Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook
wired.com

"Telegram is Russian Spying"

"Telegram has extremely weak crypto"

"Telegram is used by pedophiles"

"Telegram is used by far-right terrorists"

.... Use Signal!

sigh

The amount of times people bash on telegram is becoming painful.

But lets take a logical argument; NSA has made it's mission in backdooring basically everything.

We know from the Snowden revalations that their technical capability in 2008 (he only exposed info on things that were already old, his intent was to show illegal surveillance not capability remember) was such that they had some kind of access to every conceivable device on the planet and the majority of communication that went through the US.

I don't think their technical capability got significantly worse in that time. So, if Telegrams private crypto code is backdoored or weak: well, NSA have it. No doubt should remain in anyones mind about that.

Telegram is hosted on Google Cloud, which is under the juristiction of USA. Google cloud claims to not have access to client data, but I think it's not outside the realm of possibility that something could exist between the TLS terminators and the telegram communication relays.

Maybe I'm wrong here entirely, but two things cannot be true at the same time:

1) Telegram is weak, NSA has access

2) Telegram is strong, NSA does not have acces

If telegram was strong: NSA would do everything in it's power to push users to more controlled platforms.

If telegram was weak: Jan 6th and Jihadi terrorists wouldn't use it.

Addendum: all of these same complaints (save: weak crypto) can be used against Signal.

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I don't think this is a good justification for not using telegram, you wont be labelled alt-right or a terrorist or a pedophile.

These same arguments come out time and time again about Tor too. It's pitiful, honestly.

We don’t even need to resort to conspiracy theories — all Germany would have to do to ban Telegram is make Apple take it out of its app store. And it is coming close to that. Telegram’s Durov also openly said that they respect countries’ laws and censor certain people because to be kicked out of the app stores in that country is worse.

What is the decentralized alternative? It takes a lot of work and immunity from the profit motive, to build a viable alternative.

Moxie is famously skeptical of decentralization, but it is essential — not just for privacy, but more broadly — for user empowerment and control. If you want to know what the decentralized solutions look like, lease read my answer to Moxie

https://community.intercoin.org/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

Source? Back when Russia was playing IP whack-a-mole, they were using at least AWS, Google and Azure.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43797176

Not that this really affects the thrust of your argument, since all 3 are US entities, but it seems unlikely that there's a single place you could tap for access to everything.