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from the there-is-no-viable-alternative dept.
"A mere three days after Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook's acquisition of Whatsapp, the popular smartphone messaging app suffered a major service outage that lasted three and a half hours. Left to their own devices, Whatsapp users worldwide went rushing to its rival apps, including secure chat provider Telegram. The surge in new users quickly turned into a tidal wave that brought Telegram's service to its knees:
The SMS gateways we use to send registration codes are overloaded and slow 100 SMS per second is too much. Trying to find a solution.
In its official twitter, Telegram announced that more than 1.8 million new users had joined on Saturday, Feb 22. Four hours later, it reported an additional 800 thousand.
Telegram's messaging service, which uses 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, RSA 2048 encryption and Diffie-Hellman secure key exchange, began enjoying a spike in popularity after Whatsapp's acquisition. Although it has released the source code for its java libraries and all its official clients, its server software is still closed source."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by d on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:05PM
As in title. Why shift your security to a third party if you could have an end-to-end encryption?
(Score: 1) by jamesbond on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:32PM
Because you friends aren't using it ...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Debvgger on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:32PM
Because that's not "cool".
I just smile when I see the people who back then thought I was a bit weird for using IRC using their phones even on the toilet because they have received "a whatsapp" that couldn't wait until their pants were on their place again.
So, now there's a 3.5 hour outage and, hey, they can't receive the same videos they see on Youtube! Then millions of sheep install that program a friend told them it was so cool, and life continues happily ever until a new fad arrives to distract them from their miserable existence.
All said, fuck Whatsapp.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:40PM
It's a pretty flimsy thing to pay 16 billion dollars for when a three hour outage sends millions of your customers off to a superior competing service. It does certainly put a lot of pressure on the infrastructure support people at least.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Debvgger on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:51PM
That's the problem with fads. There's zero loyalty from your users, because they only want the same their sheep friends have, and don't really care about it or even what it is or how good it is. So, here's an idea for you Microsoft: Give free Windows Phones to the alpha guys out there! :-) ... Try to at least make them like the phone a bit, of course, if that's even possible.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxim on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:18PM
Won't work. The hate toward Microsoft is too high among general public.
They might use Windows but only because they have to.
Well, if give any advice to MS is maybe somehow be very careful and not mention anything Windows
when selling a product.
Btw, that did work with the XBOX, even thought it also probably runs something windows derived.
Also, btw, the same sadly applies to Linux brand, peoples also scare the hell out of them when they hear 'Linux',
thats why Google tries not to mention that Android is Linux based....
Its our fault, can't not admit this.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by girlwhowaspluggedout on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:44PM
Soylent is the best disinfectant.
(Score: 1) by c0lo on Sunday February 23 2014, @05:10PM
Which rots quickly with every minute that passes. If not refreshed, two years down the road will make the data next to useless (unless FB switches its business profile to an archive institution).
Does a snapshot in time really worth $16B? I doubt it, but... hey... what do I know?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by shodan on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:53PM
All true. It's really sad that such superior technology like IRC is not popular anymore. I mean come-on: 10, 15 years ago I was often speaking on IRC with 50 friends on channel.
Nowdays - people of facebook era and other fancy apps - doesn't even know that it's fun to talk to many people at once in REAL-tiME, beasue that feature is not avalible on facebook... :(
It's so sad.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Debvgger on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:58PM
Attending university in my thirties, a few months ago I was talking with a fellow student and told him something on that line, about how useful IRC was and what a crappy experience Facebook delivers in comparison.
:-)
His answer was: Well, but I HAVE ONE THOUSAND FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK!!
Let me guess, he has probably installed Telegram this weekend, too.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by clone141166 on Sunday February 23 2014, @06:49PM
24 hours in a day, minus a modest 8 hours a day for sleep, leaves 16 hours. If your friend spends 100% of that time communicating with his friends on Facebook that gives him 57.6 seconds each day to talk to each of his 1,000 "friends".
It kind of worries me the way Facebook turns friendship into a collectible item. People should value their friends more than just as part of some competition for who-has-the-most-friends. I'm sure your friend has a core group of people who are actually his close friends, but the whole concept of collecting friends just feels wrong to me.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday March 07 2014, @04:44PM
The problem is that multi-person chats in general end up being a huge waste of everyone's time. The tendency to do so increases proportional to the number in the chat. Group chat, of any variety, invariably leads to an average maturity level of a 13 year old. One need only look in on #soylent to watch the endless stream of bacon banalities that go on literally for days on end without a single intelligent thing being said for hours.
People don't want that anymore. The novelty wore off somewhere around 1996.
People use messaging apps mostly for quick short conversations, questions, etc.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 3) by Nerdfest on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:37PM
Secure key exchange is still hard or inconvenient for most people.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Fnord666 on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:30PM
Really? From the telegram FAQ:
Seems pretty simple to me.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Sunday February 23 2014, @04:17PM
This assumes that the initial key exchange was secure, and I'm guessing that it's done thought Telegram. If Telegram does the initial key exchange, can't it still happen?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 23 2014, @06:35PM
According to your friendly neighbor Wikipedia, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange method [wikipedia.org] "allows two parties that have no prior knowledge of each other to jointly establish a shared secret key over an insecure communications channel".
(Score: 1) by TheLink on Monday February 24 2014, @02:17AM
But if you can trust your software clients the picture stuff does give some sort of plausibility if you verify them over a different channel (or you directly verify the keys over that channel).
(Score: 1) by chromas on Monday February 24 2014, @02:36AM
There, fixed Slash's misteak (blame β)
(Score: 1) by TheLink on Monday February 24 2014, @02:42AM
A -> C "hey my pic is a 'cow' what's yours?"
C -> A "my pic is a cow too"
A -> C "all secure then!"
C -> B "hey my pic is a 'pig' what's yours?"
B -> C "my pic is a pig too"
C -> B "all secure then!"
Much easier if it's text messages. Harder for voice - since delays become more noticeable.
And if B started telling bacon jokes regarding the pig pic it becomes a lot more work, but C might be able to tell B to focus on stuff that's easier to "pass-through" without rewrites.
Of course you could use another channel to do the verification, but how would you arrange that without being MITMed again?
(Score: 1) by LM-Els on Monday February 24 2014, @03:59AM
The image they use is actually closer to a QR thing than a describable image. You'll have to send screenshots.
Not saying that a MITM can't alter those, but it does become a little less easy than simply cow vs pig. And you could send the screenshots via email to bypass a Telegram MITM.
(Score: 1) by TheLink on Tuesday February 25 2014, @02:47AM
(Score: 1) by scourge on Sunday February 23 2014, @04:53PM
Look into psyc. Doesn't use xmpp for good reasons. It's the solution but needs a bit of extra dev help.