Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TDLib – Build Your Own Telegram Client

telegram.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 101 posts

Re: TDLib – Build Your Own Telegram Client

#31

Post by veeti »

orbifold wrote: post #21

I like how they do very good engineering (just straight C++, Swift, with little to no external dependencies) with a very small team of apparently very talented people. Most of their products are typically owned by one or two people. It's also pretty smart of them to make all of the clients available as open source and keep the server implementations private. This way they don't have to license QT for example.

Behold, 12283 lines of very good engineering:

https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/e9e40cb13ea942b148b25...

Re: TDLib – Build Your Own Telegram Client

#32

Post by throwaway-hn123 »

andrepd wrote: post #25
Anon1096 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for me, I prefer the way telegram has decided to handle end to end encryption. Let's face it - me and my friends have no use for it, and never will. Our threat model just doesn't really care about actors like the NSA hacking us. If they wanted there's tons of other ways to get our information any (like Google or Facebook accounts). But not being encrypted gives us features not possible otherwise, like url prefet…

Speak for yourself. I care about privacy, and I couldn't give a shit about something so minor as link prefetching. I suspect I'm far from alone.

he literally was speaking for himself, you ignorant, rude cunt.

Re: TDLib – Build Your Own Telegram Client

#33

Post by parmesan »

veeti wrote: post #31
orbifold wrote: post #21

I like how they do very good engineering (just straight C++, Swift, with little to no external dependencies) with a very small team of apparently very talented people. Most of their products are typically owned by one or two people. It's also pretty smart of them to make all of the clients available as open source and keep the server implementations private. This way they don't have to license QT for example.

Behold, 12283 lines of very good engineering: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/e9e40cb13ea942b148b25...

Takes a great engineer to make that work as well as it does..

Re: TDLib – Build Your Own Telegram Client

#34

Post by detaro »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #20
lozenge wrote: post #8

Telegram has a poor security record, with homegrown encryption algorithms and no end to end encryption by default.

You're just repeating something that you read on HN. Entirely false.

Not entirely false, no. It does not have end-to-end encryption by default, and not at all for group chats, and the cryptography is a bigger unknown than with others.

Re: TDLib – Build Your Own Telegram Client

#35

Post by lloeki »

andrepd wrote: post #25
Anon1096 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for me, I prefer the way telegram has decided to handle end to end encryption. Let's face it - me and my friends have no use for it, and never will. Our threat model just doesn't really care about actors like the NSA hacking us. If they wanted there's tons of other ways to get our information any (like Google or Facebook accounts). But not being encrypted gives us features not possible otherwise, like url prefet…

Speak for yourself. I care about privacy, and I couldn't give a shit about something so minor as link prefetching. I suspect I'm far from alone.

While I do find such features convenient, more importantly to me they draw people to a more secure and privacy conscious messaging platform than the ultra-popular alternatives all the while allowing to upgrade to E2E† on demand. Signal completely fails in that regard, as the number of contacts (actual or potential) on it is precisely zero for me.

Re: TDLib – Build Your Own Telegram Client

#36

Post by orbifold »

veeti wrote: post #31
orbifold wrote: post #21

I like how they do very good engineering (just straight C++, Swift, with little to no external dependencies) with a very small team of apparently very talented people. Most of their products are typically owned by one or two people. It's also pretty smart of them to make all of the clients available as open source and keep the server implementations private. This way they don't have to license QT for example.

Behold, 12283 lines of very good engineering: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/e9e40cb13ea942b148b25...

Well the c++ code is pretty good... In any case it works much better than the signal app on android.

Re: TDLib – Build Your Own Telegram Client

#37

Post by lloeki »

negus wrote: post #12
lozenge wrote: post #8

Telegram has a poor security record, with homegrown encryption algorithms and no end to end encryption by default.

And by the way, "no end to end encryption by default" -- is intentional tradeoff for cross-device message history sharing by default, which is not possible in case of e2e, without key transferring

> cross-device message history sharing by default, which is not possible in case of e2e, without key transferring

iMessage does that† (is that what you mean by "key transferring"?). I wish it could display the device key fingerprints somewhere, allow for key pinning, as well as offline key exchange between parties though††.

† in fact history is not centrally shared: messages are encrypted and published once per receiving device by the sender.

†† And be cross-platform. But the optimist in me says it's to control the security experience while the cynical in me says it's about network effects (although mitigated by SMS integration) for commercial reasons.

Re: TDLib – Build Your Own Telegram Client

#38

Post by kemonocode »

Unless they release the server code, no, you can't build your own "Telegram" yet. The original article's title was misleading, thankfully the HN submission title was amended to correct it. Still useful of course for anyone creating third-party clients, but an entirely different matter.

Re: TDLib – Build Your Own Telegram Client

#39

Post by acct1771 »

bollockitis wrote: post #28
andrepd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself. I care about privacy, and I couldn't give a shit about something so minor as link prefetching. I suspect I'm far from alone.

Anon1096 clearly stated that he was speaking for himself (or herself) but I agree with him: I want privacy but I don't necessarily need complete secrecy. This isn't a zero sum game: Telegram and Signal can coexist and serve different needs.

"I really don't think most users are worried" is the stark OPPOSITE of speaking for yourself.

Re: TDLib – Build Your Own Telegram Client

#40

Post by calgoo »

Anon1096 wrote: post #18
DCKing wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a messaging service called Wire that does E2E, cross device messaging history by default (up to 6 devices), using very friendly, familiar UX - you only need to sign in on your device. It might have been an intentional tradeoff when Telegram came out, but it's not any more. It's not a great defense for the fact that you chat history exists in plain text on Telegram servers.

Well for me, I prefer the way telegram has decided to handle end to end encryption. Let's face it - me and my friends have no use for it, and never will. Our threat model just doesn't really care about actors like the NSA hacking us. If they wanted there's tons of other ways to get our information any (like Google or Facebook accounts). But not being encrypted gives us features not possible otherwise, like url prefet…

I really don't understand the "hate" for Telegram on HN. I understand that its not (allegedly) as secure as signal for example, but like you said, state actors etc have other ways of getting that info (see xkcd [1]).

I personally use Telegram when talking to my wife because it lets me have a client on every platform i use and the messages follow me. I could do that with some of the other platforms as well, but im already on this platform, the wife is on the platform, and some other family members as well. Now would it be better if it was "more" secure? Of course it could, I mean, we could all be communicating with PGP as well, but most people don't because its a pain to use. So to me personally, Telegram is a useful middle ground between great security and usability.

As a added bonus, using the bot framework that Telegram offers, i have started creating a home automation bot. The framework is really fun and easy to use.

[1] https://xkcd.com/538/

Post reply on HN