“Telegram is not a private messenger. There’s nothing private about it. It’s the opposite. It’s a cloud messenger where every message you’ve ever sent or received is in plain text in a database that Telegram the organization controls and has access to it”
“It’s like a Russian oligarch starting an unencrypted version of WhatsApp, a pixel for pixel clone of WhatsApp. That should be kind of a difficult brand to operate. Somehow, they’ve done a really amazing job of convincing the whole world that this is an encrypted messaging app and that the founder is some kind of Russian dissident, even though he goes there once a month, the whole team lives in Russia, and their families are there.”
" What happened in France is they just chose not to respond to the subpoena. So that’s in violation of the law. And, he gets arrested in France, right? And everyone’s like, oh, France. But I think the key point is they have the data, like they can respond to the subpoenas where as Signal, for instance, doesn’t have access to the data and couldn’t respond to that same request. To me it’s very obvious that Russia would’ve had a much less polite version of that conversation with Pavel Durov and the telegram team before this moment"
Give me ssh access to their server so I can verify that works like it should.
Can’t? Then it’s just trust me bro
the whole point is you don’t need to trust them… you can never trust any server: your client is the only thing you can trust. you can verify using your message payloads that your sender information is not ever sent to the signal servers along with your messages
Signal has your phone number and everyone else’s who signed up. That is more than just client information, and it’s possible to build entire social networking graphs with it alone.
they do, but that information is disconnected from your messages by sealed sender: that’s the point… your sender identity is cryptographically shielded from the signal servers
they know who you are, but they have no ability to connect that identity with who you message (which you can verify using only your client)
*edit: i will say, because i’m interested in conversation and understanding not just winning an internet argument, that my conversation with yogthos here has underscored i think a place where this could still be improved: your IP address across the entire sealed sender process can be used to tie things together, if it remains unchanged (but you can change your IP address between receiving your sender token and sending messages)