Comment by reitanqild | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reitanqild | Hacker News Reader

Time for the weekly reminder that if you don't have reason to believe that powerful adversaries are after you then you can use Telegram. If you feel just fine publishing on twitter or HN under you real name I guess you qualify.

Bragging about E2E encryption while feeding the Facebook data monster IMO is a bit like bragging about how you transport your slaves in armored vehicles:

Yes, they are safer against robberies.

No, [given my current threat model] I'd still prefer driving something less secure that isn't abusing my every action [and every action of everyone I communicate with] for the profit of Facebook.

Edit: clarifications, in square brackets and below

It seems no doubt that Whatsapp is safer against an 3rd party adversary.

My points are only that

- I consider Facebook an adversary at this point,

- I don't belive they bought Whatsapp and removed the fees because of the goodness in Mark Zuckerbergs heart,

- I don't believe they would update their privacy policy if they somehow thought they could get away with what they are planning to do under the old privacy policy.

I don't get why you would give up on E2E when you can just switch to Signal, unless you use Telegram for some features that Signal does not have (I don't know if there is any TBH), but you do not list them in your three points.

It would also make sense if more people are already on Telegram (so that you have less people to convince to switch), but again you don't mention this reason to prefer Telegram over Signal.

In my case, as usually advocated by security expert, I prefer Signal, and I fallback to WhatsApp whenever it is too big a hurdle to make people switch.

I don't get why you would give up on E2E when you can just switch to Signal,

I have accepted to use Telegram the same way I have accepted to drive a car that isn't the safest in the latest tests.

It is a tradeoff. Someday I or some of my passengers might get killed where we could have survived in a new Mercedes or Volvo.

Someday my messages might get intercepted where I could have avoided it.

Meanwhile I try to drive safely.

unless you use Telegram for some features that Signal does not have

I use bots, large groups, desktop client, hashtags, @replies, answers, channels and possibly more that I can't remember.

I might be wrong but I though Signal lacked several of those.

Happy to be corrected if not :-)

Don't know why you were downvoted.

I at least felt you were contributing constructively to the discussion and have upvoted you.

Beause many people on HN work for FB. It is also the reason hy every react-post gets to the top stories

Thanks!

Seems I am getting off the hook easily with my campaign against Whatsapp then.

I'm at a double digit upvotes and that is even when I have seen a few downvotes in a row : )

My biggest gripe with this has been how some of our cryptography stars IMO has a very one-dimensional view on this:

"E2E good, anything else bad."

IMO, E2E message encryption only buys you so much, i.e. as a thought experiment one could consider if you would like to use an E2E protected system run by NSA. Or by FSB. Or by our bosses, wives, parents etc. Whoever you don't want to make statistics on who you contact and when.

For me who like to think I am smart to keep as much data as possible out of the hands of FB - and by that - out of the hands of

- whoever buys the windfall when Facebook collapses or

- whoever manages to hack them thoroughly or

- whoever sends them a valid subpoena or

- (slighly evil here) pays them enough

OK, Facebook guys - let me cut you a deal: you start acting trustworthy and I start liking you. I want to like Whatsapp. I want to pay you money. I want to pay you more for API access. I want to have a brilliant messaging platform to communicate with my stubborn family.

I just don't want you to ruin product I loved. I don't want you scheme so hard to datamine me that you need to update the privacy policy.

Or better, switch to Matrix. Also E2E but without the lack of features (like multiple devices and a desktop app without a phone proxy) and odd obsession with phone numbers that Signal has.

Can you use Telegram to talk to friends on Whatsapp or Messenger?

Wouldn't that defeat the point?

Then the advice to "just use Telegram" is useless. It cannot replace the chat services we rail against because it's literally asking people to ditch their friends.

No, we are asking friends to try a better messenger.

Either I am a very good salesman or it isn't really hard.

I have participated in getting hundreds of people to ditch Whatsapp for Telegram (family + a few local groups I am member of).

I just started by using it to communicated woth my wife, then with close friends, then recommending it as enthusiastically as I used to recommend Whatsapp.

When "everyone" find they are using Telegram foreverything but a few groups then they will start bugging the rest of the members and suddenly even big groups switch.

Not Whatsapp, not officially at least. They will go after anyone who reverse engineers and publicizes an API.

I think at some point they had the (IMO possibly good) idea that they would make the client free of charge and make money by charging for API access for businesses etc but that was before (IMO as usual) they decided to go all in on scooping up user data and trying to copy Snapchat again ;-)

Can you use Whatsapp to talk to friends on Telegram or Messenger?

We're in a period of closed chat ecosystems (Joe Schmoe doesn't use Matrix, IRC or XMPP) and fairly spacious smartphone storage, which in my circles means that people tend to be quite willing to install an extra app for chatting.

A bunch of my friends use Signal, and the ones that don't I communicate with on WhatsApp.

I've found the exact opposite, there's no way I'm going to get all my friends and family to install Telegram and set up an account just for me. That's why it's pretty unreasonable to casually propose Telegram as a replacement for solutions like Whatsapp. Unless it lets me talk to users on other platforms (how would it even do that?), Messenger and Whatsapp are here to stay.

Just start by installing it.

Chances are you'll see a number of your friends have it installed already as others have noted in this thread.

Then talk about it to your friends, show them the stuff you know they will love. For some it is bots. For others it is themes. Hashtags to follow topics. The possibility to have a chat with yourself (I run a journal like thingy where I note when I check oil on my car, when I changed my contacts etc, all hashtagged so I can retrieve it by tag later.)

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