Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

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From what I gathered: a boatload of money from the rich owner for development and hosting, plus not caring about encryption in any way. Don't need to bother with tricky distributed device syncing protocols if your servers simply store everything and can index the data at leisure for fast global search etc.

It's still impressive, though. It's not as if Facebook's chat works this well and that isn't (wasn't?) encrypted either and they've got an even bigger pile of cash. It's also a lot older though, just look at the evolution from IRC to MSN to Facebook to Telegram: each step it gets better. Maybe that's how that difference can be explained? Anyway, between normal messengers like Signal/Whatsapp/Wire/etc. and Telegram, the main difference is not caring about privacy. (To be clear, I don't mean that whatsapp is a privacy-conscious messenger as they will collect what they want behind the scenes, but on the client side they have to care about keeping the server "untrusted" and that will slow everything down a lot.)

People tend to forget that Whatsapp encryption was introduced years after Telegram’s secret chats. Now they are continuously bashed for no encryption by default, but their original proposition was “messenger done right” as compared to unencrypted Whatsapp and FB.

I'm well aware of that and I don't have WhatsApp because of its privacy problems (much to the annoyance of some family members, but I imagine it saved me from a lot of printer queries, and if they aren't willing to switch then why should I).

What I think you're underappreciating is that Telegram was built on the premise of privacy and they've neglected that from day one. It was better than the status quo on day one (at release), but have fallen further and further behind ever since.

Telegram was launched when Whatsapp sent messages without transport encryption over port 443 (this was fun on public wifi!) and got big when Whatsapp was bought by Facebook because Telegram was independent and had proper end to end encryption (with air quotes around "proper" if you like; it wasn't OTR-grade but at least it was better than the status quo). Since then, nothing happened whatsoever on the privacy front. Even the legal compliance is a complete joke (gdpr data exports only work in a few clients and not very well at that), but more importantly to me, they need gdpr data exports because the servers still know everything. Whatsapp moved on, Signal got a lot more mature, Wire has also come onto the playing field, and Telegram has done nothing since before Snowden told us to turn on https basically.

Yeah and now every messenger uses encryption by default - in groups, mostly with multiple devices.

Telegram is still at "open a secret chat" with worst UX

Not just UX, also availability. I simply cannot use encrypted chats in the Telegram desktop client that I use the most and runs on the device that can actually get security updates while being fully owned by me (I, ahem, "rooted" my laptop and it can still install system updates without any hassle, it's amazing). This is why I'm slowly moving more and more friends to Signal but their UX is also very mediocre by comparison.

Thought that could also be considered being part of the user experience

But definitely

I switched to Matrix though

I'm using Matrix with two friends and it's just a world of pain. Can never find any messages because search is not implemented on web or android (only ios seems to have it or an electron desktop client... no thanks to both), random issues with encrypted chats (it all works great if you leave e2ee off! Though it got a lot better already since a big update ~1.5 years ago) such as unavailable message keys, random bugs, and too complicated for use with non-techies (so not an option for my mom). What helps is having alternative contact channels for when a message fails to decrypt or the custom homeserver is down again.

There has been a lot of work on it but the smart thing to do would have been to copy Wire or Signal and build on an existing thing if you don't have the manpower to start from scratch and want to be a mainstream alternative.

I'd rather recommend Threema (best UX, not so great in features or encryption tech), Signal (network effect, best privacy, reasonable UX), or Wire (like Signal but slightly better desktop experience).

I have been testing it for about 3 years now (FOSDEM 2019 made me interested again)

I started pulling people to it only a few months ago when I thought it was good enough (includes almost no encryption issues happening in all day usage)

My mom uses it as well. It works fine. I had to install the app though, like all the other apps.

The reasons why I found Matrix interesting, were:

- Telegram like syncing messages across all devices while adding a new device is as simple as setting up WhatsApp Web

- It's a standard for interoperability - I got sick of telling others what to use and being told so by the network effect

Copying Wire or Signal just wouldn't work for technical reasons. I also wouldn't want a copy.

I got all of your recommendations over time (including buying Threema with all my friends), but they just haven't been good enough for us and me. In practice, no one cares about Electron. It seldomly VScode or Teams are used at work

> not caring about encryption in any way

That's hyperbole and I think you know it. It's not like the messages are sent unencrypted for anyone to sniff with minimal effort.

https://telegram.org/faq#q-so-how-do-you-encrypt-data

Of course, I find that to be a given these days. When people talk about encrypted chats in 2021, it's not about transport encryption... installing let's encrypt for your api is the easy part.

And you know that encryption for messengers means E2E not server to client. Privacy means even Telegram doesn't know what I wrote.

End to end encryption seems like an endless pain in the ass. So many expected features like server side searching and link embeds become basically impossible to do in a secure way.

The problem with having your own server instead (then you can just do transport encryption and call it a day) is that everyone needs to be on your server. Or go decentralized, but that has its own host of complications that may or may not be easier than end to end encryption.

Also note that it's not impossible. Wire and Signal have come a very long way already, it's just the front-end (UX) that they're lacking on really. Telegram has features like a video editor and user-filtered search, but those are all client-side things and have nothing to do with e2e encryption. All the things that do (sending messages, emoji reactions, group chats, group video calls, etc.) are already implemented by both apps.

Actually Pavel Durov made some very rough accusations against Signal and other "secure" apps for using the standard encryption method. For what he says, he doesn't trust others encryption protocols because he believes NSA made some pretty well hidden backdoors in them to easily decrypt them.

Meanwhile I'm just here thinking, what's the matter if you're messager is super duper safe if your device OS running them is plagged with backdoors?

Kleptographic backdoors in the Signal protocol is FUD. I work as a security consultant, which is definitely not a cryptographer, but I do get around and "NSA made some pretty well hidden backdoors in them to easily decrypt them" is definitely false.

> what [if your] mess[en]ger is super duper safe if your device OS running them is plag[u]ed with backdoors

This is more relevant. Bugdoors more than backdoors, or perhaps just stupid bugs and enough budget to find them, but yeah basically that's how messages are decrypted these days (e.g. NSO group).

Wouldn't it be a good idea to use two chained encryption methods? AES+whatever Telegram is using? This would be resistant against a AES backdoor and against bugs/backdoor in the Telegram encryption method. Similar to TrueCrypt where you can select AES+Serpent+Twofish to encrypt your files.

That would work, but historically this hasn't proven necessary and double encryption means double the CPU power (or more, if one of them has CPU extensions and the other encryption method does not). Doing group calls in Wire is already very taxing on nowadays' energy-efficient laptops or not-high-end phones.

For example, people have been using Russian GOST algorithms as a hedge against the USA stuff, but it's falling out of style because it just hasn't proven necessary in the decades since the AES and SHA families came into existence. Any bugs we found, for example in SHA-1, affected everyone equally and did not create a backdoor as with Dual-EC (in which flaws were identified before release and which went unaddressed, very much unlike other common algorithms).

Idk about its security, but proxies' security is much low that owner of the proxy (Domain of the proxy) can see your messages sending while using his proxy, and it backups your messages. For me, I usually use telegram, it's better and more comfortable than whatsapp. I dont judge about its general security, but the proxies security is shit as possible. btw I live in Iran and I have only two ways to connect to telegram, VPNs or Proxies. But with these conditions, I rather using telegram instead of shitty whatsapp

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