61 ms·

A few months ago I read an article about Telegram and their related companies and individuals. [1] The article read like a mix between a nerdy James Bond story,

• dijit 9y ago
  This reads like FUD, there are reasons for and against telegram and I won't get into them here. But truth is often stranger than fiction[0] and there are actors with something to gain from making telegram look poor. [0]: The story of Karl Koch for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Koch_(hacker) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Koch_(hacker) who's death was ruled a suicide, and his history is... "colourful".
  • fastball 9y ago
    If you actually care about security/privacy, why not just use Signal?
    • x220 9y ago
      Signal isn't anonymous. You need a phone number. Why did the all-knowing Moxie require this? No one has ever provided a good reason.
      • falcolas 9y ago
        To identify a particular user so you can send them messages? IIRC, Signal has never claimed to be anonymous. True anonymity in a messaging service is hard to achieve, and not even remotely user friendly.
        • vetinari 9y ago
          Threema generates random IDs. Users then show each other QR codes and scan them.
          • falcolas 9y ago
            If the ID is not unique for each message, then they are still tied to a specific person. At best, the identity is obfuscated. As a practical example, would you say that bitcoin wallets are anonymous, given that they use random IDs?
            • vetinari 9y ago
              Yes, it is obfuscated, the pairing of real person and random id would be much more work, than pairing phone number with real person, and you can throw away and generate as many as you want, whenever you want - unlike your phone number. Still beats using your phone number for chats, or your SSN in place of bitcoin wallet.
              • falcolas 9y ago
                Honestly, I'd say it's much worse than using your phone number or SSN. Sure, an SSN makes it easier to tie an identity to a person, but it doesn't instill a false sense of anonymity in the user. Again, for the practical example, people bought and sold bitcoins with the broad assumption that it was anonymous. It's a widely understood falsehood, yet new people almost universally believed it was anonymous and safe from law enforcement/the tax man. Pretending that a random yet static ID adds any level of anonymity is simply dangerous. At best, it keeps honest people honest; like locking your door but not the bay window next to it.
      • maxerickson 9y ago
        He's written about the why. It's a tradeoff to make it easier for people to switch. https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/ (not just individual people obsessed with privacy, the large numbers of people who can see the advantage of privacy but may not invest a lot of effort to achieve it)
        • pmlnr 9y ago
          XMPP could utilize your existing email address as XMPP address - that's a solution as well.
      • AckSyn 9y ago
        Because there isn't a good reason to do this. They could have easily given each new signup a UID like ICQ and it would have been near perfect.
    • nh2 9y ago
      One argument might be "because Signal * has (almost) no tests, * has no CI (at least I could find none), * lacks some basic features competitors have, * sometimes doesn't ring when you call, and * they just closed all 1100 open issues without reading their contents [1]." Don't get me wrong, I think Signal is a great idea and have contributed some code to it, but these look like some red flags to me. Obviously hard to compare to Telegram, which is closed source so we can't know whether they have similar problems. [1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/7598 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/7598
      • andrepd 9y ago
        All those issues were closed, as it is explained in your link, because they lacked debug logs/steps to reproduce the problem/etc. It's not feasible to dedicate enormous amounts of resources to try to address those issues. You're welcome to re-open them, properly this time, if you want.
        • Mithaldu 9y ago
          That is wrong, they closed issues indiscriminately. Oh, and they will keep doing so: "Legacy issues that are more than one month old will be closed by an automated process as part of this cleanup effort."
        • nh2 9y ago
          That is wrong. If you read the thread, you would immediately see that, as I give examples there of how issues that were in the middle of being tested by users were closed, and that were acknowledged as real issues by the developers days before.
      • falcolas 9y ago
        Question: What do tests and CI have to do with the usability and usefulness of a program? I agree that the other issues could be worrying, but those first two throw me for a loop.
        • nh2 9y ago
    • Yetanfou 9y ago
      Or XMPP+OMEMO which adds things like multi-client support and encrypted group chat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13396083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13396083 I'm running this on my own server (using ejabberd [1] as Prosody - which I used previously - still has problems with some of the required XEPs[2]) using several different clients (Conversations [3] on Android, Pidgin on Linux, etc). The one weak link in OMEMO is the difficulty of verifying the authenticity of the device key signatures used by communication counterparts. These signatures are 64-character hexadecimal strings which the user is supposed to verify being authentic before initiating encrypted communications. Humans as not very good at this task, computer can help but they can also be tampered with. There are ways around this problem - e.g. meeting up in person before initiating communications (viz. PGP key signing parties), sending Q-codes off-line, using algorithms to turn those numbers into things which humans are better at recognising (e.g. the coloured emoji used by Telegram etc.). Encrypted group chat only works if all participants have all other participants in their address lists. Then again, it does work and it is fully standardised with several compatible implementations. [1] https://github.com/processone/ejabberd https://github.com/processone/ejabberd [2] https://xmpp.org/extensions/ https://xmpp.org/extensions/ [3] https://github.com/siacs/Conversations https://github.com/siacs/Conversations
      • dijit 9y ago
        we should take a leaf out of the signal/telegram book and convert the hex strings to emoji thumbprints. It's "good enough" for 90% of cases, but it depends on clients supporting emoji.. :(
        • Yetanfou 9y ago
          That would work for graphical clients but not so much for textual versions. Some type of ASCII-art might serve the purpose but whatever solution is chosen it will be hard to visualise the entropy of a 64-digit hex string in such a way as to distinguish it from the same string with 1 bit flipped.
• negus 9y ago
  "roll-your-own-crypto" == DH-RSA-AES with GPL implementation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(service)#Encryption_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(service)#Encryption_...
  • darkk 9y ago
    And autoupdater with http links, sha-1 and rsa-768. But I'm not 100% if I interpret sources correctly. https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/blob/dev/Telegram/SourceFiles/autoupdater.cpp#L257-L268 https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/blob/dev/Telegra... https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/blob/dev/Telegram/SourceFiles/config.h#L201-L215 https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/blob/dev/Telegra... https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/blob/master/Telegram/SourceFiles/core/launcher.cpp#L97 https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/blob/master/Tele...
  • lgl 9y ago
    Sure. https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2017/project/19.pdf https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2017/project/19.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf