Well for me, I prefer the way telegram has decided to handle end to end encryption. Let's face it - me and my friends have no use for it, and never will. Our threat model just doesn't really care about actors like the NSA hacking us. If they wanted there's tons of other ways to get our information any (like Google or Facebook accounts). But not being encrypted gives us features not possible otherwise, like url prefetching from the server or (when telegram was released, I guess it can be done now) accessing the chat from as many devices as you want. Yes, there is a tradeoff, but really I don't think most users are worried, nor should they be.

Speak for yourself. I care about privacy, and I couldn't give a shit about something so minor as link prefetching. I suspect I'm far from alone.

While I do find such features convenient, more importantly to me they draw people to a more secure and privacy conscious messaging platform than the ultra-popular alternatives all the while allowing to upgrade to E2E† on demand. Signal completely fails in that regard, as the number of contacts (actual or potential) on it is precisely zero for me.

Anon1096 clearly stated that he was speaking for himself (or herself) but I agree with him: I want privacy but I don't necessarily need complete secrecy. This isn't a zero sum game: Telegram and Signal can coexist and serve different needs.

"I really don't think most users are worried" is the stark OPPOSITE of speaking for yourself.

And you're very welcome to use something that fits your threat model.

I really don't understand the "hate" for Telegram on HN. I understand that its not (allegedly) as secure as signal for example, but like you said, state actors etc have other ways of getting that info (see xkcd [1]).

I personally use Telegram when talking to my wife because it lets me have a client on every platform i use and the messages follow me. I could do that with some of the other platforms as well, but im already on this platform, the wife is on the platform, and some other family members as well. Now would it be better if it was "more" secure? Of course it could, I mean, we could all be communicating with PGP as well, but most people don't because its a pain to use. So to me personally, Telegram is a useful middle ground between great security and usability.

As a added bonus, using the bot framework that Telegram offers, i have started creating a home automation bot. The framework is really fun and easy to use.

[1] https://xkcd.com/538/

> So to me personally, Telegram is a useful middle ground between great security and usability.

Same. I tried Signal a couple of years ago but the iOS app was prone to crashing, corrupting messages, and just plain losing words. Not really what you want.

> The framework is really fun and easy to use.

Yeah, I've done a couple of bots for it and it's pretty handy.

Telegram for me is the right trade off between security and convenience.

> the fact that you chat history exists in plain text on Telegram servers.

Source? https://telegram.org/blog/sessions-and-2-step-verification says:

"It allows you to set up a password that will be required every time you log into your account from a new device – in addition to the code you get in the SMS.

Be careful though: if you forget this password, you won't be able to access your messages from other devices."

This sounds to me that the chat history is encrypted with the password which doesn't leave my devices and therefore I'm not able to recover the history if I lose it. Since all clients are open-source, it should be possible to verify this.

edit: Okay the option for a recovery email could mean that they still have the password (or a key derived of it) on their servers - so basically plain-text.

Ok. Lets see

https://medium.com/@wireapp/making-your-conversations-secure... does not state any information on key management solution: how encryption key is transferred to another device.

But it has links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ratchet_Algorithm which has nothing about cross device key sharing and https://wire.com/resource/Wire%20Security%20Whitepaper/downl.... I've read it through and found nothing on cross-device key sharing as well. Can you point me to the right part?

I'm flattered you assume I have this knowledge, but I don't. I would presume the key is derived from your sign-in information, but I honestly don't know.

What I do know is that you don't have access to messages that happened before you first signed in to the device you're using. My message history is complete on the phone I created my Wire account on, but I installed it on a laptop a few days later and as such is missing those first days. Messages get delivered to all your active devices without problem though.

The source code for all their different client varieties (iOS, Android, Web/Electron) and server software can be found here if you're interested [0].

[0]: https://github.com/wireapp