> balance and consensus can be achieved in their own terms
Uh... Brazil is not out of any messes yet. And I'd like to think the people of Argentina didn't have to suffer though two separate financial meltdowns to get a reasonable president.
Not saying the US needs to invade anything, but your examples suck.
Facebook put up a banner for Indian users to try to influence the passing of a law to allow Facebook to break net neutrality in India.
Acts like these aren't limited to communications companies though. American multinationals have a tendency to exploit poor underdeveloped countries, like Papua New Guinea, and countless African countries.
It's part of the reason why China takes a highly protectionist stance especially with regards to foreign internet companies.
It's not just Indian users neither. Once an Indian user saw that banner and signed it, every single one of his friends got a notification about it. In fact, that chained reaction somehow ended up in my notifications too by one of my friends signing it. I was furious!
In my opinion, they managed to accomplish exactly what they wanted to with this campaign: make the whole online call for discussion by the India's regulatory authority meaningless.
I think that this is your congress not the US Congress but I get your point and I'd be offended and irritated if someone special interests driven like Zuckerberg stuck his nose in our politics and internal affairs like this.
Also, I wouldn't rule out that Zuckerberg could resort to astro-turfing tactics and fund those "internet freedom" groups in Brazil to do his bidding. Unfortunately, Zuckerberg turned his tech empire into a big political machine and started to influence or subvert (However you choose to view his actions) politics in foreign countries and should be treated as such not just some harmless business.
Although it has to be said that Telegram does not offer true end-to-end encryption by default. For general-purpose usage, WhatsApp may actually be considered more secure than Telegram.
Indeed Telegram is not more secure than WhatsApp, but I usually take into account the position of each company and how that affects my particular use case.
Yes, the signal protocol and signal's implementation are both open source, but you have no way to actually verify that WA has actually implemented the protocol correctly and securely. Sure you could do some basic packet analysis but this wouldn't tell you about the presence of any remotely triggered backdoors.
The only way for you as a user to actually verify the security is by reading the source and compiling the software yourself, or reading the source and verifying the signature via reproducible builds.
I really don't understand the business decision process here. If they just copied Signal with OSS/FOSS code and reproducible builds they would just win outright and tech people wouldn't have anything to complain about. The value of the service is the network anyway -- why care so much about the client?
There are many ways that both WA and Telegram can be subverted/backdoored/messed up. What it really comes down to, is who do you trust? Do you trust WA or Telegram? Personally, I trust WA a lot more than Telegram since WA has Moxie on their team and Telegram says, "Trust us" and a very unreasonable security challenge. I naturally don't trust people that say "Trust us" and put up unreasonable security challenges.
You can just decompile the program. Binaries aren't a magic black box. Given how much FB stands to lose by lying, is imminent l unlikely they think they can get away with hiding stuff in an Android app. As much as I despise FB, this isn't one of the reasons. (Using WhatsApp still gives them metadata and contact info.)
While it is true that Telegram's clients are open-sourced, their server-side code is not. So we don't know how information is stored on the server (I do not think that it is encrypted).
Closed source servers are no problem in verifying E2E encryption if the client is open source. Whatsapp's issue is that the clients are closed source. Telegram's issue is that it's optional to encrypt your messages. That's the long and short of this whole Whatsapp versus Telegram discussion.
Using an unexamined and unpublished encryption algorithm. Encryption is hard and when someone says "trust us", you know they are implementing poor encryption.
If you think everything has to be "published" in the sense of a publication in a scientific paper, hacker news is probably a disappointing place. As for unexamined, the bounty for actually cracking the encryption is still open last I heard, and I know people have been trying.
As someone professionally involved in cyber security, I fully understand and agree with the criticism that the protocol is non-standard and does not follow several best practices. On the other hand, it cannot be ignored that it hasn't been cracked yet, despite Telegram being one of the bigger messaging services in the world (especially one attracting a tech-savvy audience) and receiving a lot of attention.
The very least Telegram-haters could do is acknowledge Whatsapp's equally big problem: we cannot verify a thing. Facebok could have either open sourced the clients or published the outer shell of the wire protocol so we can verify the E2E encryption. They chose to do neither.
>"Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no engineering staff"
They just have to change job titles from software engineer to software expert