Telegram CEO calls out rival Signal, claiming it has ties to US government
(www.theregister.com)
from Caravaggio@feddit.nl to privacy@lemmy.ml on 14 May 2024 17:00
https://feddit.nl/post/15161646
from Caravaggio@feddit.nl to privacy@lemmy.ml on 14 May 2024 17:00
https://feddit.nl/post/15161646
#privacy
threaded - newest
I know that Telegram has a lot of users, so I'm not describing all of them here. But I've noticed that it seems especially popular among people who kind of like to "play pretend" as underground hackers. You know, the kind of person who likes to imagine that the government would be after them.
This mudslinging feels like more of a marketing campaign than anything else. An info op that will work well on the Telegram users who like to imagine that they have outmaneuvered all the info ops.
Yes. And those pretenders are always people who can’t install Synapse and “delete” their messages thinking that’s very smart.
Because we keeping saying Signal and Telegram instead of Anti-Libre Software, Service as a Software Substitute, and Centralised.
We should reach them in their spaces, moding, hacking, piracy and beginner programming channels.
Ma-trix! Ma-trix!
Pot trying to call out Kettle.
F. Doubt.
There is also Matrix, which has advantages over both of them.
Anyone see if self hosted server ever got easy enough? For realsies.
Use the Docker container.
Matrix is shit atm mate stop recommending it maybe one day it will become good but that day is not today also they are said to be scattering metadata and bashes XMPP for no real reason . Briar and SimpleX is the gold standard for now only if they had more users .
This is a lie.
matrix.org/docs/older/faq/
Yeah my bad . Shit source from reddit I guess .
+1
No, it is not.
No, it does not.
No, they are not. They might fit a certain niche (or could once they mature) but neither is a good general-purpose messenger, because their goals and designs inherently limit usability.
No messaging platform fits every use case, but Matrix is great for general-purpose private messaging that anyone, anywhere can easily use, without Google services, without a phone number, and without being vulnerable to shutdown if a single country’s laws turn unfavorable. It has other advantages as well. It’s not flawless, but is constantly improving, and is already very useful to many people.
If you have a specific criticism that you can actually support with facts, you could bring it up for discussion. Slinging vague attacks that look a lot like something one might see in a poorly-informed reddit post doesn’t help anyone.
Its like you have never used it . The clients and servers are laggy federation is shit etc . but you seem to have your mind set no hope in arguing .
Which ones, exactly? The largest public server was laggy about two or three years ago, but hasn’t been recently in my experience, and in any case, you can pick a different server or run your own. I have never seen a laggy client.
Again, that doesn’t match my experience, and what you’ve written is too vague to have any useful meaning.
Apparently not. Good day.
I’ve previously had issues with Matrix being incredibly slow and unreliable with federation (I’m self-hosting). However, that’s pretty much in the past now and I seem to have somehow resolved that issue.
Which server software are you running? Any recent experience with Conduit or Dendrite?
I’ve been using Conduit within a docker container for a while now, and it’s worked pretty well aside from the mautrix-signal bridge (this was fixed in version v7.0.0, I think). Other than conduit, I tried out dendrite, but the latency in sending messages was unbearable.
I wonder if Conduwuit would be worth a try. I don’t know anything about the maintainer or what led to the fork, but I see it already has active contributors.
I’m not sure - conduwuit does seem to have more active development but it’s not as though conduit is dead either…I also can’t find any other reasons to use conduwuit mentioned on its repository, so I’m just going to stick to conduit.
I think Telegram has always been a honeypot
An FSB (or AP, don’t know which, the main thing is it’s Russian) honeypot at that.
There’s no oversight for any of these agencies and they have the means and incentive to backdoor cryptography, what would stop them from doing this morality? There’s no possible way that they both aren’t compromised and all we’re seeing now is them firing pot shots at each other trying to convince the reader to join their honeypot because its sweeter.
No sure if you mean government agencies but if you do, there’s definitely oversight. Don’t think that your Congress peoples aren’t in on it too.
<img alt="1000001585" src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/6b0a9343-3605-4e95-adea-5a94bb5cefcf.webp">
I am going to repeat what I have said for another similar post.
I still stand for Signal App.
Yes, yet telegram isn’t a piece of shit of an app that runs slowly on every device, can’t sync messages because “something went wrong” and doesn’t depend on electron to run. Also, not funded by the CIA.
Could you not apply this “funded by the CIA” argument to other things such as… The Tor Network? Which was created by the US Military Naval Research? Also some US government departments have donated to Tor. Does that mean Tor is breached?
Okay that’s fair, even if remove that and assume they hold zero influence / there are no cleaver backdoors Signal is still not good when it comes to performance and reliability.
Guys, I think all these computers took military funding. Wake up sheeple.
completely agree with you. I can’t believe why you are getting downvoted. Promoting a platform which is funded by the CIA, US gov and Israel. Completely insane really I don’t understand how people are still believing this. They really need to wake up to the truth otherwise things will never change. Privacy will stay an illusion we give ourselves to believe that nobody can read our messages (even if they absolutely can)
you believe every mathematician and the crypto people are conspiring to spy on us and call other people insane?
Telegram is as safe as just using Facebook DMs (unencrypted), only it’s Russian.
I suggest you judge for yourself how safe that is.
Even if it were encrypted and the backdoor was controlled by the Russian state, logically that would make it safer than Facebook for anyone living in Western jurisdictions. The Russian government cannot get them and is hardly going to exchanging intelligence with its enemies.
It’s not.
No it wouldn’t. You shouldn’t opine on what they’d do. They can negotiate, you know. And they are exchanging intelligence all the time.
If that were true, corporations wouldn’t work with their competitors.
To “opine” is to have an opinion. Are you suggesting I should refrain from having an opinion? Does this apply to your own opinions too? Odd place to make such an argument.
Otherwise: interesting point. To me, a state that can obtain personal data by leaning on its owns corporations is, by definition, more threatening than one that has to negotiate for it with a hostile power. But perhaps I underestimate the scale of that practice.
On what they would and wouldn’t do - yes, I try not to make opinions.
Considering that the balance of power between US government and, say, Meta is not much different from the same between it and Russian government (Meta doesn’t have a military, but has ways to compensate for that), that should be right.
To what extent is it Russian?
+1
Yeah, I’m going to take this with a massive dose of salt. At least, Signal has encryption on by default for people. Where Telegram does not.
You can’t even sync encrypted chats between devices. Lose your device or have a desktop client? Bye bye encrypted chat!
Anti Commercial-AI license
Yeah, being able to seamlessly switch between the desktop app and mobile is a must for me so that’s something I already prefer in Signal.
Even Facebook Messenger has E2EE on by default now. Pavel Durov talks a lot of shit considering Telegram still treats encryption as an afterthought.
Edward fucking Snowden has recommend Signal and I think if anyone knows whether it’s secure, it’s probably him and the NSA.
That and he is paranoid to a point where he physically kills all mics and cameras on his devices, so if he claims anything is secure, I will believe him unconditionally.
Edward Snowden Is NOT a security expert. Snowden was a NSA contractor. I repeat, Snowden is NOT a security expert.
This is how you know the brain has rotten and become a slick turd.
Username related.
Do you have any serious and constructive thing to say, or may this be considered a case of hit-and-run trolling?
Agreed. Making it a contest of “this talking head seems smarter” means exactly that.
Try explaining that to normies though. They don’t want to understand shit, and they want to think they are safe without understanding shit. That this is impossible they just don’t want to believe, because they don’t understand shit.
I absolutely aim to challenge this kind of crap. If I leave, I doubt there will be people who will do it consistently. People want to follow X, Y and Z cults but not A, B and C cults, and think they are rational. Rationalists can come up with the most irrational nonsense, which is why they are not rational.
That you can’t do something well or at all without understanding it is philosophy. Philosophy is weak in the sense that it exists on the same level as aesthetics or instincts. So it’s fighting instinct in a system built to make crowd management through instinct convenient, - in disadvantaged position.
Also NT people like to champion their stupidest ideas as a banner to assemble under. Stupidest exactly to exclude any rational reason, so that only the feeling of community would remain.
They don’t always say what they mean. They might say “this thing is better”, but what they mean is “I’m with the group which distinguishes itself by support for this thing, don’t be against us”.
That’s much more stupid than just using Facebook and unencrypted e-mail with Outlook address for communication, but knowing how safe exactly those are.
Same guy shilled anti-libre software and we should let them stop us thinking for ourselves?
/s, right? I’m just hoping this is missing a /s.
Signal and Telegram are not rivals, though? Signal aims to be a E2EE chat platform, while Telegram works like a public forum in realtime chat format. Signal/WhatsApp are different from Telegram/Discord. They are not the same type of platforms.
Durov is comparing apples and oranges, and anyone falling for this whining, calling Telegram bad is an idiot.
I wouldn’t put a lot of trust in Telegram. Not only is their cryptography off by default, it’s a bespoke hand-rolled non-standard algorithm that might not work as well as they say. Oh, and it’s been potentially backdoored by the FSB (Russia’s CIA) for six years.
cnet.com/…/telegram-reportedly-ordered-to-share-e…
From the very start rather.
And there’s been a few cases where not FSB, but mundane police was reading suspects’ messages before arresting them.
Don’t trust Telegram, I use it because, eh, most people use either that or VK DMs in Russia as the default IM. But never trust it for something which should be secret.
You can even have “opposition”-themed channels there or call for rebellions, but don’t ever expect anything to be secret or even pseudonymous. Even without ill intent regularly flaws are found which allow to get a lot of information, and the code quality is sewer-level.
thats exactely the point lol. Why would you use an algorithm designed and proposed by the US government in a “secure” messenger?
The algorithm was neither proposed nor designed by the US government, it was made by (what is now known as) Signal, a 501c nonprofit.
The claims of signal being “state-sponsored” come from assuming how money flows through the OTF - Open Tech Fund - which has gotten grants from government programs before. (IIRC)
It wouldn’t make sense for the US Gov. to make such a grant to make a flawed protocol, as any backdoor they introduce for themselves would work for any outside attacker too - it’s mathematics. It works for everyone or for no one. Would they really wanna make tools that they themselves use, just to have it backdoored by other state actors?
And again, Durov’s claims are entirely assumptions, and that coming from someone that has had [various](mtpsym.github.io// different vulnerabilities and weird bugs on their platform
Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Durov’s entire criticism seems to be based on implications and have no actual evidence of any technical problems with Signal. He’s basically just throwing shade at a competing business, which amounts to whining.
Funny how first association is “end-to-end encryption is broken” and not, you know, that whoever used the message got hold of one of the “ends”.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov issued a scathing criticism of Signal, alleging the messaging service is not secure and has ties to US intelligence agencies.
Durov made his remarks on his Telegram channel on Wednesday, pushing a variety of points against the rival messenger app, including alleging it has ongoing ties to the US government, casting doubt over its end-to-end encryption, and claiming a lack of software transparency, as well as describing Signal as "an allegedly “secure” messaging app.
The comments seem to have been inspired by a City Journal report that detailed the origins of Signal, which was kickstarted by a $3 million grant from the US government’s Open Technology Fund.
The report says that Maher was an “agent of regime change” during the Arab Spring, and communicated with dissidents in the Middle East and North Africa.
The CEO also claims that users’ Signal messages have popped up in court cases or in the media, and implies that this has happened because the app’s encryption isn’t completely secure.
It’s hard to say, but Durov may be making a reference to Sam Bankman-Fried, whose Signal messages were a key part of the trial that resulted in the ex-CEO being convicted.
The original article contains 671 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot .
Edit : Bot haters can fuck off .
Idk how secure telegram is but cmon signal is shady AF . They won’t let fdroid have it cause they want to sign their own keys or some shit but there is a speculation its because they can roll out custom apk to targets which governments want which is just not possible if it is hosted by someone like fdroid . Even telegram allows that and they even allow third party apps which signal won’t .
SimpleX and briar is the best option if your actually worried about privacy .
This comment is copy pasted from another thread where I had the same opinion
Signal stans do not have an answer to this. OMEMO is verifiable, rest of the stuff around it is not. Signal even had a time when they did not update the backend open source code for over 6 months.
I’m always amazed how people come out of the woodwork to defend Signal any time any criticism of it comes up. It’s become a sacred cow that cannot be questioned. Whatever you may think of Telegram should bear zero weight on your views of Signal.
The reality is that developers of Signal have close ties to US security agencies. It’s a centralized app hosted in US and subject to US laws. It’s been forcing people to use their phone numbers to register, and this creates a graph of real world contacts people have. This alone is terrible from security/privacy perspective. It doesn’t have reproducible builds on iOS, which means you have no guarantee regarding what you’re actually running. These are just a handful of things that are publicly known.
And then we know stuff like this happens. NSA suggested using specific numbers for encryption that it knew how to factor quickly. The algorithm itself was secure, but the specific configuration of how the algorithm was implemented allowed for the exploit thehackernews.com/…/nsa-crack-encryption.html
These kinds of backdoors are very difficult to audit for because if you don’t know what to look for then you won’t have any reason to suspect a particular configuration to be malicious. Given the relationship between people working on Signal and US government, this is a real concern.
The same kind of scrutiny people apply to Telegram and other messaging apps should absolutely be applied to Signal as well.
I’d just like to add that you can use a temporary phone number service to sign up to Signal as you only need a phone number to register, not to actually use Signal.
If one is to compare apple to apples, imho the decision to choose between Signal, Whatsapp and Telegram and other “messengers” is obvious and clear.
Signal is fully open source! You can run it on-premises, if you know your business!
Why are we not talking about it?
I hope my comment will not be discarded/removed as not being in sync with the narative… 😉
Unless something has drastically changed recently, the official Signal service won’t interoperate with anyone else’s instance. That makes its source code practically useless for general-purpose messaging, which might explain why few are talking about it.
My point is that you have all the open source software components needed to run secure communications, on your own premises, for your own users/community in case you are not trusting Signal’s infrastructure.
If you know any other similar alternative with strong encryption open source protocols please let me know! I love learning new things everyday!
Cheers!
Yes, that’s an example of data (and infrastructure) sovereignty. It’s good for self-contained groups, but is not general-purpose messaging, since it doesn’t allow communication with anyone outside your group.
Matrix can do this. It also has support for communicating across different server instances worldwide (both public and private), and actively supports interoperability with other messaging networks, both in the short term through bridges and in the long term through the IETF’s More Instant Messaging Interoperability (MIMI) working group.
XMPP can do on-premise encrypted messaging, too. Technically, it can also support global encrypted messaging with fairly modern features, with the help of carefully selected extensions and server software and clients, although this quickly becomes impractical for general-purpose messaging, mainly because of availability and usability: Managed free servers with the right components are in short supply and often don’t last for long, and the general public doesn’t have the tech skills to do it themselves. (Availability was not a problem when Google and Facebook supported it, but that support ended years ago.) It’s still useful for relatively small groups, though, if you have a skilled admin to maintain the servers and help the users.
Thank you very much for the info!
simplex ;)
I wonder if it’s legit or just another attempt at manipulating markets
Blaming the Americans is a signature “Russia has fucked with this company” trademark.