81–90 of 97 posts
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]
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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…
Who said anything about changing preferences? When I said about converting those close to me, I mean in the sense that I get them to install and use Matrix for communicating with me. If they want to use/prefer close platforms to talk with other people, I am not stopping them/thinking less of them for it.
> They’ll still have other important (to them) unrelated concerns with more weight.
Yes, it's obvious. If they had prioritized openness and privacy over other bells and whistles they would been using already something like Matrix or XMPP. What I am saying since my very first comment is that I acknowledge that, but I also say that I prefer to use open tools and that I am willing to help them as much as possible to setup an account for them, install the apps and give basic guidance so that we can talk.
I am not asking them to drop other applications nor refusing to understand the reasons they have to prefer to use closed platforms. At no point I am challenging their preferences. I am just stating mine and supporting them for the hassle that I know that I am causing.
> To catch them, open IMs should have their whistles on top of regular bells, not instead.
It's not an exclusive thing. I don't have to change them all of their existing tools in order to get them to talk with me. I hope that one day the open applications will be so much easier to more people will actively look to make the switch, but I am willing to invest time and effort to keep as much as I can from my communications on open platforms and that has already been enough to get a good number of close people to become continued users.
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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…
> To this end I havent seen a good explanation from Telegram as to why they have taken this route given .. They say it is for speed. Looking at how fast Telegram is, I can say it worked for them. It is the most reliable app that works on slow internet for me. https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-why-did-you-go-for-a-cus...
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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.
So, yes. He (or any of the other 6 world champion coders that were bragged about) designed a broken protocol. Broken, as in "trivial access to the plain text by the server", which is pretty damn awful.
When people say that telegram rolled their own crypto that mean that they chose weird crypto primitives, weird key handling and generation and combined them in a way that made people go "whoa! That looks weird" and defended it by refering to their own world championship victories, by extension saying that people were to stupid to understand.
And 6 months later their protocol was shown to be broken.
Use telegram all you like. Don't say that their encryption is even close to being the gold standard.
As someone who knew Durov personally, I'd say that it's very unlikely that the UX will be ruined by ads, and even more unlikely that users will be manipulated and/or tracked in any way. If there's one thing he does well it's respecting his users. He knows what "we're earning enough to cover our expenses" means. The company is privately owned so no one will be pushing him into anything either. Many popular Telegram ch…
> I'd say that it's very unlikely that the UX will be ruined by ads [...]. If there's one thing he does well it's respecting his users. If there's one thing Telegram isn't good at, it's having a UX that respect its users. If that was the case, it would be possible to opt out of notifications from group chats and still receive notifications for private chats, but it's not. This forces one to juggle with multiple accou…
On iOS's half baked implementation of notifications, not sure.
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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 extr…
> 5. All parts of Telegram devoted to messaging will remain ad-free. We think that displaying ads in private 1-to-1 chats or group chats is a bad idea. Communication between people should be free of advertising of any sort.
Original Source: https://t.me/durov/142
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]
Does signal still have a problem of dropping messages? I tried to use it as a replacement for Android Messages a while ago but roughly 10-25% of all messages were not received any given day.
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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 extr…
Being open source it does not mean that the same code is running on their servers.
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> To this end I havent seen a good explanation from Telegram as to why they have taken this route given .. They say it is for speed. Looking at how fast Telegram is, I can say it worked for them. It is the most reliable app that works on slow internet for me. https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-why-did-you-go-for-a-cus...
Their protocol is not encrypted by default, which is an odd choice. And on any smartphone made in the last 10 years encryption should not be a bottleneck in any other way than maybe compression size, which is pretty irrelevant since most of the larger things you are sending will be heavily compressed before encryption (video and images come to mind).
Telegram is the fastest messenger on my 3 year old phone and is significantly faster than the other 6 messengers on it (some of them are e2ee and some only TLS encrypted.