235

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

215 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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 2 points 6 months ago

What polish and features is signal missing?

[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 5 points 6 months ago

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 2 points 6 months ago

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

[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 1 points 6 months ago

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 6 months ago

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 6 months ago

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 6 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.

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments (12 replies)

this post was submitted on 08 May 2024

235 points (80.4% liked)

Privacy

32177 readers

582 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS