Telegram can read all your text mesasges, unless you specifically setup an encrypted one-on-one channel between users that's tied to a specific device, so basically nobody is using that. It does not have to actively siphon the conversations to a state actor, an exploit chain or the good old infiltration by a rogue employee is enough.
Disclaimer: I use telegram, but have zero expectations of privacy there.
It also wouldn't be the first time the russian government is using an organization for their own agenda abroad, while banning it in russia.
We still don't know his true clients (people he worked for). These guys were just his marks.
We had a similar guy where I come from. He was actively seeking connections with politicians and businessmen, acting as their friend, while recording every online and offline conversation to be used for extortion in the future.
He, and the prostitute he was hiring to do his bidding, made the mistake of getting directly involved in the murder of a journalist, so she ended up in prison for 25 years, and I haven't heard anything about him ever since.
Correction: The guy also ended up in prison after all.
So it's not just me. The peering between europe and asia IS crap!
I've been to thailand in november and the connections to europe were hit or miss the whole time. The latency was poor and the reliability varied day by day.
The only thing that made any difference was switching providers on the EU side. It seems that some ISPs have better peering than others.
Also lowering the MTU for the vpn tunnel seemd to help a lot, but that might've been a placebo.
I feel bad for the people being judged. Imagine keeping a straight face looking at the guy with a funny wig doing the most serious grown up job and pretending it's just normal.
LoRa is already surfing on the bleeding edge of physics. There is no way to get anything more out of it, other than allocating wider EM spectrum for this usecase.
There are some radio amateurs in my area trying Meshcore on 169Mhz for example. There are also some new boards available that can do LoRa on 2.4Ghz, but both approaches have some downsides as well.
For a more stable and reliable network, we would also need radios capable of communicating on multiple channels simultaneously (remember, the whole thing started off as a reaction to really cheap, almost disposable dev boards), but now we're approaching the complexity and requirements of the traditional mobile networks.
People who studied the code speak really fondly about reticulum, however, it's not as popular for building the lora based mesh networks, because the full stack does not run on the simple microcontroller. You need what is basically a standard PC connected to it. Given that mesh repeaters are usually designed to run off-grid on solar and battery, wasting additional power for a raspberry pi or similar computer would make the project unfeasible.
All while Meshtastic or Meshcore are perfectly happy with the esp32 or nrf microcontrollers. And the nrf ones can run without a direct sunshine for days with the reasonably large battery.
Cutting down the international communication lines usually means incoming internal purge. But with belarus, I'm surprised there are still people left to purge...
It's hard to hear what they are trying to say over all the gun fire noise.