If you follow Open Source news you may have heard recently about the protests in Russia in support of Telegram. We particularly enjoyed the paper airplanes.

What is Telegram and why are Russians protesting?

Telegram is an open source messaging app that claims to be the first to use end-to-end data encryption in 2013. It also has fully open sourced its client code.

In March Telegram announced they had reached 200,000,000 users. Very shortly after, the Russian government banned the use of Telegram for not turning over the keys to decrypt data on the secure platform.

Pavel Durov, the Telegram founder, has said that encryption happens on the client side and that there is no universal key. For this reason he says access by the Russian government will never work.

It is also interesting to note that the Russian government has used Telegram widely.

After the ban, Telegram switched IPs prompting Russian officials to go on a banning spree blocking swathes of Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, where Telegram had shifted some of its services. At the height of the ban Russia was blocking 16 million sites causing access issues to a large number of sites Russians access daily.

To show support and solidarity for Open Source projects, we have added Telegram to our communications channels. If you would like to chat with us there we would love to see you.

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash