And that it uses a proprietary encryption protocol, "MTProto", which has been repeatedly found to have vulnerabilities, like every other self-made encryption scheme.
I don't know why you keep saying that. They have servers and offices distributed in different countries, but IIRC most of the team including the founder and CEO are Russian. They say the distribution is so that no single jurisdiction can force them to do too much.
I'm not particularly thrilled, given Telegram is based in the United Arab Emirates, its client-server encryption is almost purposefully garbage (they basically rolled their own TLS, and predictably researchers keep finding vulnerabilities in "MTProto"), they don't enable e2ee chats by default, and they don't e2ee group chats at all.
Telegram is miles ahead in terms of scalability and features that makes it fun to use and work with their API. Kudos to the engineering team for creating such a great product. Imagine you can have groups up to 200 000 people, post files up to 2GB, have options to share your screen with unlimited amount of users - both desktop and mobile. Its really good. Yes if you need secrecy you may look elsewhere.
Exactly. I have found the phone number requirement idiotic from day one. I recognize the decision was made as a trade off between usability and security (enabling discovering friends via phone etc), but they seem unwilling to admit that this does compromise security.
Is that really a problem though? Most people would just add their friends via username and bypass the whole user discovery process. Discord has demonstrated that this works perfectly fine, even with anonymous accounts not tied to emails.
that problem was solved like 25 years ago, just ignore everyone who you didn't seek out yourself by default. Basically, make liberate use of the block functionality.
Handwavy rants about shoddy cryptography tend to be just that, handwavy. Repeating that Telegram does not enable end-to-end encryption by default does not make it more of a reason not to use Telegram. Here's what you can do to live comfortably on the net, having conversations with the world and its dog while still being able to plot the overthrow of the government without inviting prying eyes: use Telegram for the former, use your private XMPP server with OMEMO for the latter. There, done, problem solved. No need for angry righteous rants about MTProto or the Emirates - and why exactly would that be the reason not to use Telegram by the way, would it have been less of an issue had they been located in Jakarta or Ouagadougou or Silly Valley - and all the bragging rights of using trusted cryptography for your local knitting club meetings where you plan to overthrow the government.
Source: this is what I do, except for the knitting. Telegram for talking to the family, XMPP standby on the server-under-the-stairs for when the going gets tough, with Conversation (which supports OMEMO) installed on target devices.
To quote a popular movie from my youth; I dunno, man; that sounds like a lot of work.
I don't want to have to decide if every message I send is sensitive or not, then if it is, swap to a totally different app. Even worse: convincing friends and family to do the same!
> I don't want to have to decide if every message I send is sensitive or not, then if it is, swap to a totally different app
Only those messages which are sensitive enough should be sent over the secure channel, the rest goes over Telegram. Assuming that you're not a full-time professional anarchist of the comic-book type (picture man in cloak with a lit bomb in hand) you won't have all that many messages which are so sensitive that you don't want to run the risk of the enemy getting hold of them so don't worry, you'll be fine. As said, there is always the end-to-end encrypted 'private chat' function in Telegram for exchanging passwords and such, those have not caught the ire of the handwave-brigade (yet).
> Even worse: convincing friends and family to do the same!
Unless they're all wearing black cloaks while holding lit bombs in their hands (see above) the same goes for them. It is not the knitting patterns the enemy is interested in. Even more, the enemy might become suspicious if you all of a sudden stop sharing them in such a way that it might be theoretically feasible to decrypt them. What are you planning on knitting next, they'll wonder, sweaters with subversive messages on them? Before you know it they'll be hiding bugs in your cereal, and I don't mean weevils.
99.999% of people simply don't care about e2e, and even if they may have some concern about privacy (most don't), they'll prioritize a top-notch UI that let's them talk with friends and family over anything else.
For the remaining people who are concerned about privacy there are plenty of options.
One thing I know is that it was possible in mtproto 1.0 to append something to a packet and have a client still accept it. This didn't allow anyone to modify the contents of the packet or see its plaintext. This was possible because the plaintext hash (the one in header, used to verify packet integrity after decryption) didn't include the padding. In mtproto 2.0, the hash is sha256 instead of sha1, and it does include the padding.
That was the MTProto. The newer one is MTProto 2.0 but they are still on the older method. Also they have servers distributed across regions so there's no single point of failure.
Perhaps they are considering e2e for smaller groups.
> This event left a lot of scar tissue across all of Technical Infrastructure, and the next few months were not a fun time (e.g. a mandatory training where leadership read out emails from customers telling us how we let them down and lost their trust).
Bullshit.
I'd believe this if it was not completely impossible for 99.999999% of google "customers" to contact anyone at the company. Or for the decade and a half of personal and professional observations of people getting fucked over by google and having absolutely nobody they could contact to try and resolve the situation.
You googlers can't even disdain yourselves to talk to other workers at the company who are in a caste lower than you.
The fundamental problem googlers have is that they all think they're so smart/good at what they do, it just doesn't seem to occur that they could have possibly screwed something up, or something could go wrong or break, or someone might need help in a way your help page authors didn't anticipate...and people might need to get ahold of an actual human to say "shit's broke, yo." Or worse, none of you give a shit. The company certainly doesn't. When you've got near monopoly and have your fingers in every single aspect of the internet, you don't need to care about fucking your customers over.
I cannot legitimately name a single google product that I, or anyone I know, likes or wants to use. We just don't have a choice because of your market dominance.
Hi there. I'm a Googler and I've directly interfaced with a nontrivial number of customers such that I alone have interfaced with more than 0.000001% of the entire world population.
All you need to do is browse any online forum, bug tracker, subreddit dedicated to a consumer-facing Google product to know that Google does not give a rat's ass about customer service. We know the customer is ultimately not the consumer.
Maps, Mail, Drive, Scholar, and Search are all the best or near the best available. That doesn’t mean I like every one of them or I wouldn’t prefer others, but as far as I can tell the competition doesn’t exist that works better.
GCP and Pixel phones are a toss-up between them and competitors.
It isn’t market dominance, nobody has made anything better.
Search is famously kind of bad the last few years, but even Maps isn’t that great.
(Data errors I’ve seen this week: the aerial imagery over Brisbane Australia is from ~2010 but labeled 2021, the coastline near Barentsburg in Svalbard is wrong and doesn’t match any other map.)
Okay I don't care if my account gets banned but why in the FUCK does everything about China has to do with the government?
Everyone here and on Reddit are bitching about Chinese propaganda bots but the only thing I see is people with new accounts attacking China and an immediate accusation of shilling to anyone who doesn't criticize China or even draws a parallel between whatever is being criticized and the U.S..
Seriously, y'all need help if you keep thinking China is the most evil bogeyman in the world. First it was Iraq, then Iran, now it's China.
I am not saying China is great or even good but this whole immediate "fuck China" whenever anything happening in China is reported, is just pathetic and a symptom of brainwashing.
It's not brainwashing to suspect s government are up to no good. I'm in the west and assume that my government is up to no good at times, but at least we have a free media which keeps it in check. That the CCP are a dangerous bunch of authoritarian control freaks really should not be that much of a stretch.
For context, I'm an expat who has traveled extensively in Asia and currently lives in Taiwan. I have spent time in China, and had personal and business dealings with Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Indonesians, Filipinos, Koreans, etc. while living in the region. So I think I probably have a more informed perspective about the region than people who haven't spent any time here.
My comment is straightforward: in China, it would not be surprising if an "incident" was the result of negligence (Google search "chabuduo") or sabotage, or if sabotage was used as an excuse to "save face" (Google it).
Since nothing in my comment called China "the most evil bogeyman in the world", your hyperbolic response is curious to me. In China, at a certain level of business, the state in some form is omnipresent. Feel free to not explore the implications of that and make value judgements, but this is a simple fact that you'd know if you spent any time here.
I believe nobody said "evil boogyman". But saying "government controlled" isn't much of a stretch for any Chinese company. I expect they do have some level of "de facto" control on over any company operating in the Mainland
I think that's not a reasonable expectation. Unless you believe that setting regulatory clauses in doing business as "de facto" control. But then so does any business.
Much like every other nation on Earth, the government will seek to take a hand in the largest businesses operating in their jurisdiction.
"Expecting" the Chinese government to control every business in China is very dystopian and baseless. They couldn't do it even if they wanted. The same way my country can't regulate a simple scooter ride-sharing startup during a pandemic...
I wouldn't question China's control over companies like Alibaba. I wouldn't question the US' control over companies like Google. Which again is a totally different ballpark.
My understanding is there has been a large push to have communist party members have a formal and active role in businesses. The economist had a nice article on this: https://archive.is/HGX2L
This is at the very least much more explicit than the control political parties in the US exert over businesses.
Being explicit in your doings is not necessarily evil. Governments frequently push to control everything that they think might benefit themselves. China just has everyone's balls in a vice and so can do it publicly.
But yeah. I'm only here to say that equating control of giants to be very different to control of everyone.
In the US, "human resources" is a misnomer for a corporate department that ensures regime compliance. Thankfully, most policies exist for the sake of worker's and minority's rights.
Every government has some level of "de facto" control over companies through legislation and whatnot. Sure that control may be more direct in China (and that's a big maybe in my opinion because I doubt a huge country with complex interactions can be handwavely summarized as that) but I just don't see the need to bring that up whenever anything happens in China.
then you've probably never worked in the Chinese tech sector because it is the literal Wild West. The competitor manipulation story in this case is utterly believable to anyone who has ever seen in what kind of quasi feudal wars Chinese tech companies are often engaged, because there is virtually no government oversight. Regulators on the mainland were generally so far behind the curve that tech companies until very recently more or less did whatever they wanted, which accounts for their enormous growth over the last two decades.
About ten years ago there was the infamous "3Q war" where Tencent and Qihoo engaged in pretty ridiculous measures over the messenger market by blocking each others usage on consumer machines when the other one was installed, orchestrating fake media articles about pornography, police raids and at some point calling on users to go into a general strike. The war basically only ended because at some point the government stepped in and for the first time enforced anti-trust law.
This has changed to some degree but China's tech sector always was so hilariously under-regulated it makes most Western countries look socialist in comparison
I genuinely don't understand how the parent comment triggered this response for ... just saying they think both battery failure being "covered up" or sabotage are likely?
Btw, all comments here explaining rationally why immediate hate on China does not belong in a lot of places, but shows up anyway, are being flagged.
So you can actually tell how well the propaganda has worked on a lot of people. They just love the outrage so much that they'll censor anyone who questions them.
The brainwashing has been complete. Poor US citizens.
It's because they are actively, right now, as we type fluff about cute drones, engaged in the rounding up, brainwashing, rape, torture, and murder of millions of ethnic uyghurs and other "undesirables" like homosexuals, political dissidents, and have implemented armed imprisonment and starvation of people suspected of having covid. Because their oblivious middle class is blithely and ignorantly enabling an evil the likes of which the world hasn't seen since Nazi fucking Germany.
It's not about US interests or anything external. It's entirely and only about the atrocities being performed. It's about the forceful harvesting of human hair from prisoners for sale to blissfully ignorant western nations. It's about the organ harvesting of the poor and disenfranchised for the medical privilege of the elite. It's about the chattel slavery of tens of millions of Chinese citizens who are put to use at gunpoint by the power of the communist party. Kept in this world living conditions, brainwashed by the party to know their given role in life is to do nothing but farm, or labor in the fields or factories. Thedrug cartels, the human trafficking, the weapons and money provided to bad actors around the world, the unmitigated environmental destruction and pollution all over the globe.
It's about the soul corrupting oppression of hundreds of millions of human fucking beings who deserve more than willful disregard by us in the west, who'd rather not be inconvenienced by having to think about what the plight of those people means to our own place in the world. About the supply chains and economic advantages in life we enjoy because of the exploitation of those people. About what I it means to ignore the evil in favor of the easy.
So yeah, bub, sorry to burst your bubble. Some of us just aren't comfortable with the "just like us" modern happy narrative crafted by the CCP.
> I also know that I have near-zero risk from COVID
There's no such thing as "near zero risk from COVID." There are factors that make you high risk (age, obesity, etc) but whether covid ends up being "nothing" to "a bit sick for a few days" to "sick for weeks" to "hospitalized" to "fatal" is basically luck of the draw.
The odds of dying from covid are far, far worse than the odds of any complication from the vaccine.
95%+ of the people in my area's ICUs for covid are unvaccinated, according to the supervising physician who was interviewed on the radio.
> I don't like injecting unnecessary stuff in there.
That's...not how that works. This sounds like the same stuff new parents believe about how they don't want to "overload" their baby's immune system with too many vaccines at once. Their immune system sees more "load" from them picking a pacifier off the floor of their living room and sticking it in their mouth.
But if an expert in fasteners says "use this nail/bolt, made of this material and grade, for this application"...and then Joe Roofer says "WELL I actually work on roofs unlike those ivory tower mechanical and structural engineers, I'll use what I think is best" and then years later a couple people get killed...
There are a lot of infamous incidents caused by people thinking they know better than the people who designed stuff and actually had training, experience, and education in that field. Doing things like changing fastener grades, or styles, or completely changing how something is put together. The most ready example I can think of is the hotel bridge collapse that killed a couple dozen people, because some mouth-breather thought he knew better than the structural engineers that drew up plans on how to anchor the bridge to its overhead supports.
Virtually nobody at a hospital is qualified to second-guess vaccines, and the people who do are people I don't want anywhere near patient care because they're going to second-guess other experts, like the doctors they work with, the instructions for equipment and drugs, etc.
> Virtually nobody at a hospital is qualified to second-guess vaccines
...and the people in the hospital are also in a great position to verify that (1) vaccines work.
Let P(H|V) be the probability that had outcome H happens if you are vaccinated, and let P(H|~V) be the probability of that had outcome when you are not vaccinated.
Then P(H|V) / P(H|~V) = P(~V) / P(V) x P(V|H) / P(~V|H)
where P(V|H) is the probability that someone with outcome H was vaccinated, and P(~V|H) is the probability that someone with outcome H was not vaccinated.
All they need to do is look at their patients that have outcome H (such as being hospitalized, or dying) and count how many were vaccinated and how many were not, find out the vaccination rate of the community their patients came from, and they can calculate P(H|V) / P(H|~V) which is how much vaccination reduces your chances of H.
For example, if 70% of the people in your community are vaccinated, and you have 50 people who died from COVID in the last month, 5 vaccinated and 45 not vaccinated, you'd get that P(H|V) / P(H|~V) = 0.048. Vaccination is reducing a person's chances of dying by 95%.
So even if they don't want to just trust the experts they can see for themselves that the experts are telling the truth.
Would you listen to an expert doctor who didn't wash his hands before childbirth or a old wive's tail midwife? BEcause this is an actual life and death scenario, and history doesn't look well on the 'experts'.
As a possible patient, good riddance as well. These people clearly don't believe in science and/or they don't believe in trusting experts and following their instructions.
That's the last person I want anywhere near me. Especially if they're nurses. I've run across a lot of nurses who think they know better than doctors, and this seems like a fantastic way to weed them out.
How much you want to bet "accidental" deaths go down after this?
Am I looking at the wrong parts of those pages? In the first I see "The threshold for establishing herd immunity for COVID-19 is not yet clear." and in the second I see "The proportion of the population that must be vaccinated against COVID-19 to begin inducing herd immunity is not known."
Also, the threshold for herd immunity is based partially on how well the virus spreads, and Delta changed that, which means that the threshold for herd immunity probably changed. When facts change, the messaging needs to change to stay accurate.
It is a moving target because yes - we don't (as a society) have a ton of practice with worldwide pandemics. Information evolves and our expert's interpretation evolves with it. If you reject opinions from everyone who has ever changed their mind after receiving more information you'll be left with one or two ridiculously lucky people and a who bunch of stubborn morons who simply reject the notion that their past selves might have been incorrect.
Society has been experiencing pandemics for as long as society has existed. There is literally nothing humanity has more experience with than disease.
Herd immunity is a moving target because people like Fauci change their assessment of it depending on opinion polls. That's by his own words, not anyone else's. The guy admitted it to the New York Times. The "science" is not evolving and people who keep claiming it is, are just hurting the credibility of actual science even more than it's already been hurt. After all, a "science" that is constantly asserting things with 100% confidence and then next week asserts something totally different, also with 100% confidence (which they do), is actually pretty worthless to society.
It's not that I reject it it's that Id like to see something like git logs. Public health officials should drop the aura of infallibility and adopt some dev community style humility.
I am in disagreement with most of my family on this point (taking the least popular point of view). I understand the idea that transparency always allows better information around personal decisions - but I'm not certain if more transparency that might include speculation during a pandemic would actually lead to a greater sense of public safety. I feel like generally being transparent does increase public stability by increasing faith in the government - but I also feel like a pandemic is a good time to burn some of that public good will to keep a unified message to the public.
Now add in the fact that it's a UAE company...