
Informer: A bot library that allows masquerading as real users on Telegram - riter
https://github.com/paulpierre/informer
======
jhabdas
This seems novel until one realizes public channels are already available on
the web.[1] Also, I'm surprised Paul didn't go with Pyrogram for creating the
user accounts (which have unlimited cloud storage and 1.5GB file limits btw).

[1] [https://telegram.org/blog/privacy-discussions-web-
bots#view-...](https://telegram.org/blog/privacy-discussions-web-bots#view-
public-channels) [2]
[https://github.com/pyrogram/pyrogram](https://github.com/pyrogram/pyrogram)

~~~
ksangeelee
The words 'mass surveillance' in the project title seem to me sensationalist.
From his repository list, I suppose the author is involved in ads and
marketing, which would figure.

Had I parsed Usenet feeds into a relational database, and called it 'mass
surveillance', I'd have rightly been ridiculed.

Regardless, it can be useful to have message data in this format.

~~~
riter
I simply was not aware of Pyrogram, thank you for sharing that and pointing it
out.

And yes, I admit the headline is a bit charged and its implementation does not
reflect it as much as I would like.

It does not change the fact that I researched an implementation of Telethon
for a use case I needed, and I didn't find it so I made it and shared it.

My involvement in ads and marketing had nothing to do with that. It's less
nefarious, it just sounded cooler and was an innocent mistake in retrospect.

As mentioned above, I appreciate the mod(s) for taking the time and energy to
edit the title so it reflected the implementation. This is my first shared
project on HN and I am excited to finally participate and see the
feedback/energy.

Thank you guys/gals!

------
KenanSulayman
Sounds like a good old IRC channel logger.. but for Telegram. The title is
some serious click bait.

That said, I haven’t checked deeper, if this bot is not actually using the bot
API but MTProto, this is pretty significant as the bot appears like a normal
user (and not as a bot, which are required to have a “-bot” suffix on
Telegram).

~~~
Robadob
It states that it's using telethon.

That appears to be an MTProto library.

[https://docs.telethon.dev/en/latest/concepts/botapi-vs-
mtpro...](https://docs.telethon.dev/en/latest/concepts/botapi-vs-
mtproto.html#botapi)

~~~
riter
Yes, it does use MTProto and yes it is a real user. And yes admittedly the
title in retrospect was a bit charged but the applications remain the same if
extended.

------
wtmt
What prevents anyone from doing the same with Signal or any messaging service
that allows one to build a client? This program isn’t pretending to be a bot
on Telegram, and it works as a normal user in every way (including the
requirement for a working phone number, even if it’s a burner number).

~~~
leppr
You can't ever assume that clients aren't logging everything that goes through
them, even if there's no official documentation/API for custom clients. If a
human can read a message, for all intent and purpose assume that a machine can
too. For instance, things like Snapchat self destructing messages rely more on
social norm than technology.

~~~
batushka3
Snapchat messages do not self destruct. They are just hidden. Multiple times
during some glitch I saw old messages from weeks ago.

~~~
vips7L
In this day and age who would actually believe anything in snapchat goes away
after being viewed?

~~~
dorchadas
As a teacher, I can most certainly tell you teenagers believe it does go away.
Which is a problem.

------
juskrey
This is not surveillance, this is just another channel crawler.

~~~
jimws
Yes, the project is disingenuous. It claims there is a bug but really it is
just functioning as designed.

~~~
riter
I wholly admit the title was a bit charged and I appreciate the correction
from the mod(s). That said, it questions the security model of privacy apps
and the nature of open source. As I mentioned above, there is a reason they
make it a hurdle to scale account creation.

It represents more than just a crawler if you have an imagination. That said,
I was looking for a solution for one of the listed use-cases and none existed
so I did something about it and shared it and now one exists. It takes no
creativity to deride a work, and enough to make one and put it out there.

Getting both sides of the feedback has been a fun learning experience and
looking forward to putting more out given the amount of feedback! Thank you
both :)

------
EncryptEntropy
I maintain some medium-sized TG channels and constantly have what we have
deemed “surveillance” accounts join daily. One of the admins of the chan
implemented a simple turing test bot which requires immediate 60 sec solving
of a basic math equation or the account gets kicked. They were solving the
“click this button to verify” but none at all seemingly know how to solve 6+4,
or they can’t read English quickly enough.

~~~
big_chungus
A few discord groups I've joined use this bot to verify through re captcha
(which I hate, but is still a potential solution):
[https://auttaja.io/](https://auttaja.io/)

------
Tepix
Unrelated but I wish Telegram would support encrypted group chats like Signal
does.

~~~
Legogris
And, at least as importantly, multi-device end-to-end encryption. E2E
conversations on Telegram are almost as rare as on FB Messenger, IME.

~~~
fastball
Security vs. Usability. Multi-device E2E requires ONE device be the source of
truth for the private key. That's why for WhatsApp Desktop to work, you need
your phone to be connected. This defeats the purpose for most people.

~~~
kelnos
Does it, though? I feel like most people just use their phone, and that's it,
and people who use the web version don't mind so much that they need their
phone on the internet, because it pretty much always is anyway.

Sure, there are edge cases, like being on a plane and only having bought
internet access for your phone, phone battery dead and no charging cable,
phone lost/stolen, but those things seem rare enough that most people just
live with it.

I would _prefer_ that I didn't need my phone to use WhatsApp Web, but in
practice it hasn't kept me from using WhatsApp (mobile or web).

~~~
crypt1d
for me, its one of the reasons why I prefer Telegram over WhatsApp. There have
been numerous cases when my phone was dead or offline (being abroad/roaming,
battery dead, etc) and I wanted to use my laptop to finish that important
conversation. The other one is lack of a native Linux desktop client for
WhatsApp.

~~~
kelnos
Right, I get that, and even mentioned one of the failure modes you mention.
But I think _for the average user_ (which more or less disqualifies most of
our experiences here), it's not even remotely a deal-breaker.

------
sschueller
This is very cool. I wish there was something like this for whatsapp so I can
forward my messages to another IM service.

~~~
koalalorenzo
Matrix?

~~~
mosselman
Is matrix the other Im service or the tool with which you can forward WhatsApp
messages or both?

~~~
BubuIIC
Matrix is the other IM service. This is the tool for getting whatsapp chats
into matrix: [https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-
whatsapp](https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-whatsapp)

------
neiman
Is there any positive ethical aspect of this tool?

~~~
ArnoVW
Eliminating information dissymmetry, by showing to the rest of the world what
-given the simplicity- undoubtedly many other people have already found out
(but have kept for themselves).

~~~
notduncansmith
For that to hold reasonable ethical weight, you’d need to spread wide
awareness of this tool. I’d say you qualify for that if, for example, you were
to run this bot in some kind of “warning mode” that would join unprotected
groups and let participants know of their danger.

~~~
riter
Fair point. At the very least it highlights the security model of OSS in
general.

------
wk0
Going to hijack this thread to plug some basic Telegram API tutorials I've
written on Medium

* Send and Receive Messages with the Telegram API [https://medium.com/@wk0/send-and-receive-messages-with-the-t...](https://medium.com/@wk0/send-and-receive-messages-with-the-telegram-api-17de9102ab78)

* Running a Serverless Telegram Bot from AWS Lambda [https://medium.com/@wk0/running-a-serverless-telegram-bot-fr...](https://medium.com/@wk0/running-a-serverless-telegram-bot-from-aws-lambda-759b71e13218)

* Integrating Your Serverless Telegram Bot with AWS API Gateway (published today) [https://medium.com/@wk0/integrating-your-serverless-telegram...](https://medium.com/@wk0/integrating-your-serverless-telegram-bot-with-aws-api-gateway-8a6227d05eb4)

~~~
riter
good on ya ;)

------
captn3m0
Looks great. I found out about
[https://docs.telethon.dev/en/latest/](https://docs.telethon.dev/en/latest/),
which looks like a usable Python API for Telegram user accounts (not bot API).

I can finally build by telegram-to-rss project!

~~~
Amir6
It would be great if someone can do an opensource like that, as mentioned by
others Telegram is not privacy friendly but having access to the content that
spreads around in such platform can be very valuable

------
noxer
This is so stupid. Public channels and Groups have a web frontend it doesn't
even need a telegram account to see or crawl them. Example link:
[https://t.me/s/durov/110](https://t.me/s/durov/110)

------
smashah
Wow nice work. I'm sure Rukmini Callimachi will love this!

~~~
HNLurker2
>Callimachi left Romania during the communist regime with her mother and
grandmother, for Switzerland and then the United States.

Inspiring actions

~~~
smashah
She does amazing work reporting on the Isis assholes on telegram

~~~
riter
That is actually an awesome and "ethical" use case for this project. Thank you
for sharing who this journalist is and sharing ideas on ethical application.

------
thomasfl
This makes it so much easier to keep track of the action on "The pump & dump
cryptocurrency club" channel on Telegram.

~~~
riter
Hahaha.. yes, if you can't tell this was a boiler plate for tracking and
analyzing the activity of the wonderful seedy world of crypto.

------
riter
TBH what I find most humorous is no one mentioning the obscure 90s reference
:)

~~~
jhabdas
Yo snow the five-o came around looking for you the other day...

------
surajs
lemme just say ... ha-ha!

