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Comment by misrab | Hacker News Reader

Is it a coincidence this came up on HN at the same time Telegram is getting dissed on HN? Can't help but think it was coordinated...which is sad for HN

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People don't like Telegram because it's a centralized thing and maybe not trustworthy. I'm not sure if I'd trust the Telegram founders, and their commitment to open source seems questionable to me (no server, outdated clients).

People advocate for Signal because it's arguably the least offensive of the available e2e options. Also the founder for Signal has a long history of doing good work in this area.

> People don't like Telegram because it's a centralized thing and maybe not trustworthy.

Just like Signal.

> I'm not sure if I'd trust the Telegram founders, and their commitment to open source seems questionable to me

Meanwhile Moxie Marlinspike's opposition to free software is evident. You use the client he dictates or fuck off. There's closed source software that respects freedom more than Signal.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android

Can't I build and use this if I want? It looks very open, but I haven't tried building my own client.

Free software is not about being able to compile and code Moxie Marlinspike allows you to use. It's about freedom that he opposes:

https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

Yes, Signal's licensing complies to the letter of how we define free software. But that is irrelevant as it violates the spirit.

I doubt it. It seems to have been posted to HN at the same time as the blog post itself was posted. The timing of the blog post seems to have been based on when their paper went up on eprint [0]. As you can see they seem to have submitted the paper on Dec 6 (date on pdf) and it got posted to the eprint server on Dec 9 (which is the typical time frame). At the very least, zero reason for the MSR people involved in the paper to base their release date around Telegram.

[0]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1416

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