4 ms·

Yes, because it’s such a delight to don’t have a synced history across devices. When I was figuring out how to transfer WhatsApp hustory from my mother’s Androi

Yes, because it’s such a delight to don’t have a synced history across devices. When I was figuring out how to transfer WhatsApp hustory from my mother’s Android to her new iPhone I realized that was no longer possible unless you use some wacky paid tools, because one only syncs with Drive and the other is with iCloud. Although I’d love to log in Telegram with Authy.

ishitatsuyuki 8y ago
Adding to this, another well known trade-off of E2EE is not being able to have server-side indexed full text search. For example sometimes it’s necessary to look for some link you shared months ago, and keeping histories local and searching through it is just inefficient on space and speed.
- pmlnr 8y ago
  Local history in plain text/SQLite is not that bad. I have 15 years of chat history including small traffic chat rooms, and it takes ~400MB.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
joeseeder 8y ago
Or just not keep your chat history , never back it up, never miss it info which i want to keep just gets send via email
- enitihas 8y ago
  Yeah, that probably works well for you, but a lot of people want chat histories. In general, telling people to give up features which they really want is not a recipe for product adoption.
  - joeseeder 8y ago
    Why don't we actually ask the question from a perspective of a user. Do people want randomly scattered , unmaintained information containers which are not accessible via unified interface, but still vulnerable to theft and abuse ? Or the desirable functionality is an easy to use, secure, organized knowledge repository ? My answer is: As a user, I want to be the only one able to search my own information, and I want to do it conveniently and securely.
lucb1e 8y ago
The usability of Telegram is indeed awesome and I'm sure that's why it's so widely used (well, that and it not being owned by Facebook). But there are so many choices they could have done better. So you want synchronised devices? Encrypted ("secret") group chats? Heck, encrypted group video calls? Wire.com has you covered. You want chat history? Any of your old devices could transfer the encryption key via a QR code or by having you type it over. The server could store opaque blobs that only your devices can decrypt. The only thing you can't do with current technology is server-side searching without server-side access to the plaintext (as far as I know, homomorphic encryption is not practical enough yet for that). But they could at least give you the option not to store your plaintexts and only have device-local searching. I'd just put a telegram-cli client on my server and have searches deferred there. Heck, media storage could be deferred there so I don't use hundreds of gigabytes (that's how large my account is) on their servers with no known profit model. The whole thing is just so shady. Anyway, most of the features are easily possible, but instead of working on it, Telegram keeps perpetuating insecure defaults since they launched. The desktop client never even supported encrypted chats. They make it very cumbersome to use the encryption (mobile only, no device sync) that I do it only for a few exceptional cases.
- wtmt 8y ago
  I don’t understand why Telegram still doesn’t have E2E (“secret chats”) on the desktop. That’s such a pain for longer and hotter conversations when one needs to type a lot.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    It's because they would have to implement multi-device sync. The last time they implemented crypto (publishing mtproto) people fell all over it, so I can see why they might consider it a risky move to introduce more crypto that someone somewhere will definitely find an imperfection in (even if you use an existing protocol). Not that I agree with it, of course. I think it's a good reason to stop using Telegram. But I'm pretty sure that's the internal reason. Unless the reason is "because then everyone would actually use it and we can't read 99% of chats anymore", but that's a little conspiratorial. Not entirely implausible, given the non-existent profit model, but still.

ishitatsuyuki 8y ago

Adding to this, another well known trade-off of E2EE is not being able to have server-side indexed full text search. For example sometimes it’s necessary to look for some link you shared months ago, and keeping histories local and searching through it is just inefficient on space and speed.

pmlnr 8y ago
Local history in plain text/SQLite is not that bad. I have 15 years of chat history including small traffic chat rooms, and it takes ~400MB.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

joeseeder 8y ago

Or just not keep your chat history , never back it up, never miss it info which i want to keep just gets send via email

enitihas 8y ago
Yeah, that probably works well for you, but a lot of people want chat histories. In general, telling people to give up features which they really want is not a recipe for product adoption.
- joeseeder 8y ago
  Why don't we actually ask the question from a perspective of a user. Do people want randomly scattered , unmaintained information containers which are not accessible via unified interface, but still vulnerable to theft and abuse ? Or the desirable functionality is an easy to use, secure, organized knowledge repository ? My answer is: As a user, I want to be the only one able to search my own information, and I want to do it conveniently and securely.

lucb1e 8y ago

The usability of Telegram is indeed awesome and I'm sure that's why it's so widely used (well, that and it not being owned by Facebook). But there are so many choices they could have done better. So you want synchronised devices? Encrypted ("secret") group chats? Heck, encrypted group video calls? Wire.com has you covered. You want chat history? Any of your old devices could transfer the encryption key via a QR code or by having you type it over. The server could store opaque blobs that only your devices can decrypt. The only thing you can't do with current technology is server-side searching without server-side access to the plaintext (as far as I know, homomorphic encryption is not practical enough yet for that). But they could at least give you the option not to store your plaintexts and only have device-local searching. I'd just put a telegram-cli client on my server and have searches deferred there. Heck, media storage could be deferred there so I don't use hundreds of gigabytes (that's how large my account is) on their servers with no known profit model. The whole thing is just so shady. Anyway, most of the features are easily possible, but instead of working on it, Telegram keeps perpetuating insecure defaults since they launched. The desktop client never even supported encrypted chats. They make it very cumbersome to use the encryption (mobile only, no device sync) that I do it only for a few exceptional cases.

wtmt 8y ago
I don’t understand why Telegram still doesn’t have E2E (“secret chats”) on the desktop. That’s such a pain for longer and hotter conversations when one needs to type a lot.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  It's because they would have to implement multi-device sync. The last time they implemented crypto (publishing mtproto) people fell all over it, so I can see why they might consider it a risky move to introduce more crypto that someone somewhere will definitely find an imperfection in (even if you use an existing protocol). Not that I agree with it, of course. I think it's a good reason to stop using Telegram. But I'm pretty sure that's the internal reason. Unless the reason is "because then everyone would actually use it and we can't read 99% of chats anymore", but that's a little conspiratorial. Not entirely implausible, given the non-existent profit model, but still.