20 ms·

Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

454 points by tuyguntn 10y ago

phillc73 10y ago
I've managed to setup Telegram for most of my (non-technical) family - wife, siblings, mother (she doesn't even have a smart phone and just uses Telegram as a message client on her desktop. It's a very convenient way to share family related pictures). Voice calls are an excellent addition. If these could now also be extended to video calls, I could likely ditch Skype forever.
- kevingrahl 10y ago
  A client of mine once explicitly asked to communicate via Wire [1] which is pretty similar to Skype but E2E encrypted. It was launched by a Skype co-founder, is easy to use and has a pleasant interface. And it's open source. I can't really tell if the product really does what it's advertising, perhaps someone with more expertise could chime in on that. I got stuck on it and I'm considering ditching Skype altogether for it. Perhaps not the solution you were looking for but interesting nonetheless! [1] - https://wire.com/en/ https://wire.com/en/
  - unicornporn 10y ago
    I used it for a year with friends and family. I have never in my life experienced a buggier app on Android. My friends and family said the same about it. The seem to focus on bringing new features (like an alien voice FX feature) when they should try to fix the basics first.
  - Siimteller 10y ago
    It's open source indeed [1] and was recently audited for the quality of the crypto protocol implementation [2]. Not sure what questions you specifically have but I'm happy to answer as I'm part of the team. [1] https://github.com/wireapp https://github.com/wireapp [2]https://medium.com/wire-news/wires-independent-security-review-61f37a1762a8 https://medium.com/wire-news/wires-independent-security-revi...
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    I can +1 Wire. After looking into it, I was very pleasantly surprised. It's not as good as Telegram's UI and featureset, but they're much newer/younger still. I'm starting to use it more and more.
  - ReverseCold 10y ago
    It's great, but they went JS for all their clients. The desktop client is electron, and there's no way their Android app is native, it feels like a WebView. Native apps really do make the experience that much better.
- krmmalik 10y ago
  I could ditch Skype once i get video and screen sharing.
  - blunte 10y ago
    Wire does video calls and screen sharing.
- unhammer 10y ago
  Make them switch yet again to Signal? ;) Most of my family is on iPhone's, while I'm using Android. I tried using Wire as a substitute for Facetime (my 3 year old doesn't consider it a real phone call unless there's video), but it was way too buggy and people would just get annoyed. Signal's new video chat, however, has worked really well after it got out of beta. There aren't many apps that manage to do video calls well between Android and iPhone, I'm a bit surprised that that feature hasn't gotten more attention.
notspanishflu 10y ago
I'm using Telegram as my main messaging system but I hope they'll open source everything. That's the only way to fully audit the service. Telegram is not too bad but has too many grey areas at this moment.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  How do you ensure that the code you have access to is the code running on their servers? Having access to some source doesn't help with that. Unless you strictly use end to end, only after having verified the keys, you are trusting the server quite a lot.
  - notspanishflu 10y ago
    Of course. That's part of the grey areas I mentioned.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      My question is how a source audit addresses the server trust issue...
      - mercer 10y ago
        It doesn't? Or at least I can't see how it would.
- Derbasti 10y ago
  Client and protocol are open source. What more do you need?
  - notspanishflu 10y ago
    Reproducible builds, and deploying my own server.
    - 10y ago
cprecioso 10y ago
Can anyone familiar with the matter say how secure is the 4-emoji verification code?
- doubleplusgood 10y ago
  Based on their tech docs[1], it seems pretty good. 1: https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-verification https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-ver...
- konart 10y ago
  Emojis in this case are just sort of visual representation of the keys two users exchange before communication. In theory this makes MitM attack impractical. https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-are-voice-calls-authenticated https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-are-voice-calls-auth... https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-verification https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-ver...
- joelthelion 10y ago
  I wonder about the possibility to use "collisions" between similar-looking emojis in order to fake a match more easily.
- ramshorns 10y ago
  I think a while ago someone on HN suggested emoji as a joke as a more information-dense and internationalized alternative to numeric or alphanumeric verification codes. I don't know about security, but if this uses all 1,088 emoji from Unicode 9.0, then four emoji have about 40 bits of information.
  - cflee 10y ago
    They say they are using 333 emoji to represent ~34 bits.
    - lucb1e 10y ago
      33.52 bits to be precise, which is where the many-nines claim comes from: 1-(1/(333^4)) = ~0.999999999918
pawelwentpawel 10y ago
Very welcome addition. Can anyone confirm if this feature will be available on the desktop app as well?
- spechide 10y ago
  yes.
  - marksomnian 10y ago
    Source?
    - anaxag0ras 10y ago
      https://twitter.com/telegram/statuses/847417578150428675 https://twitter.com/telegram/statuses/847417578150428675
wackspurt 10y ago
"Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from your and your device‘s feedback (naturally, it doesn’t have access to the contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of future calls on the given device and network." What sort of parameters are adjusted?
- CodeMichael 10y ago
  Sounds like marketing speech for variable bitrate encoding and/or adjusting compression aggressiveness.
  - samat 10y ago
    Those codecs have tons of parameters to tweak (source: private conversation with Pavel Durov)
    - moe 10y ago
      But what sort of parameters are adjusted? This is HN. A link to an example would be appreciated. Edit: To clarify, I work with audio codecs too, and can't really think of parameters (other than the compression level?) that would make much sense to adjust on the fly. If "AI" is used for more than just a buzzword here, then I imagine the answer must be quite interesting.
      - fenwick67 10y ago
        They probably adjust the incoming / outgoing buffer sizes (and therefore the audio delay, since it's live) to account for packet loss. They might also prioritize traffic depending on how full your buffers are. I can only assume Youtube and Netflix do similar parameter tweaks to optimize their video delivery based on the connection (totally filling the buffer to a max size all the time would waste bandwidth, but if the client has lots of packet loss they need a larger safety net).
Numberwang 10y ago
Very good. Great even. But there is a problem. Whatsapp has already won the chat/calls app war. Watch it grow massivly in the next year, i promise. Mostly due to incompetence of MS and Google.
- gtirloni 10y ago
  I agree it's largely due to MS and Google incompetence. However, WhatsApp is already at 1bn users [0][1]. Expanding from that is going to be very hard. 0 - http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889534/whats-app-1-billion-users-facebook-mark-zuckerberg http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889534/whats-app-1-billio... 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_with_more_than_100_million_active_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_wi...
- konart 10y ago
  > Whatsapp has already won Globaly - maybe, for now. in some countries, however, it's not as popular as Telegram or Viber, for instance. (like Iran, for example)
  - dgellow 10y ago
    Or WeChat (China), or LINE (Thailand).
- frik 10y ago
  WhatsApp/Fbchat Or WeChat (they (Tennent) just bought 5% of Tesla)
- notheguyouthink 10y ago
  To me Whatsapp is terrible. I can only use it on Mobile in any meaningful way, so it's actually worse than SMS for me. Eg, i get a better UX of seamless multi-device SMS via Hangouts, than i do with Whatsapp. Frequently i get kicked off of Whatsapp because my phone has been idle for too long. Frequently my messages are out of order between the web client and the android client. Semi-frequently Whatsapp hangs when sending messages, sometimes dropping them (i assume due to my phone going idle). I wouldn't recommend anyone to Whatsapp.. for UX, at least.
anotheryou 10y ago
Closed source, not end-to-end encrypted by default, end-to-end only device to device (so I can't swap seamlessly from a desktop to a mobile session). Not even the protocoll is open, so I am bound to their clients. Sadly it was the only nice alternative when the snowden stuff was published. That means those of my peers who made it away from skype/fb/whatsapp are now on telegram.
- Proof 10y ago
  I highly recommend you check out WIRE. Cheers
  - unicornporn 10y ago
    Wire? I used it for a year with friends and family. I have never in my life experienced a buggier app on Android. My friends and family said the same about it. They seem to focus on bringing new features (like an alien voice FX feature) when they should try to fix the basics first. The worst thing that happened to me was that UI told me I was in a chat with Alice, but I soon realized I was actually chatting with Bob. So much for E2E... Now we use https://riot.im https://riot.im. I'm kind of surprised a federated solution offers a decent UX and is less buggy.
    - throwaway399 10y ago
      There is no way riot is less buggy. Try macos to macos Sierra to Yosemite voice call. It segfaults right away. Wire is buggy but generally works. The main problem with it is that metadata is collected by default.
      - unicornporn 10y ago
        Never experienced anything like that on Riot. I mostly call from Android to other Android and iOS phones though. I'd say we had a 40% chance of actually connecting a call with Wire. Suddenly there was an update to the app and calling didn't work _at all_ until the next update came (this happened more than once). A close relative finally gave up and yelled something along the lines of "who the f* uses this POS app", and I couldn't really argue. :)
davidjgraph 10y ago
I happened to be reading a comparison of Telegram and Whatsapp this morning [1]. I've never used Whatsapp, is it really this bad or is the reviewer clearly a massive Telegram fanboy/girl? [1] https://info.seibert-media.net/display/Atlassian/Comparison+of+Telegram+Messenger+and+Whatsapp https://info.seibert-media.net/display/Atlassian/Comparison+...
- mino 10y ago
  Telegram is superior to Whatsapp from every perspective except for its smaller user base. However, how can you take as unbiased a comparison table that uses adjectives as "Incredibly fast loading times", "UNRIVALED", etc.?
  - unicornporn 10y ago
    > Telegram is superior to Whatsapp from every perspective except for its smaller user base. I'd say, except for its security/encryption...
    - lucb1e 10y ago
      The encryption they claim to use. Not saying they don't, just saying it's only "sort of" superior on encryption, given this caveat.
      - Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
        The same goes for Telegram. The android client hasn't seen any updates to it's github repo since sep 2016. And, it is quite easy to verify that WhatsApp's encryption is doing what we think. A friend of mine managed to reverse engineer their protocol in 2012 in less than 24 hours, by himself. And there is quite a big chunk of the computer security market that would disagree with the claim that something has to be open source to be verifiably secure.
        idanoeman 10y ago
t3ra 10y ago
But seriously how do they pay their bills? (I know VK brothers are super rich) There are bots that relay huge media files It's probably (imo) the fastest & most complete cloud based chat app Everything.. Literally everything you share can be retrived over the cloud & and now calling That must be super expensive infrastructure? No investors no monetization
- clishem 10y ago
  Telegram is losing millions each year, paid by Pavel Durov, its founder. "If you look at Telegram today, every month it burns over $1 million. It might seem that it’s just going nowhere, but if you want to come up with business model, you need to get to a decent size first. We have 62 million users at the moment, which is enough userbase to attract third-party developers to create products on top of your platform. You can’t do that from day one. It’s difficult." http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/13271/pavel-durov-vkontakte-telegram-interview/#sthash.Bc8PkfKi.dpuf http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-... I suspect the cost is even higher now.
  - 72deluxe 10y ago
    Isn't this just hoping that products come along that use your platform and that people are willing to pay for that? Doesn't seem a good strategy to my limited understanding. Also, experience has taught that users are fickle and that products that are free that transition to paid products quickly lose their users.
- unicornporn 10y ago
  They're sitting on troves of data. Extremely few use the E2E encrypted "secure chat" feature (mainly because it isn't default, but also because it doesn't sync between devices) and all the chat logs and data are stored on their servers (and are readable by Telegram). They also store your address book on their servers. I'm sure they will find ways monetize this. Data is the "new gold", as they say[1]... [1] https://www.google.com/#q="data+is+the+new+gold" https://www.google.com/#q="data+is+the+new+gold"
neorex 10y ago
Conference calls! That's what we need in a whatsapp/telegram like app. Make it a reality to see the end of telco domination in the voice space.
otec 10y ago
Excellent!
astannard 10y ago
With talk of neural interfaces and augmentation will we have apps in the future that support human to human encryption I wonder?
- konart 10y ago
  With things like BLADE this is not even a far future http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.3805.html http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.380...
- Geee 10y ago
  I wonder if different languages evolved as a way to encrypt communication from other tribes. Too far fetched I admit.
sneak 10y ago
This is your periodic reminder that Telegram uses sketchy crypto and should be avoided.
- snowpanda 10y ago
  So then why didn't you break the crypto yet? There was a $300,000 bounty to break it.[1] This whole, "don't roll your own encryption" argument is getting really old. Everything was new at one point. [1] https://telegram.org/blog/cryptocontest https://telegram.org/blog/cryptocontest
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
    They had their chance to win my confidence. When Telegram was released, many people said "this looks weird in so many ways. You should really dump that and rewrite it to rely on well-understood primitives" to which the telegram devs answered rather mockingly and started a bullshit crypto contest. 6 months later, a russian guy showed that the server could MITM every newly started or renegotiated secret chat. Sure, they manned up to their promises and gave him something like $80k, but it is a rather telling story about how good they are at crypto. Their crypto today? Yup, still weird.
- dgellow 10y ago
  Telegram is more than the security features.
- tpush 10y ago
  Most people who I know use Telegram(me included) use it because it's frankly the nicest(fast, looks good) Messenger out there, not because of its security features. Personally I don't use the secret chat functionality; I would use Signal if I wanted to communicate securely.
  - floatboth 10y ago
eddiecalzone 10y ago
Signal has this as well. I trust their security (personal bias), but unfortunately the call quality is a non-starter at the moment.
- pfg 10y ago
  They've rolled out a new version of video/voice calls this month[1] which supposedly improved the quality quite a bit. I haven't personally tried it yet, though. [1]: https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-video-calls/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-video-calls/
  - faitswulff 10y ago
    I was recently surprised by a Signal call and the quality was surprisingly good compared to my previous experiences. I would give it another try.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  As does Wire, just for the record. They are one of the newer kids on the block. Open sourced in March 2016, End to End encrypted (everything and by default) since June 2016 (or the other way around). Supports chats, calls, video calls, file transfers and multiple devices (including Linux, though Electron...).
  - dioltas 10y ago
    And when I tried it, for me seemed to have the best call quality, it was better than my network call quality.
  - brobinson 10y ago
    Server isn't open sourced yet... I saw a video where they claimed "Q1 2017", but that doesn't leave them much time...
- Canada 10y ago
  Call quality is much better now. I believe it's a combination of direct peer to peer stream support and a switch from Speex to Opus.
r1ch 10y ago
In a world full of bloated Electron HTML5 / JS "desktop apps", I'm very happy to see Telegram on Windows is a native app (Qt). It feels so incredibly responsive compared to everything else.
- jsheard 10y ago
  The funny thing is that Qt apps used to be derided for bloat (15MB of DLLs! 15MB!) but the rise of Electron has made Qt seem featherweight by comparison.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    Yeah, I remember years ago when I was pondering writing a desktop app in Python and thinking "Python? It would be so bloated!", and nowadays nobody gives a shit about being able to load more than four programs at once.
  - r1ch 10y ago
    I've been involved in a project that went from standard Win32 controls to Qt, and while I was very much against Qt at the time (such bloat!), I can't deny how easy it has made cross platform UI work. With many apps being written in HTML/JS, a C++ Qt framework is still magnitudes faster than a JS interpreter.
    - owlmirror 10y ago
      I have zero experience with Qt but have heard that it has problems with High DPI presentations. Now It seems that they did something in that regard in Qt 5.6, but do you have anything to say or an idea about the maturity of it?
      - floatboth 10y ago
        Qt classic (C++) apps run flawlessly on my 4K desktop (150% scale in Windows). QML/QtQuick apps only support integer scaling for whatever ridiculous reason ("fuck your monitor we need to be pixel perfect" or whatever) so they're either tiny or huge.
cflee 10y ago
Does anyone have an opinion on the new "three-message modification of the standard DH key exchange" they introduced for calls? From their API doc: https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-verification https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-ver... > Party A will generate a shared key with B — or whoever pretends to be B — without having a second chance to change its exponent a depending on the value g_b received from the other side; and the impostor will not have a chance to adapt his value of b depending on g_a, because it has to commit to a value of g_b before learning g_a. > The use of hash commitment in the DH exchange constrains the attacker to only one guess to generate the correct visualization in their attack, which means that using just over 33 bits of entropy represented by four emoji in the visualization is enough to make a successful attack highly improbable.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  That just sounds like ZRTP to me, from the short description in your comment.
  - Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
    If it is it will be interesting to see if they managed to get zrtp correct. It is a pretty complicated protocol with many use cases.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  I like it. I tried to explain it in slightly simpler terms to some friends in a group chat like this: > reading about the emoticon generation thingy, it's actually worth a read > they use a DH KEX[1], but wrapped with something which is interesting. Client A generates a, client B generates b, and g seems to be an already-exchanged finite group generator. That's all standard. [1] diffie-hellman key exchange > now before A sends g^a to B, it will send hash(g^a) to B. B responds as normal (with g^b) to which A will respond with what it normally would send first: g^a. > after receiving g^a, B can check whether the initially received hash(g^a) matches. This means that A can't brute force a specific value of a, so it doesn't matter that it's only 33 bits of entropy in that emoticon thingy. Any brute forcing will change the hash (unless you collide, iirc, sha256) and B will go "dude wtf" and kill the connection > I tried to summarize in more understandable terms, but if it's too shortened or something, the original thing is here: https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-verification https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-ver...
pgalus 10y ago
Is it fully controlled by FSB?
- eternalban 10y ago
  Brothers funded by loans from Swiss banks and citizens of a Commonwealth island. From the paranoid angle try s/FSB/GCHQ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov#Life_after_VK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov#Life_after_VK
tfatcek 10y ago
Have no fear, @tptacek will come and show us the true way, the Signal way. All praise @moxie!
- lucb1e 10y ago
  I'm still curious to hear Moxie/OWS' take on the Wire issue, where they supposedly demanded $2.5mln for implementing the Signal Protocol (which is open source) and using source code where the documentation lacked (which is open source).
  - ComodoHacker 10y ago
    I'm afraid you're talking to the wrong person.
    - lucb1e 10y ago
      The HN audience? I'm not trying to ask the person I'm responding to.
torrent-of-ions 10y ago
I will definitely try this because I have trouble with all other voice chat services including Skype, WhatsApp and Hangouts. Often one of those three will work but not always. But the most annoying problem with any internet voice chat is not so much the quality but the latency. Landline phones have noticeably lower voice quality but one can still enjoy a conversation perfectly well. High latency, on the other hand, absolutely ruins the experience. I always see these services talking about "crystal clear quality", but never latency, which is a shame. Maybe there is simply nothing they can do about it. I've noticed latency get worse and worse on the Internet since I started using it in the 90s and nobody seems to talk about it. There are so many more sources of latency on every layer on the modern internet and it's a damn shame. I remember when interleaving got enabled on my ADSL and latency to everything doubled overnight. Then there are NATs, and all kinds of filtering shit that ISPs insist on. Sigh...
- boterock 10y ago
  Can relate, I remember enjoying more talking with friends in TeamSpeak than with my girlfriend via skype/hangouts/facebook call... now with a discord server, talking with friends is so much easier, but quality is not as good as TS... but still convenience beats quality, and the loss is not that bad.
  - vram22 10y ago
    I've been using TS recently on a consulting project, after my client suggested we use it, due to issues sometimes with Skype. Seems good so far, though not used it for many days yet. Needs a server though. The software is free for a basic version. I think it supports multiple people on the call, though we haven't tried that yet. And seems to have many features overall, not tried them out yet, but will try some over time.
- pixl97 10y ago
  >I always see these services talking about "crystal clear quality", but never latency, which is a shame. Maybe there is simply nothing they can do about it. I've noticed latency get worse and worse on the Internet since I started using it in the 90s and nobody seems to talk about it. Well, the first problem at home is likely your wireless. Live in an apartment and you can pick up 30 other routers in your wifi search. Chances are you're going to have latency and re-transmit issues to your AP. Second problem, your router. Most of them suck. If you're lucky and yours doesn't setup QoS/shaping rules. I use fd_codel on mine to attempt to minimize the amount of buffer bloat that occurs. In the race to make your internet 'fast' huge buffers act like buckets for data, which is really bad if you want your data instantly. And if you search buffer bloat you'll see a lot of people talk about it, very few ISPs want to do anything about it though. Lastly, the one you can't do anything about is the path that your data takes to the remote user. If it is overloaded or has capacity induced latency there isn't much you can do, other than change ISPs maybe.
scandox 10y ago
How many times has this headline been changed? I've seen 3 different ones.
spiraldancing 10y ago
I still vote Wire. It used to be buggy, but much better now, plus completely Open Source (Telegram is not). I just placed my first Wire audio call from my phone a few minutes ago: great quality (better than my actual phone service), no noticeable lag.
- kogepathic 10y ago
  > It used to be buggy How long ago are you referring to? I tried to use it around the end of 2016 to chat with friends and it was nearly impossible to use. We would try to add a contact but the other person would not appear online, despite having the app open in front of us. Messages would frequently not be delivered, or take exceedingly long times to be delivered (hours). Notifications of a new message were also quite hit and miss. Overall I liked the functionality of Wire, but the reliability was terribad.
  - spiraldancing 10y ago
    Not sure, 6-9 months ago. Texting always worked for me, but audio & video were hit-&-miss. Actually, thinking about it now, I haven't used video much lately, but audio has been much better the past 1-2 months.
s_dev 10y ago
Are there any plans to bring group chat to Telegram?
- offa 10y ago
  Perhaps you mean group calls? Group chat is available in Telegram.
iced0wn 10y ago
This I already copywrite long ago
gregn610 10y ago
Pied Piper, is that U ?
kylehotchkiss 10y ago
This is awesome.. I have been trying to video chat with somebody more overseas. Whatsapp video, facebook video, skype, seems like the only thing that works for us right now is Duo. Bad thing: this tech is trapped in Telegram which is quite political of an app. I wish they'd break it out into something like duo.
skybrian 10y ago
Some artist had fun with this: we have a woman talking on her cell phone while driving and a fully clothed man in a bathtub, with a monocle.
vram22 10y ago
I tried https://appear.in https://appear.in recently for a short call with a student and it worked well. A friend and fellow freelancer also uses it, he said. One good point about it is if you need to do a quick ad-hoc call - it is browser-based (probably uses WebRTC), and also does not need to you create an account or sign in. Plan to try it more in future, as well as TeamSpeak which I also mentioned in this thread. I had installed Wire too, both on PC and Android phone, but not tried it yet with anyone.
jonotime 10y ago
My problem with Telegram is I want to use it but they wont let me. I use a budget phone service (freedompop) which apparently is technically voip, but I did not know until I tried to register for Telegram with it. They refuse to send me text verification. Wont work with my google voice number either. WhatsApp does not have this problem. And what if I want to use Telegram on desktop only? Why do I need to verify a phone number?
- xur17 10y ago
  I have the same problem with Project Fi. Every time I try to register they claim my number is a 'voip' number. Duh! Pretty much all numbers are 'voip' at this point.
- rz2k 10y ago
  It worked with my Google Voice number just now. Could they have changed the policy? I did sign up with my iPad (with cell service) first then iPhone, so it was probably more open to not using the device's phone number.
  - jonotime 10y ago
    Hey! What do you know? I guess they added support after enough complaints. Now I'll give it a go.
hannob 10y ago
" Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from your and your device‘s feedback (naturally, it doesn’t have access to the contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of future calls on the given device and network." Is it just me or does this sound like serious bullshit? Unless you have some hard evidence of course...
- RussianCow 10y ago
  Which part? That it doesn't have access to the conversation, or that it improves the call quality?
- backpropaganda 10y ago
  The 'neural network' is probably an SVM or logistic regression. There's nothing special that a neural network can learn with high-level features like network speed, ping times, etc. In fact, it's probably just a TCP-like algorithm, i.e. decrease rate of packet sending if not getting ACKs back. One day, Intel might come out and say their microprocessors are AI-powered, since it has branch prediction.
  - thanksgiving 10y ago
    AMD already claims that with zen platform if I recall correctly.
  - samtoday 10y ago
    I think that Samsung beat Intel to it: "Neural network spotted deep inside Samsung's Galaxy S7 silicon brain (theregister.co.uk)" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12340348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12340348
ComodoHacker 10y ago
I wish they allow arbitrary user identifiers, which are not tied to mobile operators. Just for geeks.
akinalci 10y ago
The NN approach sounds interesting, but there are no technical details and it might be hype-based marketing. Is anyone familiar with solid published work on applying ML/AI to optimize network control (or, as done here, optimize application parameters depending on network conditions).
- lloeki 10y ago
  Funnily enough, 10 years ago as a required entry step before being able to do a thesis I scribbled something[0] about distributed components with probes (some automatic, some with user feedback exactly as suggested here) and knobs driven by some fuzzy logic feedback loop, to be e.g applied to codecs and buffer size in an A/V streaming scenario† (possibly bidirectional). Concluded by saying you could get better, self-improving results by using genetic algorithms and/or AI such as NN. Was basically laughed at during defense and dismissed as being way too sci-fi. Got sick of such constant condescending attitudes and dumped research, pursuing my career as a software engineer. Had I pursued I could have been the author on such a paper you're looking for! Pretty sure I could have patented the shit out of this anyway but that's not how I roll regarding software patents. Now I lost the LaTeX source and Java code as well as the resulting PDF, and can't even download the thing as a memento since it's behind some stupid paywall. † turned out MS launched instant play adaptative 1080p streaming some years later on Xbox 360, which was exactly that. [0] Supervision d'une Application à Base de Composants afin de Respecter des Contraintes Temporelles - https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00000787 https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00000787
Animats 10y ago
The emoji out of band authentication is cool, but probably annoying. You have to read those emoji by voice to the other end, so they can check them. That could be a pain if the emoji are chosen randomly from the 2600 available emoji. The idea comes from the STU-3 secure phone, where there was a 2-digit number display to be read back by voice. It's one of the ways to detect a man-in-the-middle attack. If there's a MITM, the crypto bits sent and received are different, because the MITM is re-encrypting, and this is detectable if you have some out of band channel for comparing them. A MITM would thus have to be able to fake the voice of the other party. With techniques like this, you can make an MITM work arbitrarily hard to maintain the illusion that it's the other party. I've proposed some ways to do this for web pages.
- alphapapa 10y ago
  With the recent "voice Photoshopping" technique demonstrated by Adobe, it seems like this could be a problem in the years to come.
- ghughes 10y ago
  It's gimmicky. I prefer Signal's numeric encoding - easy to read aloud with no room for ambiguity.
raarts 10y ago
No app wil ever accomplish consistent good voice quality over the internet. Ever. For that it's too much of an unreliable network. You may try some calls over Signal, think Hey! This works well! until you hit a moment where the route between endpoints is flaky, attribute it to Signal while using another app for that same call at that particular point in time would have given the same result. Only when QoS will be honored by all internet routers will we reach something that is consistently reliable.
- snackai 10y ago
  You are dumb if you really believe this. Technology always proves people wrong. Just wait for it.
BHSPitMonkey 10y ago
The UI for trimming and setting the quality of sent videos is really neat. It's still annoyingly hard in 2017 to send videos from one mobile to another without needing to completely trash the quality via MMS or upload an often-gigantic file (captured in 1080p or higher) to an intermediary like YouTube or Facebook (and then wait for backend processing).
anoldgangstah 10y ago
a neural network learns from your and your
anoldgangstah 10y ago
a neural network learns from your and your -- typo
ausjke 10y ago
Wait, I saw nobody mentioned this, but I feel this is very similar to Slack, group-chatting basically, isn't it?
dbrian82 10y ago
hi,i'm Brian, i had my friend help me hack my ex's email, facebook, whatsapp,and his phone cause i suspected he was cheating. all he asked for was a his phone number. he's email is (hotcyberlord425@gmail.com)..IF u need help tell him Brian referred you to him and he'll help. Am sure his going to help you do it, good luck

454 points by tuyguntn 10y ago

I've managed to setup Telegram for most of my (non-technical) family - wife, siblings, mother (she doesn't even have a smart phone and just uses Telegram as a message client on her desktop. It's a very convenient way to share family related pictures). Voice calls are an excellent addition. If these could now also be extended to video calls, I could likely ditch Skype forever.

kevingrahl 10y ago
A client of mine once explicitly asked to communicate via Wire [1] which is pretty similar to Skype but E2E encrypted. It was launched by a Skype co-founder, is easy to use and has a pleasant interface. And it's open source. I can't really tell if the product really does what it's advertising, perhaps someone with more expertise could chime in on that. I got stuck on it and I'm considering ditching Skype altogether for it. Perhaps not the solution you were looking for but interesting nonetheless! [1] - https://wire.com/en/ https://wire.com/en/
- unicornporn 10y ago
  I used it for a year with friends and family. I have never in my life experienced a buggier app on Android. My friends and family said the same about it. The seem to focus on bringing new features (like an alien voice FX feature) when they should try to fix the basics first.
- Siimteller 10y ago
  It's open source indeed [1] and was recently audited for the quality of the crypto protocol implementation [2]. Not sure what questions you specifically have but I'm happy to answer as I'm part of the team. [1] https://github.com/wireapp https://github.com/wireapp [2]https://medium.com/wire-news/wires-independent-security-review-61f37a1762a8 https://medium.com/wire-news/wires-independent-security-revi...
- lucb1e 10y ago
  I can +1 Wire. After looking into it, I was very pleasantly surprised. It's not as good as Telegram's UI and featureset, but they're much newer/younger still. I'm starting to use it more and more.
- ReverseCold 10y ago
  It's great, but they went JS for all their clients. The desktop client is electron, and there's no way their Android app is native, it feels like a WebView. Native apps really do make the experience that much better.
krmmalik 10y ago
I could ditch Skype once i get video and screen sharing.
- blunte 10y ago
  Wire does video calls and screen sharing.
unhammer 10y ago
Make them switch yet again to Signal? ;) Most of my family is on iPhone's, while I'm using Android. I tried using Wire as a substitute for Facetime (my 3 year old doesn't consider it a real phone call unless there's video), but it was way too buggy and people would just get annoyed. Signal's new video chat, however, has worked really well after it got out of beta. There aren't many apps that manage to do video calls well between Android and iPhone, I'm a bit surprised that that feature hasn't gotten more attention.

notspanishflu 10y ago

I'm using Telegram as my main messaging system but I hope they'll open source everything. That's the only way to fully audit the service. Telegram is not too bad but has too many grey areas at this moment.

maxerickson 10y ago
How do you ensure that the code you have access to is the code running on their servers? Having access to some source doesn't help with that. Unless you strictly use end to end, only after having verified the keys, you are trusting the server quite a lot.
- notspanishflu 10y ago
  Of course. That's part of the grey areas I mentioned.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    My question is how a source audit addresses the server trust issue...
    - mercer 10y ago
      It doesn't? Or at least I can't see how it would.
Derbasti 10y ago
Client and protocol are open source. What more do you need?
- notspanishflu 10y ago
  Reproducible builds, and deploying my own server.
  - 10y ago

cprecioso 10y ago

Can anyone familiar with the matter say how secure is the 4-emoji verification code?

doubleplusgood 10y ago
Based on their tech docs[1], it seems pretty good. 1: https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-verification https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-ver...
konart 10y ago
Emojis in this case are just sort of visual representation of the keys two users exchange before communication. In theory this makes MitM attack impractical. https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-are-voice-calls-authenticated https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-are-voice-calls-auth... https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-verification https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-ver...
joelthelion 10y ago
I wonder about the possibility to use "collisions" between similar-looking emojis in order to fake a match more easily.
ramshorns 10y ago
I think a while ago someone on HN suggested emoji as a joke as a more information-dense and internationalized alternative to numeric or alphanumeric verification codes. I don't know about security, but if this uses all 1,088 emoji from Unicode 9.0, then four emoji have about 40 bits of information.
- cflee 10y ago
  They say they are using 333 emoji to represent ~34 bits.
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    33.52 bits to be precise, which is where the many-nines claim comes from: 1-(1/(333^4)) = ~0.999999999918

pawelwentpawel 10y ago

Very welcome addition. Can anyone confirm if this feature will be available on the desktop app as well?

spechide 10y ago
yes.
- marksomnian 10y ago
  Source?
  - anaxag0ras 10y ago
    https://twitter.com/telegram/statuses/847417578150428675 https://twitter.com/telegram/statuses/847417578150428675

wackspurt 10y ago

"Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from your and your device‘s feedback (naturally, it doesn’t have access to the contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of future calls on the given device and network." What sort of parameters are adjusted?

CodeMichael 10y ago
Sounds like marketing speech for variable bitrate encoding and/or adjusting compression aggressiveness.
- samat 10y ago
  Those codecs have tons of parameters to tweak (source: private conversation with Pavel Durov)
  - moe 10y ago
    But what sort of parameters are adjusted? This is HN. A link to an example would be appreciated. Edit: To clarify, I work with audio codecs too, and can't really think of parameters (other than the compression level?) that would make much sense to adjust on the fly. If "AI" is used for more than just a buzzword here, then I imagine the answer must be quite interesting.
    - fenwick67 10y ago
      They probably adjust the incoming / outgoing buffer sizes (and therefore the audio delay, since it's live) to account for packet loss. They might also prioritize traffic depending on how full your buffers are. I can only assume Youtube and Netflix do similar parameter tweaks to optimize their video delivery based on the connection (totally filling the buffer to a max size all the time would waste bandwidth, but if the client has lots of packet loss they need a larger safety net).

Numberwang 10y ago

Very good. Great even. But there is a problem. Whatsapp has already won the chat/calls app war. Watch it grow massivly in the next year, i promise. Mostly due to incompetence of MS and Google.

gtirloni 10y ago
I agree it's largely due to MS and Google incompetence. However, WhatsApp is already at 1bn users [0][1]. Expanding from that is going to be very hard. 0 - http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889534/whats-app-1-billion-users-facebook-mark-zuckerberg http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889534/whats-app-1-billio... 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_with_more_than_100_million_active_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_wi...
konart 10y ago
> Whatsapp has already won Globaly - maybe, for now. in some countries, however, it's not as popular as Telegram or Viber, for instance. (like Iran, for example)
- dgellow 10y ago
  Or WeChat (China), or LINE (Thailand).
frik 10y ago
WhatsApp/Fbchat Or WeChat (they (Tennent) just bought 5% of Tesla)
notheguyouthink 10y ago
To me Whatsapp is terrible. I can only use it on Mobile in any meaningful way, so it's actually worse than SMS for me. Eg, i get a better UX of seamless multi-device SMS via Hangouts, than i do with Whatsapp. Frequently i get kicked off of Whatsapp because my phone has been idle for too long. Frequently my messages are out of order between the web client and the android client. Semi-frequently Whatsapp hangs when sending messages, sometimes dropping them (i assume due to my phone going idle). I wouldn't recommend anyone to Whatsapp.. for UX, at least.

anotheryou 10y ago

Closed source, not end-to-end encrypted by default, end-to-end only device to device (so I can't swap seamlessly from a desktop to a mobile session). Not even the protocoll is open, so I am bound to their clients. Sadly it was the only nice alternative when the snowden stuff was published. That means those of my peers who made it away from skype/fb/whatsapp are now on telegram.

Proof 10y ago
I highly recommend you check out WIRE. Cheers
- unicornporn 10y ago
  Wire? I used it for a year with friends and family. I have never in my life experienced a buggier app on Android. My friends and family said the same about it. They seem to focus on bringing new features (like an alien voice FX feature) when they should try to fix the basics first. The worst thing that happened to me was that UI told me I was in a chat with Alice, but I soon realized I was actually chatting with Bob. So much for E2E... Now we use https://riot.im https://riot.im. I'm kind of surprised a federated solution offers a decent UX and is less buggy.
  - throwaway399 10y ago
    There is no way riot is less buggy. Try macos to macos Sierra to Yosemite voice call. It segfaults right away. Wire is buggy but generally works. The main problem with it is that metadata is collected by default.
    - unicornporn 10y ago
      Never experienced anything like that on Riot. I mostly call from Android to other Android and iOS phones though. I'd say we had a 40% chance of actually connecting a call with Wire. Suddenly there was an update to the app and calling didn't work _at all_ until the next update came (this happened more than once). A close relative finally gave up and yelled something along the lines of "who the f* uses this POS app", and I couldn't really argue. :)

davidjgraph 10y ago

I happened to be reading a comparison of Telegram and Whatsapp this morning [1]. I've never used Whatsapp, is it really this bad or is the reviewer clearly a massive Telegram fanboy/girl? [1] https://info.seibert-media.net/display/Atlassian/Comparison+of+Telegram+Messenger+and+Whatsapp https://info.seibert-media.net/display/Atlassian/Comparison+...

mino 10y ago
Telegram is superior to Whatsapp from every perspective except for its smaller user base. However, how can you take as unbiased a comparison table that uses adjectives as "Incredibly fast loading times", "UNRIVALED", etc.?
- unicornporn 10y ago
  > Telegram is superior to Whatsapp from every perspective except for its smaller user base. I'd say, except for its security/encryption...
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    The encryption they claim to use. Not saying they don't, just saying it's only "sort of" superior on encryption, given this caveat.
    - Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
      The same goes for Telegram. The android client hasn't seen any updates to it's github repo since sep 2016. And, it is quite easy to verify that WhatsApp's encryption is doing what we think. A friend of mine managed to reverse engineer their protocol in 2012 in less than 24 hours, by himself. And there is quite a big chunk of the computer security market that would disagree with the claim that something has to be open source to be verifiably secure.
      - idanoeman 10y ago

t3ra 10y ago

But seriously how do they pay their bills? (I know VK brothers are super rich) There are bots that relay huge media files It's probably (imo) the fastest & most complete cloud based chat app Everything.. Literally everything you share can be retrived over the cloud & and now calling That must be super expensive infrastructure? No investors no monetization

clishem 10y ago
Telegram is losing millions each year, paid by Pavel Durov, its founder. "If you look at Telegram today, every month it burns over $1 million. It might seem that it’s just going nowhere, but if you want to come up with business model, you need to get to a decent size first. We have 62 million users at the moment, which is enough userbase to attract third-party developers to create products on top of your platform. You can’t do that from day one. It’s difficult." http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/13271/pavel-durov-vkontakte-telegram-interview/#sthash.Bc8PkfKi.dpuf http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-... I suspect the cost is even higher now.
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  Isn't this just hoping that products come along that use your platform and that people are willing to pay for that? Doesn't seem a good strategy to my limited understanding. Also, experience has taught that users are fickle and that products that are free that transition to paid products quickly lose their users.
unicornporn 10y ago
They're sitting on troves of data. Extremely few use the E2E encrypted "secure chat" feature (mainly because it isn't default, but also because it doesn't sync between devices) and all the chat logs and data are stored on their servers (and are readable by Telegram). They also store your address book on their servers. I'm sure they will find ways monetize this. Data is the "new gold", as they say[1]... [1] https://www.google.com/#q="data+is+the+new+gold" https://www.google.com/#q="data+is+the+new+gold"

neorex 10y ago

Conference calls! That's what we need in a whatsapp/telegram like app. Make it a reality to see the end of telco domination in the voice space.

otec 10y ago

Excellent!

astannard 10y ago

With talk of neural interfaces and augmentation will we have apps in the future that support human to human encryption I wonder?

konart 10y ago
With things like BLADE this is not even a far future http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.3805.html http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.380...
Geee 10y ago
I wonder if different languages evolved as a way to encrypt communication from other tribes. Too far fetched I admit.

sneak 10y ago

This is your periodic reminder that Telegram uses sketchy crypto and should be avoided.

snowpanda 10y ago
So then why didn't you break the crypto yet? There was a $300,000 bounty to break it.[1] This whole, "don't roll your own encryption" argument is getting really old. Everything was new at one point. [1] https://telegram.org/blog/cryptocontest https://telegram.org/blog/cryptocontest
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
  They had their chance to win my confidence. When Telegram was released, many people said "this looks weird in so many ways. You should really dump that and rewrite it to rely on well-understood primitives" to which the telegram devs answered rather mockingly and started a bullshit crypto contest. 6 months later, a russian guy showed that the server could MITM every newly started or renegotiated secret chat. Sure, they manned up to their promises and gave him something like $80k, but it is a rather telling story about how good they are at crypto. Their crypto today? Yup, still weird.
dgellow 10y ago
Telegram is more than the security features.
tpush 10y ago
Most people who I know use Telegram(me included) use it because it's frankly the nicest(fast, looks good) Messenger out there, not because of its security features. Personally I don't use the secret chat functionality; I would use Signal if I wanted to communicate securely.
- floatboth 10y ago

eddiecalzone 10y ago

Signal has this as well. I trust their security (personal bias), but unfortunately the call quality is a non-starter at the moment.

pfg 10y ago
They've rolled out a new version of video/voice calls this month[1] which supposedly improved the quality quite a bit. I haven't personally tried it yet, though. [1]: https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-video-calls/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-video-calls/
- faitswulff 10y ago
  I was recently surprised by a Signal call and the quality was surprisingly good compared to my previous experiences. I would give it another try.
lucb1e 10y ago
As does Wire, just for the record. They are one of the newer kids on the block. Open sourced in March 2016, End to End encrypted (everything and by default) since June 2016 (or the other way around). Supports chats, calls, video calls, file transfers and multiple devices (including Linux, though Electron...).
- dioltas 10y ago
  And when I tried it, for me seemed to have the best call quality, it was better than my network call quality.
- brobinson 10y ago
  Server isn't open sourced yet... I saw a video where they claimed "Q1 2017", but that doesn't leave them much time...
Canada 10y ago
Call quality is much better now. I believe it's a combination of direct peer to peer stream support and a switch from Speex to Opus.

r1ch 10y ago

In a world full of bloated Electron HTML5 / JS "desktop apps", I'm very happy to see Telegram on Windows is a native app (Qt). It feels so incredibly responsive compared to everything else.

jsheard 10y ago
The funny thing is that Qt apps used to be derided for bloat (15MB of DLLs! 15MB!) but the rise of Electron has made Qt seem featherweight by comparison.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Yeah, I remember years ago when I was pondering writing a desktop app in Python and thinking "Python? It would be so bloated!", and nowadays nobody gives a shit about being able to load more than four programs at once.
- r1ch 10y ago
  I've been involved in a project that went from standard Win32 controls to Qt, and while I was very much against Qt at the time (such bloat!), I can't deny how easy it has made cross platform UI work. With many apps being written in HTML/JS, a C++ Qt framework is still magnitudes faster than a JS interpreter.
  - owlmirror 10y ago
    I have zero experience with Qt but have heard that it has problems with High DPI presentations. Now It seems that they did something in that regard in Qt 5.6, but do you have anything to say or an idea about the maturity of it?
    - floatboth 10y ago
      Qt classic (C++) apps run flawlessly on my 4K desktop (150% scale in Windows). QML/QtQuick apps only support integer scaling for whatever ridiculous reason ("fuck your monitor we need to be pixel perfect" or whatever) so they're either tiny or huge.

cflee 10y ago

Does anyone have an opinion on the new "three-message modification of the standard DH key exchange" they introduced for calls? From their API doc: https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-verification https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-ver... > Party A will generate a shared key with B — or whoever pretends to be B — without having a second chance to change its exponent a depending on the value g_b received from the other side; and the impostor will not have a chance to adapt his value of b depending on g_a, because it has to commit to a value of g_b before learning g_a. > The use of hash commitment in the DH exchange constrains the attacker to only one guess to generate the correct visualization in their attack, which means that using just over 33 bits of entropy represented by four emoji in the visualization is enough to make a successful attack highly improbable.

StavrosK 10y ago
That just sounds like ZRTP to me, from the short description in your comment.
- Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
  If it is it will be interesting to see if they managed to get zrtp correct. It is a pretty complicated protocol with many use cases.
lucb1e 10y ago
I like it. I tried to explain it in slightly simpler terms to some friends in a group chat like this: > reading about the emoticon generation thingy, it's actually worth a read > they use a DH KEX[1], but wrapped with something which is interesting. Client A generates a, client B generates b, and g seems to be an already-exchanged finite group generator. That's all standard. [1] diffie-hellman key exchange > now before A sends g^a to B, it will send hash(g^a) to B. B responds as normal (with g^b) to which A will respond with what it normally would send first: g^a. > after receiving g^a, B can check whether the initially received hash(g^a) matches. This means that A can't brute force a specific value of a, so it doesn't matter that it's only 33 bits of entropy in that emoticon thingy. Any brute forcing will change the hash (unless you collide, iirc, sha256) and B will go "dude wtf" and kill the connection > I tried to summarize in more understandable terms, but if it's too shortened or something, the original thing is here: https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-verification https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-ver...

pgalus 10y ago

Is it fully controlled by FSB?

eternalban 10y ago
Brothers funded by loans from Swiss banks and citizens of a Commonwealth island. From the paranoid angle try s/FSB/GCHQ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov#Life_after_VK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov#Life_after_VK

tfatcek 10y ago

Have no fear, @tptacek will come and show us the true way, the Signal way. All praise @moxie!

lucb1e 10y ago
I'm still curious to hear Moxie/OWS' take on the Wire issue, where they supposedly demanded $2.5mln for implementing the Signal Protocol (which is open source) and using source code where the documentation lacked (which is open source).
- ComodoHacker 10y ago
  I'm afraid you're talking to the wrong person.
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    The HN audience? I'm not trying to ask the person I'm responding to.

torrent-of-ions 10y ago

I will definitely try this because I have trouble with all other voice chat services including Skype, WhatsApp and Hangouts. Often one of those three will work but not always. But the most annoying problem with any internet voice chat is not so much the quality but the latency. Landline phones have noticeably lower voice quality but one can still enjoy a conversation perfectly well. High latency, on the other hand, absolutely ruins the experience. I always see these services talking about "crystal clear quality", but never latency, which is a shame. Maybe there is simply nothing they can do about it. I've noticed latency get worse and worse on the Internet since I started using it in the 90s and nobody seems to talk about it. There are so many more sources of latency on every layer on the modern internet and it's a damn shame. I remember when interleaving got enabled on my ADSL and latency to everything doubled overnight. Then there are NATs, and all kinds of filtering shit that ISPs insist on. Sigh...

boterock 10y ago
Can relate, I remember enjoying more talking with friends in TeamSpeak than with my girlfriend via skype/hangouts/facebook call... now with a discord server, talking with friends is so much easier, but quality is not as good as TS... but still convenience beats quality, and the loss is not that bad.
- vram22 10y ago
  I've been using TS recently on a consulting project, after my client suggested we use it, due to issues sometimes with Skype. Seems good so far, though not used it for many days yet. Needs a server though. The software is free for a basic version. I think it supports multiple people on the call, though we haven't tried that yet. And seems to have many features overall, not tried them out yet, but will try some over time.
pixl97 10y ago
>I always see these services talking about "crystal clear quality", but never latency, which is a shame. Maybe there is simply nothing they can do about it. I've noticed latency get worse and worse on the Internet since I started using it in the 90s and nobody seems to talk about it. Well, the first problem at home is likely your wireless. Live in an apartment and you can pick up 30 other routers in your wifi search. Chances are you're going to have latency and re-transmit issues to your AP. Second problem, your router. Most of them suck. If you're lucky and yours doesn't setup QoS/shaping rules. I use fd_codel on mine to attempt to minimize the amount of buffer bloat that occurs. In the race to make your internet 'fast' huge buffers act like buckets for data, which is really bad if you want your data instantly. And if you search buffer bloat you'll see a lot of people talk about it, very few ISPs want to do anything about it though. Lastly, the one you can't do anything about is the path that your data takes to the remote user. If it is overloaded or has capacity induced latency there isn't much you can do, other than change ISPs maybe.

scandox 10y ago

How many times has this headline been changed? I've seen 3 different ones.

spiraldancing 10y ago

I still vote Wire. It used to be buggy, but much better now, plus completely Open Source (Telegram is not). I just placed my first Wire audio call from my phone a few minutes ago: great quality (better than my actual phone service), no noticeable lag.

kogepathic 10y ago
> It used to be buggy How long ago are you referring to? I tried to use it around the end of 2016 to chat with friends and it was nearly impossible to use. We would try to add a contact but the other person would not appear online, despite having the app open in front of us. Messages would frequently not be delivered, or take exceedingly long times to be delivered (hours). Notifications of a new message were also quite hit and miss. Overall I liked the functionality of Wire, but the reliability was terribad.
- spiraldancing 10y ago
  Not sure, 6-9 months ago. Texting always worked for me, but audio & video were hit-&-miss. Actually, thinking about it now, I haven't used video much lately, but audio has been much better the past 1-2 months.

s_dev 10y ago

Are there any plans to bring group chat to Telegram?

offa 10y ago
Perhaps you mean group calls? Group chat is available in Telegram.

iced0wn 10y ago

This I already copywrite long ago

gregn610 10y ago

Pied Piper, is that U ?

kylehotchkiss 10y ago

This is awesome.. I have been trying to video chat with somebody more overseas. Whatsapp video, facebook video, skype, seems like the only thing that works for us right now is Duo. Bad thing: this tech is trapped in Telegram which is quite political of an app. I wish they'd break it out into something like duo.

skybrian 10y ago

Some artist had fun with this: we have a woman talking on her cell phone while driving and a fully clothed man in a bathtub, with a monocle.

vram22 10y ago

I tried https://appear.in https://appear.in recently for a short call with a student and it worked well. A friend and fellow freelancer also uses it, he said. One good point about it is if you need to do a quick ad-hoc call - it is browser-based (probably uses WebRTC), and also does not need to you create an account or sign in. Plan to try it more in future, as well as TeamSpeak which I also mentioned in this thread. I had installed Wire too, both on PC and Android phone, but not tried it yet with anyone.

jonotime 10y ago

My problem with Telegram is I want to use it but they wont let me. I use a budget phone service (freedompop) which apparently is technically voip, but I did not know until I tried to register for Telegram with it. They refuse to send me text verification. Wont work with my google voice number either. WhatsApp does not have this problem. And what if I want to use Telegram on desktop only? Why do I need to verify a phone number?

xur17 10y ago
I have the same problem with Project Fi. Every time I try to register they claim my number is a 'voip' number. Duh! Pretty much all numbers are 'voip' at this point.
rz2k 10y ago
It worked with my Google Voice number just now. Could they have changed the policy? I did sign up with my iPad (with cell service) first then iPhone, so it was probably more open to not using the device's phone number.
- jonotime 10y ago
  Hey! What do you know? I guess they added support after enough complaints. Now I'll give it a go.

hannob 10y ago

" Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from your and your device‘s feedback (naturally, it doesn’t have access to the contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of future calls on the given device and network." Is it just me or does this sound like serious bullshit? Unless you have some hard evidence of course...

RussianCow 10y ago
Which part? That it doesn't have access to the conversation, or that it improves the call quality?
backpropaganda 10y ago
The 'neural network' is probably an SVM or logistic regression. There's nothing special that a neural network can learn with high-level features like network speed, ping times, etc. In fact, it's probably just a TCP-like algorithm, i.e. decrease rate of packet sending if not getting ACKs back. One day, Intel might come out and say their microprocessors are AI-powered, since it has branch prediction.
- thanksgiving 10y ago
  AMD already claims that with zen platform if I recall correctly.
- samtoday 10y ago
  I think that Samsung beat Intel to it: "Neural network spotted deep inside Samsung's Galaxy S7 silicon brain (theregister.co.uk)" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12340348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12340348

ComodoHacker 10y ago

I wish they allow arbitrary user identifiers, which are not tied to mobile operators. Just for geeks.

akinalci 10y ago

The NN approach sounds interesting, but there are no technical details and it might be hype-based marketing. Is anyone familiar with solid published work on applying ML/AI to optimize network control (or, as done here, optimize application parameters depending on network conditions).

lloeki 10y ago
Funnily enough, 10 years ago as a required entry step before being able to do a thesis I scribbled something[0] about distributed components with probes (some automatic, some with user feedback exactly as suggested here) and knobs driven by some fuzzy logic feedback loop, to be e.g applied to codecs and buffer size in an A/V streaming scenario† (possibly bidirectional). Concluded by saying you could get better, self-improving results by using genetic algorithms and/or AI such as NN. Was basically laughed at during defense and dismissed as being way too sci-fi. Got sick of such constant condescending attitudes and dumped research, pursuing my career as a software engineer. Had I pursued I could have been the author on such a paper you're looking for! Pretty sure I could have patented the shit out of this anyway but that's not how I roll regarding software patents. Now I lost the LaTeX source and Java code as well as the resulting PDF, and can't even download the thing as a memento since it's behind some stupid paywall. † turned out MS launched instant play adaptative 1080p streaming some years later on Xbox 360, which was exactly that. [0] Supervision d'une Application à Base de Composants afin de Respecter des Contraintes Temporelles - https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00000787 https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00000787

Animats 10y ago

The emoji out of band authentication is cool, but probably annoying. You have to read those emoji by voice to the other end, so they can check them. That could be a pain if the emoji are chosen randomly from the 2600 available emoji. The idea comes from the STU-3 secure phone, where there was a 2-digit number display to be read back by voice. It's one of the ways to detect a man-in-the-middle attack. If there's a MITM, the crypto bits sent and received are different, because the MITM is re-encrypting, and this is detectable if you have some out of band channel for comparing them. A MITM would thus have to be able to fake the voice of the other party. With techniques like this, you can make an MITM work arbitrarily hard to maintain the illusion that it's the other party. I've proposed some ways to do this for web pages.

alphapapa 10y ago
With the recent "voice Photoshopping" technique demonstrated by Adobe, it seems like this could be a problem in the years to come.
ghughes 10y ago
It's gimmicky. I prefer Signal's numeric encoding - easy to read aloud with no room for ambiguity.

raarts 10y ago

No app wil ever accomplish consistent good voice quality over the internet. Ever. For that it's too much of an unreliable network. You may try some calls over Signal, think Hey! This works well! until you hit a moment where the route between endpoints is flaky, attribute it to Signal while using another app for that same call at that particular point in time would have given the same result. Only when QoS will be honored by all internet routers will we reach something that is consistently reliable.

snackai 10y ago
You are dumb if you really believe this. Technology always proves people wrong. Just wait for it.

BHSPitMonkey 10y ago

The UI for trimming and setting the quality of sent videos is really neat. It's still annoyingly hard in 2017 to send videos from one mobile to another without needing to completely trash the quality via MMS or upload an often-gigantic file (captured in 1080p or higher) to an intermediary like YouTube or Facebook (and then wait for backend processing).

anoldgangstah 10y ago

a neural network learns from your and your

anoldgangstah 10y ago

a neural network learns from your and your -- typo

ausjke 10y ago

Wait, I saw nobody mentioned this, but I feel this is very similar to Slack, group-chatting basically, isn't it?

dbrian82 10y ago

hi,i'm Brian, i had my friend help me hack my ex's email, facebook, whatsapp,and his phone cause i suspected he was cheating. all he asked for was a his phone number. he's email is (hotcyberlord425@gmail.com)..IF u need help tell him Brian referred you to him and he'll help. Am sure his going to help you do it, good luck