That's not saying anything of substance unless you offer your own interpretation. "You're wrong" is not a discussion, it's a kick in the gut.
> The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Solid criticism with well laid-out arguments from you, no doubt.
> Besides, look at Pavel Durovs flagkilled reply here.
Since when do upvote / downvote count mean anything at all about somebody's opinion or statements? (I haven't read the comment though.)
Look, it's obvious you have a beef with Telegram / Durov. But you are not giving any arguments, only snark. That's breaking HN's guidelines last I checked.
The author is saying "maybe things that look A WHOLE LOT like malice are actually incompetence". It's pretty clear that he thinks it's a backdoor, even though he basically says "maybe in actually wrong, but I really don't think so".
Sure, sadly that's how human languages betray us. Plus, him emphasising "a whole lot" doesn't make it a fact.
I am no cryptography expert. I judge by all the times I've seen programmers imagine they could do professional cryptography by themselves. Literally every time they fail. Thus, in my eyes it is more likely that Telegram's coders fell victim to the same illusion.
But I am not denying that it's possible it's the [beginnings of a] backdoor. The whole sub-thread is (a) my opinion on what's more likely and (b) calling out people who act snarky, offer no facts and demonstrate general negative bias.
Oh, please, this is not a math inequality where we compare with numbers. It is plain to any English speaker that what was written in the article and how you represented it differ significantly in the confidence that they communicate. As such, your continued insistence that there is no major difference between the two comes off as extremely poor faith.
You might be missing that many people here might not be native English speakers. As such, being crystal clear on what the author believes might be beneficial. Just putting "hey I might be wrong" in the end of an article is just word-padding and since I assumed the author doesn't do that, I entertain the possibility they mentioned seriously.
...Bad faith? Most of HN has bad faith when it comes to Telegram. This place devolves to Reddit / 9GAG levels of childishness when Telegram is mentioned.
I think that's quite fascinating and it's a strange outlier. Yes -- strange, as in "not justified". They did nothing more wrong than a ton of other, much more widely used software, yet any mention of Telegram on HN brings about a big bandwagon of haters. Why do you think that is?
Hanlon’s Razor says to never assume malice where stupidity suffices as an explanation. The only way I read this sentence is to say that Hanlon’s Razor applies here, in-spite of how malicious the bug looks.
Same for me. While others argue that it's "obvious" that the author believes much more strongly that this find is a backdoor and not a dumb mistake (a very easy one to make for a non-cryptographer programmer), I am still unconvinced.
Would be curious to read a statement from Telegram's team though -- not that any team would ever admit to putting a backdoor...
Neither is a good look for a security team, of course.