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Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

latimes.com

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Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#451

Post by maqp »

samat wrote: post #334
kome wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Signal literally identifies contacts via phone numbers that's so stupid. why people here keeps arguing that Signal crypto is safer when its architecture is SO unsafe?

Their crypto is state of the art, but their ops sec threat model does not include “we’ll torture you or go to your mobile operator and their would cooperate fully”. So signal is good for USA, not so good for 3rd world countries. This people making decisions in Signal live in a different world then most of the people who need secure comms. Well telegram have us covered. Sadly, if you stop trusting Durov - you are scre…

"Sadly, if you stop trusting Durov - you are screwed"

Or if anyone hacks Telegram server, you're also screwed.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#452

Post by maqp »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #190
kome wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Signal literally identifies contacts via phone numbers that's so stupid. why people here keeps arguing that Signal crypto is safer when its architecture is SO unsafe?

Because they are NSA spooks?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuRcmPnSTM

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#453

Post by maqp »

Krasnol wrote: post #361
zzz61831 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of, there is pseudoanonimity layer in Telegram that doesn't show your phone number to others, so if you can be reasonably sure that Telegram isn't going to give you up to the police of your country - your privacy can be preserved. While Signal literally identifies contacts via phone numbers and there is no mass communication features anyway, so it's both less private and less useful for such purposes.

When I installed Telegram for the first time, people in my address book saw me and wrote me. How did that happen?

Because Telegram uses phone's contact list for contact discovery. There's nothing unusual about this. This how Signal, Riot, Threema, Wire and dozens and dozens of messengers work.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#454

Post by maqp »

zanny wrote: post #34
aborsy wrote: post #14

Why not Signal? It’s the way to go as far as messaging apps are concerned.

Matrix has comprehensive encryption now and is decentralized.

The comprehensive encryption is still not something everyone was bumped into. There's still insecure rooms, there's still backwards compatibility with insecure rooms. There's still bots and bridges and all the possible things to break the E2EE. Matrix just isn't on par security-wise when compared to Signal. The freedom starts to matter once everything in Matrix ecosystem is always E2EE with no fallback options.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#455

Post by maqp »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #239
aborsy wrote: post #14

Why not Signal? It’s the way to go as far as messaging apps are concerned.

Because it's down along with the rest of the internet. Because connection resilience is more important than encryption.

Connection resilience. You mean when Telegram's EU server had an issue last time, it was down from Ireland to Egypt to Israel to Finland :D That resilience?

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#456

Post by eitland »

mcsoft wrote: post #442
eitland wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E2E-encryption is really nice but not anymore necessary for most users of Telegram than for - WhatsApp before they implemented it - GMail (or any other mail service) - Matrix (by default, until recently?) - IRC - SMS - Letters in the mail For some reason this has a tendency to boil down very quickly to - E2E-encryptet === good, no further information needed - anything else === bad, no further information needed Which…

Since E2E encryption is not enabled by default in Telegram, I believe it's used by 2% of their users at most. Messages of the rest can be read by Telegram team. https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&q=are+telegram+cha...

> Since E2E encryption is not enabled by default in Telegram, I believe it's used by 2% of their users at most.

You are probably answering another post here. I don't think it is intentional.

> Messages of the rest can be read by Telegram team.

Well, there are a number of ways to prevent that from happening easily.

I cannot verify this, but Telegram said years ago that they solved certain problems by routing keys and messages through different datacenters in different jurisdictions.

That said: the big question is if their solutions work and if it works that way? I don't know, they seem remarkable competent at certain aspects of what they do and other times I feel they suffer from the same thing that Elon Musk sometimes suffer from where they publicly state things that sound immediately unreasonable.

But that would be meaningful criticism so probably off topic in a Telegram bashing contest ;-)

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#457

Post by maqp »

hojjat12000 wrote: post #18
kozak wrote: post #5

Considering that the app has been created by Russians (albeit ones who claim to oppose the current government of Russia), and it is popular mostly in countries that surround Russia, this is not surprising at all that it's the default choice for young people in Belarus. Telegram is a strong indicator of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_world these days.

To be fair. It's the best messaging app out there (feature-wise). It got banned in Iran because it was so influential in the protests. The channels are great for being up to date on the latest news and seeing what is happening in different cities. Groups are awesome for coordinating gatherings. It allows you to send huge files and documents. It has bots (which people used to get info on the current police location, o…

Facebook is also filled with great features, but since they're not private we don't really consider those features but tasty baits for stealing our personal data. The question is, why should Telegram whose author is literally called the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia, be exempt and handed all that data. Of course he wants to make the app that gives him all that valuable data easy and fun to use. The real engineering starts when you want to achieve those fun features in a secure way -- people should ask WHY is it that it takes a bit of time from Signal developers to implement same features. That's precisely why. They're actual features with painstaking security design with clear rationale and security proofs, not a dish of spyware served with the side plate of bullshit that is damage control.

I guess it's because Durov attended the St. Petersburg military academy and studied propaganda and information warfware that makes him such a chef when it comes to the latter.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#458

Post by tripzilch »

kube-system wrote: post #269
dstick wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think Telegram, like Whatsapp, is adopted broadly enough not to bias too heavily in one direction. Definitely not 90%, and especially not if that “bias” matches the word on the street.

Telegram? 5% of the world uses Telegram. And I bet the 50+ age demographic is heavily underrepresented in that subset. Significant sample bias shows up in US polling using mediums that are exponentially more widespread. Nonetheless, I don't doubt the validity of these particular results, because I think we have enough corroborating evidence. We don't have to justify the rigorousness of a Telegram poll to come to that…

People in different parts of the world differ HUGELY in what instant-messaging communications platform they use.

For instance people in the US still use text-messaging to a significant percentage. That's hard for me to believe as well.

It's no use looking at Telegram's world usage, that's for sure.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#459

Post by maqp »

chromedev wrote: post #99
adityasaky wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately (this may have changed in recent times), they often don't update the public repos in line with their releases. They put them out all at once later. Also, last I checked only the clients are open source? Has that changed?

You can find the releases here, and if there is a delay it is only a few days at most: https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/releases Only the clients are open source, but anyone could use the source code to create their own network.

The clients wouldn't feature E2EE for groups even if you'd write your own server from scratch so no, nobody should use Telegram for anything.

Re: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

#460

Post by maqp »

dirtnugget wrote: post #312

Still don’t trust them. Loads of shady things, from them rolling their own encryption to the fact, that is not possible to encrypt group chats. IMHO red flags. However I still have not encountered a messaging app which does group chats with somewhat complete feature set in groups. Signal won’t let you moderate groups for example. (No admin role where you can ban somebody or delete messages)

Signal is working on V2 groups with moderation right now.
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