Telegram Desktop reaches version 1.0
telegram.org
telegram.org
This is the GitHub repo. https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop
Development has always looked a bit fishy to me, though. The main developer is anonymous (using the name/pic of a TV character), maybe it's even several people using the same profile.
I can't call "good" no accessibility support on macOS. But anyway Telegram Desktop is not the primary client for Macs, they have Cocoa-based alternative: https://macos.telegram.org/
I - and I guess many with me - don't trust the encryption at all.
I assume the crypto might be broken, NSA and FSB and aliens might be listening but I don't care.
My reasons to use it:
Desktop support is way better than Whatsapp.
More possibilities (bots, channels mostly).
And because I don't want to support Whatsapp by being part of the network effect that keeps people on that platform.
The reasons I use private chats sometimes is just to use autodelete to protect my conversations with my wife against my kids.
For me, for example, he selling point is having an interface as slick as Whatsapp's, but not being tied to the phone, not having to necessarily give your phone number, sending whatever attachments you want, and getting a searchable log in the cloud.
Bots are also a popular feature with many users.
[1]: https://wire.com
Secret chats on OSX has the same UX as secret chats on my Android client, fwiw.
For me it looks like web devs that don't want to learn native APIs.
* Lot of wasted disk space.
* Each app loads a whole chromium/nodejs: lots of wasted RAM.
* The chromiums may not all be the latest. This could be bad if those have network exposure: https://sobersecurity.blogspot.mx/2017/01/looks-like-you-hav...
MacOS? I fail to see that this is the way it works in RStudio, VS Code and Atom???
Looks like it was addressed in 2015 but I don't think the other applications used the fix.
We would not have charge our phones every day and laptops would last for longer if anyone cared about how much their application consumes. It's ridiculous.
Good engineering isn't just about features.
Why is native better than browser application? Browser application is by definition better sandboxed and can do much less damage to the system.
Normal application can do mayhem. And Telegram needs root access for installation... do I want to give it root access? When I can just open another tab?
Why is it better? Hundreds of reason, you can see down below. I will try to sum it up why I like native over electron in 3 words: responsiveness, robustness, cleanliness. Electron on desktop is resource hog for me. It is good for people that don't mind that, and that are deep into JS ecosystem. I am not, and I always prefer native app, partly because I am on macOS and Cocoa looks beautiful.
Telegram at idle sits at 80mb ram and <0.01% cpu. Wire for example sits at 250mb idle and waffles between 0.05% and 2% cpu. Discord sits at 200mb idle and waffles between 0.01% and 0.10%, leaning towards the latter, jumping above it every few seconds at least.
I thought they are talking about the chrome app version of telegram, which I am using right now.
Awesome Electron Apps
+ VS Code (Which was light years ahead of Atom but that gap has narrowed)
+ RStudio
+ Discord
My Point: VS Code is a great electron application. Works great.
VS Code < Vim < Vi < ed
I don't get the text editor speed as an issue ever. I used Vim (I use Vim mode in all my editors) not because it was faster on the CPU it was because it made my work faster. Today VS Code makes me work fast. I seriously have a 8 year old Dell crappy corporate computer for work and there is no noticeable slow down on either RStudio or VS Code.
Telegram hits a few sweet spots with me:
- Movement between devices is seamless (I can go from my webview in BSD to my Mac OS Native to my iOS native app and not miss a beat).
- Telegram is very reliable in situations with poor connectivity. This is pure anecdote on my side, but in the most crowded venues I've been to: Messenger, Line, and WhatsApp have performed worse than Telegram.
- Telegram's API is ridiculously open, even if it's backend source isn't. For most practical purposes, Telegram gives you full access, and is completely okay with you creating a 3rd party client
Basically anyone who wants. I have a sticker set with friends of mine : )
Really terrible and frustrating UX for me. I loathe that web interface.
Riot and Wire both seem to have that. Riot uses a WebApp-as-Native kind of thing, while Wire actually seems to have a native app.
Don't use it, don't let friends use it.
https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/81899003583181619...
https://twitter.com/kaepora/status/819181464369577984
https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/81919238137120358...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol
Edit: add link http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-crypta...
If you want to argue that Telegram and Signal are comparable because Telegram has better UX and Signal better security and some people prefer UX to security, that's fine (I could not disagree more strongly, but at least it's a coherent argument). But don't pretend the thread isn't about security to make people believe that there's controversy about whether Signal is more secure. There is no controversy: Signal won the Levchin prize this year for the Signal Protocol and sets the standard for secure chat, and Telegram... well, let's just suffice it to say that it does not meet that standard.
I somehow doubt it.
EDIT: Oh, I was mistaken, apparently there is an option now. From Wikipedia:
On October 4, 2016, Facebook deployed end-to-end encryption as an optional feature for Facebook Messenger users. It is available in an optional mode called "Secret Conversations" and uses the Signal Protocol.
Riot is based on Matrix which is a decentralized protocol (you're not tied to one company), and it doesn't need your phone number.
* open source, code on github
* e2e encryption (apparently derivative of Signal's Axolotl double ratchet)
* chat/voice/video, and group chats (all encrypted always)
* based in Switzerland, coding out of Berlin
* clients for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux, Web
* can sign up with phone number or email (or username? Not sure - I think you can find contacts via username, not sure you can sign up without email)
* reasonably responsive on twitter
* yada yada yada
Things like this: https://github.com/wireapp/wire-desktop/issues/80
Then there is the fact that the client acts as a browser that fetches information from the web automatically without blocking trackers itself. This is leaking metadata and actual data.
I can't believe there still isn't a single usable e2e mobile + desktop chat client that won't drain your cell phone battery super quickly.
The problem is that most people value convenience and speed over security and privacy. Telegram provides a very good trade off, much better than some other apps. If Signal were to be developed at the pace Telegram is, I would use it all the time, but it's not. For my use and likes, both Telegram and Wire are very good fits.
I switched from skype to telegram because of its much smaller memory footprint. 400mb+ for skype, 63mb(current) for telegram.
Before you say "but I can compile it myself", think of how many people will ever bother to do that.
That's how literally every security person feels about the argument that closed-source software is unknowable.
We don't need decompilers or special tools to read closed-source applications. Almost all of them --- very much including the Signal-based messengers --- are built with tools that produce straightforward easy to follow assembly code.
But that's sort of besides the point. Reading assembly is more tedious than reading C code, which is in turn more tedious than reading Python code. But you don't get to move the goalposts now. You claimed, repeatedly, that closed-source software was unknowable. It is not; it is in fact very far from unknowable. So the idea that Facebook is going to sneak backdoors into some of its most prominent code under cover of "closed source" is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary evidence.
So, I doubt any security professionals would say its preferable to not have the source, but to do the job of verifying the software you have to do it at a lower level than the source anyway, so having the source is a bonus, not a requirement.
whatsapp 6 out of 7
telegram(in secret chat) 7 out of 7
So i am not going to comment on the quality of whatsapp, because their sources are closed.
Most people are not going to use the secret chat.
Most people don't care about secret chat. This is for people who care. Granted, they don't have secret chat on Desktop which makes the whole app useless in general unless you only use phones for communication.
This is a reason i said "It's ok" in my original comment. Few people need encryption in day to day communication, but if you need it telegram is better.
Try this one: https://www.securemessagingapps.com
Recommends Signal and (with caveats) Threema and Wire.
If anybody really wants to hack you (you exatly) - p-2-p ecryption won't stop them, this is not some kind of absolute defence.
And if you are worried about FSB readin your messages - trust me, they don't, unless you are under suspection already. No organisation in Russian history ever worked this way, only selectively.
I know too well that not enough people care about privacy, sadly.
1. They don't claim to do end to end crypto unless you use the secret chats
2. The secret chats still aren't broken. Since 2013, I'd think at least one "crypto expert" (which all said a custom protocol was a bad idea) would have taken the effort to prove it by now.
3. Whatsapp claims to have better encryption, and they probably do, but it's 1) a lot less convenient and 2) unverifiable.
4. Telegram is open source. You can layer your own encryption on top of it if you care, and the clients' implementation is fully verifiable.
PSA: Whatsapp is dangerous snake oil--hidden source code and owned by a company with a terrible track record in terms of privacy.
They simply do a code dump every few months.
both are better options than telegram.
Yeah that doesn't work at all on my phone because it requires me to use Google Cloud Messaging (Google stuff on my phone is firewalled). You can't just connect to the Signal servers -- or your own for that matter -- and be done with it, you need to use Google servers.
Does anybody know how many users are on Telegram and who owns them? Can you invest in them?
See Wikipedia and https://www.securemessagingapps.com
As for numbers: http://www.businessofapps.com/telegram-statistics-and-revenu...
https://telegram.org/blog/100-million https://telegram.org/blog/15-billion
> Telegram is a cloud-based mobile and desktop messaging app with a focus on security and speed.
Unfortunately, it tricks a lot of people.
As a user who doesn't care about my chats being 100% encrypted, but does want the convenience of multi-platform messaging, is Telegram a better alternative to Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts or Whatsapp? My messages on Telegram may not be encrypted, but are they actively used to siphon information from my messages to contribute to my non-anonymized (or poorly anonymized) advertiser profile, and freely passed or sold to third-parties as they are with those platforms?
I've only seen hardline stances on "If you don't care about privacy, Telegram is great!" or "If you care about privacy, Telegram is awful garbage". What about the grey area in the middle? Where does it fit?
- Dark Skin (still waiting for Slack doing it)
- It's faster than the MAS version
- It's not possible to collapse the chat list anymore
- The desktop app is responsive, though, collapsing the whole sidebar into a hamburger menu
- Replying to messages is buried in a context menu, in the MAS version one could simply double click a message
- They created a giant group for themes. Once 4chan joins there, things will go very bad
Any number of any skins, actually. Themes.
Or am I misunderstanding you?
I've always liked the multi-device sync feature in Telegram and can't imagine using an app without that. My main concerns have been the home grown crypto and that normal chats are not end-to-end encrypted (only secret chats are). So I've been trying Wire [1] for a while, which provides both multi-device sync, multi-OS apps and end-to-end encrypted chats by default (there is no non-E2E chat). But it needs some more time to become much better (it's comparatively quite slow to startup and sync messages). Unfortunately, for all the fame that Signal [2] has on crypto and end-to-end encryption, it's the slowest in feature development among these apps.
[1]: https://wire.com
From what I can see Telegram doesn't have VoIP, which could be a deal breaker for some. Are there other advantages with Telegram compared to Discord that makes up for the lack of voice?
The main reasons it's so popular (with some users, 100+ mil of them) - bots (telegram has open api, and bt platform https://telegram.org/blog/bot-revolution) and channels. In Russia - telegram channels is now a new type of media, very popular with independent journalists, bloggers etc.
Everyone's looking for a decent replacement for Skype, and Hangouts ain't it.
No signup and no email required.
It helped that most people saw the advantages that Telegram had, especially back then (before whatsapp cloned everything). Not to say that Telegram didn't clone whatsapp to a large degree, but the introduction of telegram definitely made the market innovative again.
This often leads to people saying things like "Telegram doesn't have end-to-end encryption". Really, what they mean is that it's not the default and isn't on all platforms. Most people can use it if they want to though because it's available on all major mobile OSes.
I use the Telegram app on my OSX Laptop, and i use Secret chats. They seem identical to my Android secret chats. What am i missing?
[1]: https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop [2]: https://github.com/overtake/telegram
To those who think privacy does not matter : http://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters
I'm not sure they even have a real reason for not doing it yet. At this point there are at least a couple other open source protocols that work like Signal but have nothing to do with Signal and Open Whisper Systems, that they could adopt. So even if they hate OWS for criticizing them in the past, that's not a reason not to adopt the alternatives at this point.
I'd probably be content if they even take one of those and fork it and customize it for their own purposes, as long as their "math Ph.Ds" don't completely break the crypto again.
Telegram's secret chats are also client-specific and not synced, and I have no idea how it would even be possible to have e2e chats synced on multiple devices without having a "main" device that's doing the actual crypto or sharing the secret key
It doesn't. The phone is only needed for initial setup.
Hopefully, OpenWhisperSystems will release documentation about their implementation in Signal (note: it doesn't require phone, unlike WhatsApp)
I got fooled by Signal's requirement of a phone for the activation and thought it was also required for normal usage, I guess that's better than Whatsapp, though being able to register and use it without a phone at all would be even better (even Telegram doesn't do this though, IIRC it requires a phone number)
Its possible to have e2e on multiple clients, with or without a phone number attached to it. There are multiple chat clients that can do it, some with, some without phone number. Signal requires phone number and does it, Wire and Riot do it without a phone number.
Telegram just don't actually care about security or privacy. Unencrypted defaults, all conversation saved on the server, even if you use their 'roll your own' crypt secret chats you lose most of the functionality that actually go people to use Telegram in the first place.
Telegram essentially has no usable e2e crypto to speak off. Secret chats are a usability and security nightmare.
People should use Riot (Matrix) or Wire. Those are much better.
Not there yet privacy-wise as others point out, but at least you get an open API and the ability to use your own clients.
[1] - https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/277
Other than bots, the client is really a Telegram client, not something like Pidgin.
Personally I don't mind, since everyone's on Telegram. I actually prefer to have a client that's excellent with one network rather than a client that does quite well with many networks. Having used Pidgin and other multi-network clients in the past, they are always second rate compared to the official client. And with bots (irc to telegram bot; gmail to telegram bot; etc.) all I need is the Telegram client.
As for Skype, how do you want to connect it? Microsoft doesn't allow it, and neither would Whatsapp. Telegram on the other hand has no problem if you make a custom client...
[1]: https://www.skype.com/en/developer/ [2]: https://dev.botframework.com/
I don't know a single person who is on Telegram. My friends have not even heard of it despite the fact that they all talk online and a good percentage of them are developers. Why would I start using it if no one I know uses it?
Bad example: I knew nobody on Google+ but I made some new friends. The network died again, or at least I stopped using it after a year and a half or something, so it's a bad example in that it didn't work out in the end, but yeah that's how things get started. Why do you think the first million people got Whatsapp? If you don't try something new and convince at least one other person to use it, how would things ever change?
2. The clients are open source (for me that's a moral reason)
3. Secret chats are verifiably encrypted
4. You can make your own client if you want, causing:
4.1. Someone used a custom client (tgcli) to create a backup feature, which I extended to make html exports like MSN had (quite a future-proof and readable format). This prevents lock-in.
4.2. You are much less restricted in your choice of operating system, given you or someone else takes the effort of porting or writing a client.
5. The existing desktop client is native and doesn't require your phone to be turned on and have data active.
6. The clients have lots of features like custom themes, sending large files, setting up a username which can be linked to publicly, creating broadcast channels, pinned chats, etc. I'm not sure how much of this whatsapp implemented by now. It's true that Telegram also copied other products a lot, but they added lots of features that competitors didn't have, but nowadays they do (it made the market more innovative again).
I'm also not saying everyone should move to Telegram. Some monopolies are better than others (some are owned by Facebook & other things I just mentioned) but all monopolies are bad.
Additionally Whatsapp has some advantages like calling and knowing what the profit model is. The latter is actually my greatest worry about Telegram, but everything considered, Telegram is the best thing currently available in my opinion.
EDIT: smiley