Two senior police officials are accused of sharing citizens’ personal information from a classified government database with criminalsTwo senior officials working for anti-terror police in Bangladesh allegedly collected and sold classified and personal information of citizens to criminals on Telegram, TechCrunch has learned.
According to the letter, the police agents were caught after investigators analyzed logs of the NTMC’s systems and how often the two accessed it.
Last year, a security researcher found that the NTMC was leaking people’s personal information on an unsecured server.
Another Bangladeshi government agency, the Office of the Registrar General, Birth & Death Registration, also leaked citizens’ sensitive data last year, as TechCrunch reported at the time.
Although the incident is under investigation, a well-placed source within the government told TechCrunch that there are still officials who are offering to sell citizens’ data.
Apple has removed the Meta-owned end-to-end encrypted messaging app WhatsApp from its App Store in China following a government order citing national security concerns, the news agency Reuters reported Friday.
Meta’s newer, Twitter-esque text-based social networking app, Threads, has also been pulled from the App Store for the same reason, it said.
But the AppleCensorship site, which tracks App Store removals, records both Signal and Telegram as having been “disappeared” from Apple’s mainland China App Store.
Last year another Twitter alternative, Jack Dorsey-backed Damus, was also pulled from Apple’s China App Store shortly after it had been approved.
Although quite a number evidently managed to do so, as Threads quickly landed in the top 5 on Apple’s China App Store last summer.
Telegram Business will likely give Premium another bump as it offers tools and features that can be used by business customers without needing to know how to code.
Similar to features available on WhatsApp, Telegram Business will offer “quick replies,” which are shortcuts to preset messages that support formatting, links, media, stickers and files.
Business customers can also add Telegram bots, including those from other tools or AI assistants, to answer messages on their behalf.
The company said more features will roll out to Telegram Business in future updates.
(They can be found under Settings > Telegram Business in the app.)
The feature, spotted first by the TGInfoEn Telegram channel (via reverse engineer AssembleDebug), is rolling out in select countries for Telegram for Android users.
If you agree to let Telegram use your number as an OTP relay, the company will send you a transferable code for Telegram Premium.
The terms of service for this peer-to-peer login program notes that the company will send a maximum of 150 OTP messages per month.
From a monetary perspective, you might end up paying more through your phone bill than the value of Telegram’s premium membership.
However, users opting into the peer-to-peer login system have to think if giving out their phone number to strangers to save a few bucks is worth the hassle.
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov said on his channel today that the company secured $330 million in investment through bond sales last week.
“This bond offering was oversubscribed, and we were delighted to have global funds of the highest caliber with impeccable reputations as participants.
The maturity for the bonds is either 2026 or when Telegram goes public, whichever is earlier.
The chat app, which has more than 900 million users, issued bonds worth $210 million last year.
Earlier this month, the company announced that personal users can convert their accounts to business accounts by paying a subscription fee.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov said that the company expects to hit profitability next year with eyes on going public in the future.
While Telegram is not looking to raise a mega round, the company is open to investment in exchange for smaller equity.
The company also offers ad solutions for one-to-many channels and plans to launch ad revenue sharing with channel owners this month.
Durov told FT that ad solutions currently are limited to certain geographies and the company mandates agencies to spend between €1mn and €10mn.
Apart from these solutions, Telegram has also experimented with blockchain-based projects through the TON foundation.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced Wednesday that users on the chat app with personal accounts can now convert them into business accounts by paying a monthly fee.
Some of the other features for business accounts involve organizing chats with color labels, using automatic greetings or away messages, and shortcuts for quick replies.
On his channel, Durov said that Telegram plans to launch more business features this month including a way to integrate AI-powered chatbots for customer service.
“Telegram Business accounts will be able to seamlessly add chatbots as their invisible secretaries to respond to all or certain chats.
Telegram is trying to compete with WhatsApp Business, which crossed the mark of 200 million monthly active users last year, with these new features.
Bitcoin jumped and Coinbase’s app crashed, while Aptos eyes Hong Kong and Telegram rolls out rewards with TONWelcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction.
This week in web3Crunching numbersThis week the crypto market was very hyped up as the two biggest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, bitcoin and ether, both jumped about 23.6% and 18%, respectively, on the week, according to CoinMarketCap data.
The total crypto market cap increased 19.4% over a seven-day period to $2.34 trillion.
Our favorite ‘Crypto Twitter’ postICYMI, last week a lot of crypto people were tweeting about emails from Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.
In June 2022, Magic Eden raised $130 million in a Series B round that granted it unicorn status.
Telegram CEO and founder Pavel Durov announced today that the company is launching its ad platform next month, allowing channel owners to receive financial rewards.
In March, the Telegram Ad Platform will open to channel owners in nearly one hundred countries, marking a major shift toward content monetization.
“Similar to our approach with Telegram usernames on Fragment, we will sell ads and share revenue with channel owners in Toncoin.
YouTube offers a 55% share of ad revenue to creators in the YouTube Partner Program, while X started offering revenue sharing to users in July 2023.
Telegram has more than 800 million monthly active users around the world, and Telegram users generate over 500 billion views in broadcast channels every month.
Telegram is rolling out a bunch of upgrades as part of its January feature drop including “view-once” video and audio messages, the ability to pause recording while sending a video or an audio message, and new read-time controls.
Now, the company is extending this feature to voice and video messages.
Users can hit the mic icon to start recording and then pull up to tap on the “view-once” icon to allow the recipient to hear the voice message or look at the video message just once.
Additionally, Telegram is rolling out the ability to pause and resume recording for voice and video messages through the same menu.
Telegram is also adding a way for people to see when the recipient reads your message in one-on-one private chats.
