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Comment by notspanishflu | Hacker News Reader

I'm using Telegram as my main messaging system but I hope they'll open source everything. That's the only way to fully audit the service.

Telegram is not too bad but has too many grey areas at this moment.

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Telegram has been around for three years now. I wouldn't hold my breath for open source servers/ability to run your own. That's not their business model.

What IS their business model?

I think at this point it's quite clear they are not ever going to do that. They actually stopped publishing their client source code and they aren't responding to any questions about that.

https://twitter.com/durov/status/847454485882355713

> Definitely, updated source codes will be online later today.

And the Desktop client[1] is kept very up to date. My biggest complaint is that they have stopped updating the API documentation [2] which has lead me to become a rather lukewarm telegram developer (though I still have a few projects I am work with)

[1] https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop [2] https://core.telegram.org/#updates-log

How do you ensure that the code you have access to is the code running on their servers? Having access to some source doesn't help with that.

Unless you strictly use end to end, only after having verified the keys, you are trusting the server quite a lot.

Of course. That's part of the grey areas I mentioned.

My question is how a source audit addresses the server trust issue...

It doesn't? Or at least I can't see how it would.

>I'm using Telegram as my main messaging system but I hope they'll open source everything.

A bit too late, now that you're using as your main system.

I'm using an Ubuntu Phone and Telegram is the only native messaging service app in it.

I'm using UP for a beta-testing purpose so no big deal.

Really? I just get a white screen on mine. I see from reviews that others have the same problem.

I've never looked into logs though, so a fix might be obvious

Really. I got 99 ubuntu bugs but Telegram ain't one.

Once in a while I got a blank screen opening Telegram, but closing it and open it again solves the problem.

Are you running OTA-15?

Yup, OTA-15. I've restarted it a few times, and it just gives me a white screen.

First check you're running the last Telegram version, that's 2.3.36.2

Second, have you tried to delete the cache (.cache/com.ubuntu.telegram)? That will erase your secret chats too, so you can make a copy before deleting it.

Yup, latest version. I tried clearing the cache and no change. Since I was in console, I just checked syslog and I'm getting a dbus DENIED. I'll poke at it when I have more time, but I wonder if they need to fix up their apparmor perms.

Curious as to why your getting a different result though.

EDIT: I'd also be curious as to your opinion of Touch in general?

My opinion: I love it. I'm not a huge fan of Unity, or Ubuntu, and it's definitely in the beta stage. I like that most of the problems that I have were solvable on my own via shell-script or whatever hacks I come up with.

Oh sh*t I'm just remembering now a problem some people had with lock files. I thought it was fixed [0].

In that thread someone said deleting .config/com.ubuntu.telegram/<number>/auth.lock solved the problem with Telegram not starting [1].

So look for .lock file/s and delete it/them.

I still love Debian way more than Ubuntu, but I think they're doing a great work with Touch.

[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/qtbase-opensource-...

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/qtbase-opensource-...

Hmmm.... I don't have any lock files. I'll dig into it when I get more time. thanks

Client and protocol are open source. What more do you need?

Reproducible builds, and deploying my own server.

And a believable business model would be cool.

They have stopped publishing the source code for their clients.

They have?

https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop seems fairly up to date?

Latest commit on the Android version was six months ago: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram

And yes, that's the official location of the Android app, linked here: https://telegram.org/apps

it seems they are watching, they've uploaded the newer version

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