I think it's slowly high time the anti-monopolistic regulation looks into their business practices and starts considering cutting them up into discrete companies per market.
Be it messengers, social networking apps, eCommerce stores, ERP software, anything - If we choose one organization to rule them all, it won't be very long before they start showing the traits of that one Saruman's ring that rules them all.
Of course, a Linux VPS needs a fair amount of love (fiddling with settings, updating, and so on). But there are other ways: https://sandstorm.io/
[0] https://www.facebook.com/Telegram-Messenger-438429349592627/
Of course, they are going to say that this is because of Telegram's links to terrorism. But any secure messenger can be used by bad actors, so that same excuse could be used for the wholesale blocking of all competing messengers. This is clearly anticompetitive behavior.
Signal / TextSecure on the other hand is encrypted by default, implements more thoroughly audited cryptography, and is recommended by Edward Snowden and Bruce Schneier.
I don't use it because it doesn't sync chats between devices or have a desktop client.
Full-on e2e is great, and I'd use Signal if it supported my use case, but it doesn't. So I use Telegram instead, as a fast, easy-to-use, grandparent-compatible chat client with sane picture and file-transfer support. The oddball encryption and the fact that it's not end-to-end by default is a downside, but it's better than plaintext and it's actually useful to me, so…
Don't get me wrong, Signal is absolutely the right choice for people who don't need or care about multi-device syncing and only need a mobile client, or people who want the best security they can get. I fully support the widespread adoption of top-tier cryptography, including by people who don't need to protect their communications from global powers. But right now Signal is not (yet?) a one-size-fits-all solution.
> The UX is nice. The crypto is like being stabbed in the eye with a fork. https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/66668673163526553...
Which pieces of information do you need exactly? You can search HN for 'Telegram', it get's criticized nearly every time it makes headlines. Or just look at Telegram's interface and you'll see that 'secret chat' is not the default option, it's not end-to-end encrypted by default making it marginally more secure than HTTPS.
Signal/TextSecure on the otherhand has been the 'golden child' of the privacy and infosec scenes since it was released and their website has plenty of documentation on their protocol.
I really don't think people expect complete security and privacy from anyone ever, that's impractical and probably impossible. They expect their data to not be used for advertising or whatever and more security than WhatsApp (edit: Wait, it's not using e2e encryption by defautl now?), Skype, and the like. The only thin Telegram should be more upfront about is that the feature with all the security stuff is secret chats.
I just don't understand this mentality. People start using something that's not owned by a huge NSA-friendly megacorporation, that is using some advanced security (which will probably be called "unproven" for the next thousand years) along with regular security - and a ton of people get mad, because it's allegedly not "secure enough". What's next, people start using Signal and hordes of angry 'experts' show up claiming it's not secure and private unless you make a new identity for every chat through Tor running in a VM on some 3rd world island, using your own infrastructure?
If I was only slightly more paranoid, I'd start throwing accusations of false flag attacks directed from Facebook.
Do you have any suggestions on how to do that? The People I know either think Whatsapp is gods gift to mankind and won't switch or they can't use anything else because the people they interact with think it's gods gift to mankind and won't switch. I find it pretty hard to break that cycle.
From there you just send them messages on Telegram, or start group chats. You likely won't convince them to switch themselves instantly, but if they want to message you, hopefully they're more likely to check telegram, because they'll want to get a better idea of when you were last available.
It's not perfect, but it's something, and hopefully if whatsapp keeps up with their paid subscription nonsense, it will push more people away.
Versus that ridiculous hack where you can whatsapp in the browser, provided you scan a qr code and have the phone on the same network.
Their decision to purchase WhatsApp turned out to be very ill-timed. WhatsApp was at the peak of their popularity when they did, but that peak was only because of ignorance of the masses - ignorance about glaring holes in WhatsApp security, and ignorance about significantly better alternatives like Telegram. But in the age of Internet, ignorance hardly lasts long among the masses, of all people, Zuckerburg should have known this!
That was one or two years ago now and I'm not sure if the estimate has been updated, but it would seem FB is running out of time to convert the user base.
I agree with you that Telegram has been in the news recently, but I doubt it's related with this incident.
We've seen something like this before, when AIM allowed MSN Messenger to interoperate. I know this is a little different, but that was still how AIM lost.
Here is a fantastic war story from one of the MSN engineers on the battle to subvert AIM [1].
I did because it had the best quality video chat at the time, before Skype became a thing, but that was probably 15 years ago. My current company used to use it for in-office communication as recently as five years ago when I was first hired. It was an abysmal mess of sending out group chats as individual windows every time someone had a question. For a software company it was really disgraceful.
Lost? AIM was the dominant IM platform in the US until the late 00s/early 10s when mobile and cloud-based services took over. First SMS/MMS and then platforms like Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, and Skype.
The only place MSN was dominant was third-world countries like Brazil.
Probably, AIM usage correlated with AOL's marketing strategy, meaning it prevailed in the US, though I'm not even sure about europe.
Anyhow, your assertion that MSN was only dominant in 3rd world countries is unfounded.
Intentionally blocking your competitor in this situation doesn't seem like a good idea, it mostly generates publicity for them.
http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/12/01/whatsapp-is-blocking...
> The smoking gun is a pattern match performed on any URL string that begins with the word 'telegram.' In the most recent version of the app, these strings are classified as a "bad host," so that no hyperlink is generated and it becomes impossible to copy or forward any message with that URL. No other strings trigger the match, so this block is purposefully targeted at Telegram.
Local variable names aren't normally stored in an APK, they're just refereed to by register numbers. For instance, I wouldn't expect to see "for(Pattern badHost : BAD_HOSTS)" (specifically the badHost) - last time I checked, this information would be lost during compilation.
I'm not suggesting that the code is falsified - the person that decompiled it probably just guessed at some variable names and re-factored to make it more readable. It just stood out to me, so I thought it was worth mentioning.
I still think this will result in more publicity for Telegram than all the messages that are blocked.
In addition, if you are familiar with how whatsapp works, stopping any spam would be much more effective by targeting the phone numbers sending spam, not to mention the difficulty of spamming telephone numbers.. not impossible, but difficult.. which is why whatsapp spam so far has been non-existent AFAIK.
I made a screenshot of this response and wanted to share that instead. The funny thing is that in the screenshot, FBs red comment re: the dangerous link was so blurry that you could not read it. I guess this was probably due to a compression algorithm they apply on pictures but it is funny that the rest of the message was easily readable in the screenshot.
Could you repeat the test and provide the name of the service so others can try to replicate it?
That's what I initially thought. But then again, it seemed a bit too paranoid.
The name of the service is discardmail.com
Next to WhatsApp I also have installed:
1. Signal
2. Threema
3. Telegram
And I will use those (in described order) if possible.
Threema seems to be comparatively popular in Germany, while Telegram is at least not among my peers and Signal (the one recommended by Schneier and Snowden) is only used by my gf (b/c I installed it for her).
If you do a Google search that's the first result. Would be funny if they were afraid enough to do a SEO 'attack'. Yeah, tinfoil.
Coming soon to a server near you!
Airbnb chat also censors messages. Typically when you try to give your number or whatsapp or some link.
I mean, I'm a technical guy. I don't understand what either of us was doing wrong. Have you seen anything like this in your experience?
Why do you say that? Snowden keeps recommending Signal every time he's asked.
Seems like he changed his mind.
A big deal breaker for me is being able to use it without a phone number, and from desktop/sim-free devices, as well as from multiple devices simultaniously
(I just tried with my colleague)
It looks a bit fishy as it reads like an actual code as opposed to one outputted from a decompiler.
Soon we'll have wall charts of who can and can't talk to what.
Same problem as I have with facebook, there is too much critical mass to switch :(
A migration has begun.
