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Comment by maxpro | Hacker News Reader

It is not the first case for Telegram. So, Durov will continue with his show... they claim that Telegram is e2e encrypted, but don't mention that needs to be activated per chat

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I'm a little bit sad because I'm sure if they invested some effort into it, they could make all chats e2e encrypted while still allowing sync with their server. They "just" need to figure out a way to safely exchange the private key between devices. I know it's not completely trivial, but if anyone could create a good user experience for this, it's certainly Telegram.

It’s possible and how to do it is public. Signal has encrypted group chats across devices already and is open source.

I'm really late with the reply and it doesn't really matter anyway, but how Signal is doing it is not what I would like to see. It would be less of an issue if you can backup and restore your Signal chats, but as of right now, it's impossible (at least on Apple devices). I use Signal because lots of my friends prefer it, but I don't like that losing my phone would mean losing my complete chat history of all my chats. Maybe I'm not their target audience, but I think Signal is already mainstream enough that chat backups and restores should be a thing.

What I was expecting from Telegram (although it doesn't look like they plan to do this) is synced, E2E encrypted cloud chats. So any new device I add has access to all the previous message history, and is independent of all other devices.

They don't claim this. They claim Cloud Chats are encrypted, which is true and only claim e2ee for Secret Chats, which is also true.

But a court can easily get UNENCRYPTED message while in at-rest stage directly from the hard drive on their server.

Don't worry, you're safe from hackers, deep state, and foreign nation-state from eavesdropping on ya over the net through their awesomely robust and intensely-touted advertised EE2E capability.

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