I’m sure that it’s just a matter of time before someone somewhere is going to target the author of this post with snide remarks on their qualifications/ignorance and hinting at them being a Telegram shill (I’m not one of those).
That said, I liked this article a lot since it puts things in a manner that focuses on how to approach these comparisons and backs them up with relevant information. Elsewhere, there’s too much of appeal to authority that ignore other points (mainly nuances that are important).
I completely agree with this part:
> A big chunk of the criticism of Telegram amounts to defamation, lies and arguments from authority. Unfortunately this is not an opinion, but a verifiable fact. Even more unfortunate is the fact that many of these come from respected figures of the computer security community.
A few corrections and additions are required in the article:
* The part about Signal not having a standalone desktop client is not true. This was already pointed out in another comment here. Signal has had this for a few years now.
* “This is more subjective than an exact since.” — there’s a typo here for “science”.
* I didn’t see mention of metadata collection by WhatsApp. That’s as important as the content of messages.
You don't see the obvious dishonesty in how the author decided to interpret tptaceks claim about Telegram storing plaintexts of all messages?
The author claims that this is "defamation" because Telegram uses FDE or a similar solution.
With the deliberate misunderstandings apparent in this article I don't see why it would be inappropriate to call the author out for being a Telegram shill.
>Here Moxie is pretending the discussion was about having plaintext access, which obviously Telegram has for non-secret chats, instead of plaintext storage, which is what Ptacek was talking about
The whole idea of "plaintext storage" is something that the author came up with themselves, tptacek claimed that Telegram "stores the PLAINTEXT of EVERY MESSAGE". These mean entirely different things. Plaintexts are still stored even if they are encrypted on disk with keys controlled by Telegram.
That said, I liked this article a lot since it puts things in a manner that focuses on how to approach these comparisons and backs them up with relevant information. Elsewhere, there’s too much of appeal to authority that ignore other points (mainly nuances that are important).
I completely agree with this part:
> A big chunk of the criticism of Telegram amounts to defamation, lies and arguments from authority. Unfortunately this is not an opinion, but a verifiable fact. Even more unfortunate is the fact that many of these come from respected figures of the computer security community.
A few corrections and additions are required in the article:
* The part about Signal not having a standalone desktop client is not true. This was already pointed out in another comment here. Signal has had this for a few years now.
* “This is more subjective than an exact since.” — there’s a typo here for “science”.
* I didn’t see mention of metadata collection by WhatsApp. That’s as important as the content of messages.