I don’t think your paraphrase is an accurate representation of the article.
Case in point: the Hanlon's Razor mention definitely did mislead me in terms of your stance.
In any case, no hard feelings were intended anywhere.
But that's what mostly what I was saying (granted, I got worked up at one point because the blind stereotyping puts a black mark on HN's reputation in my eyes) is that indeed the situation is ambiguous and both possibilities are [mostly] equally likely.
> Anyway, it’s been a while, the world is a different place now, and maybe Hanlon’s razor cuts deeper than I thought.
How else would you interpret it?
Neither is a good look for a security team, of course.
That’s not what the post is saying.
> It's very biased and uncharitable
It’s not “very biased”, if you actually look at what Telegram did the balance of probabilities leans heavily towards “backdoor” and not “not backdoor”
Besides, look at Pavel Durovs flagkilled reply here. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
> The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Solid criticism with well laid-out arguments from you, no doubt.
> Besides, look at Pavel Durovs flagkilled reply here.
Since when do upvote / downvote count mean anything at all about somebody's opinion or statements? (I haven't read the comment though.)
Look, it's obvious you have a beef with Telegram / Durov. But you are not giving any arguments, only snark. That's breaking HN's guidelines last I checked.
Maybe do that. Not being snarky, you’re missing important context.
Still, he's an official public face and should know better. That I fully agree with.
I am no cryptography expert. I judge by all the times I've seen programmers imagine they could do professional cryptography by themselves. Literally every time they fail. Thus, in my eyes it is more likely that Telegram's coders fell victim to the same illusion.
But I am not denying that it's possible it's the [beginnings of a] backdoor. The whole sub-thread is (a) my opinion on what's more likely and (b) calling out people who act snarky, offer no facts and demonstrate general negative bias.
It's really, really fishy.
The fact that a cryptographer might scoff and laugh at the proposition doesn't mean that a normal programmer couldn't fall victim to that illusion?
In any case -- yes. Both things are likely and you made a strong point for the "malice" side.
Still, it makes me wonder why would Durov run from Russia if he was willing to backdoor Telegram? Why not remain in Russia and backdoor it while being there? Why the extra trouble? Or maybe he didn't want to backdoor it for Russia but for other nation(s)?
Thanks for being one of the few to discuss constructively in this sub-thread. It's much appreciated.
Unless you put concrete % numbers on both sides then your replace is identical with the original.
...Bad faith? Most of HN has bad faith when it comes to Telegram. This place devolves to Reddit / 9GAG levels of childishness when Telegram is mentioned.
I think that's quite fascinating and it's a strange outlier. Yes -- strange, as in "not justified". They did nothing more wrong than a ton of other, much more widely used software, yet any mention of Telegram on HN brings about a big bandwagon of haters. Why do you think that is?
Would be curious to read a statement from Telegram's team though -- not that any team would ever admit to putting a backdoor...