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Comment by nixcraft | Hacker News Reader

Has telegram addressed these concerns? https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1474067549574688768

Astounded by some of the negative comments there. (Probably partly Twitter pushing the rage bait to the top, but still). Does Telegram just have a stupid fanbase?

- people claiming MTProto (Telegram's custom protocol which is basically a worse TLS) makes it in any way more secure than pretty much any other system

- people saying moxie is just pushing MobileCoin. Maybe, I don't know, but what does that have to do with Signal? And even if Signal is a total scam, how does that make Telegram not terrible?

- people saying Signal is backdoored by <3letteragency>. We don't know if that's even possible. If it is, then probably so are almost all other e2e encrypted chat apps. And it's about 100x more plausible that Telegram is backdoored - it certainly could be.

The only slightly valid criticism I saw there is that you have to use your actual phone number with Signal. But that doesn't make Telegram any good.

I'd take Telegram over SMS, but I'd almost take SMS+rot13 over Telegram.

There's nothing to address. Telegram chats are encrypted to and from the server, they're not E2E encrypted, they do not claim to be by default. They do offer E2E chats you can opt into, and there has not been a single example of an E2E message being cracked.

The telegram web page claims on the first page:

> Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct.

How is Joe Average supposed to understand that?

Adding to that, the secret chat encryption has always been Weird (capital W) and in one of the previous generations the server could actually MITM it. Trivially.

> How is Joe Average supposed to understand that?

That's an interesting question. I don't know. Maybe he would understand it as "messages that are hard to read for NSA".

To be honest, I don't understand your criticism. Surely people can put a video on their website about E2E, about privacy, integrity and authenticity. Maybe put an honest comparison with other messengers. But I'd only expect this kind of openness from a nonprofit organization.

All HTTPS connections(most of web browsing last decade) are encrypted to and from the server.

Signal showed us that is possible to have E2E encrypted messaging, why don't they provide it, but with better UI/UX?

If Telegram doesn't read messages and doesn't provide access for 3rd parties(governments, etc.), It should provide E2E everywhere by default.

Can you get E2EE and also have multiple devices all sync'd? This is awful in Signal, it barely works to have multiple devices.

Yes, see Matrix. And imo generally better UX than Telegram on account of having a large selection of clients.

You're the first that I hear saying something has better UX than Telegram, and a Matrix client at that. Power to you, but from my experience with everything from Telegram to Threema and a lot in between, it sounds odd to me.

> If Telegram doesn't read messages

Telegram offers server side text search

You could do that with e2ee though

https://matrix-org.github.io/gsoc/#/projects?project=impleme...

Of course not. Telegram managed to catch all the people who like that they are not Google and Facebook, while also not caring enough about actual encryption.

I had telegram installed for almost 3 years. I never had a secret chat that I did not start myself.

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