111–120 of 230 posts
Imagine if our water service was like the Internet: We'd distribute potable water by shooting it way up into the sky and just having a constant municipal drizzle/rain/downpour everywhere. Every house would have some buckets to collect enough potable water to use. Then the sewer system would be a bucket brigade: You fill a bucket at home and bring it over to your neighbor, and they pass it on in a long stinky chain of…
Telegram (and other messaging apps for that matter) should allow accounts to be created without a phone number, and ideally stop saving the IP addresses of users.
This is partly why Govts are so persistent about data-localization norms while in the past companies got away by storing data in a more privacy-friendly country. Here too, Telegram tried to make the argument that the data is stored in Singapore, but the courts got their way.
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> the keys are held by Telegram This is where the privacy promise falls apart. From a user's perspective on-disk encryption makes no difference, because there is no real enhancement of privacy for them. If a third party holds the key, they hold the key. If you put something into the hotel safe, the hotel could still steal it from you. As far as I can tell, most TG users are not aware or do not care, but for those who…
I think you are being far too uncharitable and you've simply gotten the facts wrong a number of times, which I've needed to correct you on. Use another messenger if you like but e2ee encryption is not some moral imperative that must be done. There are always trade-offs. I appreciate Telegram for the purposes I use it for. If I want e2ee, I turn on a Secret Chat.
I just think that Telegram tries to position itself as some kind of subversive and secure messenger (successfully so), which it isn't and I find that dubious. I can see that many people prefer it for its user experience, which is fair, but people should not be lured by a false sense of security.
> e2ee encryption is not some moral imperative that must be done.
It is not a moral imperative, but a protection against many evils, that most people probably would benefit from if used consistently. I've got low tolerance for trying to artificially limit e2ee though.
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IRC is not end‐to‐end encrypted.
In theory you can use OTR[1] but I've yet to see an easy way to use this from a phone. I remember IRC very fondly, but I feel it has a lot of baggage that makes it difficult to bring into the modern era. This blog post (not mine) explains it quite well: https://jlu5.com/blog/im-tired-of-irc-heres-why [1] https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/
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Jabber/XMPP, Matrix are the obvious answers.
I'll get my mum right onto it
Don't use messengers that ask for your phone number and aren't end-to-end encrypted. Use services that store as little data as possible. If data is stored, it can be given away and I would assume that it will be given away. Telegram disguises itself as encrypted chat app, when it is actually just a regular centralized plaintext messenger that has an encryption feature that nobody uses.
yes. yes yes. yes. yes 100%. the same reason i avoid whatsapp and signal like the plague. "mobile number" is in itself a big identifier when you are living in a place where you have o do mandatory KYC so that the government knows which each mobile number is linked to the actual human being. i dont care signal doesnt hold any messages. the government can ask for my number and they can use the xkcd spanner method to do…
Americans and Europeans have the desire to learn this lesson the hard way. They lack the wisdom to learn from others and instead believe their governments are the noble governments that would never violate their rights for power.
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I have backups enabled actually. Sure, it's a pain to manage compared to WhatsApp, as you have to manually download it off your phone, but Signal has an option for automatic daily backups. They are encrypted with a key you have to note down somewhere though, so if you don't prepare for it the messages are, in fact, gone forever.
Manual backups are no backup.
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I'll get my mum right onto it
In all fairness, I got my entire non-technical family onto xmpp/jabber with Snikket (which is a highly opinionated packaging of existing xmpp server and clients with minor tweaks). They scan a QR code to download the app and join the server. It is e2ee out of the box and the experience is quite comfortable and seamless, even for a non-technical person.
Don't use messengers that ask for your phone number and aren't end-to-end encrypted. Use services that store as little data as possible. If data is stored, it can be given away and I would assume that it will be given away. Telegram disguises itself as encrypted chat app, when it is actually just a regular centralized plaintext messenger that has an encryption feature that nobody uses.
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There are options. Matrix, Session, Threema, Wire...
Wire? Didn't they get bought out by some shady company a few years back?
The technology itself wasn't changed and Wire was still involved in exciting things like MLS (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-mls-protocol/) when all this was happening (~4 years ago).