IRC: kind of, you can have a bot that joins a Telegram group and the IRC channel and forwards messages. It's getting more and more common.
Other than bots, the client is really a Telegram client, not something like Pidgin.
Personally I don't mind, since everyone's on Telegram. I actually prefer to have a client that's excellent with one network rather than a client that does quite well with many networks. Having used Pidgin and other multi-network clients in the past, they are always second rate compared to the official client. And with bots (irc to telegram bot; gmail to telegram bot; etc.) all I need is the Telegram client.
As for Skype, how do you want to connect it? Microsoft doesn't allow it, and neither would Whatsapp. Telegram on the other hand has no problem if you make a custom client...
Well, Skype has recently introduced a bot API ([1]), integrable with the azure bot framework thingy ([2]) that also works with Telegram/Slack/FB Messenger/MS Teams, so I guess (though I haven't looked into it, let alone tried) you could probably make a gateway between all of those
> Personally I don't mind, since everyone's on Telegram.
I don't know a single person who is on Telegram. My friends have not even heard of it despite the fact that they all talk online and a good percentage of them are developers. Why would I start using it if no one I know uses it?
Bad example: I knew nobody on Google+ but I made some new friends. The network died again, or at least I stopped using it after a year and a half or something, so it's a bad example in that it didn't work out in the end, but yeah that's how things get started. Why do you think the first million people got Whatsapp? If you don't try something new and convince at least one other person to use it, how would things ever change?
2. The clients are open source (for me that's a moral reason)
3. Secret chats are verifiably encrypted
4. You can make your own client if you want, causing:
4.1. Someone used a custom client (tgcli) to create a backup feature, which I extended to make html exports like MSN had (quite a future-proof and readable format). This prevents lock-in.
4.2. You are much less restricted in your choice of operating system, given you or someone else takes the effort of porting or writing a client.
5. The existing desktop client is native and doesn't require your phone to be turned on and have data active.
6. The clients have lots of features like custom themes, sending large files, setting up a username which can be linked to publicly, creating broadcast channels, pinned chats, etc. I'm not sure how much of this whatsapp implemented by now. It's true that Telegram also copied other products a lot, but they added lots of features that competitors didn't have, but nowadays they do (it made the market more innovative again).
I'm also not saying everyone should move to Telegram. Some monopolies are better than others (some are owned by Facebook & other things I just mentioned) but all monopolies are bad.
Additionally Whatsapp has some advantages like calling and knowing what the profit model is. The latter is actually my greatest worry about Telegram, but everything considered, Telegram is the best thing currently available in my opinion.
Everyone I want to talk to uses Telegram, and those who didn't (a few years ago) I convinced. "You want me to install Skype/Whatsapp/something, but why should I rather than you?"
It helped that most people saw the advantages that Telegram had, especially back then (before whatsapp cloned everything). Not to say that Telegram didn't clone whatsapp to a large degree, but the introduction of telegram definitely made the market innovative again.
The problem is that I already have Whatsapp installed, having been an early-adopter. I can't get my family onto Telegram (high signal) and I can't get my friends onto Discord (high noise). Whatsapp is dreadful for both.
Well, almost everyone here in Iran uses Telegram. They estimate tens of millions of users, which is practically everyone with a smartphone. It’s channels are extremely popular too. They’re a major main source of content and news for a lot of users.
Native all the way! Opening github page of app and seeing that pink line instead of yellow (line that represents languages used in project) made me smile! I am really surprised they did native app, plus it looks really nice, I tought "sigh, another electron app", but to my surprise I was wrong! Good job for guys at Telegram, respect.
Even the previous layout (which I personally preferred, but tastes…) still looked like a webapp more than native.. in a good way, never had any glitches and I really wonder how much it must have took them to make all the animations work so nicely. I loved toggling between chats and settings to see if it broke.. but never did!
Development has always looked a bit fishy to me, though. The main developer is anonymous (using the name/pic of a TV character), maybe it's even several people using the same profile.
> It's Qt by the way, and it's good on the three platforms.
I can't call "good" no accessibility support on macOS. But anyway Telegram Desktop is not the primary client for Macs, they have Cocoa-based alternative: https://macos.telegram.org/
The encryption is often cited as its primary selling point here, but I don't think that's too representative. Certainly it isn't for me and most other Telegram users I know. I don't care much about that as I don't really trust any messaging app enough to send really confidential information through them.
For me, for example, he selling point is having an interface as slick as Whatsapp's, but not being tied to the phone, not having to necessarily give your phone number, sending whatever attachments you want, and getting a searchable log in the cloud.
Sorry, I didn't express myself too clearly. I meant that you can add contacts without giving them your phone number. You do have to give Telegram your number.
You should try Wire [1] for multi-device sync and multi-OS use that has all chats encrypted end-to-end (like secret chats). It's not yet on par with the Telegram speed and UX, but it's quite good.
I'm confused, how are there no secret chats? I use them all the time from Desktop.. but maybe you mean Windows? I don't recall trying them from Windows - i use the OSX version.
Secret chats on OSX has the same UX as secret chats on my Android client, fwiw.
In my experience building Qt apps for a major automotive manufacturer (and more recently, building a web app), the latter is much easier, even if you know C++ and Qt and have mediocre knowledge of web tech. If you don't know C++, then add 6-24 months to the Qt estimate, and expect it to have more bugs than an Appalachian motel.
They're also bad platform citizens. Even in minor details - e.g. they don't exclude their browser cache dirs (which of course aren't in the OS cache dir!) from TimeMachine backups, so the incremental backups get clogged by random image caches. Accessibility is limited. Right click doesn't work. And more and more.
It doesn't in Slack and some other Electron apps. You just get generic "copy" popup and bunch of functionality is awkwardly bunched into hidden click menus which make me think there's an issue with creating these menus.
Have you ever taken a look at how much resources it consumes by comparison?
We would not have charge our phones every day and laptops would last for longer if anyone cared about how much their application consumes. It's ridiculous.
Why is native better than browser application? Browser application is by definition better sandboxed and can do much less damage to the system.
Normal application can do mayhem. And Telegram needs root access for installation... do I want to give it root access? When I can just open another tab?
Normal app can do mayhem just as any app can, even Electron one. I do not use Telegram, and do not know about root access, and it should be investigated. But root access is not always needed for native apps.
Why is it better? Hundreds of reason, you can see down below. I will try to sum it up why I like native over electron in 3 words: responsiveness, robustness, cleanliness. Electron on desktop is resource hog for me. It is good for people that don't mind that, and that are deep into JS ecosystem. I am not, and I always prefer native app, partly because I am on macOS and Cocoa looks beautiful.
Telegram at idle sits at 80mb ram and <0.01% cpu. Wire for example sits at 250mb idle and waffles between 0.05% and 2% cpu. Discord sits at 200mb idle and waffles between 0.01% and 0.10%, leaning towards the latter, jumping above it every few seconds at least.
And i don't get it, why kids today want only a browser. All that flame wars about the best window manager we fought and now we end up with one window only and a fucking tab bar?
Your point is? Emacs/Vim/Sublime are faster, more extensible and native compared to VS Code. RStudio I didn't use, nor I programmed in R, and I didn't know it was Electron app anyway.
I don't get the text editor speed as an issue ever. I used Vim (I use Vim mode in all my editors) not because it was faster on the CPU it was because it made my work faster. Today VS Code makes me work fast. I seriously have a 8 year old Dell crappy corporate computer for work and there is no noticeable slow down on either RStudio or VS Code.
Journalists used to use telegram to communicate with Jihadis in Syria/Iraq/Egypt but not anymore because it was highly suspected Russia had access to the conversations. Works?
Im not sure what 'geeks' you are talking about (The terminology is always confusing. But my friends (and me) refuse Telegram because of the terrible security and privacy.
I was just about to post something similar. I'm actually surprised to see a positive post of Telegram on HN. For the love of crypto, please stick to Signal protocol-based messaging applications.
Are there any Signal-based messaging applications that work on the desktop without having to tether an Android or IOS smartphone to it, and without having to use a phone number as identifier?
This. People say Telegram is bad even though it's no worse than any other popular product, or has a different set of advantages/disadvantages both security- and privacy-wise.
From a security and privacy perspective, Telegram is substantially worse than its competitors, so this is a little rhetorical sleight of hand you've just pulled here.
If you want to argue that Telegram and Signal are comparable because Telegram has better UX and Signal better security and some people prefer UX to security, that's fine (I could not disagree more strongly, but at least it's a coherent argument). But don't pretend the thread isn't about security to make people believe that there's controversy about whether Signal is more secure. There is no controversy: Signal won the Levchin prize this year for the Signal Protocol and sets the standard for secure chat, and Telegram... well, let's just suffice it to say that it does not meet that standard.
It's opt-in end-to-end encrypted with Signal Protocol now, so Facebook does in fact give up that data. Having said that, you should prefer protocols that aren't opt-in for security, which is what Signal buys you.
Is Facebook Messenger Signal-based (i.e. end-to-end encrypted with a Signal/Axolotl double ratchet) as GP requested?
I somehow doubt it.
EDIT: Oh, I was mistaken, apparently there is an option now. From Wikipedia:
On October 4, 2016, Facebook deployed end-to-end encryption as an optional feature for Facebook Messenger users. It is available in an optional mode called "Secret Conversations" and uses the Signal Protocol.
Riot.im uses the OLM encryption library (that is also used by XMPP OMEMO, see the OMEMO XEP). The OLM protocol is (I gather) very similar to the Signal protocol.
Riot is based on Matrix which is a decentralized protocol (you're not tied to one company), and it doesn't need your phone number.
Then there is the fact that the client acts as a browser that fetches information from the web automatically without blocking trackers itself. This is leaking metadata and actual data.
For the love of crypto, I would like to see Signal and WhatsApp make proper desktop applications for all major platforms including Linux. Until they do so, Telegram will serve as an excellent competitor to remind them that good cryptography is not enough.
The problem is that most people value convenience and speed over security and privacy. Telegram provides a very good trade off, much better than some other apps. If Signal were to be developed at the pace Telegram is, I would use it all the time, but it's not. For my use and likes, both Telegram and Wire are very good fits.
You can download it from F-Droid where they will compile it from the source for you. Yes, only very few people will use that version, too. But with that logic there isn't any reason for open-source at all.
You understand how frustrating it is for open source advocates to hear that normal users will never look at source code and so there's no practical difference for them between closed source and open source since it's all opaque to them anyways?
That's how literally every security person feels about the argument that closed-source software is unknowable.
We don't need decompilers or special tools to read closed-source applications. Almost all of them --- very much including the Signal-based messengers --- are built with tools that produce straightforward easy to follow assembly code.
In practice we often don't even need to read the assembly code; we can match control-flow graphs. There really are some software security verification problems that are easier from the binary, particularly if the build system is complex.
But that's sort of besides the point. Reading assembly is more tedious than reading C code, which is in turn more tedious than reading Python code. But you don't get to move the goalposts now. You claimed, repeatedly, that closed-source software was unknowable. It is not; it is in fact very far from unknowable. So the idea that Facebook is going to sneak backdoors into some of its most prominent code under cover of "closed source" is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary evidence.
I think there is another issue to remember, you can't trust the source.
So, I doubt any security professionals would say its preferable to not have the source, but to do the job of verifying the software you have to do it at a lower level than the source anyway, so having the source is a bonus, not a requirement.
Is anyone so incapable that they would not know how to enable the secure features?
Most people don't care about secret chat. This is for people who care. Granted, they don't have secret chat on Desktop which makes the whole app useless in general unless you only use phones for communication.
>Most people are not going to use the secret chat.
This is a reason i said "It's ok" in my original comment. Few people need encryption in day to day communication, but if you need it telegram is better.
It is, but understand that not everybody cares too much about privacy, and Telegram is good--usually reliable, nice apps on all platforms, synced chats, almost limitless file storage, etc.
I think plenty of people care about privacy, which is probably why they don't want to use Facebook's acquired messenger product but rather use something independent and open source.
Yes, but not to the point of paranoia. While I understand people's sentiment about p-2-p encryption, some people really do overreact about the lack of it in Telegram atm.
If anybody really wants to hack you (you exatly) - p-2-p ecryption won't stop them, this is not some kind of absolute defence.
And if you are worried about FSB readin your messages - trust me, they don't, unless you are under suspection already. No organisation in Russian history ever worked this way, only selectively.
Facebook's acquired messenger product uses Signal Protocol for end-to-end encryption. From a security perspective, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are materially, categorically more secure than Telegram.
Hi, we've had this discussion before. You say the crypto is better, which is true, I say it's unverifiable and it has a company behind it with a bad track record for privacy, which is also true. Still we can't agree on which one to use.
That may be true, but Signal offers almost an equal value proposition (unless I've missed something amazing about Telegram) whilst remaining the better option.
I know too well that not enough people care about privacy, sadly.
1. They don't claim to do end to end crypto unless you use the secret chats
2. The secret chats still aren't broken. Since 2013, I'd think at least one "crypto expert" (which all said a custom protocol was a bad idea) would have taken the effort to prove it by now.
3. Whatsapp claims to have better encryption, and they probably do, but it's 1) a lot less convenient and 2) unverifiable.
4. Telegram is open source. You can layer your own encryption on top of it if you care, and the clients' implementation is fully verifiable.
PSA: Whatsapp is dangerous snake oil--hidden source code and owned by a company with a terrible track record in terms of privacy.
4. Open source, you say? Technically, yes. But in fact they love to abandon github repos while still releasing new versions. Take a look at iOS sources: https://github.com/peter-iakovlev/Telegram/
Yeah that doesn't work at all on my phone because it requires me to use Google Cloud Messaging (Google stuff on my phone is firewalled). You can't just connect to the Signal servers -- or your own for that matter -- and be done with it, you need to use Google servers.
> 2. The secret chats still aren't broken. Since 2013, I'd think at least one "crypto expert" (which all said a custom protocol was a bad idea) would have taken the effort to prove it by now.
I keep seeing this as a reason not to use Telegram, but here is what I want to know:
As a user who doesn't care about my chats being 100% encrypted, but does want the convenience of multi-platform messaging, is Telegram a better alternative to Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts or Whatsapp? My messages on Telegram may not be encrypted, but are they actively used to siphon information from my messages to contribute to my non-anonymized (or poorly anonymized) advertiser profile, and freely passed or sold to third-parties as they are with those platforms?
I've only seen hardline stances on "If you don't care about privacy, Telegram is great!" or "If you care about privacy, Telegram is awful garbage". What about the grey area in the middle? Where does it fit?
Yeah. And just to add to both of the above, stickers in telegram are visually brilliant. I wonder how many illustrators do they have working with them.
i like the whatsapp web because i dont have to install something now just so i could send a message to somebody,
and because its a proxy for the phone app i dont have to worry that i got the message on the desktop but its not synced to mobile ( im looking at you skype )
It's awful for me. I constantly have to unlock my phone because web refuses to send anything or even refuses to load, as it says my phone is not connected to the internet/etc.
Really terrible and frustrating UX for me. I loathe that web interface.
Not until Telegram also adopts end-to-end encryption by default, as WhatsApp has done.
I'm not sure they even have a real reason for not doing it yet. At this point there are at least a couple other open source protocols that work like Signal but have nothing to do with Signal and Open Whisper Systems, that they could adopt. So even if they hate OWS for criticizing them in the past, that's not a reason not to adopt the alternatives at this point.
I'd probably be content if they even take one of those and fork it and customize it for their own purposes, as long as their "math Ph.Ds" don't completely break the crypto again.
Of course they have a real reason: message sync. Telegram works on your PC, in your browser, on your phone, on your tablet, in your raspberry pi tty... all with the same messages synced everywhere, which you wouldn't be able to get with end2end crypto. Sure, Whatsapp kinda does it with the web/desktop clients, but it's a horrible hack requiring your phone to be on and connected all the time...
Signal does have sync, but it works exactly the same way as Whatsapp's does, requiring your phone to be on and connected
Telegram's secret chats are also client-specific and not synced, and I have no idea how it would even be possible to have e2e chats synced on multiple devices without having a "main" device that's doing the actual crypto or sharing the secret key
I got fooled by Signal's requirement of a phone for the activation and thought it was also required for normal usage, I guess that's better than Whatsapp, though being able to register and use it without a phone at all would be even better (even Telegram doesn't do this though, IIRC it requires a phone number)
You are totally wrong. The phone number aspect has absolutely nothing to do with the e2e client problem.
Its possible to have e2e on multiple clients, with or without a phone number attached to it. There are multiple chat clients that can do it, some with, some without phone number. Signal requires phone number and does it, Wire and Riot do it without a phone number.
Telegram just don't actually care about security or privacy. Unencrypted defaults, all conversation saved on the server, even if you use their 'roll your own' crypt secret chats you lose most of the functionality that actually go people to use Telegram in the first place.
Telegram essentially has no usable e2e crypto to speak off. Secret chats are a usability and security nightmare.
People should use Riot (Matrix) or Wire. Those are much better.
To clarify: secret chats have been present on Telegram as a platform for a long time. The desktop client doesn't seem to support them though.
This often leads to people saying things like "Telegram doesn't have end-to-end encryption". Really, what they mean is that it's not the default and isn't on all platforms. Most people can use it if they want to though because it's available on all major mobile OSes.
Telegram desktop [1] aka "tdesktop" is the official telegram desktop client, it's based on Qt and it's cross platform (Windows, GNU/Linux, OS X). What you have been using must be "Telegram for OS X" [2], a different application entirely, which supports only OS X obviously. IIRC tdesktop didn't support OS X initially.
I love Telegram for the usability more than anything else, and don't really care for the encryption (which I find more of a curiosity).
Telegram hits a few sweet spots with me:
- Movement between devices is seamless (I can go from my webview in BSD to my Mac OS Native to my iOS native app and not miss a beat).
- Telegram is very reliable in situations with poor connectivity. This is pure anecdote on my side, but in the most crowded venues I've been to: Messenger, Line, and WhatsApp have performed worse than Telegram.
- Telegram's API is ridiculously open, even if it's backend source isn't. For most practical purposes, Telegram gives you full access, and is completely okay with you creating a 3rd party client
I've managed to win over a lot of my close friends and family onto Telegram, and while they initially objected over the lack of social proof, the features ended up luring them over, and many of them are not technically literate.
Some of my friends are moving from Skype to Discord, but it seems to be a plethora of new IM clients popping up all the time.
From what I can see Telegram doesn't have VoIP, which could be a deal breaker for some. Are there other advantages with Telegram compared to Discord that makes up for the lack of voice?
Telegram never planned implementing VoIP, as far as I remember, only voice messages.
The main reasons it's so popular (with some users, 100+ mil of them) - bots (telegram has open api, and bt platform https://telegram.org/blog/bot-revolution) and channels. In Russia - telegram channels is now a new type of media, very popular with independent journalists, bloggers etc.
I wonder how difficult it would be to add voice chats using a custom client. I've thought about doing some experiments extending the feature list (e.g. calls, different encryption layers, etc.) by forking an existing client and using some hacks to send custom data, but I don't have the time to try it at the moment.
Eh, there's a big community of 4chan groups already (at least for specific boards, like a variety of /g/ groups for technology discussion). I wouldn't say they're any worse than the alternatives (the Let's Talk Programming group is about the same in posting quality as the /g/ groups, if not slightly lower).
I agree. I've installed Telegram Desktop, played with it, and revert to the native macOS client a few hours later. I don't care about animations at all or even the themes. I also didn't like the fact that the icon keeps jumping when receiving new messages. The macOS version works better for my personal preference.
Congratulations to the team! The native desktop apps have been top notch in user experience, speed and stability. Among messaging apps, Telegram has been my favorite for some years. Its development speed and feature introductions, at least in my knowledge, are unparalleled.
I've always liked the multi-device sync feature in Telegram and can't imagine using an app without that. My main concerns have been the home grown crypto and that normal chats are not end-to-end encrypted (only secret chats are). So I've been trying Wire [1] for a while, which provides both multi-device sync, multi-OS apps and end-to-end encrypted chats by default (there is no non-E2E chat). But it needs some more time to become much better (it's comparatively quite slow to startup and sync messages). Unfortunately, for all the fame that Signal [2] has on crypto and end-to-end encryption, it's the slowest in feature development among these apps.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] thread(Yes, it's sarcastic, but people asking to connect everything to everything always sound really neckbeardish/trollish to me)
Other than bots, the client is really a Telegram client, not something like Pidgin.
Personally I don't mind, since everyone's on Telegram. I actually prefer to have a client that's excellent with one network rather than a client that does quite well with many networks. Having used Pidgin and other multi-network clients in the past, they are always second rate compared to the official client. And with bots (irc to telegram bot; gmail to telegram bot; etc.) all I need is the Telegram client.
As for Skype, how do you want to connect it? Microsoft doesn't allow it, and neither would Whatsapp. Telegram on the other hand has no problem if you make a custom client...
[1]: https://www.skype.com/en/developer/ [2]: https://dev.botframework.com/
I don't know a single person who is on Telegram. My friends have not even heard of it despite the fact that they all talk online and a good percentage of them are developers. Why would I start using it if no one I know uses it?
Bad example: I knew nobody on Google+ but I made some new friends. The network died again, or at least I stopped using it after a year and a half or something, so it's a bad example in that it didn't work out in the end, but yeah that's how things get started. Why do you think the first million people got Whatsapp? If you don't try something new and convince at least one other person to use it, how would things ever change?
2. The clients are open source (for me that's a moral reason)
3. Secret chats are verifiably encrypted
4. You can make your own client if you want, causing:
4.1. Someone used a custom client (tgcli) to create a backup feature, which I extended to make html exports like MSN had (quite a future-proof and readable format). This prevents lock-in.
4.2. You are much less restricted in your choice of operating system, given you or someone else takes the effort of porting or writing a client.
5. The existing desktop client is native and doesn't require your phone to be turned on and have data active.
6. The clients have lots of features like custom themes, sending large files, setting up a username which can be linked to publicly, creating broadcast channels, pinned chats, etc. I'm not sure how much of this whatsapp implemented by now. It's true that Telegram also copied other products a lot, but they added lots of features that competitors didn't have, but nowadays they do (it made the market more innovative again).
I'm also not saying everyone should move to Telegram. Some monopolies are better than others (some are owned by Facebook & other things I just mentioned) but all monopolies are bad.
Additionally Whatsapp has some advantages like calling and knowing what the profit model is. The latter is actually my greatest worry about Telegram, but everything considered, Telegram is the best thing currently available in my opinion.
It helped that most people saw the advantages that Telegram had, especially back then (before whatsapp cloned everything). Not to say that Telegram didn't clone whatsapp to a large degree, but the introduction of telegram definitely made the market innovative again.
This is the GitHub repo. https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop
Development has always looked a bit fishy to me, though. The main developer is anonymous (using the name/pic of a TV character), maybe it's even several people using the same profile.
I can't call "good" no accessibility support on macOS. But anyway Telegram Desktop is not the primary client for Macs, they have Cocoa-based alternative: https://macos.telegram.org/
I - and I guess many with me - don't trust the encryption at all.
I assume the crypto might be broken, NSA and FSB and aliens might be listening but I don't care.
My reasons to use it:
Desktop support is way better than Whatsapp.
More possibilities (bots, channels mostly).
And because I don't want to support Whatsapp by being part of the network effect that keeps people on that platform.
The reasons I use private chats sometimes is just to use autodelete to protect my conversations with my wife against my kids.
For me, for example, he selling point is having an interface as slick as Whatsapp's, but not being tied to the phone, not having to necessarily give your phone number, sending whatever attachments you want, and getting a searchable log in the cloud.
Bots are also a popular feature with many users.
[1]: https://wire.com
Secret chats on OSX has the same UX as secret chats on my Android client, fwiw.
For me it looks like web devs that don't want to learn native APIs.
* Lot of wasted disk space.
* Each app loads a whole chromium/nodejs: lots of wasted RAM.
* The chromiums may not all be the latest. This could be bad if those have network exposure: https://sobersecurity.blogspot.mx/2017/01/looks-like-you-hav...
MacOS? I fail to see that this is the way it works in RStudio, VS Code and Atom???
Looks like it was addressed in 2015 but I don't think the other applications used the fix.
We would not have charge our phones every day and laptops would last for longer if anyone cared about how much their application consumes. It's ridiculous.
Good engineering isn't just about features.
Why is native better than browser application? Browser application is by definition better sandboxed and can do much less damage to the system.
Normal application can do mayhem. And Telegram needs root access for installation... do I want to give it root access? When I can just open another tab?
Why is it better? Hundreds of reason, you can see down below. I will try to sum it up why I like native over electron in 3 words: responsiveness, robustness, cleanliness. Electron on desktop is resource hog for me. It is good for people that don't mind that, and that are deep into JS ecosystem. I am not, and I always prefer native app, partly because I am on macOS and Cocoa looks beautiful.
Telegram at idle sits at 80mb ram and <0.01% cpu. Wire for example sits at 250mb idle and waffles between 0.05% and 2% cpu. Discord sits at 200mb idle and waffles between 0.01% and 0.10%, leaning towards the latter, jumping above it every few seconds at least.
I thought they are talking about the chrome app version of telegram, which I am using right now.
Awesome Electron Apps
+ VS Code (Which was light years ahead of Atom but that gap has narrowed)
+ RStudio
+ Discord
My Point: VS Code is a great electron application. Works great.
VS Code < Vim < Vi < ed
I don't get the text editor speed as an issue ever. I used Vim (I use Vim mode in all my editors) not because it was faster on the CPU it was because it made my work faster. Today VS Code makes me work fast. I seriously have a 8 year old Dell crappy corporate computer for work and there is no noticeable slow down on either RStudio or VS Code.
Don't use it, don't let friends use it.
https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/81899003583181619...
https://twitter.com/kaepora/status/819181464369577984
https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/81919238137120358...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol
Edit: add link http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-crypta...
If you want to argue that Telegram and Signal are comparable because Telegram has better UX and Signal better security and some people prefer UX to security, that's fine (I could not disagree more strongly, but at least it's a coherent argument). But don't pretend the thread isn't about security to make people believe that there's controversy about whether Signal is more secure. There is no controversy: Signal won the Levchin prize this year for the Signal Protocol and sets the standard for secure chat, and Telegram... well, let's just suffice it to say that it does not meet that standard.
[1] https://conversations.im/omemo/
I somehow doubt it.
EDIT: Oh, I was mistaken, apparently there is an option now. From Wikipedia:
On October 4, 2016, Facebook deployed end-to-end encryption as an optional feature for Facebook Messenger users. It is available in an optional mode called "Secret Conversations" and uses the Signal Protocol.
Riot is based on Matrix which is a decentralized protocol (you're not tied to one company), and it doesn't need your phone number.
* open source, code on github
* e2e encryption (apparently derivative of Signal's Axolotl double ratchet)
* chat/voice/video, and group chats (all encrypted always)
* based in Switzerland, coding out of Berlin
* clients for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux, Web
* can sign up with phone number or email (or username? Not sure - I think you can find contacts via username, not sure you can sign up without email)
* reasonably responsive on twitter
* yada yada yada
Things like this: https://github.com/wireapp/wire-desktop/issues/80
Then there is the fact that the client acts as a browser that fetches information from the web automatically without blocking trackers itself. This is leaking metadata and actual data.
I can't believe there still isn't a single usable e2e mobile + desktop chat client that won't drain your cell phone battery super quickly.
The problem is that most people value convenience and speed over security and privacy. Telegram provides a very good trade off, much better than some other apps. If Signal were to be developed at the pace Telegram is, I would use it all the time, but it's not. For my use and likes, both Telegram and Wire are very good fits.
I switched from skype to telegram because of its much smaller memory footprint. 400mb+ for skype, 63mb(current) for telegram.
Before you say "but I can compile it myself", think of how many people will ever bother to do that.
That's how literally every security person feels about the argument that closed-source software is unknowable.
We don't need decompilers or special tools to read closed-source applications. Almost all of them --- very much including the Signal-based messengers --- are built with tools that produce straightforward easy to follow assembly code.
But that's sort of besides the point. Reading assembly is more tedious than reading C code, which is in turn more tedious than reading Python code. But you don't get to move the goalposts now. You claimed, repeatedly, that closed-source software was unknowable. It is not; it is in fact very far from unknowable. So the idea that Facebook is going to sneak backdoors into some of its most prominent code under cover of "closed source" is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary evidence.
So, I doubt any security professionals would say its preferable to not have the source, but to do the job of verifying the software you have to do it at a lower level than the source anyway, so having the source is a bonus, not a requirement.
whatsapp 6 out of 7
telegram(in secret chat) 7 out of 7
So i am not going to comment on the quality of whatsapp, because their sources are closed.
Most people are not going to use the secret chat.
Most people don't care about secret chat. This is for people who care. Granted, they don't have secret chat on Desktop which makes the whole app useless in general unless you only use phones for communication.
This is a reason i said "It's ok" in my original comment. Few people need encryption in day to day communication, but if you need it telegram is better.
Try this one: https://www.securemessagingapps.com
Recommends Signal and (with caveats) Threema and Wire.
If anybody really wants to hack you (you exatly) - p-2-p ecryption won't stop them, this is not some kind of absolute defence.
And if you are worried about FSB readin your messages - trust me, they don't, unless you are under suspection already. No organisation in Russian history ever worked this way, only selectively.
I know too well that not enough people care about privacy, sadly.
1. They don't claim to do end to end crypto unless you use the secret chats
2. The secret chats still aren't broken. Since 2013, I'd think at least one "crypto expert" (which all said a custom protocol was a bad idea) would have taken the effort to prove it by now.
3. Whatsapp claims to have better encryption, and they probably do, but it's 1) a lot less convenient and 2) unverifiable.
4. Telegram is open source. You can layer your own encryption on top of it if you care, and the clients' implementation is fully verifiable.
PSA: Whatsapp is dangerous snake oil--hidden source code and owned by a company with a terrible track record in terms of privacy.
They simply do a code dump every few months.
both are better options than telegram.
Yeah that doesn't work at all on my phone because it requires me to use Google Cloud Messaging (Google stuff on my phone is firewalled). You can't just connect to the Signal servers -- or your own for that matter -- and be done with it, you need to use Google servers.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf
Does anybody know how many users are on Telegram and who owns them? Can you invest in them?
See Wikipedia and https://www.securemessagingapps.com
As for numbers: http://www.businessofapps.com/telegram-statistics-and-revenu...
https://telegram.org/blog/100-million https://telegram.org/blog/15-billion
> Telegram is a cloud-based mobile and desktop messaging app with a focus on security and speed.
Unfortunately, it tricks a lot of people.
As a user who doesn't care about my chats being 100% encrypted, but does want the convenience of multi-platform messaging, is Telegram a better alternative to Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts or Whatsapp? My messages on Telegram may not be encrypted, but are they actively used to siphon information from my messages to contribute to my non-anonymized (or poorly anonymized) advertiser profile, and freely passed or sold to third-parties as they are with those platforms?
I've only seen hardline stances on "If you don't care about privacy, Telegram is great!" or "If you care about privacy, Telegram is awful garbage". What about the grey area in the middle? Where does it fit?
Basically anyone who wants. I have a sticker set with friends of mine : )
Really terrible and frustrating UX for me. I loathe that web interface.
Riot and Wire both seem to have that. Riot uses a WebApp-as-Native kind of thing, while Wire actually seems to have a native app.
I'm not sure they even have a real reason for not doing it yet. At this point there are at least a couple other open source protocols that work like Signal but have nothing to do with Signal and Open Whisper Systems, that they could adopt. So even if they hate OWS for criticizing them in the past, that's not a reason not to adopt the alternatives at this point.
I'd probably be content if they even take one of those and fork it and customize it for their own purposes, as long as their "math Ph.Ds" don't completely break the crypto again.
Telegram's secret chats are also client-specific and not synced, and I have no idea how it would even be possible to have e2e chats synced on multiple devices without having a "main" device that's doing the actual crypto or sharing the secret key
It doesn't. The phone is only needed for initial setup.
Hopefully, OpenWhisperSystems will release documentation about their implementation in Signal (note: it doesn't require phone, unlike WhatsApp)
I got fooled by Signal's requirement of a phone for the activation and thought it was also required for normal usage, I guess that's better than Whatsapp, though being able to register and use it without a phone at all would be even better (even Telegram doesn't do this though, IIRC it requires a phone number)
Its possible to have e2e on multiple clients, with or without a phone number attached to it. There are multiple chat clients that can do it, some with, some without phone number. Signal requires phone number and does it, Wire and Riot do it without a phone number.
Telegram just don't actually care about security or privacy. Unencrypted defaults, all conversation saved on the server, even if you use their 'roll your own' crypt secret chats you lose most of the functionality that actually go people to use Telegram in the first place.
Telegram essentially has no usable e2e crypto to speak off. Secret chats are a usability and security nightmare.
People should use Riot (Matrix) or Wire. Those are much better.
Not there yet privacy-wise as others point out, but at least you get an open API and the ability to use your own clients.
This often leads to people saying things like "Telegram doesn't have end-to-end encryption". Really, what they mean is that it's not the default and isn't on all platforms. Most people can use it if they want to though because it's available on all major mobile OSes.
I use the Telegram app on my OSX Laptop, and i use Secret chats. They seem identical to my Android secret chats. What am i missing?
[1]: https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop [2]: https://github.com/overtake/telegram
Telegram hits a few sweet spots with me:
I've managed to win over a lot of my close friends and family onto Telegram, and while they initially objected over the lack of social proof, the features ended up luring them over, and many of them are not technically literate.From what I can see Telegram doesn't have VoIP, which could be a deal breaker for some. Are there other advantages with Telegram compared to Discord that makes up for the lack of voice?
The main reasons it's so popular (with some users, 100+ mil of them) - bots (telegram has open api, and bt platform https://telegram.org/blog/bot-revolution) and channels. In Russia - telegram channels is now a new type of media, very popular with independent journalists, bloggers etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_(protocol)
Everyone's looking for a decent replacement for Skype, and Hangouts ain't it.
No signup and no email required.
- Dark Skin (still waiting for Slack doing it)
- It's faster than the MAS version
- It's not possible to collapse the chat list anymore
- The desktop app is responsive, though, collapsing the whole sidebar into a hamburger menu
- Replying to messages is buried in a context menu, in the MAS version one could simply double click a message
- They created a giant group for themes. Once 4chan joins there, things will go very bad
Any number of any skins, actually. Themes.
Or am I misunderstanding you?
I've always liked the multi-device sync feature in Telegram and can't imagine using an app without that. My main concerns have been the home grown crypto and that normal chats are not end-to-end encrypted (only secret chats are). So I've been trying Wire [1] for a while, which provides both multi-device sync, multi-OS apps and end-to-end encrypted chats by default (there is no non-E2E chat). But it needs some more time to become much better (it's comparatively quite slow to startup and sync messages). Unfortunately, for all the fame that Signal [2] has on crypto and end-to-end encryption, it's the slowest in feature development among these apps.
[1]: https://wire.com
[2]: https://whispersystems.org
[1] - https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/277
EDIT: smiley
To those who think privacy does not matter : http://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters