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Are you OK?
NSA.
NSA installing physical backdoor's in those DC's
Been working fine for me during the day, although I'm not in China and probably not in DC5.
Try pinging
@Durovto find out more.DC1 & 4 have been alright
That strangely made me laugh
out of the blue, just hit me.
They are DDoSed sometimes, it is OK
Has been bought by Facebook. Existing users are currently being migrated to Whatsapp.
Can anyone break down in fairly simply terms the differences between using WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal?
Mostly different philosophies. Whatsapp is "LOL, which kind of stupid cereal is named privacy?", Telegram is "Problem officer?" and Signal is "For real now, i'm the next Edward Snowden!".
WhatsApp
Signal
Telegram
So Telegram is like the middle ground between WA and Signal and the ‘unlimited cloud storage’ offered by them might be a deal breaker for many.
Seems like WhatsApp has better privacy than Telegram.
From my experience, 90% of my contacts have WhatsApp, whereas maybe 20% have Telegram.
I'm in the US, if that makes a difference.
What is the (free?) unlimited cloud storage useful for?
Not really, at least not compared to central Europe. In the end people are kind of deluding themselves with the privacy claims anyways. None of these is exceptionally great. Starting with that each of them wants an identifier that's in a lot of countries directly tied to a person (phone number).
Dealing with something owned by Facebook (the company that even stored posts their users didn't make and couldn't delete data if they wanted to because they have no clue where it even ended up or how many copies there are) and thinking "Oh, i'm sure that they'll respect my privacy!" is still pretty much crazy though.
For storing media and stuff?
Yea, no one uses Telegram in the US - the e2e encryption services that people in the US use are iMessage and WhatsApp. I have seen people use Signal more than Telegram in my social circle.
Tbf I have not seen any evidence that the US gov has been able to get Meta to comply with a warrant request for Whatsapp data. Sure they have gotten it but from what I have seen it's been from insecure backups people have made to iCloud or google drive.
How is the US and central Europe different, in this regard?
Afaik as i know Whatsapp basically uses the same encryption as XMPP does (OMEMO), so it shouldn't be to bad but encryption is just worth so much when dealing with something that's pretty much a blackbox. I vaguely remember there having already been some reports of Whatsapp being able to install backdoor keys to MITM the whole thing.
Huh? You wrote "if that makes a difference" and i replied with "Not really", so there isn't much of any in my opinion.
I mean yeah Facebook has an awful track record and I don't doubt they could backdoor the thing because its not open source, but I also do not think Facebook is lying to US Courts if it says it can't decrypt such content in response to a warrant.
The FBI successfully cracked into iPhones without Apple's assistance. I don't think there's much beyond their abilities.
What did they crack though? One of those silly finger print scanners, which are so popular these days? In any case it's unlikely to have been any kind of strong encryption since otherwise they would have made very sure that noone heard about it as otherwise we'd have a whole new set of standards by now. NIST doesn't endorse cryptography, which has been broken as if one party can do it another will likely also be able to and that's bad when national security relies on those standards.
They removed the flash and hooked it up to a special machine where they were able to bypass the attempt limiter and try unlimited attempts for the passcode to get the encryption key. Although I think on new phones with the encryption existing on a separate chip this is no longer possible, but I could be wrong.
I don't think we can extrapolate from the abilities of a state-actor, including world power spying agencies, to the abilities of private hackers.
Probably not but then there's more than one state actor and like i've said any kind of open publication of such an ability would have instant and very noticeable consequences.
Yeah, that's kind of what i thought too. Brute force against a weak passphrase, fooling some fingerprint scanner or even getting a key from recently powered down RAM chips is neither voodoo magic nor the fault of encryption itself.
It's interesting, even though I hear whatsapp is really popular, my contacts use facebook messenger. They're both owned by facebook, though. I'm not sure if there is any interconnection between them. I have signal installed, just in case, but nobody else I know uses it.
I did notice messenger added some end-to-end encryption recently, with a PIN protected key. If I login on a new browser, it prompts for the PIN to access message history.
I have telegram, but only installed on my pc. Not for messaging, but to access certain groups that only exist there. I dislike it, though. It's about 1% signal and 99% noise.
I can easily send you a 2GB video every hour and it will be okay. Whatsapp was 16MB and as of recently increased to 100MB afaik.
WhatsApp is one of Facebook's proprietary messengers. Most popular worldwide. 2 billion+ users. Very much mobile focused. Last time I checked you had to have your phone online and with you to login from your computer.
Telegram is closed server source, open client source. They run their own servers and are operating at extreme efficiency being only 30 employees and releasing new big features pretty much every month. Owner was forced out of Russia because he refused to give away info. Criticized for not having E2E encryption at all in group chats and by default in private chats. And for using their own cryptography for E2E. Extremely high limits for all things feeling pretty much unlimited (ex. 200,000 members in a group). Extremely customizable and community driven. A lot of quality of life tiny features that aren't present elsewhere. Not a shitty Electron desktop client. Close to 1 billion users.
Signal considered the most secure. Their protocol is used by WhatsApp and other applications. Very few people actually use Signal. A US company with US big tech servers (for censorship resistance allegedly) which worries some people. Also mobile focused.
Telegram down again India
This time I noticed that it was down not for all but a select set of users.
WhatApp used to be an independent company until Facebook/Meta bought them because they felt that they needed the market share.
Well as long as it is long enough and makes sure that retries take at least a bit of time it might actually do something. Without precautions using automation to try like 9999 or 99999 numbers is probably mere seconds and even 999999 wont be much more.
Amen brother. Electron is the 666 of the GUI world.
Telegram has 4 datacenters, 1 in the US, 2 in the Netherlands and 1 in Singapore. Which datacenter you use is based on your phone number so it's pretty rare everything might be down, it's usually only one datacenter having issues.