- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Fork found in kitchen
I’m not sure they are lying. Yes, they’re not E2E but I don’t think they claim to be by default, do they?
I’ve got a large group of friends there, since high school. We presume everything we write is available to the Russians so we never talk work details or share secrets. It would be insane otherwise.
We’ve tried to organise a move to Signal, but honestly its client is nowhere near as polished or feature rich as Telegram.
I’m not sure they are lying. Yes, they’re not E2E but I don’t think they claim to be by default, do they?
they claim to be “encrypted”. if I just make a new chat it will not be encrypted. this is false advertising. furthermore this highly advertised feature has artificial limitations, like that desktop clients can’t use it. it also cannot he used with group chats. so much for being “encrypted”.
That’s just your misunderstanding of the term. The chat is encrypted, no lies about it, it’s not end-to-end encrypted. Last time I checked they were quite explicit about that.
So far, Telegram worked exactly as it was advertised, it’s just people for some reason have weird ideas about what words mean and how stuff should work, but that’s not on them to be honest.
Plenty to criticize Telegram for, but lack of privacy isn’t it.That’s just your misunderstanding of the term. The chat is encrypted, no lies about it, it’s not end-to-end encrypted.
I was pretty sure someone is going to bring this up! “It uses HTTPS so its Encrypted™, you are just too dumb to comprehend it!”
well, yes, point me to a chat service that is not encrypted on the wire nowadays. I still think it is false advertising, because their clear intention is to make the user think their service is somehow more secure than others, while that is not the case. why would you advertise privacy and encryption, if not for arguing that you the provider cant read messages?
Ironically the owner of telegram is repeatedly posting on his channel about how much more secure telegram is over whatsapp, which is an actual end to end encrypted messaging app (but with other problems, like questionable key handling)
Centimeter by centimeter getting people towards signal and matrix chats
could not figure those out
Matrix I could understand because of federation. But Signal? That has to be rage bait
do people do ragebait here?
I know but I trust it more than Google.
There is value in spreading out your data to different companies in different countries. All the American big tech services sends a copy of everything to the nsa.
Maybe telegram doesn’t. Who knows. Maybe they are being a bit more difficult at least.
I think the point is not so mich whether you can trust Telegram or not (although I am shure you can’t).
The issue with Telegram is, that (by default) it stores all your chats unencrypted on their servers. So they can just access every message of yours whenever they want. That is not only dangerous for privacy, but when their database gets hacked, there is a decent chance, that all of your chats are gonna be released. Also, if governments want access to Telegrams data, they are legally obligated to comply.
What you should look out for, when you want more privacy is:
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Legit End-to-End encryption: That means, that all your messages are stored and transmitted encrypted and only you and the person, you are talking to have access to these keys. So even if the server of the messaging service, you use is malicious or the government forced the organisation, which is responsible for the messenger, it would be mathematically impossible to read any of your messages.
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Open Source clients, that can be verified by security experts. End to End encryption doesn’t mean much, when you can’t verify what the service, you are using is doing with your private decryption keys. In other words: It isn’t enough, if a company just says, they are doing encryption. The solution is Open Source clients, because that means, that everyone can see exactly what the apps are doing and can inspect the source code for backdoors or vulnerabilities. Usually, if a lot of people have been using them, you can be sure, that some experts have verified, that nothing fishy is going on.
If you want a simple suggestion, that has good encryption and is fully open source, but is still easy to use, I would suggest you go with Signal.
Telegram would be just wonderful were it being marketed as what it is. It’s a gorgeous mass groupchat system.
Nothing private at all, but for that you get convenience.
And I would like something also private and still fit for mass groupchats, I don’t know, perhaps, instead of encrypting messages for every participant have some kind of rotating symmetric keys for everyone, like with encrypted TV streams, signed by a smaller set of group moderators. That could fulfill the same role and also be peer-to-peer.
But a lot of things exist beyond our imagination, it’s just that for something to be persistent someone needs to make money on it.
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More people need to understand this, Telegram was never trustworthy to begin with.
They spent years lying about their encryption algorithms too acting like they’re more secure than Signal when they never were
Signal cares so much about your privacy that they need your phone number.
Go read some tech papers bro.
Privacy ≠ anonominity.
Supposedly to combat spam (which makes sense) and some BS about bringing your social network.
But let’s think about this logically. What can they do with your phone number when they don’t know who you are?
Let’s say they receive a subpoena from a government law enforcement entity. That would have to include your phone number and even then what can they give that entity? The date you registered the number and the last time your account was active?
At best my guess is that you and others who bring this up are worried about the information that you can buy from data brokers that would include a phone number and allow someone with the phone number to link it to a person.
But at that point law enforcement already knows the number, already has likely used to same services to link that number to a human, and since most people haven’t de-googled or use an iPhone they likely know what apps are installed. Including signal.
What is the threat profile that should be worried about this?
Please note that I don’t think they should need to require a phone number and if you don’t want that you can use a different service.
But I’d like someone to elaborate on their reasons for objecting to this.
I would assume if an entity had my phone number they could easily connect it to me, like by spoofing it and calling themselves and getting the name off caller id or some shit, or even just subpoenaing the phone carrier for the id of the phone number. Why they would want to do that for little old fudgy mctubbs is beyond me.
I’ll say it: I dont want anybody to know what I jack off to. It’s all legal stuff, but im too prudish to have that be public.
Anonymity is impossible, but we can still attempt it.
They don’t offer anonymity. Anonymity does not equal privacy. They aren’t the same thing. And if you’re using the signal app to jerk off I have some questions.
I dont use super secret messaging apps. I also dont fuck with peer to peer anything. I was broadly speaking about why anonymity on the internet is important to me.
I ended up wanting an online pseudonymous identity as well as an offline real-life identity, which leads to needing multiple phone numbers when things are tied to said number. That’s extremely annoying to manage, especially with Signal’s current activity and update policies that essentially require you to keep a phone in a drawer, charge it and log into it every so often or risk losing your entire account due to inactivity, as only the mobile device counts for that purpose (this might supposedly be changing).
In that particular scenario, I don’t really care if my least-favorite three-letter-agency or law enforcement can link my identities. It’s a nice bonus if they can’t, but not an absolutely required feature. The main worry is the person on the other end trivially learning it. But the person on the other end might have a different set of worries that makes Signal one of the few available options for them.
That said, Telegram also requires a phone number and has exactly the same issue, so this is a rather weird thread to bring that up.
Thank you for taking my questions seriously and giving your perspective.
I suppose to some extent I do this with emails. I have an email for public and professional things and one for just hobbies and thing I enjoy.
I think the main difference for me is I’m not trying to keep those two “identities” anonymous from each other or anything. It’s just good compartmentalization (to keep work stuff work stuff, professional stuff professional, and hobby stuff hobby stuff.
In the same class as any app store based communication software.
Signal can be installed from an apk from their site
And can you review the source for this APK?
Yes, you can even confirm the published source reproduce this specific apk
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reproducible-builds/README.md
Wow. Not what I expected in the Android world.
As long as the keys are handled via a closed source app and server system, e2ee is potentially broken.
Even if you generated the key, keep the private part locally and submitted only the public part to your communication partner, you can never be sure that the intransparent app does keep your private key private.
With WhatsApp I’m quite sure that they somehow can retrieve the private key. Certain events point to that. But I see no reason to consider signal or telegram any more trustworthy - they are all prone to governmental influence.
And as open source and closed app infrastructure are incompatible, I would not handle anything important on an Android or Apple device.
Why would you not trust Signal?
You don’t have to trust their server infrastructure, because the end to end encryption has been verified by countless experts (and all their client side code can be looked at by anyone).
to be fair there is no way to verify the google play distributed app has been built from the published source code. there are also people arguing that the closed source google components built into it could work as a backdoor
You can build the app from source code though. Couldn’t you compare that to the Google Build?
Also, you could use a fork like Molly, they removed all proprietary binary blobs and replaced them with FOSS alternatives. And it’s still fully compatible with Signal
only if the app is built reproducibly. I suspect the google libraries are likely minified/obfuscated by default though.
Also, you could use a fork like Molly
I do, but that’s only so much when the point of the app is communicating with other people
With WhatsApp I’m quite sure that they somehow can retrieve the private key. Certain events point to that.
What events point there?
There were several (ex) Meta employees stating they could read any message if they wanted to.
A number of WhatsApp conversations unexpectedly appearing in courts.
You can easily access any undeleted convo in any app if you achieve device access. I would like to read more about this to understand it more and because your reply is still a little unprecise, do you have links to examples?
This was not about device access, that’s why I considered interesting. No, I don’t have links to everything I have read in my life… IIRC it was in a discussion on Reddit, which I don’t frequent anymore.
I’ve no proof of this, but technically the whatsapp app is closed source so they could push an update that collects the private keys, if they don’t do this already
One way to prevent this is would be to re-sign the app with your own signing key and delete that key before court, I guess. But those people whose conversations appeared probably just had Google Drive plaintext backups enabled.
I don’t know about WhatsApp, but macOS backups your keys on iCloud by default, so…
So it’s not selling all my information to the Kremlin?
The Kremlin doesn’t buy, it takes.
Russia is a toothless tiger.
I try not to be repetitive with the astronaut meme, but they don’t help. Here we go:
Ever since the CEO of Telegram was basically lured to Paris, arrested, then read the riot act for Telegram’s non-cooperation with French authorities, the company has been responding to warrants and downplaying its “E2EE” features. Expect them to have a fully accessible backdoor for LE.
By the way, don’t forget about that Bitlocker backdoor that “mysteriously” doesn’t affect Windows 10.
The EU and US digital surveillance states have been tightening their grip on encryption and online anonymity for years now. “Age verification” is just the latest push.
I can only assume there’s a different backdoor for 10 that just hasn’t been published. Even if there isn’t, Windows defaults to backing the key up to the attached Microsoft account. You think they’d ever tell intelligence agencies to come back with a warrant for that?
Just use Veracrypt folks.
It was made by m*scovites in m*scovia with fsb money, by the same guys that tried to copy facebook.
Better than WhatsApp at least
As in “with WhatsApp we know, with others we cannot exclude the possibility”?
As in “fuck the zucc”
I would not limit it to him.
Signal (assuming you live in a country that hasn’t blacklisted them for refusing to install backdoors).
Signal still doesn’t support bots and is shit for bigger groups
Good for 1-10 friends and 1on1 chats tho
Are these negatives?
People criticising Telegram have no idea how big some of the channels there are. They’re stupid big. Like full ass Discord server but with one channel big.
That needs automated moderation tools - bots as well as built in tools to manage lager groups.
Signal doesn’t do that at all. It’s a good replacement for group texts, not communities.
And for me personally: missing first party bot support makes it a complete non-starter.
I mean, fair enough on you opinions, but it sounds as if all you’re saying is this one particular messaging tool doesn’t fit your requirements?
As I see it, (and I may be speculating and/or wrong), supporting bots might worsen some aspects of other users experience. If there necessitates a worsening of other users’ experience in order to support what you’d want to do, at what point should you just use a different app?
There’s little reasoning for catering to a niche use like huge channels and bots, and tbh that sounds like a dreadful experience to me. Dev time is costly, feature creep is a killer, I don’t see lack of support for unwanted (to me) features as a negative.
Signal has bit me already. Every single *Claw supports Signal bots, which pretend to be actual people.
Telegram has explicit first party bot support, a bot is always a bot and identified as such
yes
Matrix, Session, SimpleX chat, Tox chat, Jami… and so on.
Session EoL this July.
Clash of Clans
Signal is legitimately one of the worst messaging apps I’ve tried
Same. Any non-verifyable app in an app store is at least suspect.
Why not mention that “Secret Chats” aren’t that safe either?
Just like any app-store based software.
Tried to sign up once, but it wanted my real phone number and a fake one from a temp SMS site wouldn’t work. Private messaging? Sure, Jan.
Security doesn’t equal private.
