I am still waiting for be able to change the ringtone for when someone is calling, though.

Federal Interior Minister Faeser can chalk up a success: After weeks of efforts to get Telegram to delete right-wing extremist channels, the messenger service is finally responding. This also affects the chats of conspiracy theorist Hildmann. After massive pressure from the German government on Telegram, the company is taking noticeable action against hate and incitement on the net for the first time in Germany, according to a report. The online service has blocked a total of 64 channels, the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" reported, citing security circles. According to the report, these include the channels of anti-Semite and conspiracy ideologue Attila Hildmann. The closure is said to be due to pressure from the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). The BKA had sent corresponding deletion requests to Telegram, the newspaper further reported. A total of 64 have been taken into account so far, it said. According to the report, a second working-level conversation between the government and Telegram had taken place on Thursday. The government and the company wanted to "continue to remain in close exchange," it said after the talks, according to SZ. The company's founder Pavel Durov had already assured this in the first conversation, in which he himself had participated. The Ministry of the Interior has long demanded that hate and incitement on Telegram be outlawed and removed. So far, however, the company has not complied with the legal obligation to delete. Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser reiterated that she will continue to crack down on the Telegram case. "Telegram must no longer be an accelerant for right-wing extremists, conspiracy ideologues and other agitators," she told the newspaper. "Death threats and other dangerous hate posts must be deleted and face clear criminal consequences." Faeser sees the company's first major deletion action as a success of weeks of pressure on Telegram. "The Federal Criminal Police Office has significantly strengthened the investigation," she said. "I have built up clear pressure from the first day in office to get Telegram to cooperate. That pressure is working." Telegram is used by radical vaccination opponents and contrarians, among others, to network for so-called walks against Corona measures. The Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution had recently complained, for example, that a particularly large number of coup fantasies were spread there. The platform was also used by numerous right-wing extremists. (Translated from German with [DeepL](https://www.deepl.com/translator))

[archived version](https://archive.is/m2xfL) (no paywall)

The new UX and UI of Telegram reactions on desktop and mobile is so much better. What do you think? Do you use them? I also wanted to share this issue, upvote it please! Search messages by reaction: https://bugs.telegram.org/c/12765

What the fuck is this?

The German Federal Office of Justice is of the opinion that Telegram is not a pure messenger service, but a social network. This means that Telegram must comply with the requirements of the Network Enforcement Act, just like Facebook and Twitter. This includes setting up an easily accessible reporting channel for punishable content and appointing an agent for service of process for requests from German courts. As a result, two fine proceedings are underway against the company, which is based in the United Arab Emirates. "The requirements of the Network Enforcement Act are binding - and the law does not recognize a blanket exception for Messenger services," Buschmann told 'Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland' on Friday. dpa:211210-99-328460/2 (Translated with [DeepL](https://www.deepl.com))

Durov introduces Telegram's take on ads in his Russian channel. The translated channel post (translated with DeepL): > Soon, official advertising messages will appear in Telegram channels for the first time. Most users will hardly notice this change - for three reasons: > > 1. Telegram will not show advertising messages in chat lists, private conversations, or groups. The ads will only affect large channels - services where there are already ads and whose support results in the largest expenditures on the part of Telegram. > > 2. No personal information will be used to show ads. User privacy is paramount to Telegram. The content of advertising messages will depend only on the topics of the channels in which they are displayed, and not on users' personal data. > > 3. Official Telegram advertising messages will be unobtrusive. Only short texts without external links or photos will be allowed in them. An advertisement may appear only after all new messages in the channel have been viewed. > > Ads posted by Telegram channel owners themselves in the form of regular messages are now found in Telegram channels. The official advertising messages that Telegram is introducing will be much more comfortable for users. The income from such advertisements will allow Telegram to continue providing users with a free and unlimited service. Documentation: - [Telegram Ad Platform](https://promote.telegram.org/) - [Telegram Ad Platform Explained](https://promote.telegram.org/getting-started) - [Ad Policies and Guidelines](https://promote.telegram.org/guidelines) As far as I know, official apps still don't support sponsored messages, but they're probably going to support them in the next version, which should be released in a couple of weeks. This thing has not been publicized by Telegram itself yet - it has been announced just on Durov's russian personal channel

I believe these new features were supposed to be included in the recent 8.0 major update, but they weren't done with the [migration to 64 bit IDs](https://t.me/durov/167) yet at the time so they had to leave something for the inevitable 64 bit IDs update's changelog

After Telegram [was forced to stop the development](https://telegra.ph/What-Was-TON-And-Why-It-Is-Over-05-12) of its TON project, an open letter from the open-source community asking for Telegram to transfer to the community the ownership of the ton.org domain and the [GitHub organization](https://github.com/ton-blockchain) has been showed a lot of support from the community that evolved around the project over the last two years. Telegram recently embraced the request with [a comment](https://github.com/newton-blockchain/TIPs/issues/33#issuecomment-870824166) on that issue

[16/07/2021] Security analysis of Telegram that exposes 4 cryptographic weaknesses in MTProto. The vulnerabilities have been disclosed to Telegram on 16 April 2021, and have been addressed with the release of version 7.8.1 for Android, 7.8.3 for iOS and 2.8.8 for Telegram Desktop. They do not compromise the plaintext payload carried in transit-encrypted communications through standard MTProto, and the paper concludes that "_MTProto can provide a confidential and integrity-protected channel if special care is taken when implementing the protocol_". However, it also highlights how properly implementing the protocol is not a trivial task, that might lead to a brittleness/weak implementation: even the three major popular apps needed to be patched to mitigate the highlighted weaknesses. [direct link to the paper](https://mtpsym.github.io/paper.pdf) Telegram's answer: - [MTProto Analysis: Accessible Overview](https://telegra.ph/LoU-ETH-4a-proof-07-16) - [MTProto Analysis: Comments for the technically inclined](https://core.telegram.org/techfaq/UoL-ETH-4a-proof)

Android: v7.8.1 iOS: v7.8.3 Changelog: > **Message Sending Animations** (Android) > > • Send messages with improved animations­­ – your input text smoothly transforms into the message bubble as it flies into the chat. > > **Password Recovery** > > • Use the new prompt in Settings to practice your Two-Step Verification password. > > • Reset your Two-Step Verification password even if you forgot your old password and don’t have a recovery email. > > • To do this, you must be logged into your account. The reset takes 7 days and can be cancelled from any of your devices.

An interesting thing about videocalls: Telegram missed both deadlines Durov announced in an informal way about video calls (not by much): 1. "[_we will be adding a video dimension to our voice chats in May_](https://t.me/durov/160)" 2. "[_later this Spring: TV station_](https://t.me/durov/154)"

It's a simple python bot that makes it easier for me to manage my qBittorrent torrents, without having to publish and use qbittorrent's web interface, which is a bit of an hassle from mobile The bot makes it easier to add new torrents (magnet link/`.torrent` file), to see what is currently downloading/seeding, to enable/disable/change your alternative speed limits, and to manage individual torrents (pause/resume/force-start/increase priority/re-check and so on). It can also notify you when a torrent completes My torrenting setup is extremely trivial: raspberry pi 3 + headless qbittorrent + ProtonVPN + this bot + 1 TB mechanical hard drive

We have so many options through which to communicate with our friends and relatives during the lockdown, thanks to our smartphones and the number of apps that serve all possible needs. Impressive as they are though, a smartphone is not suitable for everyone. On the top of the box is a microphone with push-to-talk switch, a small thermal printer, and a set of 1/4″ jack sockets with associated jump lead. Each socket corresponds to a relative, and an audio message to that relative can be posted via Telegram simply by speaking into the microphone with the button pressed. Replies are then printed through the thermal printer. Meanwhile, behind the scenes is a Raspberry Pi holding it all together. Telegram of course has an easy-to-use API that can facilitate such communications for free, and Python was used for the coding. He has described the process in the Twitter feed but is aiming to make a proper post about it and publish the code to Github. See https://hackaday.com/2021/04/25/keep-in-touch-with-grandma-with-this-lo-tech-interface/ #technology #opensource #raspberrypi #telegram #Yayagram

This hasn't been officially announced yet (will probably be announced with the release of Telegram 7.7), but a [new ticket](https://bugs.telegram.org/c/4002) appeared on the bugs & suggestions platform introducing two new web clients: - [webK](https://webk.telegram.org/) ([source code](https://github.com/morethanwords/tweb)) - [webZ](https://webz.telegram.org/) ([source code](https://github.com/Ajaxy/telegram-tt)) From the ticket: > Can they replace the native app I'm using on my device? > > Both of the new versions support most of the features you are likely need for your day-to-day Telegram usage. > > Why are there two versions? > > Because we believe in internal competition. Both new apps work equally well on mobile and desktop devices. They are likely the outcome of the [JavaScript contest](https://contest.com/javascript-web) that took place during 2020 on multiple rounds. One of these two apps is going to replace the long-dead [old web client](https://web.telegram.org)

More or less one week ago, Telegram started to publish the Android app's APK on its website. The website app has a different package name and can be installed along with the PlayStore build. It's already updated to v7.7, which is undergoing stores reviews. One interesting thing about the "stand-alone" version is that will display groups, channels and bots that are not accessible from the PlayStore app because of PlayStore's privacy policy. From the sourcecode, by the way, as far as I can tell, it looks like content restrictions are ignored if the package name doesn't match the package name of the PlayStore build - that means that forks (such as [Telegram-FOSS](https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS)) are automatically able to display restricted content

Quoting @durov's announcement: > 🎉 More good news – I am happy to share that Telegram has raised over $1 billion by selling bonds (a form of debt) to some of the largest and most knowledgeable investors from all over the world. This will enable Telegram to continue growing globally while sticking to its values and remaining independent. These resources will also fuel the monetization strategy I [outlined](https://t.me/durov/142) in December. > > As I said when launching Telegram almost 8 years ago, the end goal for Telegram is to become a financially sustainable project that can serve humanity for decades (or centuries) to come. Today's news is another step towards that goal. This is a pretty big (and from a certain point of view also concerning) news. Telegram infrastructure is entirely proprietary and operating it requires around ~120 million $/year (according to TON's most recent whitepaper). Telegram's plan to launch TON and use its ICO money ($1.7 bn) to finance its development for the upcoming years [was crashed by the SEC](https://telegra.ph/What-Was-TON-And-Why-It-Is-Over-05-12). Considering Durov finances are not a bottomless pit, it was quite predictable that emitting bonds was the only way to fund Telegram in the short term, while they figure out a way to monetize the service. It will be interesting to follow the development of this closely to see what's going to happen in the near future, hopefully the list of investors will be published soon

This is basically the realization of [@danie10@lemmy.ml](https://lemmy.ml/u/danie10)'s [post about the XDA leak](https://lemmy.ml/post/50401)

Of course some of us have already deleted our WhatsApp accounts, but I did actually backup a few of my chats, so I'll be trying this out when it gets to Android. Even if you are an iOS user who has deleted your WhatsApp account, this will still work for any chats that you did export. See https://www.xda-developers.com/telegram-7-4-makes-easy-migrate-whatsapp-chat-history #technology #telegram #deletewhatsapp

I swear the guy comes out with really weird takes sometime