Ignoring the context.
Don’t pirate over Telegram, it’s no longer safe in terms of privacy and legal safety.
Meh, you never could trust them.
Group chats were NEVER encrypted, so I’m surprised that people are just now figuring out that if it’s not encrypted = people can read it.
If it wasn’t a 1:1 “secret chat” encrypted message, then congrats, you weren’t as opsec-y as you thought you were.
This kind of confusion illustrated by Telegram users is exactly why it was the right thing to do for privacy when Signal removed support for SMS because it’s not encrypted. People still whine endlessly about it, but most users are not very savvy, and they’ll assume “this app is secure” and gleefully send compromised SMS to each other. All the warnings and UI indicators that parts of the app were less secure (or not at all in the case of SMS) would be ignored by many users, resulting in an effectively more dangerous app. Signal was smart to remove those insecure features entirely.
Yeah. You can’t offer a half-secure and half-private platform and expect your average person to be able to figure out which half is which, which leads to crazy misconceptions, misunderstandings, and ultimately just a bunch of wrong and misleading information being passed around.
I’d argue, though, that Telegram probably did this on purpose, and profited GREATLY from being obtuse and misleading.
Don’t Google hold the keys to the kingdom on that one? I see it as unlikely that Signal adds support.
That’s why I stopped using it. They require a phone number, phone numbers require kyc with an ID around here, and there’s just too much illegal shit on there.
It’s of course possible to get a more pseudonymous experience, but honestly, what they offer isn’t worth the hastle.
Telegram never was private, group chats never were encrypted (and that’s not an opinion: the feature simply is missing). If anything, they are just removing their false and deceiving claims. That they remained there for so long is something I can’t wrap my head around.
They were cutting files in smaller parts and spreading over multiple locations and countries. At least that was the claim in the early days, so anything illegal would require lawyers on many jurisdictions sending the same letter (e.g. DMCA takedown)
Ironically, it did work but now that Durov is in jail channel admins would do good to take precautions.
What kind of system that depends on centralized servers can ever be secure from government snooping?
That kind of architecture is completely hopeless in that regard.
Is a encrypted, distributed, P2P architecture realistic though?
XMPP with the OMEMO extension is close, no? While Matrix isn’t distributed, it is decentralised like Lemmy and Mastodon, and E2EE by default. That could be the closest thing to what you mean?
I’d argue XMPP is less ideal than Matrix because groups are located on a single server, which makes them easier to take down than Matrix’ replicated state.
Running any P2P/decentralized protocol over I2P seems to be the best for privacy and censorship-resistance. I2P already works great for torrents, except for it’s speed and lack of users/seeders.
@zabadho@ani.social
The problem always comes down to usability and barrier to entry. Telegram is popular because it’s great to use, and doesn’t moderate much. More private services rarely (never?) reach the level of usability most people expect, often simply because of it’s architecture.
I’d argue XMPP is less ideal than Matrix because groups are located on a single server, which makes them easier to take down than Matrix’ replicated state.
That is true, but it’s never been a problem in my relatively long experience with XMPP: some server software can be used as a cluster and distributed, making it highly available (basically, the whole of WhatsApp runs on a fork of ejabberd), and the comparatively tiny resource usage of XMPP contributes to its stability.
XMPP does have a spec for F-MUC (distributed rooms somewhat like Matrix, many years before Matrix) and my rationale as to why it never picked up despite a whole decade of “competition” from Matrix is that it’s a problem that just doesn’t need solving. The price to pay for it is hefty: Matrix resource usage (bandwidth, CPU, RAM) is insane, its protocol complexity makes it a single-vendor implementation (which is risky on very practical grounds), and it’s not even bulletproof for the niche use-case it set to tackle: in the end, your identity server on Matrix remains centralized.
You can tell that I’m partial to XMPP, but that’s only after having been a service operator for years, with my original expectations largely favouring Matrix.
I just signed up for Matrix because you mentioned it.
I installed the Element front end, because that seems to be the most popular.
It looks like IRC, which is fine if that’s all you need.
It also appears that anything beyond text has to be hotlinked, which is understandable, given that the amount of data transmitted for redundancy between home servers is exponential with the number of home servers.
Really very similar to Lemmy, where the identity of each group is tied to a particular server, e.g. lemmy has !anime@ani.social but Matrix has #anime:matrix.org
So what happens if matrix.org goes away or decides the server admin wants to be hostile to #anime?
Telegram was never safe. All anyone ever had was their word that some chats are end-to-end encrypted.
After their CEO being detained and arrested in France because of the illegal activity on his platform, it was a matter of time.
The guy has a history of making something that looks good and then selling it to governments. I’m surprised people took the bait for the second time.
As some people poined out, I was talking about VK. A Russian social network that ended up in the claws of Russian government, which in turn ended up in massive political repressions of it’s userbase for posting “wrong” things.
He then made Telegram and used Russian government’s attempts to block it as a PR campaign. I guess that’s what made it so appealing at first, but now French government stepped in and we are going all over again.
