4 ms·

This article incorrectly implies that Telegram is end-to-end encrypted, by putting it in the same line as WhatsApp and Signal. Telegram doesn't even try to be

This article incorrectly implies that Telegram is end-to-end encrypted, by putting it in the same line as WhatsApp and Signal. Telegram doesn't even try to be end-to-end-encrypted by default. WhatsApp claims to be end-to-end-encrypted, but it's not open-source, Signal is end-to-end-encrypted.

hellcow 5mo ago
> WhatsApp claims to be end-to-end-encrypted, but it's not open-source And explicitly does not encrypt metadata. Meanwhile NSA top brass publicly stated, "We kill people based on metadata."
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
  I imagine in 2027 people will be getting killed over vibes. Does make you wonder what kind of people they kill or how many. I can't think of a lot of crimes whose metadata warrants being killed for personally.
  - xethos 5mo ago
    > I can't think of a lot of crimes whose metadata warrants being killed for personally You're (literally) missing links then. If A is a high-value target that we look at closely (because they're a high-value target), what if B frequently contacts A? If C, D, and E always recieve messages from B immediately following A messaging B? What about times? Is B messaging F at a consistant time, and never outside of that? Is A only messaging G, at a set time, with G's phone immediately being put into (ineffective) airplane mode immediately before and after? Facebook built their business on the social graph, but the CIA's been at this for decades
    - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
      Thanks for explaining. I guess we are talking about espionage or something like that. I've been so focused on the rise of domestic surveillance lately that I forgot about the noncitizen aspects. Which is ridiculous but at the same time, it does seem like a trillion dollar focus lately.
      - xethos 5mo ago
        My examples are all based on the CIA and NSA playbook though, as it was the NSA director that said the quiet part out loud, explicitly, in front of Congress. The NSA is effectively America's red team, an offensive arm, meaning they (should be) focused on threats (percieved or otherwise) outside the country The FBI has been much quieter about this though - there has yet to be a Snowden-for-the-FBI, though they would be one of the agencies I would fully expect to be doing similar work domestically. As this becomes more well-known, I would expect state and county police to start looking into data and metadata as well. In some cases, they already are [0] - even if some aspects of that case are less relevant today (Google Maps no longer uploads location history, though cell tower trilateration is getting more accurate, not less). It's far more prevalent than most people realize, though I invite you to consider which you'd rather have when building a second-by-second profile of a person's life: the message contents, or the metadata? [0] https://www.wired.com/story/find-my-iphone-arson-case/ https://www.wired.com/story/find-my-iphone-arson-case/
        2ndorderthought 5mo ago
        Metadata would be more powerful in 9 out of 10 cases. Message contents could be invaluable in some cases too. Interesting to think about
  - Projectiboga 5mo ago
    In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, thoughtcrime, also known as crimethink in the official language of Newspeak, is the offense of thinking in ways not approved by the ruling Ingsoc party. It describes the intellectual actions of a person who entertains and holds politically unacceptable thoughts; thus the government of The Party controls the speech, actions, and thoughts of the citizens of Oceania. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime
    - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
      It's a great book! It does make you wonder what s future with neural link and data centers in every city looks like under a fascist regime.
  - tardedmeme 5mo ago
    Isn't this already happening? It's why the war department uses ChatGPT and Claude to target drone strikes. It's why Anthropic had to make a public scene to pretend that wasn't happening.
- Razengan 5mo ago
  > Meanwhile NSA top brass publicly stated, "We kill people based on metadata. Can someone post a link to that?
  - LarsKrimi 5mo ago
    Maybe just search for it and pick a source you trust. Take the search term "kill people based on metadata" and no noise comes up, just tons of articles about General Hayden's interview and related
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ThePowerOfFuet 5mo ago
    Since you're too lazy to do even a precursory search: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NSaGl2uO5w https://youtube.com/watch?v=NSaGl2uO5w
    - Razengan 5mo ago
      Cause that sort of shit sounded like ambiguous clickbait
em-bee 5mo ago
telegram may not be end-to-end encrypted by default but it does support end-to-end encryption. the generous reading is that this encryption, if used, should be broken. so as i read it the article doesn't suggest that all of telegram is end-to-end encrypted only that it has support for it.
wolvoleo 5mo ago
Yes and the secret chats in telegram are super clumsy. Both parties need to be online at the same time for the key exchange, it only works on one device at each side. Nobody I know uses them. I sent some people a password reset through them but half of them couldn't get their head around it. So yeah while it has secret chats, they aren't very useful at all.
riedel 5mo ago
Open source would not help without the reproducible builds of Signal (I wonder who check them on each release?). And only builds like Molly include no binary blobs of Google [1], which could IMHO at least be used to extract some metadata. Leaving the OS still as a risk, even for Molly or Matrix clients. Even with transparency around linked devices, I would believe that few people would notice silently linked devices. Simplest thing is I guess social engineering which happened in a coordinated attack on Signal messagers of German politicians recently (I guess there should be an official signal app version not supporting linked devices for such people) [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081855 [2] https://www.politico.eu/article/hackers-attack-phone-of-german-parliament-president-julia-klockner/ https://www.politico.eu/article/hackers-attack-phone-of-germ...
- adrianN 5mo ago
  Politicians should probably not use Signal but something that is controlled by the government and for example doesn’t allow „accidentally“ deleting incriminating messages.
  - rurban 5mo ago
    If politicians would be effectively controlled by the government and not by some independent party those mysterious, oops, accidentally deleted it problems would increase.
    - librasteve 5mo ago
      oh dear, my phone was stolen - Morgan McSweeney
  - ranger_danger 5mo ago
    > controlled by the government So they can spy on them directly?

hellcow 5mo ago

> WhatsApp claims to be end-to-end-encrypted, but it's not open-source And explicitly does not encrypt metadata. Meanwhile NSA top brass publicly stated, "We kill people based on metadata."

2ndorderthought 5mo ago
I imagine in 2027 people will be getting killed over vibes. Does make you wonder what kind of people they kill or how many. I can't think of a lot of crimes whose metadata warrants being killed for personally.
- xethos 5mo ago
  > I can't think of a lot of crimes whose metadata warrants being killed for personally You're (literally) missing links then. If A is a high-value target that we look at closely (because they're a high-value target), what if B frequently contacts A? If C, D, and E always recieve messages from B immediately following A messaging B? What about times? Is B messaging F at a consistant time, and never outside of that? Is A only messaging G, at a set time, with G's phone immediately being put into (ineffective) airplane mode immediately before and after? Facebook built their business on the social graph, but the CIA's been at this for decades
  - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
    Thanks for explaining. I guess we are talking about espionage or something like that. I've been so focused on the rise of domestic surveillance lately that I forgot about the noncitizen aspects. Which is ridiculous but at the same time, it does seem like a trillion dollar focus lately.
    - xethos 5mo ago
      My examples are all based on the CIA and NSA playbook though, as it was the NSA director that said the quiet part out loud, explicitly, in front of Congress. The NSA is effectively America's red team, an offensive arm, meaning they (should be) focused on threats (percieved or otherwise) outside the country The FBI has been much quieter about this though - there has yet to be a Snowden-for-the-FBI, though they would be one of the agencies I would fully expect to be doing similar work domestically. As this becomes more well-known, I would expect state and county police to start looking into data and metadata as well. In some cases, they already are [0] - even if some aspects of that case are less relevant today (Google Maps no longer uploads location history, though cell tower trilateration is getting more accurate, not less). It's far more prevalent than most people realize, though I invite you to consider which you'd rather have when building a second-by-second profile of a person's life: the message contents, or the metadata? [0] https://www.wired.com/story/find-my-iphone-arson-case/ https://www.wired.com/story/find-my-iphone-arson-case/
      - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
        Metadata would be more powerful in 9 out of 10 cases. Message contents could be invaluable in some cases too. Interesting to think about
- Projectiboga 5mo ago
  In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, thoughtcrime, also known as crimethink in the official language of Newspeak, is the offense of thinking in ways not approved by the ruling Ingsoc party. It describes the intellectual actions of a person who entertains and holds politically unacceptable thoughts; thus the government of The Party controls the speech, actions, and thoughts of the citizens of Oceania. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime
  - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
    It's a great book! It does make you wonder what s future with neural link and data centers in every city looks like under a fascist regime.
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  Isn't this already happening? It's why the war department uses ChatGPT and Claude to target drone strikes. It's why Anthropic had to make a public scene to pretend that wasn't happening.
Razengan 5mo ago
> Meanwhile NSA top brass publicly stated, "We kill people based on metadata. Can someone post a link to that?
- LarsKrimi 5mo ago
  Maybe just search for it and pick a source you trust. Take the search term "kill people based on metadata" and no noise comes up, just tons of articles about General Hayden's interview and related
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- ThePowerOfFuet 5mo ago
  Since you're too lazy to do even a precursory search: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NSaGl2uO5w https://youtube.com/watch?v=NSaGl2uO5w
  - Razengan 5mo ago
    Cause that sort of shit sounded like ambiguous clickbait

em-bee 5mo ago

telegram may not be end-to-end encrypted by default but it does support end-to-end encryption. the generous reading is that this encryption, if used, should be broken. so as i read it the article doesn't suggest that all of telegram is end-to-end encrypted only that it has support for it.

wolvoleo 5mo ago

Yes and the secret chats in telegram are super clumsy. Both parties need to be online at the same time for the key exchange, it only works on one device at each side. Nobody I know uses them. I sent some people a password reset through them but half of them couldn't get their head around it. So yeah while it has secret chats, they aren't very useful at all.

riedel 5mo ago

Open source would not help without the reproducible builds of Signal (I wonder who check them on each release?). And only builds like Molly include no binary blobs of Google [1], which could IMHO at least be used to extract some metadata. Leaving the OS still as a risk, even for Molly or Matrix clients. Even with transparency around linked devices, I would believe that few people would notice silently linked devices. Simplest thing is I guess social engineering which happened in a coordinated attack on Signal messagers of German politicians recently (I guess there should be an official signal app version not supporting linked devices for such people) [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081855 [2] https://www.politico.eu/article/hackers-attack-phone-of-german-parliament-president-julia-klockner/ https://www.politico.eu/article/hackers-attack-phone-of-germ...

adrianN 5mo ago
Politicians should probably not use Signal but something that is controlled by the government and for example doesn’t allow „accidentally“ deleting incriminating messages.
- rurban 5mo ago
  If politicians would be effectively controlled by the government and not by some independent party those mysterious, oops, accidentally deleted it problems would increase.
  - librasteve 5mo ago
    oh dear, my phone was stolen - Morgan McSweeney
- ranger_danger 5mo ago
  > controlled by the government So they can spy on them directly?