alt Hacker News>lol Telegram
Did I miss something? what's wrong with telegram?
Replies
I assume it's the lack of end-to-end encryption by default on basic features.
Good service btw, but not the best from a privacy point of view.
I don't understand why you're downvoted for this question.
What's wrong with Telegram is the privacy story. It's not end-to-end encrypted, meaning that the server can read the content of your messages.
I hear that Telegram has a great UX, which makes it popular. But in terms of security... it's wanting.
1. It's not end-to-end encrypted by default.
2. No group chat, even a small one between close friends is end-to-end encrypted.
3. Almost all desktop clients support no end-to-end encryption for 1:1 chats, meaning if you use the desktop client as part of your workflow, you're forced to drop using the end-to-end encrypted secret chats.
4. No cryptographers have ever worked in the company.
5. Horrible teething issues for the protocol:
Telegram hosted a cracking contest back in 2013. Everyone in the industry know they are bullshit, and this was discussed back in 2013 The Fallacy of Cracking Contests (1998) | Hacker News The tldr is, Moxie issued a counter challenge to Telegram where he presented the same goals with already broken primitives like MD5, to break the encryption. Telegram never proved the challenge could be won even under those conditions. (Also again, given that Telegram’s built in backdoor of “people are lazy” exists, the cracking contest was pointless. It doesn’t matter how good the encryption is if the adversary wears you down to hand over the keys).
http://unhandledexpression.com:8081/crypto/general/security/...
https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20160425091011/http://www.alexra...
https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/telegram-ecdh/
Also this:
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...
I'll tell you what's right about Telegram: I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat application in 2025.
I maintain that someone should fork their codebase and bolt on a different backend (Signal, Matrix, whatever). It's right there and it's very, very good.
(Yes, I know it's not as simple as "bolt on a different backend". You know what I mean.)