And Russia’s veto in the UN Security Council has helped undermine the enforcement of sanctions imposed on North Korea. The most astonishing thing is that, in terms of profit/loss, friendship with Russia has proven to be much more beneficial for North Korea than friendship with the US/EU has been for Ukraine.
Anyone who reads the article may be surprised to find that it contains literally no evidence to support the claim made in its clickbait headline. The author of the article comes to pretty different, much more limited conclusion:
Based on the analysis of packet captures above, I believe it is clear that anyone who has sufficient visibility into Telegram’s traffic would be able to identify and track traffic of specific user devices. Including when perfect forward secrecy protocol feature is in use.
This would also allow, through some additional analysis based on timing and packet sizes, to potentially identify who is communicating with whom using Telegram.
This is way more different thing than claiming and proving that Telegram is somehow FSB honeypot.
Furthermore, the author of the article does not even attempt to somehow prove a Telegram/FSB connection and takes this claim for granted based on the article published on websites of OCCRP and its Russian affiliate Istories. Let’s check this article and the evidence it presents:
Reporters obtained the company’s internal accounting documents for 2024 which show that one of its most important government clients is the FSB.
The documents show that Electrotelecom installs and manages equipment for a system that is being used by the FSB offices in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region for surveillance.
Unlike the conclusions made in the rys.io article, which have a vast evidence base and can be verified, in this case we are simply asked to take the word of the so-called “investigative journalism outlet”.
And what do we know about OCCRP?
In 2024, it was reported that OCCRP receives nearly half its funding from USAID
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_Crime_and_Corruption_Reporting_Project
I think that’s enough.
TLDR:
Telegram uses a suboptimal method of handling user IDs in its packets, which allows to track which user ID is sending messages to which user ID.
The Telegram/FSB link claim is based solely on unverifiable statements made by shills on USAID payroll.
The entire original article is nothing more than a mixture of propaganda and incompetence. Even where it doesn’t lie, it tells half-truths.
I love that it even uses a variation of the good old “when you pirate MP3s, you’re dowloading COMMUNISM” poster as an illustration.
What many users do not know: The website provides users’ data to Russia.
You don’t even have to do much research to come to this conclusion, since the owner of archive.today openly states that he uses Yandex for the search function.
Proof: https://blog.archive.today/post/673695282217762816/just-realized-that-i-can-search-for-keywords-in
It’s quite funny that the author of the original article somehow ignores this.
A look at the website with Webbkoll shows the following Russian domain names: privacy-cs.mail.ru r.mradx.net rs.mail.ru top-fwz1.mail.ru
For some strange reason Webbkoll now shows “No third-party requests”.
Proof: https://webbkoll.5july.net/en/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Farchive.today
This is definitely not true, since if you opened devtools in your browser and loaded archive.today, you would see that it loads some trackers and counters from top-fwz1.mail.ru
I tried many times, but could not get requests to other mentioned domains.
By the way, the screenshot in the article also shows a request to Google servers - a fact that the author of the article happily ignores. In my case, I do not receive any requests to Google servers, perhaps it was already removed by the owner of archive.today along with requests to the other 3 mentioned domains.
First and foremost, top-fwz1.mail.ru/js/code.js is integrated. Further code from Russia is then loaded.
That’s fair, and that’s what I got. But it’s not some random “further code from Russia”, what’s loaded are mail.ru counter and vk.com event trackers:
Proofs: https://top.mail.ru/help/en/code/https & https://ads.vk.com/en/help/general/sites/offline_events
Also, you need to disable your adblock to make these scripts load. As funny as it sounds, the adblock plugin with default settings saves you from the KGB.
It is not just about the full possession of the largest social network (VK) and the largest payment service (Mail.ru), but in the case of Yandex also to influence the entire output of Yandex News.
Mail.ru is not “the largest payment service”, it owns payment service VK pay, which is so big that you won’t find its page even in the Russian wiki. Both the outdated statista and the fresh AI-slop don’t even mention it among the most significant contenders:
Proof: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1056296/most-popular-online-payment-services-russia/
Proof: https://sergioespresso.com/2024/06/16/which-is-the-most-popular-online-payment-service-in-russia/
Also, there is no such thing as “Yandex News” for almost 3 years. It’s not owned by Yandex and it’s rebranded to Zen News: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_News
The data collected show which Paywall content is particularly popular in western media, but could also provide insight about their users. One can speculate about the importance of such data in the hybrid Russian war against Europe and the rest of the West.
One can laugh at such speculations. Like: “the hybrid Russian war against Europe and the rest of the West: expectation vs reality”.
Expectation: cyber attacks on critical systems, hacking of military IT infrastructure.
Reality: providing free access to paywalled articles.
In any case, it is difficult to understand which valuable insight you can get from knowing the popularity of pirated paywalled articles.
Incidentally (and in addition), anyone who pays for the paid media content must also expect for user data to go to Russia:
The whole passage is nothing more than propagandistic filler as it has nothing to do with archive.today at all, and the owner of archive.today has no reasonable way of knowing who exactly paid for the article.
The operators of «Archive.Today» do not open their identity. Neither an impressum nor a data protection declaration can be found on the website.
I think that the owner of website with pirated content has no other reason to hide his identity than working for the KGB. Literally no other reason.
I feel I should also quote one sentence from the comments section of the original article. It was written by the author of the article, and it clearly shows his intentions and his goodwill in this case: “but one might wonder whether it’s really necessary to circumvent the corresponding paywall”.
TLDR: archive.today uses mail.ru counter and vk.com event tracker, which are blocked by ad blockers. So if you use any kind of ad blocker, none of your data will be sent to Russian servers.
I don’t understand why this was downvoted, if such a proposal had been made in 2022 during first Istanbul talks, it could have prevented another three years of meatgrinder. As during those talks Russia openly discussed getting troops back to pre-2022 border as possible option, and European alliance instead of NATO (i.e. no US troops and nukes in Europe) is also offer that is hard to ignore. So after some negotiation it might become a deal; sadly noone offered that.
none of them are worth it
It depends on the content that you seek for. And with that caveat, your statement may be 100% true or 100% wrong.
I am an avid underground metal music enjoyer and also a RED member, and i could name a dozen of public sources (ranging from soulseek to deathgrindclub or metalarea) that would offer you much better libraries then RED. So i’m using RED like once in two monthes and let my FL tokens expire. But that’s just the one specific use case, people with different musical tastes may find RED much more useful or even the main source for expanding their collection.
So actually if you can get everything you need from public sources, there’s no reason at all to bother with private trackers. And if you can’t, then you have no choice but to accept the rules of the game.
Google for VDSina. There you’ll be able to rent VDS which is invulnerable for DMCA, and then configure it for streaming, DDL hosting and so on.
This apt observation helps to understand why no one takes this “free world” seriously anymore and why the Global South and BRICS are on the rise.
The article’s headline falsely equates Russian dissidents with shills on USAID payroll.
Literally the same words said in December 2021 could possibly prevent:
The Trump administration is just saying loud what all the other NATO governors have been hiding. No one ever planned to fight Russia for Ukraine and the only destiny for Ukrainian aboriginals is to be used as proxy cannon fodder to fight one of NATO’s bogeymen.
NATO countries never cared about Ukraine’s casualities to the point that they decided that Ukrainian lives were worth less than a signed piece of paper with the aforementioned statement: ‘No NATO for Ukraine’. Everything that happens to the people of Ukraine is just collateral damage on the way to the main goal – to harm Russia. The colonizer mentality (so well known to many NATO countries) never changes.
Commentators here seem to be missing the main point - Trump is simply responding positively to Zelensky’s offer.
Proof: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/04/ukraine-trump-rare-earth-minerals/ => https://archive.ph/LXP0J
Ukraine previously offered U.S. access to its rare earth minerals in an effort to keep the Trump administration engaged in supporting the country militarily in its fight with Russia.
World history knows many battles fought for independence, but the last 10 years of Ukraine’s history represent a unique example of a ruthless struggle to become a colony.
The craziest thing of our time is that right-wing bigots claim to end the war fast with peace talks, while so-called “progressives” are going to prolong their proxy war as long as there is at least one Ukrainian still alive.
This article claims that the world’s third largest railroad network (after US and China) will collapse in a few days and this claim is based on a report from an anonimous telegram channel (“VChK-OGPU”) and an audio file provided by some Ukrainian propagandist. Moreover, it’s accompanied by a charming remark that “Newsweek was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the audio clip or VChK-OGPU’s report”. None of such “sources” are suitable for a post to pass the moderation in the lemmy worldnews community (be it .ml or .world), but for a Newsweek article it is somehow sufficient.
And the funniest thing is that Newsweek has MBFC Credibility Rating of “HIGH CREDIBILITY”. This is how “highly credible” MBFC approved journalism looks like.
While absence of China in Top 10 may be somehow explained by The Great Firewall, the absence of India, Turkey and Russia is totally implausible. Or they might be scanning only torrents of movies with English audio.
It’s revealing that you care so much about white mercs from Wagner but totally ignore casualties of black Malian troops killed by local AlQaeda branch with support of Ukraine. Seems like it’s impossible to be supportive towards Ukraine without being at least a bit racist.
What’s really under doubt here is your reading ability and knowledge of geography:
Additional coverage:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/5/mali-breaks-off-diplomatic-ties-with-ukraine
https://english.news.cn/20240805/a8a375864882411aa9c97f10de85145f/c.html
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/04/africa/mali-ukraine-wagner-intelligence-intl-latam/index.html
Pretty ironicaly, so called “Russian puppet” Yanukovych is literally the last Ukrainian president who was democraticaly elected by population of entire Ukraine (meaning within its 1991 borders).
Noone in US or EU would care about expiration of Zelensky’s presidential term as long as he’s reliable supplier of cannon fodder for proxy NATO-Russia war. Roosevelt’s words on Somoza ("he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’) would apply here as well.
Speaking about getting back 2013 Ukraine borders is not more reasonable than speaking about getting back 2013 Ukraine legitimate government. It’s impossible in real life to replay from save file - this means that Ukraine would stay with regime imposed by insurrectionists and without Crimea and Donbass.
Definately NOT proxy cannon fodder
I had gotten 100+ without port forwarding. Port forwarding is overrated, seeding time and popularity of torrent is what really matters.