Agentic Workflows and the Dust Up Between Microsoft and Salesforce
January 14, 2025
Prepared by a still-alive dinobaby.
The Register, a UK online publication, does a good job of presenting newsworthy events with a touch of humor. Today I spotted a new type of information in the form of an explainer plus management analysis. Plus the lingo and organization suggest a human did all or most of the work required to crank out a very good article called “In AI Agent Push, Microsoft Re-Orgs to Create CoreAI – Platform and Tools Team.”
I want to highlight the explainer part of the article. The focus is on the notion of agentic; specifically:
agentic applications with memory, entitlements, and action space that will inherit powerful model capabilities. And we will adapt these capabilities for enhanced performance and safety across roles, business processes, and industry domains. Further, how we build, deploy, and maintain code for these AI applications is also fundamentally changing and becoming agentic.
These words are attributed to Microsoft’s top dog Satya Nadella, but they sound as if one of the highly paid wordsmiths laboring for the capable Softies. Nevertheless, the idea is important. In order to achieve the agentic pinnacle, Microsoft has to reorganize. Whoever can figure out how to make agentic applications work across different vendors’ solutions will be able to make money. That’s the basic idea: Smart software is going to create a new big thing for enterprise software and probably some consumers.
The write up explains:
It’s arguably just plain old software talking to plain old software, which would be nothing new. The new angle here, though, is that it’s driven mainly by, shall we say, imaginative neural networks and models making decisions, rather than algorithms following entirely deterministic routes. Which is still software working with software. Nadella thinks building artificially intelligent agentic apps and workflows needs “a new AI-first app stack — one with new UI/UX patterns, runtimes to build with agents, orchestrate multiple agents, and a reimagined management and observability layer.”
To win the land in this new territory, Microsoft must have a Core AI team. Google and Salesforce presumably have this type of set up. Microsoft has to step up its AI efforts. The Register points out:
Nadella noted that “our internal organizational boundaries are meaningless to both our customers and to our competitors”. That’s an odd observation given Microsoft published his letter, which concludes with this observation: “Our success in this next phase will be determined by having the best AI platform, tools, and infrastructure. We have a lot of work to do and a tremendous opportunity ahead, and together, I’m looking forward to building what comes next.”
Here’s what I found interesting:
- Agentic is the next big thing in smart software. Essentially smart software that does one thing is useful. Orchestrating agents to do a complex process is the future. The software decides. Everything works well — at least, that’s the assumption.
- Microsoft, like Google, is now in a Code Yellow or Code Red mode. The company feels the heat from Salesforce. My hunch is that Microsoft knows that add ins like Ghostwriter for Microsoft Office is more useful than Microsoft’s own Copilot for many users. If the same boiled fish appears on the enterprise menu, Microsoft is in a world of hurt from Salesforce and probably a lot of other outfits.
- The re-org parallels the disorder that surfaced at Google when it fixed up its smart software operation or tried to deal with the clash of the wizards in that estimable company. Pushing boxes around on an organization chart is honorable work, but that management method may not deliver the agentic integration some people want.
The conclusion I drew from The Register’s article is that the big AI push and the big players’ need to pop up a conceptual level in smart software is perceived as urgent. Costs? No problem. Hallucination? No problem. Hardware availability? No problem. Software? No problem. A re-organization is obvious and easy. No problem.
Stephen E Arnold, January 14, 2025
Apple and Some Withering Fruit: Is the Orchard on Fire?
January 14, 2025
A dinobaby-crafted post. I confess. I used smart software to create the heart wrenching scene of a farmer facing a tough 2025.
Apple is a technology giant, a star in the universe of bytes. At the starter’s gun for 2025, Apple may have some work to do. For example, I read “Apple’s China Troubles Mount as Foreign Phone Sales Sink for 4th Month.” (For now, this is a trust outfit story, but a few months down the road the information may originate from the “real” news powerhouse Gannet. Imagine that.) The “trusted” outfit Reuters stated:
Apple, the dominant foreign smartphone maker in China, faces a slowing economy and competition from domestic rivals, such as Huawei…. Apple briefly fell out of China’s top five smartphone vendors in the second quarter of 2024 before recovering in the third quarter. The U.S. company’s smartphone sales in China still slipped 0.3% during the third quarter from a year earlier, while Huawei’s sales rose 42%, according to research firm IDC.
I think this means that Apple is losing share in what may have been a very juicy market. Can it get this fertile revenue field producing in-demand Fuji Apples to market? With a new US administration coming down the information highway, it is possible that the iPhone’s pop up fruit stand could be blown off the side of the main road.
An apple farmer grasps the problem fruit blight poses. Thanks, You.com you produced okay fruit blight when ChatGPT told me that an orchard with fruit blight was against is guidelines. Helpful, right?
Another issue Apple faces in a different orchard regards privacy. “Apple to Pay $95 Million to Settle Siri Privacy Lawsuit” reports:
Apple agreed to pay $95 million in cash to settle a proposed class action lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated Siri assistant violated users’ privacy…. Mobile device owners complained that Apple routinely recorded their private conversations after they activated Siri unintentionally, and disclosed these conversations to third parties such as advertisers.
Yeah, what about those privacy protections? What about those endless “Log in to your Facetime” when our devices don’t use Facetime. Hey, that is just Apple being so darned concerned about privacy. Will Apple pay or will it appeal? I won’t trouble you with my answer. Legal eagles love these fertile fields.
I don’t want to overlook the Apple AI. Yahoo recycled a story from Digital Intelligence called “The Good and Bad of Apple Intelligence after Using It on My iPhone for Months.” The Yahoo version of the story said:
I was excited to check out more Apple Intelligence features when I got the iOS 18.2 update on my iPhone 16 Pro. But aside from what I’ve already mentioned, the rest isn’t as exciting. I already hate AI art in general, so I wasn’t too thrilled about Image Playground. However, since it’s a new feature, I had to try it at least once. I tried to get Apple Intelligence to generate an AI image of me, in various scenarios, to perhaps share on social media. But every result I got did not look good to me, and I felt it had no actual resemblance to my image. It kept giving me odd-looking teeth in my smiles, hair that looked nothing like what I had, and other imperfections. I wasn’t expecting a perfect picture, but I was hoping I would get something that would be decent enough to share online — dozens of tries, and I wasn’t happy with any of them. I suppose my appearance doesn’t work with Apple’s AI art style? Whatever the reason is, my experience with it hasn’t been positive.
Yep, bad teeth. Perhaps the person has eaten too many apples?
Looking at these three allegedly accurate news stories what do I hypothesize about Apple in 2025:
- Apple will become increasingly desperate to generate revenue. Let’s face it the multi-thousand dollar Vision Pro headset and virtual Apple TV may fill the Chinese iPhone sales hole.
- Apple simply does what it wants to do with regard to privacy. From automatic iPhone reboots to smarmy talk about accidentally sucking down user data, the company cannot be trusted in 2025 in my opinion.
- Apple’s innovation is stalled. One of my colleagues told me Apple rolled out two dozen “new” products in 2025. I must confess that I cannot name one of them. The fruitarian seemed to be able to get my attention with “one more thing.” Today’s Apple has some discoloration.
Net net: The orchard needs a more skilled agrarian, fertilizer, and some luck with the business climate. Failing that, another bad crop may be ahead.
Stephen E Arnold, January 14, 2025
Some AI Wisdom: Is There a T Shirt?
January 14, 2025
Prepared by a still-alive dinobaby.
I was catching up with newsfeeds and busy filtering the human output from the smart software spam-arator. I spotted “The Serious Science of Trolling LLMs,” published in the summer of 2024. The article explains that value can be derived from testing large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others with prompts to force the software to generate something really stupid, off base, incorrect, or goofy. I zipped through the write up and found it interesting. Then I came upon this passage:
the LLM business is to some extent predicated on deception; we are not supposed to know where the magic ends and where cheap tricks begin. The vendors’ hope is that with time, we will reach full human-LLM parity; and until then, it’s OK to fudge it a bit. From this perspective, the viral examples that make it patently clear that the models don’t reason like humans are not just PR annoyances; they are a threat to product strategy.
Several observations:
- Progress from my point of view with smart software seems to have slowed. The reason may be that free and low cost services cannot affords to provide the functionality they did before someone figured out the cost per query. The bean counters spoke and “quality” went out the window.
- The gap between what the marketers say and what the systems do is getting wider. Sorry, AI wizards, the systems typically fail to produce an output satisfactory for my purposes on the first try. Multiple prompts are required. Again a cost cutting move in my opinion.
- Made up information or dead wrong information is becoming more evident. My hunch is that the consequence of ingesting content produced by AI is degrading the value of the models originally trained on human generated content. I think this is called garbage in — garbage out.
Net net: Which of the deep pocket people will be the first to step back from smart software built upon systems that consume billions of dollars the way my French bulldog eats doggie treats? The Chinese system Deepseek’s marketing essentially says, “Yo, we built this LLM at a fraction of the cost of the spendthrifts at Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Are the Chinese AI wizards dragging a red herring around the AI forest?
To go back to the Lcamtuf essay, “it’s OK to fudge a bit.” Nope, it is mandatory to fudge a lot.
Stephen E Arnold, January 14, 2025
Super Humans Share Super Thoughts about Free Speech
January 13, 2025
Prepared by a still-alive dinobaby.
The Marvel comix have come to life. “Elon Musk Responds As Telegram CEO Makes Fun of Facebook Parent Meta Over Fact Checking” reports
Elon Musk responded to a comment from Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who made a playful jab at Meta over its recent decision to end fact checking on Facebook and Instagram. Durov, posted about the shut down of Meta’s fact checking program on X (formerly known as Twitter) saying that Telegram’s commitment to freedom of speech does not depend on the US Electoral cycle.
The interaction among three modern Marvel heroes is interesting. Only Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and controlling force at Facebook (now Meta) is producing children with a spouse. Messrs. Musk and Durov are engaged in spawning children — presumably super comix characters — with multiple partners and operating as if each ruled a country. Mr. Musk has fathered a number of children. Mr. Durov allegedly has more than 100 children. The idea uniting these two larger-than-life characters is that they are super humans. Mr. Zuckerberg has a different approach, guided more by political expediency than a desire to churn out numerous baby Zucks.
Technology super heroes head toward a meeting of the United Nations to explain how the world will be working with their organizations. Thanks, Copilot. Good enough.
The article includes this statement from Mr. Durov:
I’m proud that Telegram has supported freedom of speech long before it became politically safe to dop so. Our values don’t depend on US electoral cycles, said Durov in a post shared on X.
This is quite a statement. Mr. Durov blocked messages from the Ukrainian government to Russian users of Telegram. After being snared in the French judicial system, Mr. Durov has demonstrated a desire to cooperate with law enforcement. Information about Telegram users has been provided to law enforcement. Mr. Durov is confined to France as his lawyers work to secure his release. Mr. Durov has been learning more about French procedures and bureaucracy since August 2024. The wheels of justice do turn in France, probably less rapidly than the super human Pavel Durov wishes.
After Mr. Durov shared his observation about the Zuck’s willingness to embrace free speech on Twitter (now x.com), the super hero Elon Musk chose to respond. Taking time from posts designed to roil the political waters in Britain, Mr. Musk offered an ironic “Good for you” as a comment about Mr. Durov’s quip about the Zuck.
The question is, “Do these larger-than-life characters with significant personal fortunes and influential social media soap boxes support free speech?” The answer is unclear. From my vantage point in rural Kentucky, I perceive public relations or marketing output from these three individuals. My take is that Mr. Durov talks about free speech as he appears to cooperate with French law enforcement and possibly a nation-state like Russia. Mr. Musk has been characterized by some in the US as “President Musk.” The handle reflects Mr. Musk’s apparent influence on some of the policies of the incoming administration. Mr. Zuckerberg has been quick to contribute money to a recently elected candidate and even faster on the draw when it comes to dumping much of the expensive overhead of fact checking social media content.
The Times of India article is more about the global ambitions of three company leaders. Free speech could be a convenient way to continue to generate business, retain influence over information framing, and reinforce their roles as the the 2025 incarnations of Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Hulk. After decades of inattention by regulators, the new super heroes may not be engaged in saving or preserving anything except their power and influence and cash flows.
Stephen E Arnold, January 13, 2025
Oh, Oh! Silicon Valley Hype Minimizes Risk. Who Knew?
January 10, 2025
This is an official dinobaby post. No smart software involved in this blog post.
I read “Silicon Valley Stifled the AI Doom Movement in 2024.” I must admit I was surprised that one of the cheerleaders for Silicon Valley is disclosing something absolutely no one knew. I mean unregulated monopolies, the “Puff the Magic Dragon” strafing teens, and the vulture capitalists slavering over the corpses of once thriving small and mid sized businesses. Hey, I thought that “progress” myth was real. I thought technology only makes life better. Now I read that “Silicon Valley” wanted only good news about smart software. Keep in mind that this is software which outputs hallucinations, makes decisions about medical care for people, and monitors the clicks and location of everyone with a mobile device or a geotracker.
The write up reminded me that ace entrepreneur / venture professional Marc Andreessen said:
“The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out. Fortunately, I am here to bring the good news: AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it,” said Andreessen in the essay. In his conclusion, Andreessen gave a convenient solution to our AI fears: move fast and break things – basically the same ideology that has defined every other 21st century technology (and their attendant problems). He argued that Big Tech companies and startups should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as possible, with few to no regulatory barriers. This would ensure AI does not fall into the hands of a few powerful companies or governments, and would allow America to compete effectively with China, he said.
What publications touted Mr. Andreessen’s vision? Answer: Lots.
Regulate smart software? Nope. From Connecticut’s effort to the US government, smart software regulation went nowhere. The reasons included, in my opinion:
- A chance to make a buck, well, lots of bucks
- Opportunities to foist “smart software” plus its inherent ability to make up stuff on corporate sheep
- A desire to reinvent “dumb” processes like figuring out how to push buttons to create addiction to online gambling, reduce costs by eliminating inefficient humans, and using stupid weapons.
Where are we now? A pillar of the Silicon Valley media ecosystem writes about the possible manipulation of information to make smart software into a Care Bear. Cuddly. Harmless. Squeezable. Yummy too.
The write up concludes without one hint of the contrast between the AI hype and the viewpoints of people who think that the technology of AI is immature but fumbling forward to stick its baby finger in a wall socket. I noted this concluding statement in the write up:
Calling AI “tremendously safe” and attempts to regulate it “dumb” is something of an oversimplification. For example, Character.AI – a startup a16z has invested in – is currently being sued and investigated over child safety concerns. In one active lawsuit, a 14-year-old Florida boy killed himself after allegedly confiding his suicidal thoughts to a Character.AI chatbot that he had romantic and sexual chats with. This case shows how our society has to prepare for new types of risks around AI that may have sounded ridiculous just a few years ago. There are more bills floating around that address long-term AI risk – including one just introduced at the federal level by Senator Mitt Romney. But now, it seems AI doomers will be fighting an uphill battle in 2025.
But don’t worry. Open source AI provides a level playing field for [a] adversaries of the US, [b] bad actors who use smart software to compromise Swiss cheese systems, and [c] manipulate people on a grand scale. Will the “Silicon Valley” media give equal time to those who don’t see technology as a benign or net positive? Are you kidding? Oh, aren’t those smart drones with kinetic devices just fantastic?
Stephen E Arnold, January 10, 2025
Social Media Change: Stop the Decay! Ouch! Stop!
January 10, 2025
This is an official dinobaby post. No smart software involved in this blog post.
I learned a new term: Platform Decay. I associated the phrase with Tooth Decay.
The Techspot article “Meta Wants to Fill Its Social Platforms with AI-Generated Bots” asserts:
Meta is actively working to transform its social media platforms into spaces where AI bots interact with each other. Over the next few years, the company formerly known as Facebook aims to integrate AI technology to boost “engagement” with its three billion real, human users. This could either be a revolution or just another disastrously misguided idea, like the previously dismissed “metaverse” VR ecosystem.
I thought Facebook was about people posting words and text on Instagram and shooting “secure” messages to and from via WhatsApp. Facebook is a service I perceive as supporting a platform for ecommerce excitement and allowing grandparents to see the grandchildren.
Now I am updated. The write up explains:
Meta is currently developing several AI products, including a service designed to help users create AI bots on Instagram and Facebook. These bots could clone users’ personalities and interact with other (non-bot) users on the network. The company hopes to attract younger audiences, who are apparently going crazy over AI these days.
I learned that there is a downside to this bot-topia; specifically:
Critics of this AI-filled dystopia warn about the risks related to the “weaponization” of AI-generated content. Becky Owen, innovation officer at creative agency Billion Dollar Boy and former head of Meta’s creator team, said fake AI accounts could easily be used to amplify false narratives if robust safeguards are not enforced on social media.
What’s interesting to me is that one of Meta / Zuckbook’s competitors is not going in this direction. Telegram is chasing crypto. To be fair, the Zuck is not under the control of a nation state like Pavel Durov. He enjoys the ministrations of the French judiciary. His minions are cutting deals, integrating online gambling services like CryptoCasino.com, and training developers in Vancouver and other major cities to build for the Telegram platform. (I think of Telegram as the framework for building super apps for online crime, but I am a dinobaby and hopelessly out of step with social media).
Which strategy will win in 2025? Will the Zuck get richer and dominate the social bot scene and attract millions more new users? Will Telegram grow beyond one billion users and help undermine the US financial system while delivering crypto alternatives for traditional banking services? I don’t know.
I am not sure the phrase “platform decay” captures what the Zuck is doing. I know that Telegram is not exactly decaying while its founder is confined to France, good food, and French red tape.
I think the article is trying to explain that the good old Facebook is changing. What’s decaying are the features and digital hooks that made the Zuck a big dog.
Net net: These platforms are making an attempt to adapt and avoid the MySpace problem: No users. Get real, Techspot. Longing for the past is a poor use of one’s time. Adapt or go away — That’s this dinobaby’s advice.
Stephen E Arnold, January 10, 2025
Meta and Zuck Make Free Speech News
January 9, 2025
Techmeme makes clear that Meta and its charming leader are important and “real” news. I checked the splash page of the online news service and learned:
- Zuckerberg is “pretending” about free speech. You can read that legal / journalistic explanation in TechDirt
- Mastodon, another social media service, will filter some Meta content. (Isn’t that censorship?) Read that TechCrunch story here.
- The truth outfit — Thomson Reuters — reports that the European Union says, “Hey, we don’t institutionalize censorship!” Top up your info tank at this link.
- The paywalled orange newspaper asserts that in 2023 Meta did the “give me money” approach to business, letting some “top advertisers” call ad placement shots. The FT discloses what may be non-public information too!
- The Bezos journalistic enterprise, another for-fee operation which may have some staff issues, points out that the US of A and Europe may not see eye-to-eye when it comes to filtering content.
Here’s what the Zuck-dense splash page looked like at 545 am on January 9, 2025:
Several observations:
- The message about what is permissible and what is not permissible across the Zuckerberg properties is not clear
- The gestalt of the cited stories is that Meta is responding to and taking advantage of an opportunity to define “free speech” so it conforms with the expectations of certain person of influence in the United States
- The decisions illustrate a certain opportunism with benefits in the management think tank at the Zuck operational headquarters: Reduce some costs, generate buzz, and dump the baggage of trying to establish and maintain an editorial policies that get in the way of generating cash or “free” money.
Net net: The difference between Meta’s approach to innovation to that of an organization like Telegram becomes increasingly clear. Focusing on Meta could result in missing important Telegram signals.
Stephen E Arnold, January 9, 2025
AI Outfit Pitches Anti Human Message
January 9, 2025
AI startup Artisan thought it could capture attention by telling companies to get rid of human workers and use its software instead. It was right. Gizmodo reports, “AI Firm’s ‘Stop Hiring Humans’ Billboard Campaign Sparks Outrage.” The firm plastered its provocative messaging across San Francisco. Writer Lucas Ropek reports:
“The company, which is backed by startup accelerator Y-Combinator, sells what it calls ‘AI Employees’ or ‘Artisans.’ What the company actually sells is software designed to assist with customer service and sales workflow. The company appears to have done an internal pow-wow and decided that the most effective way to promote its relatively mundane product was to fund an ad campaign heralding the end of the human age. Writing about the ad campaign, local outlet SFGate notes that the posters—which are strewn all over the city—include plugs like the following:
‘Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance’
‘Artisan’s Zoom cameras will never ‘not be working’ today.’
‘Hire Artisans, not humans.’
‘The era of AI employees is here.'”
The write-up points to an interview with SFGate in which CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack states the ad campaign was designed to “draw eyes.” Mission accomplished. (And is it just me, or does that name belong in a pirate movie?) Though Ropek acknowledges his part in drawing those eyes, he also takes this chance to vent about AI and big tech in general. He writes:
“It is Carmichael-Jackson’s admission that his billboards are ‘dystopian’—just like the product he’s selling—that gets to the heart of what is so [messed] up about the whole thing. It’s obvious that Silicon Valley’s code monkeys now embrace a fatalistic bent of history towards the Bladerunner-style hellscape their market imperatives are driving us.”
Like Artisan’s billboards, Ropek pulls no punches. Located in San Francisco, Artisan was launched in 2023. Founders hail from the likes of Stanford, Oxford, Meta, and IBM. Will the firm find a way to make its next outreach even more outrageous?
Cynthia Murrell, January 9, 2025
UK The Register Emits News of Chinese Cyber Excreta
January 8, 2025
This is an official dinobaby post. No smart software involved in this blog post.
I loved this write up from the UK’s The Register online information service: “China’s Cyber Intrusions Took a Sinister Turn in 2024.” The write up gathers together some notable cyber events and links them to the Middle Kingdom. Examples include:
- Router exploits
- Compromising infrastructure of major American cities
- The exfiltration of data from US telephony companies
The write up includes the zippy names cyber security researchers give these exploits and their perpetrators; for example, Volt Typhoon and Vanguard Panda.
Perhaps the most important statement in the article is, in my opinion:
“We cannot say with certainty that the adversary has been evicted, because we still don’t know the scope of what they’re doing,” Jeff Greene, CISA’s executive assistant director for cybersecurity, told reporters during a Salt Typhoon briefing in early December.
Several observations:
- The attacks are not confined to the estimable Microsoft software; more commercial software is providing warm, comfortable havens for attacking systems and stealing data
- The existing cyber security systems — no matter what the marketers say in sales material and at law enforcement / intelligence conferences — does not work very well
- Different cyber investigators discover novel, unknown, and possibly unique exploits unearthed and exploited by bad actors in China. Other countries enjoy the fruits of lousy security too I want to add.
So what? What happens if one shoots enough bullets at Butch Cassidy’s and the Sundance Kids’ adobe hideout? Answer: It falls down. Each exploit is a digital bullet hole. Without remediation — serious remediation — the US may suffer some structural collapses. PR, smarmy talk, and excuses won’t do the job.
Stephen E Arnold, January 8, 2025
FOGINT: Divergent Trajectories for Facebook and Telegram
January 7, 2025
A post from the FOGINT team.
The Techmeme splash page featured several Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.) stories. Here’s a mini-version of the home page with the Zuck-related stories identified:
The separate “stories” presented one theme: Free speech. Here’s a representative item from today’s Techmeme page at 9 20 am US Eastern: “Meta Is Ending Its Fact-Checking Program in Favor of a Community Notes System Similar to X.” The news item from NBC reports:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company’s moderation policies and practices Tuesday, citing a shifting political and social landscape and a desire to embrace free speech. Zuckerberg said that Meta will end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes. The company is also making changes to its content moderation policies around political topics and undoing changes that reduced the amount of political content in user feeds, Zuckerberg said.
For me, this says, “Cut some costs and respond to “a shifting political and social landscape.” The direction in which Meta is moving seems to be “freer speech,” albeit within whatever Silly Putty guardrails Mr. Zuckerberg decrees.
In contrast, Telegram — which has out-innovated Meta for many years — is taking a different path through environmental changes in the datasphere. Since France required that Mr. Durov, founder and “owner” of Telegram remain in France until his company’s behavior has been dissected, Telegram is moving on a different trajectory. A few details of this charge have been reported in “Telegram Hands U.S. Authorities Data on Thousands of Users.” This exposé declares:
Telegram, the popular social network and messaging application which has also become a hotbed for all sorts of serious criminal activity, provided U.S. authorities with data on more than 2,200 users last year, according to newly released data from Telegram. The news shows a massive spike in the number of data requests fulfilled by Telegram after French authorities arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in August, in part because of the company’s unwillingness to provide user data in a child abuse investigation. Between January 1 and September 30, 2024, Telegram fulfilled 14 requests “for IP addresses and/or phone numbers” from the United States, which affected a total of 108 users, according to Telegram’s Transparency Reports bot. But for the entire year of 2024, it fulfilled 900 requests from the U.S. affecting a total of 2,253 users, meaning that the number of fulfilled requests skyrocketed between October and December, according to the newly released data. “Fulfilled requests from the United States of America for IP address and/or phone number: 900,” Telegram’s Transparency Reports bot said when prompted for the latest report by 404 Media. “Affected users: 2253,” it added.
Since France’s direct action, Telegram has apparently become even more cooperative with law enforcement. Plus, Telegram agreed to participate in activities designed to identify human traffickers. On the surface, it appears that Telegram is becoming more agreeable to legitimate requests from law enforcement. Telegram has become associated with a number of interesting and possibly illegal activities in some countries. Examples range from groups (private and public) discussing terrorism and child pornography.
But that “shift” to cooperation distracts from what is a major change at Telegram and its affiliated entities like The Open Network Foundation, Ton.social, and assorted investment vehicles. Specifically, Telegram is doubling down on crypto currency. The Telegram infrastructure is being shaped and in some cases repurposed to host services, features, and distributed applications related to crypto. The idea, as the FOGINT team understands it, is to provide a hub or nexus for traditional financial services built on crypto, not the US dollar, euros, or “traditional” and regulated currencies.
A second effect of this shift at Telegram is its push to provide a home for a wide range of seemingly harmless online games. On the surface, a parent or a person as old as the producer of this blog, would glance at the display and think, “Oh, another child’s game.” Those individuals would be incorrect. Telegram “click to earn” games include addictive hooks and the upside of playing are points which can be converted to crypto currency. Gambling and the downstream financial services required by big winners or “whales” are the customers. The addictive element is just part of Telegram’s marketing activities.
Net net: Meta wants free speech or at least to appear to be lining up with the “shifting political and social landscape.” Telegram is using social as a way to speed use of crypto as an alternative to the US dollar. Social media giants are similar in some ways, but at this point in time, the two companies are on divergent trajectories.
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2025
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