Protected Content, Delete by Date, Device Management and more
telegram.org
telegram.org
- people might have a legal right to make copies
- it's opens up a lot of potential for abuse, as it's harder to safe proof of abuse.
- it gives people a false sense of security (e.g. when sexting)
Couldn't they instead e.g. display low resulution images for screenshots or similar?
That should be good enough for artists in my experience. (I mean there are artists which live draw the art on e.g. twitch they then sell, it works as the image quality you can easily extract is just not "good enough" for most potential buyers, and if we idk. throw AI sharpening tools at it then we could also throw tools at it which circumvent telegrams protections).
If we compare it to classical post that is like sneaking into someones else house and stealing the message you send.
I can understand why they do it.
But it, especially compared with the DRM change, makes abuse SOOO much easier.
And with fully deleting messages this opens quite a bit of possibilities.
If they instead would just make the message unreadable, i.e. leaf a placeholder behind this would be a different thing.
also I would like to have a flag for silent messages,
I remember watching at least one movie where a character did this.
Not personal conversations! That's odd. You wrote the comment even without understanding what it could be used for
However, the chat is viewable in Telegram Web (K). Web K even offers to download the picture, which actually downloads the file.
Additionally, Telegram Desktop for Mac similarly allows screenshots as usual and isn't affected.
In the past I have seen some other apps implement screenshot prevention on iOS usinf something that "cloaks" the screen when the button combination is detected, and when the OS is about to background the app. This is the method Fido My Account (mobile carrier in Canada) uses (current version allows screenshots, but blocks the info from the app switcher).
The method Telegram is using appears to be rather seamless, as it does not show the screen going black or anything when the screenshot is taken. Stack Overflow seems to discuss two solutions, one using DRM video, and another using some password field hackery. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18680028/prevent-screen-...
This is the most likely case, as the behaviour is similar to what happens when you take a screenshot of DRM netflix; it appears it is drawn by the hardware and not in the OS framebuffer, and thus shows up as a black box.
Of course this is not really security, but Telegram, despite being open source on the client, does have in the ToS that apps have to implement the "secure" features of secret chats properly, or risk being blocked. Recently they have been sending info out to bot developers that says apps that don't implement the ads in channels will be blocked as well, but I'm not sure if they will really enforce this.
"We ask that you make sure that these sponsored messages are supported and properly displayed in your app by January 1, 2022. Unfortunately, Telegram cannot financially sustain apps that support Telegram Channels but do not display official sponsored messages – such apps will have to be disconnected."
What about screen recording?
It's different from apps using DRM like Netflix, where it usually just shows a notification saying "failed to start screen recording".
The trick was to start the screen recording out of Telegram, open it (if you're on the actual page it will freeze the recording interestingly) but once you get to the media overview page, the screen recording works again and you can capture whatever you want. I have been able to record everything without problem once incl the chat, but this is probably only effective in some cases.
As it turns out, regular screenshots also work on that page. My testing was not super thorough I suppose, for something I quickly did while trying to fall asleep...
EDIT: Just to be clear given the title, I'm not pro DRM, and we can be pro or against auto-removable content, but I just love how they implement features that their users are asking for and the quality of their apps.
The UX is slicker and more comfortable to use than that of whatsapp (and miles ahead signal). With the latest update if I got it correctly, even E2E encrypted chats can be synced to all clients (? Needs to be verified)
I guess you mean the security model of non-E2E chats. Although you can read into it that they can do MITM, the details reveal that the actual keys/messages are shared into datacenters in multiple countries so no government alone can retrieve plaintext from at-rest storage. To me (especially compared to anything Facebook products) is already much better than nothing. If it's an issue for you, opt in for E2E chats and enjoy!
Sometimes I have to use whatsapp with some contacts and it feels like a huge step back after telegram, especially in UX.
It's the reason why I avoid it. I talk to someone on the desktop client, yet my phone, work laptop and tablet will ring on every message.
I can't be assed to go and mute 3 other devices every time I decide to talk to someone.
ime the desktop will pickup the message a few seconds before any of the mobile clients does and mark it as read, hence surpressing any notifications on the latter.
ofc chat notifications don't make any sounds on my systems to begin with.
on Android at least you can set telegram to limit the frequency of notifications (eg "at most 3 every 5 minutes") it is not perfect but it is an improvement
The exact same thing also happens on Telegram for me all the time, and I have a gigabit connection. The push notification arrives on my phone instantly, but when I open the app it loads for like 15 seconds before showing everything.
> I guess you mean the security model of non-E2E chats. Although you can read into it that they can do MITM, the details reveal that the actual keys/messages are shared into datacenters in multiple countries so no government alone can retrieve plaintext from at-rest storage. To me (especially compared to anything Facebook products) is already much better than nothing. If it's an issue for you, opt in for E2E chats and enjoy!
It's unfortunately not that easy. For one, their promises of sharded keys is something we as users cannot verify, so we still just need to trust them here [0]. WhatsApp, on the other hand, at least attempts to have E2E. Secret chats are an option, but only the mobile clients support them [1] and you can't have them for groups at all. There's also some critique on mtproto, their roll-your-own encryption. I don't necessarily agree, but it's another strange point.
Like you I like the UX a lot and I have some trust in Durovs motivations, but the security model is questionable.
[0] They refuse to open source their servers, but I follow their argumentation in so far as that this would not help since we could not verify that the published source code is the one running on the servers.
[1] At least the official Linux desktop client and the web clients don't.
I don't have my laptop with me (for another month), so I have to check this, but based on the redesigned devices dialog, I can imagine that this is now solved.
I think my Mac Mini now allows me to create secret chats. I didn't test it but I am fairly certain I saw it less than a week ago.
I just checked on my Windows laptop and that does not allow it. My Linux machines are upstairs but I think we can trust your observation.
Good move Telegram. This is how you ruin your otherwise-great platform.
They already ruined it with ads
It's a stretch to define Telegram as "ruined by ads"; this policy seems a reasonable compromise to monetize the product. The "famous competitor"'s way of monetizing is considerably more harmful, IMO.
Windows for example, is expanding their ad-base, even if they have a base revenue due to the product being sold, so it's reasonable to present a slippery slope argument.
Ubuntu is not (directly) sold, yet, they've removed the ads (Amazon sponsored searches).
Android products have different dynamics - differently from O/S, the cost of switch is considerably lower; users do complain/act when advertisement becomes too invasive, so there is a balancing force.
This balancing force applies also to messaging apps, so the slippery slope argument is not realistic. See the significant number of users who switched to Telegram when WhatsApp was sold to Facebook, or when they changed the privacy rules.
I don't know how many users expect to freeload messaging apps (that is, to expect that apps don't monetize metadata or ads or not to directly sell the product). I have heard people complainints about Whatsapp's privacy invasion rather than Telegram's advertising (as a matter of fact, I guess that none of the people I know has ever seen a Telegram ad).
In this specific case, paradoxically ads are less dangerous, because the cost to the user is overt, as opposed to metadata (ab)use, which is covert.
This seems like a fine change, people on HN just like to be angry.
It is impossible to prevent abuse, but it is necessary to contain it.
Is this effectively true for media? Key concept is democratizing DRM. You as a digital person having digital rights and letting you manage them.
Consider Netflix on iOS devices. Now consider if OnlyFans creators could have the same effective guarantees. Might they not adopt Telegram in droves?
I simply do not understand why people are even thinking of moving to another closed platform like Discord. We already have an alternative and I think it's time to embrace it: Matrix
Also, the UI has improved a lot recently. There are number of matrix clients that have appeared on app stores but I still prefer Element which gets regular updates and features.
Rather seems like a bug.
Comparing Matrix to polished apps like telegram or discord is... misplaced to say the least.
We all know how open source Software moves forward. It's us who can put up with little inconveniences of an open source app and maybe even improve it by identifying, reporting and implementing fixes. Those polished apps are polished because they have dedicated teams that get paid hefty $$$ to ensure they do not loose existing user base. In matrix case the user base is very little but I think they have achieved something remarkable: a thriving community that is developing client and server Software required for matrix to work.
I wonder if we had this kind of attitude in starting days of Internet, we probably would not have Internet today. By the way, when did you last use any matrix client?
By not acknowledging the importance of polish, you only push to keep the status quo ... and the status quo is that the masses are not using matrix.
There are very few open source application (desktop or mobile) that are as polished as commercial applications.
This is unlikely to change, but I still think it's worth trying to get as many users to use open source apps, because more users an app has - higher chance of more developers - better app. Not to mention no ads or spying and other crap that commercial apps are riddled with (General opinion not just chat apps)
But to get it into the mainstream, it needs to compete with other messaging apps such as Telegram.
For that, it needs polish. Period. There's no way around it. So if the goal is to get it into the mainstream (and personally, I want it to be), then that is what it needs.
There are loads of ways you can contribute to this:
1. Contribute time, code, designs, general help and volunteering
2. Contribute money via personal means or via work
3. Promote the use of Matrix to individuals
4. Promote the use of Matrix to businesses, eg. at work, or as a backing protocol for messaging where it makes sense etc.
5. Purchase products that make use of or contribute to Matrix
etc. But in order for it to become popular on its own, and acquire a network effect (which it needs, because IM apps are a class of their own), friction to get new users needs to be reduced to near-zero. And for that... polish is needed. That's it.
I came to the same conclusion I have the past four times I tried. The same one as the person you’re responding to.
This tendency to render your project unusable by choosing inappropriate development tools (perhaps for their seeming friendliness towards inexperienced developer - maybe if the same developers were forced to write in C their code would simply crash all the time, whereas as it is it "merely" runs slowly and/or leaks memory) is manifestly not an intrinsic feature of open source. If anything, in the old days, open source projects (such as Linux itself) stood out for being more lightweight and performant than their commercial counterparts. In fact, I think the first time I remember encountering an open source project that was rendered unusable by its bloat was with Diaspora (an early attempt to make a federated Facebook/Google+ replacement, written using Ruby on Rails). Perhaps there is something to the fashionable "fix social media" sector that necessitates making development inclusive to those who are more activists than engineers, even if this comes at the cost of sound engineering decisions.
I still prefer open source. Managed to convince a portion of friends as well.
However, don't see a problem. Why does it matter if they join each channel? you don't need to read a channel in Discord as well despite you are auto joined
Higher friction to visit other channels means that it will mean less people will visit other channels. I've been in a Nix / NixOS room for a while and I had no clue I was in a space and that space had other rooms until you commented that it existed. I never had this issue with discord. It was obvious there were other channels the first time I used it.
sounds like a temporary issue though: first only rooms existed, now Spaces exist, but the room directory still exposes rooms instead of Spaces
At least in the mobile app I didn't even know this existed. To find this directory of rooms you need to open up the spaces drawer. The you need to open a menu for the space by clicking on a stack of three vertical dots. I thought this would have things like settings or something in it, but no this is the way to navigate to important information. Then you need to click on explore rooms. You now can see a list of rooms you can join. You can now join a room with a tap. Then you have to open the room with a tap. This is extremely convoluted and hidden.
Meanwhile Discord doesn't need this whole process since you don't need to manually join rooms yourself.
iOS doesn't have the same system as Android that fully blocks screenshots within the app, but they can obscure part of the screen when taking a screenshot.
Edit: granted, not only old websites do this. Instagram lays a full width/height transparent div atop the picture to prevent right-click copying of the image.
This introduced me to developer tools and the funny 3d view of html layers that Firefox had.
This - it didn't use to be true because most computer users were literate enough to bypass simple restrictions, and if a platform was restricted, others were available.
With the latest changes in Windows, Android, and demographics, now a vast majority of users cannot easily bypass restrictions; the war on general computing has been won. Yes, a small number of highly skilled people can easily dump binary data through hacked devices, but in the grand scheme of economics, that doesn't matter.
I’m glad I’m privileged enough to have multiple devices with cameras
Its a low bar, but I was told to check my privilege and I do love doing that now
We have free software everywhere except phones. I wonder why organizations such as GNU aren't working on free software clients for these popular services like WhatsApp and Telegram. The potential for a positive impact is enormous.
https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop
https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram
https://github.com/TelegramMessenger/Telegram-iOS
Plus a few web frontends, I am way too lazy to find them all.
https://github.com/zhukov/webogram
WhatsApp forbids third party clients IIRC.
I’ve had enough of it, too. Ordered a Librem 5 and can’t wait for the day it arrives – so I can finalize my divorce from the Apple ecosystem.
> I wonder why organizations such as GNU aren't working on free software clients for these popular services like WhatsApp and Telegram.
Regarding WhatsApp, it looks like it’s against their TOS, and Meta goes out of their way to detect usage of third-party apps and ban your account [1].
Regarding Telegram: not only do they allow third-party implementations, they even link to them [2]. Besides, Telegram’s own desktop client is FOSS under GPLv3 [3].
[1]: https://www.cultofmac.com/314343/use-a-third-party-whatsapp-...
Javascript hijacking right click is prevented by shift-right click in Firefox.
At some point the website is sending you HTML and JS to be interpreted on your computer.
It doesn't seem particularly unreasonable that a company dealing with sensitive data would want to prevent their less computer-educated employees from falling for self-XSS attacks
The given reason to disable view source itself was "students are able to find Google Form Quiz answers in source code" which is pretty ridiculous.
Also something about getting past a really broken web filter.
Or maybe that was already an option to disable by admins before this
I am not sure I understand where you are coming from. Are you suggesting that people accidentally take screenshots and share them?
**
Oh and this is yet another kick in the face to people with accessibility issues.
**
As an aside, once AR is mainstream I expect that apps will only display encrypted text and some pair of smart glasses will be able to be configured to decrypt and display the play text all on the client (glasses) such that such issues are removed.
Building walls in physical world is also very stupid. It does not prevent people of using ladders hehe.
Sorry about the joke. They want to create more friction so users can avoid people from 'easily' taking screenshots.
With messaging inherently you are trying to share with others. If you’re sharing why stop saving?
Not to mention it won’t work. If they read it nothing is stopping them from simply telling someone else, drm or not. This technology will not prevent anyone from simply handing over their phone - and your messages - to someone else.
It's entirely reasonable to create a system designed to allow people to share things once, and indicate to others that they don't want it spread any further. It's reasonable to design software which attempts to honor such requests by introducing friction, making it 95% effective despite knowing that 5% of people will be able/willing to work around it.
Most people are "path of least resistance" and are too lazy to work around something like this, which is exactly the point. Pretty much every person using such a system is aware that the recipient could just take a picture of the phone with a camera.
Perfect is the enemy of the good.
Is it reasonable that someone give you a gift and you cannot sell it or give it to anyone else?
It's completely reasonable for someone to give you a letter or photo of a personal nature and ask you not to share it (or simply expect you to understand that it's not to be shared). In the physical realm, the honor system comes into effect. In the digital realm, there's nothing wrong with adding an imperfect layer of accountability/protection to greatly reduce the chance that it becomes shared.
Yeah, and because I am a good friend, I will not share those photos with anyone, especially if they ask me not to. :)
And people are terrible friends and will take the time/effort to bypass any measures necessary to share the photo.
The feature is designed to address the "somewhat bad" case, not to be perfect.
Exactly. They will pretty much bypass this one as well.
Reducing the chance of something that you didn't want shared from being shared by a factor of X% is better than nothing. Try to step out of black-and-white thinking for a minute. Just because something is not perfect doesn't mean it's useless.
Yes, your example of trying to prevent someone moderately bad from sharing something personal to you which you don't want shared is reasonable. The trouble is, you can use the same mechanism for much less reasonable and more nefarious, corporate things.
So the end result is that we're not to have moderately nice things, lest they be used as a weapon against user freedom by a mega-corporation.
The same expectations and honor system you described can be upheld in the “digital realm”. The only difference is that people have the arrogance to try to force things upon “digital” users because they can.
And also, I never said the gift was physical in nature.
Grandma gifts you a photo of her and her partner. Do you believe that you shouldn’t be able to show your own family their ancestors picture?
It’s obviously not reasonable. She could explicitly ask, but ultimately the choice is yours.
Which is a contrived example that conveniently sidesteps the two most relevant factors: the personal/intimate nature of the communication and the consequences of sharing it against the person’s will during a timeframe in which it would have an effect on the person's life.
I think it also comes down to wanting to own the "distribution" chain.
Example scenario (made up, so might have flawed reasoning): If I have an official following on Telegram where I post my art, and there's a fan/knock-off Twitter account reposting my art without my permission. I don't have many ways of stopping them. I could send a DMCA notice, but that's slow and doesn't prevent someone from reopening their knock-off distribution channels. DRM creates friction for most people that they won't even bother thinking about setting up a sidestepping distribution channel that fragments my audience.
Also to add (edit): being perfect isn't the point. I mean, most habits or ways we do things _every day_ aren't even close to optimal; much less perfect. If we threw out everything that's not perfect, we'd be left with nothing.
Ultimately if you feel like you’re being wronged DMCA should be used and not a programmatic approach simply because a program has no notion of who was right to begin with.
So in your example you say “my art”, but what if it were not? Should you not be able to post “your art?”
I believe people should handle people issues and computers handle, well, the other stuff.
If I say "Alice told me this", there is no proof that it actually happened; Alice can deny it. If I forward the message or show you a screenshot, then the case that the communication happened is significantly stronger. (Of course screenshots can be doctored, but that's another problem)
That's mostly what this is about - reducing the chances for accidental or willful disclosure to third parties.
And it is about sharing - that’s how communication works, no?
How is it another problem? If the method purports to be able to strengthen claims of veracity, but immediately after you demonstrate it to be vulnerable to spoofing, then it offered nothing in the first place. It's exactly the same problem.
While I an certain the current state of affairs of having DRM and personal privacy is unstable in the face of even the tech we had 10 years ago, we still have a strong personal need for control over our information and our works.
The EU, where I live, absolutely does have legal protections for personal privacy and personal information collection, hence GDPR and all the cookie popups[0].
And even if the law was silent, that wouldn’t itself be evidence of a lack of need, as people died from lack of workplace health and safety regulations well before there were laws about that.
And while IP assignments are an interesting suggestion to raise, I counter that I have also seen a forum of users who didn’t read the T&C and suddenly realised $corporation had the eternal right to reproduce whatever they wrote on that forum (kinda necessary but clearly non-obvious to most normal people), which demonstrates that people definitely feel strongly attached to even really dumb and low-value works if they are those works are their own.
[0] that they adhere to the relevant law about as well as all the YouTube videos saying “no copyright intended” adhere to IP laws is an enforcement problem, not a lack of rights
No, DRM is used to extend control to media players and manufacturers via licensing. The rest are just excuses.
Some others, not all.
Otherwise, tell me the point of all the effort that has gone into products like Signal, protocols like TLS etc.
> With messaging inherently you are trying to share with others. If you’re sharing why stop saving?
When sending packages to the Internet you are inherently trying to share with others. If you're sending, why stop receiving?
Except this isn’t the analogous situation.
TLS is more like three people in a room, one of which cannot be removed, and you want to say something to one person without the other person hearing.
Ultimately the person who the message is intended for can do whatever they want with the message.
If all chat communication was public in a single thread I’d agree with you.
Edit. Side note seeing as I don't think I 100% addressed your point. If we allow data to be viewed, and relayed with the potential for altering, then they no longer have 100% control over the content being changed/recorded. So viewing and sharing (with potential edits) is akin to tampering with the pipeline. Sharing is not at issue, it's you being able to intercept and have control over the data on your device.
Now I'll go scurry off and take my tin-foil hat off for the day.
If I tell you something in person, you may remember it for some time, but it's not recorded forever. It exists only in your and my mind. I may misremember or forget it, you may too, and there's no way to know the original message. And there's no way to share that communication. Showing a screenshot of what someone said, is entirely different from saying someone what you heard from someone else. That's why we have contracts because "I said, you said" was never meant to be permanent or enforceable.
This is a feature, not a bug. If human conversations were to be permanent, they would be much less said or written. Messengers, especially private messengers, are a loophole, in a sense that they keep forever what people still unconsciously think of as ephemeral communication, and it's good that Telegram is trying to address it; though I'm not confident how effective it may be.
If this premise were true encrypted unscreenshotable apps would be the norm for communication.
They are not. Not even close.
In the real world, I won’t forget the messages you tell me either, the memories are forever. Why should a digital message expire when memories don’t? I can still remember what my first day of school was, why shouldn’t I be able to see the messages I got sent last week?
I'm curious if you understand that your memories don't expire, but that almost all other people's do? I'd be interested to know if you think the platforms should conform to how your brain works, or if you think most brains work like yours. Just so you know, most people can't remember 99% of conversations verbatim that are years old.
In that case, why do you need a digital message if you remember everything? You also don't have any extra recording on personal communication except your (and the counterpart) memory, why it should be any different for digital messages?
And again, this doesn’t prevent redistribution.
Also I assume it's working in a the way intended. It may be a stupid thing to do from your or my perspective because it doesn't work towards our benefit – but the rational behind it is sane. That's what I meant with „not stupid”.
I just realize I sound like this sickening utilitarian tone you find in HN discussions so often. Sorry for going that way. Basically I'm with you, it's stupid when you take a step back.
My point is that a prevention mechanism can have utility for those employing it, even if it’s trivially circumvented by those who really want to. It does not have to be a binary thing, where either it works perfectly 100% of the time or it’s useless. It’s obvious to me that this feature could have a stifling effect on spread of content, and that might be well enough to have fulfilled its purpose.
Mind you, ideologically I do not necessarily agree with it, but that’s another matter.
How do they enforce it on the web client?
Or, more power for technical people to hold over those less able.
At some point all of this changed... Software now works for the corporations and only allow us to do what they designed for us. If they don't like something, you just won't be able to do it anymore. You can't even program the computers anymore, that's now a privilege increasingly reserved only for "approved", "licensed" individuals.
Typing out a document? I wouldn't be surprised if the office suites of the future started automatically checking your work against some "rights holders" corpus that you're not supposed to copy and then preventing saving or printing until you fix it.
[1] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/WindowM... [2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/30618030
for example private Firefox tabs do not show a preview in the system activity preview, it is a general "do not let the content of the screen escape the control of this app"
In fact, iOS does not provide any tools to prevent screenshotting, on the contrary, this feature requires some nasty hacks to pull off.
One of them is actually even patented and it requires rendering whatever you want to protect (text, image, etc) into a one frame DRM protected video and rendering that instead.
Any screenshot would only get one frame. You may have to stitch together multiple frames to get any useful data.
I wonder if this would work.
When I used feature "screen cast" and tried to cast Firefoxs private tab, I just got black screen.
1. Hey Siri, turn Voice Over on.
2. Tap the message once, making Voice Over speak its contents.
3. Tap the screen four times with three fingers. When Voice Over is on, this gesture copies the last spoken phrase to the clipboard.
4. Hey Siri, Turn Voice Over off.
There's no way to block this without breaking accessibility. You could split a message up into multiple items, which partially solves your problem, but the more items you have, the more annoyed actual Voice Over users become.
A similar (although more involved) attack could be used to extract Kindle books. There's no way for Amazon to prevent this, one of the primary screen readers for Windows uses GPL without a CLA, so a proprietary accessibility API is out of the question.
Then sooner or later someone will break accessibility just to prevent this. And everyone will follow.
There's nothing in the ADA (or any similar legislation) that says that all services ever created need to be accessible. Whether such legislation applies to you depends on a lot of factors, whether your software is used in workplaces, government and education being the most important (but not the only) ones.
Sometimes it's the organization that's only allowed to pick accessible software, not the developer that needs to make the software accessible. Sometimes it's okay to use inaccessible software as long as an accessible alternative exists and can be used by those who need it.
If someone cared enough to break accessibility this way, they could implement a switch that conditionally disables accessibility where legally permitted. I believe Kindle already lets publishers do this, come to think of it.
In modern iOS versions, Voice Over has an AI-powered screen recognition module that does not rely on the accessibility information that the developer provides.
As far as I know, it's not possible to prevent the use of this module, not without making the text on the screen unreadable to any OCR engine.
This module isn't perfect, in fact, it's far from perfect, but for something as simple as extracting a bunch of text that already appears on the screen, it would probably work.
Correct, however they can randomize certain words in your copy to watermark it and trace it back to you if it ever finds its way to the public internet.
In Poland, there's no single E Ink reader company, so there's no DRM standard that would be compatible with all devices that you might want to read your books on. As a consequence, offering unprotected epub files is standard practice here, but all kinds of watermarks, from divs that are 1px by 1px, to subtle modifications of your book's cover, are pretty common.
You can beat this kind of watermark pretty easily by getting three copies of the book and comparing them with diff. You need 3, not 2, so that you know which variant is the original when you notice a difference.
Also,
>In Poland, there's no single E Ink reader company
lol imagining a tech sector without a monopoly or an obviously harmful duopoly is wild.
Just want to point out that it's not actually DRM. Just Telegram giving users the option to prevent message recipients from downloading content.
Now, that I'm thinking about it, it seems that the new trend of hiding the files on the disk looks indeed like a light version of DRM preventing users from doing whatever they want with their data.
Life tip: never send nudes or any private information to anyone you don't completely trust, regardless of the privacy features the communication medium offers, as there's always an easy workaround.
Data can leak in multitude of ways, earned trust can be broken, etc..
That's obviously the safest option, but sending and receiving nudes is an activity many sexually active people find arousing.
Not having sex is also the safest option to preventing pregnancies and STDs, but people still engage in it with protections that are not 100% guarantee simply because it's an activity that most people need.
My conclusion and I think everyone elses too at that project was that despite the fact that Microsofts offering (Azure Information Protection, but not the the Sharepoint part of it) was almost brilliant it only solves involuntary leaks:
- people forgetting to lock their machines,
- forgetting that something is internal
- etc
If someone wants to leak information they can always take a photo of it.
As someone who has had colleagues send screenshots of sensistive details, taking the effort to reply on BCC-ed mails and more and who has also managed to do a few things of my own I welcome this.
Applications definitely shouldn't get any say in which screenshots are allowed.
But my personal favorite is that this is entirely, 100% client-side, and there's already a few handy ways to patch out the checks from the foss client.
In short, this limitation is rather pointless.
According to other comments in this thread, this just freezes when switching apps, and fails. I'm not too surprised, given that the feature (at least on Android) is meant as a security measure (i.e. most of the banking and 2FA apps use it to some extent).
This isn't like classical DRM where the intent is to stop you from owning content you already purchased.
This is effectively a way for group/page holders to ensure control over content that is not meant to be shared beyond that context.
Yes I know that technically if you post a picture of your kids in the group someone could still take a physical screenshot from another phone, but the point is reasonable friction, not an insurmountable tech barrier.
Telegram seems to have decided that either Person A or Person B can delete the message, without the permission or notification of the other.
I personally would prefer it to be the message is only deleted with the permission of Person A and Person B. Ie. "Bob has deleted his copy of this chat, and requests you do the same. Delete Chat?"
On the other hand however, unilateral delete does help the use case where people want to minimize the chance that the information is accidentally leaked or exposed - the "store less info" strategy
Or make you forget instantly!
^1 Actual viewing of the movie not included, use of IP during social events requires a premium license, disparaging comments are subject to filtering and may result in license termination, Disney is not responsible for any long term damage to your brain, ... .
These media fingerprinting databases are truly dystopian. I have come across a wide range of media recently that is being erased from our culture this way. The media giants say "don't pirate it, you can buy/rent it from us". But - and this is a big but - what if you can't rent/buy it? What if the media giant just adds the content's fingerprint to the database but then erases or locks away all copies of it.
Now you cannot upload it to any site with any serious audience. I have videos that the networks have locked away, but yet I cannot upload them to Youtube/Vimeo or anything similar because they are flagged. I cannot self-host them because the bandwidth requirements would kill me. Sure, they probably exist on places like Freenet, but that is essentially inaccessible for most mortals.
Once all the people that know of these things die off we'll only be left with whispers on the Web where such things are mentioned as having once existed, but can never be seen.
When I worked on Microsoft's DRM products in the early 00s I came to the sudden realization that if we had AR glasses in the future they could block out things from our vision and replace them with adverts. Ugh. It will come true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E
"Welcome to Life"
Also, Telegram Desktop is licensed under GPLv3, which is an anti-DRM license. Something doesn't add up here...
You know, to protect its users' privacy.
I fail to see how this actually prevents what it is supposed to prevent. You can still take a screenshot on desktop, or you can take a photo with another phone of your phone with the "DRM'd" content. They just got rid of the "Save" button and probably revoked the permission for taking screenshots.
Is the client open source? If it is, you can just modify it then.
https://community.signalusers.org/t/watermark-photos-videos/...
Back in the days there were apps in cydia to get a hold of all the snaps you received since they were just lying unencrypted inside a private sandbox.
Hell, I even stopped trying to use developer tools to extract facebook videos because they made it more difficult, and stopped using youtube-DL because Google is now throttling it. Main reason is that it's not worth the trouble anymore.
It was still doable, but quite inconvenient.
Simpler to just record screen with OBS.
I lost a favourite video of mine from youtube, fortunately someone reupled it, so I quickly ripped it with OBS, as the youtube downloaders had trouble downloading the audio part.
Had the same problem. Switched to yt-dlp. Now I do not have the problem.
(In my opinion, Telegram has by far the best apps of all messengers out there, but I will never be able to get certain friends to use it until that issue is resolved...)
No one has two phones, or one phone and a camera.
Of course, that’s not remotely true, so what have they accomplished? If someone receives messages that they want or need to save, e.g. for legal reasons, this feature isn’t going to stop them.
Making people jump through hoops means only the most egregious stuff would still be shared.
Why is this even a feature?
It seems a lot of people don't realize that Telegram is used for more than chatting with your contacts. Telegram Groups and Channels serve as a content delivery system, with access often restricted behind some kind of pay system like Patreon or Telegram's own Payments API (think OnlyFans and private Discords). This is a boon to content creators as it protects their payed Telegram content from being easily shared into other Telegram Channels.
Telegram quietly transcended beyond chat app and into the social media arena a while ago. It's about time HN caught up.
So, this can curb sharing but not really prevent it. Will it be a net positive? Let's see.
I am generally of the opinion that piracy is a net positive, but I am ok with pirated content being slightly degraded, analog copies often meet this criteria
How is it disingenuous? They introduced DRM. Call it "protected content" if you want,but that honestly seems more disingenuous than simply calling it "DRM".
> This is a boon to content creators as it protects their payed Telegram content from being easily shared into other Telegram Channels.
No it doesn't. DRM doesn't work. End of story. Telegram has a public API and a Free Software client. All someone has to do is fork the client and disable screenshot / screen recorder blocking. At best they can block "forwarding" so you can't actually see what user originally sent the message. Once you send someone content on Telegram, you have no technical capability to stop them from doing what they want with it.
obviously everyone cheated that question to get more money; a year they essentially changed the module to add a "are you lying?" question and suddenly this lowered significantly the overestimated prices farmers declared
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this does not apply 1-1 to DRM in telegram (they removed the download option, not just added a warning), but I find it a relevant story to a broad interpretation of "DRM doesn't work"
The result is that the screenshot still gets taken (they have no way of disabling that), but the photo is unusable.