Telegram founder and CEO alledges signal has backdoors, they don't provide reproduceible builds, etc.

Here’s what he said in a post on his telegram channel:

🤫 A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly “secure” messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad 🥷

🥸 The US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption, and today the exact same encryption is implemented in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages and even Skype. It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕‍🦺

🕵️‍♂️ An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media. But whenever somebody raises doubt about their encryption, Signal’s typical response is “we are open source so anyone can verify that everything is all right”. That, however, is a trick 🤡

🕵️‍♂️ Unlike Telegram, Signal doesn’t allow researchers to make sure that their GitHub code is the same code that is used in the Signal app run on users’ iPhones. Signal refused to add reproducible builds for iOS, closing a GitHub request from the community. And WhatsApp doesn’t even publish the code of its apps, so all their talk about “privacy” is an even more obvious circus trick 💤

🛡 Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github. For the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private 💪

Original post: t.me/durov/274

FIST_FILLET,

well, this is concerning to hear. i had no idea signal was funded by the US state

InternetCitizen2,

It is an eye raiser, but it is also somewhat of a red herring. Tor is a very solid privacy browser that started as a government project; not sure if they are still funded today. Nothing is ever going to be a perfect solution (cat and mouse game), but it does strike me that Telegram is more concerned about features than it is about privacy.

FIST_FILLET,

oh damn, didn’t know about tor’s history either! thank you for the relief. faith restored cautiously

tcit,
@tcit@beehaw.org avatar

Wait till you hear where the Tor money comes from. Funding is not a direct cause of issues.

FIST_FILLET,

just learned through another reply, thank you for putting my mind more at ease brothers 🤝

possiblylinux127,

The kettle calls the pot black…

delirious_owl,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Is telegram not providing reproduce builds?

onlooker,
@onlooker@lemmy.ml avatar

I don’t know about reproducible builds, but Telegram has a slew of other problems. For example, they advertise that your messages are “heavily encrypted”, but this feature is restricted to secret chats which is NOT the default method of communication and they use their own weird-ass algorhythm called ProtoMT instead of one of many existing algorhythms which have been audited and verified. Not to mention you need to give them your phone number to use the app.

biscuitswalrus, (edited )

Telegram isn’t encrypting chats (only secret chats).

As far as reproducible builds telegram has got instructions and caveats or excuses around builds for the same issues signal does: core.telegram.org/reproducible-builds#reproducibl…

Both easily make Android reproducible builds. This Twitter message is a rock being thrown in a glass house, knowing most people who consume Twitter like it’s a firehose, won’t swallow the nuance of the details.

I don’t even, not to complete lengths.

firefly,
@firefly@neon.nightbulb.net avatar

Telegram: We keep you private. Now enter your phone number to sign up.

Ferk,
Ferk avatar

Signal is the same in that regards.

Tja,

Was

Matt,

Signal still requires a phone number to use it. What they recently added is the ability to message people without needing to know their phone number.

Tja,

Oh, that sucks. My bad.

SLfgb,

Signal does the same

Bookmeat,

I didn’t think that’s required anymore?

delirious_owl,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

It is

SLfgb, (edited )

You still need a phone number to register an account as far as I could tell when I did the other day. You no longer need to share your number with any contacts and can set it so noone who has your number can look you up on signal. You can optionally set a unique alphanumeric ‘username’ instead to hand to people to look you up. But yea, Signal still requires you to give them and their authenticatian service (through sms code) your phone number.

Bookmeat,

Thanks for the clarification.

SLfgb,

Np

Omniraptor,

Are there any equivalents that don’t need a phone number?

SLfgb,

Yes, XMPP, a long-standing protocol that’s also not a walled garden, doesn’t require a phone number or even a phone. For android I use the Conversations client combined with Dino on computers. Currently logged in to a handful of devices synchronously. You can choose what server to make an account on; conversations.im I found to be reliable. Drawback is Signal doesn’t let you bridge to it from anywhere outside of Signal. So I have accounts on both.

miss_brainfarts,

That breaks anonymity, not privacy

delirious_owl,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

It breaks both

Ferk, (edited )
Ferk avatar

You mean "confidentiality", not privacy.
Just the metadata related to whether you personally, traceable to your full name and address, have a Signal account and how much you use it might be considered a privacy breach already, even if the content of the messages is confidential.

electro1, (edited )
@electro1@infosec.pub avatar

Yeah, he needs to fix his broken secret chat feature first… I think it’s broken on purpose…

After seeing his interview with Tucker Carlson, I’m 100% sure the guy has some really dark agenda…

rdri,

What’s broken there?

electro1, (edited )
@electro1@infosec.pub avatar

It stops working after a while ( days or weeks ), your receipents will stop receiving your messages, and you’ll not receive theirs, or you’ll receive them with a big delay, it happens more frequently with iOS users

most people have to go out of their way to start a secret chat, the user journey to activate it is too long, it’s safe to consider it hidden…

smileyhead,

Telegram: There are backdoors in Signal encryption!

Also Telegram: not encrypted

dsemy,

Telegram secret chats are e2e encrypted though

ReversalHatchery,

Secret chats only. With their own, in-house encryption, that, if I remember correctly, the apps don’t use according to the specifications.

Maybe I’m mixing up mtproto 1 and 2 with that second part, though.

dsemy,

I don’t mind in-house encryption (the Signal protocol didn’t just appear out of nowhere either), however the latter part is worrying.

In any case, I personally don’t trust Signal or Telegram.

possiblylinux127,

What do you trust? It seems like something like Molly is the best for compatibility and security.

toastal,

The best is to not trust the centralized server of either of these platforms. Set up your own XMPP server & gives these the boot.

possiblylinux127,

No thanks. XMPP is old and dead

toastal,

XMPP is battle-tested* and thriving*

I don’t think you know how many commercial use cases are relying on XMPP, nor how much the community has been working on updates. Older technologies tend to have maturity is spec but also in implementations where the servers are robust & already at the point of optimization over chasing features. We see this with how little specs it takes to run a server & have Conversation forks on Android have some of the best battery life & data plan usage in the chat space. The network is massively decentralized too… unlike Matrix where almost everyone is on Matrix.org or a server provided/hosted by Matrix.org giving them all the metadata.

SLfgb,

Molly is just Signal with a different name and on more depositories

possiblylinux127,

And no proprietary software or dependencies

SLfgb, (edited )

The Signal servers it connects to run proprietary or unauditable software, no?

possiblylinux127,

All server side software is proprietary as you don’t control it. With that being said having a centralized design isn’t great but Signal is well known and pretty well proven.

There are other messagers but don’t though Signal out so quickly.

dsemy,

Molly still depends on Signal’s centralized servers.

Best solution I know of currently is SimpleX, though Veilid (and VeilidChat by extension) also seem promising, though it might take a while for those to be usable.

possiblylinux127,

From a cryptographic and usability perspective Signal still has a few benefits. However Simplex is promising.

EngineerGaming,
@EngineerGaming@feddit.nl avatar

AND only available on mobile.

noodlejetski, (edited )

AND 1-on-1 chats only, no e2ee for group chats available at all.

delirious_owl,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

But extremely hard to use to the point that nobody uses them. I send a secret chat to someone and they write me back in the unencrypted chat.

It shouldn’t be possible to send anything unencrypted

efstajas, (edited )

Tbf not all the chats being E2E encrypted is a UX compromise. It makes Telegram a lot nicer to use across devices and allows just accessing your messages from anywhere without needing your phone to be on. Plus no need to back up chats etc. because they’re all just on the server. As opposed to secret chats, which of course are bound to one particular device and can only be accessed from there.

I’m all for E2E by default but I must say I actually like the idea of having a choice in this particular case.

delirious_owl,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

There’s no reason for secret chsts to not be stored on the server and to not be synced to all your devices. We’ve had double ratchet for a while. Telegram rolling their own crypto is dumb for many reasons

efstajas,

Correct me if I’m wrong, but even with double ratchet, retrieving and decrypting the message history is tricky / impossible, no? Afaik signal does allow you to receive new messages on multiple “linked devices”, but a new linked device doesn’t have access to any messaging history.

delirious_owl,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

That behavior would be a major improvement to telegram

efstajas,

From a privacy POV, sure, not trying to argue that. Just saying that Telegram does have a bunch of features like that that wouldn’t really work if all chats were always E2E encrypted, so there’s a reason that it’s opt-in. Whether it’s a good one or not is up to you to decide for yourself.

Though I definitely think that Telegram could do a much better job explaining the trade-off, especially in a world where many major messengers are always e2e encrypted, and people somewhat expect it to be the default.

Scolding7300,

But for some reason they don’t develop features for e2ee like the other chats. Perhaps it’s just hard

fushuan,

It’s encrypted though?

You are trusting their server security and them as a company, sure, but it is encrypted against the server for sure.

It’s not as good as ir could be but that’s no reason to spread misinformation.

kellenoffdagrid, (edited )
@kellenoffdagrid@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Saw someone post that City Journal article on mastodon a couple days ago and I’m amazed that so few people picked up that the City Journal and the article’s author are basically puppets of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. I know most people aren’t tuned to look out for think tank propaganda but it came off as really obviously FUD-y and unsubstantiated.

resetbypeer, (edited )

Dorsey isn’t that the guy who fell into the anti vacation rabbit hole and backed JRFK Jr ? I mean let’s be honest. If these guys are concerned then I am pretty sure it’s safe.

PotatoesFall,

Okay first things first Jack Dorsey is a tool

The US government / CIA did in fact develop the protocol back in the day, with the goal of helping people in China and other countries message securely, probably with ulterior motives.

But the protocol itself is open source, and you can use it without any affiliation with the US government.

The claim " It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕‍🦺" is therefore so stupid it almost invalidates everything else being said because the person writing is either an idiot or purposely misrepresenting the facts.

Not having reproducible builds is definitely weird though. Does anybody have more information on that?

kellenoffdagrid,
@kellenoffdagrid@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

EagerEagle posted a good comment under this post going over the client code stuff, pretty enlightening stuff.

darklamer,
@darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Not having reproducible builds is definitely weird though.

github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/…/README.md

Steamymoomilk,

My theory is that apple wont let the developer share there code for IOS because of “security”

I remember an emulator (retro arch i think?) Got on ios at one point and was later removed because it showed apples file system layout. Which apples reason was “because it could be used to make malware for IOS”

I feel like there is some similar thing with signal IOS

bamboo,

Not having reproducible builds is definitely weird though. Does anybody have more information on that?

They boast this as a feature, but on the instructions for how to do this for iOS, even Telegram admits “As things stand now, you’ll need a jailbroken device, at least 1,5 hours and approximately 90GB of free space to properly set up a virtual machine for the verification process”. Browsing the steps, it’s extremely complex, and doesn’t seem like something that is very user friendly and that you’d do weekly or monthly when a new version is released.

On the GitHub issue linked to in the body, it’s disingenuous to claim they refused to implement this, and that the technical hurdles Apple has in place make this extremely difficult which halted progress. In the community forums where the conversation was moved to, someone pointed out that even if you were to reproduce it on a jailbroken iPhone, that there’s no way to confirm that non-jailbroken iPhones aren’t receiving a version with a backdoor.

And even if you are using a jailbroken device exclusively and can confirm the reproducibility of the iOS app, then the risk becomes the latest available jailbroken iOS could be outdated from the real versions, and you’d have other issues with not receiving timely security updates. This same issue applies to Telegram also.

ArcaneSlime,

then the risk becomes the latest available jailbroken iOS could be outdated from the real versions

Flipper0: iOS 17 Lockup Crash has entered the chat juuuust to be annoying.

Sims,

I feel hustled, bc I recommended Signal to others :-( However, ANY contact with the US elite is a clear sign of the NSA/CIA/NED propaganda/spying network. I think It is safest for everyone, to voluntarily adopt the Russian, Chinese, Iranian, etc blocklist/firewall of western big-tech propaganda and spy methods, and seek out trustworthy open source. Oc Lemmy/federation as well as any other point of contact with the commoners are valid targets for these guy’s, but a minimum of defense like that seems to be the only way to keep the US Capitalist elite out of our lives.

Anyway, bye bye Signal. Gnu? Alternative ?

rivvvver,
@rivvvver@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

please get some more opinions on this, try to understand the arguments here better, before making up ur mind and believing the founder and CEO of a competing platform that u should switch away from their competitors

kixik,

Jami is the GNU alternative, if you’re wondering

dukethorion,
@dukethorion@lemmy.world avatar

I read something on the internet, so it must be true!

shrugal, (edited )

It’s hard to overstate what a nothing-burger this article really is! Let me break it down:

  • Signal got $3 million from the Open Technology Fund at some point in its development
  • Some anonymous source alleges that the OTF’s ultimate goal is to promote US foreign interests
  • The current chairman of the board Katherine Maher worked at the National Democratic Institute and Wikipedia before
  • The same anonymous source says she was recruited because of connections to the OTF
  • She has at some point voiced the opinion that a completely free internet without regulation just reproduces existing power structures, and that balancing regulation and 1st amendment rights is a tough problem
  • Signal doesn’t have reproducible builds on iOS (it absolutely does on Android btw)
  • Some people feel like Signal chats come up more often than they should in court cases and media reports

That’s it, that’s the whole story. That’s the reason why the Telegram guy of all people thinks you should be careful, and better use his chat service instead, and the Twitter guy agrees.

I mean, reproducible builds on iOS would be nice, but that platform has much bigger problems from a privacy/security/sovereignty/freedom standpoint anyway. And the rest is just nothing turned up to 11.

eager_eagle,
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

tl;dr “Signal might be untrustworthy because the tech came from a State-sponsored project and the current chairman acknowledges that Wikipedia has a white and Western bias.”

just wait until they find out pretty much all tech we have can be traced back to government-funded research.

9488fcea02a9,

Did you know the early early internet researchers were part of a clandestine government organization known as ARPANET??? The entire TCP/IP stack is just a state-sponsored backdoor into your life!!!

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!

refalo, (edited )

yea just wait until they find out why the first digital computer was made:

ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory). However, its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.

Coasting0942,

Getting “Tor is pentagon spyware” vibes from OP

eveninghere,

I guess it’s the usual Russian propaganda tactic throughout Telegram. Mixing conspiracy theories with half-truths.

The NSA indeed distributed a defected encryption library in the past. These days I’m pretty sure big techs use open source encryption to avoid this trap.

And Telegram says blah, blah, iPhone is exploited. But IF Telegram is correct on this one, Andriod versions would be defect as well.

eager_eagle, (edited )
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github.

Not true. Signal has a very similar client verification process to Telegram’s, described here. The lack of an iOS reproducible build is an Apple limitation / nuisance.

It’s very complicated, the 2nd jailbroken device is necessary because there’s no other way to download the .ipa, but even if you manage to do that and bit-for-bit reproduce the .ipa you downloaded from source, there’s no way to know if the App Store is sending every user the same .ipa or if your other, non-jailbroken iPhone downloaded a backdoored one.

Telegram docs even acknowledge these limitations.

Ultimately, this client verification is not the selling point Telegram’s founder makes it sound like, since most messages are not E2EE and the server code is closed.

jmanes, (edited )
@jmanes@lemmy.world avatar

I logged into Telegram today to this update from Durov. It reads like a bunch of hogwash from someone who is hiding something. They are eyeing investor funding soon, right? (EDIT: eyeing an IPO techopedia.com/…/telegram-eyes-ipo-as-it-aims-to-…) A lot of things seem to be coinciding with him slinging mud about his competitors.

drwho,
@drwho@beehaw.org avatar

Points 0 and 1: None of this is new. This goes back to 2011 or 2012.

Point 2: If someone gets hold of your phone and unlocks it (meaning, they can interact with it), they have access to your Signal messages on-board. This is why additional security measures (not using biometrics, encrypting your phone natively) are recommended. If your phone is off and someone dumps the data from it, they get encrypted data.

electric_nan,

Looks like a push to discredit Signal right now. While I know Signal isn’t perfect, I do like it and I haven’t seen anything that is better (on the whole). The 3rd “emoji-point” is quite an accusation, and I would love to see any evidence of this kind of thing, that didn’t result from the cops unlocking a defendants phone, or having infiltrated a chat.

CaptainSpaceman,

The 3rd emoji is just bs. Then again, most of his post is bs

possiblylinux127,

Tin hat time:

I wonder if Russia’s trying to get everyone on Telegram because they have control over it.

electric_nan,

This is probably just Telegram seeing an opportunity to peel some users away from Signal during a period of heightened paranoia in the West (anti-genocide organizing).

noodlejetski,

mastodon.social/

DaseinPickle,

Maybe not Russia, but they sure are working with a certain government:

mastodon.social/

MajorHavoc, (edited )

While I know Signal isn’t perfect, I do like it and I haven’t seen anything that is better (on the whole).

Agreed. But it is worth mentioning that XMPP with OMEMO seems to be the current gold standard - runs almost everywhere, tons of available (free) servers, secure end to end messages, and fully auditable public source code.

refalo,

That may be true, but wake me up when they capture 0.5% of the messaging app market :)

electric_nan,

I have used xmpp a lot, but I can’t really recommend it to friends and family as a secure messenger. There are too many compatibility issues between clients and servers. If your friend is on a client or server that doesn’t support the same encryption protocols, then you can’t have a secure chat. Basically there is too much user knowledge and effort required at this time, for xmpp to be a good, secure, general use chat. I very much look forward to this changing. I also really like Matrix, but it is still a bit rough around the edges as of my last check.

MajorHavoc,

Agreed on all points. It’s not the best solution when I can’t get both parties into it successfully.

That’s why I still use Signal a good bit.

SLfgb,

I use xmpp all the time. Biggest hurdle for certain fam/friends using xmpp has been certain android builds (samsung) and ios interfering with timely notifications. User knowlege is not a problem as I can recommend the apps that are compatible encryption protocols with mine.

electric_nan,

That’s great, and I’m happy it’s working out for you. It’s still kind of a bummer that this open protocol ends up fragmented across all those clients and severs. I’ve met other Linux enthusiasts online, connected with them via xmpp only to find we can’t encrypt our chats. Neither of us wants to give up our preferred client for various reasons, so we have a non-working situation.

SLfgb,

Hmm, I see. But isn’t there an obvious solution to this? One of you just run two different clients side-by-side?

electric_nan,

Sure there are workarounds, but every one of them erases a bit of convenience or is at odds with the benefits of federation. Again, I think XMPP is great, but I wish it was better. As it is now, it doesn’t fully meet my needs better than Signal does.

SLfgb,

Yea, I hear you. I use both.

SLfgb,

Well if only those samsung & ios users that never get my messages until I see them and tell them to open their app had phones that didn’t interfere with it running in the background / push notifications it would be working out for me even better, but that’s not an issue with the protocol or client but with OS’s being hostile to xmpp.

toastal,

client or server that doesn’t support the same encryption protocols

Outside of TLS which most any server uses by default, XMPP or not, the server is not responsible for E2EE. Conversations Compliance & Are We OMEMO Yet have existed for a long while & I never see anyone recommending a client not on these lists so while certain features may be fragmented, the communication essentials have been more or less established for years now. XMPP is an extensible format, and some applications that aren’t for chatting with your friends/family, don’t need many of these features which allows the protocol to morph into something stripped down for the task… which is why the base spec is basically barren, & community XEPs are what folks get behind for adding new features for different use cases.

rivvvver, (edited )
@rivvvver@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

arent telegram chats unencrypted by default?

An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media

source?? (i bet this ends up being a “they had full access to my unlocked phone” situation again)

also the whole thing abt US funded encryption is the same bullshit argument ppl use against Tor all the time. it doesnt mean shit.

this just reads like someone desperately trying to get more market share by spreading FUD

penquin,
@penquin@lemmy.kde.social avatar

“an alarming number of important people” is the source. That’s more than enough, right?

jabathekek,
@jabathekek@sopuli.xyz avatar

read: “all my rich white friends”

DaseinPickle,

“One rich dude I met once at a dinner party. Totally legit. “

Ilandar,

“Who work for Telegram”

rivvvver,
@rivvvver@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

im gonna assume ur joking. its hard to tell sarcasm on the internet.

obviously i would like an actual source like at least one of those “important” ppl talking abt what happened to them

penquin,
@penquin@lemmy.kde.social avatar

😂. Of course I’m joking. That claim is bullshit. Hey I know a guy who sold a bridge, and he’s wealthy now. Source: trust me, he told me.

possiblylinux127,

"Signal is insecure"

  • Putin probably
rdri,

arent telegram chats unencrypted by default?

Encryption is always there. Problem is, some people refer to anything “not e2e encrypted” as “unencrypted” for some reason.

fushuan,

And it infuriates me to no end. It’s one thing to trust them and their servers and it’s another thing altogether to send actual plaintext data around the net, that’s crazy and it’s what people are implying.

For the record, until WhatsApp implemented e2e their messages were indeed fucking plaintext, and it took a while before they were pressured into e2e. It helps for them that their platform is very mobile based vs telegram, where the service is more server based. Telegram did have enough time to implement a server based e2e 0 knowledge encryption protocol though, it’s not really rocket science at this point.

rdri,

Telegram did have enough time to implement a server based e2e 0 knowledge encryption protocol though, it’s not really rocket science at this point.

What do you mean by server based e2e? From what I get, most people’s complain is that Telegram doesn’t support e2e in group chats, and that is what seems to be close to rocket science in my opinion. Also Telegram is historically filled with ever growing group chats, which means quite serious implications for server requirements from what I understand.

fushuan,

Tegram stores all the conversation in their servers, since you don’t need to be connected in the phone or have the phone witchednon if you want to chat in the pc, or in another phone. This means that the authority is the server. WhatsApp it’s not like that, if you delete a shared photo after a while it will be cached out and you will lost access to it, meaning that they don’t store that stuff. The same thing happens with WhatsApp desktop or web, they stay in an infinite loading icon until you twitch on the phone or sometimes even unlock it.

This means that whatever telegram develops must not only keep the group chat encrypted in the server, but any valid client of a user must be able to decipher the content, so every client must somehow have the key to unlock the content. One way of doing it would be for every client of a single user to generate keys (which I’m sure they already do) and reform a key exchange between them, to share that way a single shared key, which is what identifies your account. Then toy could use that shared key to decipher the group chat shared key which telegram can store on their server or do whatever is done in those cases, I’m not that well versed.

The problem here lies in what happens when you delete and/or logout of all the accounts, currently you can login into the server again, because telegram has all the info required, but if they store the “shared key” then it’s all moot, I guess they could store a user identifying key pair, with the private key encrypted with a password, so that it can be accessed from wherever. They should as always offer MFA and passkey alternatives to be able to identify as yourself every time you want to log into a new client, without requiring the password and so on.

This is some roughly designed idea I just had that should theoretically work, but I’m sure that there’s more elegant ways to go about this.

It’s work for sure to implement all of this in a secure way, provided that you have to somehow merge everything that already exists into the new encryption model, make everyone create a password and yada yada while making sure that it’s as seamless as possible for users. However, I feel like it’s been quite a while and that if they did not do it already, theybjist won’t, we either trust them with our data or search for an alternative, and sadly there’s no alternative that has all the fuzz right now.

rdri,

Sorry I have a hard time understanding the gist of your text. I don’t think it’s viable to be upset about what happens with access that was already acquired previously because that very fact already poses a bigger threat (which might have more to do with the nature of conversations vs how the platform works).

fushuan, (edited )

I wasn’t talking about situations with compromised accounts, I was talking about legitimate accounts that were created in a typical way being converted to a zero knowledge encryption method, I was aknowledging that it’s hard doing that conversion when a user might have several clients logged on (2 phones, 6 computers…).

My point was that if they have not put any motivation in the transition, they never will because the bigger the userbase, the harder for them to manage the transition. Also, I find that sad because they should have invested more effort in that instead of all the features we are getting, but whatever.

If you found the technical terms confusing, public/private keys are some sort of asymmetric “passwords” used in cryptography that secure messages, and shared keys would be symmetrical passwords. The theory between key exchanges and all around those protocols are taught in introductory courses to cryptography in bachelors and masters, and I’m sorry to say that I don’t have the energy to explain more but feel free to read about the terms if you feel like it.

If you however found it confusing because I write like crap, I’m sorry for potentially offending you with the above paragraph and I’ll blame my phone keyboard about it :)

rdri, (edited )

No that’s not what I didn’t understand. The problem itself as you described it seems either a non-issue or something very few people (who’s already using telegram for some time) would care about. I don’t understand the scenario that would pose a problem for the user. The moment some account legitimately gains access to some chat is probably what should trouble you instead.

VeganCheesecake,

spiegel.de/…/telegram-gibt-nutzerdaten-an-das-bun…

Well, Telegram seems to be giving user data to the German Federal Criminal Police Office, and if they’re cooperating with the German authorities, I don’t see why I’d presume they aren’t cooperating with others as well.

All this is actually documented, compared to those nebulous “important people”.

UnfortunateShort,

Tbf, they held a user vote in Germany (supposedly, although the app did ask me to vote) whether to work with them or risk to cease services. Iirc the backgrounds were extremist (terrorist?) groups operating on the platform

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