Facebook works directly with oppressive central governments to implement censorship against their citizens.[1] Some might consider that getting screwed over.
Americans used to use unencrypted telephony every day because they expected the government to uphold constitutional guarantees. That day ended shortly after 9/11 and the passage of the Patriot Act, which I believe today is used against Patriots more than it is used on their behalf.
Works on web, macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android and already looks promising to be the diamond standard of chat software and compete against the alternatives.
Impressive piece of extremely high quality software so rare in this software industry.
Holy s*t this looks amazing. Our (multi-disciplinary) team has been struggling with Zulip, which adopts the threaded messaging paradigm we need, but has a face only an engineer could love. This looks like it could be a drop-in replacement without the UX quirks.
This is kind of loaded. I do think Telegram does an excellent job at ephemerality from a practical standpoint. Without being able to audit their server though, we have no clue if 'disappeared' chats and messages are actually scrubbed from their server.
I was once banned from the service for playing around with very old clients and had a back and forth with them over email for a week or so (it was re-enabled and they apologized for the inconvenience). They are prickly and refuse to give any details over how data is managed.
Interested to read a blog post about that story if you decide to write about it. Woz tought us never to trust a computer. Trusting software seems equally risky. Approaching comms from this perspective leads one to assume the best place to hide, so to speak, is in the open—in plain sight.
>Telegram does an excellent job at ephemerality from a practical standpoint. Without being able to audit their server though, we have no clue if 'disappeared' chats and messages are actually scrubbed from their server.
Aren't disappearing messages a feature of secret chats? If my understanding is correct here, these messages are not backed up to the cloud. Rather they are stored within your device. That's precisely why e2ee synced chats are not available.
I wasn't referencing E2EE, I was specifically talking about their regular 'cloud' chats. I am speaking of features like deleting old messages from prior chats or even going as far as removing your account. These are not possible to do on many other more secure chat systems, I cannot tell you how many new Matrix users are frustrated that this is not possible there but it's simply not in a federated system, cannot force other servers to scrub your server's messages. It is practical to have this ability to tear down comms and scrub a shareh/synched history but it is nor perfect.
You are correct about their secret chats. The secret chats limitations (inability to sync) actually encourage destroying and recreating sessions when needed vs Signal that is intended for longer synched sessions. Not having to worry about those sessions syncing to a system you may not be in front of is also a benefit.
The ephemeral functionality is different from end-to-end encrypted functionality. The former is part of the end-to-end encrypted chats, and can be modified as needed. It's basically a timer that controls when your messages disappear.
Philosophy and sociology should be moved earlier in the curriculum. I gained much from studying Descartes and Bertrand Russell, and learning propositional logic. The school system did not teach me those things until after I graduated high school. Had those teachings come earlier I may not have been as susceptible to propaganda at such a young age as I was.
