Many people who focus on information security, including myself, have long considered Telegram suspicious and untrustworthy. Now, based on findings published by the investigative journalism outlet ISt

Investigation by investigative journalism outlet IStories (EN version by OCCRP) shows that Telegram uses a single, FSB-linked company as their infrastructure provider globally.

Telegram’s MTProto protocol also requires a cleartext identifier to be prepended to all client-server messages.

Combined, these two choices by Telegram make it into a surveillance tool.

I am quoted in the IStories story. I also did packet captures, and I dive into the nitty-gritty technical details on my blog.

Packet captures and MTProto deobfuscation library I wrote linked therein so that others can retrace my steps and check my work.

  • Vodulas [they/them]@beehaw.org
    2·
    1 day ago

    On average kind people are just being kind.

    And that is great, it is good to be optimistic. My point is being kind has nothing to do with trustworthiness. Hell, someone that is kind can also just be plain wrong. They might think they know something when they do not. The kindness just does not factor in to knowledge. Plenty of experts are not what people would describe as kind, and plenty of misinformation peddlers are kind. It just has nothing to do with expertise