Telegram's getting ads
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
if you go to the founders post https://t.me/durov/142
It clearly says ads will be for the 1:many public community channels and not the private 1:1 and group chats. Other ways of funding will be premium services for businesses and premium stickers.
Sounds reasonable to me
To this end I havent seen a good explanation from Telegram as to why they have taken this route given there are so many proven & battle tested methods and algorithms. "We havent been hacked yet" doesnt seem good enough for me.
1:1 messages aren't e2e by default and group messages dont support e2e.
For these reasons about encryption I dont like it but their UI/UX is the absolute best.
Someone has to roll crypto.
Did Signal roll their own?
Kids these days, can't keep up with fashion
Telegram's on the other hand, can't be continually audited, but the MTProto scheme they put together has been found to have a number of flaws [1], and that hasn't changed. They also haven't really allowed third-party audit of their actual code, so there may or may not be extra bugs waiting to bite you.
So, yes. He (or any of the other 6 world champion coders that were bragged about) designed a broken protocol. Broken, as in "trivial access to the plain text by the server", which is pretty damn awful.
When people say that telegram rolled their own crypto that mean that they chose weird crypto primitives, weird key handling and generation and combined them in a way that made people go "whoa! That looks weird" and defended it by refering to their own world championship victories, by extension saying that people were to stupid to understand.
And 6 months later their protocol was shown to be broken.
Use telegram all you like. Don't say that their encryption is even close to being the gold standard.
They say it is for speed. Looking at how fast Telegram is, I can say it worked for them. It is the most reliable app that works on slow internet for me.
https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-why-did-you-go-for-a-cus...
Telegram is the fastest messenger on my 3 year old phone and is significantly faster than the other 6 messengers on it (some of them are e2ee and some only TLS encrypted.
What you are experiencing is probably "just" UI.
That's because end-to-end encrypted chats are only available on a single device, since the e2e keys are not shared between devices. Most users switch between devices and like to have everything stored in the cloud, so having that as the default is the obvious convenience.
Anybody who is concerned about e2e can easily start a secret chat for that purposes, at the expense of cloud functionality.
It's not like we can't do instant messaging without ads. I have used IRC every day for the past 15 years. Not every project needs a business model to work and not every approach is justified because the business needs it.
People watching the US Professional Football Championships primarily to see the ads and watching movie trailers voluntarily (which are ads) seem to disprove your suggestion.
Messaging has costs, especially if it includes proxying media, or verifying control of phone numbers. If the costs aren't too big, it's find not to have a business model, but if the costs are large, a business model enables longevity.
That's different to me than unsolicited advertising.
For instance, Instagram’s targeting has realized that I like outdoorsy products, and even though I don’t buy the products, sometimes they inspire me to find a way to recreate the item myself.
In my opinion your POV is very dismissive of all the good work product design foundries the world over have been doing.
The whole advertising industry is now predicated on gaming people's attention, wants, and financial vulnerabilities. I also don't see how not wanting to see ads is dismissive of product design foundries. Just because you've designed a good product does not mean you're entitled to my attention or my time.
And the whole point is they show me things I don’t know I wanted, so a search doesn’t solve the problem — I’d only search if I knew I wanted something.
Someone will always have to foot the bill, and telegram has been doing so for free for the last 8 years.
Many popular Telegram channels already have ads in them, posted by their creators. My understanding is that Telegram will be taking control of this by acting as an intermediary, taking a cut and possibly deciding what goes through. Thinking of it, it makes sense, and doesn't alter the UX at all for the average user.
If you like guitars, you can visit a good, large online guitar store, say once a week, and you will always be up to date. Same for swimsuits.
I don't understand why people act like they can avoid ads, and enjoy a free service.
Hopefully there is a paid option that hides ads. Would you pay for it?
The Google founders were pretty idealistic when they started too and no doubt many swore by their intentions.
I've also seen him run monetization at VK. Basically: there was one developer responsible for ads, and he sat in another office together with financial staff because of the different values.
If there's one thing Telegram isn't good at, it's having a UX that respect its users. If that was the case, it would be possible to opt out of notifications from group chats and still receive notifications for private chats, but it's not. This forces one to juggle with multiple accounts if they want to both join public groups and also use it for regular chats.
They already put engagement over respect for their users, I don't have much confidence they won't ruin it even more with ads.
Uh, it's possible, and has always been? In the Android client at least, there's a group of big honking toggles under "notifications and sounds" that do just that.
TG has in my opinion the best UI and functionality of all chat-apps available too.
On iOS's half baked implementation of notifications, not sure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)#Encryption_p...
[2] https://threatpost.com/signal-audit-reveals-protocol-cryptog...
[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013.pdf [PDF]
Telegram feels like it's adding something new every few months, though the documentation over the features is poor since it's mostly through announcements. It's also a lot more customizable. I ultimately settled on Telegram because it was a good balance of feature-rich and crypto (when you use it)
That being said, it was hard enough to get a small group of friends to transition to Telegram. Signal would be much harder due to not having so many niceties.
I wish both to continue competing against each other, though. It's great to have choices that aren't owned by the big corporations.
It seems hard to add a rogue device to an existing user's account without them knowing. The 5-digit login code is sent by SMS only when there is no other devices logged into Telegram in the account. In all other cases the user will be notified by seeing the confirmation code message on their Telegram app.
One can add a password as an authentication factor for their Telegram account also. Just in case the login code is intercepted.
This error seems to happen a lot more often, when i send messages via Signal Desktop.
https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
Consider using Matrix instead.
It might be easier, so what? Apple's products are supposedly more privacy-oriented than the Facebook's/Google's. So what? The idea is that we should be rooting/encouraging others to put decentralization and freedom as a top-priority choice, not to keep excusing ourselves into adopting solutions that are bound to become another dominant walled garden.
If you want to argue for Matrix vs XMPP, or XMPP vs SIP or any other decentralized protocol, by all means go ahead. Just please don't come with "I like Matrix, but here is a completely lazy cop-out that I will use to justify to not fight the good fight"
Matrix has a long way to go before getting people to join is "easy". Theyve done great work over this year to get that done, but its far from perfect.
Fight the good fight but dont forget what makes an app attract users. Even now on matrix, when you sign up, matrix.org is the default server. If majority go about signing up without changing that, you end up with a centralized service.
It on us the tech savvy to identify these issues, educate and help them overcome them, and ideally contribute for these issues to be solved in the first place. This gives us progress and freedom. Saying "matrix is hard/incomplete, let's just stick in the golden cage" gives us convenience, but no progress.
100% conversion rate. Stop with excuses and Just. Ask. Them. In fact even if I have no paying customers at all for communick I wouldn't still shut it down just so my friends and family can continue using it.
Over the years I myself have been converted to Signal, Telegram (encrypted chats), Threema, some kind of encrypted IRC and OTR on at least two other messengers, Google Wave, Google Talk, Viber, ... can't remember them all. I have no idea anymore what person prefers which app and since most of those people weren't the very best of friends, contact to almost all of them has effectively ceased (in part because those specific people don't often start conversations themselves), which is a pity, but it's simply really bothersome to cater to everyone's preferences, and I absolutely can't and won't switch to $other_app fully myself, because I really value being able to talk to all my acquaintances and friends and relatives and being able to stay in touch with new ones easily and frictionlessly, and pretty much everyone is on Whatsapp, and all I need is a phone number.
If some people categorically don't value other people who don't use their preferred app, that totally weirds me out. Their choice, but not one I'm willing to make, especially since that notion of freedom I gain feels like a very, very abstract kind of freedom in a world where billions use Whatsapp for next to anything and all sorts of devices, apps and websites from all sorts of brands and sources phone home lots and lots of data, which also means eschewing Whatsapp doesn't matter a thing unless I make dozens of other painfull choices like opting out of all mainstream social media, complex privacy-centric browser setups that need constant attention to not fall behind, no mainstream phone (possibly no smartphone at all), no smart devices at all, Linux exclusively, etc. pp., otherwise I'll just leak data like a sieve elsewhere. Given that I gain what feels like very little, life just feels too short for this.
> If some people categorically don't value other people who don't use their preferred app, that totally weirds me out.
Who said anything about judging/not valuing other people by their preferred app? I am not claiming exclusivity. I still have WhatsApp on my phone for contacts and groups who are not close enough to me for me to ask them to use a different app.
The point I am trying to make is that if everyone (including privacy-sensitive, tech-savvy people) keep this apathy in regards to their digital hygiene, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and there is no way we will ever get out of this mess. I presume anyone on Hacker News can and know how to do better, and we should be the ones in the front lines fighting for more open systems instead of passively waiting for some magical benevolent entity to save us from Big Tech.
No, it’s on IM app developers. And not ideally, but today. Nobody is buying into tomorrow’s promises, the quicker signal/matrix will understand it, the better for everyone. Tell them.
My argument is that the inferior usability is not an intrinsic issue of federated systems, just circunstancial. Being closed/centralized on the other hand, is an intrinsic property of all major platforms, and any of these major platforms will screw its users whenever they have enough lock-in.
So, I am not saying simply that open is good and closed is bad. What I am saying is that open should be preferred and promoted.
And no, people working on open systems should not just sit on their asses and say "you have no other choice, so you will have to take whatever we do". People working on Matrix already have quite a lot of work cut out for them and I am painfully aware of the points were it can improve. The thing is I am also aware of how much improvement has happened already, while there is absolutely zero proprietary platform that opened up itself for public benefit.
And I’m saying that preference is a function of many parameters, and you can’t change preferences by just promoting a new parameter to the public. They’ll still have other important (to them) unrelated concerns with more weight. What we think it should or should not be is effectively irrelevant to their minds. To catch them, open IMs should have their whistles on top of regular bells, not instead. This looks like a strawman because it addresses (I believe) a wrong premise.
Who said anything about changing preferences? When I said about converting those close to me, I mean in the sense that I get them to install and use Matrix for communicating with me. If they want to use/prefer close platforms to talk with other people, I am not stopping them/thinking less of them for it.
> They’ll still have other important (to them) unrelated concerns with more weight.
Yes, it's obvious. If they had prioritized openness and privacy over other bells and whistles they would been using already something like Matrix or XMPP. What I am saying since my very first comment is that I acknowledge that, but I also say that I prefer to use open tools and that I am willing to help them as much as possible to setup an account for them, install the apps and give basic guidance so that we can talk.
I am not asking them to drop other applications nor refusing to understand the reasons they have to prefer to use closed platforms. At no point I am challenging their preferences. I am just stating mine and supporting them for the hassle that I know that I am causing.
> To catch them, open IMs should have their whistles on top of regular bells, not instead.
It's not an exclusive thing. I don't have to change them all of their existing tools in order to get them to talk with me. I hope that one day the open applications will be so much easier to more people will actively look to make the switch, but I am willing to invest time and effort to keep as much as I can from my communications on open platforms and that has already been enough to get a good number of close people to become continued users.
If it is not easier/equal they won’t give it a go. Just that.
>The idea is that we should be rooting/encouraging others to put decentralization and freedom as a top-priority choice, not to keep excusing ourselves into adopting solutions that are bound to become another dominant walled garden.
Words of a freedom and privacy specialist. General folks are not specializing in it, more than a half (if only) cannot even connect it with their benefit. You say that like some economist could say “use less gas to keep prices down and nature alive”. But it doesn’t work, because “screw that nonsense, I have to drive my kids and groceries home”. If you’re in a quarantined country right now, just look around and see how many efforts the inconvenience requires to be sustained. This is the amount of force you have to apply, when doing it your “so what” way. Make IM app easy, friendly and full of features and cat pics and only then care for high matters. Literally all Real Security First apps are barely usable by a regular person in terms of everything.
I don't think that once you pay for a service, ads and selling user data simply go away. In general, companies don't exist to just cover their costs, they exist to make as much money as they can. If they can make money by showing you ads or sell your data, they will.
> 5. All parts of Telegram devoted to messaging will remain ad-free. We think that displaying ads in private 1-to-1 chats or group chats is a bad idea. Communication between people should be free of advertising of any sort.
Original Source: https://t.me/durov/142
> We are not going to sell the company like the founders of Whatsapp. The world needs Telegram to stay independent as a place where users are respected and high-quality service is ensured.
They're on the wrong track. Ads do not make a company independent. They make them dependent on those advertisers. If you're still using Telegram, it's long past time to move on to Signal.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23156224 [1] https://t.me/durov/142