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It’s been 23 years since I first used a private messaging service, and 16 years since I first built my own. The number of electronic private conversations I’ve had over those years is enormous. I am certain this is also the case for you. Over the last 10…

2018 was a great year for Telegram, but 2019 is going to be by far the most important one in our company's history.

In 2018, more and more people discovered Telegram and switched to it from services run by ad-selling IT monopolies.

As a result, Telegram became one of the few messaging apps that are enjoying significant growth globally.

Building on the success of the last year, this year we are going to implement many long-awaited product changes you have been asking for.

2019 will be the time when feature-related wishes of our users come true.

It’s been 23 years since I first used a private messaging service, and 16 years since I first built my own. The number of electronic private conversations I’ve had over those years is enormous. I am certain this is also the case for you.

Over the last 10-20 years, each of us exchanged millions of messages with thousands of people. Most of those communication logs are stored somewhere in other people’s inboxes, outside of our reach. Relationships start and end, but messaging histories with ex-friends and ex-colleagues remain available forever.

It’s getting worse. Within the next few decades, the volume of our private data stored by our chat partners will easily quadruple.

An old message you already forgot about can be taken out of context and used against you decades later. A hasty text you sent to a girlfriend in school can come haunt you in 2030 when you decide to run for mayor. We have to admit: Despite all of our progress in encryption and privacy, we have very little actual control of our data. We can’t go back in time and erase things for other people.

Well, we couldn’t. Until today. Starting today, we are allowing every Telegram user to delete any message in a private conversation from both sides. It doesn’t matter who sent the message and when – you have complete control over it. You can even wipe out the whole conversation from both sides if you want to. No trace will be left on either side.

We know some people may get concerned about the potential misuse of this feature or about the permanence of their chat histories. We thought carefully through those issues, but we think having control over your own digital footprint should be paramount.

Looking through my Telegram inbox now, there’s not much I would want to delete for both sides. And yet, for the first time in 23 years of private messaging, I feel truly free and in control.

I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.

Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.

🎉 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! 🍏

We’ve just started Instant View 2.0 Competition – our crowdsourcing contest with a prize fund of $300,000, ending on the 4th of April.

The goal is to create sets of rules (“templates”) that are used to generate beautiful “Instant View” previews for links shared on Telegram. Anyone with an understanding of HTML/CSS can participate. Participants get $100 for each correct template + $10,000 and $5,000 to top 2 contributors.

Check out the rules here – https://instantview.telegram.org/contest

We’ll launch more similar competitions for developers soon. Eventually there’ll be a competition for everything we do (Android, C++, voice calls etc). Winners get mighty prizes and a chance to join our dev team.

Stay tuned – we’ll announce the next competition within 10 days.

Instant View Platform

Template Competition 2.0

We are holding a new $300,000+ 2-month competition (4 Feb 2019 - 4 April 2019) to create Instant View Templates for news websites and blogs, $100 per template. Everyone is welcome to participate!

In May, I predicted that backdoors in WhatsApp would keep getting discovered, and one serious security issue would follow another, as it did in the past [1]. This week a new backdoor was quietly found in WhatsApp [2]. Just like the previous WhatsApp backdoor and the one before it, this new backdoor made all data on your phone vulnerable to hackers and government agencies. All a hacker had to do was send you a video – and all your data was at the attacker’s mercy [3].

WhatsApp doesn’t only fail to protect your WhatsApp messages – this app is being consistently used as a Trojan horse to spy on your non-WhatsApp photos and messages. Why would they do it? Facebook has been part of surveillance programs long before it acquired WhatsApp [4][5]. It is naive to think the company would change its policies after the acquisition, which has been made even more obvious by the WhatsApp founder’s admission regarding the sale of WhatsApp to Facebook: “I sold my users’ privacy” [6].

Following the discovery of this week’s backdoor, Facebook tried to confuse the public by claiming they had no evidence that the backdoor had been exploited by hackers [7]. Of course, they have no such evidence – in order to obtain it, they would need to be able to analyze videos shared by WhatsApp users, and WhatsApp doesn’t permanently store video files on its servers (instead, it sends unencrypted messages and media of the vast majority of their users straight to Google’s and Apple’s servers [8]). So – nothing to analyze – “no evidence”. Convenient.

But rest assured, a security vulnerability of this magnitude is bound to have been exploited – just like the previous WhatsApp backdoor had been used against human rights activists and journalists naive enough to be WhatsApp users [9][10]. It was reported in September that the data obtained as a result of the exploitation of such WhatsApp backdoors will now be shared with other countries by US agencies [11][12].

Despite this ever-increasing evidence of WhatsApp being a honeypot for people that still trust Facebook in 2019, it might also be the case that WhatsApp just accidentally implements critical security vulnerabilities across all their apps every few months. I doubt that – Telegram, a similar app in its complexity, hasn’t had any issues of WhatsApp-level severity in the six years since its launch. It’s very unlikely that anyone can accidentally commit major security errors, conveniently suitable for surveillance, on a regular basis.

Regardless of the underlying intentions of WhatsApp’s parent company, the advice for their end-users is the same: unless you are cool with all your photos and messages becoming public one day, you should delete WhatsApp from your phone.

[1] – Why WhatsApp will never be secure

[2] – WhatsApp users urged to update app immediately over spying fears

[3] – WhatsApp Android and iOS users are now at risk from malicious video files

[4] – Everything you need to know about PRISM

[5] – NSA taps data from 9 major Net firms

[6] – WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton: 'I sold my users' privacy'

[7] – Hackers can use a WhatsApp flaw in the way it handles video to take control of your phone

[8] – WhatsApp is storing unencrypted backup data on Google Drive

[9] – WhatsApp hack led to targeting of 100 journalists and dissidents

[10] – Exclusive: Government officials around the globe targeted for hacking through WhatsApp - sources

[11] – Police can access suspects’ Facebook and WhatsApp messages in deal with US

[12] – Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.

Telegram turns 6 years today. Throughout these years, Telegram stood up for freedom and privacy. We defended what we believe in against tyrannies, kleptocracies and corporations.

Today, 6 years after launch, Telegram is the third largest global messaging app in terms of the number of countries where Telegram is in top 10 Social Networking apps.

Let us celebrate today. Tomorrow we’ll get back to building new features. There’s a lot of exciting work left to do.

I don’t like to focus on competitors. But since people keep asking me about WhatsApp, I have just written this post. It includes my thoughts on them. It also includes my thoughts on us. Enjoy.

https://telegra.ph/Why-WhatsApp-Will-Never-Be-Secure-05-15

Telegraph – Pavel Durov

Why WhatsApp Will Never Be Secure

The world seems to be shocked by the news that WhatsApp turned any phone into spyware. Everything on your phone – including photos, emails and texts – could be accessed by attackers just because you had WhatsApp installed [1].   This news didn’t surprise…

Those of you who follow my posts know that I’m a big believer in self-restraint. In the last 15 years, I’ve had no alcohol, no caffeine, no meat, no pills, and no fast food. Health-wise it brought good results: I only had a fever once in the last 15 years. Typically, I just don’t get ill.

A year ago I added more restrictions to my diet: no gluten, no dairy, no eggs, no fructose. I did it to achieve higher productivity and clarity of thought, as well as to train will power and self-discipline.

Another technique I employ to improve will power is swimming in ice-cold water every winter in Finland or Switzerland. If you ever faced the necessity to stay in a lake with a thin layer of ice on top for a few minutes, you are less likely to procrastinate when it comes to starting on a boring but necessary project.

In May I limited the foods I eat to fish and seafood only. In case you have daily access to fresh wild-caught fish, I can definitely recommend this diet for boosting productivity. Unlike farmed meat or the products of agriculture, which were introduced to our diet fairly recently (like 15,000 years ago), wild fish cooked on fire is something our ancestors evolved to consume throughout the last million of years. As humans required a daily source of water, they had to live near rivers and lakes, so a seagan diet makes much more sense to me than veganism or rawism from an evolutionary perspective.

This month I’m trying something more radical, with consuming no food at all. I’ve been on a water fast for the last 6 days and am feeling great so far. Since zero food consumption improves clarity of thought, I also got many things done on the product-management side.

Fasting is a great way to allow your digestive system to clean and reboot, and also to allow your immune system to work on other things than clearing the constantly incoming food. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to do with no food for prolonged periods of time, so our body is not only evolved for that, but is actually expecting us to give it a break in consumption at least once a year. That’s why most religions have a tradition of fasting – it’s healthy and necessary both for the body and the mind.

Obviously, I might lose some muscle mass as a result, but I believe that if I manage to come up with new great ideas for Telegram during the fast, it will be beneficial for all of the millions of Telegram users. And making the lives of our users more enjoyable has been and will be my number one priority.

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.

🥳

iCloud is now officially a surveillance tool. Apps that are relying on it to store your private messages (such as WhatsApp) are part of the problem https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-for-encrypting-backups-after-fbi-complained-sources-idUSKBN1ZK1CT

Reuters

Exclusive: Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained - sources

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc (AAPL.O) dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices in the company’s iCloud service after the FBI complained that the move would harm investigations, six sources familiar with the matter told…

Today the Russian authorities tried to hack 4 journalists covering the Ekaterinburg protests. Fortunately, all those attempts have failed due to the 2-step verification check.

This serves as a reminder that authoritarian governments will stop at nothing to violate their citizens' privacy. We urge users in such countries to double check that they have 2-step verification set up.

Stay safe and stay strong 💪🏾

Last week at Telegram was intense – we’ve been busy polishing the rough spots in our new iOS app and fighting connection issues with little time left for sleep. Yet, there’s no other company in the world I would rather work at. At Telegram, we have the rare freedom to do what our users expect us to do, standing up for their interests.

The recent exodus of WhatsApp founders is a good example of what you end up with if you sell your company. You can earn some money, but you lose something much more valuable – your integrity and the ability to continue improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Last week, it became known that WhatsApp has had a backdoor for years – anybody you had a video call with could potentially read all your messages. Even if there are no more backdoors left (which seems unlikely), WhatsApp has other flaws which make most of the messages sent via the app accessible to third parties.

In the long run, promises given by corporations like Facebook just don't materialize, because these corporations prioritize maximizing profits over serving their users. And that’s what makes Telegram so different – the only thing that will ever matter to us is your interests.

Happy to announce the arrival of auto-playing videos on Telegram for iOS and Android. It's flavored with improved auto-download settings and multiple account support on all mobile platforms. Enjoy Telegram 5.4!

Finally some good news for our Iranian users.

A couple of weeks ago Telegram stopped working in Iran, so I assumed we had been blocked there. However, service has since returned to normal, and the Iranian Ministry of Information and Communication declared they were not going to block Telegram.

The interruption of service, they say, was due to the disruption of cables connecting Iran with the rest of the world (Suez Canal, Mandeb Strait + Iran-Turkey cables), and the poor connectivity affected most western services in Iran – not just Telegram. 

Moreover, the government denied that they required any kind of spying tools from Telegram, saying that the demand I received was fake and not authorized by any higher authorities.

I’d like to believe that this is true – it would mean that the Iranian people will continue to be able to use what I maintain is the best messaging service on the market. And since our system administrators confirm that the Iranian government’s report of cable disruption is probable, my earlier claim about Telegram getting blocked may have been inaccurate (or at least premature). 

In that case, sorry for the false alarm, everyone. It’s easy to misinterpret the situation in markets that have a history of internet censorship – you might have heard that Facebook and Twitter have been blocked in Iran for a few years. However, this doesn’t mean that Telegram can't be blocked there in the future.

Iranian authorities made it clear that they would block Telegram if it contained publicly available porn, i.e. porn bots and porn channels. If this is the only matter that poses a concern, there will hardly be any problem, since we already block most porn bots and channels anyway due to App Store restrictions. 

Anyway, the bottom line: we’re good in Iran. For now. And let’s hope for the best ????

My motto is “Never be afraid”. Even when an app's icons are trying to scare you. Happy Halloween! 🎃

P.S. To see those icons, you'll need to have the latest version of Telegram for iOS installed.

Cycling around Saimaa for 370km got us to Kummakivi, the balancing rock. This 7-meter long stone was left standing here by the Ice Age (or the Giants, whichever version you prefer).

Some tech media reported that the Telegram Desktop app wasn’t secure because it “leaked IP addresses” when used to accept a voice call.

The reality is much less sensational – Telegram Desktop was at least as secure as other encrypted VoIP apps even before we improved it by adding an option to disable peer-to-peer calls. As for Telegram calls on mobile, they were always more secure than the competition, because they had this setting since day one.

During a peer-to-peer (P2P) call, voice traffic flows directly from one participant of a call to the other without relying on an intermediary server. P2P routing allows to achieve higher quality calls with lower latency, so the current industry standard is to have P2P switched on by default.

However, there’s a catch: by definition, both devices participating in a P2P call have to know the IP addresses of each other. So if you make or accept a call, the person on the other side may in theory learn your IP address.

That’s why, unlike WhatsApp or Viber, Telegram always gave its users the ability to switch off P2P calls and relay them through a Telegram server. Moreover, in most countries we switched off P2P by default.

Telegram Desktop, which is used in less than 0.01% of Telegram calls, was the only platform where this setting was missing. Thanks to a researcher who pointed that out, we made the Telegram Desktop experience consistent with the rest of our apps.

However, it is important to put this into perspective and realize that this is about one Telegram app (Telegram Desktop) being somewhat less secure than other Telegram apps (e.g. Telegram for iOS or Android). If you compare Telegram with other popular messaging services out there, unfortunately, they are not even close to our standards.

Using the terminology from the flashy headlines, WhatsApp, Viber and the rest have been “leaking your IP address” in 100% of calls. They are still doing this, and you can't opt out. The only way to stop this is to have all your friends switch to Telegram.

Yesterday we shipped the fourth major update of Telegram in the last 2 months. This time we radically improved chat backgrounds.

It seems iOS users have to wait a while to get the update, because the App Store has been experiencing issues since yesterday. I expect that Apple is going to get their issues sorted out in the next few hours as Cupertino is waking up.

Fortunately, Google doesn’t have such outages, so Android users can enjoy Telegram v5.3 right away. As for their less fortunate iOS counterparts, they are welcome to have a look at the sneak peak below to get a taste of what’s coming.

For the past several years, we’ve been fighting the spread of terrorist content on Telegram. We’ve been doing it in a way that is consistent with our values and Privacy Policy. While some pundits quite irresponsibly suggested that absolute privacy and counter-terrorism efforts are mutually exclusive, the success of our regular anti-terror actions prove that this is not the case.

Yesterday Europol recognized our continuous efforts in their statement:

“Telegram is no place for violence, criminal activity and abusers. The company has put forth considerable effort to root out the abusers of the platform by both bolstering its technical capacity in countering malicious content and establishing close partnerships with international organisations such as Europol. 

Thanks to this collaboration, the already-existing content referral tools available to Telegram’s users have been strengthened and expanded. Now, any user is able to refer and classify the content they find inappropriate and violent via the referral feature in public groups and channels. In addition, new technical developments, such as the advanced automated content detection system, continue to strengthen Telegram’s effort in obliterating extremism on the platform even further.”

This follows another Europol report dedicated to the Referral Action Day, in which several tech companies including Telegram took part:

“Whilst Google and Instagram deployed resilience mechanisms across their services, Telegram was the online service provider receiving most of the referral requests during this Action Day. As a result, a significant portion of key actors within the IS network on Telegram was pushed away from the platform. 
 
In the past year and a half, Telegram has also put forth considerable effort to root out the abusers of the platform by both bolstering its technical capacity in countering malicious content and by establishing a close partnership with Europol.”

As I have made clear before, ISIS and their likes will have a hard time on Telegram if they continue to spread their message of violence and hatred. After the ISIS attacks in Europe we have zero tolerance for their propaganda on our platform. At the same time, we’ll continue to defend our users' absolute right to privacy like no other service, proving that you don’t have to sacrifice privacy for security. You can – and should – enjoy both.

Telegram

ISIS Watch

This channel publishes daily updates on banned terrorist content. Report content via the in-app button or by emailing [email protected]

Although I normally don't watch football matches, I am very happy to hear France has won the World Cup ⚽

I am a big admirer of French culture, art, design, architecture, cuisine, history and language.

France is certain to play an even larger role in the world culture and economy in years to come 🇫🇷

Recent events showed once again that all WhatsApp users are at risk. My thoughts – https://telegra.ph/Why-Using-WhatsApp-Is-Dangerous-01-30-4

Telegraph – Pavel Durov

Why Using WhatsApp Is Dangerous

A few months ago I wrote about a WhatsApp backdoor that allowed hackers to access all data on any phone running WhatsApp [1]. Facebook, its parent company, claimed at the time that they had no proof the flaw had ever been used by attackers [2].  Last week…

Today is a sad day for us here at Telegram. We are announcing the discontinuation of our blockchain project. Below is a summary of what it was and why we had to abandon it.

https://telegra.ph/What-Was-TON-And-Why-It-Is-Over-05-12

Telegraph – Pavel Durov

What Was TON And Why It Is Over

For the last 2,5 years some of our best engineers have been working on a next-generation blockchain platform called TON and a cryptocurrency we were going to name Gram. TON was designed to share the principles of decentralization pioneered by Bitcoin and…

As you might have heard, for the last couple of years we’ve been quietly rebuilding Telegram for iOS from scratch with Swift – a programming language released by Apple as a faster alternative to Objective C.

The Swift version of Telegram looks exactly as the old one, but is faster, slicker and more battery-friendly than the good old Telegram (which was already great considering it outperformed other messaging apps in speed).

This new Telegram has been available for everyone to download under the name “Telegram X” since January. Thousands of users have been testing it and sharing their feedback with us, so thanks to them the app is now much more polished than a few months ago. While we are still putting some finishing touches on it, it seems that the new Telegram is ready to be shipped to every Telegram user on iOS.

That’s why within the next week or two we are planning to update the default Telegram iOS App with the Swift version. As a result, Telegram will become faster, slicker and more efficient. Since it will rely on an entirely new codebase, some minor bugs and glitches might occur, but we’ll make sure they are quickly – or should I say “swiftly” – fixed.

This change will make Telegram the most popular messaging app written fully in Swift. Some would say it’s a big risk, but I think somebody has to take such risks and be the first to implement new technologies, such as e2e encryption – or Swift.

Happy Winter Solstice! May your wishes come true ✨????

Telegram keeps growing at a rate of ~50% annually in DAU. This extraordinary growth, unfortunately, still comes with certain growing pains.

Yesterday from 1PM to 2PM GMT about 15% of users who were online at that time experienced connection issues on Telegram. This disruption mainly affected users from Germany, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus.

We apologize for each of the messages we failed to deliver during that hour. We are striving to make our platform as reliable as possible. We are proud that, even despite some attempts to disrupt its availability (like the DDoS from China in June), every year Telegram becomes less prone to such issues.

This month we have verified and promoted 17 official news sources, representing Ministries of Health in 17 countries (the constantly growing list is available in @corona). We did this as part of our anti-covid19 initiative announced in early April. While Telegram is not exactly famous for cooperating with government officials, we decided to make one exception globally to help spread information about the virus.

The current pandemic is a threat to our entire species. When it ends, the world will not return to normal. We may witness a civilizational shift that will ripple through generations. It is up to all of us to ensure that the new world about to be born is a better place than the one we're leaving behind.

This is a chance for people to use their time in isolation to create a better version of themselves – and a chance for technology to prove its worth for humanity. I believe we at Telegram should do all we can not only to help contain the pandemic and combat the spread of unverified information – but also to find new ways of moving forward.

For this reason, in addition to providing informational support, we’ll try to contribute to tackling the problem of education under lockdown. We also have several other anti-covid19 projects in the works at Telegram.

I will announce more details in the next few days on the Telegram Blog.

Stay tuned. And stay safe.

Telegram

Coronavirus News and Verified Channels

Channels are a tool for broadcasting your public messages to large audiences. They offer a unique opportunity to reach people directly, sending a notification to their phones with each post.

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.

As you may have heard, we have recently launched encrypted voice calls for Telegram. They are super-easy to use and improve themselves over time using machine learning.

Personally, I rarely make voice calls. When I lived in Russia, I developed the habit of NEVER speaking over the phone, as every conversation was being recorded by corrupt law enforcement agencies. This habit stayed with me even after I left Russia a few years ago. I don't expect agencies in other countries to have more respect for privacy than their Russian counterparts. In my opinion, they're the same everywhere, some are just better at marketing.

My phone habits may change now that I use secure calls via Telegram to communicate with my team and family members. Unfortunately, not everyone in the world will be able to enjoy the same.

In countries like Saudi Arabia, Telegram traffic is throttled in order to discourage usage. In others, like China and Oman, it's blocked completely. In Iran, where Telegram has some 40 million active users, Telegram voice calls have been completely blocked by the country's internet providers and mobile operators following an order from the judiciary (more about this here – http://telegra.ph/Telegram-Calls-in-Iran-NEWS).

Telegram has historically had problems with regulators in some parts of the world because, unlike other services, we consistently defended our users' privacy and have never made any deals with governments. In three and a half years of existence to date, Telegram disclosed exactly zero bytes of users' data to any third-party.

Services like WhatsApp, on the other hand, are not blocked in China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or other countries with a history of censorship. This is the case because WhatsApp (and its parent company Facebook) are eager to trade user trust for an increased market share. The claim that “WhatsApp and third parties can’t read or listen to your WhatsApp messages and calls” – is completely false. WhatsApp actually can read and listen in to your calls and messages, as they are able to invisibly change the encryption keys for 99.99% of their users (more about this backdoor-disguised-as-a-feature here – http://telegra.ph/whatsapp-backdoor-01-16). So much for "End-to-End Encryption".

Moreover, third parties like Google or Apple have direct access to most of WhatsApp's users' chat history. This is because WhatsApp tricked the majority of users into allowing third party backups. And the sharing doesn't stop with just these third parties. Apple and Google in turn have to deal with data requests from all the countries they have business in, and so the data flows.

By claiming that they are secure, our competitors may be involved in the single largest case of consumer fraud in human history.

By comparison, Telegram relies on end-to-end encryption assisted by a built-in encrypted and distributed cloud for messages and media. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are spread across different jurisdictions. This structure makes your cloud data a hundred times more protected and secure than when it is stored by Google, Facebook, or Apple.

No wonder governments and regulators are unhappy with Telegram. Well, let them block us as much as they want. We won't change our principles or betray our users. I know it’s not great to have Telegram (or parts of it) restricted in your country. But sometimes it’s better to stop using a communication service entirely than to keep using it with misplaced trust in its security.

It's why I avoided voice calls for years, in Russia and beyond. It's also why I'm coming back to them now, on Telegram.

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.

Here are 50+ great Telegram sticker sets for you. Made by winners of the sticker competition I held earlier this year. ENJOY! ????

https://telegram.me/addstickers/JeanBaptistePlagouille
https://telegram.me/addstickers/JessAndJack
https://telegram.me/addstickers/BornVillain
https://telegram.me/addstickers/HuskCool
https://telegram.me/addstickers/ThisCat
https://telegram.me/addstickers/BowWow
https://telegram.me/addstickers/AstroKitty
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Dog_Collection
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Orange_Sparrow
https://telegram.me/addstickers/FunnyJerboa
https://telegram.me/addstickers/ArchieDog
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Bunny_Boo
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Albrecht
https://telegram.me/addstickers/LoriBoy
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Zac_the_Pug
https://telegram.me/addstickers/BlueRobots
https://telegram.me/addstickers/UnicornStella
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Goosy
https://telegram.me/addstickers/JoeIsSadTurtle
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Violet_Crabbit
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Lisushka
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Kotey
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Manool
https://telegram.me/addstickers/CrazyDogz
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Spitz
https://telegram.me/addstickers/KokoBoy
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Haley
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Bulljoy
https://telegram.me/addstickers/MouseArnold
https://telegram.me/addstickers/MarseyCat
https://telegram.me/addstickers/RickyPanda
https://telegram.me/addstickers/MisterFrogo
https://telegram.me/addstickers/AudreyGlamour
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Little_Ant
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Tvorozhok
https://telegram.me/addstickers/GusTheDuck
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Racoon_Jessie
https://telegram.me/addstickers/FunnyImps
https://telegram.me/addstickers/USPresidents
https://telegram.me/addstickers/SuperPepe
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Little_Bear
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Vicky
https://telegram.me/addstickers/harry
https://telegram.me/addstickers/theBunny
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Animals
https://telegram.me/addstickers/AlligatorHarold
https://telegram.me/addstickers/ArtistBoy
http://telegram.me/addstickers/Hot_grandpa
https://telegram.me/addstickers/MartyTheBear
https://telegram.me/addstickers/FattyYeti
https://telegram.me/addstickers/Fima_Rooster
https://telegram.me/addstickers/RussianMinds
https://telegram.me/addstickers/FunnyFox

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.

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.

Some media reported on a “massive” hacker attack on Telegram in Iran. Here's what really happened:

https://telegram.org/blog/15million-reuters

There’s a weird rumor being spread in Iran about Telegram moving servers there. The idea of a privacy-oriented messaging app like Telegram moving its servers to a country with a history of Internet censorship is absurd and is hardly worth commenting on. However, it’s interesting to try to understand why such rumors appear in the first place. I can think of two reasons for that.

1. First, countries such as Iran or Russia usually try to pass laws ordering Internet companies to store private data on their territory. Sometimes officials in those countries make loud claims that turn out to be false (“Apple agreed to host private data of their users in our country”). It’s pretty obvious that Telegram can’t comply with any such demands due to our strict Privacy Policy. We won’t be able to put the privacy of our users at risk, even if rejecting such demands means getting blocked in some countries. We’d rather lose a big market (like we did in China) than compromise a single byte of private data of our users.

2. Second, some politicians and journalists discussing “servers” of a company in a country are confused about the terms and what they actually mean by “servers”. Along with a company’s servers that store private data in safe places, there also are internet providers that deliver its encrypted traffic to users, and third party caching nodes (CDNs) that make sure popular public content doesn’t go twice around the globe every time to reach its users. If Telegram servers store data, these third parties merely provide connectivity between Telegram servers and its users.

It seems that politicians / journalists sometimes refer to an internet traffic provider or a CDN provider that delivers or caches encrypted data of Telegram as “Telegram” or “Telegram servers“, thus misleading the public. There’s a world of difference between them: Telegram servers store private data and will never “travel” to countries with internet censorship, while internet providers and CDNs operate all over the world and have no access to private data of Telegram (and other secure apps).

All popular apps have to work with ISPs and CDNs in order to make sure users can get their traffic in a fast and reliable way, but unlike some of them, we at Telegram are always 100% transparent about how we encrypt and store data. That's why I will soon share more details about how exactly Telegram plans to work with third parties such as CDN providers to guarantee speed and security for our users all around the globe.

However, while we keep researching ways to improve connectivity and speed for our users globally, there’s one thing we will never do: we will never change the location of our servers or change our Privacy Policy due to restricting laws or threats from local officials. The only party Telegram can be held responsible to is our users, and only our users can dictate us their wishes and demands.

A Bloomberg correspondent spotted me in Dubai and asked a few questions re Telegram and Bitcoin https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-12/cryptic-russian-crusader-says-his-5-billion-app-can-t-be-bought

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.

Since some journalists don’t read my Telegram channel (a shame!), I made a Telegraph story about rumors on Telegram moving servers to weird places. It repeats some of the stuff from the last two posts from here, but could be useful as a summary of all our CDN-related posts. Spread the word!

http://telegra.ph/On-Rumors-About-Telegram-Servers-in-Weird-Places-07-30

In other – more personal – news, I’ve turned 33 today.

Earlier I shared some info about how I stay healthy and productive. In short, there are 7 things I never do:

1) Alcohol
2) Meat (fish is OK though)
3) Any kinds of pills and meds (unless I’m at a dentist’s)
4) Nicotine and other addictive drugs.
5) Coffee, black and green tea, energy drinks (I drink herbal teas instead).
6) Fast food, sugar, carbonated soft drinks.
7) TV and its alternatives.

At certain points in life, I realized these things decrease productivity and clarity of thought. So I’ve been living without them for many years now and in general have been feeling great and healthy.

Disclaimer: I do not recommend folks with permanent health issues to stop taking medication. While I’m happy with my habits and lifestyle, I’ve no idea whether the same would work for you. I guess it should, provided you’re young and healthy. But if you’re young and healthy, there are good chances that having fun is more important for you than increasing your productivity, so you may safely ignore these tips. However, if you enjoy building stuff more than consuming it, you might benefit from abstaining from these 7 items above.

▶️ 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

Trusting a US-based company for secure communication was naive before today. But starting today, it is pure madness.

http://boingboing.net/2016/11/09/a-madman-has-been-given-the-ke.html

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.

Why Charges Against Us in Iran And Russia Don’t Matter

Some users ask me how the charges in Iran and Russia will affect Telegram and me personally. The simple answer to this is: they won’t.

It’s easy for me not to travel to Iran – while the country has a rich history and sounds like a fun place, I have no connections with it and can live with that travel ban. It’s a bit more noticeable in case of Russia since I am an ethnic Russian (although with a St. Kitts passport), and my parents live there. Not being able to occasionally drop by is not great, but a small price to pay considering the matters at stake.

Luckily, we don’t have any legal presence in any of these countries. The last remaining link between Telegram and Russia was cut in July, when we terminated our contract with “Telegraf” – a Saint-Petersburg-based company to which we outsourced fighting spam coming from (surprise) Russia and Iran.

“Telegraf” used to play a larger role in the early days of Telegram when I was living in Russia, losing its importance after I left in 2014 with our core team.

Following the events this June when the Russian authorities threatened to block Telegram, “Telegraf” lost its outsourcing contract from Telegram Messenger, let go all of its employees and changed its owner. By September when the Russian authorities started sending warnings to our London office, they had nobody to target in their jurisdiction, not even Russian spam moderators.

This story highlights something local regulators often tend to ignore: it’s 2017, and the world is open and connected. If you pass archaic laws that limit freedoms, all you’ll end up doing is killing your own economy. In the last few years, Google, Oracle and Microsoft (Skype) shut down their development offices in Russia, and many smaller companies followed suit.

While the state of affairs in Iran doesn't look much brighter than in Russia, things seem to be going in the right direction there compared with the situation a few years ago. I’m not an expert on Iran, but one thing about the country is clear to me: despite the continuing debate among the Iranian politicians on how to regulate the Internet, Iran is not blocking Telegram, and for the last few years 40 millions Iranians have been able to securely communicate and to get news from independent sources through Telegram channels. Instagram and WhatsApp are also accessible there.

For any European this would sound like the norm, but unfortunately it’s not always like this in the world. The Chinese and the North Koreans, for example, are far less lucky when it comes to such freedoms, and Saudi Arabia had been throttling Telegram’s traffic until recently. The situation in Iran itself used to be very different: almost all major internet services were blocked in the country several years ago (some of them still are).

Don’t get me wrong: there are probably many things that Iran can change for the better (a more IT-friendly prosecutor of Tehran, perhaps?), but overall it seems that the country is moving in the right direction by becoming more open and market-driven.

I hope that one day Iran and Russia get to a point when we (and other IT companies) will be able to set up offices there. Until then, we’ll continue providing secure messaging to users in these markets from places that respect freedom.

We don't care if specific countries press charges against us for defending the privacy of our users. We are always ready to cut all our personal and business links to such places so that they don't have any leverage on us. They can try to block us on their territory, but, as I've shown in my previous post about China, even this won't always help them. Eventually freedom and privacy will prevail, and those who would like to get back to the 1930s will find themselves on the wrong side of history.

Thank you for the support, Russia! This could become a Sunday tradition. Please don’t forget to clean up ✈️????????

Why I Can't Visit Iran and Russia

Today, Iran joined the list of countries I can't travel to – Tehran's prosecutor just filed criminal charges against me there. More than 40 million people use Telegram in Iran and we've never blocked a single political channel and gave up exactly zero bytes of data to the government (in Iran and elsewhere).

Russia, where we have about 10 million users, is also rushing to join Iran in filing charges against the Telegram management. They seem to be unhappy because we won't comply with the unconstitutional "Yarovaya laws" and won't give them the encryption keys they wanted. I always publish such demands online, and did the same today with the documents that the FSB has been sending to our London office in the past weeks.

Because of my parents, not being able to visit Russia on occasion is more painful for me than never going to Iran. But Mom and Dad are not too old to travel and the globe is still pretty big.

An epic Telegram update is coming today. Along with some cool new features such as Live Locations and the new Music Player, Telegram 4.4's UI supports many more languages that you’ve been asking us to add, namely French (I’m still excited that “stickers” are in fact “autocollants”), Indonesian, Malay, Russian, Ukrainian and – very soon – Persian.

As someone who majored in linguistics, I know there are thousands of small details that are easy to miss when you translate things into other languages.

That’s why we’re launching the Telegram Localization Platform today – it allows our users to suggest and vote for translations of phrases found in the Telegram UI. Unlike other apps, we can instantly push fixes for the localized versions of Telegram from the server-side, without forcing our users to update the whole app for a few changes in wording.

So if you’re unhappy about how a specific word in the Telegram UI was translated into your language, go ahead and suggest an alternative at translations.telegram.org. If the new version you suggested outvotes the currently applied one (and a Telegram admin approves it), your change will instantly go live for millions of users.

Some thoughts on Indonesia

A lot of Telegram's early adopters come from Indonesia, and now we have several million users in that beautiful country. I am personally a big fan of Indonesia – I’ve been there a few times and have many friends there.

So it made me upset to hear that the Indonesian Ministry of Communication and IT suggested they would have to block Telegram in Indonesia. It turns out that the officials of the Ministry recently emailed us a list of public channels with terrorism-related content on Telegram, and our team was unable to quickly process them.

Unfortunately, I was unaware of these requests, which caused this miscommunication with the Ministry. To fix the current situation, we're implementing the following 3-step solution:

1) We have blocked all the terrorist-related public channels that have been previously reported to us by the Ministry of Communication and IT of Indonesia.
2) I emailed back to the Ministry to establish a direct channel of communication, which should allow us to work more efficiently on identifying and blocking terrorist propaganda in the future.
3) We are forming a dedicated team of moderators with knowledge of Indonesian language and culture to be able to process reports of terrorist-related content more quickly and accurately.

Telegram is heavily encrypted and privacy-oriented, but we’re no friends of terrorists – in fact, every month we block thousands of ISIS-related public channels and publish the result of this work in @isiswatch. We’re constantly striving to be more efficient at preventing terrorist propaganda, and are always open to ideas on how to get better at this.

I emailed the Ministry my suggestions above to hear their feedback. I am confident we can efficiently eradicate terrorist propaganda without disrupting the legitimate use of Telegram by millions of Indonesians. I will keep you updated in this channel on how Telegram will develop in Indonesia – and globally.

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