Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests
latimes.com
latimes.com
And posted poll to vote for new president with some clever restrictions.
Anyone can vote, but you can't choose options with candidates if your phone number is not Balarusian.
"I am not from Belarus" is only available poll option to make your vote if your phone number is not Balarusian. There is currently 736'000 votes with that option.
Telegram poll https://t.me/s/telegrambelarus/9
In Belarus there is only 7.8 million eligible voters.
Poll shows that 1,184 million choose to vote for new president Tikhanovskaya.
Only 85'000 votes for current president Lukashenko.
While official results is 80% for current, 7% for new, with 40% participation.
This is obviously mind blowing picture for citizens.
This doesn't reconcile with the official numbers regardless of how you massage them.
... but doesn't really matter how big the poll sample was if the sample was not representative - the results don't have a lot of meaning.
And it's pretty fair to say it was not representative.
In fact, you don't even need remotely that size of a sample if the sample is representative.
Polling is not about sample size, it's about the quality of the sample.
Did all the eligible voters who phone-polled actually vote?
Did they poll the way they actually voted?
Some people don't have two phones?
Can we trust that telegram doesn't have a flaw in the means by which it is measured? (i.e. register again with the same SIM, or something like that?)
It's nice that there is a phone number as validation, but this doesn't 'prove' anything.
Edit: I should add, apparently people are registering photos of their votes, which don't jibe with the tally, which is probably a much better indication of problems with voting [1]
Whom exactly benefits from that? It would have to be a nation-state, and they weren't exactly doing much about the situation before the "election".
What is more likely: that the existing dictator and his supporters made defrauded the election to keep power or that some unknown entity defrauded an Telegram poll for not much gain.
Unless Telegram poll's system was completely broken, but you'd expect other large polls to already have revealed that.
Propaganda and narrative is the whole name of the game here.
It's Telegram poll, there are any number of ways it could be messed up, including very easily someone sympathetic at Telegram (though I doubt this), it has no material credibility.
It's a data point, not 'proof'.
According to the telegram poll, 1.184 million people voted for Tikhanovskaya. That's over 5x as many as according to the official numbers.
The sample size doesn't matter here, were talking absolute number. It seems pretty unlikely 5x more people (absolute number, not fraction) voted for her in a poll than in the real elections.
(I have not checked the source for the numbers, I've just assumed the above poster used the right ones)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Belarusian_presidential_e...
Bear in mind that Wikipedia's policy is use "official" sources when in doubt. According to Wikipedia, Assange is a criminal. Snowden is a traitor.
Not really.
They use credible sources as far as they can find them, their numbers on Belarus look like what the international press is reporting.
Wikipedia doesn't 'think' that Assange or Snowden are anything. They have long articles detailing their history, and possibly what some others might think.
That's true for "reasonable" poll sizes. As your poll size increases past a certain point, it does begin to guarantee correctness.
An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.
Nonetheless, I don't doubt the validity of these particular results, because I think we have enough corroborating evidence. We don't have to justify the rigorousness of a Telegram poll to come to that same conclusion.
For instance people in the US still use text-messaging to a significant percentage. That's hard for me to believe as well.
It's no use looking at Telegram's world usage, that's for sure.
Also what about all the babushkas who most likely voted for Lukashenko but don't have a smartphone?
This is not to say that more people didn't vote for the opposition than the official numbers state. But Lukashenko still could have won.
There are many ways that could happen. But it's pretty good evidence to add to the context, and the pile of evidence was already quite big.
"Official" election results were giving Tsikhanoyskaya around half a million votes while over 1 million Telegram users with Belarusian phone numbers already said that they voted for her.
Se here https://t.me/telegrambelarus/9
Not really though.
An election is ostensibly 'perfect sample of the electorate' (assuming everyone voted), which is what makes it 'good'.
It's very easy to get a 'very large sample size' that is still 'very inaccurate'.
In this case, we're talking about potential numbers larger than literal voters, which makes it interesting - but the sample size again is not the issues if we're looking at a 'poll'.
> An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.
I think you're oversimplifying the situation. Clearly, sample size alone doesn't have that much of a correctness guarantee, or according to your own statement, we'd be able to trust the official results.
People are not complaining because the election is a biased sample of the population (not possible because by definition an election is open to all eligible voters).
People are complaining because they believe the government is not truthfully reporting the actual election results.
Good polling technique cannot mitigate fraud.
If there is an issue with the underlying polling technique, making the sample larger does not guarantee more correctness. You simply end up with a larger set of bad data.
The poll itself says 59% of the 2.3m respondents were people who voted in the election.
That's 1.4m people, which is 15% of their population and 21% of their eligible voting population.
But that’s not what I was taking issue with. Above, I was disputing the claim that a large sample size “guarantees correctness”
Likely, neither this Telegram poll nor the election are statistically sound in their results, for different reasons.
I am not saying that the Telegram poll has to be statistically sound to be valuable evidence.
2. This sample in the Telegram poll is ~20% the number of voters in Belarus.
Telegram users are not going to pass any "Randomness" scrutiny. For all we know, Telegram User A asks Telegram User B to take the poll, etc. That's not random, and can introduce all sorts of statistical bias.
While I don't believe in Belarus official results, that Telegram evidence is not a real evidence. It's just a hint.
Otherwise you can only draw your error bars equally in both ways at once, and then they need to be pretty large before the numbers stop saying what they clearly are saying.
If a poll shows 80% for candidate A, you’d only need to hit 62.5% of the population to guarantee that candidate A would hit 50% of the vote even if the remaining 47.5% voted for other candidates.
But isn't that really only the case when you're trying to use statistical inference to generalize from a sample? It seems like the right way to think about this poll is as a direct measurement of a floor of support for the challenger (others have said that is >2x the her official vote count), and the right statistical question is to ask is what's the probability that the official results are true given that floor.
We can't exclude the possibility that If I were a foreign power with a military budget measured in trillions then the telegram poll would say exactly what I wanted it to say.
With the census.
Its possible that some of the people in the Telegram poll are not eligible to vote (due to age or whatever).
There could be other issues like people changing who they voted for in the election after previously voting in Telegram.
People behind this campaign are starting to reveal their names at last. I know personally one of them.
My network says others are highly respectable as well.
From what I've seen of reporting in Belarus, nobody watched over the shoulder as people filled in their ballots. It's still a secret who any specific individual voted for (unless they choose to tell you).
It's not quite a Telegram problem, voters in a protest poll are not an unbiased sample. This is why elections where one side denies the legitimacy of an election "invalid," in the "we all accept the results" sense.
Call it it petition, protest or public declaration. In that regard,the numbers are meaningful.
They have a massive audience but Ron Paul and Bernie still weren't anywhere near the presidency.
https://www.indexmundi.com/belarus/demographics_profile.html
So regardless of how unbiased a sample it may be the Telegram poll shows over 2x as many people (or phone numbers to be exact), willing to vote for Thikhanovskaya (at the time of writing).
Use this information as you wish.
That's why I called upon people to use heir own judgement.
Everyone who voted could vote twice, and felons and kids voted too.
Given the examples of police brutality related to protests that I've seen in the US just this year I doubt you'll be able to provide any examples that are more worrying than that.
Although I'd agree with the general point that whilst America has good theoretically human rights, the EU is better at actual rights (and in particular, rights against corporations).
Press Freedom Index [1]: Nope Human Rights Scores & Human Rights Violations [2]: Nope and nope
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index [2] https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights
Nice euphemism. Yes, it is one the areas where America is truly a backward nation. Here's hoping we can finally correct the systemic issues undermining our representative democracy and can thus have a more progressive government come 2021.
This is not true. Some people have multiple SIM cards, but it is not even remotely close to "everyone". Based on numbers that I found, multiple SIMs have around 30% people.
Who has the burden of proof here? Should disparity in SIM card ownership be proven? Or the fact that they are evenly distributed be proven? Few things in life are evenly distributed, disparity is the norm!
Note, I don’t support Luk in anyway, just pointing out the bias.
Altho it does uncover the fact that the results are fabricated. But it’s not like anyone was doubting that anyways.
I don't believe Belarus is any different. Yeah, younger people are probably more likely to vote in such a thing, still, I don't think the bias is huge.
It is possible that Telegram is being impartial and providing more honest statistics wrt. what the citizens want. But it's also the case the results are unverifiable data broadcasted from Telegram's server over TLS-equivalent connection. MITM attack of client-server encryption, as well as compromise of the server broadcasting the results allow the attacker to alter the voting results. People acting on those results will allow Telegram to bypass democratic processes. Not saying Belarus is a democracy, but if this sets a precedent it will turn Telegram into a tool of political power, and power, as always, will corrupt. Even if Durov's team is being fair and honest (which I find unlikely considering Durov is yet another Russian oligarch who made their money spying on VKontakte users), they're also useful fools creating yet another architecture with centralized control over user data.
And nope, Signal doesn't make the cut for the above reasons because it exposes your phone number to everyone else. WhatsApp is the same in this respect. Neither of them prevent enumeration attacks (they may slow that down a bit, but not sufficient enough to protect against state actors).
Wire and Element (Matrix) are comparatively better than Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp because you don't need a phone number to sign up and they also have end to end encryption for all chats (with Element it's a bit more recent). Hopefully more people can soon ditch phone number based apps that cause them to be vulnerable because of that vector.
Unlimited storage helps too.
- WhatsApp before they implemented it
- GMail (or any other mail service)
- Matrix (by default, until recently?)
- IRC
- SMS
- Letters in the mail
For some reason this has a tendency to boil down very quickly to
- E2E-encryptet === good, no further information needed
- anything else === bad, no further information needed
Which obviously isn't the whole truth:
It is far less likely give you trouble
- if you receive a stream of unencrypted postcards from Grandma on vacation
- than it is if you send and receive perfectly encrypted messages to/from a criminal mastermind over a channel that leaks metadata or by default backs up your data to any mainstream cloud provider.
The availability of metadata, who can access that metadata etc etc plays a role.
Telegram has significant problems, as far as I know both technically and also at higher levels, but for some reason someone always have to pull the E2E: Good, anything else: Bad.
That isn't useful.
That's such a bullshit excuse. Everything goes with outer layer of encryption these days, what matters is will Telegram offer to lock themselves out of the messages to which the answer is no by default. If you want to chat on desktop or create a group, the answer is no whether you like it or not.
So again, some niché use case of "it's probably nothing sensitive so you might as well send it in the clear because that says you're not a dissident" is thus not even valid. There's almost always outer layer of encryption.
"The availability of metadata, who can access that metadata etc etc plays a role."
Indeed. All the more reason to avoid Telegram that by default stores all that metadata.
"someone always have to pull the E2E: Good, anything else: Bad."
No the point is we'll never even get to the debate on reducing metadata as long as we need to play whack-a-mole with shit apps like Telegram that don't E2EE by default, let alone provide any kind of metadata protection, even sealed sender like Signal does.
As the author of messaging system[1] that provides both E2EE by default for everything as well as metadata protection (more than any other app out there) and advanced protections like endpoint security, I don't really like you putting me into some square of caring only about E2EE. All I can say to you is, first things first.
https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&q=are+telegram+cha...
You are probably answering another post here. I don't think it is intentional.
> Messages of the rest can be read by Telegram team.
Well, there are a number of ways to prevent that from happening easily.
I cannot verify this, but Telegram said years ago that they solved certain problems by routing keys and messages through different datacenters in different jurisdictions.
That said: the big question is if their solutions work and if it works that way? I don't know, they seem remarkable competent at certain aspects of what they do and other times I feel they suffer from the same thing that Elon Musk sometimes suffer from where they publicly state things that sound immediately unreasonable.
But that would be meaningful criticism so probably off topic in a Telegram bashing contest ;-)
Firstly, there is no proof of this happening. I've been looking for the documentation and/or source code for this for more than five years now, and it's never been published.
Secondly, even IF it was happening, the server that strips the in-transit encryption has access to the plaintext, and can copy the message to anywhere it damn pleases. It can write it to "plaintext-messages.txt" for all it cares, that's like two lines of Python in the backend.
Also, the servers creating database entries must by definition have the full database encryption key in its RAM, from where privileged processes can exfiltrate it (computer organization 101).
The thing is, there isn't technology out there that allows Telegram to do what it claims as securely as it claims. If they are indeed innovating on this, why aren't they publishing their research and proving their worth?
"they seem remarkable competent at certain aspects of what they do"
Yeah, you can be great at UX design and shitty at cryptography. That's perfectly fine. The fact they won't spend money to hire competent cryptographers is the shitty part. I don't know if it's this Russian pride wrt. Nikolai being an award winning mathematician, or if they don't really give a fuck and think damage control can mend the damage that resulted from nepotism.
Well, the first time they get hacked properly shows how shit the architecture was. We can only hope people will then ask "ok where the fuck did we go wrong, again, can we switch to something that fixed this once and for all", and that by then, Signal is usable enough for their needs.
> Firstly, there is no proof of this happening. I've been looking for the documentation and/or source code for this for more than five years now, and it's never been published.
I haven't found anything more either. See also below.
> Secondly, even IF it was happening, the server that strips the in-transit encryption has access to the plaintext, and can copy the message to anywhere it damn pleases. It can write it to "plaintext-messages.txt" for all it cares, that's like two lines of Python in the backend.
Theoretically, couldn't the client send the message to one server and the keys to a different set of servers? Clients would request the encrypted messages from one server and the keys from another?
It is still not nearly as good security as proper E2E-encryption but should still be possible to set up so that a single rogue sysadmin cannot get hold of messages.
> Also, the servers creating database entries must by definition have the full database encryption key in its RAM, from where privileged processes can exfiltrate it (computer organization 101). The thing is, there isn't technology out there that allows Telegram to do what it claims as securely as it claims. If they are indeed innovating on this, why aren't they publishing their research and proving their worth?
See above. As long as they don't do serverside search or anything this should be possible?
> "they seem remarkable competent at certain aspects of what they do" Yeah, you can be great at UX design and shitty at cryptography. That's perfectly fine.
Definitely.
As mentioned before I prefer Signal. I actually like your answer.
We need more of these answers and less:
- X is definitely in the pocket of FSB.
- E2E or nothing!
- Use WhatsApp or nothing!
Hey, even tptacek went as far as admitting this at some point:
That would imply client-side encrypted cloud backups, with external key management which isn't the case in Telegram, if it were it could be shown from client-side code. Also, even if that would be the case, it would just need combining key and ciphertext in once place which is again the weak link.
Also, there's no way the search would work as fast as it does now if key /ciphertexts would have to be transported via servers, and finally, since it's a single server that can request data (I have checked the destination IPs), anything of the sort is not happening.
"should still be possible to set up so that a single rogue sysadmin cannot get hold of messages."
I'm afraid that's not possible. When the message arrives to server and the outer layer that is in-transit encryption is stripped, what must remain is the plaintext message, or a message that the server can not decrypt. Such technology already exists, it's called end-to-end encryption. If there was a simpler way to protect from malicious servers, there wouldn't be a need for E2EE communication ;)
"See above. As long as they don't do serverside search or anything this should be possible?"
So no that wouldn't work in practice. Proper cryptographic design in secure messaging apps doesn't distinguish between entities on server who have access to keys. "Jack has one part of the key and Jill has another, but they will never collude or get hacked at the same time" is very bad security rationale.
"- X is definitely in the pocket of FSB."
Well, the problem here is, if the scenario is this "Telegram is secretly in the pocket of the FSB and they're giving access to every message on their server" I can't say "No way, it's all end-to-end encrypted they have nothing to give". I can say that for Signal, however, so I'd rather recommend it instead, and actually, because I can't say Telegram definitely isn't in the pocket of FSB, I don't think it should be used. I hope you understand this requirement of verifiability. If Telegram really wanted to lock themselves from user data, the would've implemented E2EE from the get go.
"E2E or nothing!"
Not sure what to make of this, I haven't heard anyone claim no encryption is better than weaker encryption. But wrt. message confidentiality, since there is no difference when it comes to service provider obtaining the plaintext copy, it's hard to not say "don't use it if it's not E2EE".
"- Use WhatsApp or nothing!"
Another complex problem that boils down to trusting WA has not changed source code after Moxie helped implement Signal Protocol. Like I said earlier, there's maybe a 1..2% chance of backdoor that allows WA to snoop on it's E2EE. So if for some reason one would have to compare these particular ones (IRL this is what we'd call a false dilemma), I'd say
1. Telegram secret messages for one-on-one chats 2. WhatsApp group messages 3. Telegram group messages
WhatsApp may have 1..2% chance of backdoor, but with Telegram I know there's a front door with 100% probability.
If we forget the false dilemma, suddenly Signal solves all of our woes wrt. cross-platform private one-on-one chats and group chats.
"Hey, even tptacek went as far as admitting this at some point:"
Let's not put his words "almost literally any secure messenger is better than email."
Firstly, that assumes he considers Telegram a secure messenger. Secondly, encrypted email has serious problems with deniability (which we'll ignore this time) and forward secrecy: in those respects Telegram's E2EE is better, sure, but E2EE email for group chats (Assuming the client knows how to reply individually to all, and to use each individual's PGP key to protect it) is again more private than Telegram's group chats.
the idea being that there can be an internal policy to shut down the server and wipe the ram but it is harder to do with drives.
I also have a question since you probably can answer: can E2E offer a similar user experience to what normal telegram chats offer?
There's no precedent I'm aware of that if e.g. NL Telegram server has the key in its RAM but not in its disk, that it doesn't have to hand out the keys. Also the keys and/or plaintexts can just be stolen by foreign intelligence establishments. It's not just judicial means we need to be concerned about. E.g., just because it's legal in China to hack Telegram servers abroad, doesn't mean it's right, and Telegram should take this into account.
"the idea being that there can be an internal policy to shut down the server and wipe the ram but it is harder to do with drives."
This is pure speculation and it wouldn't matter because key lifting attacks would be transparent, i.e. the exploit is polished enough not to raise alarms.
"I also have a question since you probably can answer: can E2E offer a similar user experience to what normal telegram chats offer?"
Yes. Except channels and extremely large supergroups. But these two don't enjoy expectation of privacy. You can't expect something you say to a group of 10,000+ people to remain private, people consider such groups public.
Encrpytion is just math so there's also no way around the UX problem of authentication that's part of E2EE, but since that's expected of users, it's not a problem either.
Everything else, group chats with roles, synced chats, file transfers, locations, stickers... you name it, can be done over E2EE, just look at how Signal is showing each of those can be done. It's not trivial of course, but like you asked, "can it be done", yes, it can.
the desktop client of telegram is the main reason to use it over the competition for me. something that does not lag when you type text or resize its window, opens in a quarter of second, etc etc
It has everything it should have and is not Electron. The best app of this kind there is at the moment.
I'm not affiliated with Unigram in any way, just a happy user.
Just don't send your passwords or whatever to your Telegram buds and you should be alright. Funny enough, here in the UK Telegram is mostly associated with shady stuff like drug dealers.
That's a price you surely have to pay for freedom and privacy, a knife can kill a person or cut a potato.
Wire is a bit of a mess. Client is buggy, cross-platform usage is difficult. At least that's my memory of it.
Don’t use Telegram.
Telegram is no worse (or even might be better) than email, your banking website, facebook, your credit card, etc...
It's 100% better than SMS though, which is completely unencrypted.
I'd bet that for most people its an upgrade in security and privacy.
Telegram is encrypted with client-server MTProto (i.e. encryption ALSO happens between client and server) unless their the special secret chat with its hand-rolled E2EE is enabled.
In LTE networks SMS uses the SNOW3G[1] encryption between the cell-tower and phone. This is also equivalent to client-server encryption in that the server-side area covers the more or less TelCo side decentralized SS7 backbone where message travel more or less unencrypted.
So by default with all three Telegram, Facebook, and SMS, all messages are readable by the vendor. Telegram and Facebook offer E2EE as an opt-in measure, but given that neither offers it for groups, they're not a viable option. Signal uses E2EE for everything, hence it's the recommendation by every security expert out there, nobody's recommending Telegram or Facebook.
There's nothing puristic about expecting companies in 2020 to implement basic security like E2EE for everything, by default. After all, we're not talking about anything short from protecting universal human right to privacy here.
[1] https://www.gsma.com/aboutus/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/snow...
There's perhaps a 1-2% chance WhatsApp has a backdoor that allows server to read all group conversations at will.
There's 100% chance Telegram's architecture allows server to read all group conversations at will.
You're 100% wrong with your security assessment between the two.
You mean how multiple companies have done on dozens of millions of accounts before Tg added that feature last year, and are openly selling that data? Like with that dump of 40 million numbers just from Iran and Russia. How often do you change your number?
This is being worked on.
The thing is you're mixing two threat models. One is a creepy dude who will give you nightly calls if they learn your phone number. The other is a state actor who will hack the server and track you based on your IP-address if no phone number is being used otherwise: hence the enumeration attacks won't matter. You can't escape state actors looking at your metadata with Wire, Element or Signal. For that you want an Onion Service based system like Briar, Cwtch, Ricochet, or TFC.
For the creepy people not having to hand out your phone number is a nicety, but it's not at all hard to block a phone number either, it works just like any other app's blacklist: just add the number and be done with it.
I feel like they have 1 threat model and the "thing" is you're trying to decompose it into a mixture of black and white....
I was making this exact point today to a couple of friends. Telegram's features puts it way ahead of its competitors. While using it, I feel I'm charge and not the other way around (WhatsApp being the worst offender here).
With the recent addition of video calls, and if you judged only by its feature set, it could arguably be called the best messaging app at the moment.
As for countering the network effect, I do my part. I politely ask my acquaintances to message me through telegram for anything important.
There is none at the moment.
Signal lives off donations.
WhatsApp off the Facebook datagrabbing connection
Matrix/Element from support/server renting
But Telegramm has invested a lot, but received no money in return yet. So, I suppose the current plan is to get dominant and then .. ROI with who knows?
I also use it right now. Creating and managing groups is easy. You can edit messages! It is fast and reliable.
But I surely would not use it if I would be scared of the government.
But mark zuckerberg is also really successful and I still don't want him control my communication.
And a great bot API. It's literally one of the easiest to use APIs I've ever seen. If you need a home-made solution to control something from your phone or even get push notifications, a Telegram bot is the way to go.
They also have an API which lets you make clients. That, on the other hand, is one of the worst APIs I've ever seen, but it exists, and you can't say that about most centralized and popular messaging solutions.
Because of that API, there's a great client for Windows 10 called Unigram, which is much more pleasant to use than all those Electron apps.
I suspect Unigram is the single reason why Telegram is so popular in the blind community, even though iOS accessibility is horrible, much worse than in most apps of this kind.
- You cannot sign up for Telegram without your phone number (even if it isn't public). - End to End encryption exists but is limited to 1-1 chats. - Telegram cooperates with data requests from law enforcements.
The kind of risk this puts them in cannot be overstated.
It is not that black and white:
AFAIK and IIRC it is more like this:
- yes: Telegram gives data about members of public groups/channels
- no: Telegram does not give out information from closed groups / personal chats, and they go to great lengths to prevent that information from becoming available. We might be sceptical all we want about the custom crypto, but I've seen no credible source that I can think of that have backs you statement except the limited example I gave above.
Happy to learn more though.
Where's the documentation for this? Without documentation your assumption that there's any security is just blind faith.
Here's the case for Russia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia (eventually the govt has blocked over 20 million (!) IP addresses, including Google's and Cloudflare's, and that disrupted 30% of the Internet in the country, but the app just kept working fine)
As for Russia, China, Israel etc. The servers are outside their borders, and mostly they don't give a flying fuck even if it was domestically hosted.
As to whether Telegram itself would cooperate with data requests from your government - that depends on which government it is, and in the end is up to personal judgement. I don't think there's any reason that Telegram would betray me to the Chinese government, for example, while I won't at all trust Facebook for that. Facebook, and Zuckerberg himself (for how long did he stick to that Wuzhen avatar?), tried hard to appease the Chinese government for such a long time.
International megacorp are generally the worst to trust in that respect. To many of us in authoritarian places, the illegality of Telegram is itself an attraction.
We saw it with the Green Revolution in Iran. We've seen it several times since.
So long as messages are not encrypted, messaging apps are much more naturally suited as tools of oppression than tools of revolution.
But as far as I know Telegram has no equivalent feature.
Ammendment to my above statement: This does not apply to Signal.
Why can't they look at the TCP headers of incoming packets to determine source-IP? Also, why can't they look at session identifier or signal ID like phone number to determine who the sender is?
> All compatible Android devices newly launching with Android Q are required to encrypt user data, with no exceptions.
Unless the OS+HW provide API for some sort of TPM, it's not possible to provide strong protection for app databases without asking for strong password every time the app is opened. Android has had some sort of sandboxing for a while but it's not comparable to secure enclaves etc. AFAIK.
Don't depend on asking someone else's device to delete the data as that data being gone.
There's Secret Chats feature which they claim to be end-to-end encrypted, meaning that it's no more secure than Facebook's Messenger (also end-to-end encrypted in Secret Conversations). Even less so considering that they roll their own encryption (MTProto), while Facebook's Messenger uses Signal's protocol.
Further info (which will also lead you to problems with their MTProto protocol, if you're interested): https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegr...
Facebook is planning to merge Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, which makes it even more awful of a choice.
> Some of its channels helped unconnected, scattered rallies mature into well-coordinated action.
This line alone makes their encryption rather meaningless for this use case, since Secret Chats only work between two people.
This has nothing to do with secure chats and everything to do with Telegram's Channels feature. But a ton of people that have never used Telegram nor read the article don't know that.
A multitude of proxies, shadow optic cables over the border and a bit of whitelisting from the government to allow payment processing made Telegram invincible.
Facebook can't read your WhatsApp messages (of course they can add an update any time to do that), but Telegram has access to all your messages right now.
¹ Yes, you can select the end-to-end encrypted sessions, but they're very crippled from a usability perspective. I don't remember the last time anyone used it with me, yet all my chats on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted without anyone doing anything.
Are we sure it can't? Because WhatsApp is closed-source, its GDrive backups are unencrypted and Facebook's whole profit model is based around snooping. Unless they make the app open-source, I'm not trusting them even with a grocery list. People act like E2E is the be-all and end-all but trusting an incredibly shady company on its word is not something I'm comfortable with.
GDrive backups are not readable by Facebook, they're readable by Google. End-to-end, if properly implemented is the be-all and end-all. Except for metadata, which is a problem, but a different one, and Facebook definitely abuses that. But they don't/can't read the contents of chat messages (for now).
It's not merely trusting that shady company, but also realizing that the news of FB not having E2E-encrypted messages would definitely make the news, you'd be aware of it.
Right.. consider what your adversary would be giving up by revealing such a secret, even if it was true. That alone provides a not-insubstantial amount of security.
Open source means anyone can audit and verify nothing was done after audit.
Moxie more or less audited WhatsApp's Signal protocol implementation, and people are right to be concerned about whether changes have been made since FB bought the app.
> Are we sure it can't?
Google can remotely uninstall, and install a trojaned version of any app regardless of app signature on an official Android distribution.
No, there's a 1..2% chance of backdoor.
The real question is, why is Telegram more secure? There's a 100% chance it can read your group messages, because it says so on their documentation that describes the cloud encryption. There is no E2EE at all for groups. There is no E2EE at all for desktop. Together these mean E2EE are completely neutered and useless. I'm a privacy researcher and I don't use them at all. Why would an average joe?
Facebook does get your WhatsApp communication metadata, and has been for years now. As the three letter agencies showed, metadata is actually quite valuable in many respects without needing to trawl through massive amounts of content.
Really? I haven't seen a single credible audit, nor a clear reason for rolling their own
The fact Telegram's E2EE has not been available
1. by default
2. on desktop apps
3. for group messages
for seven years tells you exactly how secure it is.
"the only other criticism comes from a direct competitor"
Fuck this attitude. Everyone has the right to criticize. If Telegram can't own their mistakes it's their fault, not that of the people who are beating them. Also, impartial professional cryptographers like Bruce Schneier and Matthew Green have told people not to use Telegram. Why is that if not because it's so horribly insecure. Why isn't there a single recommendation for Telegram from ANY cryptographer on the entire planet?
"they recommend WhatsApp despite the fact that it's closed-source and nobody can verify if its encryption truly works."
Because they've helped implement the encryption? Also if proprietary tools doing encryption are not secure, then why do Telegram users think it's ok for Telegram to use closed-source server that's doing the "distributed datacenter encryption" for group messages' at-rest protection. There's not even documentation available for this let alone source code.
But secret chats are only for 1-to-1 chats, not for groups as far as I know (or has that changed?)
There are also options for invite only channels ( I manage several TG channels, public and private) in which nobody can join without having been given the invite link, or added to the channel if their settings permit other users adding them to channels.
The world's best audit of Telegram would make the following obvious findings:
1. It's not E2EE by default therefore it's not private and secure by default.
2. It's not E2EE at all for groups therefore it's not safe for use of dissident groups
3. It's not E2EE at all for desktop clients therefore it's not practical in daily messaging.
Any audit of the E2EE part is meaningless when E2EE is so impractical it's not used by users at all.
Telegram's protocol... is not that.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/06/comparing_mes...
[2] https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/72642891296898252...
But yes, not having encryption on by default speaks poorly of them. OTOH it’s not concrete proof that the encryption still sucks as of now.
Also, Signal has no upper group size limit but E2EE would make group with 100,000s a bit sluggish. But that's a problem that reduces with Moore's law.
This is demonstrably false. Telegram's apps are open sourced (except Telegram X for some reason), same as Signal's (no exceptions). None of the two offer you their server's code.
> And who "rolled" the Signal protocol, Moxie Marlinspike? Did he not design that himself?
It passed the scrutiny of the best cryptographers out there. This comment provides more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24237791
And again, this is completely irrelevant because even if Telegram's end-to-end encryption was absolutely the best there is, a) it doesn't work on group chats, and b) it's not enabled by default, only in Secret Chats. The vast majority of Telegram's usage is not end-to-end encrypted at all.
Signal server source code:
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
"The vast majority of Telegram's usage is not end-to-end encrypted at all."
This. This is the backdoor right here. It was never going to be shady flaw in the implementation. It's SO much easier to put it out there in the open, spread misinformation about Telegram being at the forefront of privacy battle and silence all criticism (my links were shadowbanned on their subreddit), and to attack straw men like people posting example's of Telegram's bad track record. tl;dr: damage control.
The open source Telegram client tells us
1. That E2EE is not enabled by default
2. That E2EE is not available at all for group chats
3. That E2EE is not available at all for desktop clients.
So just. No.
"Are you a cryptographer?"
Here's the world's most famous cryptographer, Bruce Schneier saying don't use Telegram: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/06/comparing_mes...
Here's the world's second most famous cryptographer, Matthew Green saying don't use Telegram https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/72642891296898252...
Now show me the cryptographer who recommends Telegram. You can't. Because there isn't _any_.
"And who "rolled" the Signal protocol, Moxie Marlinspike? Did he not design that himself?"
No, it was co-authored with Trevor Perrin[1] who is a cryptographer.
[1] https://twitter.com/trevp__
Telegram's encryption OTOH was designed by Nikolai Durov who is not a cryptographer, but a geometrician. That's like asking a gynecologist to perform brain surgery, lol.
>> Sure, maybe this doesn't help you in a channel, but one on one? Or small groups? Most people don't run custom apps
The bidirectional part is helpful in the non-public channel context.
How does this help? Why does this matter? Well you can keep a public face and a private face. Private channels, group chats with friends, or one on one messages you can be more open and use this tool. But this is normal. Everyone shows a different face in public than what they show to friends (offline!).
> If your friends are picked up by a nefarious actor, you would have to know that they were
Sure. But they're your friends. I don't know how you interact with your friends, but usually when I'm out with them I'm physically near them and know what they are doing. Chances are pretty high I'd know within a few hours if they got arrested/abducted.
> you'd have to ensure that Telegram isn't keeping some sort of deletion log.
This is a different issue and FWIW that's why I don't personally use Telegram. There's no verification so no trust. But that doesn't mean that the deletion tool can be useful in certain contexts if the implementation is correct. No reason to throw the baby out with the bath water. It is about the probability of reducing self incrimination, not guaranteeing.
There's a reason big companies/government employers want root access to your phone and will wipe data if it is lost or stolen. Because it reduces the chance that company/state secrets. No one thinks it is a guarantee. But if given the choice of "revealing a secret" vs "rolling a dice to see if I reveal a secret or not" I'm going with the latter no matter the odds.
> You're protesting with people. Cops pick them up, but not you. You can delete their messages and it is likely that you are able to do so before the police can clone your phone or copy the messages (screenshot, whatever).
I got a few strange responses back:
- Deleting messages doesn't mean they can't be saved (yeah... this is probabilistic privacy, not guaranteed)
- My device, my data (okay?)
- Some people run custom apps that save everything (how does that apply here? Funny enough, a sibling comment said something similar)
- Just own up to your typos (-_____-)
- Don't use Signal for communication then because you can't be guaranteed privacy (great, I'll use smoke signals with my friends to organize)
To be fair to Signal, the devs did not get into the forums. To also be fair, Signal is taking the same position and is going to only allow deletion an hour after a message was sent. As much as I love Signal, it is my preferred messaging app, I think they are not in touch with the needs of people. We should look at why people are turning to Telegram when protesting. What can we do to better preserve the privacy of people protesting in HK, Belarus, America, etc? Everything is probabilistic security and privacy when it comes down to it. But what tools would help these people the most? I would argue that bidirectional deletion to reduce the chance of self incrimination is one of them. The other is group messaging, channels, and anonymous messages (so your phone number isn't visible in channels). Emojis are nice and fun for day to day use, but it is getting more and more important to push these other features (yes, I know they are extremely difficult to do and actually preserve privacy to the standard Signal currently does. I think many would be fine if it was an incremental increase in privacy with these newer features).
- the UI should hide e2e/“reallyprivate” conversations by default - as in "not visible anywhere" (edit: unless the app is in the foreground and you are chatting of course)
Unless you:
- do the “add a new user/conversation" - then instead of adding mail/GUID/phone you add a whatevercanberemembered number/emoji/sentence that unlocks the private conversation you initiated long before
There should be no trace in the UI that private conversations are going on.
What does HN think ? Why hasn't it been done before ?
Edit: there could even be notifications disguised as another app (news subscriptions, medical reminders, battery low, etc.)
Security by obscurity is never a win.
Rather I'd change the GP's solution to having a secret vault in an already encrypted chat system (so you can do the above), essentially making it two layers. Just the second layer isn't a button that says "look at me, I'm where all the real secret shit is."
I agree that security through obscurity isn't a winning solution, but it is part of the toolkit. It would just be dumb to rely on your security solely being obscurity. Encrypted steganography is still a powerful tool, hackers obscure code, and real spies use obscurity all the time. It just isn't the dominant factor.
Hmmm. What about from the get-go saying that the app allocates 100Mbytes of space and fills it randomly at regular time until some encrypted content is generated. That'd put a 100Mbytes log/message limit to conversations but that'd be by design and nobody could be sure those bytes are random or genuine messages.
> If the phone is jailbroken and the key for the message logs is leaked, it doesn't help at all.
Why would the key get leaked if it's never stored ?
Sadly, this has been true of Signal for a long time. Signal marches only to its own beat, and is quite slow to address real needs of most people.
Every single person I know who uses Telegram does it for either porn or piracy or both. So using what you already have for protests if they occur makes sense. Trying to get ppl to install a different app is much more complicated at this point. Sometimes may even be prevented by the regime.
What it also is here is male. I haven't met a single woman in Germany who'd have the app.
In telegram it is understood that 'secret chats' constitutes confidentiality. As such, both parties, I believe, ought to be able to delete everything.
I kind of see you point about non-secret chats.
But then we are back with a opt-in model for privacy.
Personally: what I tell you at the coffee machine, in confidence or not, is ephemeral. I would probably not talk to you at all if you where taperecording all conversations, as you want to do with messages... so I think both.parties.should be able to delete text conversations. And privacy should be on by default.
> I would probably not talk to you at all if you where taperecording all conversations
You hit the nail on the head with this one. To me deletion is a nice compromise and why the coffee shop analogy isn't a good comparator. Similarly we don't record video calls (and Moxie himself doesn't like this). So why should every text be recorded and parties do not have control over that data? I do feel that each person in the conversation has a right to control that data (if anything the sender more so) and when policy fails it should fail in the direction that has more privacy (which is the message not existing within Signal's log^). But currently people aren't given this choice and there is no consideration of failure modes.
^ Careful wording because if I don't make this added comment people think I'm unaware that screenshots exist.
I don't really make that distinction, I think it's harmful to have E2E as optional, and only use platforms than have either mandatory E2E encryption (Signal, WhatsApp), or no E2E encryption (SMS, email).
If you have an in-person conversation with me in confidence, that doesn't grant you any additional powers to make me forget details of the conversation.
> Personally: what I tell you at the coffee machine, in confidence or not, is ephemeral. I would probably not talk to you at all if you where taperecording all conversations, as you want to do with messages...
What if I have a very good memory, and follow conversations by writing up their details in personal memos that you can't delete? (e.g. Comey's contemporary memos of conversations he had with Trump.)
> so I think both.parties.should be able to delete text conversations. And privacy should be on by default.
The problem for you is that I'm not going to agree to that - if you won't use Signal, I'm going to force a downgrade to SMS or email, and then you get even worse security and privacy.
If you want to have a conversation that can't be recorded in an automated way, you basically need to meet in a sauna.
Or we will set up e2e encrypted telegram. Or not talk.
> What if I have a very good memory, and follow conversations by writing up their details
You saying that you remember I said something, even took a screenshot vs you can prove I said something, is a big difference.
If I am doing a snowden, I might go to a sauna. If I am planning to overthrow my boss, I think e2e telegram is okay. Because I can delete the conversation it might even be preferable to signal.
Use cases and threat models...
'Congressional investigators determined that "targeting of US political figures would not occur by accident, but was designed into the system from the start."'
So yeah that might still be going on. Signal etc. make it harder but it's not like the NSA isn't hacking endpoints so hard to say if it's actually secure. We can only hope the next Snowden will let us know if NSA's spying on the opposing political party.
My kids tested sending https://kamalaharris.info and https://joebiden.info to each other on Instagram, in private messages. The sender would see that the message was successfully sent, but it would never arrive.
Another case is that the person who ran the primary campaign for Kamala Harris now works at Twitter, where he blocked an opponent's campaign account.
This isn't good advice for trying to show someone their messages aren't being sent in clear text. It could be encrypted using a weak cipher or have other implementation bugs that make it trivial for a nation state to decrypt it. You need to be able to look at the application's source code to tell what encryption it's using and if it's secure enough.
Sure they can encrypt E2E but they don't. Most chats on Telegram are unencrypted. Huge channels like the one mentioned above are full of agents and nothing prevents them from taking screenshots.
Don't spread false security.
Maybe I'm stupid for not realizing or looking it up before chosing Telegram. Luckily there are a lot of other apps out there in the same space that do this better. Have switched to Signal now and really like it! Privacy should never be an opt-in feature like in Telegram!
So that would include world famous professional cryptographers like Bruce Schneier and Matt Green. Meanwhile the people recommending Telegram are random usernames on internet forums. It sounds like you're the only one who doesn't know what they're talking about.
"Anyone can start a private chat encrypted end-to-end"
This is such a shill talking point. Telegram doesn't even support E2EE for groups. Every dissident groups leaks 100% of its chats to server with no possibility to opt-out.
People who join later only see messages from a while before they joined though so that helps a bit but only a bit.
This is customizable and can be disabled, so that new members do not see any messages from before they joined.
1. arrest person.
2. torture until you get the chat app unlocked. (which is readily verifiable and very practical to get with torture).
3. arrest everyone else based on the chats after cross-referencing telegram accounts and phone company records.
~~By default~~ Telegram's group chats used to organize protests aren't E2EE. If Belarusian government hacks Telegram server, they can read every dissident group's chat history trivially.
Telegram group messages are not end-to-end encrypted.
Telegram desktop messages are not end-to-end encrypted.
Telegram's messages are never end-to-end encrypted by default.
Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
What you've counterpointed doesn't exactly negate what I said. There are no Belarus state controlled or regionally located Telegram servers. I fully understand and take that risk that server side code is manipulable, and I also fully know they are able to edit open conversations from the server and this has been done. Still a better alternative to choose a foreign state adversarial network these days and to choose E2E and do as best you can to use a throwaway number than to choose something that's been gamed by your own state, for fun and for profit to eavesdrop all conversations out of the gate, or use backdoored WhatsApp. Choose all throwaway, blend in, and don't talk too much.
If you fear such a reprisal then in being afraid you have only your life to save. If you try and make it succeed then you have everything to gain.
It is total gamble, but there seems to be little choice now for the Belorussian people: a chance at freedom or worse reprisals.
If Russia so overtly threw money at organising American riots it would be front page news. There's been a year of mass unrest and yellow vest riots in France yet Marcons junta still reigns supreme.
Also, the article is not about people exchanging messages, it's about telegram channels read by many.
In Turkey, they arrested people who had the ByLock app installed. It didn't matter how people had used it. Having installed it was enough.
All the security services need is to find one protesters phone force the person to unlock it and they have it all.
I am sure all network traffic of any kind was heavily monitored too.
It also becomes entirely useless when the authority turns off the internet.
There is another one that can work with a Bluetooth mesh https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsi...
That Bluetooth is easy to notice and I’m the past was easy to listen in on. I presume that is better now.
Also group chat has a search feature for all time.
Don't use real name in profiles. You can also set Telegram to show your profile picture only to your contacts and also choose to not share it with specific users or groups in the privacy settings.
> Also group chat has a search feature for all time.
This is managed by the group administrator when setting up the group to either limit history to new members or provide all history to new members.
This is true for all apps regardless of how good their network encryption is. With Telegram it's possible to delete messages for everyone. Not so in some other apps.
If the phone is in airplane mode, or faraday bag it's not receiving any "delete message" commands.
Also, with Telegram the case is, when the Belarusian, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, US... intelligence agency compromises the server, they can see every group message of every group, because by design Telegram's group chats never use E2EE.
Every cryptographer agrees Telegram's encryption is shit. Let's start believing them.
Dissent is very damn cheap with modern communications infastructure and can exist with and without it.
The only funding the CIA certainly provided was historical general purpose funding of computers and cryptography research. Calling it planned would certainly be a stretch.
However, both TFA and other things I've read about Belarus have a very "Euromaidan"/"Kong Tsung-gan" flavor to them. This is the sort of thing CIA does. They publicly claim this is the sort of thing they should do. Why would they be sitting this one out?
CIA does a lot of things, but they are not the only ones, and they can't be everywhere at once.
If that ever happens, we'll know democracy in the US is under threat.
Telegram is not US controlled. There is no crackdown from the "establishment". Except if you meant only in situations where there is widespread unrest? If it is not relevant to Facebook here in the US in the first place.
Not to get political or anything, but with the clear election interference with dismantling the USPS and removing sorting machines only in swing states it's clearer than ever that democracy is already currently under threat.
I really think that’s just a personal project of a Russian billionaire that has enough free time and pretty much unlimited resources.
We also can't claim he's secretly handing all non-end-to-end encrypted group chats and one-on-one messages to Kremlin, or that he's an oligarch who made his money by spying on Vkontakte users. We also can't say it's extremely suspicious his arrest warrant only lasted two months, or that journalists who visited Telegram offices in Dubai heard the company Telegram shared floor with had never even seen Telegram employees enter the offices. There is no evidence Telegram is an intelligence agency front. None. We should periodically remind people of this.
To better understand who Durov is, look up the story about him throwing money to a crowd out of a window of his VK office.
He also believed that foreigners should be able to buy land in Russia to create small states within the country.
I would not (and I do not) believe in good intentions of this guy, at all. And in fact it is you (or Durov himself) who should provide a proof that Telegram is not getting funded by governments, being one of the most popular communication tools around. Especially after the failed ICO. The source of funds should be transparent.
Not a billionaire, at most 2-3 hundred megabucks cash as his Russian assets are rendered effectively worthless, and he burned himself a lot trying himself in investments, real estate, and, in general, burning money on expensive things, including telegram, like no tomorrow.
I am still very suspicious at how he managed to flout around Kremlin for so long.
His first successful project (VK) was founded and gained popularity partially using money of really weird investors some of whom were related to Kremlin.
Also keep in mind that Russia was just a kleptocracy until around 2008-2010 and only after 2012 when Putin decide to get back presidency everything started to go really sour. So it's not surprise they taken control of the company away from him shortly after.
Telegram it’s currently a business and Durov keeps the control...
Because you made a definitive claim without providing any evidence, or even your line of reasoning.
(FWIW: I prefer Signal.)
Yes: in Telegrams case I might possibly, maybe at some time be taken advantage of.
In WhatsApps case it would surprise everyone greatly if one isn't - sooner or later - take advantage of.
FWIW you can also create multiple groups with the same person(s) so you can keep one "group" chat with your spouse for chores, shopping lists etc and another for photos of the kids, birthday planning, funny stuff etc.
This probably works in most messengers though, but it is a nice hack anyway.
This was all in the news: Facebook lying about not being able to connect WhatsApp and Facebook, then trying to weasel their way out of their previous statements.
For all the problems Telegram has they don't seen to have our raw messages more than GMail has your raw emails.
Yep: unlike WhatsApp and Signal they can, technically produce them. (Edit: I forgot to mention: WhatsApp chat logs gets uploaded unencrypted to American Cloud providers. I have less against the police and Americans than many other here but lets not pretend end-to-end encryption helps for anything when you backup the data unencrypted with everyones favourite villain it seems: NSA)
And yes: like with GMail if Telegram has done exactly what they said and done it properly it would probably take cooperation of at least two sysadmins on different teams and it woumd also probably trigger alarms east and west.
At least that is my understanding.
A non-profit just means profit isn’t their goal.
https://core.telegram.org/bots/payments
Update, from the doc: «Telegram does not charge any commission for using the Payments API.»
The thing you bring up here however is my main issue with Telegram: I want it to be sustainable line WhatsApp once was.
Or maybe I should say that 2020 is a disappointment, from a 2005 perspective. The internet was supposed to be free. The ability to use it for political change democratically was supposed to be built in, innate.
This wasn't supposed to be a rare and fortunate blip, a soon-to-be-closed loophole in an app that . Internal security office around the world are currently reviewing their susceptibility to Telegram-based "attacks."
Even in democratic countries, we're increasingly seeing the internet's ability to lead to political organizing as dubious... something that must be controlled.
I don't want to waste your time on how i moved 30 people to Signal and preached about security and signal being the best pick on the market. Hell, even my family is on Signal.
Now, let me tell you this. The `anti censorship switch` did not work during the internet hiccup. In a moment all that fancy stuff just ended up being.... useless.
So check this out, i have family members living outside Belarus, they have Signal installed. But i am not able to message quite blatantly simple phrase "i am all right!".
Next thing happened i fired up Telegram, hooked up SOCKS5 proxy and was capable to reach out my family members and asked friends to go on Twitter and get @signalapp's attention same evening outage started. Zero reaction.
Signal was and is dead silent. This makes me think that, come on, people Signal caters to the USA users only. They won't care for others. Moxxie denouncing american police for their brutality, you've been to Chernobyl, you know what Eastern bloc looks like. Guys over here are three times more fierce than yours. But your company somehow makes a statement to accommodate local protesters, now what have you done to aid anything outside of cozy California?
Lesson i've learned, that on the verge of something Belarus experienced last week, Signal has zero value.
I even own the debug logs to send 'em so they will figure why the censorship circumvention wasn't working, but i'm drop dead sure i won't hear from them. Not being a hothead to get rid of Signal straight away but definitely i have to tell you my trust in Telegram's resilience grown
You need to explicitly start secret chat (under More button on the contact page) to opt-in for E2EE, something you get by default in every Whatsapp chat.
Telegram is really really well made ux wise though, scales effortlessly and is in use anyway for everything else in certain groups so it is easy to reach for.
What do you have against Telegram? Do you have a competing app, or are you concerned about security?
Everybody (atleast on HN) knows it is not e2ee. They don't use it for security. They know Signal is more secure. Telegram has insane features.
I use Telegram for unlimited file sharing, pirating movies not available in my country, bots. nothing personal
that's so stupid.
why people here keeps arguing that Signal crypto is safer when its architecture is SO unsafe?
Or if anyone hacks Telegram server, you're also screwed.
Telegram knows who you are and who you talk to, they store your contact list. Signal knows who you are, but they don't store your contact list.
Also, Signal is already working on usernames. Your criticism is just silly.
Why is that being brought up as difference?
All the clients suck, features are missing/buggy, nobody is sure if it is supposed to be a discord/slack or whataspp replacement, giving a half-ass implementation of both, and confusing to users security stuff(asks random users about their keys).
That being said, I still love the project and hope they sort out their UX problems.
Matrix on-boarding is more complicated and would probably require hand holding through which client and server to use.
Signal is definitely more secure than Telegram, but the latter has a far better user interface, API, and social ecosystem, which gives rise to massive networks effects that are simply not available in Signal.
https://community.signalusers.org/t/beta-feedback-for-the-up...
The community forums are a wonderful place to follow the development BTW.
It is a real platform.
I guess it's because Durov attended the St. Petersburg military academy and studied propaganda and information warfware that makes him such a chef when it comes to the latter.
https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/releases
Only the clients are open source, but anyone could use the source code to create their own network.
IMHO red flags. However I still have not encountered a messaging app which does group chats with somewhat complete feature set in groups.
Signal won’t let you moderate groups for example. (No admin role where you can ban somebody or delete messages)
What Telegram did: 1. Started sending pushes from Google services with new IP addresses for their app. 2. They started using IPv6, turns out gov cannot detect them. 3. Also, they added support of SOCKS5 proxy to their app.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia Russian version has more details.
Of course there was a lot of technical shenanigans going to block their IP addresses and proxy servers, but everyone understood that's is very fruitless attempt.
Oh and they fully unblocked it when Durov's TON network was destroyed by SEC in the US. Very soon after event Telegram official representative went to Kremlin and poof: Telegram is unblocked.
They have asked Apple and Google to remove Telegram from appstore. - https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17406178/russia-telegram-...
Thousands of essential services have stopped working and internet in the country came to a standstill for days. Many were pissed off and loosing money, including folks working for the government, so it was not tenable to continue.
Do you have any proof for the Kremlin visit is it as unsubstantiated as the rest of your post?
> Thousands of essential services have stopped working and internet in the country came to a standstill for days. Many were pissed off and loosing money, including folks working for the government, so it was not tenable to continue.
> Do you have any proof for the Kremlin visit is it as unsubstantiated as the rest of your post?
https://www.rbc.ru/business/10/07/2020/5f08406a9a7947867c1d9...
Russia basically trained tg and more importantly it's users to work this way to the extent when further blocking would harm the network infrastructure itself.
Actually, availability at 9-10 does not really matter, people were already intended to protest by that time.
How are they using Telegram without internet?
Tech propaganda at its best.
Technology is only a tool, and is only as good as what people actually do with it. But it can be a crucial tool that changes everything.
Calling it "{arbitrary brand} revolution", when pretty much every messaging platform is indistinguishable feels crass and tacky. The brand isn't the one in the trenches making the sacrifices.
It could be called a smart phone revolution instead. A revolution of the people.
- location based chats, you see people around and can start a local group. So you can easily get in contact with other protestors around you.
- Broadcasting channels
- Not by default, but you can creat encrypted chats, with auto destruction
- Since a few days, encrypted video calls
- Not owned by Facebook
"nine out of ten Egyptians and Tunisians responded to a poll that they used Facebook to organise protests and spread awareness" [1]
"During the Arab Spring the number of users of social networks, especially Facebook, rose dramatically in most Arab countries, particularly in those where political uprising took place, with the exception of Libya, which at the time had low Internet access preventing people from doing so" [1]
As far as I'm aware Facebook is actually owned by Facebook.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...
Keyword "public". It is the same useful for protests as it was then.
And you have a huge difference between Facebook 2010 and 2020.
Careful though, since video calls are currently in alpha.
Also, I installed Telegram for the explicit purpose of following the events in Belarus directly from sources. By doing that I noticed that apparently the local press in my country have done the same, as it seemed that most of the updates in online media have come from the same Telegram channels. So, it has also served the role of information dissemination beyond the borders of Belarus at a time when journalists working there were harassed and sometimes imprisoned.
I also read that most of the VPNs wouldn't work, with the exception of psiphon.
You might be thinking of FireChat.
Reportedly, Telegram has kept working when other apps did not.
That makes it a "telegram revolution".
Same logic would apply if, say, a camera company had tried to brand Selma.
this is the exact same narrative that took place when the Arab Spring happened. What determines the success of revolutions isn't what makes the news media, it's what happens on day 1 after the revolution is over and the cameras are turned off
...authorities shut off the internet, leaving Belarusians with almost no access to independent online news outlets or social media and protesters seemingly without a leader. That’s where Telegram — which often remains available despite internet outages, touts the security of messages shared in the app and has been used in other protest movements — came in. Some of its channels helped unconnected, scattered rallies mature into well-coordinated action.
Or these folks can coordinate with protestors in other parts of the world, to raise awareness and stop consumers from buying from a dictatorship.
- Keyboard warrior? This is a crime in any country including the the US. Can you imagine what it will do to you in a country like China?
>"Or these folks can coordinate with protesters in other parts of the world, to raise awareness and stop consumers from buying from a dictatorship."
- What prevents you from not buying from a dictatorship now? Do you need to be directed by people from Tibet about it?
Usually, the way this problem is overcome is that rioters show up to peaceful protests and engage in a sort of signalling game to other would-be rioters. The usual trigger to begin the riot is the sound of shattering glass. Until someone is ready to throw that first brick, you aren't likely to see much of anything.
Authoritarian countries know all this and they try very hard to prevent riots by banning all peaceful protests. Much harder to start a riot when there aren't any people on the streets to give cover.
So, the fact that it happens to be a popular solution for encrypted chat right now doesn't really speak to its necessity for any revolution like you and the article seem to be implying. Easy access to encryption technology in general, sure, but that doesn't specifically need to be Telegram.
The adversary in their case is mostly limited to beating up random people and picking on those that take a public stand against the regime.
Turns out it's more important that it works at all and not whether the security is perfect.
Supergroups and channels don't have expectation of privacy. They're not about protecting the content but about spreading sousveillance material, message etc. There only your anonymity matters so you can be safe with burner SIM + burner phone + Tor.
But immediately when you step into realm of confidentiality E2EE matters and Telegram becomes a piece of shit software. No E2EE for groups, desktop clients, or for anything by default. Small dissident groups greatly benefit from E2EE when Belarusian government can't read their conversation by just hacking a single server.
Both are important. Signal isn't about non-private mass-messaging like channels and supergroups so it's not going to offer those. Telegram could be fantastic for channels and supergroups if it used Tor by default and didn't ask for phone number. But it doesn't, and it tries to do too many things while ignoring too many security problems. Turns out that's a recipe to a disaster. See e.g. how CCA tracked Telegram users in Hong Kong, and how Telegram failed to enable the protective measures for users by default.
This is the rsync v Dropbox of messaging applications.
Yes, unencrypted social features that could just as easily be serviced by any other social networking app which hasn't been explicitly banned yet (and that could happen to Telegram at any time).
> It's that Telegram operates under harsher network conditions.
So their operators claim. But it's not clear why that would be true and I haven't seen any numbers to demonstrate it either. Have you?
Telegram had to survive Russia's attempt to ban it, so it evolved a number of strategies: using push notifications to deliver IP-adresses of not-yet-blocked servers, using socks-proxies, the evolution of the MTProto Proxy encrypted protocol, and finally resorting to steganography to mimic ordinary https traffic, thus evading the DPI.
The attempts of the state censorship agency to block the telegram servers were hilarious to watch: at one point they had 0.5% of the IPv4 address space banned, and broke a lot of stuff (AWS, Google, DigitalOcean, OVH, etc). Telegram was still working, of course.
The IP-address delivery via push notification was a nice idea, if they'd only be on that level with their E2EE deployment.
As opposed to a general populace pushed to an edge by extreme conditions and leadership which does the exact wrong thing in a circumstance.
* citation needed
> “Telegram channels and websites that don’t belong to our government are the main source of information today as we cannot at all rely on state media,” said Roman Semenov, who follows the NEXTA channels and joined a rally in central Minsk on Wednesday evening. “It’s a Telegram revolution.”
On top of that this is article detailing how this particular technology, has made a significant impact for the protesters.
“The fate of the country has never depended so much on one [piece] of technology,” Viacorka said.
There have been a number of articles and news coverage of this topic. That this one article focused on the technology aspect of the protesters and protesting does not make it, "tech propaganda."
Signal focuses on secure communication, Telegram has a secure communication feature... But also a social network of group chats and channels that link to each other; and that's the focus of this article.
The other use cases of Telegram could be serviced by other apps. There are plenty of non-E2E social networks available just like Telegram.
EDIT: Unfortunately postmodernbrute I am not able to reply to your comment. But I am not trying to deny that Telegram has caught a wave of popularity among Belarusians and others. What I am saying is that Telegram likely only has that trust because of puff pieces like this. It is not because of any technological superiority or unique feature that it provides (since it isn't/there aren't any).
Also Telegram was more-or-less resistant to at least not leak any personal information of their users in ex-USSR. So it's works well enough for protesters threat model.
This is akin to stealing valor (basically stealing medals and pretending to be the honorable).
This type of valor stealing, is also happening when people call US border detention facilities as 'Nazi concentration camps'. For people whose family members went through a Nazi concentration camp, hearing such a comparing is painful.
For Byelorussians whose livers and kidneys were raptured by the beatings, whose loved ones are imprisoned -- hearing Telegram marketing spin is painful, like when their valor, their sacrifice is stolen.
Yes of course, without recording technology, in my view, we would not have successful type of investigative journalism that project Veritas has delivered.
Or, without cell phones, the ability of people of Belarus to share images of brutality with the world.
Technology, is helping to concentrate the will power of the masses, against well funded machines of system oppressions.
But the will of the people, their sacrifices, their sufferings -- is the driving force -- not Telegram
In fact it is a Telegram revolution, because Telegram is the tool that is allowing this rage to become organized. That doesn't minimize anything about the protesting or the political situation itself. That's not marketing, it's just recognizing the tool.
I was with you until this comment.
What the Jews went through is horrible beyond words.
What immigrant families are going through is also horrible.
They may not be systematically murdered like the Jews being sent to gas chambers, and they may not be sterilized like the Uighurs, but they are still suffering. Families are being separated forever. Lost children will never be given back to their parents. That's not okay.
Don't trivialize human suffering. Condemn it. Don't turn it into an analogy where you can praise those that suffered the most. Who are you to know how any of this feels? We're not trying to win some contest here - the result we're after is the end of suffering.
Your "successful investigative journalism" is more widely recognized as a "right-wing disinformation outfit". O'Keefe and his organization have been repeatedly shown to have fabricated stories, solicited fraudulent activity, and deceptively edited recordings. Their activities are politically motivated propaganda, not journalism.
That's what Lukashenko is using to imprison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siarhei_Tsikhanouski .
Who ran a blog and youtube channel, recording, often without the knowledge of the person he was talking too.
It is the same style of investigative journalism as Project Veritas, O'Keefe are using to show the true colors of the people, actions and ideologies hiding, conveniently, behind a banner of a 'legitimate' political party (who also, unlike Lukashenko, have access to far greater resources, including Wikipedia to 'clean up')
I hoped to get across 3 points with my previous post:
a) what's happening in Belarus is systemic, medieval-style suppression of the populous, voter abuse, and political imprisonments.
And the argument that used by Lukashenko, is the same as @dukswuff is used against Project Veritas...
b) One of the imprisoned leaders, exposed the methods of the tyranny, using the same approach as investigative journalism (involving recordings) as Project Veritas, O'Keefe is doing in US.
Technology is important there, but not more or equal to the heroism of the people doing it. And, at least for me, the more dare the retribution, the more heroic actions are of the journalist.
c) Telegram marketing spin manipulating words, trying to assigning the heroism and suffering of the victims -- to their platform.
Just like some in US are using heroism and suffering of the victims in Nazi concentration camps (who did not choose to go there), equating that to people crossing US border illegally and being detained.
This is stealing of valor.
It is being perpetrated in western media daily for many years, and often spills over to events like Democratic National Convention.
====
I am also going add one more point.
The statements Lukashenko is making about Byelorussian's duty to support him, so not dissimilar to the argument Biden is making about the duty of African-Americans to to support his candidacy.
The marks are that similar.
Then Moscow had a giant demonstration on Red Square and that’s right around the time Putin blinked and started cracking down on such platforms and free speech.
Of course, for those who remember, Telegram was started by Pavel Durov, the “Zuckerberg of Russia” who refused to give out details of VKontakte users, and the mail.ru conglomerate took his company, while he fled to France and started Telegram. Roskomnadzor tried unsuccessfully to ban it in Russia, and inadvertently banned colocated AWS servers hosting LinkedIn etc.
There's a pretty big and well known country that is blaming the election of its president on interference of another country through social media. It seems pretty credible the same social media can have promoted protests in more unstable countries.
Seriously, it'd be nice if we could have one thread about Telegram without S-advocates showing up and complaining about "security". Yes, we know Telegram isn't as secure, yadda yadda yadda. Now if only Signal provided half the features Telegram does, maybe non-cryptonerds would have heard of it.
While I have you: Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Out of honesty however, I should tell you that I value my anonymity and don't want an extensive posting history to be used to track and identify me. As pg said, keep your online footprint small, yadda yadda. So I can space out the intervals at which I make accounts but I can't promise I won't vanish the identity I created after a while.
Also, Signal is getting those features, at slower pace sure because it's not trivial to do things securely, but at least there's zero technical debt compared to Telegram, who can't suddenly drop all insecure features, nor implement E2EE without starting basically from scratch.
Maybe if Telegram provided the security Signal does you wouldn't have concerned people telling about Signal ;)
When Telegram does it over there it's called "Liberation"
It’s a foreign led insurrection that we should all oppose. That people in this thread label it a revolution just goes to show how easily truth can be perverted.
Seems to me he’s a threat to their Corona agenda, that's why he must go.
One might wonder if perhaps some government who wanted nukes on Russia's border might expend some effort into discrediting an election of somebody who was blocking that objective.
Telegram accounts can be made in an automated manner, for somebody sufficiently motivated.
https://social.techjunkie.com/use-telegram-without-phone-num...