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Comment by dnate | Hacker News Reader

There is literally no downside to end-to-end encrypting text messages. So it should be default. It is just harder to implement technically.

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That's not a very good use of "literally", because searching through encrypted messages will certainly be slower, and on mobile devices, this will have a bigger impact on responsiveness and battery life. That is a big downside on mobile (not desktop). Create similar chats that are long (like tens of thousands of messages) on different apps and compare Telegram's search speed with others'.

Keeping a long history is almost always a bad idea because something you have written a year ago and have forgotten can be used against you. Keeping messages for just about a week is much better idea.

For you. Some people like having records.

Which is why we have other communication channels for that type of thing. Instant messaging should be ephemeral.

Why should it matter which medium is used? I have some conversations I want to keep forever. Some I treat as ephemeral. This should be a per-conversation setting.

Not always, I have my emails on Gmail since 2010 & WhatsApp chats since beginning and through multiple device changes.

I partially agree with you on the point that we should be cautious with not storing any and all communications "forever", but messages among friends, relatives, etc., and on groups focused on specific topics can be very nice to look back on (or even get inspired by). The same goes for photos shared in the past too.

Reading old IRC or ICQ logs from 2001 can be quite fun though, brings back some memories.

my group of friends have a 4 year old telegram group chat.

i downloaded all the history, put it into a markov chain library and now we have a bot that can generate random phrases (some, absurdly hilarious) based on our own conversations.

Sounds interesting. Is your bot available for others to use (source or orherwise)?

Mine got me interviewed by the FBI. So there are some downsides :p

I'd love to know more about this story! Care to elaborate?

Fortunately my name isn't associated with this HN account. So I suppose I can comment about the situation.

Me and a bunch of other people met online and talked about programming, hacking, etc. All of us were teenagers at the time. One of the people, who I considered a good friend, turned out to be this guy:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-id...

They found the logs of our IRC conversations over a period of 5 years and found a bunch of incriminating stuff (just teenagers shooting the shit, trashing people, and talking about hacking and stuff)

EDIT: domain removed

It's unpleasant to know a bunch of people read your private stuff. TBH, the username is pretty similar

I have several 10,000+ message chat logs in signal. Searching is pretty much instantaneous even on a 3 year old device.

You can search on your device. One could implement filters like "last week, last month ..." to make searching faster. If that is even relevant.

Oh, it's okay, you can use it as a generic intensifier now, even though it's confusing and there are much better ones.

So, you can use it, but you shouldn't.

I should have added a /seething tag.

There is, you can only access them on the devices you sent them from or receive them from. If you add another client weeks down the line, you cannot access these messages anymore

not entirely true... you can pair a new device which shares the decryption key. hell, you could even do a p2p sync so the server stores nothing... there are plenty of options that get technically harder with each increment (perfect forward secrecy gives you some limitations), but you can absolutely backup and restore, or even live sync conversations between multiple devices even if it’s e2e

> It is just harder to implement technically.

To the point that the major players mostly fail at doing it well enough to achieve a good UX.

WhatsApp doesn’t allow you to sync conversation history between devices, even though this is technically possible. It’s just hard, so they don’t do it. Instead, they require you to have a single device (e.g. your phone) acting as a secure conversation-history database, which other devices (e.g. your laptop) can then interact through WhatsApp “thin clients.”

iMessage manages to sync conversation history between devices while also being E2E-encrypted, but it’s the exception (and also unavailable to non-Apple users.)

1) yes, harder/costlier to implement 2) maintaining security is an issue - losing security can cause outage or trust 3) patents are a thing.

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