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Telegram Voice Chats

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Re: Telegram Voice Chats

#71

Post by tsjq »

timwis wrote: post #63

This reminds me of how I used to use Teamspeak with a gaming organisation I used to be part of. It was a completely different dynamic than a video call. You could "hang out" in a room, chime in when you wanted, say nothing when you wanted. It was a lot more like working separately but with physical proximity to one another. I'm optimistic that, applied to a work context and with the same norms, this could go a long w…

that's interesting, indeed. is it like everyone puts their mic on mute except when they want to speak ?

Re: Telegram Voice Chats

#72

Post by pkulak »

unicornporn wrote: post #60
adkadskhj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish Telegram would embrace open source, security audits, etc. It's one of, if not the, best UX chat message apps with so many features it's sort of mindblowing. I'd love to use them. But.. i avoid it, because something doesn't smell right. Allowing me to pay would be yet another right direction for Telegram, but i just can't move past the audit (and to a lesser extent, FOSS)

> It's one of, if not the, best UX chat message apps with so many features it's sort of mindblowing. I'd go as far as saying it's by far the best. I have used the word unnerving to describe the fact it's so beyond the rest of the competition, yet free and without a viable business model. I use Signal with friends and Matrix with other nerds.

It goes too far for me. Every time I set it up I have to turn the background to white and turn off emojis that take up the entire window and wipe out all context. I actually prefer the simplicity of Signal's apps.

Re: Telegram Voice Chats

#73

Post by oarsinsync »

escalt wrote: post #30
MatthiasP wrote: post #23

No mention of any kind of encryption?

Telegram keeps talking about how private and secure it is, but all group and private chats are not encrypted by default. Its end to end encrypted chats are very limited (only direct messages and only on one device) and rely on self-baked crypto. Their voice chat is also almost definitely not end to end encrypted, as I'm not aware of a way to do e2ee voice chat with many participants without linearly increasing bandwi…

I wonder if it’s possible to do in the same way WhatsApp does for media uploads.

When you send a video to a contact on WhatsApp, it takes some time to upload the video. When you then forward the video a few minutes later, it’s near instant. This set off red flags for me, as that can’t be E2EE if so.

Someone explained that the media is encrypted using one key, which is stored locally. The key is then encrypted and transmitted to the recipient using the clients public key. When you forward the media, you only need to send the second recipient the encrypted key using their pubkey (along with the identifier for the media that is still present in WhatsApp server side cache).

This in itself raises some more red flags relating to the encryption of the media being transmitted and cached in the first place, but if that’s all done sensibly, then this isn’t the worst solution to reduce bandwidth utilisation by end users.

A similar approach could be used for E2EE group calls. Encrypt the payload using one key, send the payload to all participants via a central server (which generally has to happen anyway due to NAT traversal issues, especially with mobile internet), and send each participant the keys individually. Voila, group call with 3 people or 30 people doesn’t result in having to retransmit the same audio payload multiple times.

Obviously this is a simplistic overview of how this could work. I am not a cryptographer, I have no expertise in this area, everything above could be total baloney. Anyone with expertise should absolutely correct me please and thank you.

All that said, hope this helps.

EDIT: changed the above to reflect that forwarding media is “near instant” rather than “instant”

Re: Telegram Voice Chats

#74

Post by selykg »

timwis wrote: post #63

This reminds me of how I used to use Teamspeak with a gaming organisation I used to be part of. It was a completely different dynamic than a video call. You could "hang out" in a room, chime in when you wanted, say nothing when you wanted. It was a lot more like working separately but with physical proximity to one another. I'm optimistic that, applied to a work context and with the same norms, this could go a long w…

one of the teams I was on at my previous employer was like this. code review was done in groups on this call as well. Got stuck on something and need another set of eyeballs? Share your screen and pair program on it.

It made working from home a little less solo. You could come and go on the call as you wished it wasn't really required unless it was a team call where certain topics were being discussed that should have everyone (or nearly everyone).

Re: Telegram Voice Chats

#75

Post by pkulak »

perardi wrote: post #52
adkadskhj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish Telegram would embrace open source, security audits, etc. It's one of, if not the, best UX chat message apps with so many features it's sort of mindblowing. I'd love to use them. But.. i avoid it, because something doesn't smell right. Allowing me to pay would be yet another right direction for Telegram, but i just can't move past the audit (and to a lesser extent, FOSS)

Despite the potential security issues, I still use Telegram. Where possible, I prefer to type on my proper desktop keyboard, because I am a stubborn old man and you kids with your phones, and Telegram is just so nice in that context. It uses no resources, the UI largely gets out of the way, and message sync and delivery is 99.9% reliable in my experience. (Looking at you, Messages app.) I do worry on some level that,…

It's not your info that people can get, it's your chats, which makes "info" sound like the understatement of the year. Less so the past year that we've been in the same house at all times, but I generally chat with my SO all day long about everything on my messaging app. It's _not_ okay to have years of that history stored on a Russian app server based in Dubai. A security audit doesn't matter. I'll take for granted that the chats get to the server securely before being stored in plain text forever. Even if I could trust the current company to be 100% altruistic, I can't trust that data to be safe with them forever. Through state-sponsored attacks, company sales, new CEOs, new boards, etc.

Re: Telegram Voice Chats

#76

Post by rhamzeh »

zinekeller wrote: post #20
ninkendo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? That sounds wrong to me. Do you have a source for this?

There is literally a website for this specifically ( https://dontkillmyapp.com/ ) created by the Urbandroid team (creators of Sleep as Android). Rather annongingly, the team started out due to problems encountered on HMD/Nokia phones, since acknowledged and partially fixed ( https://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/faq/alarms-sleep-... ). Personal anecdote: even Google have been wishy-washy between different versio…

The problem isn't killing the apps in the background, it's whitelisting others.

I want every app I don't manually allow to run in the background to be terminated after a short period of 30s~60s or so.

Re: Telegram Voice Chats

#77

Post by kifhuwzrsa »

berkes wrote: post #58
adkadskhj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish Telegram would embrace open source, security audits, etc. It's one of, if not the, best UX chat message apps with so many features it's sort of mindblowing. I'd love to use them. But.. i avoid it, because something doesn't smell right. Allowing me to pay would be yet another right direction for Telegram, but i just can't move past the audit (and to a lesser extent, FOSS)

Telegram, the client, is fully FLOSS. You can even find it on f-droid¹, contrary to e.g. Signal, which is only available for installation via closed app stores. Do you refer to the server-stack? How would that being Open Source help you when you cannot ever verify what a server actually runs? ¹ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.telegram.messenger/

Signal is available from their website and the build on their website includes a self update feature.

Re: Telegram Voice Chats

#78

Post by ffpip »

hungryforcodes wrote: post #68
aaomidi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically already exists through payment bot api

But who knows that? It's poorly documented, obviously, as I'm a big Telegram fan, and this is the first I've heard of it.

Telegram's documentation is fantastic. Everything is updated, and their API allows building your own app. It's that open

https://core.telegram.org/bots/payments

^ first result for telegram bot payments

Re: Telegram Voice Chats

#79

Post by ffpip »

oarsinsync wrote: post #73
escalt wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram keeps talking about how private and secure it is, but all group and private chats are not encrypted by default. Its end to end encrypted chats are very limited (only direct messages and only on one device) and rely on self-baked crypto. Their voice chat is also almost definitely not end to end encrypted, as I'm not aware of a way to do e2ee voice chat with many participants without linearly increasing bandwi…

I wonder if it’s possible to do in the same way WhatsApp does for media uploads. When you send a video to a contact on WhatsApp, it takes some time to upload the video. When you then forward the video a few minutes later, it’s near instant. This set off red flags for me, as that can’t be E2EE if so. Someone explained that the media is encrypted using one key, which is stored locally. The key is then encrypted and tra…

>When you send a video to a contact on WhatsApp, it takes some time to upload the video. When you then forward the video a ..

It's actually not instant. I've tested this multiple times. Maybe you had a spike in upload speeds suddenly when forwarding?

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