Phone numbers are NOT safe. I don't know why SMS MFA is even a thing, they're worse than passwords.

When you use phone numbers or SMS for security, you are putting the fate of your entire company's security on an underpaid customer service rep at Verizon.

What happened?

At least since version 2.0 it seems it's using AES encryption: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto/description

- Multi Device

Seems to me that are some of the most useful things about modern chat.

Also, why not just use a chat app that is save by default. The whole concept of private chat is insane to me.

Telegram on the other hand is better for issues like this, where large numbers of people need to communicate anonymously without prying eyes.

They're addressing the same issue for different markets. That's all it is.

Whatsapp is THE messaging standard in my country. Hell, even our politicans use it for communication. "Apping" is even used by news outlets to describe communication by Whatsapp.

We used to have SMS and MSN. Now it's either Whatsapp or Messenger. Depending only on the fact if you have the others phone number or not.

They don't care that they are uploading their entire contact list to Facebook — "death before inconvenience".

- message delivery was not very reliable when your connection is poor and intermittent (think wifi in the underground between stations)

- when you need to resend a message in a group, you need to tap "retry" once for every recipient in the group

Issues that my friends complained about, justifying their non-use of Signal:

- you cannot create links to allow people to join groups (obviously this is a nonstarter, without first allowing people to be in groups pseudonymously)

I applaud the direction they've taken. These are the kinds of features that will acquire and retain a broader user base.

Electron isn't as safe as Chromium. Last I checked it's based off a vintage build of Chromium with some very important features like the sandbox turned off (!)

There's one big drawback though that's relevant here, and that is that it doesn't support E2E encrypted chats, those are confined to the phone app. I guess it's a security feature, I haven't looked into it too much, but I don't think it would be that difficult to share keys locally between devices you own.

Obviously that'd be better to have a configurable data folder.

Sounds crazy when I say it outloud...

In Korea, Taiwan and Japan, LINE became the de facto IM. In China, WeChat. But ain't sure if these are usually/always preinstalled in those markets.

Cheers.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/898254/south-korea-most-...

[1]: https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-most-popular-messaging-ap...

iCloud backups (enabled by default) are not end-to-end encrypted.

So while it's technically E2E, in practice you get very little protection from it because it's broken by design.

I still use iMessage because of the user experience, but let's not be fooled by their misleading E2E claims; it's all just marketing BS.

It’s an active attack and can’t apply retroactively but within these constraints they can still do it.

E2E with centralized key management is primarily to protect you from casual/private threats (vendor employees, snoopers in your or your recipients network) not from legal authority.

What’s stopping some US government agency from forcing them to insert code that causes the Signal app to a indicate it is behaving correctly but isn’t?

And don’t say “laws”.

If your threat model includes advanced persistent threats all bets are off.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/6898

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9194

Other apps like Threema or Telegram might delay messages sometimes, but at least they keep my device operational. If I'm punished for opting out of Google's spying, I at least want to choose the punishment.

The desktop app takes several minutes to open (at least on Linux), so I find that the only way to use it is to start it at boot and always leave it open. I'm still hoping that someone may create other clients, e.g. a Pidgin backend.

The mobile apps, on the other hand, work really well. Been using them for years now, both on Android and iOS.

I also see that the other issues I noticed previously (high latency when typing, “compose key” not working) have now been fixed as well.

Signal is really annoying with all the things it wants me to do. Re-linking a mobile device. Re-entering a PIN/password for no reason other than to prove that I still know the password.

And when I'm finally logged in it shows me a completely useless selection of mostly obsolete contacts.

You can turn off the PIN reminders in Settings → Privacy.

Ah, that's good to know. Thanks!

Muted chat, chat groups, draw on photos, stickers on photos, quiz / polls, dice rolls.

Signal does cover the basics well through (GIFs, voice messages, video, photo, replies) and it has a clean interface.

Signal has all of these

> quiz / polls, dice rolls.

Not these, as far as I know.

I’m looking forward to it as well as my only Telegram use case is using it as a notification service for my servers. All my chats are transitioned to Signal.

Do you mean message history when setting up a new device? They are working on that, but it’s not so easy to do without storing all your chats with a server side encryption key. Apparently something coming soon though.

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007062012-Ne...

Maybe this is an okay trade-off for you, but Signal's phone number as ID requirement means they can rely on the local contacts kept on your device and keep very little metadata about you on their servers.

Signal, Wickr, WhatsApp and others do not have this experience. They all have drawbacks and do not feel Telegram fast.

I feel like I’ve repeatedly seen on HN that they’re not a good choice for secure messaging (though I don’t remember the specifics around it).

Signal and Matrix are the two options I’ve settled on.

[Edit]: Looks like the main issues with Telegram are that it doesn't use end to end encryption by default and that they rolled their own encryption protocol that's likely not secure. They also used to leak a ton of metadata, but from searching around it looks like they may have made improvements. Either way seems like something to avoid when there are obviously better alternatives.

They're also making moves to make the phone number requirement unnecessary. What privacy features does Telegram have? It sounds like they don't even have encryption on by default and people have also dismissed their security? Why would anyone use them?

Only the expert's opinions are of any value IMO, and I've never seen anyone showing an attack on Telegram's encryption. Telegram themselves seem to claim that it's never broken. I often see vague criticism over the fact that they use their own protocol, but never anything more detailed than that.

https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-i-39m-a-security-expert-...