Spain has banned Telegram.

They are claiming this is over copyright violations of users, that Telegram is failing to police. Now some users will be forced to consider decentralized solutions. As I have repeated many times, Session messenger empowers users to defy state level censorship, with its unique blockchain based DNS that completely separates physical locations from identity. And our team has repeatedly mentioned using Session to defy a Monero ban.

With Session, if the location of the VPS or device is discovered, the user can rotate the blockchain name to a new public key. On the other hand, SimpleX, Tor Onions, or XMPP are tied to physical devices with encryption keys in memory, and their discovery is a game-over.

However, Session receives a lot of criticism. Rather than ignore this, I tackle it head on, https://simplifiedprivacy.com/spain-has-banned-telegram-defending-session/

Tor Browser Onion: http://privacypkybrxebcjicfhgwsb3coatqechwnc5xow4udxwa6jemylmyd.onion/spain-has-banned-telegram-defending-session/

  • black0ut@pawb.social
    51·
    3 months ago

    Spain has not really banned Telegram. It has instituted a temporary restriction while the company appeals. However, this restriction isn’t really enforceable, because it must be implemented within 3 hours of the ISPs receiving the ban notice. However, ISPs can only receive these notices oficially on working days, and right now they’re celebrating easter.

    Telegram has 3 days to appeal the ban, and it probably will appeal before ISPs start blocking it. The appeal will most probably be accepted (as Telegram is an important company, and many people there use it as their only messaging app).

    Thus, the ban will probably be lifted even before ISPs start blocking Telegram, unless something goes terribly wrong.

  • AriaVPN@monero.town
    1·
    3 months ago

    If anyone is interested…we’re building a VPN service which collects zero data and would love to trade some free trials for your feedback :)

  • gunnm@monero.town
    21·
    3 months ago

    I don’t think Telegram users are the kind to use decentralized solutions, they will rather use some proxy. I think it is still important for Monero community still being active on Telegram for more exposure.

  • azalty@jlai.luEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    I’m all for switching for Session, but it has some serious issues that can’t be ignore and that you didn’t talk about:

    • Messages fail to send WAY too often. On mobile it automatically retries to send the message so all good, but not on desktop / windows. Having to resend the same message 5 times for it to finally work is annoying
    • Notifications and message reception can be really delayed on mobile (android specifically), but goes faster on iOS than on desktop
    • Mobile apps have some accessibility issues like not scrolling down automatically when a new message is received while the conversation is open
    • The android app regularly crashes
    • the onion routing sometimes gets stuck on mobile. The solution is to close the app and wait for it to choose a new route
    • image quality sucks. Too much compression even with the best settings enabled

    These issues have been here for a couple of years now. That’s pretty annoying not to see any change and improvement

    • azalty@jlai.luEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Also the shadiness around the OXEN foundation doesn’t make me want to support them financially. A crypto on which they get a certain % of each block mined, and also have pre-mined currency? Heh, can’t support that