5 ms·

Telegram reports 1.000.000 new users 4 hours after the block started, 1.500.000 new users 1 hour ago: https://twitter.com/telegram https://twitter.com/telegram

adrtessier 11y ago
John Gilmore's oft quoted in these cases: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." When, if ever, will politicians learn this? Will it take a generation that has grown up on the Internet and watched this to make them realize these actions are pretty futile?
- roymurdock 11y ago
  This is exactly what the judge wants. He is trying to get Whatsapp to comply with his request. What could be a better way to do this then to drive millions of users to a competitor? The longer Whatsapp holds out, the more users leave the service, possibly for good. Thing is, this better be a really important case. Because if users migrate and stay on Telegram, it could be much harder for Brazilian courts to get records in the future.
  - adrtessier 11y ago
    > Because if users migrate and stay on Telegram, it could be much harder for Brazilian courts to get records in the future. Yeah, that's the way that I see it. I don't believe this is the right kind of gambit to be playing. Not only would I expect Telegram to be even more likely than Facebook to tell the judge to shove the subpoena up his arse, he has escalated a war with a company that often is very good at fighting all of its battles on its own terms. I am now very curious who the subpoena was going after.
  - moxie 11y ago
    > Thing is, this better be a really important case. Because if users migrate and stay on Telegram, it could be much harder for Brazilian courts to get records in the future. Why would it be harder? Telegram has the entire plaintext message history for every message all of their users have ever sent, WhatsApp doesn't. It's much easier for Telegram to comply, not harder.
    - roymurdock 11y ago
      I'm not completely familiar with data storage and access policies between the two, but I was under the impression that Telegram's main selling point was security/privacy and that you could schedule messages to be permanently deleted from Telegram's servers. Now that I've read more on the subject from you and others, it seems to be UX/UI and marketing. I'll defer to you on this one as you're an expert in the field.
newman314 11y ago
Ugh. I wish Signal had the UX to compete with Telegram so that people would use Signal instead.
- SapphireSun 11y ago
  I'm really curious. I've been using Signal for years, and it's been much much better than the default app on my phone (not to mention more secure). What's so good about Telegram? I've avoided it because of its suspicious encryption.
  - newman314 11y ago
    To be clear, I'm not advocating for the use of Telegram. I keep posting this in hopes that moxie will understand just how important UX is and hire accordingly. WhatsApp, Telegram etc. are going to eat Signal's lunch because of the UX and I would like that not to happen.
    - janimo 11y ago
      I think he understands UX is important; the majority of recent changes are to the UX since the crypto is more or less stable. OWS probably has much fewer developers contributing to Signal than either Telegram and WhatsApp, so that could be one of the reasons they have to play catch-up. There are also features some consider good UX but Signal shuns because they create confusion regarding the security properties (i.e. self-destructing messages). Signal's number one priority is security while that is not nearly as important for Telegram in practice. A lot of the UX advantages the latter has can be traced back to this essential difference. I agree though that something like messaging multiple people without creating a group first is more or less UX-only and would probably make sense (groups are anyway a client-side abstraction only in Signal, servers have no concept of them, so making anonymous or automatically named groups on the fly should be doable) Also probably getting in touch with OWS on their mailing list is more effective than hoping they notice random posts on HN. It is not the most contributor-friendly project on the planet but clearly articulated and focused posts are usually answered and so are issues/pull-requests that conform to their stated guidelines (do not add extra options, do not put security second, etc.)
oceanofsolaris 11y ago
I think in this context it might be interesting that WhatsApp is actually using the same end-to-end encryption employed by Signal/Textsecure for some users. This encryption is in general considered superior to the strange protocol Telegram employs. The problem WhatsApp has right now in Brazil MIGHT be caused by them simply not posessing the information the judge wants them to hand out. But I am heavily speculating here, since I neither know what information they were asked for, nor whether the data in question was end-to-end encrypted. The problem with WhatsApps encryption is of course that you have no way to check the encryption status of a conversation. It seems to only work for one-to-one messages between Android users as of the end of last year. Maybe this has changed in the meantime. Maybe the encryption has been enabled for more or less users in the meantime. Who knows.

adrtessier 11y ago

John Gilmore's oft quoted in these cases: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." When, if ever, will politicians learn this? Will it take a generation that has grown up on the Internet and watched this to make them realize these actions are pretty futile?

roymurdock 11y ago
This is exactly what the judge wants. He is trying to get Whatsapp to comply with his request. What could be a better way to do this then to drive millions of users to a competitor? The longer Whatsapp holds out, the more users leave the service, possibly for good. Thing is, this better be a really important case. Because if users migrate and stay on Telegram, it could be much harder for Brazilian courts to get records in the future.
- adrtessier 11y ago
  > Because if users migrate and stay on Telegram, it could be much harder for Brazilian courts to get records in the future. Yeah, that's the way that I see it. I don't believe this is the right kind of gambit to be playing. Not only would I expect Telegram to be even more likely than Facebook to tell the judge to shove the subpoena up his arse, he has escalated a war with a company that often is very good at fighting all of its battles on its own terms. I am now very curious who the subpoena was going after.
- moxie 11y ago
  > Thing is, this better be a really important case. Because if users migrate and stay on Telegram, it could be much harder for Brazilian courts to get records in the future. Why would it be harder? Telegram has the entire plaintext message history for every message all of their users have ever sent, WhatsApp doesn't. It's much easier for Telegram to comply, not harder.
  - roymurdock 11y ago
    I'm not completely familiar with data storage and access policies between the two, but I was under the impression that Telegram's main selling point was security/privacy and that you could schedule messages to be permanently deleted from Telegram's servers. Now that I've read more on the subject from you and others, it seems to be UX/UI and marketing. I'll defer to you on this one as you're an expert in the field.

newman314 11y ago

Ugh. I wish Signal had the UX to compete with Telegram so that people would use Signal instead.

SapphireSun 11y ago
I'm really curious. I've been using Signal for years, and it's been much much better than the default app on my phone (not to mention more secure). What's so good about Telegram? I've avoided it because of its suspicious encryption.
- newman314 11y ago
  To be clear, I'm not advocating for the use of Telegram. I keep posting this in hopes that moxie will understand just how important UX is and hire accordingly. WhatsApp, Telegram etc. are going to eat Signal's lunch because of the UX and I would like that not to happen.
  - janimo 11y ago
    I think he understands UX is important; the majority of recent changes are to the UX since the crypto is more or less stable. OWS probably has much fewer developers contributing to Signal than either Telegram and WhatsApp, so that could be one of the reasons they have to play catch-up. There are also features some consider good UX but Signal shuns because they create confusion regarding the security properties (i.e. self-destructing messages). Signal's number one priority is security while that is not nearly as important for Telegram in practice. A lot of the UX advantages the latter has can be traced back to this essential difference. I agree though that something like messaging multiple people without creating a group first is more or less UX-only and would probably make sense (groups are anyway a client-side abstraction only in Signal, servers have no concept of them, so making anonymous or automatically named groups on the fly should be doable) Also probably getting in touch with OWS on their mailing list is more effective than hoping they notice random posts on HN. It is not the most contributor-friendly project on the planet but clearly articulated and focused posts are usually answered and so are issues/pull-requests that conform to their stated guidelines (do not add extra options, do not put security second, etc.)

oceanofsolaris 11y ago

I think in this context it might be interesting that WhatsApp is actually using the same end-to-end encryption employed by Signal/Textsecure for some users. This encryption is in general considered superior to the strange protocol Telegram employs. The problem WhatsApp has right now in Brazil MIGHT be caused by them simply not posessing the information the judge wants them to hand out. But I am heavily speculating here, since I neither know what information they were asked for, nor whether the data in question was end-to-end encrypted. The problem with WhatsApps encryption is of course that you have no way to check the encryption status of a conversation. It seems to only work for one-to-one messages between Android users as of the end of last year. Maybe this has changed in the meantime. Maybe the encryption has been enabled for more or less users in the meantime. Who knows.