[HN Gopher] Telegram is about to be blocked here in Brazil
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Telegram is about to be blocked here in Brazil
Author : Cuintle
Score : 38 points
Date : 2022-03-18 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| pdimitar wrote:
| The world is gradually sliding into an authoritarian dystopia and
| nobody is willing to do anything about it.
|
| What a time to be alive.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Honestly I don't really see the dystopia here. Telegram refused
| to comply with legal court orders, and as a result the app
| can't operate in the country.
|
| Honestly to me this is less dystopian than having unaccountable
| business wholesale ignore the laws of a nation state, which
| Telegram seems to do just about anywhere. Not sure since when
| literally following the law qualified as authoritarianism.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I don't enjoy giving a-holes a platform but it's way too easy
| to just point at somebody, call them names that rile up the
| public, and de-platform them if they are inconvenient for
| you.
|
| Freedom of speech is important, even if it enables a-holes as
| a side effect.
|
| Furthermore, this seems like a classic case of political
| warfare where a company is dragged into the politicians'
| squabbles and is forced to pick a side. It's an impossible
| situation for any company involved and we already know even
| Facebook and Google and Apple gave in.
|
| The "legal court orders" are super easy to craft when you're
| ruling the country so don't give me that, it's not a good
| argument at all. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden were also
| "legally" persecuted. Or will you now say they shouldn't have
| done what they did?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Freedom of speech is important, even if it enables a-holes
| as a side effect
|
| many things are important and all of them have in common
| that they find their limits within the bounds of the law.
| Brazil has a different take on freedom of speech than the
| US. You can argue about the details of this particular case
| of course and whether it's politized or not, but it isn't
| authoritarian at all to demand that tat a tech company acts
| within regulations. A Russian dude running a company out of
| Dubai by American speech standards is a nice cosmopolitan
| tale but has little relevance in Brazil.
|
| >Or will you now say they shouldn't have done what they
| did?
|
| Yes I think they should not have done what they did, or
| slightly more nuanced, if they thought it was ethical to do
| what they did, they should have accepted the punishment.
| Assange's wholesale dump in particular was damaging not
| just to US national security but also civilians who
| assisted American forces and whose identity was exposed,
| but that's another discussion.
| Bancakes wrote:
| Because the courts are abusing their powers and working
| against the citizens.
| Cuintle wrote:
| Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the
| suspension of messaging app Telegram, following a request from
| the country's federal police, local news broadcasters TV Globo
| and CNN Brasil both reported on Friday.
| henriquemaia wrote:
| > The decision comes after the messaging app, which is widely
| used by Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and his
| allies, failed to respond to court orders to block certain
| accounts that had been found to disseminate disinformation,
| Globo reported.
|
| What is really happening? This is as _ad hominem_ as it can
| get. Boo! Bolsonaro uses it, so block it. So maybe this is an
| oversimplification of the real reason. Anyway, I don't get it.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Brazil has some laws about what app's 'are permitted to do'.
| Whatsapp was blocked more than once, but eventually complied;
| Telegram didn't.
| adontz wrote:
| Russia totally failed to block Telegram, lets see what Brazil can
| do.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia
|
| https://meduza.io/en/cards/russia-is-trying-to-block-telegra...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-telegram-ban-idUSK...
| marcodiego wrote:
| Doesn't seems like a big problem for me, I can use via tor. But
| it will be hard or impracticable to convince everybody I know to
| do the same.
| maronato wrote:
| > But it will be hard or impracticable to convince everybody I
| know to do the same.
|
| That's why it is a problem. Messaging apps are for messaging
| people
| henriquecm8 wrote:
| There's a fine for anyone that tries to bypass this, a
| reasonable R$ 100,000.00 per day, and other punishments.
| Bancakes wrote:
| Nobody will know you're using tor.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| That's $20,000/day for anyone wondering. Seems like they mean
| business.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| Brazil is the B in BRIC ?
| marcodiego wrote:
| Yes. Actually, Brazil is the B in BRICS. S is for South Africa.
| maronato wrote:
| And just like that, Facebook processes every message sent between
| every Brazilian.
| joshxyz wrote:
| From Durov's Channel at Telegram:
|
| "It seems that we had an issue with emails going between our
| telegram.org corporate addresses and the Brazilian Supreme Court.
| As a result of this miscommunication, the Court ruled to ban
| Telegram for being unresponsive.
|
| On behalf of our team, I apologize to the Brazilian Supreme Court
| for our negligence. We definitely could have done a better job.
|
| We complied with an earlier court decision in late February and
| responded with a suggestion to send future takedown requests to a
| dedicated email address. Unfortunately, our response must have
| been lost, because the Court used the old general-purpose email
| address in further attempts to reach us. As a result, we missed
| its decision in early March that contained a follow-up takedown
| request. Luckily, we have now found and processed it, delivering
| another report to the Court today.
|
| Because tens of millions of Brazilians rely on Telegram to
| communicate with family, friends and colleagues, I ask the Court
| to consider delaying its ruling for a few days at its discretion
| to allow us to remedy the situation by appointing a
| representative in Brazil and setting up a framework to react to
| future pressing issues like this in an expedited manner.
|
| The last 3 weeks have been unprecedented for the world and for
| Telegram. Our content moderation team was flooded with requests
| from multiple parties. However, I am certain that once a reliable
| channel of communication is established, we'll be able to
| efficiently process takedown requests for public channels that
| are illegal in Brazil."
|
| https://t.me/durov/180
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(page generated 2022-03-18 23:01 UTC)