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where does Telegram fit in your opinion? genuine question from someone oblivious to messaging advances in the last decade.
by Jenk 4y ago
where does Telegram fit in your opinion?
genuine question from someone oblivious to messaging advances in the last decade.
- laurex 4y agoThis article is worth a read on that front: https://www.wired.com/story/how-telegram-became-anti-facebook/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-telegram-became-anti-faceboo...
- smegsicle 4y agotelegram "supports" e2e encryption, but it is frustrating to use and is not enabled by default
- tptacek 4y agoLast time I checked, it also doesn't work for group chats. Has that changed?
- pr0zac 4y agoTelegram only provides e2e encryption for one-to-one conversations and only if you specifically create a "secret chat" largely because of usability and discoverability reasons with regard to their major point of focus. Its probably better discussed in comparison to other services like IRC, Matrix, Discord, or Slack that concentrate on feature rich group chat implementation with easy discoverability, organization, and mobility for which encryption either does not exist or is an opt-in or bolt-on feature. Services like Signal, Whatsapp, Keybase, or iMessage that provide e2e encryption for all chats, group or otherwise, (albeit with differing levels of implementation security) have chosen to do so at the expense of things like mobility of chat history across devices and the ability to easily discover and join new group chats and instead focus on a less organized, more ad-hoc form of messaging that's a rather different use case than Telegram's.
- theK 4y agoDoesn’t matrix also do all that with the added benefit of federated Id and pulling Chat history from an e2e group chat?
- hiimkeks 4y agoThe e2e encryption protocol is the definition of "let someone who has just learned about Diffie-Hellman roll their one crypto". It's called MTProto, and version 2 mostly updates padding and uses SHA256 instead of SHA1. Yes, SHA1 was deprecated before Telegram even existed. No, version 2 is not better. Cryptographers praise Signal because the protocol makes sense and because it's not run by someone as data-hungry as Meta or Alphabet (though I think it's hosted on AWS). Threema is a good alternative if you want username/password, but has less users (probably since it's a paid app) and less neat security properties (not even forward secrecy). I agree Signal is not perfect and has never played the Open Source game very well (even under Moxie reports from the community were largely ignored) and the MobileCoin move is weird. I also have not followed the direction the project has taken since Moxie left. However, the _entire_ code is open source (which iirc is not the case with Telegram) and the protocol makes sense (and has been extensively studied), and there is a lot of eyes on the development. I remember code changes that suggested a pivot to not using phone numbers as identifiers (i.e. maybe requiring them for registration but not showing it to everyone you talk to). I wonder whether MLS will go anywhere and actual projects will adopt it. Last time I checked it did require consensus on message ordering, which seems to make it less well-suited for non-centralized protocols like Matrix, but we'll see.
- snotrockets 4y agoTelegram is first and foremost a social network, and that type of service is incompatible with what we expect from a modern secure chats.
- IYasha 4y agoTgm is more a database, rather than just a messenger. It's a centralised huge server-side searchable abyss. It is both its good and bad side. On the good side: if you're using it for public and non-sensitive things like running tech support, it's easily the best thing. Once you type a word and search - you'll get everything from the very distant past. It's very good for dev-ops activity. On the other hand - forget privacy: a phone number ID, server-decrypted chats, e2e hidden behind two menus and not available on some platforms (like Linux).