Subj : Oh.. and I forgot to ask, is Telegram th
To   : August Abolins
From : Nil Alexandrov
Date : Sun Sep 13 2020 05:14:44

Hello, August!

Sunday September 13 2020 04:42, from August Abolins -> Charles Pierson:

 AA> Oh.. and I forgot to ask, is Telegram the only one among the other
 AA> messenger apps that is open-source?

It's actually a bit tricky. Telegram demonstrates transparency and provides the source code, though nobody knows for sure whether the app in the store is built from the sources without any patches.

A bit of a history. Russian government asked Telegram to share the cryptographic keys. Telegram rejected to cooperate and stated that end-to-end cryptography does not have such centralized keys to decrypt the whole traffic. There was a court order to block Telegram in Russia and all ISPs added some traffic filters. All those IP filters caused a lot of troubles to non-Telegram services hosted on AWS and other platforms. It was a long war and Telegram traffic was always able to sneak behind all those filters. Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram emigrated from Russia.

This year something happened and Durov started writing kinda stupid articles, bitching about miserable live in the US including healthcare, police, education system and taxation. Recently he was talking shit about Apple and Google 30% app store commission and how cruel they are. Anyway, suddenly Russian government has removed the ban and Telegram was unblocked in Russia. It was sort of weird way of resolving the issue, because the legal case against Telegram was not dropped, but it was government direct order to unblock. It definitely shows Durov cooperation.

Best Regards, Nil
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