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Comment by throwaway13337 | Hacker News Reader

Care to qualify that speculation with some evidence?

It seems like whenever telegram is brought up here, there's a lot of speculation about it not being trustworthy but no concrete evidence.

The client is open source. While not end to end encrypted by default, it shares that property with most messengers. E2E limits search-ability and other features so it's a tradeoff.

I have to wonder if part of why this is mostly brought up is due to the origin of the app being a group with a Russian nationality. That's pretty sad.

The app is damn good. The best messenger app I've used - much better than signal. I'm so disappointed by this attitude.

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I( completely agree with whatever you have listed here and the reason why the app is up for bashing is because of the antecedents of the owner.

How does everything which has its origins in US is touched up with fairy duust while anything that may have a remote link with Russia is garbage?

Signal is garbage. They are riding on the coattails of marketing (and that's what investment money does)

Care to elaborate why you believe Signal is garbage? Is it for technical reasons?

1) Platform sync is bad. 2) Backups drain my battery. 3) Notifications across platform are weird. 4) Video calling quality is now an issue. Previously it wasn't. 5) No usernames and no ingrained privacy controls to prevent users from calling me.

1. Having to share the phone number is the biggest issue for me. This shouldn't be the case in 2021. I can only use Signal with my close friends. OTOH, I can confidently share my Telegram handle with anyone I have known for a some months, even online (not in anonymus forums, of course).

2. Notifications in one platform is weird for me.

3. Video quality is extremely bad to the extent of unusable.

4. Completely agree with the lack of settings whether other users with my number can text/call me on Signal.

The whole point of signal is privacy, so the fact that it's tied to a number is insane to me. I have friends in china that can't use it because china blocks the verification SMS. It's otherwise great app IMO but this is nearly a fatal flaw.

Americans used to use unencrypted telephony every day because they expected the government to uphold constitutional guarantees. That day ended shortly after 9/11 and the passage of the Patriot Act, which I believe today is used against Patriots more than it is used on their behalf.

When it first started getting popular I was curious about whether they were trustworthy, so I chatted with the devs and they said it was 100% open source. I looked through the source and found a pre-compiled binary blob buried deep in the folder structure, and they came up with some strange excuse that I can't recall and then it disappeared after a while.

Also, the evidence that it's not end to end encrypted by default for many operations is out in the open.

> I have to wonder if part of why this is mostly brought up is due to the origin of the app being a group with a Russian nationality.

I think it has more to do with the fact that there is no known reason for the organisation behind Telegram to provide it. It doesn’t make money from users, it has large operating and development costs, it keeps access to a lot of personal data without regulation, it is not a non-profit funded by donations and being open about their operation…

So most realistic hypotheses about that organization is that it’s shady. There are very few other possible explanations.

Telegram is about as private as facebook messenger or discord is the basic assertion. FB messenger is a much nicer client than the more private chat messengers, but telegram is essentially a client you can't assume is private, much like FB messenger itself, even if it has an E2EE chat mode that nobody uses.

But people are deluded that it's as private as Signal or Matrix, which is laughable.

This is one of the API entry points with which the apps communicate: http://149.154.167.51/

Nginx is currently at 1.21.0

Why wouldn't you care about your load balancer being so outdated? That's over 15 years.

There could be an explanation for this, but I'd have to put some unnecessary trust into it before I get the valid explanation. It is http and no https is offered on that server, which probably indicates that there's no need for TLS, that the communication is secure enough for it not to rely on TLS. But anyway...

They roll their own crypto and group chats can't be end-to-end encrypted anyway. It's even worse security than WhatsApp, let alone Signal.

> Care to qualify that speculation with some evidence?

This is a weird way to respond to someone using a metaphor to describe how an app makes them feel.

> I wouldn't be surprised if Telegram reads those exclusive Bitcoin whale groups and uses that insider info.

That's not a metaphor, though.

Does Telegram even offer server side searching?

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