111–120 of 299 posts
Signal has this as well. I trust their security (personal bias), but unfortunately the call quality is a non-starter at the moment.
Signal has this as well. I trust their security (personal bias), but unfortunately the call quality is a non-starter at the moment.
In a world full of bloated Electron HTML5 / JS "desktop apps", I'm very happy to see Telegram on Windows is a native app (Qt). It feels so incredibly responsive compared to everything else.
The funny thing is that Qt apps used to be derided for bloat (15MB of DLLs! 15MB! ) but the rise of Electron has made Qt seem featherweight by comparison.
This is your periodic reminder that Telegram uses sketchy crypto and should be avoided.
So then why didn't you break the crypto yet? There was a $300,000 bounty to break it.[1] This whole, "don't roll your own encryption" argument is getting really old. Everything was new at one point. [1] https://telegram.org/blog/cryptocontest
6 months later, a russian guy showed that the server could MITM every newly started or renegotiated secret chat.
Sure, they manned up to their promises and gave him something like $80k, but it is a rather telling story about how good they are at crypto.
Their crypto today? Yup, still weird.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But NOBODY I know actually uses the secure chat feature — mainly because it isn't default, but also because it doesn't sync between devices.
The lack of sync is a feature. That's what you get when you have a secure system.
"Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from your and your device‘s feedback (naturally, it doesn’t have access to the contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of future calls on the given device and network." What…
Sounds like marketing speech for variable bitrate encoding and/or adjusting compression aggressiveness.
I hope not... VBR can easily leak all sorts of information (including the actual content of the conversation)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Telegram on Windows is a native app (Qt) I thought Qt still bypassed the native user interface and drew all their own controls?
That doesn't make it a non-native app. They're still just leveraging direct platform APIs under the hood. Native these days seems to mean "without a web browser under the hood".
The word has lost meaning as to nontechnical users, it's mostly about "can i install it directly on my device". We need better terms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know what it is, it's just not lightweight.
It is compared to Electron; I don't know how WPF compares though, IIRC the 'de facto' way to make windows native apps nowadays also involves some web technology?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't make it a non-native app. They're still just leveraging direct platform APIs under the hood. Native these days seems to mean "without a web browser under the hood".
Not even that. I've seen plenty Electron and Cordova apps billed as "native". The word has lost meaning as to nontechnical users, it's mostly about "can i install it directly on my device". We need better terms.
But it being a window that runs a second web browser, that is OK.
In a world full of bloated Electron HTML5 / JS "desktop apps", I'm very happy to see Telegram on Windows is a native app (Qt). It feels so incredibly responsive compared to everything else.
The funny thing is that Qt apps used to be derided for bloat (15MB of DLLs! 15MB! ) but the rise of Electron has made Qt seem featherweight by comparison.
Life's a little different now than in the old XP days. Disk space and ram aren't as limiting as before and the slow redraw times of qt and other cross-platform libraries have been taken care of by GPU hardware acceleration, faster ram, and faster CPUs.
These complaints were valid back then and our opinions didn't change because of things like Electron, as much as our hardware is so much more powerful. I remember dreading running Java desktop apps and now I can barely see the difference between them and native win32 apps. Heck, running an app on a virtualized OS on top of my native OS is often fairly performant nowadays.