Telegram's getting ads • Hacker News Board

Re: Telegram's getting ads

#71

Post by Klonoar » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 3:02 AM UTC

otachack wrote: post #15

utf_8x wrote: post #12

I'd recommend Signal[0] as an alternative. It's fully Open-Source (including the backend) and their crypto is public and independently verified[1][2][3]... [0] https://signal.org/en/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)#Encryption_p... [2] https://threatpost.com/signal-audit-reveals-protocol-cryptog... [3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013.pdf [PDF]

Signal is great and I believe it does have better crypto. But the UI is severely lacking along with feature set. Telegram feels like it's adding something new every few months, though the documentation over the features is poor since it's mostly through announcements. It's also a lot more customizable. I ultimately settled on Telegram because it was a good balance of feature-rich and crypto (when you use it) That bei…

One thing that's frustrating re: Signal is the client being a bloated entity (on desktop). In comparison, Telegram runs laps around it, and is a true native experience in many cases. It's a joy to use, whereas Signal - while amazing, and probably better in terms of privacy aspects - feels foreign and unwelcome.

Re: Telegram's getting ads

#72

Post by ClumsyPilot » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 3:12 AM UTC

karlmcguire wrote: post #66

thekyle wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Signal did create their own crypto (which is also used now by apps like WhatsApp). The difference is that Signal's crypto was created by a trained cryptographer and seems to be generally respected in the cryptography community while Telegrams is not.

It's not clear who made Telegram's crypto but it was probably Nikolai Durov who is a genius mathematician and engineer, so it's not like it's some guy in a garage.

O thought a garage gives you street cred, now ot works against you?

Kids these days, can't keep up with fashion

Re: Telegram's getting ads

#73

Post by shakna » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 4:05 AM UTC

karlmcguire wrote: post #66

thekyle wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Signal did create their own crypto (which is also used now by apps like WhatsApp). The difference is that Signal's crypto was created by a trained cryptographer and seems to be generally respected in the cryptography community while Telegrams is not.

It's not clear who made Telegram's crypto but it was probably Nikolai Durov who is a genius mathematician and engineer, so it's not like it's some guy in a garage.

Signal's crypto has also been independently audited [0], with pretty encouraging results, and as it is open source, can continually be audited.

Telegram's on the other hand, can't be continually audited, but the MTProto scheme they put together has been found to have a number of flaws [1], and that hasn't changed. They also haven't really allowed third-party audit of their actual code, so there may or may not be extra bugs waiting to bite you.

[0] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013.pdf

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf

Re: Telegram's getting ads

#74

Post by cft » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 4:50 AM UTC

This sounds like a hit piece, ordered by competitors. "longtime drug-dealer haven"- most of my work colleagues use telegram, and I see friends from my contact list joining Telegram from all over the world. I started using it when Putin exiled the founder from Russia, and tried to ban its IP space for refusal to hand over the private keys to FSB. He never had any issues with WhatApp by the way. And I am an engineer, not a drug dealer. Private and group conversations (things that compete with WhatsApp) aren't getting ads.

Re: Telegram's getting ads

#75

Post by tmp538394722 » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 5:17 AM UTC

cblconfederate wrote: post #46

bilal4hmed wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founder had been covering the costs

Which shows the extent to which the mainstream internet is overrun with greed

I mean... He tried to make a bazillion dollars with gram crypto currency, but it failed.

Re: Telegram's getting ads

#76

Post by pkulak » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 5:18 AM UTC

bilal4hmed wrote: post #42

hertzrat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you dislike about telegrams encryption? The only private messaging app Im really familiar with signal

The reason primarily is that they have rolled their own crypto, which based on a lot of reading and comments from other experts suggests is the wrong thing to do. To this end I havent seen a good explanation from Telegram as to why they have taken this route given there are so many proven & battle tested methods and algorithms. "We havent been hacked yet" doesnt seem good enough for me. 1:1 messages aren't e2e by def…

It's not end to end. Getting data to a server encrypted is a solved problem. But if you're just going to store it there in plain text forever, what's the point?

Re: Telegram's getting ads

#77

Post by cosmiccatnap » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 5:41 AM UTC

It seems like for a decade now a product appears that offers reasonable security promises or reasonable feature promises. In either case it's a ticking clock before it can no longer be self sustained and ads creep in one by one.

I must have went through 10 different applications this way, applications that were superior at a previous point in their history.

Re: Telegram's getting ads

#78

Post by AlfeG » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 5:54 AM UTC

soupson wrote: post #55

From the founder's statement about making telegram sustainable: > We are not going to sell the company like the founders of Whatsapp. The world needs Telegram to stay independent as a place where users are respected and high-quality service is ensured. They're on the wrong track. Ads do not make a company independent. They make them dependent on those advertisers. If you're still using Telegram, it's long past time t…

But ads is already there. Every channel at some point start to show Your ads. As far I understand telegram will take a bite of those ads and provide to channel owners some platform.

Re: Telegram's getting ads

#79

Post by soupson » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 6:25 AM UTC

AlfeG wrote: post #78

soupson wrote: post #55

From the founder's statement about making telegram sustainable: > We are not going to sell the company like the founders of Whatsapp. The world needs Telegram to stay independent as a place where users are respected and high-quality service is ensured. They're on the wrong track. Ads do not make a company independent. They make them dependent on those advertisers. If you're still using Telegram, it's long past time t…

But ads is already there. Every channel at some point start to show Your ads. As far I understand telegram will take a bite of those ads and provide to channel owners some platform.

I've never seen any ads on Mastodon.

Re: Telegram's getting ads

#80

Post by wruza » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 7:01 AM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #65

wruza wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It on us the tech savvy to identify these issues, educate and help them overcome them, and ideally contribute for these issues to be solved in the first place. No, it’s on IM app developers. And not ideally, but today. Nobody is buying into tomorrow’s promises, the quicker signal/matrix will understand it, the better for everyone. Tell them .

I think you are arguing with a strawman. Signal is as centralized as Telegram and moxie has already stated that he does not care about open or federated systems because of the usability trade-off required. My argument is that the inferior usability is not an intrinsic issue of federated systems, just circunstancial. Being closed/centralized on the other hand, is an intrinsic property of all major platforms, and any o…

>open should be preferred and promoted

And I’m saying that preference is a function of many parameters, and you can’t change preferences by just promoting a new parameter to the public. They’ll still have other important (to them) unrelated concerns with more weight. What we think it should or should not be is effectively irrelevant to their minds. To catch them, open IMs should have their whistles on top of regular bells, not instead. This looks like a strawman because it addresses (I believe) a wrong premise.