700M users and Premium(telegram.org) |
700M users and Premium(telegram.org) |
Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none.
Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day.
And it’s lots of small features and details such as built in translation for messages in a foreign language, all the smooth animations, quick look and summaries of channels with aggregated links media etc, a super fast and responsive UI etc. And their stickers are actually ridiculously fun to play with (I used to not be into that, telegram converted me).
Just yesterday I accidentally found out that it’s possible to replace a picture you have sent, with a new or different one - I sent a photo, realised it would have been better cropped, and just edited the message as I normally would have.
And with all that it’s the only popular messenger that is actually easy to programmatically interact with. (And cheap! WhatsApp has a business offering and it’s ridiculously expensive)
That is precisely because they don't give a shit about security. While others like Whatsapp bother with e2ee and resulting device sync problems and inability to do server-side search, Telegram just stores everything on a server without (meaningful) encryption and boldly claims that 'it is the most secure messenger'. And, imagine that, users just believe that it is the most secure! (I did talk to MANY people who repeated this word for word, 'Telegram is the most secure and encrypted messenger app!', and yes, nobody of them used Secret chats, - it doesn't nicely sync, and nobody needs disappearing messages anyway.
Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system. So that means that the people running the servers can MITM if they feel like it to get the content. So in practice Telegram might be the best of something or another for all it matters. It's sort of a con. Yes our E2EE encryption app is perfectly secure assuming you do this thing that we know you won't bother with and will not be able to figure out anyway.
Study based on Signal, but applicable to pretty much all of them:
* https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/09...
People care about these features. Tell you what: I care about these features! And I also care about e2ee but I care more about all the things I can’t do with e2ee enabled.
When it matters, I enable secret chats. In the early weeks of the war I used secret chats a ton to organise things (and I echo your observation that most people don’t know about them).
But it doesn’t matter all the time.
Messenger also has e2ee secret chats; they’re awful and don’t have 1/10th the features telegram’s chats have. Hell even telegram’s secret chats are more featureful than WhatsApp chats (which are all e2ee)
But it does aggressively surface the P2P AES256 text chat feature, it does P2P AES256 encrypt voice and video by default (unless I'm badly mistaken), it's got the cute emoji key-verification affordance in voice and video, it does aggressively surface features for allowing people to contact you or not, which is the exact opposite of what a "growth-hacker" PM would do.
How it stands up to a serious security audit is beyond my pay-grade, Moxie seems to think it's weak-ish, and again, that makes it a bad choice if you have credible adversaries.
But I've worked in privacy-hostile settings. Telegram is not privacy-hostile.
If I were a dissident then given the choice between whatsapp and telegram, telegram wins
"Secret chats use end-to-end encryption, thanks to which we don't have any data to disclose.
To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data." https://telegram.org/faq#q-do-you-process-data-requests
Telegram is more convenient by default and it can provide security for those who need it.
Well, it's not like other messengers excelled at UX before they introduced e2ee (which is not implemented very well either)
https://theoutline.com/post/2348/what-isn-t-telegram-saying-...
signal does marginally better.
real e2ee is possible with XMPP and Omemo iirc. but as others have pointed out that's not UXy enough to compete with Telegram for the mainsteam.
That's awesome. You have your pick of a massive variety of clients… one of them bound to fit your device setup like a glove. No lowest-common-denominator one-size-fits-all compromises like is so common with cross platform software these days.
As a result, you have a large set of very good clients for pretty much all platforms.
Imagine if the FLOSS darlings like Signal would make something as amazing as this - a library any plaform (from RPi, watches, etc.) to implement the best possible secure client that fits the user.
I didn't enjoy using it without a third party library [1].
Sending a single message is easy, but using the rest of telegram's features is "meh" when using pure API calls.
If you want to see a well designed API, you should take a look at FTX or Stripe. I love those two :)
hmmm ... could I participate fully on Telegram without ever installing the app anywhere ?
That would be compelling ...
Signal on the other hand seems to have failed to stick with the rest of the users and instead of trying to attract users from WhatsApp, not only they can't get backing up messages working properly, they instead were focused on introducing a scam cryptocurrency and wallet only usable on their app that no-one wants, and probably scared everyone off.
Perhaps Signal is only good for getting users to keep using WhatsApp or Telegram, since there are too many missing basic features that the end users keep complaining about when trying it out.
Let me introduce you to Matrix SDKs https://matrix.org/sdks/
I’m a proponent of matrix, but it’s absolutely not popular.
List of third-party tech in their desktop stack listed here:
> Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day.
User experience is, well, subjective to the user. For tech savvy, primarily desktop users, Telegram and Discord can be great choices.
This is however probably not true for the majority of the population.
Apparently it is true for 700M people
Is "automatically sends your message text to google" supposed to be a plus?
Seriously, sometimes people are so cynical here it makes my blood boil. Give people some credit, ffs.
I can provide some answers. Telegram is my primary chat app.
- It offers you to simply share an alphanumeric handle and you can connect with anyone in the world. I can do a voice chat or normal chat really quickly and easily. It is the only famous truly Instant Messenger there is. And I can do it without sharing my name (unlike FB), email address, or phone number (unlike WApp).
- It is the only app where I add any woman to any group outside of family or other close-knit groups. When creepy dudes get women's cell numbers, it sometimes becomes very difficult for the women to handle. In Telegram, you can be part of large or large-ish groups without the women having to share phone numbers or real names. Blocking is really easy and tension-free.
- The video quality in chats is really high. In Android, only Google Duo came close.
- ONLY chat app in market with an excellent desktop app for Linux. Also Windows.
- I love their non-SJW-everything approach to allowed stickers. Emojis can only be PG-13 and "wholesome" (like banning gun emoji and replacing it with water gun- where I live no one owns guns - and guns are irrelevant to my politics and everyone else's). Telegram's stickers are really fun and creative.
- UI/UX is excellent. Really love chat themes and how I can edit them. Many components are customizable. Chat bubble colors, radii of rounded corners, etc.
- I like the fine-grained control over notifications from different chats (groups and persons).
- I like the lack of E2EE. I just like logging in and having access to all my chats. I don't have to be with the same device to be on the same chat.
- The simple yet effective image editor is nice. So is the text formatting with no fuss.
- I often use the auto image resize feature to downscale images.
- It is so seamless. It has replaced email when I want to transfer small files to my own devices.
- I am a selectively social person. It's good that even with 700 mn people, not many people are in it. The people with whom I don't want to interact more aren’t yet in Telegram. That's an appeal to me.
- Developing bots is a bliss. So easy and effective.
- SO helped a bunch of HS kids with their Bio study before a big test, the quiz feature was great. SO is not a technical person, and it was easy for her to set up a group, no phone numbers, create quizzes and so on. She loved it.
It's got best-in-class applications with lovely animations. The server now governs reactions to specific messages. Stickers are fun, with premium stickers having additional animations.
From a technical perspective, they occupy least space; is "fast" and have a great ecosystem of third party clients. (I use "Owlgram") that offers additional UI elements without cluttering the experience. Tabbed chats are possible now; on Windows desktop, Unigram offers a stellar experience. Threat perceptions or "privacy concerns" are not in the lexicon of ordinary users like me and I am better off without Signal or WhatsApp. WhatsApp reminds me of what Telegram was 5 years back.
I think it is time to reconsider the association of Russia with the application. Criticism is fine, but much of it directed against Telegram appears biased and coloured. I don't work for Telegram, but am a happy user. I couldn't get my folks to understand XMPP or Matrix, or even get my colleagues to switch from any other competing application. This is fine by me.
Other finely grained privacy options (ability to control who can call you or add you to groups) are critical for my needs. Yes, it could be better, but no other application offers those controls. Besides, it's easy to chat with others using "usernames" without the hassle of handing out phone numbers.
Bravo!
I don't think a potential association with Russia is the main problem; what about E2EE by default, including for group chats? It's mind-boggling that it's 2022 and we still have to trust that whoever controls Telegram's servers doesn't abuse their powers and is diligent enough to protect them.
It's fine to celebrate Telegram for its features, but let's not pretend that this criticism is unwarranted.
Telegram feels like that group of people they warned you about. Sexual and political freedom. Be whatever you want others to see you like. Easy bot API, deep event based td-lib SDK, censorship bypass through MTProto proxies. Delete messages you sent before your crush sees them because you changed your mind. Send messages anonymously in a group if you have multiple admins. Forbid people from clicking your profile when your messages are forwarded. See the people who saw your messages in a group.
Telegram feels like the last place where as a European I’m not dealing with US-identity ideology, where I’m not dealing with copyright censorship, where everyone can speak up no matter how normal or insane.
In this moment I have 17 bots keeping me up to date with all the things happening, and telegram has essentially become the single stream of news and online social interactions for me.
Another one I wrote recently is a bot that I ported to Telegram from its original IRC incarnation: https://github.com/19h/minuteman-bot.
A bot I wrote that, when seeing a voice message, transcribes it using AssemblyAI and finally uses OpenAI GPT3 to summarise it: https://github.com/19h/transcriptbot. (Needs an api key for both)
Finally, a bot that monitors a tcp / http endpoint configured via a yaml file, can be configured to send alerts via SMS (via AWS SNS), Slack or Telegram: https://github.com/19h/zuse.
There's a bunch more but most of them are very specific to my needs.
I want to buy it, I've been wanting to pay for this service for so long (it just feels so shady this whole time, it's gigabytes of (unencrypted) storage for free? WCPGW), I just can't figure out how to buy this.
Also their client apps are open source and have very good Linux support.
Signal sounds nice but it's a bit overbearing - backups are somewhere between difficult to impossible depending on the device, there is no web client, and it's only open source in that you can audit source or run your own independent chat network (3rd party clients on the official server are treated as hostile) not as in it's an open community. Despite all of this kind of stuff being defended for contrived hyper-secure hyper-private reasoning you can't send a chat without giving out your phone number and it's ridiculously easy to cause your verification number to change making people numb to all of the protection in the first place.
I did grab a Telegram account recently but only since Beeper supported it and I figured "why not" so I'm missing out on these features but I almost wonder if I would have even been so excited about new things like Beeper had I went Telegram originally.
Interestingly of all the chat apps WhatsApp and Telegram usage seemed to align heavily. Not sure if that was just a quirk of my friend group or a more general thing.
Do you happen to know why there is no Telegram client fork using Matrix protocol? it seems a pretty obvious thing to try given their advantage with UI and Matrix ecosystem's slow progress with friendly clients.
They’re both great, I plan to support both, they’re just for different things.
Needless to say I will be paying for their premium services.
Is Dubai a place with good protection against government pressure?
Depends on the government :)
The German government has been throwing a temper tantrum and threatening to bad Telegram because Telegram doesn't respond to data requests from German police and spies.
that 'temper tantrum' is colloquially known as the rule of law, and Telegram has cooperated with the government concerning terrorism and child abuse as they should, or alternatively leave if they consider those rules unacceptable.
https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2022/06/telegram-has...
- people claiming MTProto (Telegram's custom protocol which is basically a worse TLS) makes it in any way more secure than pretty much any other system
- people saying moxie is just pushing MobileCoin. Maybe, I don't know, but what does that have to do with Signal? And even if Signal is a total scam, how does that make Telegram not terrible?
- people saying Signal is backdoored by <3letteragency>. We don't know if that's even possible. If it is, then probably so are almost all other e2e encrypted chat apps. And it's about 100x more plausible that Telegram is backdoored - it certainly could be.
The only slightly valid criticism I saw there is that you have to use your actual phone number with Signal. But that doesn't make Telegram any good.
I'd take Telegram over SMS, but I'd almost take SMS+rot13 over Telegram.
> Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct.
How is Joe Average supposed to understand that?
Adding to that, the secret chat encryption has always been Weird (capital W) and in one of the previous generations the server could actually MITM it. Trivially.
Signal showed us that is possible to have E2E encrypted messaging, why don't they provide it, but with better UI/UX?
If Telegram doesn't read messages and doesn't provide access for 3rd parties(governments, etc.), It should provide E2E everywhere by default.
I had telegram installed for almost 3 years. I never had a secret chat that I did not start myself.
But people use Telegram for its plethora of features, the UX, and its attention to even the smallest of details.
It could very well be that one of your friends looked up the product being discussed and FB (correctly) guessed based on other data they had that you're the one most likely to be interested in it (or alternatively just shown this ad to everyone in your friends group, but only you picked up on it).
• 4 GB uploads, faster downloads: I'm struggling to imagine what these would be useful for, other than movie piracy. The default upload limit is already 2 GB, and the download speed is fine.
• Doubled limits: Most of these are client-side limits. Locking these features down behind a paywall is just obnoxious.
• Voice-to-text: I have never intentionally used Telegram's voice messaging features. Most mobile phones can already do speech-to-text; making other people use a premium feature to get the same results is silly.
• Unique stickers, unique reactions: Oh please god no. Animated stickers were bad enough. I'm going to be tempted to ban anyone using these in the groups I moderate.
• Chat management: More paywalled client-side features. (Including one feature that was previously available to all users -- auto-archive for new chats used to be offered to any user that was getting a lot of chat requests.)
• Animated profile pictures: See "unique stickers".
• Premium badges, premium app icons: Yawn.
• No ads: Where do ads even show up? I've never seen one, even in large channels.
Telegram is not like that, channels with tons of videos and pictures continue to work smoothly.
Same. I've seen enough people get burned by losing messages because of the E2EE of WhatsApp to prefer to use Messenger and/or Telegram.
> - Developing bots is a bliss. So easy and effective.
Reason I am using Telegram more these days. I'm house hunting and needed a way for my scraping script to notify me and my partner about houses that the script finds: Telegram works perfectly for this. Just create a private chat group and send a HTTP request to Telegram.
I appreciate stuff like this too. I hate being treated like a child.
Sometimes I want to express "just shot me" with an emoticon, which a watergun ruins.
Has this changed? Last time I looked, you needed a phone number to sign up.
Telegram have your phone number. But you need not share it with anyone else to connect.
You can do that with E2EE as well. Proof: Element/Matrix which btw has excellent bot tooling and alphanumeric usernames as well...
I have the same issue with hey.com email provider, but they are too expensive too. I would love to have an email service provider for 2-3€/month, I'm not an hardcore email user so 8€ as they ask is too much for me. For 3€ and less "pro" features I would pay for the email service.
Same for Spotify, I don't listen much, I would prefer to pay only 4€ a month and have only 2 hours a month of listening without ads. But 10€ for listening for less than 2 hours is a lot. And I don't think I'm the only one like this.
The only company I know who is doing an affordable paid service is nextdns. For 2€ a month, I'm happy to pay for the service for having a DNS that filters trackers on all my devices.
Bitwarden paid is $10 per YEAR. I'm very happy to pay that. (Off-topic for discussion of Telegram though)
Their smallest webhosting package is 1,90 €/month and comes with your own domain. Configuration is done through their web-based interface, so no CLI fiddling and nothing.
I think that's a good deal, you could even run your own NextCloud on that package, if you want to. That way you get a CalDav server, so you can ditch Google Calendar and Contacts, if you want to.
I use it for all email forwards for my family: https://github.com/politician/barissat-infra
It has a lot of good security features too, including support of account passwords, requiring verification of new logins on another device, letting you see all of your login sessions on any device and log out any of them, private groups with detailed controls for join links, etc. A lot of crypto people get mad that it doesn't have E2E encryption outside of opt-in "secret chats", but I don't think that's all that important.
It's also completely free of most of the dark patterns that plague most social media sites. No reshuffling of message order, optimizing for outrage and engagement, or pushing new content to keep you scrolling. No randomly banning or locking accounts for no apparent reason.
I view this paid account thing as an excellent sign that their future plans for the app are for optimizing user satisfaction instead of trying to appeal more to advertisers. I plan to sign up as soon as I can, and hope it goes well and helps us move towards a future where our social platforms see the users as customers to be served, not products to optimize the sale of to advertisers who become their actual customers.
At my kid's previous school and at my kid's current school there are parents using Telegram. Sure WhatsApp is still the most common one but Telegram is not unheard off.
700 millions users is quite something.
Hardly a week goes by without Telegram telling me: "xxx joined Telegram". Last week I re-connected with a friend I hadn't talked to in a long time because I saw he just joined Telegram. Said hi to him, sent him a few pictures. I don't know who brought him to Telegram but he ended up using it and he's definitely not a techie.
At this rate in two years they'll have 1 billion users. Maybe it'll even snowball at some point.
This is competition to WhatsApp. 700 million users and growing is not nothing.
- Telegram vs. Whatsapp is clear, Whatsapp is off-limits due to it being owned by Zuckerberg & Co.
- Telegram vs. Signal is a bit less clear but the user experience offered by Telegram is superior to that of Signal which made it easy to get some of my more computer-averse family members to accept it. The fact that Telegram is easy to use across devices - native apps on mobile and PC, web, CLI, you name it - is a big plus here.
- Telegram vs. XMPP is a battle which has yet to be fought, I have an XMPP server standing by for the moment when Telegram crosses some line which makes me want to switch. With Conversations on Android the user experience is quite good so I consider this to be a serious contender.
- Telegram vs. XXX - see Telegram vs. Signal.
It's also great for piracy. There's a channel I'm in with links to updated Nintendo Switch modpacks as well as one for premium STL files.
Many Ukrainian and Russian primary sources are on Telegram only. Including government officials etc.
Not much in terms of restrictions to message size, or file size, or storage, or bandwidth.
You're not spoon-fed by some algorithm, no recommendations, you only see the channels that you manually joined/followed/subscribed to. Feels very old-school in that regard, but in the best possible way.
It has great desktop app support (I'm not much of a mobile user).
No ads, ever, anywhere.
If you just want to follow some content creators without much interaction, it's perfect (that being said, of course there's regular group chats too, I just don't use any of those).
I am very happy with it btw; much better than whatsapp.
On the other side, people who I know use it for finding all kinds of uncensored stuff in the groups there. It is not totally dark net style there, but the moderation is lax compared to the more visible social media.
LibreOffice user groups (e.g. Right-to-Left)
Some activism.
My ex-girlfriend.
Yeah. And WhatsApp/FB/MSNMessenger/GChat by US companies. Both are detrimental for your privacy.
I’m not sure the signup is available without the app, that’s the only thing.
That's an interesting question. I don't know. Maybe he would understand it as "messages that are hard to read for NSA".
To be honest, I don't understand your criticism. Surely people can put a video on their website about E2E, about privacy, integrity and authenticity. Maybe put an honest comparison with other messengers. But I'd only expect this kind of openness from a nonprofit organization.
Second one was talking to one of my neighbors about their dog. For a few days I kept getting ads about dog leashes. I don't have a dog.
The question is: can German police compel Dubai police to perform the query? Can Russian police to that? Can US police do that?
May be UAE will be 21-century Switzerland which failed miserably at being independent, but this specialization of being independent is in demand.
True that it is not very customizable. And yes it is electron.
They rebranded recently - https://discord.com/ Not very gamery
"Gamery" features like voice calls, video calls, videostreaming an application or videostreaming your desktop?? :D
Servers where you can talk/do/post whatever? And just drop in?
Now I use both but Telegram feels more like Whatsapp to me with 1 to 1 convos and Discord is more of the Teamspeak/Mumble philosophy where its a voice room/server.
[1] https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/deviceapp-specific-pa...
Also all the other messengers like WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram don't seem to care about interoperability or internet standards and are not XMPP compliant.
You first create a bot, then join a chat with that bot, then control the bot via the http api
api: https://core.telegram.org/bots/api
quickstart (just to send messages, not mine): https://gist.github.com/dideler/85de4d64f66c1966788c1b2304b9...
The comment was more related to a puzzling observation that a really serious promise of security makes people more happy than actual security. Why bother with providing safety to people if all they need is to feel safe?
It's called security theater. The TSA is my favorite example of this phenomenon.
Wrong, see Element or Matrix generally
I wonder if it'll come to the f-droid version, but otherwise I'm still using the official desktop client so it should be possible there.
Group handling is where all of the apps really shine though. Doing groups in SMS is basically garbage compared to pretty much any chat app ever made.
I don’t know why this is so hard to understand. With telegram, you have both.
It is the nature of an international network that you cannot reasonably expect your government's laws to have any say on a service run in another part of the world. If you do think your government SHOULD have a way to enforce their laws in another country, maybe the internet is not for your country.
European (and for that matter, Canadian[1]) courts wanting stuff gone internationally is well-documented[2]. It is not unconceivable that German enforcement agencies would use similar tactics. Once you give them the small finger, they will take the whole arm.
[1] https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/16701/inde... [2] https://www.heise.de/news/Gericht-Facebook-muss-bei-Rechtsve...
Do you have any evidence for this, or is this your "better safe than sorry" assumption for every e2e messenger that doesn't allow you to verify keys?
I do like both the Telegram and Discord clients. I use both myself.
But I use it in a container tab in FF. I have uBlock Origin installed.
I don't trust the electron client to respect my privacy.
I only use Telegram, no WhatsApp / Messenger so I had no idea that this was normal for other chat apps. Terrifying.
This is not true for Messenger, where it's your facebook account as your identifier.
I'm using the distro (manjaro) build, which is also pretty good. No idea how good the AUR versions are.
The fact that anybody can verify keys raises the stakes of attempting a MITM attack significantly and thus protects the majority that doesn't verify keys themselves.
Even my tech-illiterate mother asked if I was hacked or just got a new phone (I got a new phone). The study you link is from 2018, I think it's not a bad assumption to say that people have had some education since then. In 2018 I just started using Signal, nowadays everybody is on it, in my various circles.
literally no one cares for the 'secret key of x has changed' on whatsapp, so i might as well enjoy the supperior useability of telegram.
Signal makes some cruddy decisions that makes identity verification happen way more often than necessary. Keybase did it better, too bad Zoom bought them just to kill them. Here's their blog post: https://keybase.io/blog/chat-apps-softer-than-tofu . TL;DR:
> Is there a good solution, one that doesn't involve trusting servers with private keys? At Keybase, we think yes: true multi-device support. This means that you control a chain of devices, which are you. When you get a new device (a phone, a laptop, a desktop, an iPad, etc.), it generates its own key pair, and your previous device signs it in. If you lose a device, you "remove" it from one of your remaining devices. Technically this removal is a revocation, and there's also some key rotation that happens automatically in this case.
> The net result is that you don't need to trust the server or meet in person when a partner or teammate gets a new device. Similarly, you don't need to trust the server or meet in person when they remove a device, unless it was their last. The only time you need to see a warning is when someone truly loses access to all their installs. And in that case, you're met with a serious warning, the way it should be:
Telegram offers server side text search
https://matrix-org.github.io/gsoc/#/projects?project=impleme...
It's not perfect, obviously, but if I had the choice between Durov and Zuckerberg, I'd take the former every time.
There is also a GEB reading server.
The fast.ai server.
Others are OSSU, Rust, MSFT Python, RL group, Yannic Kilcher, sentdex, Eluether.AI, Mark Saroufim's and Aleksa Gordic's ones, wandb, ConwayLife Lounge, Hugging Face, AI Art, etc.
Good choice for a dissident! (No)
[1]: https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/friendship-betrayal-clai...
Of these two, Telegram is hardly verifiable: its clients are open-source, BUT the sources in the public repository are updated very rarely, so if T. wants to slip in some malicious code aimed at a specific user to compromise their Secret messages, they can very well do it in a number of ways.
But, given that the vast majority of Telegram users do not even user the secret chats, they can just accest all their chat history without any efforts. Since you can log in to your chat history with just a login and password, the even if chat history is indeed encrypted 'in storage', it is clear that Telegram can decrypt your messages for you. Consequently, they can decrypt it for themselves or for anyone else. (I personally think that they don't even bother, what's the point of doing extra work if nobody sees that anyway?)
Thus, the only thing that users can rely on is Durov's reputation, as a fearless modest person with few material possessions, who was pressured by Russian government to sell his business to Putin's cronies. And here is the problem:
Rosenberg in his series of posts alleges a lot of things. First, that Durov has quite a few material possessions, of which he lied (not a big deal in itself, but it adds up). Then, Durov has lied that once he launched Telegram, T's developers were located in Germany. But they turned out to be working from the same office as his old business, which was taken from him in a rather hostile way. These allegations were never addressed by Durov, the only comment he made was the attack on Anton's personality ('This man is a jerk', basically), and Rosenberg has even won his case in court, proving that his claims for payments, etc were solid and he really did work for Telegram in Russia. Do you have a feeling that Durov's reputation is kinda besmirched by now?
Then, this famous case when Russian censorship agency, Roscomnadzor, has tried to ban it in Russia, and couldn't. For some reason, the most obvious thing you do when banning an app was not done: Telegram had remained on Google Play and Apple's AppStore. We know that Google and Apple have previously complied with Russian government requests to ban apps (as proven in the case of Linkedin), but with Telegram it wasn't done - and all sources claiming that Roscomnadzor has demanded the ban were sourced to Roscomnadzor's own post (I have personally verified about 40 news articles, they all linked either each other or RCN's post) - and it is unclear if this demand was ever officially sent to Google/Apple, neither of them have ever confirmed or denied it. (btw if somebody has a congressman or district attorney pal, it would be good to send an official inquiry to Google and Apple to put this question to rest! Anyone?)
And then we have the 'unban' of Telegram by Russian authorities. This is in itself is unprecedented, for a russian government agency to back down from earlier demands 'because they were unable to make it stick'. Nothing like this has never ever happened, russian government officials just don't function like that, under no circumstances! And the week after the ban, Telegram's top manager sat on the same board with russian government officials! This alone makes me think that all this 'telegram's ban' was a successful special PR operation to build up Telegram's reputation, at the expense of Roscomnadzor reputation, which is below the lowest anyway.
So we have questionable reputation by Durov whom we know to lie about vital things, and we have very suspicious block-unblock story, and nobody really knows anything about Telegram the company and where it is incorporated, etc.
That's rather fine in the event you don't want the Five Eyes to spy on you and you don't care if Putin reads your messages when he eats his breakfast.
messenger privacy is not a function of technology unfortunately.
the only real choice is which powerblock (us,ru,ch) can read your conversation
No data (so Signal) is better than whatever legal hoops you're going through to supposedly avoid giving out the data you have. Plus if you look up "telegram data germany", it's not clear that it's actually working and that they're actually true to their word.
What about Signal, Wire, Threema?
The last time I've used Matrix actually, usability was a disaster; took me a while to figure out even just how to login, and that wasn't the only problem.
Not all all, that’s how much.
Seriously. Again, huge proponent and financial supporter of matrix efforts here; I think they do an a amazing job. But comments like yours are detrimental to what they do.
For example when looking for an apartment I told my agent (non business account) that I wanted safety catches on the windows. I immediately got advertising for safety catches and window gates.
I don’t own cats but in a conversation with a friend who owns cats I said she should get one of those cat tree things and scratch poles. Right away Facebook starts showing me adverts for cat toys.
This is not stuff I’ve searched or googled or anything. Just mentioned in WhatsApp. Maybe WhatsApp whats differently in America but in Singapore I get advertising in Facebook from conversations.
Unless WhatsApp is audited completely, not just looking at some source code but also how all information passes through facebook and back to a receiver. Then we can only assume the e2ee is just marketing fluff and not something that is done in favour of privacy.
At best it’s circumstantial anecdotes pointing to Facebook extracting topic metadata out of your convos. This can be done clientside, no decryption necessary. (And it’s easy to prove that it’s being done if that’s the case)
Last update of Telegram on Google Play: 2022-06-17 [2]
[1]: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/commits/master
[2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.telegram.m...
The UX of communicating with other users was problematic as well. I've tried to establish communications with a certain user, and I have no idea if I succeeded or not (likely not); two separate communications "channels" (I don't know the terminology) were opened with the same user, which is perplexing, since again, this is something I've never experienced before.
I think those two weren't even the only problems I've had.
As for the chat rooms, they work exactly like Discord, which is exactly like every chat client with chat rooms has since the dawn of IRC. You can send a message to one person, or you can join a room and message everyone at the same time.
Easy peasy!
If you don't, then you have no idea how bad it used to be.
Also your attitude is super toxic. You’re calling people who don’t value the same things you do, “clueless”.
You don’t really get to bullshit people on HN — you can be super smart and skilled in your field, you’ll far too often come across people with vastly more experience than you. I invite you to think about that.
Again, matrix is great, and I see it as the future of messaging. But it’s absolutely not the “present” of messaging; it’s years behind telegram, and the UX of most clients including the more popular ones is garbage.
Oh and all of matrix is totally open source! Wow. That's how you know you can trust it. If they decide to pull a WhatsApp and move to Facebook, you can just fork and get on with your life.
I like that the telegram client is open, but the sever isn't. Which means I don't really trust them. Same problem as Signal.
Then things like MSN Messenger got popular. Protocols got locked down and screen real estate got consumed. For some reason everyone wanted to use Google Talk (which was horrible but at least spoke XMPP so folks on Pidgin could still chat with their friends). BB messenger taught a few tricks to Apple. Then facebook messenger happened, whatsapp, wechat, etc.
In the background, there were programs like teamspeak and mumble that were trying to do voice chat for gaming reasons. In a way, these were the precursors to Discord who now, for some reason, dominates what people consider a good chat UI. I personally think it's a bloated mess. In my opinion, ICQ had the best chat UI. Because it stayed out of the way.
It's too bad it turned out to be spyware! Hah
obvious explanations:
1. coincidence/luck + confirmation bias. this can also be aided by demographic/interest factors. For instance, suppose there are 10,000 "interests" that facebook tracks. You'd think that for a given conversation that contained such a topic, the chance that you'd see ads for it was 1 in 10,000. However, if the conversation topic was "mechanical keyboards", and facebook knew that you were male, 18-35, and are interested in video games, then it might be able to infer that you're much more likely to be interested in mechanical keyboards and therefore show you ads for mechanical keyboards 1 in 50 times rather than 1 in 10,000 times.
2. the other side ended up leaking the information to facebook (eg. through a search or clicking on an ad)
2. So facebook leaked information that a conversation happened between me and a friend and they thought, oh you know what, Phillip had a conversation with X, and X just search for 'cat toys' so Phillip must want cat toys right now!
No, neither of those are 'obvious' explanations.
It seems doubtful that you can hide the fact that you had a 1 year old kid from facebook, unless you're a very sporadic/careful user. Besides, it's not too hard to imagine one of your friends outed you to facebook (eg. posted photo of you with a baby, or mentioning the fact that you have a baby on a post/comment somewhere). From there it doesn't seem too implausible that "had 1 year old kid" was a targeting factor for "window safty latch for children". As for the "looking for an apartment" part, I don't really think that's necessary for sending you ads for safety latches. Even if you live in a house you'd need latches to secure room windows that are on the second floor.
>2. So facebook leaked information that a conversation happened between me and a friend and they thought, oh you know what, Phillip had a conversation with X, and X just search for 'cat toys' so Phillip must want cat toys right now!
e2e provides zero assurances about metadata/social graph. that's been the case since PGP days.
2. Again, those ad's never showed until shortly after the conversation occurred. I'm talking within ~30m of the discussion.
That's too soon to be a coincidence.
Confirmation bias is a hell of a thing; it works in many different ways. Personally over years of usage I’ve never had WhatsApp convos trigger ads.
The issue is, I have only 3 chats happening in WhatsApp in the last 2 years that are non-business chats. And all 3 have had conversations resulting in advertising.
As for your other examples, as I said, it’s all very circumstantial and coincidental. Not evidence. Your accusation is more serious than you think, and serious accusations need serious evidence.
If you’re saying Facebook can just decrypt stuff at will, your accusations are quite extreme, and you better back it up with stronger evidence.
>The issue is, I have only 3 chats happening in WhatsApp in the last 2 years that are non-business chats. And all 3 have had conversations resulting in advertising.
you realize that Messenger is owned by facebook? I find it baffling that you think the leak must be from whatsapp, when in reality both Messenger and whatsapp are both owned by facebook.
My point is because everyone I know uses other messaging apps, not what’s app. My sample size is very small because I’m not having daily conversations on what’s app. Conversations are happening in other apps.