• shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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    4 months ago

    Yeah, I’m going to take this with a massive dose of salt. At least, Signal has encryption on by default for people. Where Telegram does not.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    4 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Telegram CEO Pavel Durov issued a scathing criticism of Signal, alleging the messaging service is not secure and has ties to US intelligence agencies.

    Durov made his remarks on his Telegram channel on Wednesday, pushing a variety of points against the rival messenger app, including alleging it has ongoing ties to the US government, casting doubt over its end-to-end encryption, and claiming a lack of software transparency, as well as describing Signal as "an allegedly “secure” messaging app.

    The comments seem to have been inspired by a City Journal report that detailed the origins of Signal, which was kickstarted by a $3 million grant from the US government’s Open Technology Fund.

    The report says that Maher was an “agent of regime change” during the Arab Spring, and communicated with dissidents in the Middle East and North Africa.

    The CEO also claims that users’ Signal messages have popped up in court cases or in the media, and implies that this has happened because the app’s encryption isn’t completely secure.

    It’s hard to say, but Durov may be making a reference to Sam Bankman-Fried, whose Signal messages were a key part of the trial that resulted in the ex-CEO being convicted.


    The original article contains 671 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • catalog3115@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I am going to repeat what I have said for another similar post.

    I still stand for Signal App.

    • Telegram has no default E2EE, Telegram is run by for profit company
    • Multiple flaws were found in Telegram’s encryption algorithm
    • Almost all cleartext messages are stored on telegram server, but signal stores encrypted message temporarily
    • Signal is non-profit & all their source code + finances are public. Even their server codes are publically available
    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      Telegram is as safe as just using Facebook DMs (unencrypted), only it’s Russian.

      I suggest you judge for yourself how safe that is.

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Even if it were encrypted and the backdoor was controlled by the Russian state, logically that would make it safer than Facebook for anyone living in Western jurisdictions. The Russian government cannot get them and is hardly going to exchanging intelligence with its enemies.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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          4 months ago

          Even if it were encrypted

          It’s not.

          logically that would make it safer than Facebook for anyone living in Western jurisdictions. The Russian government cannot get them and is hardly going to exchanging intelligence

          No it wouldn’t. You shouldn’t opine on what they’d do. They can negotiate, you know. And they are exchanging intelligence all the time.

          with its enemies.

          If that were true, corporations wouldn’t work with their competitors.

          • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            You shouldn’t opine

            To “opine” is to have an opinion. Are you suggesting I should refrain from having an opinion? Does this apply to your own opinions too? Odd place to make such an argument.

            Otherwise: interesting point. To me, a state that can obtain personal data by leaning on its owns corporations is, by definition, more threatening than one that has to negotiate for it with a hostile power. But perhaps I underestimate the scale of that practice.

            • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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              4 months ago

              On what they would and wouldn’t do - yes, I try not to make opinions.

              But perhaps I underestimate the scale of that practice.

              Considering that the balance of power between US government and, say, Meta is not much different from the same between it and Russian government (Meta doesn’t have a military, but has ways to compensate for that), that should be right.

    • TCB13@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Yes, yet telegram isn’t a piece of shit of an app that runs slowly on every device, can’t sync messages because “something went wrong” and doesn’t depend on electron to run. Also, not funded by the CIA.

      • Linguist@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Could you not apply this “funded by the CIA” argument to other things such as… The Tor Network? Which was created by the US Military Naval Research? Also some US government departments have donated to Tor. Does that mean Tor is breached?

        • TCB13@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Okay that’s fair, even if remove that and assume they hold zero influence / there are no cleaver backdoors Signal is still not good when it comes to performance and reliability.

      • hruzgar@feddit.de
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        4 months ago

        completely agree with you. I can’t believe why you are getting downvoted. Promoting a platform which is funded by the CIA, US gov and Israel. Completely insane really I don’t understand how people are still believing this. They really need to wake up to the truth otherwise things will never change. Privacy will stay an illusion we give ourselves to believe that nobody can read our messages (even if they absolutely can)

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
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    4 months ago

    The CEO also claims that users’ Signal messages have popped up in court cases or in the media, and implies that this has happened because the app’s encryption isn’t completely secure. However, Durov cites “important people I’ve spoken to” and doesn’t mention any specific instance of this happening.

    […]

    The Register could not find public reports of Signal messages leaking due to faulty encryption.

    Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

    Durov’s entire criticism seems to be based on implications and have no actual evidence of any technical problems with Signal. He’s basically just throwing shade at a competing business, which amounts to whining.

    • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
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      4 months ago

      Funny how first association is “eend-to-end encryption is broken” and not, you know, that whoever used the message got hold of one of the “ends”.

  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Edward fucking Snowden has recommend Signal and I think if anyone knows whether it’s secure, it’s probably him and the NSA.

    That and he is paranoid to a point where he physically kills all mics and cameras on his devices, so if he claims anything is secure, I will believe him unconditionally.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        This is how you know the brain has rotten and become a slick turd.

        Agreed. Making it a contest of “this talking head seems smarter” means exactly that.

        Try explaining that to normies though. They don’t want to understand shit, and they want to think they are safe without understanding shit. That this is impossible they just don’t want to believe, because they don’t understand shit.

          • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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            4 months ago

            That you can’t do something well or at all without understanding it is philosophy. Philosophy is weak in the sense that it exists on the same level as aesthetics or instincts. So it’s fighting instinct in a system built to make crowd management through instinct convenient, - in disadvantaged position.

            Also NT people like to champion their stupidest ideas as a banner to assemble under. Stupidest exactly to exclude any rational reason, so that only the feeling of community would remain.

            They don’t always say what they mean. They might say “this thing is better”, but what they mean is “I’m with the group which distinguishes itself by support for this thing, don’t be against us”.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      so if he claims anything is secure, I will believe him unconditionally.

      That’s much more stupid than just using Facebook and unencrypted e-mail with Outlook address for communication, but knowing how safe exactly those are.

    • The_Dark_Knight@lemmy.sdf.org
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      4 months ago

      Matrix is hsit atm mate stop recommending it maybe one day it will become good but that day is not today also they are said to be scattering metadata and bashes XMPP for no real reason . Briar and SimpleX is the gold standard for now only if they had more users .

      • Autonomous User@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        bashes XMPP for no real reason .

        This is a lie.

        The whole area of XMPP vs Matrix is quite subjective. Rather than fighting over which open interoperable communication standard works the best, we should just collaborate and bridge everything together. The more federation and interoperability the better.

        https://matrix.org/docs/older/faq/

      • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
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        4 months ago

        Matrix is shit atm mate

        No, it is not.

        bashes XMPP for no real reason .

        No, it does not.

        Briar and SimpleX is the gold standard for now

        No, they are not. They might fit a certain niche (or could be once they mature) but neither is a good general-purpose messenger, because their goals and designs inherently limit usability.

        No messaging platform fits every use case, but Matrix is great for general-purpose private messaging that anyone, anywhere can easily use, without Google services, without a phone number, and without being vulnerable to shutdown if a single country’s laws turn unfavorable. It has other advantages as well. It’s not flawless, but is constantly improving, and is already very useful to many people.

        If you have a specific criticism that you can actually support with facts, you could bring it up for discussion. Slinging vague attacks that look a lot like something one might see in a poorly-informed reddit post doesn’t help anyone.

        • The_Dark_Knight@lemmy.sdf.org
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          4 months ago

          Its like you have never used it . The clients and servers are laggy federation is shit etc . but you seem to have your mind set no hope in arguing .

          • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
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            4 months ago

            The clients and servers are laggy

            Which ones, exactly? The largest public server was laggy about two or three years ago, but hasn’t been recently in my experience, and in any case, you can pick a different server or run your own. I have never seen a laggy client.

            federation is shit etc .

            Again, that doesn’t match my experience, and what you’ve written is too vague to have any useful meaning.

            no hope in arguing .

            Apparently not. Good day.

            • devraza@lemmy.ml
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              4 months ago

              I’ve previously had issues with Matrix being incredibly slow and unreliable with federation (I’m self-hosting). However, that’s pretty much in the past now and I seem to have somehow resolved that issue.

              • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
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                4 months ago

                Which server software are you running? Any recent experience with Conduit or Dendrite?

                • devraza@lemmy.ml
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                  4 months ago

                  I’ve been using Conduit within a docker container for a while now, and it’s worked pretty well aside from the mautrix-signal bridge (this was fixed in version v7.0.0, I think). Other than conduit, I tried out dendrite, but the latency in sending messages was unbearablex

  • tuckerm@supermeter.social
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    4 months ago

    I know that Telegram has a lot of users, so I’m not describing all of them here. But I’ve noticed that it seems especially popular among people who kind of like to “play pretend” as underground hackers. You know, the kind of person who likes to imagine that the government would be after them.

    This mudslinging feels like more of a marketing campaign than anything else. An info op that will work well on the Telegram users who like to imagine that they have outmaneuvered all the info ops.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      Yes. And those pretenders are always people who can’t install Synapse and “delete” their messages thinking that’s very smart.

    • Autonomous User@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Because we keeping saying Signal and Telegram instead of Anti-Libre Software, Service as a Software Substitute, and Centralised.

      We should reach them in their spaces, moding, hacking, piracy and beginner programming channels.

    • extant@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      There’s no oversight for any of these agencies and they have the means and incentive to backdoor cryptography, what would stop them from doing this morality? There’s no possible way that they both aren’t compromised and all we’re seeing now is them firing pot shots at each other trying to convince the reader to join their honeypot because its sweeter.