Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 257 posts

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#171

Post by strogonoff »

vinay427 wrote: post #157
silvercove wrote: post #84

It's hilarious to watch Americans get triggered at Telegram's success. I'll grab my popcorn.

What would you consider to be legitimate criticism of Telegram rather than just being “triggered at Telegram’s success?” I’m curious where you draw this line, and where you found comments from users identifiably from the US who you believe fall into the latter camp.

A non-American’s take on Telegram:

1. Everyone I know uses it in plain-text, very few dare to (gasp) initiate secret chats (and they tend to lose chat histories every now and then).

2. At one point it had been banned by Russian authorities with a demand to disclose the E2E encryption keys. The ban was quietly lifted with a single report I could find vaguely mentioning some cooperation promises by Telegram’s leadership. What is happening beneath the curtain is anyone’s guess.

3. Last time I checked, the company that runs the servers has undisclosed structure and is liable to be manipulated by whichever entity that gains a hold of them (not even through legal mechanisms, but through direct or indirect fear for personal safety).

4. According to what I heard from friends, solvency/debt issues from the failed ICO attempt made them desperate for money.

It’s not a safe private messenger, period. Even Telegram’s own advocates are switching from their old stance “Telegram is secure” to “Telegram is just best for messaging, who cares about e2e or privacy anyway” (which, incidentally, I don’t know if true in Android land, but at least on iOS Apple Messages has way superior stickers, built-in apps, etc. for those who don’t care that much about privacy).

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#172

Post by twelve40 »

grishka wrote: post #156
twelve40 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russian gov is mad at him citation needed

Telegram was blocked in Russia for around 2 years for refusing to cooperate with FSB. That block wasn't effective despite breaking half the internet at times and many people didn't even notice it, so eventually the government just gave up and unblocked it to save itself from being laughed at.

It is actually trivially cut off at the app store level (both apple and google), just like the free-speech-loving Germany is proposing right now (1), and the Russian government chose not to do that. The "telegram blocked" story is 2 years old, currently 52% of Russian Internet users rely on Telegram every day (2) All charges against Durov personally were dropped, and he is (admittedly) rumored to visit Spb now and then, but there is no official beef with him or any of his services currently.

1. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/politician-says-germany... 2. https://www.vedomosti.ru/media/articles/2021/09/28/888523-au...

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#173

Post by twelve40 »

szszrk wrote: post #164
twelve40 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russian gov is mad at him citation needed

Check out "telegram russian block" or "ban" in a search engine, from 2018. I don't want to give any particular resources as you will know better what is better source for you - that was a huge event and most news sources wrote on that, including HN. Russian gov forced a block on so many IP classes that a lot of goverment services stopped working, not to mention whole public clouds. Let me just cherry-pick this hilari…

great, so a story from 4 years ago? the ban was removed in 2020, although they could have easily choked Telegram at the appstore level. Yet, it's officially alive and well.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#174

Post by piaste »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #169
piaste wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That requires re-encoding all transmitted data with a single password and is potentially vulnerable to brute-force attacks. Encryption used in signal, etc relies on double ratchet mechanism that continuously regenerates keys as they move along. This way one compromised key will not allow to decode the rest of the messages. That's a different, further goalpost - we were talking about E2E encryption, weren't we? I.e.…

> we were talking about E2E encryption, weren't we? Exactly, and what is described is not e2ee at all.

How is it not E2EE? Are you going by a stricter definition than commonly used?

> End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system of communication where only the communicating users can read the messages. [..] End-to-end encryption is intended to prevent data being read or secretly modified, other than by the true sender and recipient(s). The messages are encrypted by the sender but the third party does not have a means to decrypt them, and stores them encrypted. The recipients retrieve the encrypted data and decrypt it themselves.

Which requirement do you believe is failed by such a system?

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#175

Post by grishka »

twelve40 wrote: post #172
grishka wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram was blocked in Russia for around 2 years for refusing to cooperate with FSB. That block wasn't effective despite breaking half the internet at times and many people didn't even notice it, so eventually the government just gave up and unblocked it to save itself from being laughed at.

It is actually trivially cut off at the app store level (both apple and google), just like the free-speech-loving Germany is proposing right now (1), and the Russian government chose not to do that. The "telegram blocked" story is 2 years old, currently 52% of Russian Internet users rely on Telegram every day (2) All charges against Durov personally were dropped, and he is (admittedly) rumored to visit Spb now and th…

> It is actually trivially cut off at the app store level (both apple and google)

Yes, this is why Pavel blocked the Navalny bot (providing a very nonsensical explanation for it). Apple's app store is why we can't have nice things. Google Play doesn't matter nearly as much because Android allows sideloading and Telegram already makes use of that. This page https://telegram.org/android has a prominent apk download button and an "if you want a Google Play version instead we have that too, you weirdo" link at the bottom.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#176

Post by swah »

The "sad thing" is that Whatsapp is 10x-50x more popular in my country and its quite hard to integrate (APIs, bots) compared to Telegram, at least for "small business".

I wonder if Telegram would also be more closed if it was #1...

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#177

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

gefhfffh wrote: post #161
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not 'true e2ee' at all, and more of a security theater.

How is that? Only you as a recipient can decrypt the messages, because they are sent e2ee to you. And this stays true if you use the backup, as only you know that password.

Encrypted backups are just that, encrypted backups. They are called end-to-end encrypted backups only by people who are ignorant of correct terminology. Even the Wikipedia entry on e2ee addresses this.

Regarding the security theater, the backups encrypted with your password are far more vulnerable to being compromised than any of the popular e2e encryption protocols.

But then again, most users do not need real security, they are fine with a warm comforting feeling of safety, provided by a sincere promise that everything is really safe, as demonstrated by Telegram users.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#178

Post by McDev »

shp0ngle wrote: post #23

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…

>his developers can deliver good and working product really fast. (And from what I understand, it's a really small team.)

Fun fact, their Android code [0] (haven't seen iOS) is unmaintainable mess and on the surface just looks like a complete disaster. I find it baffling how Telegram Android not only hasn't fallen to bits requiring a full rewrite, but has continued to deliver brilliant UX and features.

0. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DrKLO/Telegram/master/TMes...

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#179

Post by feanaro »

Gigachad wrote: post #155
grandpoobah wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody I know gives a shit that it's not E2E encrypted. It's a kick ass instant messenger, that's all that matters to most people. Vastly superior to Signal and others in almost every way.

There are like 1000 features in telegram that just don’t work properly for e2e chats as well. When I use e2e messengers they cut so many features for security. Matrix doesn’t show link previews when e2e is on for example.

I think you mean Element doesn't show previews when E2EE is on.

This is not a fundamental limitation but a default setting in order to preserve privacy. You can easily turn URL previews for a given E2EE room on by going to the room settings > General > scroll down to Other > URL Previews.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#180

Post by feanaro »

__void wrote: post #143
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #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).

let's be realistic: (outside of certain self-referential bubbles - like this site) no one cares anything about encryption, if in public chats I am anonymous and untraceable (example: no one can know my phone number and there are granular privacy settings) this is enough for 98% of people out here "yes, encryption is useful if I want to send nudes to my partner or if I want to buy drugs but not while I'm asking mom fo…

"Normal" people are slowly but surely starting to care about encryption. They hear about it from people participating in self-referential bubbles like HN and then they start wondering. This is my experience.
Post reply on HN