[pdimitar]

It's only weird if (a) I accept that the criticism is well-deserved, which I don't, and (b) because I want to read educated technical discussions. If I want to read half-baked snark then I can go to Reddit or 9GAG. Place like HN should be better than this.

I see some people linking old articles and cryptography research, and some historic incidents. Good! That's arguing in good faith and I've read those with an interest, and upvoted them. "I don't trust Durov", which many of the HN comments about Telegram boil down to, is just noise. I don't want noise in threads where I want to find objective information. I am doing my part to improve HN by downvoting / flagging comments I see as noise or non-constructive attacks.

> Usually I see comments criticizing it get downvoted. Funny, no?

Filter bubbles then, I suppose. Seems we are both in our own and apparently neither of us is right in their generalization. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I can live with that.

[ryanlol]

You don’t seem to actually respond the criticism, instead you just dismiss it as “half-baked snark” or with “other apps do bad stuff too!”

You complain about the quality of discussion here, but do little to participate in a constructive manner.

[pdimitar]

Yeah, I definitely got worked up so I partially contributed to the problem. Can't deny the facts.

I already responded to those criticisms elsewhere but here goes: I never expected any messenger to do end-to-end encryption. I am quite aware how un-ergonomic such a messenger would be so I know that Telegram does little more than TLS protection of the network socket. And that's fine with me and with millions of others.

But I still don't get why Telegram is the constant target of HN. Why not WhatsApp? Viber? Or literally every other messenger? I challenge you to find such brutal and full of flagged comments threads not pertaining to Telegram. As said above, we both live in our own bubble but all WhatsApp threads I've seen lately only aim at the user's data privacy and almost nobody ever mentions that their "encryption" is also a glorified TLS and their claims for end-to-end encryption are very likely dubious and a pure PR stunt.

Admittedly some of the responses earlier -- which were very unconstructive -- got to me.

[ryanlol]

> I am quite aware how un-ergonomic such a messenger would be so I know that Telegram does little more than TLS protection of the network socket. And that's fine with me and with millions of others.

The amount of people who understand this certainly isn’t in the millions. The fact is that most Telegram users have no idea that their conversations aren’t encrypted, most people incorrectly assume that it’s more secure than whatsapp.

> WhatsApp threads I've seen lately only aim at the user's data privacy and almost nobody ever mentions that their "encryption" is also a glorified TLS and their claims for end-to-end encryption are very likely dubious and a pure PR stunt.

This is complete nonsense. Whatsapp uses the Signal Protocol. Their claims of end-to-end encryption are true (and easily verifiable! just pull out the debugger of your choice)

> Admittedly some of the responses earlier -- which were very unconstructive -- got to me.

I think your (perfectly understandable) misinterpretation was corrected in a rather polite manner, but you still wanted to argue after being corrected by multiple native english speakers.

[pdimitar]

> This is complete nonsense. Whatsapp uses the Signal Protocol. Their claims of end-to-end encryption are true (and easily verifiable! just pull out the debugger of your choice)

I don't dispute this but apparently there's still a way for Facebook to give FBI et. al. un-encrypted chats, no? So is that truly encrypted?

> I think your (perfectly understandable) misinterpretation was corrected in a rather polite manner, but you still wanted to argue after being corrected by multiple native english speakers.

Yes and no. Being a native speaker doesn't excuse ambiguity and idiomatic expressions. I believe people who write in English on the internet have a duty to avoid idioms as much as possible. I am not a native speaker and easily misrepresented the meaning.

But, even the author corrected me so, okay.

As for polite... let's agree to disagree there. You are questioning my opinion that I get snarky replies but IMO it's clearly visible that no small amount of replies weren't made in good faith and were only aimed to express hurtful sarcasm.

[ryanlol]

>but apparently there's still a way for Facebook to give FBI et. al. un-encrypted chats, no?

I’d love to see a source for this.

[pdimitar]

Me too, but after Snowden I doubt we'd be able to even if it were true.