Here’s what he said in a post on his telegram channel:
🤫 A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly “secure” messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad 🥷
🥸 The US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption, and today the exact same encryption is implemented in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages and even Skype. It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕🦺
🕵️♂️ An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media. But whenever somebody raises doubt about their encryption, Signal’s typical response is “we are open source so anyone can verify that everything is all right”. That, however, is a trick 🤡
🕵️♂️ Unlike Telegram, Signal doesn’t allow researchers to make sure that their GitHub code is the same code that is used in the Signal app run on users’ iPhones. Signal refused to add reproducible builds for iOS, closing a GitHub request from the community. And WhatsApp doesn’t even publish the code of its apps, so all their talk about “privacy” is an even more obvious circus trick 💤
🛡 Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github. For the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private 💪
Original post: https://t.me/durov/274
It’s hard to overstate what a nothing-burger this article really is! Let me break it down:
- Signal got $3 million from the Open Technology Fund at some point in its development
- Some anonymous source alleges that the OTF’s ultimate goal is to promote US foreign interests
- The current chairman of the board Katherine Maher worked at the National Democratic Institute and Wikipedia before
- The same anonymous source says she was recruited because of connections to the OTF
- She has at some point voiced the opinion that a completely free internet without regulation just reproduces existing power structures, and that balancing regulation and 1st amendment rights is a tough problem
- Signal doesn’t have reproducible builds on iOS (it absolutely does on Android btw)
- Some people feel like Signal chats come up more often than they should in court cases and media reports
That’s it, that’s the whole story. That’s the reason why the Telegram guy of all people thinks you should be careful, and better use his chat service instead, and the Twitter guy agrees.
I mean, reproducible builds on iOS would be nice, but that platform has much bigger problems from a privacy/security/sovereignty/freedom standpoint anyway. And the rest is just nothing turned up to 11.
tl;dr “Signal might be untrustworthy because the tech came from a State-sponsored project and the current chairman acknowledges that Wikipedia has a white and Western bias.”
just wait until they find out pretty much all tech we have can be traced back to government-funded research.
Did you know the early early internet researchers were part of a clandestine government organization known as ARPANET??? The entire TCP/IP stack is just a state-sponsored backdoor into your life!!!
WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!
yea just wait until they find out why the first digital computer was made:
ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory). However, its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.
Telegram’s server side software is closed source, owned and ran by them exclusively so they really have no room to talk. WhatsApp doesn’t even have OSS clients so they’re even worse in that regard
exactly, they (Telegram) don’t need to put sketchy code in the clients when most messages are not E2E encrypted and they control the servers lol
I find it weird how any discussion about Signal will inevitably have a bunch of people piling on dismissing any criticisms of it. Believing that Signal is perfect has become like a religion at this point. Whatever people might think of Telegram is completely irrelevant when it comes to the question of whether Signal is actually a secure tool or not.
The fact that people working on Signal have direct ties to US intelligence agencies cannot be ignored. No can the fact that Signal is a centralized system based in US. These two things alone should make everybody very concerned.
Imagine using telegram… It’s worse than whatsapp
Maybe he should focus on adding e2e encryption to the default chats and group chats instead of spreading FUD.
Lol telegram calling signal insecure is too funny.
Isn’t it that Telegram doesn’t claim to be super secure, apart from possibly their encryption on mobile?
This doesn’t prevent them from uncovering other possible plots in supposedly secure platforms.
True but in this case there credibility is low
arent telegram chats unencrypted by default?
An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media
source?? (i bet this ends up being a “they had full access to my unlocked phone” situation again)
also the whole thing abt US funded encryption is the same bullshit argument ppl use against Tor all the time. it doesnt mean shit.
this just reads like someone desperately trying to get more market share by spreading FUD
Well, Telegram seems to be giving user data to the German Federal Criminal Police Office, and if they’re cooperating with the German authorities, I don’t see why I’d presume they aren’t cooperating with others as well.
All this is actually documented, compared to those nebulous “important people”.
arent telegram chats unencrypted by default?
Encryption is always there. Problem is, some people refer to anything “not e2e encrypted” as “unencrypted” for some reason.
And it infuriates me to no end. It’s one thing to trust them and their servers and it’s another thing altogether to send actual plaintext data around the net, that’s crazy and it’s what people are implying.
For the record, until WhatsApp implemented e2e their messages were indeed fucking plaintext, and it took a while before they were pressured into e2e. It helps for them that their platform is very mobile based vs telegram, where the service is more server based. Telegram did have enough time to implement a server based e2e 0 knowledge encryption protocol though, it’s not really rocket science at this point.
Telegram did have enough time to implement a server based e2e 0 knowledge encryption protocol though, it’s not really rocket science at this point.
What do you mean by server based e2e? From what I get, most people’s complain is that Telegram doesn’t support e2e in group chats, and that is what seems to be close to rocket science in my opinion. Also Telegram is historically filled with ever growing group chats, which means quite serious implications for server requirements from what I understand.
Tegram stores all the conversation in their servers, since you don’t need to be connected in the phone or have the phone witchednon if you want to chat in the pc, or in another phone. This means that the authority is the server. WhatsApp it’s not like that, if you delete a shared photo after a while it will be cached out and you will lost access to it, meaning that they don’t store that stuff. The same thing happens with WhatsApp desktop or web, they stay in an infinite loading icon until you twitch on the phone or sometimes even unlock it.
This means that whatever telegram develops must not only keep the group chat encrypted in the server, but any valid client of a user must be able to decipher the content, so every client must somehow have the key to unlock the content. One way of doing it would be for every client of a single user to generate keys (which I’m sure they already do) and reform a key exchange between them, to share that way a single shared key, which is what identifies your account. Then toy could use that shared key to decipher the group chat shared key which telegram can store on their server or do whatever is done in those cases, I’m not that well versed.
The problem here lies in what happens when you delete and/or logout of all the accounts, currently you can login into the server again, because telegram has all the info required, but if they store the “shared key” then it’s all moot, I guess they could store a user identifying key pair, with the private key encrypted with a password, so that it can be accessed from wherever. They should as always offer MFA and passkey alternatives to be able to identify as yourself every time you want to log into a new client, without requiring the password and so on.
This is some roughly designed idea I just had that should theoretically work, but I’m sure that there’s more elegant ways to go about this.
It’s work for sure to implement all of this in a secure way, provided that you have to somehow merge everything that already exists into the new encryption model, make everyone create a password and yada yada while making sure that it’s as seamless as possible for users. However, I feel like it’s been quite a while and that if they did not do it already, theybjist won’t, we either trust them with our data or search for an alternative, and sadly there’s no alternative that has all the fuzz right now.
Sorry I have a hard time understanding the gist of your text. I don’t think it’s viable to be upset about what happens with access that was already acquired previously because that very fact already poses a bigger threat (which might have more to do with the nature of conversations vs how the platform works).
I wasn’t talking about situations with compromised accounts, I was talking about legitimate accounts that were created in a typical way being converted to a zero knowledge encryption method, I was aknowledging that it’s hard doing that conversion when a user might have several clients logged on (2 phones, 6 computers…).
My point was that if they have not put any motivation in the transition, they never will because the bigger the userbase, the harder for them to manage the transition. Also, I find that sad because they should have invested more effort in that instead of all the features we are getting, but whatever.
If you found the technical terms confusing, public/private keys are some sort of asymmetric “passwords” used in cryptography that secure messages, and shared keys would be symmetrical passwords. The theory between key exchanges and all around those protocols are taught in introductory courses to cryptography in bachelors and masters, and I’m sorry to say that I don’t have the energy to explain more but feel free to read about the terms if you feel like it.
If you however found it confusing because I write like crap, I’m sorry for potentially offending you with the above paragraph and I’ll blame my phone keyboard about it :)
No that’s not what I didn’t understand. The problem itself as you described it seems either a non-issue or something very few people (who’s already using telegram for some time) would care about. I don’t understand the scenario that would pose a problem for the user. The moment some account legitimately gains access to some chat is probably what should trouble you instead.
Maybe fix Telegrams privacy problems.
https://www.404media.co/this-tool-shows-some-telegram-users-approximate-physical-location/
I can’t read it because of the paywall but IIRC (based on a similar article) that was such a nothing-burger issue.
People turned on an entirely optional (I think off by default setting) for some feature that allowed discovery of users by location … and shocked pikachu they could be tracked or something like that.
It’s not nothing if Telegram makes people believe they only share their location in a limited manner, but instead broadcast it to the whole world. That’s a serious breach of trust. I don’t know why Telegram users keep making excuses for that platform.
I don’t know why Telegram users keep making excuses for that platform.
Honestly? Because the others are just so bad.
- Element has an extremely clunky UX and uses Electron. The other Matrix app implementations are incomplete buggy messes.
- Signal can’t sync old messages to the desktop, uses a messy Electron interface, and lacks a bunch of features/polish I’ve come to expect.
- Discord doesn’t even pay lip service to privacy and uses a similarly doesn’t invest in native apps.
- Threema has been saying that cross-platform/multi-device connectivity is coming for like 2+ years and has had nothing but the most minor of unexciting features added.
- WhatsApp is run by Meta, has a crappy desktop experience, and has had several serious security vulnerabilities.
- Jami is … extremely glitchy.
- Session is basically Signal backed by a Crypto platform.
If someone took Telegram’s UX and feature set and paired that with Signal’s approach of “everything is encrypted”, that would be a winner. I kinda hope someday Telegram just does that and moves everything to E2EE. When Telegram was launched E2EE for group chats/at scale wasn’t really a thing … now it’s not nearly as novel but nobody has deployed E2EE with a feature set like Telegram’s.
It’s not nothing if Telegram makes people believe they only share their location in a limited manner, but instead broadcast it to the whole world.
That’s not even what happens by the way. It’s just that you can spoof a device into random locations and eventually figure out where someone is.
What polish and features is signal missing?
- Signal can’t sync old messages to the desktop
- Persistent voice rooms
- Custom emoji
- Animated emoji
- Location sharing
- Chat folders
- Topics/rooms for larger group chats
- Support for larger group chats
- Quoted replies (i.e., quote part of a reply or create an arbitrary quote block)
- Code snippets
- Message forwarding
- Polls
- Animations in the UI
- Detailed custom theming
- Chat room theming
- A content index (e.g., view only the files, links, videos, etc that were sent in this chat)
- Group invite links to people you don’t have in your contacts
- Channels (i.e., micro-ish blogging)
- A nice bot API
- Subjective UI/UX changes to put things in more reasonable places (e.g, why can’t I right click on a chat to pin it in the desktop client, why is the Electron menu bar shown by default)
And probably several other things I’ve forgotten because … basically nobody I know is still using Signal.
Thanks for the detailed reply. Signal does have location sharing and invite links, FWIW.
Signal’s location share AFAIK can’t be a live location share (which is useful during events like amusement park trips and stuff)
They have invite links to group chats? I don’t know how that would work
I mean it’s pretty bad to practice mass surveillance.
A “toot” isn’t a very persuasive piece of journalism.
I can verify that it absolutely impacts groups run by queer communities in the Gulf, because I was in one such group that was monitored and shut down by Etidal.
That claim needs a lot more investigation and context. At the very least, it needs investigated by a credible third party.
Also, do you even know what the feature you’re criticizing is? A “channel”? Because it’s not even really a part of the messaging portion of Telegram. It’s basically an in-app blogging platform.
She links to a news article: https://www.saudigazette.com.sa/article/641746/SAUDI-ARABIA/Etidal-Telegram-remove-over-16-million-extremist-contents-in-early-2024
I don’t think Telegram denies doing mass surveillance. They might deny targeting queer groups and claim to only target extremist, whatever that means.
Looks like a push to discredit Signal right now. While I know Signal isn’t perfect, I do like it and I haven’t seen anything that is better (on the whole). The 3rd “emoji-point” is quite an accusation, and I would love to see any evidence of this kind of thing, that didn’t result from the cops unlocking a defendants phone, or having infiltrated a chat.
Tin hat time:
I wonder if Russia’s trying to get everyone on Telegram because they have control over it.
While I know Signal isn’t perfect, I do like it and I haven’t seen anything that is better (on the whole).
Agreed. But it is worth mentioning that XMPP with OMEMO seems to be the current gold standard - runs almost everywhere, tons of available (free) servers, secure end to end messages, and fully auditable public source code.
I have used xmpp a lot, but I can’t really recommend it to friends and family as a secure messenger. There are too many compatibility issues between clients and servers. If your friend is on a client or server that doesn’t support the same encryption protocols, then you can’t have a secure chat. Basically there is too much user knowledge and effort required at this time, for xmpp to be a good, secure, general use chat. I very much look forward to this changing. I also really like Matrix, but it is still a bit rough around the edges as of my last check.
I use xmpp all the time. Biggest hurdle for certain fam/friends using xmpp has been certain android builds (samsung) and ios interfering with timely notifications. User knowlege is not a problem as I can recommend the apps that are compatible encryption protocols with mine.
That’s great, and I’m happy it’s working out for you. It’s still kind of a bummer that this open protocol ends up fragmented across all those clients and severs. I’ve met other Linux enthusiasts online, connected with them via xmpp only to find we can’t encrypt our chats. Neither of us wants to give up our preferred client for various reasons, so we have a non-working situation.
Hmm, I see. But isn’t there an obvious solution to this? One of you just run two different clients side-by-side?
Sure there are workarounds, but every one of them erases a bit of convenience or is at odds with the benefits of federation. Again, I think XMPP is great, but I wish it was better. As it is now, it doesn’t fully meet my needs better than Signal does.
Yea, I hear you. I use both.
Well if only those samsung & ios users that never get my messages until I see them and tell them to open their app had phones that didn’t interfere with it running in the background / push notifications it would be working out for me even better, but that’s not an issue with the protocol or client but with OS’s being hostile to xmpp.
Yeah, he needs to fix his broken secret chat feature first… I think it’s broken on purpose…
After seeing his interview with Tucker Carlson, I’m 100% sure the guy has some really dark agenda…
What’s broken there?
Telegram: There are backdoors in Signal encryption!
Also Telegram: not encrypted
Telegram secret chats are e2e encrypted though
Secret chats only. With their own, in-house encryption, that, if I remember correctly, the apps don’t use according to the specifications.
Maybe I’m mixing up mtproto 1 and 2 with that second part, though.
Telegram: We keep you private. Now enter your phone number to sign up.
Signal does the same
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You still need a phone number to register an account as far as I could tell when I did the other day. You no longer need to share your number with any contacts and can set it so noone who has your number can look you up on signal. You can optionally set a unique alphanumeric ‘username’ instead to hand to people to look you up. But yea, Signal still requires you to give them and their authenticatian service (through sms code) your phone number.
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Np
Are there any equivalents that don’t need a phone number?
Yes, XMPP, a long-standing protocol that’s also not a walled garden, doesn’t require a phone number or even a phone. For android I use the Conversations client combined with Dino on computers. Currently logged in to a handful of devices synchronously. You can choose what server to make an account on; conversations.im I found to be reliable. Drawback is Signal doesn’t let you bridge to it from anywhere outside of Signal. So I have accounts on both.
