Linked List: August 27, 2024

Tuesday, 27 August 2024

Casey Newton, writing at Platformer:

Telegram is often described as an “encrypted” messenger. But as Ben Thompson explains today, Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted, as rivals WhatsApp and Signal are. (Its “secret chat” feature is end-to-end encrypted, but it is not enabled on chats by default. The vast majority of chats on Telegram are not secret chats.) That means Telegram can look at the contents of private messages, making it vulnerable to law enforcement requests for that data.

Anticipating these requests, Telegram created a kind of jurisdictional obstacle course for law enforcement that (it says) none of them have successfully navigated so far. From the FAQ again:

To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data. […] To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.

As a result, investigation after investigation finds that Telegram is a significant vector for the spread of CSAM. (To take only the most recent example, here’s one from India’s Decode last month, which like others found that criminals often advertise their wares on Instagram and direct buyers to Telegram to complete their purchases.) [...]

“Telegram is another level,” Brian Fishman, Meta’s former anti-terrorism chief, wrote in a post on Threads. “It has been the key hub for ISIS for a decade. It tolerates CSAM. Its ignored reasonable [law enforcement] engagement for YEARS. It’s not ‘light’ content moderation; it’s a different approach entirely.

From the Ben Thompson piece yesterday that Newton links to above, is this description of just how unusual Telegram’s “secret chats” are:

That is why “encryption” in the context of messaging means end-to-end encryption; this means that your messages are encrypted on your device and can only ever be decrypted and thus read by your intended recipient. Telegram does support this with “Secret Chats”, but these are not the default. Moreover, Telegram’s implementation has a lot of oddities, including some non-standard encryption techniques, the fact that secret chats can only be between two devices (not two accounts, so you can’t access a secret chat started on your phone from your computer), and that both users have to be online at the same time to initiate a secret chat (I’ll come back to these oddities in a moment).

Apple Announces Chief Financial Officer Transition ★

Apple Newsroom, yesterday:

Apple today announced that Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri will transition from his role on January 1, 2025. Maestri will continue to lead the Corporate Services teams, including information systems and technology, information security, and real estate and development, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook. As part of a planned succession, Kevan Parekh, Apple’s Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis, will become Chief Financial Officer and join the executive team.

Roblox: Hugely Popular, Yet Unprofitable ★

Matthew Ball has written an excellent deep-dive into Roblox:

Compared to its most similar competitors — the social virtual world platforms, Minecraft and Fortnite — Roblox has about 5× and 2.25× as many monthly players. For non-gamers, Roblox has about two thirds as many monthly users as Spotify and half as many as Snap (though it probably has a lower share of daily-to-monthly active users) and is roughly as popular as Instagram circa Q4 2015, and Facebook in Q3 2009.

Each month, players spend close to six billion hours using Roblox. This time excludes the viewing of Roblox content on Twitch or YouTube, the largest video platform on earth and which counts non-live gaming content as its second most popular genre, with Roblox one of its five most watched games. Most estimates suggest the average Disney+ account watches no more than 20 hours per month, which would mean about 3.1 billion hours in total monthly watch time — barely half of Roblox’s total.

But:

So yes, Roblox is unquestionably “working.” Yet Roblox is also unprofitable. Very unprofitable. What’s more, Roblox’s losses continue to swell because its impressive rate of revenue growth has been outpaced by that of its costs. [...] Over the last twelve months it has averaged $138 in costs for every $100 in revenue.