this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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Privacy

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Telegram founder and CEO alledges signal has backdoors, they don't provide reproduceible builds, etc. (lemm.ee)
submitted 6 months ago by clot27@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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Here's what he said in a post on his telegram channel:

🤫 A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly “secure” messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad 🥷

🥸 The US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption, and today the exact same encryption is implemented in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages and even Skype. It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕‍🦺

🕵️‍♂️ An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media. But whenever somebody raises doubt about their encryption, Signal’s typical response is “we are open source so anyone can verify that everything is all right”. That, however, is a trick 🤡

🕵️‍♂️ Unlike Telegram, Signal doesn’t allow researchers to make sure that their GitHub code is the same code that is used in the Signal app run on users’ iPhones. Signal refused to add reproducible builds for iOS, closing a GitHub request from the community. And WhatsApp doesn’t even publish the code of its apps, so all their talk about “privacy” is an even more obvious circus trick 💤

🛡 Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github. For the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private 💪

Original post: https://t.me/durov/274

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[–] DaseinPickle@leminal.space 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Maybe fix Telegrams privacy problems.

https://www.404media.co/this-tool-shows-some-telegram-users-approximate-physical-location/

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I can't read it because of the paywall but IIRC (based on a similar article) that was such a nothing-burger issue.

People turned on an entirely optional (I think off by default setting) for some feature that allowed discovery of users by location ... and shocked pikachu they could be tracked or something like that.

[–] DaseinPickle@leminal.space 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It’s not nothing if Telegram makes people believe they only share their location in a limited manner, but instead broadcast it to the whole world. That’s a serious breach of trust. I don’t know why Telegram users keep making excuses for that platform.

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I don’t know why Telegram users keep making excuses for that platform.

Honestly? Because the others are just so bad.

  • Element has an extremely clunky UX and uses Electron. The other Matrix app implementations are incomplete buggy messes.
  • Signal can't sync old messages to the desktop, uses a messy Electron interface, and lacks a bunch of features/polish I've come to expect.
  • Discord doesn't even pay lip service to privacy and uses a similarly doesn't invest in native apps.
  • Threema has been saying that cross-platform/multi-device connectivity is coming for like 2+ years and has had nothing but the most minor of unexciting features added.
  • WhatsApp is run by Meta, has a crappy desktop experience, and has had several serious security vulnerabilities.
  • Jami is ... extremely glitchy.
  • Session is basically Signal backed by a Crypto platform.

If someone took Telegram's UX and feature set and paired that with Signal's approach of "everything is encrypted", that would be a winner. I kinda hope someday Telegram just does that and moves everything to E2EE. When Telegram was launched E2EE for group chats/at scale wasn't really a thing ... now it's not nearly as novel but nobody has deployed E2EE with a feature set like Telegram's.

It’s not nothing if Telegram makes people believe they only share their location in a limited manner, but instead broadcast it to the whole world.

That's not even what happens by the way. It's just that you can spoof a device into random locations and eventually figure out where someone is.

[–] nix@midwest.social 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What polish and features is signal missing?

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)
  • Signal can’t sync old messages to the desktop
  • Persistent voice rooms
  • Custom emoji
  • Animated emoji
  • Location sharing
  • Chat folders
  • Topics/rooms for larger group chats
  • Support for larger group chats
  • Quoted replies (i.e., quote part of a reply or create an arbitrary quote block)
  • Code snippets
  • Message forwarding
  • Polls
  • Animations in the UI
  • Detailed custom theming
  • Chat room theming
  • A content index (e.g., view only the files, links, videos, etc that were sent in this chat)
  • Group invite links to people you don't have in your contacts
  • Channels (i.e., micro-ish blogging)
  • A nice bot API
  • Subjective UI/UX changes to put things in more reasonable places (e.g, why can't I right click on a chat to pin it in the desktop client, why is the Electron menu bar shown by default)

And probably several other things I've forgotten because ... basically nobody I know is still using Signal.

[–] nix@midwest.social 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the detailed reply. Signal does have location sharing and invite links, FWIW.

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Signal's location share AFAIK can't be a live location share (which is useful during events like amusement park trips and stuff)

They have invite links to group chats? I don't know how that would work

[–] nix@midwest.social 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It works about the same as any other app's group invite link. It can be set to automatically add the person or be treated as a request to join that needs approval.

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Huh... That I did not know, thanks for the info. I'm not sure how that works with their encryption model

[–] nix@midwest.social 3 points 5 months ago

Yea, I couldn't tell you the specifics. I know new members of group chats don't see any previous messages. I think it might re-negotiate the keys every time someone is added. It's probably not meant to scale up to very large groups (tho I've never tried), but I've noticed no issues in 25ish people chats.

[–] DaseinPickle@leminal.space 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I mean it’s pretty bad to practice mass surveillance.

https://mastodon.social/@alshafei/112413115927959085

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

A "toot" isn't a very persuasive piece of journalism.

I can verify that it absolutely impacts groups run by queer communities in the Gulf, because I was in one such group that was monitored and shut down by Etidal.

That claim needs a lot more investigation and context. At the very least, it needs investigated by a credible third party.

Also, do you even know what the feature you're criticizing is? A "channel"? Because it's not even really a part of the messaging portion of Telegram. It's basically an in-app blogging platform.

[–] DaseinPickle@leminal.space 1 points 6 months ago

She links to a news article: https://www.saudigazette.com.sa/article/641746/SAUDI-ARABIA/Etidal-Telegram-remove-over-16-million-extremist-contents-in-early-2024

I don’t think Telegram denies doing mass surveillance. They might deny targeting queer groups and claim to only target extremist, whatever that means.