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Telegram is just so much more usable than Signal.

The perceived advantage of Signal over Telegram is LITERALLY not having an option for a cloud-synced chat and ONLY having end to end encrypted chats. That's all.

You give up of usability to get that advantage. Explain to your mom why she has to give up Telegram to get basically the same functionality as Telegram secret chats.

Signals crypto is used by Facebook and was sponsored by the US Govt. Before you believe "OMG Telegram crypto is bad!" FUD, do 15 minutes of research.

Most non profit work in the US is somewhat funded by the US government via grants and crap ... 80% to be exact.

There are no known attacks against Telegram.

The problem is entirely that its cryptography was sketchy and just plain weird to begin with. It wasn't wrong, per se, but raised some eyebrows. And then some of the questionable choices were silently fixed removing the ability to MITM, etc, but with no real notice.

It's not FUD.

Interestingly, if you say that Signal's funding is sketchy and it raised some eyebrows, that would be FUD (see sibling comment). But saying the same about Telegram encryption is for some reason perfectly fine and definitely not FUD.

Shouldn't we have the same standard for all claims?

So you're saying we should have the same standard while literally giving two different types of allegations that are thrown at Signal and Telegram respectively?

We either consider the funding of both and decide how the funding COULD ultimately impact the product, or we could look at the source code of the applications and the cryptographic theory supporting them and talk about that. If crypto experts aren't finding holes in Signal's protocols [1], I don't think random people on the internet yelling "bUt It WaS fUnDeD bY ..." will make it less secure.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013

> Interestingly, if you say that Signal's funding is sketchy and it raised some eyebrows, that would be FUD (see sibling comment). But saying the same about Telegram encryption is for some reason perfectly fine and definitely not FUD.

> Shouldn't we have the same standard for all claims?

Huh? Telegram's protocol has been criticized by cryptographers for making specific "odd" cryptographic choices (see See https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/31418/signal-vs-t...). It's not FUD to bring that up.

However, it is FUD to imply something concrete based for vague, indirect reasons.

More than one red flag there, there was the claim of it being secure just because the spec was out there and nobody had broken it yet.

and telegram does not used encrypted e2e messages by default. Only on the special secret messages that no ones uses.

> There are no known attacks against Telegram.

Because there isn't anything to meaningfully attack. Chats and chat backups are not encrypted by default.

That's a big advantage, and a very important one. But definitely, that and the superior crypto is what keeps me on the app. Telegram is in a whole different level when it comes to usability and refinement.

>Signals crypto is used by Facebook and was sponsored by the US Govt

Funny that you're talking about FUD.

It is not FUD.

OWS was financed by Open Technology Fund, to the tune of almost $3M, during the years 2013-2016. See here: https://www.opentech.fund/results/supported-projects/open-wh...

What is Open Technology Fund? It is a program of Radio Free Asia, which run by US Agency for Global Media, funded by US Congress.

Hey, advisor for a non-signal E2EE chat service here that also benefited from the Open Technology Fund.

I recognize that you'd basically just be taking my word for it, but literally all they did was take an application from us, approve it after doing their diligence, and paying Cure53 for an assessment. There was no other involvement or, as you're implying, interference.

Just my experience, but I'm publishing this because the fud breaks my heart. OTF does good work.

It could be, I believe what you say is very much the truth.

But that doesn't really matter. Even by doing that. these two are associated. Imagine, if there was a non-profit, that took money from some Kremlin or Fobidden City development program, using exactly the same procedure. Would be that non-profit trustworthy going forward, given their association?

So this one is the same, just with red and white stripes. Definitely not FUD, they did take money from US Gov agency.

> Would be that non-profit trustworthy going forward, given their association?

Kinda depends. If the money was authorized by a parliamentary body (with clear legal text around who's receiving funding, what the conditions are, etc), I wouldn't be so worried. If it was authorized by an executive as a disbursement from a random pot, I'd be more worried about strings.

Ergo my comfort with US congressional funding v. a DARPA grant or In-Q-Tel investment.

>Would be that non-profit trustworthy going forward, given their association?

As long as the product is proprietary, no.

In my experience, most people who project nefarious intentions on the government have no experience working with or within the government. The government, after all, is a big thing with no unified goals or intentions. But for some reason, for some people, 'government' always means 'bad'.

To be fair it usually is bad when it comes to matters of privacy and being open and honest about said privacy.

Governments gave us things like GDPR and HIPAA.

That is not the point. The point is what does the funding get them? A backdoor? The algorithm as well as the client source are open for audit and have been audited multiple times.

Signal's by default e2e encrypted chats can be used across platforms, e.g. synced across desktop and mobile. Telegram's secret chats are only available on the device where you initiated them. That's a major disadvantage.

Signal is single-device. The crappy web app that reads stuff from your phone is not a real client.

I just have to reply here because it's so wrong.

Signal doesn't even have a web app. They have a desktop app that works great and that I use every day, all day long for all kinds of communication. On my desktop and laptop.

The same is true of Whatsapp; this is not a major impediment to adoption for most people.

Last I checked, end-to-end was only available on the phone app (not the desktop client) and only for one-on-one conversations. That's a pretty huge difference, but one that most people won't even understand or care about.

But the simple fact is that for most people the security profile of Telegram is good enough and its UI is miles ahead of Signal.

I've already complained about that in the past but the fact that the desktop client still won't let me set the spellchecking language is baffling to me. It's an application that's meant mainly for exchanging text, and it won't let me configure the spellchecking, and let's not even talk about formatting options.

It amused me when in the announcement they said that the reason for testing the payments in the UK was that they were English speaking. You can tell that this is an application developed my monolinguals...

FWIW, if you’re on macOS at least, private chats are supported under the Cocoa client.

Matrix has E2EE cloud chats

Can you share what you have discovered about Telegram's crypto implementation in these 15 minutes of research when you did them? That would be far more useful than just leaving a teaser without anything concrete.

I thought about spending my time on promoting Signal, now I am happy that I avoided it.

As someone who has been defending Telegram against certain claims here from time to time this is still a sad day for me.

I'd appreciate however if everyone who has been saying ugly things about the alternatives would take a step back now and consider if there is more to security than E2E-encryption.

E2E-encryption is a seriously nice and useful property of a messaging system, but in the long run it is only one of many important details, and while E2E-encryption is always a good thing for end users as far as I can see other useful properties are often directly at odds with each other:

- incentives and funding. Free to give everyone the ability to use it or paid to align incentives?

- anonymity or verified identies? Both have significant advantages.

- repudiation or non repudiation? Depends on if you agreed on a contract or discussed something that the new regime doesn't approve of.

- backups? or ephemeral? Again, depends on if you are sharing family photos in a group or or sharing something that should stay between you and the recipient

Edit to add: As for solutions I think healthy competition is one of the best ways to ensure every messaging system tries to be tje best they can be.

> easy backup when you get a new phone

I just recently got a new phone, and used the new feature to do this (uses wi-fi direct) and I have to say it seemed like it would be easy enough for non-techy users to use.

Try transferring from an iOS phone to Android. Try transferring messages to a new desktop (you can't).

It's 2021, I don't want to be platform locked and none of the other popular messaging apps have that issue.

Last I checked (about a year ago I think) Whatsapp backups were platform-locked as well.

They are working on it https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/05/whatsapp-chat-history-migrati...

> Last I checked (about a year ago I think) Whatsapp backups were platform-locked as well.

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. Whatsapp backups are still platform locked to this day. But that may change soon.

https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/apps/news/whatsapp-may-s...

You can get a dump of all your messages with someone pretty easily.

Not completely. WhatsApp pushed out an Android-compatible backup option on their BlackBerry 10 app when they announced that they were shutting the app down a few years ago. But it was behind a notice that said it was 'not supported', even though it worked fine. Only to Android though.

Whatsapp does, so it's probably not that critical of a feature.

Most people don't switch platforms very often so it's not a big deal to them and just a corner case. Also most people don't care that much about old messages so again a corner case.

I transferred between two Android phones, and had to re-pair desktop clients. It all worked, but now the desktop client won't receive messages I've sent via phone.

Also video calls still don't synchronize orientation. It's very hard not to stoop down to use more vulgar language to express my feelings about this.

> Also video calls still don't synchronize orientation.

This is insanely annoying in real life.

My phone needed to be factory reset, where was my backup to restore from without purchasing a second phone?

I only just got this set up, but you can point the automatic backups to your SD card on Android. I guess some cloud sync app could pick it up from there or internal storage.

Signal for iOS disables backup.

Not sure why this was downvoted. I switched phones yesterday and transferring signal with the direct wi-fi transfer was easier than transferring whatsapp, I do know that that used to not be the case.

because it is only relevant for one very specific type of 'switching phones'

Yeah, but consider the use case where you lose your phone in an accident or someone steals it. You can recover your sim card, you know your recovery password. But you'll be SoL and you won't be able to recover the history of all of your group and individual chats. This sucks.

There's a backup function. Maybe they should add some cloud drive integration to that feature.

Signal for Android allows backup. Signal for iOS doesn't.

Did you ever try to salvage data off a dead phone? Many of us only buy a new device when the old is fubar.

Will that feature work if you drop your phone and it breaks? Or will you lose all your conversations and photos then?

That's great to know, I didn't know they had improved on that front. Last time I tried to do it you had to manually copy a file from a micro-SD card (and it was only supported on Android) and then you had to copy a crypto key. In the end I couldn't get it to work and gave up.

Unfortunately day-to-day my issue is more with syncing the desktop to the phone client's history and as far as I know it still won't let me do that.

An other super convenient feature of Whatsapp and Telegram is that they offer a pure web interface with basic functionality which is super convenient if you're in a pinch and don't want to/can't install the standalone desktop application.

> I'm willing to give the Signal devs the benefit of the doubt

How many "benefit of the doubt" cards do they have left by now?

Zero. This was an obvious get rich quick scheme. They intentionally fragmented the space of privacy coins to profit off of a frankly disgusting pump and dump.

Mobilecoin (Foundation) is a technological, ethical, and legal tour de force. I recommend you read their FAQ, but, to me anyway, it is obvious why Signal/Moxie needed to create a new coin (tl;dr: It needed to be a private venmo-like experience). To prevent conflicts of interest, a new org was created. Hence Mobilecoin, not SignalCoin. A few highlights:

Technological: * First Oblivious RAM implementation, "fog", so that transacting parties cannot be revealed * Their Rust codebase is really nice * Instant transfers with little computing power (CO2 emissions)

Ethical: * Moxie and Josh Goldbard hold no MOB, along with the employees. The Mobilecoin foundation has some awesome partners, e.g. the Long Now Foundation. * Mining is not ethical, it pollutes the planet and is just bad. The only alternative is a "pre-mine" given to an independent org, ie Mobilecoin Foundation

Legal: * The US's laws are not clear on what is allowable with privacy coins, so Mobilecoin has played it conservatively by saying US residents can't own the coins.

In summary, the critiques of Mobilecoin (in any of its incarnations, foundation, moxie, etc.) are assuming the agents involved have a financial interest in MOB being expensive -- I contend that is not the case. Please show your evidence.

PS. I am assuming good faith and honesty in statements, eg "Marlinspike notes, however, that neither he nor Signal own any MobileCoins." https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-payments-messa...

PPS. Some direct responses:

>Let's assume that they integrated with Bitcoin or Litecoin or some "mainstream" CC, would it still be a good idea?

No, not private. Also slow. Also pollutes planet. Monero is close on the privacy front, but takes 3 minutes to send (very stressful). It's possible a coin with the proper attributes could be made on stellar, but that raises questions towards ownership of Lumens (and pumping them) and their stellar reimplementation in Rust is likely more secure.

>Niche coin

nit: MOB has a top 15 market cap with 250m coins in distribution. Though I would hesitate to compare to other cryptocurrencies which are almost entirely scammy, polluting garbage.

> Moxie and Josh Goldbard hold no MOB, along with the employees

Right, the foundation sells the premined crypto-currency at a pumped up price. The foundation pays Goldbard and Moxie for their work. Employees are paid from the VC. No one connected has to hold any of it, nor will they want to after the dump.

Agreed that the foundations and payments need to be transparent. But if they are making, say on the order of a hundred grand a year in payments, wouldn't it behoove them to have a stable or increasing MOB market cap in the long run. IOW, if payments << market cap (currently O(10B)) then pumping and dumping is a disincentived move.

> I recommend you read their FAQ

Could you provide a concrete link please? There's a bewildering array of officials looking websites with zero information. And a widely shared white paper (among others linked from Wikipedia) that Josh claims isn't the whitepaper he originally wrote. It's hard to know what's what.

As a signal user and even promoter my biggest issue with a new cryptocurrency is that my privacy and security concerns for a chat app are different from my privacy and security concerns for monetary transfers.

I'm not sure why you find Monero's confirmation any more stressful than instant-like blockchains, most wallets will show pending transactions as soon as they enter the mempool.

This makes me sad. I have, up until now, been happy with Signal, but with this foray into cryptocoins, I now put it in the general "why do you hate the planet" bucket that all other cryptoshills are in.

It works (FSVO "works") for small levels of transaction, but does not scale to "a substantial fraction of humanity uses it for payment" (low-end, imagine 2.5 billion people trying to make on average 3 economic transactions per day, you'd need to be able to sustain about 80k transactions per second; now note that I low-balled bot the number of economic transactions AND the global population).

Moxie, this is seriously disappointing.

Proper message sync is hardly possible with end-to-end encryption everyone so excited about (without fully understanding the implications of true secrecy). If you have e2ee and then sync messages via google drive (looking at you, Viber), you are kinda missing the point.

I remember that Skype, before it was bought and ruined by Microsoft, had P2P chat history sync that worked the following way: once two of your devices were online at the same time, they synchronized chat history among the two running instances flawlessly. It was super reliable and predictable.

I am sure that Signal could implement the same peer-to-peer sync scheme with full end-to-end encryption without any secrecy compromises.

One of the features of the Signal protocol is that each message is signed with a different key so that if one message is somehow compromised it's still impossible to retrieve the others. I think this would break with P2P sync.

First people want full security, but when they encounter inconveniences that come with true full security, they start wanting convenience. What works best is a very very very good promise of security without e2ee, as shown by Telegram. It's users just know that Telegram is the most protected messages, and they are happy with it's advanced features.

Your Signal client has all the messages stored unencrypted (this is true because you can read them all, and search all the local messages).

What's preventing the client from dumping all the messages to a single file, encrypt it with a public key of the other running instance of Signal logged in to the same account, and send it, so that your other device can decrypt the file and import all the messages?

This is actually working very bad in most practical situations. The way to go is Telegrams way, where you store all data on the server and happily sync ut easily between devices. Just do it on your own server using xmpp. E2ee helps mostly against server owner, and you eliminate this risk by being your own server owner.

You run your own datacenter?

XMPP is extremely light, you can use a moderately powered personal computer to handle traffic from several users. I don't have the numbers with me but last I'd heard, the number was in the hundreds.

ejabberd can host ~2k active connections on $2/month server.

Where can I get this $2/month server?

The nice thing about client-side/end-to-end security is that the service provider matters less.

Also, $2/month is $2 more than many people would be willing to pay for private messaging, and I can't message people on a network they're not on, no matter how much I pay.

Ionos.com

And if you're privacy is worth less than $2/month, just use Telegram. It works way better than these messenges obsessed with privacy, precisely because it does not have encryption for most messages

> Ionos.com

That looks a lot like a server hosted by somebody else in a data center.

It's also way more hassle than almost all of my contacts would be willing to go through, and if only I self-host but they don't, it'll be Gmail all over. (Almost all emails go through Gmail because that's what at least one of the parties in an exchange is likely using.)

Point-to-point encryption is not enough for messaging in today's network topology.

> just use Telegram

No thanks, I'll continue using one actually spending some effort on not being able to read the messages their users send.

Fortunately most people in my country do. Ironically it's only a couple of people in my circle of friends worried about the privacy of said messenger switching to Telegram "because it's encrypted"...

> E2ee helps mostly against server owner, and you eliminate this risk by being your own server owner.

Unfortunately you only eliminate it by being your own server owner _and_ your recipient being their own server owner. Take a look at email: I might not want to use e2ee because I self-host, but the second I send an email to a friend hosted on gmail, Google gets all the content.

I think federation does have its place (for different reasons) but it unfortunately isn't enough for privacy.

> Just do it on your own server

What if I don't have and don't want my own server?

Pre-MS skype was so far peak IM.

Don't forget about when IM networks actually used open standards instead of closed proprietary protocols. Managing all of my accounts through pidgin was a breeze, and didn't leave me swapping between half a dozen different programs trying to remember which networks somebody would typically use.

That was never a thing: Pidgin & the rest had to write their own implementation for many of those protocols, starting with AIM.

There was a tiny period, somewhere in 2006, when many services were XMPP, maybe even federated, but due to the lack of good clients - compared to skype -, it never manifested as good as it should have.

There are now many nice XMPP clients, but the big players now all moved into proprietary territory.

Good point, I am misremembering.

I also remember a period in time when I could use Trillian to connect to ICQ, MSM, AIM and have it all in one convenient chat client without having to fire up all the individual ones. Granted it sometimes broke when the protocols updated, but for a moment it was pretty cool.

e2ee is a technical term, not a social term. It only means that 2 devices exchange bytes and no third-party can read them. Nowhere is there any obligation that the 2 devices belong to different people: it is perfectly possible to exchange history between your laptop and your smartphone with e2ee.

> Proper message sync is hardly possible with end-to-end encryption

iMessage (and soon WhatsApp) would beg to differ.

It is much more difficult, yes, but definitely not impossible.

Matrix features E2EE with proper message sync between clients: https://matrix.org/