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.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 57 users / day
- 383 users / week
- 1.5K users / month
- 5.7K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 2.44K Posts
- 57.5K Comments
- Modlog
I deleted telegram long ago, but not my account, just the apps.
As of recent, I wanted to log back in and actually delete my phone number from there, so there’s no more association.
I can’t login. I download the app, and it sends a verification code through Telegram and won’t do SMS, but I’m not logged in at all so I can’t get the code.
I’m stuck there. I contacted support and they’re yet to respond. :p
Every messenger is.
I will probably up this one, it’s really a lot of materials, and articles, and news if you read behind all this war and politics stuff
You should really search, I tried to compile all I could find, but I’m here to stop using tg, not going back to tg and scroll Russian opposition channels for all the mentions of stuff like that
There are some articles in English that describe the events, but most of them are in Russian
Also, from the search it’s really hard to find anything because a lot of stuff about the war
Here are a few topics:
Compilation of different technical vulnerabilities and issues of telegram(in Russian):
And in general, Russian government unbanned tg after it realized it can read it. I wouldn’t trust anything that was unbanned in Russia or China
And one more article that lists issues of telegram: https://emisare.medium.com/так-ли-безопасен-telegram-f5a3128a1311
I’m already tired of doing this, I didn’t even start on activists and how they get hacked and stuff
A lot of speculation that does end with this in the article:
"After discussing her case with experts, Matsapulina now believes her Telegram messages may have been compromised by a form of spyware. When she was told that a hacking device would need to be physically nearby to infiltrate her phone, a memory resurfaced: At times before her arrest, she had noticed an unmarked truck with a dome on its roof parked outside her building. She had even jokingly mentioned it to friends on Telegram. Now, she remembered, as the police were banging on her door that morning, she’d spotted the same mystery vehicle parked outside. By the time the police stormed her home, the vehicle was gone.
Matsapulina has since started using Telegram again."
Most messaging apps are vulnerable on the client side with spyware, no matter what E2EE exists along the way.
Russian authorities usually just hijack login sms confirmation codes. This is a common practice in Russia. Not denying that something else shady might be going on, but I do know mobile providers there don’t even bother to ask why - they just provide shit on demand.
Probably this might be related to why tencent removed cloud backups from WeChat. It used to be like telegram, when you login it loaded all the previous messages, now when you login using the sms confirmation code you need to ask (with a different chat app!) three friends to send you a session specific passcode and then all the previous chat history is wiped clean.
(It was a problem to login back to me as I didn’t have three friends)
I have been living under a rock, what happened to Telegram?
It is not considered a good alternative as a messaging app for privacy folks and because the source code is not open, it is not E2E encrypted by default (you need to start a secret chat or something to make your conversation encrypted) if I remember correctly.
You remember incorrect. All Clients are open source:
In Fdroid there are also forks. But yes, their servers are closed source and centralized.
Still its not recommended. It requires Phone number and as you said its E2ee is not on by default and is not soooo good.
Nobody in this entire thread of FUD has posted a single link to support any claim of Russian data intrusion.
I mean from what I gather e2ee is not on by default (and unsuppoeted in group) and is proprietary.
The link below talks about why that is; Telegram focuses on features over maximize privacy.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/telegram-encryption-end-to-end-features
Here’s a recent article, Telegram’s Connection to the Kremlin.
Is it even possible to get a telegram account these days? I heard their SMS service was down or something making it impossible to sign up and they don’t support email.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Stop it with the creative commons link in your comments.
Also, there is nothing wrong with Telegram logins or new accounts.
No.
Just gave it a shot. Doesn’t work.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
I get notifications of new contacts that join Telegram so it does. I don’t need to try it myself.
And I don’t understand your cc link and your down votes speak for themselves so stop the silliness.
Do you fear what you don’t understand? “I don’t understand it, so stop”.
And I don’t care about downvotes. Go on, downvote. It has no real life effect.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Your link also has no real life effect.
Am i the only one who doesnt use telegram for porn
deleted by creator
Nah.
I use it for drugs.
I’m gonna need a source on that, since the creator himself was persecuted and telegram had layers of fake companies to stop Putin from getting to it.
Here’s what I found:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/
I must agree on the bloated part. Telegram was awesome before Pavel got greedy and added more and more stuff that are just not related to any chat service, for an example payments and crypto.
I installed Snikket on my server few weeks ago and are now trying to move everyone to it. It seems to be a very slow process, though.
But I might keep Telegram only for the porn channels. Mighty good stuff!
By the way. Do you have the source for your claim that Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages?
XMPP, 🙂
Oh, yeah, the porn channels are really good indeed
I’m thinking if I can access them from some telegram channel mirror
Well, Telegram already have a preview feature for every public channels. Just copy the direct link to the channel and add
/saftert.me/(or choose “Previous channel” without opening the link in Telegram) and you’re good to go. If only Pavel will add an RSS feed to that feed. That would be mighty-mighty awesome!More work to save the media files, though. You have to inspect the element and get the direct link to the image through
background-imagefor thetgme_widget_message_photo_wrapclass. Much easier and takes less time to just save it inside Telegram, as of now.Good advice, but I will look into converting some to RSS and read in an RSS reader
I just one a solution for that: RSS-Bridge. Just tried it through one of their instances and it works really well. At least for some of the channels.
So what do you use to send, receive and store 2GB ish files to other people?
Edit: Would be great if some non-selfhosting solution was suggested here.
Magic wormhole, Bitorrent
How do you share using BitTorrent. I had a lot of problem sharing with BT, especially on tracker choosing reasons and port problems.
I use Pingvin Share to share one or more files. Have set the max limit for each share to 4 GB. All files will be stored temporary which is awesome privacy-wise.
Depends what people
For family and friends I have nextcloud, many of them are using it (yes, i’m that one out of a million people who made their friends and family use selfhosted stuff and be happy)
I only use it for porn groups🗿
Eww, disgusting!
Where?
I thought furry groups use discord?💀
Nu uh, I aint no furry❌🗣️
Porn groups? What do you do in those groups? Exchange porn? Is there not enough on the internet?
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Now, where might one find those? For science, of course…
You can actually just search telegram porn groups on your search engine of choice. Although google usually leads to better results in the porn department
Porn groups are good indeed!
critical damage to the “privacy-conscious people are not freaks” message
I never got with these russian authority claims. Telegram is not based in russia, sure its founders are born in russia but they have taken citizenship of France for a long time now, its based in saudi arabia. I never saw a single proof of them giving data to russian authorities, they were banned in russia for that iirc but eventually got unbanned due to mass adoption. At this point these russian claims just seem racism to me.
It’s the usual foreign fearmongering. It’s never phrased this way if the subject is a western company (even though we know they cooperate with the US government).
Specially since we know for a fact that Meta hands over any and all information the US government wants from all their apps.
deleted by creator
It happened too many times already, telegram has a very bad record at this point, some security mistakes happen every month, c’mon, this is a really bad idea to use telegram at this point
It happened too many times but I can’t find a single case, please enlght me. I will use telegram because it have a lot of features, good ui and easy to use
You should really search, I tried to compile all I could find, but I’m here to stop using tg, not going back to tg and scroll Russian opposition channels for all the mentions of stuff like that
There are some articles in English that describe the events, but most of them are in Russian
Also, from the search it’s really hard to find anything because a lot of stuff about the war
Here are a few topics:
Compilation of different technical vulnerabilities and issues of telegram(in Russian):
And in general, Russian government unbanned tg after it realized it can read it. I wouldn’t trust anything that was unbanned in Russia or China
And one more article that lists issues of telegram: https://emisare.medium.com/так-ли-безопасен-telegram-f5a3128a1311
I’m already tired of doing this, I didn’t even start on activists and how they get hacked and stuff
There was just a fine on telegram yesterday for not “complying” with Russian authorities which is another proof they are doing great. https://tass.ru/obschestvo/20188921