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Read the article - "Whether this is a good thing for the world is another question, one muddied by how poorly understood Telegram is, especially in the US. The vast majority of journalists still refer to it as an “encrypted messaging app.” This description unnerves many security experts, who warn that, unlike Signal or WhatsApp, Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default; that users must go out of their way to turn on the app's “secret chats” function (which few people actually do); and that only individual conversations, not those among groups, can be end-to-end encrypted. For the millions of people who use Telegram under repressive regimes, experts say, that confusion could be costly."

Even if you make the argument that telegram CAN be encrypted (only in 1-1 chats) what ultimately matters is how people actually use it, and that is probably in an unencrypted manner.

> what ultimately matters is how people actually use it, and that is probably in an unencrypted manner

I've heard criticisms about Telegram's MTProto encryption on HN, but in my usage of Telegram nobody has ever turned on the secret chats mode enabling it anyway. Anyone privacy-conscious asks me to use Signal, Matrix, or even Threema.

I have heard compliments about Telegram sticker packs though, if the other apps want more users they could consider making "cute stickers" :)

> I have heard compliments about Telegram sticker packs though, if the other apps want more users they could consider making "cute stickers" :)

You joke, but Telegram's clients have been innovating for years. Way ahead of the rest. Its packed with features and yet never feels bloated or slow. Frankly, its amazing.

Not even a joke, I had a younger friend comment on the sticker cuteness and it never even crossed my mind that people would prefer messaging apps based on that.

The Telegram client/feature set is great, and I hope Signal and competitors will improve their clients to match.

This is why line dominates in Japan. The range of stickers is incomparable.

Oh? Wechat lets users provide their own stickers, for free or for money. I'd bet the range is competitive.

I had to get vouched for by two people who moved from mainland China to get a wechat account, then the client took up all my free space so I deleted it.

> I have heard compliments about Telegram sticker packs though, if the other apps want more users they could consider making "cute stickers" :)

Many of Signal's sticker packs were ported from Telegram:

https://signalstickers.com/?s=author%3ATelegram

Is "ported" another word for "stolen"?

Telegram supports importing stickers from other apps and platforms:

https://core.telegram.org/stickers#importing-stickers-from-o...

In light of that, importing stickers from Telegram to other apps is fair game. Telegram's very brief terms of service* do not forbid users from using Telegram stickers outside of Telegram.

Also, some of these stickers are recycled memes from social media and pop culture, which usually qualify for fair use when used for messaging.

* https://telegram.org/tos

I don't think I've ever seen any of the stickers from the telegram company actually used in a chat. I've seen lots of stickers that people have had drawn, though, sometimes even used by the people who commissioned them.

We have a sticker pack with the expressions of my cat and it's absolutely great

Telegram puts out a lot of packs, but they're made by different artists. You may be using their packs without realizing it. Everything on the Trending tab is theirs, and it changes frequently. Here are three packs with bats that I use, all commissioned by the Telegram team.

https://tlgrm.eu/stickers/MrBat https://tlgrm.eu/stickers/BattyBat https://tlgrm.eu/stickers/FangBat

Cute stickers are not just a crucial part of the conversation. Cute stickers are the conversation.

> Telegram is hosted on Google Cloud

Source? Back when Russia was playing IP whack-a-mole, they were using at least AWS, Google and Azure.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43797176

Not that this really affects the thrust of your argument, since all 3 are US entities, but it seems unlikely that there's a single place you could tap for access to everything.

Oof, called out, have an upvote, you're entirely right.

Frankly I wasn't aware they were on all three, I was just on google cloud and got affected by these whack-a-mole shenanigans, and assumed it was exclusive.

This is entirely my bad for not checking my assumptions and I apologise.

> If telegram was weak: Jan 6th and Jihadi terrorists wouldn't use it.

The Jan 6 dudes ("terrorists" and/or otherwise) put their ugly mugs all over Facebook, Twitter, Parler, and the public Internet. I wouldn't exactly take opsec advice from that lot.

Some Jan 6 folks did. Presumably not all of them did

The whole Jan 6 thing is a complete joke. Many people outside the USA can not even understand why this is still a thing people talk about, compare it to terrorism and even to the 9/11 attacks. Its completely insane.

I remember 9/11 from outside USA. It "broke" the normal way people lived their life. Jan 6 on the other hand did nothing, no one cared. Only US propaganda media made a huge deal out of it. And they keep talking about the 768 (an more) people who have been charged as if they where charged for terrorism or something. Most of them simply got charged for entering a restricted building. Comparing this to a terrorist attack that took the life of 3000 people and injured at least 6000 other is grotesque and disgusting.

That's because Jan 6 turned into a failed, and very incompetently executed attempt at a coup.

9/11 may have been devastating in many ways, but Jan 6 was an attack at the very structure of the American democracy. They tried to install a leader of the country who wasn't actually the one elected by the majority. If they succeeded, it would be a major blow to American credibility and founding story of a "democratic nation by the people, for the people".

> That's because Jan 6 turned into a failed, and very incompetently executed attempt at a coup.

You gotta be kidding me and/or yourself. Do you really believable that?

This was a rather normal protest march which escalated to a riot where a small fraction of the people probably 100-200 resorted to various forms of violence mostly against property and to an extend against police. No question this is bad. But a coup? Really? Installing a leader, lol what?

Reality check: If an heavy armed group would have stormed the capitols and killed everyone inside that would not have installed a leader and that would be an actual terrorist act. Still there is no logical path how that would/could have changed whos the next president.

There is no evidence that any group of people went there with this goal (to violently install a leader). The vast majority was just there to protest and didn't do anything wrong. From the 700+ people charged the majority was just foolish and entered the building/property after police gave up or where overpowered by the actual violent people. There are plenty videos from inside the capitol where people just walk around. These videos were used to charge them but given the fact that they just walk around they basically are trespassing and cant be charged for much. Most of the 700+ charges are non-violent.

One person died because she was shot by the police some others died do to medial reasons. Some injuries and property damage as you would expect from a riot. Calling this a coup is absurd. America would be the last place where people start a coup unarmed.

I would advice you to watch some of the live streams from that day and/or read some foreign news articles about it and make sure you know about all the debunked misinformation tied to the riot. From X people who got killed to a police officer being murdered to bombs it really had it all and most old articles you find about it still are not corrected.

Indeed. And it was trivial to get evidence of neo-Nazis faking "tradie" personae in the Melbourne riots because people could rock into their Telegram groups.

Telegram and Signal are the best we have out of CENTRALIZED solutions. Both are founded by anarchists who like end-to-end encryption and user empowerment. One accuses the other of being less secure and easily backdoored by governments… but the actual problem is — they are both centralized.

We don’t even need to resort to conspiracy theories — all Germany would have to do to ban Telegram is make Apple take it out of its app store. And it is coming close to that. Telegram’s Durov also openly said that they respect countries’ laws and censor certain people because to be kicked out of the app stores in that country is worse.

What is the decentralized alternative? It takes a lot of work and immunity from the profit motive, to build a viable alternative.

Moxie is famously skeptical of decentralization, but it is essential — not just for privacy, but more broadly — for user empowerment and control. If you want to know what the decentralized solutions look like, lease read my answer to Moxie

https://community.intercoin.org/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

A shorter (and less Web 3-focused) response to Marlinspike's claims in ‘The ecosystem is moving’ is this post by Daniel Gultsch, the maintainer of the "Conversations" XMPP client:

https://gultsch.de/objection.html

>... founded by anarchists ...

That's reaching deep... seriously?

It’s based… no ?

Marlinspike is a self-described anarchist:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/moxie-marlin...

Durov seems to be more of a right libertarian type. Whether this qualifies as "anarchist" or not depends on who you ask.

> Both are founded by anarchists who like end-to-end encryption and user empowerment.

Telegram didn't have e2e encryption for a long time and its chats are still not e2e encrypted by default. Also, I would hardly call Durov an anarchist.

>What is the decentralized alternative?

Matrix

> We know from the Snowden revalations that their technical capability in 2008 (he only exposed info on things that were already old, his intent was to show illegal surveillance not capability remember) was such that they had some kind of access to every conceivable device on the planet and the majority of communication that went through the US.

We know they had access to every centralised provider's servers (including Google and any other company you care to name). We also know that they couldn't break post-DES cryptosystems when properly used - indeed NSA employees expressed considerable frustration about the fact that they couldn't break PGP-encrypted emails or chats and had to resort to metadata analysis, social engineering, hacking individual users and so on.

> 1) Telegram is weak, NSA has access

> 2) Telegram is strong, NSA does not have acces

It's not a binary. Most attacks on cryptosystems reduce the amount of work it takes to break in rather than making it completely free. And even if the NSA theoretically has access, that doesn't mean they can predict an attack or will share that data with every contry/agency/company. We know the NSA was reading all unencrypted emails up until at least 2012 or so, yet there was plenty of crime committed and discussed over email during that period.

(I'm no fan of Signal or the way it's marketed, quite the opposite, but I trust Telegram far less)

>NSA was reading all unencrypted emails up until at least 2012 or so, yet there was plenty of crime

NSA is not a law enforcement agency; they don’t care about crime.

> If telegram was weak: Jan 6th and Jihadi terrorists wouldn't use it.

Pretty sure the intelligence people have a policy to maintain their ability to see their shit rather than blowing their load.

In fact there's probably an evolutionary aspect to the jihadi thing.

Telegram boardcasting phone number lead to arrest of Hong Kong protestors in 2019. I know it is fixed now, but a couple of years and a lot of people jailed too late.

Most people I know would rather use Signal now.

The app itself in terms of features and UX quality is superior to Whatsapp. What I don't get is how is this funded.

Pavel Durov was Russian's Zuckerberg until Putin chased him out.

> If telegram was strong: NSA would do everything in it's power to push users to more controlled platforms.

What power does the NSA have to influence those choices? When has it happened? Do you have evidence of it?

Speaking hypothetically: the NSA could push the US Government to ask Apple and Google to remove Telegram from their app stores. Without mobile apps, Telegram would die very quickly.

> I don't think their technical capability got significantly worse in that time

I think that was probably around the same time more and more of the web moved from HTTP to HTTPS. Even webmail was accessed over plaintext for a long time, so I guess a lot of signal got worse while legal access got not only better but "integrated".

> Addendum: all of these same complaints (save: weak crypto) can be used against Signal.

Better and E2E crypto is the main argument for Signal though.

This is a significant difference between those two. You can't just ignore it if you build up such a case.

Telegram makes it insanely easy to have a non-encrypted message, so the NSA definitely wants terrorists to use that. It also has central mass data collection. Of course the NSA wants people to use Telegram.

Let's be fair, Jihadi terrorists probably don't know which platform is actually secure for their terrorist operation (none of them is, actually). They could've used WeChat if they were able to register an account for themselves. It's simply not a good metric.

It's the same reason why you don't want to measure someones kindness by comparing it with Adolf Hitler. "Oh I have such good neighbor, he is the completely opposite of Adolf Hitler", it just don't compare very well.

> If telegram was weak: Jan 6th and Jihadi terrorists wouldn't use it.

You must have missed this piece [1]:

> The app was in fact secretly built by the FBI, and designed to allow law enforcement to tune into conversations between about 9,000 users scattered around Earth.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/08/operation_ironside_an...

The article doesn't discuss Telegram at all. How is it related?

it shows that criminal groups aren't always going to pick the most secure option for communication

In the case of the article, they got caught in a honeypot. That seems like a different risk than choosing poorly made software.

It disproves the assertion.