For years, Telegram’s public groups have been rife with illegal content—scams, pornography, glorification of violence, illegal drug sales, and more. Pavel, you’re not going to pretend you’re only just learning about this, are you?
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Last night Apple briefly removed Telegram from the AppStore because a user had planted illegal porn in a public chat.
Telegram was restored within hours. But I want to explain what happened — to warn other app developers and help protect online communities from similar attacks.
Because Telegram quickly removes illegal content from public groups using all kinds of moderation tools, the attacker had to resort to a technical trick. He inserted AI-modified illegal content by editing an old message in an active group chat. As a result the content was effectively hidden from the group’s members, preventing them from seeing/reporting it.
The attacker was a takedown extortionist: someone who demands ransom from group owners in exchange for not targeting their communities. These extortionists use automated accounts to plant illegal content in public groups and then report it directly to Apple, attempting to trigger the removal of legitimate communities whose owners refused to pay them.
From a practical standpoint, illegal pornographic content in Telegram’s public groups is not a systemic problem. Our moderation is effective. The fact that attackers must resort to backdated, effectively invisible content and other technical tricks proves this.
⚠️ However, there are two important lessons here for app developers and online communities:
— Extortionists have found a way to manipulate Apple into overreacting. Apple removed Telegram from the App Store before contacting us. This creates a potential systemic risk for every mobile app that hosts user-generated content. If an app used by more than a billion people can be removed from the App Store without prior warning, any app can be.
— The tactics used by takedown extortionists are evolving, putting communities across social platforms at risk. Telegram has extensive experience identifying the tricks used by coordinated reporting gangs and protecting legitimate communities (even when doing so risks our own app being temporarily removed from the App Store). Other platforms may not be equally prepared.
Stay vigilant! ☝️
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After all these years, the iPhone’s built-in Phone app still only displays call durations in minutes, with no way to see the exact number of seconds.
Tencent Cloud was one of the key technology providers behind the recently concluded World Cup. In addition to powering live streaming for major Chinese broadcasters, it provided audio and video technology support to broadcasters, telecom operators, and OTT platforms across 17 countries and regions.
During the tournament, the combined peak concurrent audience across the platforms supported by Tencent Cloud exceeded 50 million.
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🎉 My book, "Crack Any Codebase with AI", just went live on Manning Publications Co.'s early access program!
The backstory: about a year ago I built an AI tool called Codebase Knowledge Builder that turns any GitHub repo into a readable tutorial. I figured a few people would find it handy. It hit the Hacker News front page with ~1,000 upvotes and crossed 12K GitHub stars in a few days.
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Even GovTech is laying off staff—and GovTech has actually built some pretty good products, such as Singpass and FormSG. Synapxe, meanwhile, employs more than 4,000 tech and knowledge professionals. That is roughly one Synapxe employee for every 1,000 Singapore residents. 😂
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Of GovTech’s 93 retrenched staff, 42% are in their 40s: Jasmin Lau
I’m sick of reading stock astrology.
It’s time to get back to launching the rockets, putting internet in the sky, and projecting free speech down on the world.
anthropicBeingAnthropic
If AI large-model talent in China is looking for domestic career opportunities, WeChat is actually worth considering. Not many people know that the WeChat team also has its own large model, WeLM, which is closed-source and has already iterated to version V4.
At this stage, joining established, scaled large-model teams is the more conventional choice. But there are also people who choose to join WeChat’s relatively small-scale large-model effort, which is somewhat like trying to bottom-fish in the stock market—of course, it still depends on individual judgment and ability to evaluate the situation.
Revisit this post in three months.
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Over the past month, we have identified a number of large accounts that have been programmatically reuploading content from smaller accounts to game the revenue share program and circumvent crediting the original author.
We are now identifying these posts and allocating the impressions entirely to the creator. If you have insightful commentary about a post, we recommend using the Share Video or Quote feature to ensure your posts are properly attributed.
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It's not a trip to Taipei without a night market stop. 🍧📸🤳
ChatGPT is now available as an add-on in Excel and Google Sheets.
It can help analyze messy data, write formulas, update spreadsheets, and explain what it’s doing along the way—without leaving your spreadsheet.
Powered by GPT-5.5.
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