this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Privacy

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It was a many months transition, and it's finally done

Fun thing, you can actually make a backup of all* your messages, groups, contacts, etc. So before leaving you can have all of your data in case you need that one contact or something

The final red flag was as that allegedly Russian authorities were messing with people's deleted messages. Not for the first time there are news that they could read, modify, delete, see location, and etc. Screw it, this is unsafe, I'm out.

Also, these days telegram is really at the state of a pile of garbage, bloated, buggy, and shady messenger.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I posted this down below in a comment thread but I'm afraid it won't be seen and not enough people know about this.

Session was at first a fork of Signal without usernames.

Now by design it uses their own custom tor-like service (instead of just... using tor) and does not support forward secrecy or deniable authentication, so anyone who collects the messages in transit can either find a vulnerability in the encryption scheme, or spend enough GPU resources to crack it, and they have confirmation of who sent and received the message and what the contents of the message are. And is headquartered in Australia, which is 5EYES and much more against encryption than the US. Oh, and the server is closed-source.

Regarding Australia's 2018 bill...

The Australian Parliament passed a contentious encryption bill on Thursday to require technology companies to provide law enforcement and security agencies with access to encrypted communications. Privacy advocates, technology companies and other businesses had strongly opposed the bill, but Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government said it was needed to thwart criminals and terrorists who use encrypted messaging programs to communicate.

Regarding the 'vulnerability or cracking them later' bit...

Messages that are sent to you are actually sent to your swarm. The messages are temporarily stored on multiple Service Nodes within the swarm to provide redundancy. Once your device picks up the messages from the swarm, they are automatically deleted from the Service Nodes that were temporarily storing them.

From Session's own FAQ:

Session clients do not act as nodes on the network, and do not relay or store messages for the network. Session’s network architecture is closer to a client-server model, where the Session application acts as the client and the Service Node swarm acts as the server. Session’s client-server architecture allows for easier asynchronous messaging (messaging when one party is offline) and onion routing-based IP address obfuscation, relative to peer-to-peer network architectures.

I wouldn't touch it with a 12ft ladder.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

FYI, regular Signal now has usernames available with the option to hide your phone number switched on by default (you may still need tithe beta release for the next few months since it's staggered rollout)

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

You forget to mention they gave informations to german police, seems like they forget the point of the app

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'm glad I never used it

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Back to Facebook messenger?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

where did you moved to? i tried matrix but their android client (element) is terrible compare to telegram's.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Try checking out Element X. It's made to replace Element stable once it's complete.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Try schildichat it seems more polished

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Good for you. I still don't know how to move my friends and relatives to Signal. Any tips with that?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Easy! Just replace their usual SMS app with Signal, and then every contact they have that does use Signal is private and secure!

Oh. Wait. That's exactly the functionality that Signal removed in their effort to ensure that Signal is never widely adopted.....

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I didn't agree with their decision at all at the time, but now that I realize they made it a little while after it gained widespread adoption and people stopped using it because "Signal isn't actually secure!" ... seems like people were expecting a secure messenger to be, well, secure. So they would chat about anything and everything thinking "I am using a secure messenger, these messages can't be read..." and tech ignorance is a dangerous thing if you're trying to be secure. I would've preferred a colored window and un-closable message for SMS chats, but oh well. I like that they've introduced usernames so you don't have to give out your real number.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Do what I did. Let everyone you care about on TG that you're closing that crap, with your reasons for doing so. Inform them of your moving to signal, session, whatever. Be clear that, otherwise, they can try calling you and wish them good luck. Close TG on the day you set as deadline. I did that and whomever didn't get a Signal or Session account has to call me. I've never looked back.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My family is all on iMessage. I told them if they didn't install Signal I wouldn't reply to their texts.

At first, whenever they texted I would just reply with something that looked automated like "This user is no longer available via text message. Please install Signal if you wish to communicate."

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Keep bugging them. I almost exclusively use signal for messaging these days and it's fantastic. It took longer to convince some people than others

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

One day I said that in the future I will only be available via Signal. If not there then there is still SMS. And so far everyone I have contact with regularly installed it eventually.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's exactly right.

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