SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Telegram, the encrypted messaging app that's prized by those seeking privacy, lost a bid before Russia's Supreme Court to block security services from getting access to users' data, giving President Vladimir Putin a victory in his effort to keep tabs on electronic communications.
Supreme Court Judge Alla Nazarova on Tuesday rejected Telegram's appeal against the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB spy agency which last year asked the company to share its encryption keys. Telegram declined to comply and was hit with a fine [paywall] of $14,000. Communications regulator Roskomnadzor said Telegram now has 15 days to provide the encryption keys.
[...] "Threats to block Telegram unless it gives up private data of its users won't bear fruit. Telegram will stand for freedom and privacy," Pavel Durov, the company's founder, said on his Twitter page.
Putin signed laws in 2016 on fighting terrorism, which included a requirement for messaging services to provide the authorities with means to decrypt user correspondence. Telegram challenged an auxiliary order by the Federal Security Service, claiming that the procedure doesn't involve a court order and breaches constitutional rights for privacy, according to documents.
[...] The court decision is intended to make one of the last holdouts among communications companies bow to Putin's efforts to track electronic messaging. Durov in June registered the service with the state communications watchdog after it was threatened with a ban over allegations that terrorists used it to plot a suicide-bomb attack.
What I find interesting is that Telegram has encryption keys to give them. If they do, then in my opinion they're doing it wrong.
Source: Bloomberg
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday March 24 2018, @12:19AM
LOL. That would be something. I don't expect this kind of Linux phone to take off initially, but I do expect brisk sales simply because it is entirely open, may have physical rocker switches for mic/cam inputs, and is being designed such that the carrier module can be replaced.
The thing is, it will be orders of magnitude better in terms of security/stability because it's not carrier locked, and not locked away from user. Right now there are people operating on ancient versions of Android, replete with all the vulnerabilities, that can't really upgrade because the carriers aren't trying to be responsible sys admins. They're in to make money, and long term support of a device, it's drivers, the operating system, is simply way too costly in the eyes of the hellbound avaricious execuscum.
It's really, really, hard to get a system with full and absolute root privileges, much less binary/blob free. The LibrePhone promises me:
I don't expect them take over the phone market, but I expect them to sell plenty of units to geek/privacy oriented people. That and anybody that gets well and truly fucked from playing with unsafe operating systems like iOS and Android.
This may be a different situation where the year of Linux on the smartphone might not be that far away.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.