It was a many months transition, and it’s finally done
Fun thing, you can actually make a backup of all* your messages, groups, contacts, etc. So before leaving you can have all of your data in case you need that one contact or something
The final red flag was as that allegedly Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages. Not for the first time there are news that they could read, modify, delete, see location, and etc. Screw it, this is unsafe, I’m out.
Also, these days telegram is really at the state of a pile of garbage, bloated, buggy, and shady messenger.
Honestly, signal is the only thing I would ideally use. But whatsapp is still a better second messenger than telegram.
Unpopular but true take.
But whatsapp is still a better second messenger than telegram.
You didn’t mean that.
I’m sorry. It might be meta owned, but its metadata theyre stealing. I still trust the e2e encryption. Naively perhaps
telegram e2e encryption is open-source, whatsapp not
Almost no one uses telegram e2e, because it’s not automatically activated. Also group chats are not e2e.
I still like to use telegram tho.
Also doesn’t Whatsapp just use the signal protocol for e2e?
Also Telegram’s E2EE chats don’t work on desktop apparently, and you are not able to see message contents in the notification (which is a plus or minus depending on you)
Asked a friend earlier today if we could use secret chat. He declined because he mostly chats on desktop, and apparently wants to see messages from notifications while driving.
Jep, all of this is true. I have two chats with some people because of that.
Also you can’t search for words within e2e chats, which is a pain in the ass sometimes.
Whatsapp is built on the Signal E2EE protocol, Telegram has a terrible homebrew encryption protocol with a ton of weirdness and it has had a long history of weaknesses which they lied aggressively about
I didn’t use WhatsApp for the last like 3 years already
I have already got rid of the Sim card, but want to setup some sip Sim cards at home for package delivery and work
So like, using WhatsApp is pretty pointless at this point
Deleted the app and account recently as well. I’m hoping that having the account deleted means that people don’t try to use it to message me there.
People who had you listed will just see “Deleted Account” instead of your name, and a little ghost as your avatar.
They will still see your chat history though.
What happened with Telegram? I’m unfamiliar with those particular rumors.
… But also definitely not a fan of it in general. Their app has had terrible encryption (when it’s even used) for a long time.
There have been rumors from its start. I have no idea of their validity. Like anything, it’s hard to find the truth.
As for its encryption, while I dislike it’s not open source, and it’s deserving of some criticism, there have been no reported cracks of it that I’m aware.
That said, it seems to store your public key on the server (though I’m not sure of this), which is not ideal, for sure.
What the issue with them storing the public key?
Aside from not storing anything you don’t absolutely need to store, there shouldn’t be an issue there.
Typo
The “no reported cracks” thing is a red herring. You can make an intentionally broken cryptography system and claim it’s unbroken too.
And even if it was sound, it doesn’t really matter because the messages are decrypted by the server for all desktop and group chats, and probably most one-on-one chats too.
There has been multiple breaks, like the good old 2^64 bruteforce attack when they used too short session identifiers, malleability issues that could let the server/hackers change your messages, reordering attacks, etc.
Also, these days telegram is really at the state of a pile of garbage, bloated, buggy, and shady messenger.
Every messenger is.
I deleted telegram long ago, but not my account, just the apps.
As of recent, I wanted to log back in and actually delete my phone number from there, so there’s no more association.
I can’t login. I download the app, and it sends a verification code through Telegram and won’t do SMS, but I’m not logged in at all so I can’t get the code.
I’m stuck there. I contacted support and they’re yet to respond. :p
I will probably up this one, it’s really a lot of materials, and articles, and news if you read behind all this war and politics stuff
You should really search, I tried to compile all I could find, but I’m here to stop using tg, not going back to tg and scroll Russian opposition channels for all the mentions of stuff like that
There are some articles in English that describe the events, but most of them are in Russian
Also, from the search it’s really hard to find anything because a lot of stuff about the war
Here are a few topics:
- Telegram leaking location
- Telegram leaking IP address
- Deleted many years ago chats/messages were recovered remotely (just recently)
- Telegram is delaying source code publishing
- The source code’s build has a different hash and a few mb smaller than the release
- Their data sharing reports are empty although they were openly giving data to authorities in e.g. Germany
Compilation of different technical vulnerabilities and issues of telegram(in Russian):
- https://habr.com/ru/articles/206900/
- https://habr.com/ru/articles/252911/
- https://xakep.ru/2018/10/31/telegram-plain-text-chats/
- https://habr.com/ru/articles/460655/
- https://habr.com/ru/articles/744316/
And in general, Russian government unbanned tg after it realized it can read it. I wouldn’t trust anything that was unbanned in Russia or China
And one more article that lists issues of telegram: https://emisare.medium.com/так-ли-безопасен-telegram-f5a3128a1311
I’m already tired of doing this, I didn’t even start on activists and how they get hacked and stuff
Why did Telegram get so popular in the privacy scene compared to Signal in the first place? To my knowledge Signal came out first and never had a history of breaches or leaks.
I think the big reason that nobody’s mentioned yet is simply that they were earlier. Back when projects like Tox and Matrix were first starting to pop up, telegram was already fully formed. Signal didn’t come until at least a year later and didn’t have feature parity until several years later. Telegram by contrast was a much closer experience to WhatsApp and Messenger, making the transition much easier, particularly for low-tech knowledge users.
I assumed the popularity was not in the privacy scene, but rather in general population, just because of usability. It is just a more usable alternative to Whatsapp or VKontakte. It is pretty much the default messaging platform for young people like Whatsapp is for older ones.
in some circles yeah.
In Germany it actually became famous because it allowed for huge groups and it’s where covid misinformation breeding grounds took off. People thought you were a nutjob if you had telegram lol.
Which, while that is the dumbest reason to reject a chat app, at least meant that Signal was able to get more popular with uhhh smarter folks.
Honestly it was mostly a Discord competitor if anything. One with FOSS clients for desktop and Android.
The private chat is baseline implementation just to tick a box rather than anything practically useful.
Besides the ease of registration, the sync between devices make it easier. It can be frustrating not to be able to easily backup/restore/sync all your chats just like Whatsapp or Telegram. Yes, privacy/security, but i believe not everyone is chased by a state actor and you might want to have the option, as an opt-in maybe.
Maybe because it offers public chats and channels? Something other apps lack.
Also the best desktop experience out of all apps I’ve tried.
Telegram, while often hyped as high privacy/security got popular because it was/is fully featured and isn’t Google or Facebook. That’s it
It’s less invasive, less annoying, and can do all the stuff like gifs and stickers. So it was very easy to get people onto compared to pretty much anything that was actually private or secure.
Once enough people started using it, it snowballed into its own monolith of bloat.
It was also very fast and transparent – not a lot of stuff separating somebody from the other people in their conversations, which was pretty solid even compared to other messaging apps of its day. Most people didn’t feel the need to fact-check its privacy and security claims because it worked good enough for them!
By lying aggressively.
Lying about being the first phone app with E2EE (they’re not even close, by over a decade if we count J2ME apps) because Signal was called TextSecure back when telegram didn’t even exist yet. Lying about their protocol, lying about their backup system (if you’re using group chats or regular chats which are backed up they are visible to the admins and any other claim is a lie), bullshit propaganda against Signal, etc…
Oh and by the way, Signal has now finally launched usernames, so you don’t have to share your phone number to use it anymore.
I can’t speak for the privacy scene but in my country it’s pretty popular merely because of anonimity (which boils down to not having to use a phone number) and Discord-like server/groups. For porn and other NSFW content, it is pretty popular.
Ah I did not know Signal required a phone number compared to Telegram not requiring one. Thanks.
Telegram still requires a phone number to sign up, but they have had usernames that can be used to contact people without needing their phone number. Signal is only now finally rolling out usernames.
And they still want your phone number.
At least they have usernames now…
Honestly, UI and PC client experience.
I find the UI in signal a bit off putting. Telegram grabs you with their funky stickers, clean UI and dumb features. I alps hate that Signal won’t bother copying the messages to a new client… Like, I have a 1Gbps connection, surely we can copy my chat histories from my phone to my PC? Nope, gotta start fresh on every new client…
If they did less dumb shit like adding statuses, and put some more effort into making the UI nice, more people would use it.
And I get these are dumb reasons, but they’re real none the less
I think Signal shot themselves squarely in the dick by removing SMS functionality.
Previously, you could use Signal as the primary SMS/messenger app. Any conversations with other Signal clients secure. Conversations in SMS/MMS? Marked as not-secure.
But, out of some purity concerns, SMS functionality was removed and the dev team focused on adding useless shit like “stickers” and then the pin-code harassment.
Signal adoption plummeted as intended (?)
It’s popular with furries because of sticker support. Furries are an anchor population for the larger world of IT/etc. It was never really about privacy, or signal would have taken off.
Telegram came out a year earlier in that signal, and because immediately popular amongst young people and drug dealers in Russia
Telegram got its popularity because of piracy and having your chats on cloud. It was never intended to give privacy to user but due to WhatsApp breaches they started promoting telegram as a secured chat app which is a toatal joke till this day.
tg premium user here, WTF? i tought telegram was privacy respectfull and pretty secure, what changed/happened? that’s not the first post i saw abt It. also, any alternatives? with almost same features and as many channels/groups as telegram ofc like don’t suggest me signal or Matrix nobody Is on that platforms…
Removed by mod
ye it’s like a social media that doesn’t spy on me and doesn’t have strange algos to feed me with shit. never used It as a chatting app
Telegram hasn’t been secure since basically day 1. IIRC it went something like
Security experts: Never roll your own cryptography.
Telegram: We rolled our own cryptography!
Security experts: Don’t. And it’s broken.
Telegram: uhhhh… We fixed it.
Security experts: It still looks really bad. Stop it.
Telegram: says nothingSecurity is a spectrum. Telegram has never been the most secure alternative, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any security.
From my first link
The safest way to use Telegram would be not to. However, if you have no other choice, the best approach would be to use a clean burner phone to communicate with another clean burner phone. Change them regularly.
…
In short, for better protection, use anything else.
The final red flag was as that allegedly Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages.
I don’t know about “Russian authorities”, but the fact remains that if you can login anywhere and see your messages, then your public key is stored in the server.
Since Telegram requires authorization from an extant connection, I don’t know if that means your public key isn’t stored on the servers and it’s being sent from the authorizing device, or if that device is merely authorizing the Telegram servers to transmit that key to the new device.
Since they have a full e2e chat feature (Private Chats), I’m going to assume the latter.
So anyone who can get those keys can gain access to your chats.
I still say Telegram is far superior to anything from Fuckbook/Meta, because it’s not integrated into everying you do (even those of us who’ve never once been on Facebook, and yet have ghost profiles), not to mention the Facebook app integrated into Android on many vendor phones.
Even so, know Telegram for what it is - not ideal, just better than WhatsApp, and a step along the path to moving to more secure and privacy-respecting apps.l
then your public key is stored in the server
Did you mean private key?
I automatically read it as private key, good catch
Comparing telegram to WhatsApp is something really 2015 😅
Now we have many alternatives, and let’s just switch, fb and telegram both suck compared to signal, simplex, session, or even matrix (wait for the new matrix’ update where they add some new encryption stuff)
Session was at first a fork of Signal without usernames.
Now by design it uses their own custom tor-like service (instead of just… using tor) and does not support forward secrecy or deniable authentication, so anyone who collects the messages in transit can either find a vulnerability in the encryption scheme, or spend enough GPU resources to crack it, and they have confirmation of who sent and received the message and what the contents of the message are. And is headquartered in Australia, which is 5EYES and much more against encryption than the US. Oh, and the server is closed-source.
Regarding Australia’s 2018 bill…
The Australian Parliament passed a contentious encryption bill on Thursday to require technology companies to provide law enforcement and security agencies with access to encrypted communications. Privacy advocates, technology companies and other businesses had strongly opposed the bill, but Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government said it was needed to thwart criminals and terrorists who use encrypted messaging programs to communicate.
Regarding the ‘vulnerability or cracking them later’ bit…
Messages that are sent to you are actually sent to your swarm. The messages are temporarily stored on multiple Service Nodes within the swarm to provide redundancy. Once your device picks up the messages from the swarm, they are automatically deleted from the Service Nodes that were temporarily storing them.
From Session’s own FAQ:
Session clients do not act as nodes on the network, and do not relay or store messages for the network. Session’s network architecture is closer to a client-server model, where the Session application acts as the client and the Service Node swarm acts as the server. Session’s client-server architecture allows for easier asynchronous messaging (messaging when one party is offline) and onion routing-based IP address obfuscation, relative to peer-to-peer network architectures.
I wouldn’t touch it with a 12ft ladder.
Between forking Signal to make their desktop and mobile clients, and forking Monero to make their cryptocurrency… I’m surprised they came up with Lokinet.
Edit: I’m pretty Session doesn’t even use Lokinet. So much for the claimed resiliency from “hackers”
Session does use the Oxen network which is the renamed Lokinet, unless they made a change I’m wholly unaware of.
I must have been thinking of their past implementations. Their FAQ says things were different:
Proxy routing was an interim routing solution which Session used at launch while we worked to implement onion requests. When proxy routing was in use, instead of connecting directly to an Oxen Service Node to send or receive messages, Session clients connected to a service node which then connects to a second service node on behalf of the Session client… The proxy routing system has now been replaced by onion requests.
It was even less clear to me because this is what it says in the app itself:
Session hides your IP by bouncing your messages through several Service Nodes in Session’s decentralized network.
Not “the Oxen network” but “Session’s network.”
And then it has a graph of
• You
• Entry Node
• Service Node
• Service Node
• Destination
You’re not wrong. Lokinet and Session are both products from the same parent company. Lokinet was renamed to the Oxen protocol, and they run all the servers AFAIK, so it would be like tor, if tor ran every guard, entry, and exit node. AKA worthless. So you’re spot on, it’s a joy to the intelligence community and after the Encrochat debacle and Session stopped using Signal’s encryption algorithms and code, I would suggest no one use it for anything sensitive.
i use telegram, but i agree that signal and matrix is superior from both(i don’t about the others)
where did you moved to? i tried matrix but their android client (element) is terrible compare to telegram’s.
Try schildichat it seems more polished
Schildi is planning to be based on Element X later.
Try checking out Element X. It’s made to replace Element stable once it’s complete.
A lot of speculation that does end with this in the article:
"After discussing her case with experts, Matsapulina now believes her Telegram messages may have been compromised by a form of spyware. When she was told that a hacking device would need to be physically nearby to infiltrate her phone, a memory resurfaced: At times before her arrest, she had noticed an unmarked truck with a dome on its roof parked outside her building. She had even jokingly mentioned it to friends on Telegram. Now, she remembered, as the police were banging on her door that morning, she’d spotted the same mystery vehicle parked outside. By the time the police stormed her home, the vehicle was gone.
Matsapulina has since started using Telegram again."
Most messaging apps are vulnerable on the client side with spyware, no matter what E2EE exists along the way.
Back to Facebook messenger?
The only private one
Me here waiting for the autys to miss the sarcasm and spread some weaponized autism about the most secure ways to chat… Just no EncroChat or Session, please.
Session is better than Facebook by a long shot. The issues many people have with it seem pretty minor compared to me. At least compared to Signal.
At least compared to Signal
Please enlighten me
what’s wrong with session?
Good for you. I’m still don’t know how to move my friends and relatives to Signal. Any tips with that?
Easy! Just replace their usual SMS app with Signal, and then every contact they have that does use Signal is private and secure!
Oh. Wait. That’s exactly the functionality that Signal removed in their effort to ensure that Signal is never widely adopted…
I didn’t agree with their decision at all at the time, but now that I realize they made it a little while after it gained widespread adoption and people stopped using it because “Signal isn’t actually secure!” … seems like people were expecting a secure messenger to be, well, secure. So they would chat about anything and everything thinking “I am using a secure messenger, these messages can’t be read…” and tech ignorance is a dangerous thing if you’re trying to be secure. I would’ve preferred a colored window and un-closable message for SMS chats, but oh well. I like that they’ve introduced usernames so you don’t have to give out your real number.
Install a family XMPP server like Snikket or otherwise. Show them the benchmarks of how little battery & data plan drain is used from Conversations forks. Explain how bloated Electron apps are & how you don’t wish that on your loved ones vs. Dino, Gajim, or a TUI client. Sidecar a Movim server so y’all can share long-lived, non-ephemeral posts instead of losing memories like photos in some long group thread. Let them know their data is safe with you as the operator instead of some massive for-profit corporation—and if they don’t trust you, they are empowered to start their own server to interop.
(This tactic has yet to work for me, but I will keep running into that wall til it breaks 😃)
Do what I did. Let everyone you care about on TG that you’re closing that crap, with your reasons for doing so. Inform them of your moving to signal, session, whatever. Be clear that, otherwise, they can try calling you and wish them good luck. Close TG on the day you set as deadline. I did that and whomever didn’t get a Signal or Session account has to call me. I’ve never looked back.
My family is all on iMessage. I told them if they didn’t install Signal I wouldn’t reply to their texts.
At first, whenever they texted I would just reply with something that looked automated like “This user is no longer available via text message. Please install Signal if you wish to communicate.”
I did something similar and just sent a link to Signal when IPhone friends and family SMS’d me, worked…eventually :) (am on Android)
Like that, also, a few months prior to the deletion turn off the notifications, and come there every few days, so people need to wait for your reply for days, and when you come you say “oh, I’m not using tg, I switched to signal/session/simplex/bird mail”
These are allngreat suggestions. Another huge advantage is that this help detoxify from the constant pinging with others.
One day I said that in the future I will only be available via Signal. If not there then there is still SMS. And so far everyone I have contact with regularly installed it eventually.
That’s exactly right.
Keep bugging them. I almost exclusively use signal for messaging these days and it’s fantastic. It took longer to convince some people than others
Russian authorities usually just hijack login sms confirmation codes. This is a common practice in Russia. Not denying that something else shady might be going on, but I do know mobile providers there don’t even bother to ask why - they just provide shit on demand.
I’m glad I never used it
