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Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

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Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#21

Post by discardedrefuse »

bmarquez wrote: post #18
countvonbalzac wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the article - "Whether this is a good thing for the world is another question, one muddied by how poorly understood Telegram is, especially in the US. The vast majority of journalists still refer to it as an “encrypted messaging app.” This description unnerves many security experts, who warn that, unlike Signal or WhatsApp, Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default; that users must go out of their way to t…

> what ultimately matters is how people actually use it, and that is probably in an unencrypted manner I've heard criticisms about Telegram's MTProto encryption on HN, but in my usage of Telegram nobody has ever turned on the secret chats mode enabling it anyway. Anyone privacy-conscious asks me to use Signal, Matrix, or even Threema. I have heard compliments about Telegram sticker packs though, if the other apps wan…

> I have heard compliments about Telegram sticker packs though, if the other apps want more users they could consider making "cute stickers" :)

You joke, but Telegram's clients have been innovating for years. Way ahead of the rest. Its packed with features and yet never feels bloated or slow. Frankly, its amazing.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#23

Post by shp0ngle »

This article is good.

Telegram is really weird and sketchy; the rants Durov posts on his channel against WhatsApp usually make no sense; and their claims of security are dubious. And TON was a disaster.

On the other hand. If I did any social organizing today, I would definitely use Telegram. Signal is fine, but nobody is using it and the UX is just worse. I don't trust Facebook to randomly not shut everything down because some outsourced content moderator in New Delhi had a bad sleep.

Durov might be sketchy and weird libertarian, but damn, his developers can deliver good and working product really fast. (And from what I understand, it's a really small team.) Credit where it's due.

I still think Telegram will plainly run out of money in a few years (you can use it to host unlimited amount of data and share it with unlimited number of people!! that is not sustainable), but well, I will use them before they do.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#24

Post by lmm »

dijit wrote: post #3

"Telegram is favoured by Jihadists" "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…

> 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.

We know they had access to every centralised provider's servers (including Google and any other company you care to name). We also know that they couldn't break post-DES cryptosystems when properly used - indeed NSA employees expressed considerable frustration about the fact that they couldn't break PGP-encrypted emails or chats and had to resort to metadata analysis, social engineering, hacking individual users and so on.

> 1) Telegram is weak, NSA has access

> 2) Telegram is strong, NSA does not have acces

It's not a binary. Most attacks on cryptosystems reduce the amount of work it takes to break in rather than making it completely free. And even if the NSA theoretically has access, that doesn't mean they can predict an attack or will share that data with every contry/agency/company. We know the NSA was reading all unencrypted emails up until at least 2012 or so, yet there was plenty of crime committed and discussed over email during that period.

(I'm no fan of Signal or the way it's marketed, quite the opposite, but I trust Telegram far less)

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#25

Post by selcuka »

dijit wrote: post #3

"Telegram is favoured by Jihadists" "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…

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

You must have missed this piece [1]:

> The app was in fact secretly built by the FBI, and designed to allow law enforcement to tune into conversations between about 9,000 users scattered around Earth.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/08/operation_ironside_an...

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#26

Post by ratsmack »

EGreg wrote: post #7
dijit wrote: post #3

"Telegram is favoured by Jihadists" "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…

Telegram and Signal are the best we have out of CENTRALIZED solutions. Both are founded by anarchists who like end-to-end encryption and user empowerment. One accuses the other of being less secure and easily backdoored by governments… but the actual problem is — they are both centralized. 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 i…

>... founded by anarchists ...

That's reaching deep... seriously?

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#27

Post by wolverine876 »

dijit wrote: post #3

"Telegram is favoured by Jihadists" "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…

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

What power does the NSA have to influence those choices? When has it happened? Do you have evidence of it?

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#28

Post by wolverine876 »

selcuka wrote: post #25
dijit wrote: post #3

"Telegram is favoured by Jihadists" "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…

> If telegram was weak: Jan 6th and Jihadi terrorists wouldn't use it. You must have missed this piece [1]: > The app was in fact secretly built by the FBI, and designed to allow law enforcement to tune into conversations between about 9,000 users scattered around Earth. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/08/operation_ironside_an...

The article doesn't discuss Telegram at all. How is it related?

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#29

Post by alfiedotwtf »

dijit wrote: post #3

"Telegram is favoured by Jihadists" "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…

> I don't think their technical capability got significantly worse in that time

I think that was probably around the same time more and more of the web moved from HTTP to HTTPS. Even webmail was accessed over plaintext for a long time, so I guess a lot of signal got worse while legal access got not only better but "integrated".

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#30

Post by bmarquez »

discardedrefuse wrote: post #21
bmarquez wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what ultimately matters is how people actually use it, and that is probably in an unencrypted manner I've heard criticisms about Telegram's MTProto encryption on HN, but in my usage of Telegram nobody has ever turned on the secret chats mode enabling it anyway. Anyone privacy-conscious asks me to use Signal, Matrix, or even Threema. I have heard compliments about Telegram sticker packs though, if the other apps wan…

> I have heard compliments about Telegram sticker packs though, if the other apps want more users they could consider making "cute stickers" :) You joke, but Telegram's clients have been innovating for years. Way ahead of the rest. Its packed with features and yet never feels bloated or slow. Frankly, its amazing.

Not even a joke, I had a younger friend comment on the sticker cuteness and it never even crossed my mind that people would prefer messaging apps based on that.

The Telegram client/feature set is great, and I hope Signal and competitors will improve their clients to match.

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