Telegram fined €5.1M by Germany

Germany announced Monday that it is issuing fines of 5.125 million euros ($5 million) against the operators of the messaging app Telegram for failing to comply with German law. The Federal Office of Justice said Telegram FZ-LLC hasn't established a lawful way for reporting illegal content or named an entity in Germany to receive official communication. Both are required under German laws that regulate large online platforms.

German officials said they have repeatedly failed in their attempts to serve papers to Dubai-based Telegram, despite support from authorities in the United Arab Emirates. A Germany-based law firm has since declared that it represents Telegram, but this wasn't enough to prevent the fines being issued, the Federal Office of Justice said. German federal police warned earlier this year that the app is becoming a “medium for radicalization,” used by some to target politicians, scientists and doctors for their role in tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

“The operators of messaging services and social networks bear a particular responsibility for acting against incitement to hatred and violence on their platforms,” Justice Minister Marco Buschmann said in a statement. “These legal requirements and this responsibility can't be avoided by trying to be unreachable.” The fine can be appealed.

Telegram Web 3.0 Is Coming

Two test NFT collections of Telegram usernames have appeared on the Getgems website. Durov’s Code found that the mint of the first NFT-usenames started on 11 October. The first collection called “Telegram usernames” consists of 24 usernames, such as erevan.t.me and mmm.t.me. All of them are currently unavailable for purchase. We have only found 1 NFT username in the debug collection. The test buying and selling of Telegram usernames is provided by a wallet, which the TON Explorer service marks as a Telegram Team.

Messages on behalf of channels with Premium subscription

Users have reported that accounts without an active Premium subscription can no more comment on channel posts or send messages in groups on behalf of a channel. A close source to the Telegram development team talks about that decision this way:

“Since the introduction of this feature, it has been difficult to assess the scale of the scams made.

80% of the comments made and messages sent on behalf of channels were identified as spam. Previously, channel and group administrators suggested removing this feature entirely, but instead of that, we have limited it to those who have an active Premium subscription. Hopefully, this will reduce the spam operations that take advantage of this feature, without having to entirely drop the feature.”

Telegram is working on video stickers

An API Schema update revealed a mention on video stickers. Likely, users will be able to create stickers from regular raster videos. We can assume a video format with transparency support will be used. One of the most popular such formats is WebM. Currently all animated stickers are vector. To create your own animated stickers for Telegram, you need Adobe After Effects skills. Video stickers will make animated stickers easier to create, will allow to use camera footage or, for example, 3D animation.

Credit: @tginfo

Telegram Down: Several Users Reported Outage On Twitter, Issue Fixed

Several users reported facing issues with Telegram, the instant messaging platform. The issue began on January 17 2022 and lasted for a couple of hours. However, Telegram acknowledged the issue and fixed it soon. The outage was limited to certain regions around the world, including India. Users reported the Telegram outage on Down Detector as well. Keep reading to know more about the Telegram down the issue and when was is resolved on January 17, 2022.

According to Down Detector, users started facing issues with the instant messaging platform Telegram from 07:50 PM IST on January 17, 2022. Half an hour later, the number of reports peaked at 4,464 and then they declined by 12 AM midnight on January 18, 2022. As mentioned on the Down Detector website, about 45% of reports were about the application not functioning properly while another 36% were about server connection related problems. About 19% of users faced issues with the website as well. While these issues were reported at the Indian portal, the global Down Detector portal reports only 446 reports at the peak of the issue.

Telegram filed for enforcement of fines in the amount of $148.000

The bailiffs opened new cases against Telegram on the enforcement of fines, for a total of $148.000, because it refused to remove content prohibited in the Russian Federation. According to the data bank of the Federal Bailiff Service (FSSP), based on the decision of the Tagansky Court of Moscow dated December 20 2021, three enforcement proceedings were initiated against the company to collect $67.000, $27.000 and $54.000 in fines. As reported, in mid-December 2021, Telegram fully paid off the debt in fines for the amount of $200.000.

Source:@tginfo

Telegram fixed Reproducible Builds on Android

Earlier we reported that few latest versions of Telegram for Android couldn't be verified to be compiled from the official source code, since Reproducible Builds were broken by developers' mistake. Version 8.4.3 fixes reproducibility: we were able to verify that installation packages for Telegram for Android from telegram.org and Google Play use the source code published in the official repository. This means the Telegram developers didn't add any hidden functionality that would be missing in source code.

source:tginfo

Telegram works on message translation through its own servers

The new API schema data on the Telegram website indicates that in future versions of the messenger, translations will be made through the Telegram servers. In the current version of the application, translation on iOS is done via Apple Translator, and on Android — by direct requests to Google Translate. The language of the message is detected on-device. According to Durov's Code , Google Translate in Telegram for Android is used in a quirky way, with a workaround to not pay the service fee, as a temporary measure, while the messenger team is working on translation through their servers.

What technology will be used is still unknown. Language detection will most likely continue to be on-device.

source: @tginfo