Here’s what he said in a post on his telegram channel:
🤫 A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly “secure” messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad 🥷
🥸 The US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption, and today the exact same encryption is implemented in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages and even Skype. It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕🦺
🕵️♂️ An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media. But whenever somebody raises doubt about their encryption, Signal’s typical response is “we are open source so anyone can verify that everything is all right”. That, however, is a trick 🤡
🕵️♂️ Unlike Telegram, Signal doesn’t allow researchers to make sure that their GitHub code is the same code that is used in the Signal app run on users’ iPhones. Signal refused to add reproducible builds for iOS, closing a GitHub request from the community. And WhatsApp doesn’t even publish the code of its apps, so all their talk about “privacy” is an even more obvious circus trick 💤
🛡 Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github. For the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private 💪
Original post: https://t.me/durov/274
Telegram’s server side software is closed source, owned and ran by them exclusively so they really have no room to talk. WhatsApp doesn’t even have OSS clients so they’re even worse in that regard
exactly, they (Telegram) don’t need to put sketchy code in the clients when most messages are not E2E encrypted and they control the servers lol
It’s hard to overstate what a nothing-burger this article really is! Let me break it down:
- Signal got $3 million from the Open Technology Fund at some point in its development
- Some anonymous source alleges that the OTF’s ultimate goal is to promote US foreign interests
- The current chairman of the board Katherine Maher worked at the National Democratic Institute and Wikipedia before
- The same anonymous source says she was recruited because of connections to the OTF
- She has at some point voiced the opinion that a completely free internet without regulation just reproduces existing power structures, and that balancing regulation and 1st amendment rights is a tough problem
- Signal doesn’t have reproducible builds on iOS (it absolutely does on Android btw)
- Some people feel like Signal chats come up more often than they should in court cases and media reports
That’s it, that’s the whole story. That’s the reason why the Telegram guy of all people thinks you should be careful, and better use his chat service instead, and the Twitter guy agrees.
I mean, reproducible builds on iOS would be nice, but that platform has much bigger problems from a privacy/security/sovereignty/freedom standpoint anyway. And the rest is just nothing turned up to 11.
tl;dr “Signal might be untrustworthy because the tech came from a State-sponsored project and the current chairman acknowledges that Wikipedia has a white and Western bias.”
just wait until they find out pretty much all tech we have can be traced back to government-funded research.
Did you know the early early internet researchers were part of a clandestine government organization known as ARPANET??? The entire TCP/IP stack is just a state-sponsored backdoor into your life!!!
WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!
yea just wait until they find out why the first digital computer was made:
ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory). However, its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.
I guess it’s the usual Russian propaganda tactic throughout Telegram. Mixing conspiracy theories with half-truths.
The NSA indeed distributed a defected encryption library in the past. These days I’m pretty sure big techs use open source encryption to avoid this trap.
And Telegram says blah, blah, iPhone is exploited. But IF Telegram is correct on this one, Andriod versions would be defect as well.
Lol telegram calling signal insecure is too funny.
Isn’t it that Telegram doesn’t claim to be super secure, apart from possibly their encryption on mobile?
This doesn’t prevent them from uncovering other possible plots in supposedly secure platforms.
Maybe he should focus on adding e2e encryption to the default chats and group chats instead of spreading FUD.
Telegram: There are backdoors in Signal encryption!
Also Telegram: not encrypted
Secret chats only. With their own, in-house encryption, that, if I remember correctly, the apps don’t use according to the specifications.
Maybe I’m mixing up mtproto 1 and 2 with that second part, though.
I don’t mind in-house encryption (the Signal protocol didn’t just appear out of nowhere either), however the latter part is worrying.
In any case, I personally don’t trust Signal or Telegram.
But extremely hard to use to the point that nobody uses them. I send a secret chat to someone and they write me back in the unencrypted chat.
It shouldn’t be possible to send anything unencrypted
Tbf not all the chats being E2E encrypted is a UX compromise. It makes Telegram a lot nicer to use across devices and allows just accessing your messages from anywhere without needing your phone to be on. Plus no need to back up chats etc. because they’re all just on the server. As opposed to secret chats, which of course are bound to one particular device and can only be accessed from there.
I’m all for E2E by default but I must say I actually like the idea of having a choice in this particular case.
