Hacker News Reader

Comment by skrowl | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why Telegram is beating Signal.

They're singularly focused on the user experience and what users want.

Uninstall / reinstall / multiple-devices works flawlessly.

I fundamentally distrust any program which claims E2E encryption and is capable of recovering my chat history onto a new device. This means that Telegram is technically able to recover my chat history, making the "E2E" bit of the encryption smoke-and-mirrors.

I can be wrong, but on Telegram E2E is not default. Those are used only in 'secret chats', which I believe are not recoverable.

So you can use regular texting for everything you don't care much about, like sending youtube videos and memes to your friends, and use the secret chat to things that re more sensitive. That's great for most people that currently use Whatsapp

How is that great? On whatsapp everything you do is E2E by default.

* normal ppl care about chat history more than encryption, and telegram can be accessed from many devices without tethering from one (a la whatsapp). If you want E2EE anyway, you can use E2EE chats.

* Whatsapp is closed source, so you can't tell if the encryption is true anyway (what if they are transmitting your private key?). Telegram has open source implementation and API.

* Facebook will not have your metadata. The subject of these events is basically FB having too much of data about you.

In my case, I care more about being able to use it without depending on my phone, than E2E. The single thing I hate the most on any messenger is my phone having to be on and online, for me to send/receive messages on my computer

Not my field but: https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end

Right, that's not the default option.

I am unaware of Telegram's implementation, but this is not necessarily true. The app could use a secret you provide and only you know (most obviously, your password) to store and restore chat history.

> I fundamentally distrust any program which claims E2E encryption and is capable of recovering my chat history onto a new device.

I would expect a Signal implementation of this to allow recovering chat history if you restore a backup onto the new device and if you re-enter your PIN.

Your pin is not your key, even through a KDF. That would allow guessing with only 10**4 guesses. Signal exports an unencrypted backup to a formatted text file, which can then be imported by another signal instance.

I don't mean a network backup. I mean a device-to-device data transfer, for which the device passphrase and the Signal PIN together should be sufficient.

(Also, your Signal PIN can be an alphanumeric passphrase.)

Telegram only has E2E if you enable it. "Normal" chats are not E2E encrypted.

That's ok. I care about data hygiene. Signal cares about data hygiene. I don't want old data lying around and ready to be used by nefarious third parties at any point in the future. I'm sticking with Signal as long as they stay true to their values. I don't need it to be #1.

> I don't need it to be #1.

I don't either, but a chat app is useless if I can't use it to chat with people and almost nobody I know will consider Signal. It's either WhatsApp, Telegram, or SMS (horrible).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com