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ok, now I admit you might have caught me in a mistake. Thanks! I like to get corrected. Edit: and have my upvote. Now: can you admit that WhatsApp was unencry

ok, now I admit you might have caught me in a mistake. Thanks! I like to get corrected. Edit: and have my upvote. Now: can you admit that WhatsApp was unencrypted and you were wrong?

lmm 5y ago
WhatsApp was unencrypted in its early days, sure. As you said, 2009 was a different time. I'll admit that 2012 was significantly later than I expected, and FWIW that does reduce my trust in WhatsApp (who I've never been the biggest fan of in any case). But I think my original point still stands, because at no point has Telegram been a more secure alternative to mainstream messenger options (such as WhatsApp), despite their marketing and branding being security/privacy-oriented and their "breakout moment" being a targeted, hypocritical call-out of WhatsApp security. Yes, I'm holding them to a higher standard than WhatsApp. But I think that's completely fair given that security and privacy is Telegram's supposed selling point, whereas WhatsApp never positioned itself as anything more than a way to send messages to each other. If Telegram had come first then I could understand why people would keep using it. But I don't get why anyone would switch to it (except for the owned-by-Facebook thing I guess, which sure, is much more of a question about what your threat model is).
- skinkestek 5y ago
  > But I think that's completely fair given that security and privacy is Telegram's supposed selling point, whereas WhatsApp never positioned itself as anything more than a way to send messages to each other. Why don't you look at discussions here and see why people use Telegram? Many, maybe most of us don't think of it as specially secure. If you ask why people use it they'll tell you it is fast, stable, almost bug free, well designed and everyone else in their group uses it. I've yet to see anyone using cryptographic security as a selling point. Telegrams biggest claim to fame security wise is their censorship resistance and that they get away saying they've never give authorities one bit of user data, year after year. If they had a secret deal with anyone that should soon become obvious. Edit: > and FWIW that does reduce my trust in WhatsApp (who I've never been the biggest fan of in any case). I'm consistent here: I liked them better back then when they were a scrappy startup trying to do good in a world of ads and tracking. Technical issues can be fixed, as they have done. The incentives formed by being bought for $17bn (or 19 or whatever?) by Facebook, they cannot easily be fixed. Yes, messages are now E2E-encrypted but we now have thousands of people working trying to exploit metadata etc instead of 50 guys trying to avoid that.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Like I said in the parallel thread, literally the first line of the first ad/result I get when searching for Telegram is "Telegram messages are heavily encrypted". It may not be your reason for using it but it's very much what they're pushing.
    - afiori 5y ago
      Which is true for most kind of cloud storage. example of heavily encrypted: multiple rounds of properly configured AES with multiple keys split on multiple servers. example of non heavily encrypted: zip archive with PaSsWoRd as password.
      - lmm 5y ago
        > Which is true for most kind of cloud storage. Sure, it's not actually saying a lot. My point is that's the very first thing in their marketing message, so they're very much advertising themselves as secure/private. By comparison if I pick an arbitrary cloud storage service - Dropbox - their first line is "Bring your files and cloud content together with the tools your team wants to use".

ok, now I admit you might have caught me in a mistake. Thanks! I like to get corrected. Edit: and have my upvote. Now: can you admit that WhatsApp was unencrypted and you were wrong?

lmm 5y ago

WhatsApp was unencrypted in its early days, sure. As you said, 2009 was a different time. I'll admit that 2012 was significantly later than I expected, and FWIW that does reduce my trust in WhatsApp (who I've never been the biggest fan of in any case). But I think my original point still stands, because at no point has Telegram been a more secure alternative to mainstream messenger options (such as WhatsApp), despite their marketing and branding being security/privacy-oriented and their "breakout moment" being a targeted, hypocritical call-out of WhatsApp security. Yes, I'm holding them to a higher standard than WhatsApp. But I think that's completely fair given that security and privacy is Telegram's supposed selling point, whereas WhatsApp never positioned itself as anything more than a way to send messages to each other. If Telegram had come first then I could understand why people would keep using it. But I don't get why anyone would switch to it (except for the owned-by-Facebook thing I guess, which sure, is much more of a question about what your threat model is).

skinkestek 5y ago
> But I think that's completely fair given that security and privacy is Telegram's supposed selling point, whereas WhatsApp never positioned itself as anything more than a way to send messages to each other. Why don't you look at discussions here and see why people use Telegram? Many, maybe most of us don't think of it as specially secure. If you ask why people use it they'll tell you it is fast, stable, almost bug free, well designed and everyone else in their group uses it. I've yet to see anyone using cryptographic security as a selling point. Telegrams biggest claim to fame security wise is their censorship resistance and that they get away saying they've never give authorities one bit of user data, year after year. If they had a secret deal with anyone that should soon become obvious. Edit: > and FWIW that does reduce my trust in WhatsApp (who I've never been the biggest fan of in any case). I'm consistent here: I liked them better back then when they were a scrappy startup trying to do good in a world of ads and tracking. Technical issues can be fixed, as they have done. The incentives formed by being bought for $17bn (or 19 or whatever?) by Facebook, they cannot easily be fixed. Yes, messages are now E2E-encrypted but we now have thousands of people working trying to exploit metadata etc instead of 50 guys trying to avoid that.
- lmm 5y ago
  Like I said in the parallel thread, literally the first line of the first ad/result I get when searching for Telegram is "Telegram messages are heavily encrypted". It may not be your reason for using it but it's very much what they're pushing.
  - afiori 5y ago
    Which is true for most kind of cloud storage. example of heavily encrypted: multiple rounds of properly configured AES with multiple keys split on multiple servers. example of non heavily encrypted: zip archive with PaSsWoRd as password.
    - lmm 5y ago
      > Which is true for most kind of cloud storage. Sure, it's not actually saying a lot. My point is that's the very first thing in their marketing message, so they're very much advertising themselves as secure/private. By comparison if I pick an arbitrary cloud storage service - Dropbox - their first line is "Bring your files and cloud content together with the tools your team wants to use".