5 ms·

It has severe drawbacks if you use e2e. The default is without because that's what most people want.

by noxer 5y ago

strogonoff 5y ago
Part of my point. I use WhatsApp and Signal, both using the Signal protocol, and experience no drawbacks whatsoever. In any case, for a messenger that advertises as secure, placing security after convenience seems pretty unusual.
- Laarlf 5y ago
  No drawbacks? Whatsapp requires your phone to be on and have Whatsapp running in the background if you want to use it over Whatsapp Web. Also the amount of Messages and Media that Telegram delivers to me would not fit on my Phone. Also let's not forget what a bad user experience Whatsapp offers apart from that. No bots, no channels, no hiding your phone number, no polls, limited permission system in groups,... i could continue for 20 minutes. But what is most infuriating to me is the backup system. It never works and you can only store it in iCloud/Google Drive.
  - beermonster 5y ago
    See https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/14/22577594/whatsapp-multi-device-e2e-facebook https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/14/22577594/whatsapp-multi-d...
    - Laarlf 5y ago
      Still all the other points. And i am REALLY not sure if switching from a company that is known to try to not give data to governments to facebook, which makes it's money by analysing and selling data would make a lot of sense.
  - strogonoff 5y ago
    Ah. I’m not using any of those features, I just use it for text messaging.
    - theshrike79 5y ago
      If you use Whatsapp as a SMS replacement, then you'll be fine. Many Telegram users use them for chats with large groups of people (hundreds or thousands) with native bot support being a huge thing. Whatsapp and Signal don't give many tools for handling groups that big, with Telegram you can actually manage it.
      - strogonoff 5y ago
        May I recommend Matrix, where group chats can actually be secure. By using Telegram for that you are basically leaking your group chats to a tiny company of unknown structure, as well as whomever they may be liable to be influenced by. If you only use Telegram for convenience and not security, then I guess my point upstream stands.
- noxer 5y ago
  No drawbacks over what? Over WhatsApp before they got e2e? Compared to telegram both of these are 5+ years behind. And have a different use case for a lot of users. Telegram being some kind of social media IM with a focus on public content and pubic messaging where the whole security thing is moot anyway. Personally >99.9% of my messages on telegram are public or at least accessible by strangers which I have zero reason to trust. There is no point encrypting such messages. They are similar to HN comments. I consider these messages public but still like the fact that neither google nor FB indexes or analyses them to send me spam/ads. >for a messenger that advertises as secure Its p much PR nonsense but to be fair it also come from the early days when telegram was the only IM with any e2e that had a relevant market share. I think its understandable that they will not remove "secure" from the description after all those years, it would raise some eyebrows if they would suddenly no longer say is secure ryt?
lucb1e 5y ago
Telegram's implementation has severe drawbacks that people don't want; e2ee in general does not have to have those drawbacks.
- noxer 5y ago
  Maybe try telegram someday? Because you dont seem to know what it can do? The features is has are NOT possible with e2e. Its not an implementation flaw its a implementation decision they made on purpose and clearly explained in their FAQ why they made it. >e2ee in general does not have to have those drawbacks. How come no other messenger simply copies telegrams feature but with e2e? Also what exactly is the point of e2e chats if every user that joins gets a key to decrypt the whole chat. Its completely useless "security".
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    > The features is has are NOT possible with e2e. Its not an implementation flaw its a implementation decision they made on purpose Oh don't be so vague, go on and name one! > How come no other messenger simply copies telegrams feature but with e2e? I've been wondering the same thing, especially for something as young as Matrix that didn't (at the time Telegram was already good) have a decent client themselves yet. I've also been thinking myself of doing exactly that, but then it's basically a full-time job to get something halfway decent. People worked on reverse engineering a server at all, not an encrypted server but just any working self-hostable server at all. I don't remember the repository name but it's on GitHub. Even this was abandoned because it's just a ton of work that very few people are going to use. Additionally modifying the clients to work with a different protocol is even more work. So I can see why people aren't doing this because I'm one of them, but yeah what I don't get is why the folks at Signal/Matrix/Threema/etc. would rather start from scratch than do this. It might be easier to have some sort of plugin that overlays encryption on top of Telegram and uses the existing servers. On F-Droid there's this project called OverSec <https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.oversec.one/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.oversec.one/> that I've been meaning to try, though presumably it hooks on an input field level and so it couldn't decrypt images before decrypting so it's not a full solution. You'd need to really modify the client (every one of them) and everyone needs to use your custom clients.
maqp 5y ago
"It has severe drawbacks if you use e2e. The default is without because that's what most people want." I would suspect majority of users would disagree with the question "are you ok with Telegram keeping a plaintext copy of your messages" The most technical answer you can expect is "All Telegram chats use MTProto encryption. Their End-to-end encryption protocol is called MTProto. Ergo, they can't see my messages". Ask any user if they want privacy or no privacy. 0% will tell you, oh I explicitly want no privacy.
- noxer 5y ago
  Whats so hard to understand about having a choice? Telegram doesn't keep a plant text copy of your message if you use the secret chats. Its up to you beside the fact that its also completely voluntary to even use telegram. >The most technical answer you can expect is "All Telegram chats use MTProto encryption. Their End-to-end encryption protocol is called MTProto. Ergo, they can't see my messages". Sorry but that just stupid. Any user who cares can clearly read which chats are e2e encrypted and which are not. Zero technical knowledge is needed. The name of the protocol or other irrelevant info are also not needed. The reality is people often just dont care. >Ask any user if they want privacy or no privacy. 0% will tell you, oh I explicitly want no privacy. Again at the verge of pure stupidity. Idek what your argument is here. No one forces you or anyone to use Telegram nor is the question privacy versus no privacy. Its mostly privacy versus convenience and more likely its use-cases versus nothing. Because other solutions dont have public channels and public groups and other telegram features people want. And "privacy" is meaningless for stuff mean to be public. Anonymity would be the next best thing and Telegram gives that although they ofc know who posts on a channel since there is no feasible way to change that. They have to know who's responsible for publicly posted content. If you dont want or need any of that dont use it, its that simple.
  - maqp 5y ago
    >Whats so hard to understand about having a choice? It's absolutely not hard. Literally my point :D I want choice but there is no choice. I can't enable secret chats on desktop clients. I can't enable secret chats for groups. The choice is choosing between another app entirely, not from within options in Telegram. >Its up to you beside the fact that its also completely voluntary to even use telegram. That's like saying, "if you don't like the society, don't criticize it, join the Amish". I have every right to criticize Telegram, if you think they're immune to critic, understand that's a dangerous situation. It's really weird me being concerned about your (and others') safety, is a threat to your self-esteem. If Telegram is part of your personal identity, you're in a world of trouble. >Any user who cares can clearly read which chats are e2e encrypted and which are not. No, 90% of people don't understand what encryption is. 99.9% of people don't understand the distinction between E2EE and cloud encryption. Your views are distorted by your bubble. Also nice work with the weasel word "who cares". So let me say this: if you care about privacy, you read my comments with the mindset "this guy is trying to help me", not "this guy is trying to attack my self-esteem". "Its mostly privacy versus convenience" It absolutely boils down to that when we start to compare applications. I'm not denying that. But when we say there's two ways to achieve same level of convenience, one is easy and insecure, the other is hard but secure. The problem isn't e.g. "You can't do end-to-end encrypted group chats", the problem actually "it's hard to do end-to-end encrypted group chats". We know, because apps like Telegram have failed to do that. So it's not "use-case vs nothing", it's not "insecure group chat or nothing". It's "Telegram lacks know-how on how to create secure group chats vs Signal knows how to make secure group chats". Surely you must see this. "Because other solutions dont have public channels and public groups and other telegram features people want." But now you're lying. Signal's group can be public, because the group link can be made public. If you want to make the argument that Signal groups are not searchable inside the app, or if you want to make the argument Signal don't scale to massive group sizes, the by all means do so. Please understand I'm not advocating E2EE for massive, +1000 member gropus, I never have. The point is, small groups for small groups have the right to privacy too, and there is no technical reason non-super-groups can't have E2EE, and upgrading to supergroups would drop the E2EE. "they ofc know who posts on a channel since there is no feasible way to change that." Funnily enough, Telegram could make all clients connect via Tor by default, not require phone numbers, and thus, make everyone anonymous. But I can totally see why it's not feasible. E.g. the E2EE calls in telegram would stop being low latency. Adding six relay nodes between users would make it unusable. So you see, I'm not blind to real life technical limitations. But I'm not afraid to point out bad design decision when there is no actual technical limitation, either. The fact is, Telegram doesn't know how to make E2EE sync across devices. The current design allows two people who own iPhone and iMac to have secret chats. But this is what it looks like: One secret chat between the phone and the phone, another between desktop and phone, and third between desktop and desktop, and a fourth one between phone and desktop. So four chats in total. And you can never know if the contact has read the message. Compare that to Signal that has one chat per contact, seamlessly synced on all devices. The convenience is right there, embedded in the clever key management system. "And "privacy" is meaningless for stuff mean to be public" I ABSOLUTELY agree with you. But surely you have your own friends, and you form groups with them. The stuff you say to each other is not public. And if you disagree with that assessment, surely, you don't think every other group of close friends, family etc. have nothing to hide from the rest of the world? I say, let the public channels be public, I'm not trying to rob you of the enjoyment like millions of crypto currency spam chanels. That stuff doesn't benefit from E2EE. But I say, give us the choice to E2EE small groups, and 1:1 chats regardless of platform. Why are you opposed to users having technically guaranteed privacy in these contexts? "If you dont want or need any of that dont use it, its that simple." The problem in modern society is, we often don't really have such choice. I can't go tell hundreds of contacts, let alone hundreds of millions of people explicitly everything I know. The ones I've told have been absolutely horrified to learn Telegram is not nearly as private as they've previously thought. And everyone has thought Telegram is right there, next to Signal. So kudos to Telegram marketing team. If only the engineers were able to actually deliver privacy tech that matches the public's perception.

It has severe drawbacks if you use e2e. The default is without because that's what most people want.

by noxer 5y ago

It has severe drawbacks if you use e2e. The default is without because that's what most people want.

Part of my point. I use WhatsApp and Signal, both using the Signal protocol, and experience no drawbacks whatsoever. In any case, for a messenger that advertises as secure, placing security after convenience seems pretty unusual.

Laarlf 5y ago
No drawbacks? Whatsapp requires your phone to be on and have Whatsapp running in the background if you want to use it over Whatsapp Web. Also the amount of Messages and Media that Telegram delivers to me would not fit on my Phone. Also let's not forget what a bad user experience Whatsapp offers apart from that. No bots, no channels, no hiding your phone number, no polls, limited permission system in groups,... i could continue for 20 minutes. But what is most infuriating to me is the backup system. It never works and you can only store it in iCloud/Google Drive.
- beermonster 5y ago
  See https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/14/22577594/whatsapp-multi-device-e2e-facebook https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/14/22577594/whatsapp-multi-d...
  - Laarlf 5y ago
    Still all the other points. And i am REALLY not sure if switching from a company that is known to try to not give data to governments to facebook, which makes it's money by analysing and selling data would make a lot of sense.
- strogonoff 5y ago
  Ah. I’m not using any of those features, I just use it for text messaging.
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    If you use Whatsapp as a SMS replacement, then you'll be fine. Many Telegram users use them for chats with large groups of people (hundreds or thousands) with native bot support being a huge thing. Whatsapp and Signal don't give many tools for handling groups that big, with Telegram you can actually manage it.
    - strogonoff 5y ago
      May I recommend Matrix, where group chats can actually be secure. By using Telegram for that you are basically leaking your group chats to a tiny company of unknown structure, as well as whomever they may be liable to be influenced by. If you only use Telegram for convenience and not security, then I guess my point upstream stands.
noxer 5y ago
No drawbacks over what? Over WhatsApp before they got e2e? Compared to telegram both of these are 5+ years behind. And have a different use case for a lot of users. Telegram being some kind of social media IM with a focus on public content and pubic messaging where the whole security thing is moot anyway. Personally >99.9% of my messages on telegram are public or at least accessible by strangers which I have zero reason to trust. There is no point encrypting such messages. They are similar to HN comments. I consider these messages public but still like the fact that neither google nor FB indexes or analyses them to send me spam/ads. >for a messenger that advertises as secure Its p much PR nonsense but to be fair it also come from the early days when telegram was the only IM with any e2e that had a relevant market share. I think its understandable that they will not remove "secure" from the description after all those years, it would raise some eyebrows if they would suddenly no longer say is secure ryt?

lucb1e 5y ago

Telegram's implementation has severe drawbacks that people don't want; e2ee in general does not have to have those drawbacks.

noxer 5y ago
Maybe try telegram someday? Because you dont seem to know what it can do? The features is has are NOT possible with e2e. Its not an implementation flaw its a implementation decision they made on purpose and clearly explained in their FAQ why they made it. >e2ee in general does not have to have those drawbacks. How come no other messenger simply copies telegrams feature but with e2e? Also what exactly is the point of e2e chats if every user that joins gets a key to decrypt the whole chat. Its completely useless "security".
- lucb1e 5y ago
  > The features is has are NOT possible with e2e. Its not an implementation flaw its a implementation decision they made on purpose Oh don't be so vague, go on and name one! > How come no other messenger simply copies telegrams feature but with e2e? I've been wondering the same thing, especially for something as young as Matrix that didn't (at the time Telegram was already good) have a decent client themselves yet. I've also been thinking myself of doing exactly that, but then it's basically a full-time job to get something halfway decent. People worked on reverse engineering a server at all, not an encrypted server but just any working self-hostable server at all. I don't remember the repository name but it's on GitHub. Even this was abandoned because it's just a ton of work that very few people are going to use. Additionally modifying the clients to work with a different protocol is even more work. So I can see why people aren't doing this because I'm one of them, but yeah what I don't get is why the folks at Signal/Matrix/Threema/etc. would rather start from scratch than do this. It might be easier to have some sort of plugin that overlays encryption on top of Telegram and uses the existing servers. On F-Droid there's this project called OverSec <https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.oversec.one/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.oversec.one/> that I've been meaning to try, though presumably it hooks on an input field level and so it couldn't decrypt images before decrypting so it's not a full solution. You'd need to really modify the client (every one of them) and everyone needs to use your custom clients.

maqp 5y ago

"It has severe drawbacks if you use e2e. The default is without because that's what most people want." I would suspect majority of users would disagree with the question "are you ok with Telegram keeping a plaintext copy of your messages" The most technical answer you can expect is "All Telegram chats use MTProto encryption. Their End-to-end encryption protocol is called MTProto. Ergo, they can't see my messages". Ask any user if they want privacy or no privacy. 0% will tell you, oh I explicitly want no privacy.

noxer 5y ago
Whats so hard to understand about having a choice? Telegram doesn't keep a plant text copy of your message if you use the secret chats. Its up to you beside the fact that its also completely voluntary to even use telegram. >The most technical answer you can expect is "All Telegram chats use MTProto encryption. Their End-to-end encryption protocol is called MTProto. Ergo, they can't see my messages". Sorry but that just stupid. Any user who cares can clearly read which chats are e2e encrypted and which are not. Zero technical knowledge is needed. The name of the protocol or other irrelevant info are also not needed. The reality is people often just dont care. >Ask any user if they want privacy or no privacy. 0% will tell you, oh I explicitly want no privacy. Again at the verge of pure stupidity. Idek what your argument is here. No one forces you or anyone to use Telegram nor is the question privacy versus no privacy. Its mostly privacy versus convenience and more likely its use-cases versus nothing. Because other solutions dont have public channels and public groups and other telegram features people want. And "privacy" is meaningless for stuff mean to be public. Anonymity would be the next best thing and Telegram gives that although they ofc know who posts on a channel since there is no feasible way to change that. They have to know who's responsible for publicly posted content. If you dont want or need any of that dont use it, its that simple.
- maqp 5y ago
  >Whats so hard to understand about having a choice? It's absolutely not hard. Literally my point :D I want choice but there is no choice. I can't enable secret chats on desktop clients. I can't enable secret chats for groups. The choice is choosing between another app entirely, not from within options in Telegram. >Its up to you beside the fact that its also completely voluntary to even use telegram. That's like saying, "if you don't like the society, don't criticize it, join the Amish". I have every right to criticize Telegram, if you think they're immune to critic, understand that's a dangerous situation. It's really weird me being concerned about your (and others') safety, is a threat to your self-esteem. If Telegram is part of your personal identity, you're in a world of trouble. >Any user who cares can clearly read which chats are e2e encrypted and which are not. No, 90% of people don't understand what encryption is. 99.9% of people don't understand the distinction between E2EE and cloud encryption. Your views are distorted by your bubble. Also nice work with the weasel word "who cares". So let me say this: if you care about privacy, you read my comments with the mindset "this guy is trying to help me", not "this guy is trying to attack my self-esteem". "Its mostly privacy versus convenience" It absolutely boils down to that when we start to compare applications. I'm not denying that. But when we say there's two ways to achieve same level of convenience, one is easy and insecure, the other is hard but secure. The problem isn't e.g. "You can't do end-to-end encrypted group chats", the problem actually "it's hard to do end-to-end encrypted group chats". We know, because apps like Telegram have failed to do that. So it's not "use-case vs nothing", it's not "insecure group chat or nothing". It's "Telegram lacks know-how on how to create secure group chats vs Signal knows how to make secure group chats". Surely you must see this. "Because other solutions dont have public channels and public groups and other telegram features people want." But now you're lying. Signal's group can be public, because the group link can be made public. If you want to make the argument that Signal groups are not searchable inside the app, or if you want to make the argument Signal don't scale to massive group sizes, the by all means do so. Please understand I'm not advocating E2EE for massive, +1000 member gropus, I never have. The point is, small groups for small groups have the right to privacy too, and there is no technical reason non-super-groups can't have E2EE, and upgrading to supergroups would drop the E2EE. "they ofc know who posts on a channel since there is no feasible way to change that." Funnily enough, Telegram could make all clients connect via Tor by default, not require phone numbers, and thus, make everyone anonymous. But I can totally see why it's not feasible. E.g. the E2EE calls in telegram would stop being low latency. Adding six relay nodes between users would make it unusable. So you see, I'm not blind to real life technical limitations. But I'm not afraid to point out bad design decision when there is no actual technical limitation, either. The fact is, Telegram doesn't know how to make E2EE sync across devices. The current design allows two people who own iPhone and iMac to have secret chats. But this is what it looks like: One secret chat between the phone and the phone, another between desktop and phone, and third between desktop and desktop, and a fourth one between phone and desktop. So four chats in total. And you can never know if the contact has read the message. Compare that to Signal that has one chat per contact, seamlessly synced on all devices. The convenience is right there, embedded in the clever key management system. "And "privacy" is meaningless for stuff mean to be public" I ABSOLUTELY agree with you. But surely you have your own friends, and you form groups with them. The stuff you say to each other is not public. And if you disagree with that assessment, surely, you don't think every other group of close friends, family etc. have nothing to hide from the rest of the world? I say, let the public channels be public, I'm not trying to rob you of the enjoyment like millions of crypto currency spam chanels. That stuff doesn't benefit from E2EE. But I say, give us the choice to E2EE small groups, and 1:1 chats regardless of platform. Why are you opposed to users having technically guaranteed privacy in these contexts? "If you dont want or need any of that dont use it, its that simple." The problem in modern society is, we often don't really have such choice. I can't go tell hundreds of contacts, let alone hundreds of millions of people explicitly everything I know. The ones I've told have been absolutely horrified to learn Telegram is not nearly as private as they've previously thought. And everyone has thought Telegram is right there, next to Signal. So kudos to Telegram marketing team. If only the engineers were able to actually deliver privacy tech that matches the public's perception.