Privacy

32471 readers

266 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

[email protected]

225

Telegram founder and CEO alledges signal has backdoors, they don't provide reproduceible builds, etc. (lemm.ee)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

187 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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Is telegram not providing reproduce builds?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Telegram isn't encrypting chats (only secret chats).

As far as reproducible builds telegram has got instructions and caveats or excuses around builds for the same issues signal does: https://core.telegram.org/reproducible-builds#reproducible-builds-for-ios

Both easily make Android reproducible builds. This Twitter message is a rock being thrown in a glass house, knowing most people who consume Twitter like it's a firehose, won't swallow the nuance of the details.

I don't even, not to complete lengths.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

I don't know about reproducible builds, but Telegram has a slew of other problems. For example, they advertise that your messages are "heavily encrypted", but this feature is restricted to secret chats which is NOT the default method of communication and they use their own weird-ass algorhythm called ProtoMT instead of one of many existing algorhythms which have been audited and verified. Not to mention you need to give them your phone number to use the app.