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.
It looks a whole lot more likely to me that this is a backdoor, as they added their own thing to a very standard algorithm (the easy and better thing to do would have been to not add anything), and all that thing did was mess with the key exchange.
But is it really that unlikely that it's a misguided attempt to increase entropy?
The fact that a cryptographer might scoff and laugh at the proposition doesn't mean that a normal programmer couldn't fall victim to that illusion?
In any case -- yes. Both things are likely and you made a strong point for the "malice" side.
Still, it makes me wonder why would Durov run from Russia if he was willing to backdoor Telegram? Why not remain in Russia and backdoor it while being there? Why the extra trouble? Or maybe he didn't want to backdoor it for Russia but for other nation(s)?
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?
That’s not what the post is saying.
> It's very biased and uncharitable
It’s not “very biased”, if you actually look at what Telegram did the balance of probabilities leans heavily towards “backdoor” and not “not backdoor”