Thanks for sharing. I’ve always known that While Telegram may tout privacy features, it falls short in comparison to Signal due to its lack of end-to-end encryption by default and the absence of private group chats. This discrepancy raises concerns about the actual level of privacy and security Telegram provides, especially considering the reliance on trust rather than robust encryption methods.
Therefore, recommending Telegram over Signal for privacy reasons seems contradictory and raises suspicion about the motives behind such endorsements.
I think people make a serious mistake assuming much of anything to be private, really. Everything on the Internet can be compromised with enough resources and effort, and the parties most interested in doing so have no shortage of both to do it. Not that it's not worth choosing the better options when possible, but it's confounded me that people assumed Signal to be so private in the first place when it's primarily a phone app built for convenience.
Privacy seems to have mostly become about brands, clichés, catchphrases and the like, and doing whatever is "easy" as is to be expected in our fast, brain-damaging dopamine culture. It's easy to switch apps, much harder to change habits and lifestyle; moreso to change what creates the need to do so in the first place.
As a rule of thumb, if one wouldn't think something to be good enough at protecting their privacy to be able to commit a real crime like selling drugs or planning a terror attack, then it should be treated with very low trust. The only communications that can be trusted to be private will be sent through such means as a VPN—ideally multiple—over a properly used TOR (i.e., all default settings, no resizing of the browser window, understood to have been infiltrated by intelligence and FBI with honeypot nodes), and the communications itself encrypted via PGP with no more than an anonymous email attached to the public keys of both parties.
The weakest link is probably VPNs because you must pay for them, likely creating a vulnerability via financial attachment to one's real identity; getting Bitcoin anonymously with prepaid debits paid with cash is now quite difficult, as is laundering it, which used to be easy with the laundering even offered by publically available and nearly free services. There are ways to get around this and avoid any attachment to real identity without even using Bitcoin, of course.
Still, not so easy now for anyone to do, as Bitcoin has been ruined by uneducated masses (incl. credentialed elites, of Wall St. in particular) of the kind that confuse "crypto" for "cryptocurrency," and all the idiots who think of it as an investment—in spite of actually being quite late to the party—who have funnelled most of it into American market control while castrating its purpose as a currency, originally intended to disempower state control over money just as Ross Ulbricht used it to disempower their control over markets before he, like another of the greatest cypherpunks Assange that did the same for publishing, was thrown into an American controlled oubliette for doing so.
Nonetheless, that is what actual criminals such as drug dealers and wanted dissidents do, as well as other methods and tactics that fortunately remain not well known (maybe even unknown, I'm not quite sure to want to expose them) among the general public and privacy advocates—if they were, it'd be much easier for states and law enforcement to understand and deal with them.
Basically, nothing should be trusted, all of it assumed compromised, and you should act accordingly while knowing the state will catch you if you make yourself a worthy target. Even if you do all the above and more, you must still assume the same, and that any mistake you make will mean your life is over since the state will identify it. Even if any exposure is not enough to prosecute, they will change and break laws to do that if they must, like with Assange and Ulbricht, the prosecution of the latter of which has in the US allowed limitless seizure of electronic devices and legalised government and police hacking of private citizens even internationally. I.e., everything can even be legally hacked and turned into a honeypot by the US gov!
Thanks for sharing. I’ve always known that While Telegram may tout privacy features, it falls short in comparison to Signal due to its lack of end-to-end encryption by default and the absence of private group chats. This discrepancy raises concerns about the actual level of privacy and security Telegram provides, especially considering the reliance on trust rather than robust encryption methods.
Therefore, recommending Telegram over Signal for privacy reasons seems contradictory and raises suspicion about the motives behind such endorsements.
Yeah it's all super weird tbh! Let's just try to keep people better informed! 💪
Got off telescam months ago. thx for the article :-)
Thanks for reading! I appreciate you being here!
I think people make a serious mistake assuming much of anything to be private, really. Everything on the Internet can be compromised with enough resources and effort, and the parties most interested in doing so have no shortage of both to do it. Not that it's not worth choosing the better options when possible, but it's confounded me that people assumed Signal to be so private in the first place when it's primarily a phone app built for convenience.
Privacy seems to have mostly become about brands, clichés, catchphrases and the like, and doing whatever is "easy" as is to be expected in our fast, brain-damaging dopamine culture. It's easy to switch apps, much harder to change habits and lifestyle; moreso to change what creates the need to do so in the first place.
As a rule of thumb, if one wouldn't think something to be good enough at protecting their privacy to be able to commit a real crime like selling drugs or planning a terror attack, then it should be treated with very low trust. The only communications that can be trusted to be private will be sent through such means as a VPN—ideally multiple—over a properly used TOR (i.e., all default settings, no resizing of the browser window, understood to have been infiltrated by intelligence and FBI with honeypot nodes), and the communications itself encrypted via PGP with no more than an anonymous email attached to the public keys of both parties.
The weakest link is probably VPNs because you must pay for them, likely creating a vulnerability via financial attachment to one's real identity; getting Bitcoin anonymously with prepaid debits paid with cash is now quite difficult, as is laundering it, which used to be easy with the laundering even offered by publically available and nearly free services. There are ways to get around this and avoid any attachment to real identity without even using Bitcoin, of course.
Still, not so easy now for anyone to do, as Bitcoin has been ruined by uneducated masses (incl. credentialed elites, of Wall St. in particular) of the kind that confuse "crypto" for "cryptocurrency," and all the idiots who think of it as an investment—in spite of actually being quite late to the party—who have funnelled most of it into American market control while castrating its purpose as a currency, originally intended to disempower state control over money just as Ross Ulbricht used it to disempower their control over markets before he, like another of the greatest cypherpunks Assange that did the same for publishing, was thrown into an American controlled oubliette for doing so.
Nonetheless, that is what actual criminals such as drug dealers and wanted dissidents do, as well as other methods and tactics that fortunately remain not well known (maybe even unknown, I'm not quite sure to want to expose them) among the general public and privacy advocates—if they were, it'd be much easier for states and law enforcement to understand and deal with them.
Basically, nothing should be trusted, all of it assumed compromised, and you should act accordingly while knowing the state will catch you if you make yourself a worthy target. Even if you do all the above and more, you must still assume the same, and that any mistake you make will mean your life is over since the state will identify it. Even if any exposure is not enough to prosecute, they will change and break laws to do that if they must, like with Assange and Ulbricht, the prosecution of the latter of which has in the US allowed limitless seizure of electronic devices and legalised government and police hacking of private citizens even internationally. I.e., everything can even be legally hacked and turned into a honeypot by the US gov!