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Thoughts from the CEO / Founder / Product Manager of Telegram.
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You already know Telegram has your back when it comes to privacy. Another human right we feel passionately about is the freedom of speech. In some countries Telegram is the only popular platform for independent sources of information. Take Iran for example, where the BBC is blocked, but its @bbcpersian channel has been active for years and attracted almost a million followers. There are thousands of large Telegram channels that are critical of their governments.

Telegram has never yielded to pressure from officials who wanted us to perform political censorship. Freedom of speech is one of the values we’ve been defending for the last 11 years, first in Russia, and then globally.

Of course, there are rules that admins of Telegram channels should respect, for example, Telegram ToS prohibit publicly promoting violence in any form. This is why this October alone we have blocked over 8,500 channels related to terrorism (more stats in @isiswatch).

Another recent example of a line one shouldn’t cross is an Iranian channel that started to urge its members to throw stones into the windows of public buildings and vehicles (schools, temples, buses) and film it. We got in touch with the channel admins and asked them to stop this vandalism contest; not only did they ignore us, but launched another creepy competition urging their 100K+ users to burn mosques by throwing Molotov cocktails into them and film it. As a result, we were left with no other options but to block their channel.

For us, the line is pretty straightforward. Criticizing local authorities, challenging the status quo and engaging in political debate are OK. Meanwhile, promoting violence and calling for actions that can harm innocent people are not OK. This is a rule of thumb we’re always applying when moderating public channels.
Happy Winter Solstice! May your wishes come true 🌟
Happy New Year, everyone! 🎉
I hope you enjoyed the Telegram product updates this December. Stay tuned – we are going to make 3 big announcements in January.

On a less joyful note, Iranian authorities started blocking Telegram in Iran today after we publicly refused to shut down channels of peaceful Iranian protesters, such as @sedaiemardom.

We are proud that Telegram is used by thousands of massive opposition channels all over the world. We consider freedom of speech an undeniable human right, and would rather get blocked in a country by its authorities than limit peaceful expression of alternative opinions.

When it comes to freedom of speech, Telegram is as unrestricted as a mobile app can get. In 2015, after Apple and Google reached out to us in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, we added the simplest Terms of Service theoretically possible in an app: no calls for violence, no porn and no copyright infringement on public broadcast channels.

Since then, Telegram has been blocking hundreds of violent public channels daily (including those reported in @isiswatch), making sure our rules are applied equally and fairly to all players, regardless of their size and political affiliation.

Yesterday we had to suspend @amadnews, a public channel that started calling its subscribers to use Molotov cocktails and firearms against police. The admins of the channel reached out to us after the fact, apologizing for breaking our rules and pledging not to promote violence in the future. As a result, they have been able to reassemble most of their subscribers (800,000) in a new peaceful channel, which we welcomed.

Obviously, our neutrality and refusal to take sides in such conflicts can create powerful enemies. Iranian officials have filed criminal charges against me back in September for letting Telegram spread “uncensored news” and “extremist propaganda”. Today they imposed a block on Telegram – not clear whether permanent or temporary.

And yet, doing the right thing is more important than trying to avoid having enemies. We’re extremely lucky to have been able to consistently apply our principles in 2017. We will continue doing it in 2018 – and beyond.
The Kaspersky antivirus company claimed today they found a “0-day vulnerability on Telegram for Windows”, which affected “1000 users before it was fixed”.

As always, reports from antivirus companies must be taken with a grain of salt, as they tend to exaggerate the severity of their findings to get publicity in mass media. Telegram Geeks, a community of Telegram fans, gave a good explanation of what it really was about:
Forwarded from Telegram Geeks
▶️ Our two cents:

Well, this is not a real vulnerability on Telegram Desktop, no one can remotely take control of your computer or Telegram unless you open a malicius file.

This kind of vulnerability is based on social engineering.

In fact, it was a .js file hidden on a a .png file, this happened thanks to RTL characters.

Windows users must click on the Run dialog in order to install the malware.

So don't worry, unless you opened a malicius file, you have always been safe.

ℹ️ @geeksChannel
Happy Valentine's Day! I see some good art in trending stickers, be sure to check it out.
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This week, over 700,000 new users are signing up for Telegram each day. The annual user growth of Telegram surpassed 70% YoY in most markets.

With so many new people joining, not every user may have a clear understanding about what Telegram stands for.

That’s why when announcing the 200M milestone last week, I used the opportunity to write a bit about the values of Telegram and what drives us forward.

https://telegram.org/blog/200-million
Every service growing too fast is bound to experience growing pains; unfortunately, Telegram is no exception, although we strive to be one.

Many of our European users noticed connection issues earlier today. Those were caused by planned maintenance by our data center provider, which unfortunately lead to unplanned downtime. Thanks to Telegram’s distributed infrastructure, Americas and East Asia were not affected by the issues.

We sincerely apologize for the inconveniences this might have caused – we know tens of millions of Europeans rely on Telegram for communication with their colleagues and loved ones.

To make sure such disruptions don’t happen again, we have established a more direct and real-time communication between our engineers and the data center electricians, and, more importantly, started upgrading our power-related equipment to add even more redundancy.

Thank you for your support and patience during this time.
The power that local governments have over IT corporations is based on money. At any given moment, a government can crash their stocks by threatening to block revenue streams from its markets and thus force these companies to do strange things (remember how last year Apple moved iCloud servers to China).

At Telegram, we have the luxury of not caring about revenue streams or ad sales. Privacy is not for sale, and human rights should not be compromised out of fear or greed.
For the last 24 hours Telegram has been under a ban by internet providers in Russia. The reason is our refusal to provide encryption keys to Russian security agencies. For us, this was an easy decision. We promised our users 100% privacy and would rather cease to exist than violate this promise.

Despite the ban, we haven’t seen a significant drop in user engagement so far, since Russians tend to bypass the ban with VPNs and proxies. We also have been relying on third-party cloud services to remain partly available for our users there.

Thank you for your support and loyalty, Russian users of Telegram. Thank you, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft – for not taking part in political censorship.

Russia accounts for ~7% of the Telegram user base, and even if we lose that entire market, Telegram’s organic growth in other regions will compensate for this loss within a couple of months. However, it is important for me personally to make sure we do everything we can for our Russian users.

To support internet freedoms in Russia and elsewhere I started giving out bitcoin grants to individuals and companies who run socks5 proxies and VPN. I am happy to donate millions of dollars this year to this cause, and hope that other people will follow. I called this Digital Resistance – a decentralized movement standing for digital freedoms and progress globally.
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For 7 days Russia has been trying to ban Telegram on its territory – with no luck so far. I’m thrilled we were able to survive under the most aggressive attempt of internet censorship in Russian history with almost 18 million IP addresses blocked.

If you live in Russia and support free internet, fly a paper plane from your window at 7 PM local time today. Please collect the airplanes in your neighborhood an hour later – remember, today is Earth Day.

My thanks to all the members of the #DigitalResistance movement. Keep up your great work setting up socks5-proxies and VPNs and spreading them among your Russian friends and relatives. They will be needed as the country descends into an era of full-scale internet censorship.
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Thank you for the support, Russia! This could become a Sunday tradition. Please don’t forget to clean up ✈️👍🏽
Thank you, each and every one of the 12,000+ people who stood up to support the freedom of internet and Telegram today in central Moscow.
https://goo.gl/fEFtQb
Unfortunately, some Telegram features, such as stickers, don’t work correctly under iOS 11.4 that was just released – even though we fixed this issue weeks ago.

Apple has been preventing Telegram from updating its iOS apps globally ever since the Russian authorities ordered Apple to remove Telegram from the App Store. 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. We believe we did the only possible thing, preserving the right of our users to privacy in a troubled country.

Unfortunately, Apple didn’t side with us. While Russia makes up only 7% of Telegram’s userbase, Apple is restricting updates for all Telegram users around the world since mid-April. As a result, we’ve also been unable to fully comply with GDPR for our EU-users by the deadline of May 25, 2018. We are continuing our efforts to resolve the situation and will keep you updated.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
🎉 Amazing news – Apple has just successfully reviewed our latest update for Telegram iOS, and we were able to ship a new version with long awaited fixes and improvements to the AppStore.

Thank you, Apple! 🍏