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Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

Just use telegram. Open source, native clients for every platform. No phone number necessary.

Open source client, as far as i know the server is still closed source.

I suggest using Riot, preferrably self-hosted.

Not even that. They only dump the source code over the fence once in a while. Try to find the source code for the latest release of any one of the Telegram mobile clients. Good luck!

"No phone number necessary" is only true if Google Voice is available in your country. A phone number is necessary to create a Telegram account.

> "No phone number necessary" is only true if Google Voice is available in your country. A phone number is necessary to create a Telegram account.

To add to that I can use Signal just fine with Google Voice. So if both Telegram and Signal require a Google voice number, might as well go with Signal.

I would like to use Signal, but I am forced to use Telegram for the same reason. (I have also to say that Telegram mac client is pretty awesome).

It makes no sense to create a "secure" chat app, and then to force your users to use cellphones, which is the most unsafe technology I can imagine... Why this cellphone fetish?

Cellphones are far more safe than your computer - especially iPhones. All apps are run in a sandboxed environment and are vetted before being released. Further, the secure enclave is far better at protecting secrets than anything on a typical laptop/desktop machine.

but:

- you are tracked everywhere - you don't control the software for real - you have almost no control on connectivity - it's super difficult to kill a process

etc.

Nonsense. Some adroid virus, like Triada, is a nightmare compared to nearly anything even on Windows.

iPhones are secure, maybe they contain backdoors from Apple and we don't know, but Android are not secure at all, especially because most Android vendors usually don't update the OS to the latest security patches, so the majority of the Android phones out there are full of unpatched security vulnerabilities.

Also there are not good free software mobile operating systems, sure there is LineageOS and other ROMs that still require some proprietary parts, mainly the firmware of the device and binary blobs in the kernel, for one person concerned about privacy that is a problem, because proprietary software means backdoors, and it's useless to use a fantastic free software secure communication app if we can't trust the OS where we run it.

You're talking about Android not being secure because it uses proprietary blobs, but saying that iphones are secure because both the hardware and software is proprietary?

Apple's reality distortion field in full effect...

Neither Android nor iPhone can be considered secure.

no, this is wrong. secure enclave or not. radio chips have direct memory access. phones are only as secure as providers want them to be. Computers actually do what I tell them to --I don't need hacks to "root" them or inspect their behavior.

> No phone number necessary.

How did you sign in without a phone number? It's not possible on https://web.telegram.org/#/login.

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