We have no way to know this, and (unlike Signal), Telegram doesn't give us best-effort assurances by doing things like open-sourcing its code.
We have no way to know this, and (unlike Signal), Telegram doesn't give us best-effort assurances by doing things like open-sourcing its code.
Well, other than his arrest ;-)
When an authoritarian govt is calling for the release of someone who runs a "private" messenger, it suggests they have a back door. Otherwise they tend to oppose all private messaging.
Most western countries do horrific things we do not find acceptable, but when we do find out we hand wave it away because they're the "good guys".
Good thing it’s legal to say so in the countries that dominate its user base.
It came very close to this during Covid, and maybe once or twice since then.
You're free to say what you want, and everyone is free to ignore you if what you say doesn't jive with "common sense".
Well the embassy is complaining about this arrest, so maybe that's just counter-intelligence.
And then, he is also on Putin's wanted list; his arrest could one day turn him into a valuable bargaining chip.
It’s French national law, not EU (though the EU will copy for sure).
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/whats-going-frances-onl...
Also now they have added “because people watch football matches illegally on Telegram”. So they are going to throw everything at kitchen sink at Durov, probably also national security issues because anti-French political groups use Telegram in Africa.
Also it is still the investigative phase but the suspicion is warranted completely.
I seriously do not understand low moral people shielding those helping criminals, do you really not knowing what are you doing, seriously, just because there is a - misleadingly presented - popular service there? Really? Very worrying the moral state of social media user masses.
Well Tucker Carlson also said he used Signal and his messages were leaked by the government so yeah...
XMPP and Matrix services run open source software such as ejabberd
The integrity of your conversation with someone would then depend on both your endpoints, clients, and the respective server.
Just like email, but for chat. There is no single gatekeeper who is allowed to use the network.
> global network consists of servers run by many independent entities
This is not the case for all the popular chat apps including Signal which uses centralized servers which they run themselves. They clearly see little benefit from this distributed independent server model.
And even that doesn't mean the server is open source.
As I explained earlier if you cannot audit the physical server you are connected to, claiming it's open source is useless. FYI that's literally how the term open source was used in this context!
> The integrity of your conversation with someone would then depend on both your endpoints, clients, and the respective server.
Client to client verification simply works and eliminates the need to also "verify" the server which if compromised introduces an even higher risk of contamination in the trust model (too many co-dependent functions are delegated to the server), not to mention collusion in establishing integrity of yet another device that we need to trust.
An IM platform server can be open sourced. Just like any kind of software.
It's just a matter of publishing your code and, preferably making it possible to verify that the service your users are connecting to is build using the same published code.
Typically, the way it goes is that you implement e2ee such that even a fully compromised server cannot read the clients messages, publish the client's source code, and build it yourself or use reproducible builds. That ladt part is where you can criticize Signal. Whether they publish the server code is mostly irrelevant unless you want to run a separate messenger infrastructure.
Or if you S2S federate with the upstream server. Which is a core differentiator of XMPP and Matrix. Signal server(s) notably supported proper federation during their initial growth-phase but famously closed it off ("The ecosystem is moving").
Similar story as Google [Chat/Talk/Hangouts], which did federate over XMPP before they closed that down years ago.
Open client code and documented protoccols are much more important. If you can compile your own client from open source code and it works fine, then you can know for sure what you're sending to the server.
Either way, you're saying the MTProto is binary? How do you mean that?
Pretending you misunderstand what I meant is detestable.