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Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

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Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#81
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the big sacrifice with Telegram security? I get that people like its UX, but if you're sacrificing security for UX then basically anything becomes fine?

For most people the said security is not a big issue. Esp. in countries where police can come for you and make you talk by any means. E2EE won't help you if they want you.

"Encryption isn't useful because you can be tortured" is a bizarre and ridiculous argument.

The police can only make you talk if they know who to make talk in the first place.

Reading your messages tells them who to interrogate, where to find them, who else is involved, etc.

Encryption is important especially in such countries.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#82
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason Telegram is able to easily outclass WA and Signal in the UX department is due to the lack of E2EE. If you don't need/want that it is clearly superior, but if you do...

What does UX\UI has to do with E2EE? Sure, Telegram team used more human resources elsewhere while WA and Signal where doing their E2EE magic, but once they where done - what stopped them from investing into everything else?

Zero-knowledge E2EE makes it difficult or impossible to implement certain "quality of life" features that users have come to expect from cloud-based services.

The most salient of these is that, if you lose your keys, you may never be able to recover your data.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#83
People are consistently surprised that Telegram is not encrypted by default in any setting. You have to create a device-to-device-specific encrypted chat with your counter-party. It's not a reasonable security model, vastly outclassed by (the still quite flawed) Signal.

Ultimately, we need encrypted-by-default messaging based on public/private key pairs (obscured from the uninterested user, of course).

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#85
post #24
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 (includi…

>NSA was reading all unencrypted emails up until at least 2012 or so, yet there was plenty of crime

NSA is not a law enforcement agency; they don’t care about crime.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#86

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 b…

I take issue with your description of Telegram as "really weird and sketchy". You don't give any evidence other than Durov's personal opinions. And he's certainly entitled to them, given all the weird, often totally illogical beliefs everyone else in the world holds.

You toss out another statement in "TON was a disaster" without explanation. If you're going to make really big statements like this, please go into detail otherwise you're just shooting from the hip.

TON was a disaster because the SEC got involved. TON, as a technical solution to decentralizing Telegram, was a great idea and I'm sad Telegram was forced into a position of paying for all that infrastructure another way, with ads (opt-in, non-tracking, and only in one-to-many channels but still, ads).

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#87
post #73
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't see how Telegram is any different to say, Signal. It may have better apps, UX, features and more which that alone makes it…

>I don't see how Telegram is any different to say, Signal. It may have better apps, UX, features and more which that alone makes it a compelling competitor You have answered your own question there. Humans naturally chose paths that they find convenient, not necessarily safest or otherwise "better" paths.

Also, out of the "popular" IM networks (network effect is a real thing), Telegram is the only one that has a sensible API to interface with your own systems.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#88
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed, the giveaway is the label "far right" to describe anyone who doesn't agree with their politics.

So are they not allowed to write about the "far right" or doesn't it exist according to you?

No post body was provided.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#89
post #74
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…

The app itself in terms of features and UX quality is superior to Whatsapp. What I don't get is how is this funded.

Pavel Durov was Russian's Zuckerberg until Putin chased him out.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#90
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed, the giveaway is the label "far right" to describe anyone who doesn't agree with their politics.

So are they not allowed to write about the "far right" or doesn't it exist according to you?

As someone mentioned somewhere, there are more articles in mainstream media mentioning Ku Klux Klan than there actually are KKK members.

The far right exists and is potentially dangerous, but overconcentrating on it will let other dangers fly under the radar.

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