I saw a message today stating the “Google Play Store is now censoring certain pages on Telegram if you downloaded the app through them.” The message suggested a simple workaround to download the app directly from telegram.org/android. Here’s the message in its entirety: Google Play Store is now censoring certain pages on Telegram if you downloaded the app through them. To get around this simply download the Android app directly from Telegram themselves.

When I left Facebook in 2012-2013 I did so knowing I was no longer in full control of how I received information from my friends and acquaintances. Fast-forward to the year 2021 and I’ve now been on Telegram for over 4 years. With Telegram there are no information gatekeepers algorithmically deciding what I can and cannot see, or what may or may not be considered factually correct. As an individual who spent their entire youth choosing for themselves what to believe I wasn’t about to give that up because of some college drop-out who attained “network effect”.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you already know the guy behind WikiLeaks, who was living at an Ecuadorian embassy in London, was recently arrested and now facing extradition to the United States – the country I’m originally from – and the country which forces tax payers to fund the second-largest stockpile of nuclear weaponry ever created.

But perhaps you didn’t know that WikiLeaks was at one point hosted by Amazon. Yep, right up until political pressure caused them to take it down. Afterall, nothing says freedom like a fear of misbehavior in a country with the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. I suppose Julian Assange’s situation could be worse… Maybe, had he also been practicing Falun Gong in China. But I digress. And there’s no telling what’s going to happen.

After making some tweaks to improve my online privacy I’ve been waffling over whether or not to use Telegram. I’ve never been too keen on software which collects metadata, or, as Edward Snowden calls them, “activity records”, about their users. My hang-up was the controversy and theoretical weakness in MTProto, Telegram’s encryption protocol. But that all changed the moment Russia banned Telegram, reportedly disrupting their national banking system in the process.

Privacy is not for sale, and human rights should not be compromised out of fear or greed.

Pavel Durov

Now that’s what I call integrity.

I’m back in Bali after a trip to Anarchapulco and Chicago to pick up my cats. It was my first time back in the United States in over a year. Instead of a warm welcome back to my birth country I was promptly detained by a CBP officer and put in holding room while they ran a background check and attempted to obtain personal information.

After declining to give CBP my address in Bali and questioning them as to whether or not I was under arrest they were kind enough to inform me I was free to go at any time but that my passport belonged to the U.S. government and wasn’t my property.

It would appear surveillance states like post-9/11 USA don’t appreciate having their own citizens outside their visibility. That certainly wouldn’t suit the “Deep State” if such a thing existed now would it? The experience was very disheartening to say the least.