Privacy

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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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What polish and features is signal missing?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 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.