Privacy

31815 readers

484 users here now

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
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

229

Telegram founder and CEO alledges signal has backdoors, they don't provide reproduceible builds, etc. (lemm.ee)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

215 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Here's what he said in a post on his telegram channel:

🤫 A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly “secure” messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad 🥷

🥸 The US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption, and today the exact same encryption is implemented in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages and even Skype. It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕‍🦺

🕵️‍♂️ An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media. But whenever somebody raises doubt about their encryption, Signal’s typical response is “we are open source so anyone can verify that everything is all right”. That, however, is a trick 🤡

🕵️‍♂️ Unlike Telegram, Signal doesn’t allow researchers to make sure that their GitHub code is the same code that is used in the Signal app run on users’ iPhones. Signal refused to add reproducible builds for iOS, closing a GitHub request from the community. And WhatsApp doesn’t even publish the code of its apps, so all their talk about “privacy” is an even more obvious circus trick 💤

🛡 Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github. For the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private 💪

Original post: https://t.me/durov/274

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 180 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

It's hard to overstate what a nothing-burger this article really is! Let me break it down:

Signal got $3 million from the Open Technology Fund at some point in its development
Some anonymous source alleges that the OTF's ultimate goal is to promote US foreign interests
The current chairman of the board Katherine Maher worked at the National Democratic Institute and Wikipedia before
The same anonymous source says she was recruited because of connections to the OTF
She has at some point voiced the opinion that a completely free internet without regulation just reproduces existing power structures, and that balancing regulation and 1st amendment rights is a tough problem
Signal doesn't have reproducible builds on iOS (it absolutely does on Android btw)
Some people feel like Signal chats come up more often than they should in court cases and media reports

That's it, that's the whole story. That's the reason why the Telegram guy of all people thinks you should be careful, and better use his chat service instead, and the Twitter guy agrees.

I mean, reproducible builds on iOS would be nice, but that platform has much bigger problems from a privacy/security/sovereignty/freedom standpoint anyway. And the rest is just nothing turned up to 11.

[–] [email protected] 89 points 6 months ago (1 children)

tl;dr "Signal might be untrustworthy because the tech came from a State-sponsored project and the current chairman acknowledges that Wikipedia has a white and Western bias."

just wait until they find out pretty much all tech we have can be traced back to government-funded research.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Did you know the early early internet researchers were part of a clandestine government organization known as ARPANET???? The entire TCP/IP stack is just a state-sponsored backdoor into your life!!!

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

yea just wait until they find out why the first digital computer was made:

ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory). However, its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

Getting “Tor is pentagon spyware” vibes from OP

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I guess it's the usual Russian propaganda tactic throughout Telegram. Mixing conspiracy theories with half-truths.

The NSA indeed distributed a defected encryption library in the past. These days I'm pretty sure big techs use open source encryption to avoid this trap.

And Telegram says blah, blah, iPhone is exploited. But IF Telegram is correct on this one, Andriod versions would be defect as well.