Anyone who reads the article may be surprised to find that it contains literally no evidence to support the claim made in its clickbait headline. The author of the article comes to pretty different, much more limited conclusion:

Based on the analysis of packet captures above, I believe it is clear that anyone who has sufficient visibility into Telegram’s traffic would be able to identify and track traffic of specific user devices. Including when perfect forward secrecy protocol feature is in use.

This would also allow, through some additional analysis based on timing and packet sizes, to potentially identify who is communicating with whom using Telegram.

This is way more different thing than claiming and proving that Telegram is somehow FSB honeypot.

Furthermore, the author of the article does not even attempt to somehow prove a Telegram/FSB connection and takes this claim for granted based on the article published on websites of OCCRP and its Russian affiliate Istories. Let’s check this article and the evidence it presents:

Reporters obtained the company’s internal accounting documents for 2024 which show that one of its most important government clients is the FSB.

The documents show that Electrotelecom installs and manages equipment for a system that is being used by the FSB offices in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region for surveillance.

Unlike the conclusions made in the rys.io article, which have a vast evidence base and can be verified, in this case we are simply asked to take the word of the so-called “investigative journalism outlet”.

And what do we know about OCCRP?

In 2024, it was reported that OCCRP receives nearly half its funding from USAID

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_Crime_and_Corruption_Reporting_Project

I think that’s enough.

TLDR:

1. Telegram uses a suboptimal method of handling user IDs in its packets, which allows to track which user ID is sending messages to which user ID.

2. The Telegram/FSB link claim is based solely on unverifiable statements made by shills on USAID payroll.

The entire original article is nothing more than a mixture of propaganda and incompetence. Even where it doesn’t lie, it tells half-truths.

I love that it even uses a variation of the good old “when you pirate MP3s, you’re dowloading COMMUNISM” poster as an illustration.

What many users do not know: The website provides users’ data to Russia.

You don’t even have to do much research to come to this conclusion, since the owner of archive.today openly states that he uses Yandex for the search function.

Proof: https://blog.archive.today/post/673695282217762816/just-realized-that-i-can-search-for-keywords-in

It’s quite funny that the author of the original article somehow ignores this.

A look at the website with Webbkoll shows the following Russian domain names: privacy-cs.mail.ru r.mradx.net rs.mail.ru top-fwz1.mail.ru

For some strange reason Webbkoll now shows “No third-party requests”.

Proof: https://webbkoll.5july.net/en/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Farchive.today

This is definitely not true, since if you opened devtools in your browser and loaded archive.today, you would see that it loads some trackers and counters from top-fwz1.mail.ru

I tried many times, but could not get requests to other mentioned domains.

By the way, the screenshot in the article also shows a request to Google servers - a fact that the author of the article happily ignores. In my case, I do not receive any requests to Google servers, perhaps it was already removed by the owner of archive.today along with requests to the other 3 mentioned domains.

First and foremost, top-fwz1.mail.ru/js/code.js is integrated. Further code from Russia is then loaded.

That’s fair, and that’s what I got. But it’s not some random “further code from Russia”, what’s loaded are mail.ru counter and vk.com event trackers:

Proofs: https://top.mail.ru/help/en/code/https & https://ads.vk.com/en/help/general/sites/offline_events

Also, you need to disable your adblock to make these scripts load. As funny as it sounds, the adblock plugin with default settings saves you from the KGB.

It is not just about the full possession of the largest social network (VK) and the largest payment service (Mail.ru), but in the case of Yandex also to influence the entire output of Yandex News.

Mail.ru is not “the largest payment service”, it owns payment service VK pay, which is so big that you won’t find its page even in the Russian wiki. Both the outdated statista and the fresh AI-slop don’t even mention it among the most significant contenders:

Proof: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1056296/most-popular-online-payment-services-russia/

Proof: https://sergioespresso.com/2024/06/16/which-is-the-most-popular-online-payment-service-in-russia/

Also, there is no such thing as “Yandex News” for almost 3 years. It’s not owned by Yandex and it’s rebranded to Zen News: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_News

The data collected show which Paywall content is particularly popular in western media, but could also provide insight about their users. One can speculate about the importance of such data in the hybrid Russian war against Europe and the rest of the West.

One can laugh at such speculations. Like: “the hybrid Russian war against Europe and the rest of the West: expectation vs reality”.

Expectation: cyber attacks on critical systems, hacking of military IT infrastructure.

Reality: providing free access to paywalled articles.

In any case, it is difficult to understand which valuable insight you can get from knowing the popularity of pirated paywalled articles.

Incidentally (and in addition), anyone who pays for the paid media content must also expect for user data to go to Russia:

The whole passage is nothing more than propagandistic filler as it has nothing to do with archive.today at all, and the owner of archive.today has no reasonable way of knowing who exactly paid for the article.

The operators of «Archive.Today» do not open their identity. Neither an impressum nor a data protection declaration can be found on the website.

I think that the owner of website with pirated content has no other reason to hide his identity than working for the KGB. Literally no other reason.

I feel I should also quote one sentence from the comments section of the original article. It was written by the author of the article, and it clearly shows his intentions and his goodwill in this case: “but one might wonder whether it’s really necessary to circumvent the corresponding paywall”.

TLDR: archive.today uses mail.ru counter and vk.com event tracker, which are blocked by ad blockers. So if you use any kind of ad blocker, none of your data will be sent to Russian servers.