It’s funny to see Trump, Netanyahu and Zelenskyy teaming up. I bet their fanbases will soon merge too.

Non-paywalled link to original Trouw article: https://archive.ph/Uqb6l

House of Commons calls on Keir Starmer to condemn Donald Trump’s ‘interference’ in European politics

That’s pure comedy gold.

The House of Commons seems to have never had a problem interfering in the politics of other countries. For example, in Georgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doKuOlpffdU

This telegram bot would solve the problem: @GlomaticoBlueMusicBot

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/rt-news/

MBFC Credibility Rating: LOW CREDIBILITY

Failed Fact Checks: 6 articles on Voice of America and 1 article on Newsweek

“RT is a propagandistic outlet funded by the Russian government. This is true because it is claimed by a propagandistic outlet funded by the US government”

Regardless of credibility of RT, MBFC is ROFL

You can find the answer to your question on this graph in dynamics over 15 years, which reflects survey by the same Levada Center with question “Which political system do you prefer?”

Red stands for Soviet one, orange is “current one”, blue is Western democracy, black is no responce and gray is hard to say.

https://www.levada.ru/cp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/5F94x-.png

MBFC is ROFL, even when everything is clear, they publish some slop bordering on conspiracy theories.

If we click on the first link, we’ll see that New Eastern Outlook is listed as a periodical of The Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences on the website of said institution.

It looks like:

The Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences: New Eastern Outlook is our periodical.

MBFC: Ownership information is not transparent!! You share the same adress!! That must mean something!!

regurgitating Russian media sources.

You’re in the world news community, the world is not limited to Western countries or Western media.

I use telegram bot @GlomaticoPinkMusicBot , it allows to download entire albums without apple music subscription

And Russia’s veto in the UN Security Council has helped undermine the enforcement of sanctions imposed on North Korea. The most astonishing thing is that, in terms of profit/loss, friendship with Russia has proven to be much more beneficial for North Korea than friendship with the US/EU has been for Ukraine.

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.

This apt observation helps to understand why no one takes this “free world” seriously anymore and why the Global South and BRICS are on the rise.

The article’s headline falsely equates Russian dissidents with shills on USAID payroll.

Literally the same words said in December 2021 could possibly prevent:

• invasion of Ukraine;
• death of dozens or hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and turning of millions of Ukrainians to refugees;
• destruction of dozens of Ukrainian cities;
• loss of Ukrainian territory to Russia;
• loss of Ukrainian rare minerals to US.

The Trump administration is just saying loud what all the other NATO governors have been hiding. No one ever planned to fight Russia for Ukraine and the only destiny for Ukrainian aboriginals is to be used as proxy cannon fodder to fight one of NATO’s bogeymen.

NATO countries never cared about Ukraine’s casualities to the point that they decided that Ukrainian lives were worth less than a signed piece of paper with the aforementioned statement: ‘No NATO for Ukraine’. Everything that happens to the people of Ukraine is just collateral damage on the way to the main goal – to harm Russia. The colonizer mentality (so well known to many NATO countries) never changes.

Commentators here seem to be missing the main point - Trump is simply responding positively to Zelensky’s offer.

Proof: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/04/ukraine-trump-rare-earth-minerals/ => https://archive.ph/LXP0J

Ukraine previously offered U.S. access to its rare earth minerals in an effort to keep the Trump administration engaged in supporting the country militarily in its fight with Russia.

World history knows many battles fought for independence, but the last 10 years of Ukraine’s history represent a unique example of a ruthless struggle to become a colony.

You’re 100% correct here. My observation is based solely on Trump’s rhetoric and i also have heavy doubts that he will stop the war and bring peace to war-torn area. Anyway, if he really tries and succeeds, it would be twice more embarrassing for his predecessors, as it would mean that they could have done the same, but instead preferred to have tens of thousands Ukrainians killed and dozens of Ukrainian cities razed to the ground.

The craziest thing of our time is that right-wing bigots claim to end the war fast with peace talks, while so-called “progressives” are going to prolong their proxy war as long as there is at least one Ukrainian still alive.

This article claims that the world’s third largest railroad network (after US and China) will collapse in a few days and this claim is based on a report from an anonimous telegram channel (“VChK-OGPU”) and an audio file provided by some Ukrainian propagandist. Moreover, it’s accompanied by a charming remark that “Newsweek was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the audio clip or VChK-OGPU’s report”. None of such “sources” are suitable for a post to pass the moderation in the lemmy worldnews community (be it .ml or .world), but for a Newsweek article it is somehow sufficient.

And the funniest thing is that Newsweek has MBFC Credibility Rating of “HIGH CREDIBILITY”. This is how “highly credible” MBFC approved journalism looks like.

While absence of China in Top 10 may be somehow explained by The Great Firewall, the absence of India, Turkey and Russia is totally implausible. Or they might be scanning only torrents of movies with English audio.