It's not as if encryption would stop them being able to infiltrate and observe criminal gangs, and generally catch the bad guys. There are all kinds of other tools they can use without having instant push-button access to all communications data.
Encryption doesn't stop them spying on you. It stops them spying on everyone in the world simultaneously all the time with no effort.
I wouldn’t put a lot of trust in Telegram. Not only is their cryptography off by default, it’s a bespoke hand-rolled non-standard algorithm that might not work as well as they say. Oh, and it’s been potentially backdoored by the FSB (Russia’s CIA) for six years.
In general, people are wise to use ciphers and protocols that have been examined by the global cryptography community and have held up to that scrutiny.
The algorithm was neither proposed nor designed by the US government, it was made by (what is now known as) Signal, a 501c nonprofit.
The claims of signal being “state-sponsored” come from assuming how money flows through the OTF - Open Tech Fund - which has gotten grants from government programs before. (IIRC)
It wouldn’t make sense for the US Gov. to make such a grant to make a flawed protocol, as any backdoor they introduce for themselves would work for any outside attacker too - it’s mathematics. It works for everyone or for no one. Would they really wanna make tools that they themselves use, just to have it backdoored by other state actors?
Oh, and it’s been potentially backdoored by the FSB (Russia’s CIA) for six years.
From the very start rather.
And there’s been a few cases where not FSB, but mundane police was reading suspects’ messages before arresting them.
Don’t trust Telegram, I use it because, eh, most people use either that or VK DMs in Russia as the default IM. But never trust it for something which should be secret.
You can even have “opposition”-themed channels there or call for rebellions, but don’t ever expect anything to be secret or even pseudonymous. Even without ill intent regularly flaws are found which allow to get a lot of information, and the code quality is sewer-level.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I absolutely aim to challenge this kind of crap. If I leave, I doubt there will be people who will do it consistently. People want to follow X, Y and Z cults but not A, B and C cults, and think they are rational. Rationalists can come up with the most irrational nonsense, which is why they are not rational.
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”.
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.
Matrix is shit 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 .
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.
No, they are not. They might fit a certain niche (or could 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.
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.
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.
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 unbearable.
I wonder if Conduwuit would be worth a try. I don’t know anything about the maintainer or what led to the fork, but I see it already has active contributors.
I’m not sure - conduwuit does seem to have more active development but it’s not as though conduit is dead either…I also can’t find any other reasons to use conduwuit mentioned on its repository, so I’m just going to stick to conduit.
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.
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