I'm actually quite thrilled that end users found a way to communicate in spite of "the everyday solution" being down. That gives me some hope that smaller vendors do stand a chance against incumbents, even in Facebook's space.
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Telegram founder says over 70M new users joined during Facebook outage
141–150 of 153 posts
Re: Telegram founder says over 70M new users joined during Facebook outage
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've thought about a phone-numberless messaging app, but then it'd be full of spammers.
Is that really a problem though? Most people would just add their friends via username and bypass the whole user discovery process. Discord has demonstrated that this works perfectly fine, even with anonymous accounts not tied to emails.
I’ve only used discord a couple months in a handful of servers and I get spam dms..
Re: Telegram founder says over 70M new users joined during Facebook outage
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other than the 1:30 hour downtime that happened to a lot of old accounts. I actually think it's genius if they throttled old accounts just to let new people see how good telegram is.
Source re 'old accounts'? I have an account as old as you can get, and had no problems, so I'd be interested in proof of a disproportionate impact on older accounts.
I wonder if they meant longest idle accounts. It would make sense to throttle them if they're just running tmux with an idle shell or ten. Like a bigger renice that shuts off when the process stops being idle.
Re: Telegram founder says over 70M new users joined during Facebook outage
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very good point. There's a free-ish client on F-Droid (probably even official), but it's still a proprietary and centralized service. I would not really consider it better than the other proprietary options, but for whatever reason some tech people are into telegram.
Back in high school when I started using telegram (2010ish?), I started using it because it wasn’t Whatsapp, it wasn’t owned by Facebook, and it had a really great UI. And I didn’t really understand the encryption implications. Today I really wish it had full encryption. It says something about the developers that they’ve avoided default E2E for a full decade or more now. I’m trying to use signal more. But I also hav…
> It says something about the developers that they’ve avoided default E2E for a full decade or more now.
It's by design: https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by...
Re: Telegram founder says over 70M new users joined during Facebook outage
#145Is there a way to join telegram without giving them my phone number? That just feels like a honeypot/dataleak waiting to happen.
That would be a no-go for me too... if I had a phone number. These days, it's actually surprisingly hard to get a free email account without having to provide a phone number.
I just made an anonymous phone number at textnow.
Re: Telegram founder says over 70M new users joined during Facebook outage
#146I feel like Telegram has some big user base out there that organizes into communities. How do I find out about those communities to participate?
If you're a dev. https://thedevs.network
Re: Telegram founder says over 70M new users joined during Facebook outage
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be a no-go for me too... if I had a phone number. These days, it's actually surprisingly hard to get a free email account without having to provide a phone number.
I just made an anonymous phone number at textnow.
How did you sign up to textnow without an email address?
Re: Telegram founder says over 70M new users joined during Facebook outage
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except who the hell even use E2EE on Telegram?
Fair enough, not me. But it's there and verified if you want it.
Yeah it's here, but it doesn't sync between devices, there is no group chat support, etc. While marketing trying to sell Telegram as good privacy by default.
Re: Telegram founder says over 70M new users joined during Facebook outage
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any sources about any real vulnerabilities in MTProto?
Mtproto did have. Mtproto 2.0 hasnhasn't seen such vulnerability. Reporters are still on the older method as that's what creates an effective login.
One thing I know is that it was possible in mtproto 1.0 to append something to a packet and have a client still accept it. This didn't allow anyone to modify the contents of the packet or see its plaintext. This was possible because the plaintext hash (the one in header, used to verify packet integrity after decryption) didn't include the padding. In mtproto 2.0, the hash is sha256 instead of sha1, and it does include the padding.
Re: Telegram founder says over 70M new users joined during Facebook outage
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. I have found the phone number requirement idiotic from day one. I recognize the decision was made as a trade off between usability and security (enabling discovering friends via phone etc), but they seem unwilling to admit that this does compromise security.
I've thought about a phone-numberless messaging app, but then it'd be full of spammers.
that problem was solved like 25 years ago, just ignore everyone who you didn't seek out yourself by default. Basically, make liberate use of the block functionality.