Telegram is giving away FREE Premium subscriptions! All they need from you is to use your cell phone as a relay to text out their OTP codes! And the recipient of the OTP sees your phone number! What could POSSIBLY go wrong with this deal?
PLEASE don’t use Telegram! I personally recommend Matrix as it’s totally FOSS, you can self host, there are tons of front end clients to choose from. Or even use Signal. I have my own issues with Signal, the fact they don’t allow third party clients, you can’t self-host, they have a proprietary shim in their stack that only they know what it does, they were pushing crypto, etc, but at least Signal is better than this garbage.
But I don’t wanna see ads (╥﹏╥)
Thanks for the heads up
One can never expect power of any kind to not be abused!
Wow, that’s super sketchy.
I’m trying to get my wife to use something decent, and I think Signal is the way to go. It’s focused on P2P communication so it’s a better replacement for SMS and whatnot, but it also has groups so it can also replace MMS. She likes Discord, but I don’t think she’ll be as keen to try out Matrix since she’ll just wonder why I don’t just use Discord.
Try Simplex Chat
Looks cool, thanks! I’m interested in P2P platforms in general, and this seems like an interesting middleground between P2P and centralized.
It is centralized but it does take security seriously
Yeah, it looks like a centralized service that behaves like a distributed one. I may even (re)learn Haskell to properly understand it.
It also looks like it’s intended to be used for applications, so that’s pretty cool too.
My wife knows that if she doesn’t use Session, she needs to call me and hope I pick up. Granted, she only uses it with me, but that’s already a win in my book.
IDK, forcing someone to use a certain app to contact you seems a bit extreme, and something that could cause conflict in a relationship. But that’s just me, I obviously don’t know your situation.
Could be the case. But we agree that she doesn’t have to use it if she doesn’t want to, and I don’t have to use any of the mainstream stuff if I don’t want to. We trust each other to no end, to the point that our biometrics are in each other’s devices, and we leave them laying around regularly. I can see how that could be a sure way to bring issues into a relationship, but thank God, that’s not our case. As for other people, I couldn’t care less. My kids have no access to devices yet (except their Linux PCs built by themselves), so all is great in my life.
My girlfriend said she prefers it knowing I couldn’t get other girls to talk with me over XMPP 😂
Cool. I mostly wanted to warn others in case they tried to do this without the proper consent.
My kids also only use Linux PCs (mine, they’ll likely get their own when they get older), have no personal devices, etc, though we’re getting close to the point where they’ll want them. I also refuse to use any of the mainstream stuff, and I try to persuade my wife to use it too.
What proprietary software does Signal have?
What could POSSIBLY go wrong with this deal?
No jokes, I’d like to know. How is it different from sending sms to random numbers?
… people just send SMS to random phone numbers?
No but what exactly stops anyone from doing that? A privacy consideration? I’d think it’s just a waste of time at best.
The issue here is that you could potentially read the content of a 2FA sms that wasn’t intended for you. It makes it easy too break 2FA if you have many devices
Logic suggests OTPs are locked to login sessions of corresponding users and also expire. Besides telegram would be able to tell if OTPs meant to be sent through you tend to not reach the recipients.
Yes but you can login on an account and hope you will be the one selected to send the code
You mean you can try to guess someone’s number before they get an OTP through you in order to be the first to log into their account?
Well then you’ll also going to need their cloud password in order to find anything worth of your effort.
But anyway this is an improbable scenario, considering how vast the user base is, and if we assume telegram implemented some precautions.
Malicious service providers and cloned sim cards pose a much more serious risk if you ask me.
Reading the discussion here. Seems like I’d maybe never heard of xmpp. I’ll be checking it out. In the meantime id be interested to hear people’s thoughts on Signal and DeltaChat.
XMPP is an old protocol. GTalk (google talk) and Whatsapp used it, then extended it, then didn’t give back to the community. So here we are…
The problem with alternative protocols and apps and whatnot is that people are reluctant to change and won’t try anything new if only 2-3 other people use that protocol/service. I can’t even convince my best friends to use Signal, let alone XMPP.
https://joinjabber.org is also a good resource for learning about XMPP.
Xmpp died. Don’t try to bring back the dead
Nah, just call it retro.
Retro has this meaning that it’s stagnant & no longer evolving while the protocol + XEPs are actively being worked on & not like a hobbyist making Sega Saturn games in 2024, but to solve modern, real-world issues.
XMPP died for no good reason, we absolutely should be bringing it back instead of trying to reinvent the wheel again and again unsuccessfully.
IRC v3 anyone?
Also Simplex but I find element client very comfortable to use.
This link doesn’t work for me. Do you have an alternative/original? I’d like to read some context and explanation.
Works for me, but here is where it leads; https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/26/free-premium-telegram-subscription/
Thanks!
I think this is a bit panicky… am I going to use it? Nah.
But also, my phone number has been leaked by plenty of entities… some random person getting a text from it wouldn’t even be that weird considering SMS spoofing. Someone could be using my number for a nasty spam attack right now and I wouldn’t know.
Or good old XMPP!
XMPP doesn’t support modern features and the protocol is older than some of the people here
It has more “modern” features than Simplex 🤷♂️
Define “modern features”?
HTTP is old too, what’s your point? It get’s constant updates via XEPS, and currently runs: WhatsApp, Messenger, Zoom, iMessage, and more. It’s perfectly capable. And offers federation out of the box.
The single reason XMPP died off in the tech crowd is that Signal killed it.
I was wondering about that the other day. Why did Jabber/xmpp not evolve further into the mainstream? For a while there were multiple good-enough clients and running ejabberd was not very difficult. I thought it would become ubiquitous (and in a way it has, just not interoperable), and the clients would evolve to become great. Instead it feels like the whole ecosystem kinda just faded away.
I remember why we switched away from Jabber (running ejabberd) in our company: the biggest issue was no server-side history, so using multiple clients on multiple devices was basically impossible, just like MUCs without history to browse and search were useless for our use cases. Has that gotten better over the last 10 years?
We switched to self-hosted Rocketchat, so which sucks in many, many ways but feature-wise it offers everything we were missing from xmpp.
I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts about Signal and DeltaChat for messaging
I said Signal, meant to say Sessions
Deltachat is a clever idea that I wish it became more widespread.
Signal and DeltaChat, as well as Simplex and some others e2e communication solutions, are adequate from a technical point of view.
The main issue is always adoption. You can have the most convenient way to safely communicate with people, it’ll be useless if nobody you’re talking to wants to use it.
So, since Signal is very easy to set up and use as well as the most adopted, it’s currently the best pick for regular conversations.
Signal good, I’ve never heard of Deltachat
Been using Deltachat for about a year, so far so good. I dunno how secure it really is (never took the time to check) but it’s been reliable. Multi-device was kinda quirky at first but has gotten better.
Signal is pretty broken. A chat app shouldn’t require a SIM card & an iOS/Android device just to create & maintain an account (too bad Linux or KaiOS users or folks that otherwise don’t want a smart phone). Multi-devdice setups seem to have issues. The desktop app being Electron is a waste of resources. They still don’t want to support UnifiedPush while highly encouraging you download the app from the Google Play Store & send notification data thru Google-controlled FSM. There’s also the missing history of the server code which is probably has something to do with US intelligence injecting code.
Is it better than a lot of things, sure, but it should be put on a pedestal nor seen as exemplary for private chat in UI or philosophy.
Signal is fine for a drop-in WhatsApp replacement. I use it for chatting to my friends casually. For something you need more security for you could do encrypted emails as that doesn’t require exchanging phone numbers, or ideally just arrange to meet up in-person and discuss things so you don’t leave any kind of digital or paper trail.
Yes, meet up, place your phones on the table, and discuss 👍 Facebook ads won’t change at all 😉
Obviously you don’t have your phones on you. Otherwise what’s the point of meeting up in person.
You don’t use your phone outside of the house? I must be the only one then. My bad.
Not if I don’t need to, like if I need to have a conversation with someone that doesn’t need to be overheard. In any case turning your phone off and putting it in a faraday bag then putting it somewhere relatively noiseproof should be more than enough if you need to bring your phone with you.
Sounds like something everyone does for sure. When I sit in public transport or go out to eat, nobody has their phone one them, and if they ever do, it’s safely tucked away in a faraday cage 👍
I imagine SMS authorisation texts are Telegrams biggest single expense, they are for Signal https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/
Telcos know that authentication is about the only remaining use case for SMS and are not going to turn down the revenue stream.
That said this idea from Telegram sounds absurd. Not least I expect most contracts prevent reselling free SMS’s like this. The security implications have got to be significant too.
Telcos know that authentication is about the only remaining use case for SMS and are not going to turn down the revenue stream.
And it can’t die fast enough, as it’s essentially the same as broadcasting your sensitive information over unencrypted radio.
Apart from security, phone number based user identification is such a half-assed approach and I still don’t get why Signal wants to die on that hill. It’s inconvenient, yet trivial, for anyone to register a second, third or tenth phone number. With a bit more knowledge and inconvenience, even anonymously. It adds so little.
It’s pretty drastically harder to register 100 phone numbers, especially in your target region, than 100 email addresses. Major spammers and such work with automation across many accounts, this isn’t designed around someone with 10 accounts.
They accept VOIP numbers, so… not really that much harder.
Man this is so scuffed! Offering free subscriptions in exchange for using your personal phone as a relay for OTP codes is a recipe for disaster.
I would use Simplex chat over matrix
