Dev.SN ♥ developers
Sections
Dev.SN
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, Informative) by drac on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:36PM
I like Telegram. Installed their client on both Android and iOS, it looks nice and it just works. The problem is - I've read things about their custom protocol and now I'm no longer sure if they're truly safe.
This [telegram.org] covers most of Telegram's rebuttals to a host of experts. They awarded a cash prize early on after their crypto was broken. More embarrassingly, for a brief time a couple of days ago - complete strangers could add others and send messages to them, a fact they acknowledged in a broadcast message a few hours ago.
Call these teething troubles and that's fair enough - Whatsapp has had their share of security problems too. But I'm not sure anyone should bet the farm (or anything else) on how secure they are just yet.
As a postscript: a minor UI niggle that people (including myself) do not like - secret chats (their term for private, end to end encrypted conversations) are NOT the default, although not using a secret chat is conceivably a mistake you'd only make once (a padlock icon appears next to all secret conversations).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by spiritplumber on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:57PM
every two-three years people inexplicably move to a different IM platform. I'd like something like Pidgin on android, personally.
(Score: 1) by Marand on Monday February 24 2014, @03:47AM
IM+ is a multi-protocol messenger on Android, similar to how Pidgin is on other platforms. Full version costs a few bucks and it works well enough, but I don't think it's open source so it may not be trustworthy enough for anyone that requires high security.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Geotti on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:29PM
Here's [cryptofails.com] some [thoughtcrime.org] food [hackapp.com] for [dev.soylentnews.org] thought [ewdn.com].