Although a welcome addition to Signal, personally would like to see the 'phone number sign up' 'disappear' from the app and instead add email signup.
Thats all.
Thats all.
I'm not really interested in the disappearing message either if I wanted that I could just use Slack Free edition :troll:.
In all seriousness though, my messages are part of my memory. They're shared experience with my partner and a record of decisions.
I understand they're useful for some people, but they're an anti-feature for me.
Thanks for saying this, I moved to Telegram[1] before I had a chance to learn about/suffer from Whatsapp take on backups, but it would have been devastating to lose years of messages with people over a bricked phone.
[1] I know Telegram has a bad rep due to their home cooked crypto and maybe other stuff, but I like the app, I vaguely trust the author, and it works fine for me.
Is that because you assume the NSA aren't reading all your messages or you don't mind if they are? Because the whole problem with dodgy crypto is that it still seems to "work fine for me" even when it isn't.
I keep that in mind when discussing things.
If I want to start doing something shady, I can pick up something else than Signal, since I don't want my phone number ending up on random people's phones.
Telegram's initial marketing heavily emphasised privacy. If I search for Telegram then the very first search result blurb starts "Telegram messages are heavily encrypted". Maybe they don't explicitly claim to be E2E, but they absolutely are selling themselves as an encrypted, privacy-friendly messenger.
> If I want to start doing something shady, I can pick up something else than Signal, since I don't want my phone number ending up on random people's phones.
Completely agreed, I dislike the Signal hype as much as anyone. But I trust Telegram even less.
https://telegram.org/privacy#3-3-1-cloud-chats
> All data is stored heavily encrypted and the encryption keys in each case are stored in several other data centers in different jurisdictions. This way local engineers or physical intruders cannot get access to user data.
Disappearing messages are to prevent my kids reading the messages between me and their mother ;-)
If NSA actually read my messages that would be kind of funny.
If they have such a hack I'm sure they won't spend it on me or any other Joe Sixpack.
Maybe ФСБ reads it but I have a hard time believing that too.
My threat model consists of (not in any particular order):
- my kids,
- random internet strangers,
- Facebook (who'll sell you to whoever pays),
- Google or a Google-like entity with runaway "AI" and arrogant customer support[1] (who can lock out from my accounts for no reason)
Besides, despite all the talk about E2E-encryption being so important, Signal (which I cheer for) IIRC has had a nasty XSS-exploit in their desktop allowing remote control of the pc, their phone client has been sending pictures to others than the recipient and probably a couple more.
Ad I and others have pointed out repeatedly:
There is more to security than encryption. It doesn't matter if it is E2E-encrypted if it is delivered to the wrong contact. And it doesn't matter if it is E2E-encrypted if whoever knows the secret can send you a specially crafted message and take control over your machine.
[1]: I originally wrote employees but I don't think the average Google employee is more arrogant than others, they just come across that way because of policies created far above them.
Not caring about your messages being read, or being willing to trust the operator of the service, is fine, but in that case I struggle to see why you'd pick Telegram, given that their whole selling point was about privacy and encryption when their encryption didn't actually work.
what are referring to here? I vaguely know about delivery bugs and protocol patches
I don't defend Telegrams history when it comes to crypto,just pointing out that there are massive double standards here:
- WhatsApp is the good one (sending data unencrypted until 2012, and to add insult to injury they sent it on port 443)
- Telegram is the bad guy (sent data encrypted but used a dodgy algorithm early on)
Absolutely not universally true:
Encryption that protect against everyone except NSA is still infinitely much better than sending plaintext.
Internet banking can't work with plaintext.
It can work perfectly fine even if everyone knows NSA could break it.
It is secure for my purposes.
Throwing away threat models and the meaning of secure and encrypted just to be able to define something that competes for attention as "not secure" and "not encrypted" (from other threads) isn't very high level, it is basic framing.
edit:
> Not caring about your messages being read, or being willing to trust the operator of the service, is fine, but in that case I struggle to see why you'd pick Telegram, given that their whole selling point was about privacy and encryption when their encryption didn't actually work.
Remember, when Telegram came around WhatsApp was un-encrypted. Not point-to-point encrypted, just encoded. You didn't need to know or crack a key, you just needed toknow the protocol.
Also, the main selling point of Telegram as I remember it wasn't security, it was dumb IMO, it was "we will be free (no cost) forever while WhatsApp is going to charge you money".
Finally it isn't that I don't care if my messages are read, K just cannot care if my messages are read by NSA or FSB. If they go after me nothing will stop them.
It's basic, but it's valid. I was responding to all your "It doesn't matter if it is E2E-encrypted if xyz" points, which are faulty logic; if whether it's E2E-encrypted matters in your threat model, then whether it's E2E-encrypted still matters in your threat model even if other aspects of the system are secure.
> Remember, when Telegram came around WhatsApp was un-encrypted. Not point-to-point encrypted, just encoded. You didn't need to know or crack a key, you just needed toknow the protocol.
Citation? I don't remember it happening that way at all; Telegram marketed themselves by attacking WhatsApp on a couple of minor vulnerabilities in side features like video handling (which was legitimate in some ways, but extremely hypocritical given the bigger weaknesses in Telegram's own implementation). If message text was readable that would have been a much bigger deal.
I wrote basic framing.
It is a valid and effective marketing technique but not something you should rely on in a technical discussion.
> if whether it's E2E-encrypted matters in your threat model, then whether it's E2E-encrypted still matters in your threat model even if other aspects of the system are secure.
Then we agree :-)
I've been communicating over email, irc and lots of other channels that were not E2E-encrypted for years and I still have to.
I'll have to live with the fact that my bank, my government and a number of others have unencrypted, realtime access to far more sensitive data than Telegram.
The fact that someone can read my Telegram messages consisting of perfectly innocent photos is way down on my list as long as they who do it has a lot to lose by doing it ;-)
(I.e. if you had access it would be a problem. If any serious agency has access they will never use it against me because then they give away that they have the capability. In the same way Telegram has everything to lose by letting employees snoop. Same as Google: I do not fear them snooping my mail, I fear their AI will kill my account and no one will tell me why.)
> Citation? I don't remember it happening that way at all; Telegram marketed themselves by attacking WhatsApp on a couple of minor vulnerabilities in side features like video handling (which was legitimate in some ways, but extremely hypocritical given the bigger weaknesses in Telegram's own implementation). If message text was readable that would have been a much bigger deal.
I've followed Telegram quite closely so I am fairly certain about their marketing message early on. As you can see it also put them in a bad light so thats something too.
I've been unable to find references for the point about just being encoded, not encrypted so take that with a grain of salt for now. Some evidence can probably be found in an old unofficial client repo or someone who wrote one of those can confirm.
I might be wrong but remember this was back in 2009. It was a whole different world back then.
I used and liked WhatsApp despite all this because just like with Telegram perfect security didn't matter for the kind of communication I have on messengers back then either.
> WhatsApp was initially criticized for its lack of encryption, sending information as plaintext.[198] Encryption was first added in May 2012.[199][200][201] End-to-end encryption was only fully implemented in April 2016 after a two-year process.
from the "Security and Privacy" section of :https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp
Happy now?
Again: this wasn't thought to be a big deal back in 2009 and I don't want to beat them up over it.
The person I wrote to wrote:
> If message text was readable that would have been a much bigger deal.
For anyone who has read so far, keep in mind such rules only apply to Telegram ;-)
Now: can you admit that WhatsApp was unencrypted and you were wrong?
But I think my original point still stands, because at no point has Telegram been a more secure alternative to mainstream messenger options (such as WhatsApp), despite their marketing and branding being security/privacy-oriented and their "breakout moment" being a targeted, hypocritical call-out of WhatsApp security. Yes, I'm holding them to a higher standard than WhatsApp. But I think that's completely fair given that security and privacy is Telegram's supposed selling point, whereas WhatsApp never positioned itself as anything more than a way to send messages to each other.
If Telegram had come first then I could understand why people would keep using it. But I don't get why anyone would switch to it (except for the owned-by-Facebook thing I guess, which sure, is much more of a question about what your threat model is).
Why don't you look at discussions here and see why people use Telegram?
Many, maybe most of us don't think of it as specially secure.
If you ask why people use it they'll tell you it is fast, stable, almost bug free, well designed and everyone else in their group uses it.
I've yet to see anyone using cryptographic security as a selling point.
Telegrams biggest claim to fame security wise is their censorship resistance and that they get away saying they've never give authorities one bit of user data, year after year. If they had a secret deal with anyone that should soon become obvious.
Edit:
> and FWIW that does reduce my trust in WhatsApp (who I've never been the biggest fan of in any case).
I'm consistent here: I liked them better back then when they were a scrappy startup trying to do good in a world of ads and tracking.
Technical issues can be fixed, as they have done.
The incentives formed by being bought for $17bn (or 19 or whatever?) by Facebook, they cannot easily be fixed.
Yes, messages are now E2E-encrypted but we now have thousands of people working trying to exploit metadata etc instead of 50 guys trying to avoid that.
example of heavily encrypted: multiple rounds of properly configured AES with multiple keys split on multiple servers.
example of non heavily encrypted: zip archive with PaSsWoRd as password.
Sure, it's not actually saying a lot. My point is that's the very first thing in their marketing message, so they're very much advertising themselves as secure/private. By comparison if I pick an arbitrary cloud storage service - Dropbox - their first line is "Bring your files and cloud content together with the tools your team wants to use".
An example is E2EE, it is a nice property but today it has significant UX implications that makes it bad default in my opinion for a popular personal messagin app; in other places it is essential, just not there.
Moreover the main threat model is not NSA hacking my device or the app's servers, it is app developer selling my data and governments making "lawful" requests to service providers. In both these metrics signal ranks better as far as I understand, but it is more of an individual choice.
If we are worried about the NSA the best thing to do is to move out of SMS/phone calls as fast as possible on mediums that do not allow passive monitoring and are likely to resist government pressure.
But Telegram's whole selling point is privacy and security. If security is not your priority (which is totally reasonable!) there are plenty of other messaging apps that are much more established than Telegram, and much more honest about not being particularly privacy-oriented.
> An example is E2EE, it is a nice property but today it has significant UX implications that makes it bad default in my opinion for a popular personal messagin app
Doesn't seem to have been a problem for e.g. WhatsApp.
> Moreover the main threat model is not NSA hacking my device or the app's servers, it is app developer selling my data and governments making "lawful" requests to service providers. In both these metrics signal ranks better as far as I understand, but it is more of an individual choice.
> If we are worried about the NSA the best thing to do is to move out of SMS/phone calls as fast as possible on mediums that do not allow passive monitoring and are likely to resist government pressure.
Both these points seem like complete non sequiturs. If you want to avoid the app developer selling your data or providing it to governments, you need E2EE, there is no other way. Passive monitoring hasn't been a thing for about a decade, any non-joke messenger is at least using TLS, and it's not like people were using SMS/phone calls until Telegram came along with the revolutionary new idea of an internet messaging app.
> there are plenty of other messaging apps that are much more established than Telegram.
Not where I live, the only comparable app is whatsapp and after that various social media platforms probably.
> [E2EE] Doesn't seem to have been a problem for e.g. WhatsApp.
It is, porting backups between phones (last time I tried) requires both phones to be active.
> and it's not like people were using SMS/phone calls until Telegram came along with the revolutionary new idea of an internet messaging app.
They were using whatsapp, which in my opinion is worse than telegram and uses E2EE as a PR shield. I personally do not trust facebook to deliver a trustworthy app (they would have to be OSS with reproducible builds at least) I do not care that my messages are encrypted on their servers, they can steal them from my phone storage directly. It is a matter of lack of trust towards facebook.
I want to find a better cell plan with a company I am not ethically opposed to but Fi is so good that it makes it really really hard to beat.
I avoid phone based 2FA where possible, but the few that I have are sent there.
But it's not really for non-US, and they've really started cracking down on people that use it exclusively internationally.
Which is a real shame. It's absolutely the service I want/need as digital nomad.
Do you have to constantly cycle through numbers, do you have a VOIP number?
I'm note vertis, but I wont give out my cell phone number, so: Companies that require 2FA via phone just don't get my business and about all banks in germany offer chipTAN. The chipTAN devices are all made by shady companies and are less than open but I still trust them more than any smartphone or the mobile network.
Or, at the very least, support people who have a phone that is not Android or iOS by allowing them to register from a desktop application. Does not seem misaligned with Signal's aim for privacy.
Pros
Free
Very good encryption
Almost no metadata kept
Protocol independently audited
Seamless to use on Android
Disappearing messages
E2EE text, voice, and video group chat
Requires a valid phone number to register
Hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Edit to clarify: Signal sets up a background connection instead, which still results in real-time notifications (the same way that Wire works on a phone without Google Play services)
A year ago or two, I wanted to build Signal for Android without the proprietary library that talks with google play services. It was possible by modifying the source code a bit, because the code checks for the presence of the handles the absence of the Google play Services and enables some sort of fallback.
I would not know if it is still the case today, I don't currently own an Android device.
You can manage to use Signal with most features without the need to run proprietary blobs by registering your phone number using signal-cli or axolotl (and maybe alternatives, but I haven't tried). They can run on a regular desktop or on a GNU/Linux phone, and then pairing Signal-Desktop with it. This is not straightforward, and forget convenience on the phone for now (I haven't managed to make groups work on UIs based on signal-cli though they theoretically should, Axolotl does not fully support new groups and by that I mean it's missing essential features like accepting an invitation).
Then, the blobs you are running are "only" in your phone's modem, unless you also managed to use some service providing SMS from the internet.
This is totally unsupported because it depends on alternative Signal clients that are not allowed on the Signal's network. For some reason Signal-cli and Axolotl don't seem to have been asked to stop from the Signal team, but it happened to a Signal fork, Free-Signal, which only goal was to de-blob Signal. And they are in their own right to do so, I'm not questioning this.
This is painful, really. Signal is so close to be great. Matrix / Element works well enough. It has rough edges but I (re)-discovered that Signal has some too and I'm not speaking about this whole situation.
Signal is an analogue of the tor browser, most people get diminishing returns after an adblocker/incognito mode.
they did iPad. presuambly the secure region coding for iDevices is better?