I've read that MAX (typical horse taste of modern Russian official names, similar to Rosgvardia, Gosuslugi, Rostech and so on ; Soviet-time many-many-many caps abbreviations are boring, but somehow better) in its current early versions is a piece of spyware looking like Telegram, literally saving passwords and banking data and browsing history. Well, I'm almost certain Telegram itself is not much better.

Installed Briar on my phone and persuaded my sister, and to my grandma's today.

Yes, so like 12 years ago I was thinking - maybe they won't do such bad things, maybe it's a purely hypothetical possibility, surely someone will catch them outright spying.

Yet suppose that back then Zuck rolled out an update with hidden functionality to spy at some underage girl, and then rolled it back. Who would check every FB application update? And if the hidden functionality looked enough like a bug (matching only a handful of device IDs of millions), then who'd become suspicious? There have been many updates with many bugs.

And Zuck surely behaves as if such thing happened many times.

I just hope more people in Russia will switch to Briar, it IMHO seems to have all the necessary Telegram-like functionality other than channels, votes, video uploading .... But that's probably intended, too much data to synchronize. Text and pics are a lot.

when using their services

Have I got some bad news for you...

Yes that's why China bans most private messengers.

it's less likely that local law enforcement can spy on my communications.

Most developed nations at this point have some sort of data-sharing treaty. So some other country not subject to local laws spies on you, then just shares that information with your local country, and vise-versa, and voila everyone on the planet has just skirted any and all consumer privacy protections.

Weird, I agree with Russia on something. I'm sure I won't agree on their suggested replacement though.

Signal and/or Simplex FTW.

Vcontact exists for exactly this reason.

I like the idea of these meshes but until Linux phones become a practical option it doesn’t matter. Apple will restrict the hardware, Google will let Gemini spy on anything that passes through the phone, the phone situation is a mess.

I don’t really blame governments for that either. I blame fucking business majors.

They actually don't yet have mesh routing, it's more like an automated sneakernet over BT and shared Wi-Fi right now, until you have access to global Internet. Like ships at high seas exchanging mail and news.

Briar has an alpha stage client for Linux phones among other things, unfortunately I use FreeBSD right now and don't want to reboot to try it, and without rebooting there are some problems under Linux JRE under Linux emulation, and under native JRE it swears at unknown OS.

A little background info:

Russia's been sponsoring one of its oligarchs' business by eliminating their competition.

First, they restricted YouTube's speed to an unusable state to force people to switch to RuTube (they didn't)

Now they're trying to force people to switch from WhatsApp (and potentially Telegram) to MAX, which they want to be Russia's version of WeChat.

Add the fact that our politicians are obsessed with controlling all of the media and you'll get the gist of it.