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What an absolute nonsense article. It does everything it can to miss the huge main reason people are migrating from WhatsApp. I don't want my data mined and so

What an absolute nonsense article. It does everything it can to miss the huge main reason people are migrating from WhatsApp. I don't want my data mined and sold so Facebook can profit from pushing ads at me, I'm not worried about someone hacking into my messages. So yes, even the article TITLE is wrong. No, it may not be more 'secure', but you'd have to be a fool to argue it isn't more 'private'. This article is absolutely paid for by Facebook, no doubt it my mind.

elliekelly 6y ago
I read your comment and thought it was a little over the top. Then as I was reading the article I saw the embedded tweet without any context and it was just so bizarre I had to see why on earth it was even featured. A search for “toothpaste” and, sure enough: > Telegram's MTProto protocol isn't obviously broken in a practical way, concedes Matt Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University who has consulted for Facebook on encrypted messaging systems. But it's uniquely "weird," he says, in a way that suggests its inventors don't understand tried-and-true cryptography practices and raises his suspicions that it may yet have undiscovered vulnerabilities. "It's like if everyone else in the world has agreed that we're going to use drywall to do the walls in a house, and then you've got somebody who's using toothpaste," says Green. "Even if the toothpaste works and makes a nice wall, that's weird. How do you know they're not doing other weird, nonstandard things when they put the electrical wiring into the house? And that's what scares me." I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt (maybe this guy is just terrible at analogies?) so I’m not sure I’d say facebook definitely seeded the article but this is just such a wacky, nonsensical thing for someone to say I don’t really know what on earth to make of it.
- bitL 6y ago
  Bunch of researchers from another country with a different cryptographic tradition creates different cryptographic primitives and a competing school of cryptography calls them weird and "toothpaste". What did I just read?
  - at-fates-hands 6y ago
    That was my impression as well. "You're not doing it the way we did it, so we're assuming you must be doing other nefarious things as well." That's some pretty serious hubris and not something I've seen before in the crypto space. I've just always assumed most of the people in crypto worked together to build a better product which seems to be constantly under attack from governments. This is the first time I've seen one group call out another group simply because they didn't do it "the FB way"? Is this just some healthy competition between two competing products or is FB actively trying to undermine Telegram's product??
  - viro 6y ago
    > different cryptographic tradition ...Thats not how maths works... cryptography is just math.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      There are different traditions within topology. Cryptography is much larger.
- JetSpiegel 6y ago
  > who has consulted for Facebook on encrypted messaging systems I mean, bonus point for the disclosure, but why should I believe is any word of that quote?

elliekelly 6y ago

I read your comment and thought it was a little over the top. Then as I was reading the article I saw the embedded tweet without any context and it was just so bizarre I had to see why on earth it was even featured. A search for “toothpaste” and, sure enough: > Telegram's MTProto protocol isn't obviously broken in a practical way, concedes Matt Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University who has consulted for Facebook on encrypted messaging systems. But it's uniquely "weird," he says, in a way that suggests its inventors don't understand tried-and-true cryptography practices and raises his suspicions that it may yet have undiscovered vulnerabilities. "It's like if everyone else in the world has agreed that we're going to use drywall to do the walls in a house, and then you've got somebody who's using toothpaste," says Green. "Even if the toothpaste works and makes a nice wall, that's weird. How do you know they're not doing other weird, nonstandard things when they put the electrical wiring into the house? And that's what scares me." I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt (maybe this guy is just terrible at analogies?) so I’m not sure I’d say facebook definitely seeded the article but this is just such a wacky, nonsensical thing for someone to say I don’t really know what on earth to make of it.

bitL 6y ago
Bunch of researchers from another country with a different cryptographic tradition creates different cryptographic primitives and a competing school of cryptography calls them weird and "toothpaste". What did I just read?
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  That was my impression as well. "You're not doing it the way we did it, so we're assuming you must be doing other nefarious things as well." That's some pretty serious hubris and not something I've seen before in the crypto space. I've just always assumed most of the people in crypto worked together to build a better product which seems to be constantly under attack from governments. This is the first time I've seen one group call out another group simply because they didn't do it "the FB way"? Is this just some healthy competition between two competing products or is FB actively trying to undermine Telegram's product??
- viro 6y ago
  > different cryptographic tradition ...Thats not how maths works... cryptography is just math.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    There are different traditions within topology. Cryptography is much larger.
JetSpiegel 6y ago
> who has consulted for Facebook on encrypted messaging systems I mean, bonus point for the disclosure, but why should I believe is any word of that quote?