Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

Post by skyyler » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 3:00 PM UTC

codedokode wrote: post #163

newscracker wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a very good use of "literally", because searching through encrypted messages will certainly be slower, and on mobile devices, this will have a bigger impact on responsiveness and battery life. That is a big downside on mobile (not desktop). Create similar chats that are long (like tens of thousands of messages) on different apps and compare Telegram's search speed with others'.

Keeping a long history is almost always a bad idea because something you have written a year ago and have forgotten can be used against you. Keeping messages for just about a week is much better idea.

Post by dkrich » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 3:02 PM UTC

ubercow13 wrote: post #179

dkrich wrote: post #167

Serious question as someone who has never used Telegram and don't know anyone who uses it: what's the plan for sustainability from a financial perspective? Running the infrastructure for a scalable secure and reliable service like this for hundreds of millions of users has to be extremely expensive. Yet on Telegram's website it says that it will be free forever and will never sell advertisements or charge subscriptio…

Yes, it is a donation from a rich founder. It says clearly on their website: >Q: How are you going to make money out of this? >We believe in fast and secure messaging that is also 100% free. >Pavel Durov, who shares our vision, supplied Telegram with a generous donation, so we have quite enough money for the time being. If Telegram runs out, we will introduce non-essential paid options to support the infrastructure a…

Post by dkrich » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 3:07 PM UTC

Fins wrote: post #184

dkrich wrote: post #167

Serious question as someone who has never used Telegram and don't know anyone who uses it: what's the plan for sustainability from a financial perspective? Running the infrastructure for a scalable secure and reliable service like this for hundreds of millions of users has to be extremely expensive. Yet on Telegram's website it says that it will be free forever and will never sell advertisements or charge subscriptio…

The somewhat cynical answer is that it will be around just fine as long as FSB pays for it. Durov has been singing praises of Putin and Mother Russia right up to the moment he suddenly up and left to supposedly do a "banned in Russia" communication system. It's possible, of course, that he had a change of heart. It's just as possible that these are just theatrics.

Post by p2detar » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 3:18 PM UTC

kuhhk wrote: post #175

p2detar wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is that they rolled their own poor crypto instead of using battle-tested crypto. I come across this a lot about Telegram and while I do agree, I think there have been no reports so far about hacks in Telegram's service, and it's online since 2013 or so.

6 years is a short time in cryptography. That isn't battle-tested. "Even worse, security doesn't provide immediate feedback. A dead patient on the operating table tells the doctor that maybe he doesn't understand brain surgery just because he read a book, but an insecure cryptosystem works just fine. It's not until someone takes the time to break it that the engineer might realize that he didn't do as good a job as h…

Post by Arathorn » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 3:21 PM UTC

lucideer wrote: post #173

newscracker wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just waiting for end-to-end encryption to be available, stable and be the default on Matrix.

FWIW, I've been using it and had zero issues. Obviously my experience probably doesn't reflect everyone's, so hopefully whatever stability issues others are experiencing can be resolved soon, but from my own perspective having it on-by-default would be pretty seamless at the moment.