdick• 8 years ago

While true they can access a phone based on the user opting in, there's likely a high degree of "security" around how and when this can occur including the necessity of a user opting in.

Tim Cook has taken a very public stance on privacy and the addition of police-unfriendly encryption of data. So, there's much to lose if news were to come out undermining that position.

He probably would not be going so far out on a limb personally if the reality of the privacy/security/encryption were just for PR. His integrity is dependent on that position being true.

Slowing things down for political purposes in entirely another matter, and well within the realm of probability.

eridius6• 8 years ago

One can imagine that such an approval dialog is not actually required in a technical sense, and _theoretically_ a screen share could be remotely started without any such dialog/notification.

Well I mean, they wrote the OS so they can theoretically have it do whatever they want. But there's an extremely high probability that the way the OS is written, they cannot remotely trigger screen sharing without the user confirming it first.

sigzero• 8 years ago

I don't think it implies anything like that. Apple has way too much to lose given Cooks stance on privacy.

dannyw2• 8 years ago

The new iMessages in the Cloud claims to be 'end to end encrypted', which is true, but omit the fact that a copy of the key is stored with Apple in your iCloud backup...

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

"Messages in iCloud also uses end-to-end encryption. If you have iCloud Backup turned on, a copy of the key protecting your Messages is included in your backup"

Given that almost everyone has iCloud backup enabled, messages are certainly retrievable with a simple court order.

eridius6• 8 years ago

Good to be aware of, but¹ Messages in iCloud is off by default².

¹At least for existing users.

²And almost certainly requires opt-in for new users as well.

ex3ndr2• 8 years ago

Backups are encrypted.

kondro• 8 years ago

No… from a pure game theory perspective the positives don't outweigh the negatives for doing so.

amatecha3• 8 years ago

"Russia banned Telegram on its territory in April because we refused to provide decryption keys for all our users’ communications to Russia’s security agencies"

Why does Telegram have decryption keys for all their users' communications (or do they)?

readams2• 8 years ago

For private chats Telegram uses end-to-end encryption and they cannot read the chats. Of course, they control the clients though, so they could update their clients to also send the chats to Russian intelligence and it would be hard for anyone to notice.

amatecha3• 8 years ago

Yeah, I thought it's supposed to be e2e-encrypted, so I was confused by this statement. I guess it make sense if he means they refused to add a backdoor like you say.

verroq• 8 years ago

Telegram isn't E2E encrypted by default.

You need to choose an "encrypted" chat.

They have been criticised over this for many years now.

codedokode14• 8 years ago

The communication between client and server is encrypted and probably authorities would like to get the keys for it. By default Telegram doesn't use end-to-end encryption, and the messages are received in cleartext on the server.

zapita3• 8 years ago

Presumably Telegram doesn't know for sure why Apple is blocking updates... They are most likely getting stonewalled, with Apple not responding to any of their requests for information.

Telegram suspects that Apple is trying to appease Russian censors while keeping a low profile and plausible deniability. Perhaps Apple is buying time and showing goodwill to Russia while they negotiate a deal - who knows?

Acting on their suspicion, Telegram makes this announcement, putting pressure on Apple to unblock updates, or at least to stop stonewalling them.

It's a clever use of PR as a tactical weapon. And assuming that Apple was indeed stonewalling Telegram (extremely likely knowing Apple), I think it's perfectly justified.

eridius6• 8 years ago

Your assumptions are probably wrong. Most likely Telegram does know why they're being blocked, they just aren't saying because they want people to assume malfeasance on Apple's part and they're hoping bad PR will convince Apple to approve whatever it is that they're currently rejecting.

zapita3• 8 years ago

You might be right... I think it's fair to say we're both guessing.

To me it just doesn't seem logical to resort to such a "nuclear option" over a review disagreement, instead of just complying, negotiating, or at least working around the problem in a creative technical way. It's not like Telegram is changing in some fundamental way since the last review... What could Apple be telling Telegram that is such a massive showstopper?

codedokode14• 8 years ago

Then Apple could tell the real reason.

y_molodtsov11• 8 years ago

I’m pretty sure Apple communicates with the developers of major apps in a different manner. Like when they didn’t immediately deleted Uber that was tracking the permanent device IDs which is prohibited by the platform. They’d delete any regular app that tried to do that.

thotaway• 8 years ago

Theory 1: It’s because Russia, a market with a very small iOS user base, can pressure Apple into doing what it wants.

Theory 2: It’s because Telegram raised more than a billion dollars for a virtual currency that does an end-run around Apple’s in-app payments.

Based on Apple’s past actions, which one is more likely?

dannyw2• 8 years ago

The ICO didn't mention anything about doing an end-run around IAPs, and even so, such functionality isn't integrated in the app.

How can Apple justify penalising something not in an app? Why is the Kindle app still up, despite the fact that Kindle ebooks don't go through IAP?

veidr7• 8 years ago

This is a fundamental problem with the single DRM-enforced app store model that Apple innovated, and which has been widely copied and lauded.

Once you implement that, you have to toady up to whatever governments exist, including oppressive/murderous regimes, to be in their markets.

If your ecosystem is just console video games, say, it's not that big of a deal; you have to either censor some games or don't enter certain countries at all. Might be unfortunate, but its not a fundamental human rights issue.

But if your ecosystem is about general-purpose apps and communication tools, you become complicit to some degree in all sorts of vile shit; oppression and forced relocation of minorities (China), mass murder of gay people (Russia), etc.

There's no way around this for Apple; they have to cave to government demands or risk being forced out of the Russian market. That wasn't inevitable, though; it's a side effect of the model they chose.

sandov• 8 years ago

This is why we must eradicate proprietary software from our general purpose computers, because computers are the single most powerful weapon we have for freedom and self-improvement.

It doesn't matter too much if your videogame console is closed source, but it matters a lot if the software you use to read books, to write, to communicate with people is closed source.

Apple isn't going to do it, Google isn't going to do it. We must do it.

Scene_Cast2• 8 years ago

There are three ways of slicing the problem: the technical capability of loading whatever apps you want, the legal ability to do so, and the ecosystem / game theoretical (is it a reasonable way of doing things - e.g. living without gapps is possible but very hard in practice).

Back when Stallman outlined the distinction between proprietary vs open, he meant all of the above in spirit, but never really addressed the hosting and server-side side of things. I think it's currently still a weak spot in his philosophy. Open-source software doesn't truly solve the server-side if your phone has a hardcoded "ax.itunes.apple.com" - in theory, you could modify & recompile & host your own, but it wouldn't be a first-class-citizen thing. Also, consider e.g. if Apple's stack was open but highly customized - you needed a team of engineers and a swath of servers to simply get a clone up and running. Again, not impossible, but I don't think open-source is only a part of the solution.

veidr7• 8 years ago

Well, 100% conversion of the entire world to open-source software would indeed solve the issue I describe. But, I have only 57 more years to live[1], and I don't think I will likely see that happen in my remaining time on earth.

Another way to prevent this issue is simply to have open computing platforms without significant barriers to running arbitrary software, and without any gatekeeper that can prevent them. This is mostly how computers have worked since their inception, and indeed is still how Apple's macOS machines work.

I am not saying that this model can prevent atrocities, but it can prevent companies like Apple from being complicit in those atrocities.

(But I think it's likely that this kind of platform model would benefit at-risk populations to some degree, too, because when there's no effective gatekeeper, there's no central point for a state actor wishing to do evil to apply pressure to.)

[1]: I just assume I will live to 100. :)

logicallee• 8 years ago

But Apple has to obey the laws of the United States. Here is an alternative viewpoint:

If Apple is based in the "right" country (that believes in freedom) -- and I think you and I seem to agree this is the case, because you don't mention anything bad about the U.S., mentioning only Russia and China by name, and with descriptions like "vile shit", "mass murder", "oppression" --, then the U.S. government should be doing whatever negotiations and interventions need to take place to keep foreign governments from forcing a U.S. company to do evil.

Here is an analogy. If you're CEO at a Fortune 500 American company, you don't have to make your life choices so that foreign governments can't blackmail you into doing evil, by kidnapping your family. Because the government protects you from that. If Tim Cook's family were abducted by China to force Tim Cook to have Apple do something... well this scenario is just completely implausible, the whole weight of the entire U.S. government would be all over it, it would be an international issue of immense proportions.

I think it's kind of up to the government to keep foreign companies from forcing American companies to do bad things.

jpetso• 8 years ago

It kind of isn't up to the U.S. government. It's about how you structure your organization to have the right incentives to do the right thing.

Apple and numerous other businesses are beholden to shareholders, whose #1 demand is profit. Many shareholders are located in the U.S. - so far, so good.

At some point, the business decides that more profit is best obtained through international expansion. Apple extracts money from Europe, China, Russia etc. and delivers the desired returns. Yay.

The flipside is that if those returns are in danger of disappearing, there's now an immense pressure to stop that from happening. I don't believe the U.S. government can even help Apple if they don't want to be helped - their primary incentive is not preservation of diversity and free speech, but satisfying the shareholders.

Possible fixes:

a) Avoid conflicts of interest. Apple is not an American company at this point, it's an international company. So, limit your market reach to regions that align with your principles, i.e. don't expand to Russia and China. Of course, this can never work because public companies are legally obligated to maximize shareholder returns. Which leads to,

b) Put incentives in place to prefer doing the right thing over the profitable thing, i.e. don't sell a voting majority of your business to investors who will sacrifice principles for money.

Both of these fixes mean sacrificing market share to other, less morally grounded businesses, because you don't get to be a world leader in selling stuff by playing fair. You can't go back to playing fair once you depend on being a world leader. Apple literally can't do anything about it because of what its incentives are, and if it aligned those differently then it wouldn't be the big Apple that we give a shit about.

I don't believe there's a solution to this except supporting a decentralized market and educating others about why that's important. Apple is a lost cause, they're at the point of no return. They couldn't fix it if they wanted to. Let's make sure they're only one of several viable options going forward.

veidr7• 8 years ago

I don't think the US government has the desire or ability to do that.

Also, I didn't mean to imply by omission that the United States government is not a bad actor. An evidence-based examination of the US government will reveal that it is (when taken as a whole) a deeply and objectively racist institution, has more people incarcerated than China and Russia combined, has killed far more civilians over the past 20 years than China and Russia combined, etc.

But as you say, American companies and individuals typically enjoy a far higher degree of freedom from governmental interference than their counterparts in (say) China and Russia.

So the reason I didn't mention the US government in this context is simply that they don't exert that type of control (at least, not yet) on platform companies like Apple.

Although parts of the US government are trying to ban encryption, and trying to force companies like Apple to create backdoors for the various secret police and law enforcement institutions, they don't seem to be successful with that so far.

volgo• 8 years ago

What about mass incarceration of black people (USA)? Should Apple play nicely with them too?

dane-pgp• 8 years ago

If your ecosystem is just console video games, say, it's not that big of a deal; you have to either censor some games or don't enter certain countries at all. Might be unfortunate, but its not a fundamental human rights issue.

Be careful of the ground you might concede to the censors. Freedom of expression is most certainly a fundamental human right:

https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/quotes/universal-declar...

It's easy to dismiss video games as "lesser" forms of art or expression, but we shouldn't underestimate the potential for games to convey significant social and political messages (both positive and negative).

In case a concrete example is needed of a thought-provoking video game with artistic merit, let me suggest this to those who haven't seen or played it:

http://www.papersplea.se/

ggg9990• 8 years ago

There isn’t a single source of truth on what is or isn’t a “fundamental human right.” It’s a matter of opinion that differs across time and geography.

veidr7• 8 years ago

You are right. That sounded more dismissive than I intended, and I agree on both counts; video games can be artistic masterpieces, and freedom of expression is a very important and fundamental human right.

So censorship of games is bad, too. But in my judgement, it is probably not going to rise the the level of interning or murdering people at scale.

Will check out the game. ;-)

jackson1way2• 8 years ago

mass murder of gay people (Russia)

any source on that? I have never heard about any murdering of gay people in russia.

Clearly, Russia is rather hostile to gay people. But "mass murder" requires a proper source. Or you you are walking on the Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction path.

veidr7• 8 years ago

Well, here are a few sources (I think the first one might be where I originally read about it, and realized the situation there was worse than I knew):

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2017-in-review/the-year-ru...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/27/russia-chechny...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_concentration_camps_in_Che...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/01/russia-rise-ho...

duxup• 8 years ago

But if your ecosystem is about general-purpose apps and communication tools, you become complicit to some degree in all sorts of vile shit; oppression and forced relocation of minorities (China), mass murder of gay people (Russia), etc.

I wonder if it would be possible to sort of fence off communication tools to a more open area of the ecosystem.... like everything in an curated app store.... then another space where it is a bit of the wild west but you don't control what is installed... sort of Android's ability to side load apps....

Granted this is convoluted and I guess there's nothing keeping that side channel from becoming all pirated apps from the other store....

well that thought experiment didn't work.

ezoe• 8 years ago

If they seriously believe that protecting customers security is important, they shall not encourage their user to use Apple products. Android is also bad for this.

jenga223• 8 years ago

Apple has now entered dangerous territory.

Over the last month they seem to have banned apps because some government out there didn't like that app. To make matters worse, those very same governments weren't happy with the app being removed from their regional app store but they demanded it removed from all app stores.

The VPN issue was a wake up call for a lot of developers. These apps were on the app store for years and because China didn't like these apps one morning, they banned it and referred to some arbitrary clause in the app store TOS.

The thing is this script has played out before. Twitter also had a vibrant ecosystem of third party developers. Those developers made Twitter into a billion dollar company. Then one morning, they decided certain classes of apps were not okay. This back and forth went on for months until there were barely any apps left. Twitter eventua

The same thing is happening with Apple. Several founders I've spoken to, all with big exits in the past, refuse to write apps first for Apple or Google because of the threat of getting "banned one morning".

Worse, VCs are now getting nervous in investing in startups where the app is the fundamental foundation of the business.

For any market to thrive, there needs to be transparency and stability. Just like Twitter, once developers are gone....they're gone. They won't come back and consumers will start wondering if the 1,000 dollar smartphone they purchased, with subpar apps, is really worth it.

aaronchall• 8 years ago

"Twitter eventua" what?

Purism's Librem 5 phone is funded and dev kits are only $400!

https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

I'm a little excited about this company.

walrus014• 8 years ago

Whilen I entirely agree with your point, I don't think that a comparison between the Apple and Twitter is suitable. One is a company that publishes an operating system, which is locked down and requires software installation through their Monopoly App Store ( which I find highly distasteful), the other one is a web-based social media thing. iOS as a product is in no way similar to twitter.

jenga223• 8 years ago

It's the same thing. iOS is controlled by Apple. Twitter's API is controlled by Twitter. Both invite developers to develop on their platform so they can reap the benefit of increased user functionality.

y_molodtsov11• 8 years ago

What’s distasteful about that? That’s their key differentiator that enabled a lot of their advantages. And there's also Android anyone could use if they’d want to.

gesman2• 8 years ago

> Worse, VCs are now getting nervous in investing in startups where the app is the fundamental foundation of the business.

Betting on startup whose business solely depends on a mercy of someone else's platform is a bad idea to begin with.

Qwertie6• 8 years ago

Thats the reality now. Many companies are based entirely on mobile apps. How would a service like uber work without relying on Android/iOS

y_molodtsov11• 8 years ago

I thought they just removed those VPNs apps from the China AppStore? Apple also blocked LinkedIn in Russian store as it’s banned by the government. But only in Russian.

That’s the key problem here, if what Telegram says is true and they’re blocking Telegram worldwide, it’s really different.

netheril96• 8 years ago

There are now plenty of VPN apps on iOS App Store China, some of which have literal "VPN" in their names. Many were removed, but then many new are added. For example, I used an App called Wingy to connect to my shadowsocks server, and that app was removed during the purge of VPN apps. But then other Wingy-like apps appear, and I am now using one of them.

I don't know what exactly has happened though. Is Apple defying China's government in secret now? Or are Chinese regulators only concerned with GFW bypass on some special days that has passed?

sb8244• 8 years ago

Is it possible that the intent is kept somewhat secretive and the review teams aren't aware of it? This would lead to new apps being approved but then catch-up happens and they're removed.

I am speculating and somewhat playing devil's advocate. My thought process is that Apple is huge, global, and communication is going to suffer sometimes for it.

jquast• 8 years ago

had to ban all the good vpn apps to make sure users would download the latest ones with all the latest backdoor tech!

yoz-y2• 8 years ago

AFAIK VPNs are not outright banned in China, rather, they have to follow regulation which enables the government to inspect the traffic.

jacksmith210063• 8 years ago

How is it any worse than Apple handing over all their user data in China to the government?

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy... Campaign targets Apple over privacy betrayal for Chinese iCloud ...

floatingatoll2• 8 years ago

The App Store guidelines [5] indicate that, with regard to a single app, the app author (Telegram) "must comply with all legal requirements". Telegram agreed to this requirement when they published their latest update two months ago, and so Telegram – not Apple – is liable for illegality.

Apple received a notice of illegality from Russia regarding Telegram, a third-party app. This notice was inappropriately delivered to Apple, who currently has no responsibility for Telegram. Telegram's compliance with Russian law is not Apple's problem unless a Russian court orders Apple to de-list Telegram. Until such an order occurs, Apple has no reason to de-list Telegram.

Therefore, I believe that Apple did three things:

[1] Apple temporarily suspended Telegram app updates worldwide after receiving a notice of illegality.

[2] Apple immediately forwarded the notice of illegality to Telegram, without any assertion of validity.

[3] Apple notified Telegram that they may resume updates by either declaring in writing to Apple that Telegram is legal in Russia or de-listing Telegram in Russia.

And Telegram did no things:

[4] Telegram has refused to declare in writing to Apple that Telegram is legal in Russia, and has refused to de-list Telegram in Russia.

And Telegram, after two months of refusing to act on [3], is trying to pressure Apple into giving up on [3] using the "woe is me" GDPR excuse.

[5] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#leg...

codedokode14• 8 years ago

"must comply with all legal requirements"

Every country has its own legal requirements. As Telegram is a British company I assume it must comply only with British laws, right?

y_molodtsov11• 8 years ago

Tell that to GDPR. I’m pretty sure Apple meant the compliance with the regulations of the countries where the app is available.

floatingatoll2• 8 years ago

Telegram may absolutely ignore non-British laws and refuse to concern itself with them. Independent of laws, Apple may refuse Telegram access to the App Store if a guideline is not met.

codedokode14• 8 years ago

Please note that Telegram is not a Russian company; it is registered in Great Britain. Russian government doesn't have any jurisdiction over it.

Also, russian users are less than 10% of Telegram userbase.

So now Apple is putting sanctions upon a British company just because Russia says so.

This sets a dangerous precedent. What will we see tomorrow? China, Thailand, Iran and North Korea kicking apps they don't like out of App Store? Apple banning apps on political grounds?

veidr7• 8 years ago

Apple already does ban apps on political grounds, even pretty innocuous just-the-facts type apps:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just...

And yes, I think you are likely right: we will see apps banned at the behest of the Chinese government, given the size of their market. (North Korea, perhaps not.)

Apple painted themselves into this corner when they decided to become the gatekeeper of what iPhone users are allowed to install.

y_molodtsov11• 8 years ago

We already see that, but it’s more subtle. They aren’t banning those apps worldwide, just delist them from their Chinese store.

konart• 8 years ago

At the same time alternative clients are getting their updates just fine (like Teleplus and Loopy).

saagarjha8• 8 years ago

There are a multitude of reason why this is the case. It might be that Telegram in particular did something that pissed Apple off, or that Apple is ignoring third-party clients.

glhaynes• 8 years ago

Tweet from Founder/CEO of Telegram: https://twitter.com/durov/status/1002653210245586944 ("Thank you @Apple and @tim_cook for letting us deliver the latest version of @telegram to millions of users, despite the recent setbacks.")

Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia

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