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

Telegram is asking German users when to share information with law enforcement

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 234 posts

Re: Telegram is asking German users when to share information with law enforcement

#171

Post by upofadown »

Canada wrote: post #165
upofadown wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How about not storing any information at all? That wouldn't work for groups. Abusers could then destroy the groups with impunity for the purpose of censorship. Telegram is mostly about groups. Telegram is often used for activism. Signal claims to not store data about who is talking to who. That doesn't mean that they don't. If they were, say, a secret subsidiary of the CIA they would act exactly as they are acting n…

The signal code is public and has been widely reviewed. We know full well what the server knows regardless of what they say.

That means the end to end encryption (if you verify your identities) works. It says nothing about how much meta data Signal collects.

Re: Telegram is asking German users when to share information with law enforcement

#172

Post by hunter2_ »

sequoia wrote: post #132
croes wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not messaging to you but to HN via E2E https connection. You can't read that messages as they are transported, you can read them afterwards because HN makes them public not because my message wasn't send encrypted.

You seem to be mistaken about what the "ends" refer to in end to end encryption. If I whisper something in my friend's ear and she whispers it into your ear, that is not a secret message between you and me even if each "hop" was private. E2E means no intermediaries see the plaintext, only the original sender and ultimate recipient see the plaintext. HN is not the recipient of your message, it's an intermediary.

With HTTPS alone, I can assure you that HN is, indeed, the recipient/end. If you post something like a PGP-encrypted message on HN, now you've got a situation where HN is no longer a recipient/end.

I think the better point to make is that we all collectively agree to refrain from using the term "end" (as in E2EE) in situations like the former, as it's misleading despite being accurate; please only use it for the latter.

Re: Telegram is asking German users when to share information with law enforcement

#173

Post by suction »

ssizn wrote: post #104
funnym0nk3y wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram is considered a platform for people, which do not respect the basic values of democracy like groups far right expressing xenophobia and groups which think (and express loudly) of the COVID measures as repression by some elite against the common citizen. Most of them whish for a autoritarian government. Groups which act against the constitution are observed by the Verfassungsschutz, an authority to protect th…

People who think that the COVID measures were repressive wish for an authoritarian government? Get your propaganda right.

No post body was provided.

Re: Telegram is asking German users when to share information with law enforcement

#175

Post by hunter2_ »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #108
croes wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram is just the middleman between sender and receiver. When you write on HN, the receiver is HN. That message is transported via E2E https encryption so it's secure. But because HN displays all messages publicly you can read them after they were received. This doesn't change the fact that the transport as such is E2E.

There is a distinction between TLS and E2EE. E2EE is client to client encryption.

Ideally it would be the human at each end doing the encrypting and decrypting. But humans can't be bothered, so we let some code that we know very little about do it for us. Obviously having that code run on the client device (the one in your hand) is preferable to having it run elsewhere (like some web server), but either way the human (the true end) is delegating the job to an entity that isn't quite at the end, it's ever so slightly toward the center.

Things like PGP help to maximize the endianness, since the human has a better sense that the crypto software is legitimate, and can read the code before executing it, although there's still plenty of points of compromise between that code and the human (compiler, Intel ME, etc.) so unless you're doing crypto with a pencil and paper, you're always putting your trust somewhere that isn't precisely the "end."

Re: Telegram is asking German users when to share information with law enforcement

#176

Post by kitsunesoba »

AnonC wrote: post #167
izzytcp wrote: post #3

Hi, German here. How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal. I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason! The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info. App should be dead already or turned into a dating app because it’s clearly not seriously privacy fucused.

> I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason! Any reason? I’ll give you some serious ones. Signal sucks really bad on user experience and features. If you try both for a week or two and learn about the features, you’d be able to conclude the same. Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? A…

Signal operates on the idea that anything sent through chat is ephemeral and not worth keeping, which just doesn’t work in practice in my experience.

When you’re knee deep in conversation with someone you’re probably not going to say, “oh hey we should switch to email so we can keep a record of this”. It might not even occur to you that the conversation could ever be of value.

There’s been several occasions when my life has been made much more easy for having been able to dig up some old message in iMessage, Telegram, etc from as far back as multiple years ago sometimes because the way things played out the pertinent info didn’t exist anywhere else simply because nobody involved could’ve ever guessed it had any importance.

Re: Telegram is asking German users when to share information with law enforcement

#177

Post by kitsunesoba »

em-bee wrote: post #83
izzytcp wrote: post #3

Hi, German here. How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal. I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason! The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info. App should be dead already or turned into a dating app because it’s clearly not seriously privacy fucused.

I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason! telegram is the only chat app that offers Free Software clients, does not force me to share my phonenumber, is easy enough to use even for old people. matrix is ok. but element is still buggy and the ux is complex and takes some learning. another alternative is deltachat. it uses smtp as transport and works with an email account. the…

The multiple third party clients feature is huge for me. It’s means I’m not stuck with living with whatever set of trade offs have been made in the official client, and it means there are true native (UWP, UIKit, etc) clients for just about every platform that don’t use UI as branding and behave the way one would expect apps of those platforms to behave.

Re: Telegram is asking German users when to share information with law enforcement

#178

Post by em-bee »

hungryforcodes wrote: post #142
em-bee wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason! telegram is the only chat app that offers Free Software clients, does not force me to share my phonenumber, is easy enough to use even for old people. matrix is ok. but element is still buggy and the ux is complex and takes some learning. another alternative is deltachat. it uses smtp as transport and works with an email account. the…

It's actually fun to use?

that's very subjective i suppose, i don't have much to compare it to. if by fun you mean stickers and animated emojis. sure. it doesn't get in my way. it is possible to find groups and people through searching for keywords. i can name my contacts as i like. (which matrix/element for example does not allow, and that's a real problem)

the only thing annoying is that anyone can just talk to me, whereas eg. in wechat people have to make a contact request before they can talk to me directly. but i have the impression that wechat is the unusual one here, which a feature that i'd like to see adapted by other messengers too.

i also miss wechat's feature of being able to choose a custom name for myself in each group. but again, i don't know if any other messenger offers that.

Re: Telegram is asking German users when to share information with law enforcement

#179

Post by traspler »

funnym0nk3y wrote: post #29
traspler wrote: post #4

Is there anything special going on in Germany atm to prompt this? I‘m slighlty confused why they would do such a poll…

Telegram is considered a platform for people, which do not respect the basic values of democracy like groups far right expressing xenophobia and groups which think (and express loudly) of the COVID measures as repression by some elite against the common citizen. Most of them whish for a autoritarian government. Groups which act against the constitution are observed by the Verfassungsschutz, an authority to protect th…

Well, Telegram is my main messenger and I don't associate myself with any of the mentioned groups. I think most of your impressions are bit bit over the top. That's not your fault as the media likes to paint Telegram in that light. Sure, there are these channels and yes Telegram tries to be light on censoring them, focusing only on the public and dangerous ones but still, claiming "Telegram is considered a platform for people, which do not respect the basic values of democracy" is a bit much as you could replace Telegram with the name of any social media/messenger platform.

Re: Telegram is asking German users when to share information with law enforcement

#180

Post by traspler »

z02d wrote: post #33
traspler wrote: post #4

Is there anything special going on in Germany atm to prompt this? I‘m slighlty confused why they would do such a poll…

Yes, see the German article: Gouvernment and Developer conflict about free speech, cyber bullying,, ... . https://www.golem.de/news/an-die-polizei-telegram-bittet-nut...

Thanks a lot! This is what I was looking for.
Post reply on HN