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Informer: A bot library that allows masquerading as real users on Telegram
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- smashah 7y agoWow nice work. I'm sure Rukmini Callimachi will love this!
- HNLurker2 7y ago>Callimachi left Romania during the communist regime with her mother and grandmother, for Switzerland and then the United States. Inspiring actions
- sschueller 7y agoThis is very cool. I wish there was something like this for whatsapp so I can forward my messages to another IM service.
- koalalorenzo 7y agoMatrix?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jhabdas 7y agoWait until EU gets their data portability laws ironed out.
- ailideex 7y agoYeah, I mean they really ironed cookies out something fierce, with every website now spamming us multiple times a week probably asking if we want to store cookies. So ironed out.
- Nextgrid 7y agoWebsites that do that are actually in breach of the regulation. The problem is that they're allowed to get away with it and the "4% of global turnover" fines are yet to be seen.
- heroprotagonist 7y agoTwilio has a WhatsApp integration. It's paid per message, but it's pretty cheap if you're just forwarding a single user's messages. Probably a bit expensive to do at scale though. I'm not sure what kind of open source apps leverage it, but I would guess there is something.
- neiman 7y agoIs there any positive ethical aspect of this tool?
- ArnoVW 7y agoEliminating information dissymmetry, by showing to the rest of the world what -given the simplicity- undoubtedly many other people have already found out (but have kept for themselves).
- notduncansmith 7y agoFor that to hold reasonable ethical weight, you’d need to spread wide awareness of this tool. I’d say you qualify for that if, for example, you were to run this bot in some kind of “warning mode” that would join unprotected groups and let participants know of their danger.
- riter 7y agoFair point. At the very least it highlights the security model of OSS in general.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 22c 7y agoSure, drawing attention to the weaknesses of Telegram. Similar discussion from previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776327
- diffeomorphism 7y agoSo what is the weakness here? It just seems to say public channels can be read by anyone, duh.
- ShorsHammer 7y agoDepends who you think should be able to bomb people based on metadata I guess. It's all relative.
- Tepix 7y agoUnrelated but I wish Telegram would support encrypted group chats like Signal does.
- Legogris 7y agoAnd, at least as importantly, multi-device end-to-end encryption. E2E conversations on Telegram are almost as rare as on FB Messenger, IME.
- fastball 7y agoSecurity vs. Usability. Multi-device E2E requires ONE device be the source of truth for the private key. That's why for WhatsApp Desktop to work, you need your phone to be connected. This defeats the purpose for most people.
- kelnos 7y agoDoes it, though? I feel like most people just use their phone, and that's it, and people who use the web version don't mind so much that they need their phone on the internet, because it pretty much always is anyway. Sure, there are edge cases, like being on a plane and only having bought internet access for your phone, phone battery dead and no charging cable, phone lost/stolen, but those things seem rare enough that most people just live with it. I would prefer that I didn't need my phone to use WhatsApp Web, but in practice it hasn't kept me from using WhatsApp (mobile or web).
- vetinari 7y agoThreema works similarly, but I rarely use web version, because it is annoying.
- crypt1d 7y agofor me, its one of the reasons why I prefer Telegram over WhatsApp. There have been numerous cases when my phone was dead or offline (being abroad/roaming, battery dead, etc) and I wanted to use my laptop to finish that important conversation. The other one is lack of a native Linux desktop client for WhatsApp.
- surajs 7y agolemme just say ... ha-ha!
- jhabdas 7y agoThis seems novel until one realizes public channels are already available on the web.[1] Also, I'm surprised Paul didn't go with Pyrogram for creating the user accounts (which have unlimited cloud storage and 1.5GB file limits btw). [1] https://telegram.org/blog/privacy-discussions-web-bots#view-public-channels https://telegram.org/blog/privacy-discussions-web-bots#view-... [2] https://github.com/pyrogram/pyrogram https://github.com/pyrogram/pyrogram
- ksangeelee 7y agoThe words 'mass surveillance' in the project title seem to me sensationalist. From his repository list, I suppose the author is involved in ads and marketing, which would figure. Had I parsed Usenet feeds into a relational database, and called it 'mass surveillance', I'd have rightly been ridiculed. Regardless, it can be useful to have message data in this format.
- riter 7y agoI simply was not aware of Pyrogram, thank you for sharing that and pointing it out. And yes, I admit the headline is a bit charged and its implementation does not reflect it as much as I would like. It does not change the fact that I researched an implementation of Telethon for a use case I needed, and I didn't find it so I made it and shared it. My involvement in ads and marketing had nothing to do with that. It's less nefarious, it just sounded cooler and was an innocent mistake in retrospect. As mentioned above, I appreciate the mod(s) for taking the time and energy to edit the title so it reflected the implementation. This is my first shared project on HN and I am excited to finally participate and see the feedback/energy. Thank you guys/gals!
- wtmt 7y agoWhat prevents anyone from doing the same with Signal or any messaging service that allows one to build a client? This program isn’t pretending to be a bot on Telegram, and it works as a normal user in every way (including the requirement for a working phone number, even if it’s a burner number).
- kaens 7y agonothing aside from things that require actual human interaction, so basically nothing.
- telegrammember 7y agohttps://www.channel-member.com/ https://www.channel-member.com/
- m12k 7y agoWell, Signal comes with a system for verifying a person's identity, so you can be sure it's really someone you know and not an imposter. But sure, for semi-public channels that will let anyone in without verification, something like this would allow you to monitor it. Lesson: If you're using Signal to run a dissident network and organize protests, be sure to verify everyone before adding them to groups.
- kome 7y ago> Well, Signal comes with a system for verifying a person's identity like what? I really have no idea.
- m12k 7y agoThere's an article about how it works in their help section: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007060632-What-is-a-safety-number-and-why-do-I-see-that-it-changed- https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007060632-Wh...
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- thomasfl 7y agoThis makes it so much easier to keep track of the action on "The pump & dump cryptocurrency club" channel on Telegram.
- riter 7y agoHahaha.. yes, if you can't tell this was a boiler plate for tracking and analyzing the activity of the wonderful seedy world of crypto.
- captn3m0 7y agoLooks great. I found out about https://docs.telethon.dev/en/latest/ https://docs.telethon.dev/en/latest/, which looks like a usable Python API for Telegram user accounts (not bot API). I can finally build by telegram-to-rss project!
- Amir6 7y agoIt would be great if someone can do an opensource like that, as mentioned by others Telegram is not privacy friendly but having access to the content that spreads around in such platform can be very valuable
- riter 7y agoSweet! This point of this project was I found no boilerplate for one of the listed use cases so I just built it in 2 days and later shared it. I hope you do the same :)
- juskrey 7y agoThis is not surveillance, this is just another channel crawler.
- jimws 7y agoYes, the project is disingenuous. It claims there is a bug but really it is just functioning as designed.
- riter 7y agoI wholly admit the title was a bit charged and I appreciate the correction from the mod(s). That said, it questions the security model of privacy apps and the nature of open source. As I mentioned above, there is a reason they make it a hurdle to scale account creation. It represents more than just a crawler if you have an imagination. That said, I was looking for a solution for one of the listed use-cases and none existed so I did something about it and shared it and now one exists. It takes no creativity to deride a work, and enough to make one and put it out there. Getting both sides of the feedback has been a fun learning experience and looking forward to putting more out given the amount of feedback! Thank you both :)
- KenanSulayman 7y agoSounds like a good old IRC channel logger.. but for Telegram. The title is some serious click bait. That said, I haven’t checked deeper, if this bot is not actually using the bot API but MTProto, this is pretty significant as the bot appears like a normal user (and not as a bot, which are required to have a “-bot” suffix on Telegram).
- Robadob 7y agoIt states that it's using telethon. That appears to be an MTProto library. https://docs.telethon.dev/en/latest/concepts/botapi-vs-mtproto.html#botapi https://docs.telethon.dev/en/latest/concepts/botapi-vs-mtpro...
- riter 7y agoYes, it does use MTProto and yes it is a real user. And yes admittedly the title in retrospect was a bit charged but the applications remain the same if extended.
- EncryptEntropy 7y agoI maintain some medium-sized TG channels and constantly have what we have deemed “surveillance” accounts join daily. One of the admins of the chan implemented a simple turing test bot which requires immediate 60 sec solving of a basic math equation or the account gets kicked. They were solving the “click this button to verify” but none at all seemingly know how to solve 6+4, or they can’t read English quickly enough.
- riter 7y agoYes, the click button is on the todo. I have encountered these and the common one is the button click followed by the basic arithmetic. Solvable but anything beyond this would "defeat" it.
- big_chungus 7y agoA few discord groups I've joined use this bot to verify through re captcha (which I hate, but is still a potential solution): https://auttaja.io/ https://auttaja.io/
- noxer 7y agoThis is so stupid. Public channels and Groups have a web frontend it doesn't even need a telegram account to see or crawl them. Example link: https://t.me/s/durov/110 https://t.me/s/durov/110
- riter 7y agoTBH what I find most humorous is no one mentioning the obscure 90s reference :)
- jhabdas 7y agoYo snow the five-o came around looking for you the other day...
- wk0 7y agoGoing to hijack this thread to plug some basic Telegram API tutorials I've written on Medium * Send and Receive Messages with the Telegram API https://medium.com/@wk0/send-and-receive-messages-with-the-telegram-api-17de9102ab78 https://medium.com/@wk0/send-and-receive-messages-with-the-t... * Running a Serverless Telegram Bot from AWS Lambda https://medium.com/@wk0/running-a-serverless-telegram-bot-from-aws-lambda-759b71e13218 https://medium.com/@wk0/running-a-serverless-telegram-bot-fr... * Integrating Your Serverless Telegram Bot with AWS API Gateway (published today) https://medium.com/@wk0/integrating-your-serverless-telegram-bot-with-aws-api-gateway-8a6227d05eb4 https://medium.com/@wk0/integrating-your-serverless-telegram...
- riter 7y agogood on ya ;)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- telegrammember 7y agohttps://www.channel-member.com/ https://www.channel-member.com/ very good site