Re:Why Telegram is insecure (2015)
by jillesvangurp on Sunday January 06, 2019 @10:06AM
(#18838652)
Keybase is nice indeed. I think what they are doing with their network of proofs is somewhat unique in this space and makes end to end crypto usable for the masses (unlike e.g. pgp). I agree they UI is not as slick as slack or telegram but nothing that they won't be able to fix with a bit of love and attention. Fixing this is expensive, however. Hence their association with Stellar for funding.
It's worth pointing out that Telegram has recently funded itself with an ICO as well. They are very well funded and they have a huge user base.
IMHO investor/greed driven walled gardens have long been a problem in this space and is also the reason email is still around because despite its many flaws, it has one feature that is incompatible with running a walled garden: it is federated and decentralized from the ground up. Anybody can run a server and email clients that lock you into communicating only to users on one server went extinct in the nineties.
With chat, it seems there is a pattern of perpetually recreating walled gardens with a single all powerful company at the center. This has been going on since the days of ICQ, AIM, Yahoo messenger, MSN and all those other long forgotten products that each did more or less the same thing and each tried to own your network. Strictly speaking, there's actually very little that differentiates modern day chat apps from those early chat apps in terms of what they do.
Signal just got a capital injection from the whatsapp founders. I like that Signal are setup as a foundation and that their stack is intentionally completely open source end to end and yet easy to get into for on techie users. This breaks the pattern of centrally controlled for profit walled gardens as the only option. And this makes them somewhat unique in this space: they are now well funded, independent, and widely respected by people that care about communicating securely, and their mission is keeping it like that.
I'm not that eager to swap out Whatsapp for Telegram. Ultimately, I don't trust either of them to do the right thing. But, arguably Whatsapp is somewhat more secure because at least it uses Signal's crypto. I use Keybase because I find their setup intriguing. And of course, I have Signal installed on principle but it seems none of the people I normally chat with are on it. I hope that they can fix that. But realistically, I seem stuck on Whatsapp, which I've never liked because it is such an inferior product compared to almost anything I've used for chat in the last 20 years (fugly UI, limited feature set, no decent desktop client, etc.). But world + dog seems to be on it so there's that.
It's worth pointing out that Telegram has recently funded itself with an ICO as well. They are very well funded and they have a huge user base.
IMHO investor/greed driven walled gardens have long been a problem in this space and is also the reason email is still around because despite its many flaws, it has one feature that is incompatible with running a walled garden: it is federated and decentralized from the ground up. Anybody can run a server and email clients that lock you into communicating only to users on one server went extinct in the nineties.
With chat, it seems there is a pattern of perpetually recreating walled gardens with a single all powerful company at the center. This has been going on since the days of ICQ, AIM, Yahoo messenger, MSN and all those other long forgotten products that each did more or less the same thing and each tried to own your network. Strictly speaking, there's actually very little that differentiates modern day chat apps from those early chat apps in terms of what they do.
Signal just got a capital injection from the whatsapp founders. I like that Signal are setup as a foundation and that their stack is intentionally completely open source end to end and yet easy to get into for on techie users. This breaks the pattern of centrally controlled for profit walled gardens as the only option. And this makes them somewhat unique in this space: they are now well funded, independent, and widely respected by people that care about communicating securely, and their mission is keeping it like that.
I'm not that eager to swap out Whatsapp for Telegram. Ultimately, I don't trust either of them to do the right thing. But, arguably Whatsapp is somewhat more secure because at least it uses Signal's crypto. I use Keybase because I find their setup intriguing. And of course, I have Signal installed on principle but it seems none of the people I normally chat with are on it. I hope that they can fix that. But realistically, I seem stuck on Whatsapp, which I've never liked because it is such an inferior product compared to almost anything I've used for chat in the last 20 years (fugly UI, limited feature set, no decent desktop client, etc.). But world + dog seems to be on it so there's that.