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Comment by janmo | Hacker News Reader

The title is not correct IMO, it is not "end-to-end encrypted" by default.

But the traffic between you and the Telegram server is always encrypted and the "end-to-end encryption" can be enabled.

Telegram appears to be the last company selling SSL as "encryption" though. In 2024 that's akin to claiming that your car doesn't need oil every 500km, foodproduct has a reasonably predictable shelf life or tap water is safe for consumption.

It's all great, also arguments a generation old.

Maybe I should add 'literate' on my resume too...

Genuinely curious.. in what sense do you not consider SSL to be encryption?

As always, context matters. SSL is clearly encryption, but if you talk about encrypted messaging, in this future year of 2024, people will assume that you mean end to end encryption. If it was 1996, this might be a different story, of course, but it's not.

Telegram really has kind of pulled off a masterstroke in marketing by convincing people that it is e2e encrypted (honestly, as a non-user I assumed that its non-group messaging was until the current fuss), while not being, even where it would be easy to be (non-group stuff). One might reasonably question their motives there.

In the sense that SSL in 2024 is the bare minimum and goes without saying, so when talking about encryption we mean e2ee.

and also, a lot of the "HTTPS" encryption is only encryption until the Cloudflare edge node.

https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end

Then we can say with my comment the traffic between you and Hacker News is encrypted. See, its using TLS.

"The same encryption as your bank"

"Military grade"

Everything is transport-encrypted these days. Almost everybody still emphasizing that as a product feature is doing so out of questionable motives.

You are right, but they are just having good fun shitting on the service, and the guy ("obsessed") for being a donor. Why not get some cheap clicks?

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