Comment by dijit
11 hours ago
It was audited, found to have some serious flaws[0], then those were rectified.
Most people dislike Telegram because:
A) It takes away from Signals market share
B) They don't enable E2EE by default
C) They're owned by Pavel Durov, the Russian Zuckerberg.
I am aware that it's an unpopular opinion, but the FUD spread against Telegram and the hagiographies of Signal make me think something weird is going on.
Telegram has third party clients, so you can just roll your own client that runs another encryption on top if you want, like Pidgin used to do with OTR.
People in the US prefer Signal over Telegram because Signal was created by people who took security seriously, and Telegram wasn't.
People outside the US prefer telegram because they assume that Signal is probably compromised, or at least highly vulnerable to compromise, by US intelligence - they trust Pavel Durov's history of expropriation and arrest more than they trust some nerds who claim that our product is secure.
As someone that uses Telegram almost every day, the sad true is that most messages are not private. Most people simply don't use "secure chats". Not only it's not the default, but encrypted chats also don't work across devices.
So it shouldn't be a surprise that Signal users speak against Telegram. It's simply not private for most people. It's like recommending using Facebook Messenger (pre-E2EE)... privacy minded people won't do that. Signal itself is criticised by other more privacy minded users because it requires a phone number.
Signal doesn't have the best call quality (voice/video) especially on slow connections, sending media can be a pain in the rear, their desktop client is way too simple, they move slowly, etc. Telegram beats them in almost everything, but not privacy...
Between having to trust Durov forever with our texts and system that uses e2ee by default and may or may not (no proof) have some flaw, I think most people that want privacy will use the option that uses e2ee for everything.
D) They don't enable E2EE for groups at all
E) (I believe) don't enable E2EE with more than one device
F) They added a third-party verification so that Russian authorities can add an "A+" mark to channels who are complying with the new law and are registered (social network channels/blogs with more than 10K subscribers must be registered with the government now and have the owner identified).
D) True aside from group calls afaik
E) Neither does Whatsapp/Signal; they rely on a backdoor interface to your phone to send messages.
Signal desktop can send & receive messages while your phone is off, so that doesn't seem correct.
1 reply →
Signal very definitely does multiparty end-to-end secure messaging.
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E) Yet it works fine on Matrix.
3 replies →
F) They don't allow E2EE on GNU/Linux, including phones and desktop.
I like how you sandwiched "the encryption story is bad" between two irrelevant social claims.
D) They moved to the enshittification phase and started displaying ads
I mean Durov is going down the deep end in the last few weeks. Messaging all Telegram user with an Emergency feature with a doomer manifest.
https://t.me/durov/452
This really bugged me. I led adoption of Telegram as our family-internal standard chat tool several years ago because I was more anti-Zuck than I was concerned about backdoors or overt politicization of Telegram. Since the Ukraine war began, there has been literally no positive news about Telegram and Durov has become increasingly political (especially since his arrest in France) in his all-users blasts.
With the amount of known use of Telegram by unsavory actors, combined with Durov's own leveraging of his platform for activism, I've been using Whatsapp more and more lately, and don't feel bad about that.
I respect Signal, but it's missing too many product features and it doesn't have the reach Whatsapp does, so it's not compelling as a switching option at this point, even for family use.
I was pretty ticked off about this. I don't disagree with the message content itself, but having political content pushed to me is a big no-no. If this kind of thing keeps up I'll be dropping my premium sub.
> with a doomer manifest
Can you point at anything in his message that's not factually correct?
One factual thing that looks off is "the UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets". I'm not in the UK and not following closely the situation there, but "thousands", really? Genuine doubt, would love to see some evidence.
Otherwise, the "doomer manifest" is OK, but the comically inflated ego of Durov is annoying, him thinking that such banal and commonplace sentiments are worth pushing as an alert message to all users, wrapping everything into announcing his birthday (that he doesn't want to celebrate, oh no).
It's not about the content IMO; it's about the principle. Should not be sending content to users, unless they opted into said content being sent to them.
There is a grossly sexist omission in "built by our fathers"
>Can you point at anything in his message that's not factually correct?
He also got involved in Romanian and Moldovan elections, by sending a message to target users in the day of the elections( when doing campaign is illegal) with claims he presented no evidence for, basically the bastard works for Ruzzia, he might be forced to but the facts do not lie.
Seems pretty cognizant of the modd of entire HN front page past few weeks honestly
I don't care I didn't subscribe to anything from him. I'd rather take a Coldplay album than political opinions.