3 ms·

Signal, thank you for not collecting my data. But I won’t use you

3 points by rukshn 6y ago

mvolfik 6y ago
> I’m bit reluctant to use Telegram due to its poor user interface I wonder what they mean by that. There was a recent post on HN where many people said that it's one of the most polished private messengers (and I myself love it too). As for the connections to Russia, this isn't an issue, since they store all their data encrypted in datacenters around the world, making it near-impossible for the governments to get decrypted data by court orders in all needed countries. They also again mentioned the misconception that "telegram is not secure by default". See https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by-Default-08-14 https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by...
- rukshn 6y ago
  Op here, ever tried selecting multiple chats and deleting? There is no ability to do that, and deleting a chat is a multi step process on android
  - mvolfik 6y ago
    ok, tbh I don't delete chats, so never noticed this
    - rukshn 6y ago
      Yes deleting chats involve multiple steps. at least on adroid which i have tried. Plus there is no option to select multiple chats, which is quite annoying
      - Normille 6y ago
        Tap and hold on a Chat in Android and it selects. A tick appears beside it. You can continue to tap on other chats to select multiple chats. A Bin icon will appear at the top to delete them. I don't see what's so difficult about that. [and, like a previous commenter, I never delete chats either but I sussed that out in about 2 seconds by following the standard Android convention of tapping and holding on items in a list, to make multiple selections.] I also find it odd you condemn Telegram for its 'poor interface' when it's generally recognised as being one of the most polished of the various chat apps you list. I've recently come to Telegram after years of using Wire and becoming frustrated with its stagnated development and user-hostile dev team. Before settling on Telegram, I also kicked the tyres on Signal and several other secure messengers and Telegram was lightyears ahead of them all, in terms of features and usability.
Arnt 6y ago
When my wife was an editor at a linux-related magazine, she used to complain about how some article authors would send in drafts that described in detail how to 'configure; make; make install' and left out all of the substantive issues. If the subject software had a concept of priority, these articles would explain how to set priority using 'configure' but not whether priority=2 was higher or lower than priority=1. This article reminds me of that — "we need x" and then a big void instead of discussion about why we don't have x or what we might do to get x. We don't know why only one of the big providers started interoperating with XMPP. But we do know why that one stopped again: A terrible wave of spammy contact requests. They were able to fight intra-gtalk spam much more effectively than spam that originated via XMPP. Someone who wants app authors (and IM providers) to support an XMPP-like protocol could investigate and write about how an XMPP-like protocol could be made unfriendly to spam. That would be interesting and IMO useful, completely unlike this article.
- MattJ100 6y ago
  > We don't know why only one of the big providers started interoperating with XMPP. But we do know why that one stopped again: A terrible wave of spammy contact requests. They were able to fight intra-gtalk spam much more effectively than spam that originated via XMPP. I think you're mistaken to believe this over the fact that Google was going through one of its turbulent internal transitions. The whole of Google Talk got replaced by Hangouts (which is now facing its own complex demise: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/the-great-google-hangouts-shutdown-begins-october-2019/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/the-great-google-han... ) and the whole Google+ shift undoubtedly played a part. Spam is not the problem. I have a Gmail account, and I receive tonnes of spam daily. I've had spam in Hangouts, I've had spam in Google Docs. Meanwhile independent and voluntary public XMPP server operators have quite a good handle on spam on the network today. I refuse to believe that Google's resources were unable to solve this, rather than that they were unwilling to solve this and took it as an excuse to wind down their participation in an open network. I'm all for more research into anti-spam solutions, any open network has to deal with it. But so far none of the well established open networks (phone, email, physical mail) have yet solved the problem.
  - 6y ago
Normille 6y ago
>If the subject software had a concept of priority, these articles would explain how to set priority using 'configure' but not whether priority=2 was higher or lower than priority=1. It's amazing how often this is done. Two favourite examples of mine are: 1: Those text-base Captchas which NEVER tell you whether the letters are case sensitive or not. 2: I get a monthly report from Yandex Webmaster which gives me some basic info on visits to my sites. It also gives my sites a 'score' which varies up or down a bit. Sometimes it's 10. Sometimes it's 8. Not one single time in the several years I've been receiving these reports has Yandex ever thought to enlighten me as what this score means; whether it's good when the score goes up... or when it goes down... or what the score is out of. Is my site occasionally scoring 10/10?... or is it scoring 10/100 or /1000?

3 points by rukshn 6y ago

> I’m bit reluctant to use Telegram due to its poor user interface I wonder what they mean by that. There was a recent post on HN where many people said that it's one of the most polished private messengers (and I myself love it too). As for the connections to Russia, this isn't an issue, since they store all their data encrypted in datacenters around the world, making it near-impossible for the governments to get decrypted data by court orders in all needed countries. They also again mentioned the misconception that "telegram is not secure by default". See https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by-Default-08-14 https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by...

rukshn 6y ago
Op here, ever tried selecting multiple chats and deleting? There is no ability to do that, and deleting a chat is a multi step process on android
- mvolfik 6y ago
  ok, tbh I don't delete chats, so never noticed this
  - rukshn 6y ago
    Yes deleting chats involve multiple steps. at least on adroid which i have tried. Plus there is no option to select multiple chats, which is quite annoying
    - Normille 6y ago
      Tap and hold on a Chat in Android and it selects. A tick appears beside it. You can continue to tap on other chats to select multiple chats. A Bin icon will appear at the top to delete them. I don't see what's so difficult about that. [and, like a previous commenter, I never delete chats either but I sussed that out in about 2 seconds by following the standard Android convention of tapping and holding on items in a list, to make multiple selections.] I also find it odd you condemn Telegram for its 'poor interface' when it's generally recognised as being one of the most polished of the various chat apps you list. I've recently come to Telegram after years of using Wire and becoming frustrated with its stagnated development and user-hostile dev team. Before settling on Telegram, I also kicked the tyres on Signal and several other secure messengers and Telegram was lightyears ahead of them all, in terms of features and usability.

Arnt 6y ago

When my wife was an editor at a linux-related magazine, she used to complain about how some article authors would send in drafts that described in detail how to 'configure; make; make install' and left out all of the substantive issues. If the subject software had a concept of priority, these articles would explain how to set priority using 'configure' but not whether priority=2 was higher or lower than priority=1. This article reminds me of that — "we need x" and then a big void instead of discussion about why we don't have x or what we might do to get x. We don't know why only one of the big providers started interoperating with XMPP. But we do know why that one stopped again: A terrible wave of spammy contact requests. They were able to fight intra-gtalk spam much more effectively than spam that originated via XMPP. Someone who wants app authors (and IM providers) to support an XMPP-like protocol could investigate and write about how an XMPP-like protocol could be made unfriendly to spam. That would be interesting and IMO useful, completely unlike this article.

MattJ100 6y ago
> We don't know why only one of the big providers started interoperating with XMPP. But we do know why that one stopped again: A terrible wave of spammy contact requests. They were able to fight intra-gtalk spam much more effectively than spam that originated via XMPP. I think you're mistaken to believe this over the fact that Google was going through one of its turbulent internal transitions. The whole of Google Talk got replaced by Hangouts (which is now facing its own complex demise: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/the-great-google-hangouts-shutdown-begins-october-2019/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/the-great-google-han... ) and the whole Google+ shift undoubtedly played a part. Spam is not the problem. I have a Gmail account, and I receive tonnes of spam daily. I've had spam in Hangouts, I've had spam in Google Docs. Meanwhile independent and voluntary public XMPP server operators have quite a good handle on spam on the network today. I refuse to believe that Google's resources were unable to solve this, rather than that they were unwilling to solve this and took it as an excuse to wind down their participation in an open network. I'm all for more research into anti-spam solutions, any open network has to deal with it. But so far none of the well established open networks (phone, email, physical mail) have yet solved the problem.
- 6y ago

Normille 6y ago

>If the subject software had a concept of priority, these articles would explain how to set priority using 'configure' but not whether priority=2 was higher or lower than priority=1. It's amazing how often this is done. Two favourite examples of mine are: 1: Those text-base Captchas which NEVER tell you whether the letters are case sensitive or not. 2: I get a monthly report from Yandex Webmaster which gives me some basic info on visits to my sites. It also gives my sites a 'score' which varies up or down a bit. Sometimes it's 10. Sometimes it's 8. Not one single time in the several years I've been receiving these reports has Yandex ever thought to enlighten me as what this score means; whether it's good when the score goes up... or when it goes down... or what the score is out of. Is my site occasionally scoring 10/10?... or is it scoring 10/100 or /1000?