Comment by maqp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maqp | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah if you buy a number with Durov's TON shitcoin. The original sales are over and number auctions start from opening bid of 37 dollars, and run all the way to 14,000 USD https://fragment.com/numbers, and they take very long, even up to one year to close.

Also, Telegram is not private.

1. It's not E2EE by default

2. It's not E2EE for groups on any platfrom

3. It's not E2EE 1:1 on desktop clients forcing you to downgrade from secret chats to insecure chats

4. It's collecting 100% of your metadata, including

* who you talk to, when, how much, what type of data you exchange,

* your IP-address which sort of defeats the purpose of having no phone number, and

* when you enable secret chats

Telegram is also not transparent about its funding, about who develops it, and who has access to the plaintexts stored on their server (meaning, anyone with a zero day or two).

Journalists who went to look for Telegram's office in Dubay found out no-one in the neighboring office had ever seen Telegram staff enter the space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg8mWJUM7x4

Telegram was built with blood-money from VKontakte, and Durov has been marketed as living in exile, when in reality he has visited Russia on average once every 2.4 months since the exile began, and strangely Durov has not had his underwear poisoned and windows have been kind to him despite supposedly betraying Putin's interests.

tl;dr Telegram reeks of FSB/SVR honeypot.

>Durov's TON shitcoin

>Telegram reeks of FSB/SVR honeypot

Btw interesting connection between Durov/TON and Jan Marsalek (alleged Russian spy) was recently uncovered by FT:

>In 2018 Marsalek invited Ben Halim and other backers of the Libya projects to invest in a new crypto token being launched by messaging platform Telegram, whose founder Pavel Durov had met Marsalek and invited him to participate.

>A special purpose vehicle was set up for them to pool their money and invest but Credit Suisse, which was organising the sale of the token, blocked the transaction. It turned out the bank was happy to take money from Marsalek, whose role in the biggest corporate fraud in recent European history had yet to be revealed, but was wary of his Libyan friends.

>As a workaround, Ben Halim and others decided to let Marsalek invest their money in his name, sidestepping Credit Suisse’s money laundering checks. However, the US Securities and Exchange Commission blocked Telegram’s issuance of the tokens and Marsalek refunded his Libyan associates.

https://archive.fo/7evmm

> Yeah if you buy a number with Durov's TON shitcoin

Not even. If you actually try you will discover at the last step (after full KYC, signing some dubious agreements, and linking an existing TG account) that the Fragment "market" is actually fully centralized and has not been open for new buyers-users for a good while. No secondary markets out there (maybe not even possible on their network) afaik.

That's... all sorts of funny and sad to hear.

And the authorities are blocking it to protect people from falling into the honeypot, right?

I mean as in the number is not tied to the identity, maybe you are asked your number to verify the account, but after that you can have a non number linked account. The account is tied to a username @blablabla.

I think Telegram is filth as much as the next guy, but I'm just making that technical point.

Anyone using Telegram and expecting it to be a secure messenger is delusional.

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