Not that the action against Telegram is right, but there’s a big difference between what Signal and Telegram is doing.

Would you have more info on the differences? I was wondering the same thing, but I don’t know enough about Telegram to compare

Signal always responds to authorities when they ask for data, and they give them all they have: the day they registered, their phone number and the timestamp they last used the app.

Telegram has unencrypted channels of drug dealing, and what I heard is a lot of illegal porn too. The authorities want information on certain users there and Telegram doesn’t comply. This is directly against the law Signal is not breaking, because they always send all the data they have to the law enforcement.

Telegram is a propaganda weapon in some sense, between two worldviews - one is “a good service doesn’t require trust, because they physically can’t sell you”, another is “a good service you can trust because they won’t sell you”. And Telegram helps the latter.

So frankly - kill it with fire. Sadly I’m in Russia and everybody uses it here.

while not wrong context matters, US social media companies also enable human, weapons, and drug trafficking. they play a role in a few genocides too.

but the western regime does not care.

But they give their data when the officials ask. That is all that matters. And I seriously hope none of us uses Telegram or WhatsApp to any discussions. Use Signal because that is so far pretty unbreakable.

Telegram is already in the hands of that tiny Russian old man and WhatsApp is owned by a lizard.

Yeah, try telling your family, friends, colleagues, therapist to use Signal.

Did so years ago. Everybody uses it from my family and friends. I’ve had a very active group chat there for eight years with friends. My mom uses it actively, even calls me using Signal. My partner knows it is the best chat app and actively uses it.

I just asked ages ago for everybody to switch to signal, they valuated the features and for a group chat automatically deleted messages and strong encryption were really interesting for everybody. Now we can shoot shit in a group chat without needing to worry that the logs are stored somewhere forever.

All of the illegal stuff like that that I’ve seen around on social media always linked to telegram channels. Most of the time what you see on regular social media are bots advertising the telegram channels, where the real people are at

Hilarious that it’s impossible. They don’t even horde your data.

Is it time stamp of last usage, or time stamp of all messages?

I’m no authority on it but from what I’ve read it seems to have more to do with the social features of telegram where lots of content is being shared, both legal and illegal. Signal doesn’t have channels that support hundreds of thousands of people at once, nor media hosting to match.

Right, the French authorities are going to present evidence that this dude was aware of specific illegal activity and refuse to comply with a legal warrant involving said actively, making him guilty of obstruction at best, and possibly conspiracy. Signal complies with warrants, they just don’t have anyone’s keys. Telegram has everyone’s keys, and theoretically could turn them over but they refuse. That’s a huge difference from a legal perspective.

Thank you. I’m going to restate your explanation to be sure I’ve got it:

authorities want platforms to comply with legal requests
when Signal gets a subpoena, they open the key locker and show that it’s empty. They provide the metadata they can (sign up date and last seen date, full stop) and tell authorities they can’t do better.
when Telegram gets a subpoena, they open the key locker and show all the keys, then slam it shut in the face of the investigator, telling them to get bent.
conclusion: it’s easier to never have the keys in the first place than to tease the government with them

It’s easier, but Telegram’s authors are from Russia. They psychologically can’t accept that “never have the keys” thing. They want to have control and they want to be able to tell “yes” to the investigator, possibly for something in return.

And it’s sad that it doesn’t. Because that’s why people use Telegram.

Media hosting - we-ell, I suppose something similar to bittorrent (or just sharing encrypted files over bittorrent) would do to back such a system?

Telegram’s channels are like blogs, they have reactions and comment links leading to a groupchat associated with a channel.

It’s basically a social network in an instant messenger format.

Telegram is socially , in terms of finding a market niche, the smartest thing of what’s happened in the Internet recently. Durov really is a good businessman.

She responds to this point in the interview.

Indeed there is, one is an op funded by US intelligence agencies and the other is a platform that the US has no control over.

Telegram is available on F-Droid. Signal is not. Whatever is Signal doing, it’s pretty bad.

Are you developing your opinions based on vibes or have you actually audited their software yourself (you are free to do so both client and federation server code)?

If you audited it, have you produced an actual report with metrics and points of reference for your data points?

This person has been running around spreading FUD in every post about this

It’s what Ive come to expect from the lemmy.ml instance and I finally blocked the entire instance.

But you still post in lemmy.ml/privacy?

It’s actually sad, even though I’m a libertarian, tankies and in general marxists could have made a good input into our future. But if they can believe in Telegram being secure because of vibes and not even doing basic research, they’ve already lost.

Heeey I am also a libertarian, I just tend towards left libertarian. Back to the point of discussion, I find it difficult to ha e a meaningful conversation with the tankies or in general anyone from lemmy.ml . The discussions tend to lack any real data and feel entirely vibe based OR it’s apologist bullshit for Russia.

Like it’s cool if you like communism and have a philosophy based around why you think it’ll help humanity. I can politely disagree but still listen and discuss. It’s quite another to just be a complete dipshit and say “Ukraine had the invasion coming” (actual quote I’ve seen).

Doesn’t take away the fact that not being on F-droid is a huge issue and says a lot about how much they care about privacy and security.

The folks at F-Droid have said that Signal would certainly qualify, but Signal doesn’t want multiple channels out there. F-Droid is just honoring their wishes.

Assuming you’ve audited Signal, can you tell us what your findings were and why you think Signal must be up to something pretty bad? I’m very curious and would love to be enlightened by someone as knowledgeable as you.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide if that is bad or not, but one of the reasons the Signal app can’t be put unaltered on F-droid is because it loads in external dependencies from Google at run-time, which can also be altered by Google at will with any Android update.

one of the reasons the Signal app can’t be put unaltered on F-droid is because it loads in external dependencies from Google at run-time

IIRC, the APK you get directly from their website doesn’t have the GCM bits in it (edit: I did not recall correctly; the GCM bits are there, but there is a websocket fallback if GCM isn’t available), and will work without them. At least, I didn’t have any issues with notifications back when I was running the website APK with GrapheneOS and no Google bits.

How significant is it that the server code is open-source or not? It’s possible for Signal to publish their server code while running completely different software on their servers. The point of the client is being open source and audited on a regular basis by the community, which is why it doesn’t make sense to trust the server-side software.

The entire point is that we don’t have to trust the sever at all. The client is open source and regularly audited by the community. As long as the client stays fully open source, everything’s fine. Also, the closed source dependencies are part of a spam reduction effort which IMO is well worth it. Prior to this, Signal had a spam problem and the client itself remains fully open source.

Signal could have very well not even told people that they added a closed source dependency on Google to its servers and just lied by publishing fake server code that omits the closed source dependency., but instead they were very transparent about the spam problem. In terms of they “why?” regarding the closed source dependencies, their argument is that making it open source would almost immediately result in all anti-spam measures being thwarted. Frankly I’m inclined to agree and again, as long as the client is fully open source and regularly audited, the server code is irrelevant to user privacy/security.

https://community.signalusers.org/t/spam-scam-on-signal/26665

https://signal.org/blog/keeping-spam-off-signal/

The external Google dependencies I am talking about are loaded into the client not the server, so that’s an entirely different issue.

Every app from the Play store requires GCM though, and Signal functions even if a user disables GCM. It pertains to a phone’s ability to notify a user of a new message. But again, users can disable GCM and the app itself will continue to work just fine.

For what it’s work, the APK on Signal’s website (obviously) doesn’t have the external Google dependencies. Personally, I really don’t see this as an issue at all.

It would still be nice to have the server code. I want to run my own server on my own hardware

Lots of apps have slight modifications in F-Droid. Like Telegram for instance.

Someone should audit your downvote

Jokes aside, I’m a firm believer that upvotes/downvotes should be private and I think it’s very unfortunate that they aren’t. I’m fine with people downvoting me and me not knowing who they are.

Wonder how you get negative one down vote…

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