
Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered - tuyguntn
https://telegram.org/blog/calls
======
torrent-of-ions
I will definitely try this because I have trouble with all other voice chat
services including Skype, WhatsApp and Hangouts. Often one of those three will
work but not always.

But the most annoying problem with any internet voice chat is not so much the
quality but the latency. Landline phones have noticeably lower voice quality
but one can still enjoy a conversation perfectly well. High latency, on the
other hand, absolutely ruins the experience.

I always see these services talking about "crystal clear quality", but never
latency, which is a shame. Maybe there is simply nothing they can do about it.
I've noticed latency get worse and worse on the Internet since I started using
it in the 90s and nobody seems to talk about it.

There are so many more sources of latency on every layer on the modern
internet and it's a damn shame. I remember when interleaving got enabled on my
ADSL and latency to everything doubled overnight. Then there are NATs, and all
kinds of filtering shit that ISPs insist on. Sigh...

~~~
l1ambda
The Opus codec ( [http://opus-codec.org/comparison/](http://opus-
codec.org/comparison/) ) can enable very low latency audio. 26.5 ms
algorithmic delay (the time it takes to go through the algorithm) by default,
but can be set to a very impressive 5ms. Digital audio can't achieve the near
no-latency analog POTS has, but it can get pretty darn close e.g. if Opus is
used in the very low latency mode. I believe Mumble and maybe TeamSpeak let
you choose the Opus latency. I know some other apps like WhatsApp, Wire, and
Signal use Opus as well. I don't know what settings they use though.

Another problem is cell phones add ~150ms latency (pre VoLTE) and people that
route calls through Google Voice adds an additional 150ms+ latency on top. If
you ever talk to someone on a cell phone on google voice, it sounds like
they're calling from the moon.

150ms is about the human limit before turn-taking and talking over each other
becomes an annoyance. That's why cell-to-landline conversations (150ms one
way) were tolerable, but cell-to-cell (300ms one way) conversations are
abysmal. And that's all in the same area code. Once you add long distance, it
gets worse.

~~~
doctorshady
Just fyi, POTS is digital up until the very last mile. While the network is
digital, it uses time multiplexed serial PCM streams under the hood. Aside
from the delay imposed by fiber transmission at the trunk level (~40
milliseconds from one side of the US to the next. If you're using a long
distance network that packetizes the connection or sends a call on some weird
route, that can certainly increase), the g.711 encoding delay should be fixed
at 0.125 milliseconds.

~~~
l1ambda
Interesting. I didn't know g.711 was so low. Typical VOIP latency must then
stem from D/A and A/D conversion and internet latency.

~~~
makomk
g.711 has such low latency because it doesn't take advantage of inter-sample
redundancy in any way whatsoever - it's just raw 8-bit samples at 8 ksps with
a compander on either end (traditionally on the analog side of the DAC and
ADC).

------
hannob
" Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from
your and your device‘s feedback (naturally, it doesn’t have access to the
contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as
network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine
optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of
future calls on the given device and network."

Is it just me or does this sound like serious bullshit? Unless you have some
hard evidence of course...

~~~
backpropaganda
The 'neural network' is probably an SVM or logistic regression. There's
nothing special that a neural network can learn with high-level features like
network speed, ping times, etc.

In fact, it's probably just a TCP-like algorithm, i.e. decrease rate of packet
sending if not getting ACKs back. One day, Intel might come out and say their
microprocessors are AI-powered, since it has branch prediction.

~~~
samtoday
I think that Samsung beat Intel to it:

"Neural network spotted deep inside Samsung's Galaxy S7 silicon brain
(theregister.co.uk)" \-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12340348](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12340348)

------
wackspurt
"Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from
your and your device‘s feedback (naturally, it doesn’t have access to the
contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as
network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine
optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of
future calls on the given device and network."

What sort of parameters are adjusted?

~~~
CodeMichael
Sounds like marketing speech for variable bitrate encoding and/or adjusting
compression aggressiveness.

~~~
JshWright
> variable bitrate encoding

I hope not... VBR can easily leak all sorts of information (including the
actual content of the conversation)

~~~
drakenot
Whoa, I had never thought of monitoring VBR as an attack vector for recovering
audio.

Do you have a link discussing this?

~~~
JshWright
Sure, here are a couple papers on the topic:

[https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf](https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf)

[https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/voip-
vbr.pdf](https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/voip-vbr.pdf)

It's fundamentally very similar to the sorts of issues you end up with if you
compress then encrypt. If the attacker can make some educated guesses about
the plaintext prior to the compression, the compression ratio can be a very
powerful tool in their arsenal.

~~~
walterbell
Wire implemented CBR for their encrypted calls, upstreamed it to WebRTC and
submitted a patch to Signal, [https://medium.com/wire-news/call-security-
constant-bit-rate...](https://medium.com/wire-news/call-security-constant-bit-
rate-encoding-and-improving-webrtc-a85be6caa43a)

~~~
JshWright
Silent Phone has used CBR since day 1.

------
cflee
Does anyone have an opinion on the new "three-message modification of the
standard DH key exchange" they introduced for calls?

From their API doc: [https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-
ver...](https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-verification)

> Party A will generate a shared key with B — or whoever pretends to be B —
> without having a second chance to change its exponent a depending on the
> value g_b received from the other side; and the impostor will not have a
> chance to adapt his value of b depending on g_a, because it has to commit to
> a value of g_b before learning g_a.

> The use of hash commitment in the DH exchange constrains the attacker to
> only one guess to generate the correct visualization in their attack, which
> means that using just over 33 bits of entropy represented by four emoji in
> the visualization is enough to make a successful attack highly improbable.

~~~
stouset
I haven't personally reviewed it, but based on their previous inability to
make principled cryptographic choices and resistance to critical feedback from
actual cryptographers… I'm skeptical.

~~~
cyphunk
can you point to some examples where the resisted critical feedback? I've
heard people mention this but haven't actually seen anything convincing yet

~~~
ecthiender
Read up the comments on the telegram announcement post here on HN. From couple
of years back, IIRC.

PS: on mobile. Could not.search.

~~~
cyphunk
Found it [1].

tldr: First message from TelegramApp has some marketing copy ("acm winner
phds") but not horrible. The TelegramApp user remains calm/careful and mostly
polite in every message after that. There are only a few cases of sideways
slapping and they come from HN users. Despite this the conversation between
TelegramApp and HN users remain informative debate and discussion.

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6913456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6913456)

~~~
stouset
Being cordial and polite on Hacker News wasn't my concern. My concern is their
repeated dismissal of feedback from experienced cryptographers.

Cryptographers can't seem to make sense of a _lot_ of their design decisions
in the MTProto protocol. Their response to criticism has mostly been in the
form of: if you can't demonstrate a break directly, then we don't care.

Given how fragile cryptography can be, this is an absurdly irresponsible way
to maintain a cryptosystem. Modern cryptographic designs try to be _very_
principled, and steps are taken to prevent any kind of theoretical weakness,
even if we don't know how to break it in practice. This is because
cryptographic breaks only ever get stronger — never weaker.

As an example, TLS 1.0 using doing authentication for CBC modes with MAC-then-
Encrypt was known to be weak, but it was only years later when researchers
were able to turn this into a plaintext-leaking break. And MTProto is
absolutely littered with unconventional or known-weak constructs, giving a lot
of potential levers attackers can use to break it.

You might argue that it's fine for this to be the case, as long as they
respond quickly to protocol breaks. The problem is, the _good guys_ only
learned how to break TLS 1.0 CBC when the attack was published. Did the
NSA/CIA/GRU/FSB know about these attacks before we did? There's no way to
know. But if it had conservatively chosen an Encrypt-then-MAC scheme to begin
with, such an attack would have never been possible in the first place.

That's not to throw the TLS 1.0 authors under the bus here. The weaknesses of
that type of scheme were yet to be widely known. In the case of MTProto,
weaknesses in their use of certain constructs _are_ widely known, and they
don't seem o care.

~~~
cyphunk
I read through the linked thread in my previous post and I think it gives a
good idea of the rift between the in-house-HN-cryptographers and those at
Telegram. One will find the exact same disconnect between cryptographers that
worked under heavy computational constraints, and those that have not. For
example, in the Satellite TV industry.

The Telegram designers built a protocol with anticipation of some constraints.
But rather than debate the plausability of the percieved constraints, the HN-
crowd just dug into whatever they already knew and threw in a lot of snark in
their response to close the door.

> Their response to criticism has mostly been in the form of: if you can't
> demonstrate a break directly, then we don't care.

I haven't seen that. I went looking for it. If you have the patience and time
please dig up a link or quote.

> That's not to throw the TLS 1.0 authors under the bus here. The weaknesses
> of that type of scheme were yet to be widely known. In the case of MTProto,
> weaknesses in their use of certain constructs are widely known, and they
> don't seem o care.

I did see a good bit of discussion about the feasability of some of the
weakness pointed out. They responded in a way that seemed to indicate they
fully understood the issue but "chose" to take the risk. I'm not sure this
means "they don't care". Perhaps it does. But this is where I started to see
that the rift here was really about the perception of constraints, not lack of
knowledge or, in my opinion, lack of care.

------
phillc73
I've managed to setup Telegram for most of my (non-technical) family - wife,
siblings, mother (she doesn't even have a smart phone and just uses Telegram
as a message client on her desktop. It's a very convenient way to share family
related pictures).

Voice calls are an excellent addition. If these could now also be extended to
video calls, I could likely ditch Skype forever.

~~~
kevingrahl
A client of mine once explicitly asked to communicate via Wire [1] which is
pretty similar to Skype but E2E encrypted. It was launched by a Skype co-
founder, is easy to use and has a pleasant interface. And it's open source. I
can't really tell if the product really does what it's advertising, perhaps
someone with more expertise could chime in on that. I got stuck on it and I'm
considering ditching Skype altogether for it. Perhaps not the solution you
were looking for but interesting nonetheless!

[1] - [https://wire.com/en/](https://wire.com/en/)

~~~
Siimteller
It's open source indeed [1] and was recently audited for the quality of the
crypto protocol implementation [2]. Not sure what questions you specifically
have but I'm happy to answer as I'm part of the team.

[1] [https://github.com/wireapp](https://github.com/wireapp)
[2][https://medium.com/wire-news/wires-independent-security-
revi...](https://medium.com/wire-news/wires-independent-security-
review-61f37a1762a8)

------
notspanishflu
I'm using Telegram as my main messaging system but I hope they'll open source
everything. That's the only way to fully audit the service.

Telegram is not too bad but has too many grey areas at this moment.

~~~
Derbasti
Client and protocol are open source. What more do you need?

~~~
_jomo
They have stopped publishing the source code for their clients.

~~~
RubyPinch
They have?

[https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop](https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop)
seems fairly up to date?

~~~
r3bl
Latest commit on the Android version was six months ago:
[https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram](https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram)

And yes, that's the official location of the Android app, linked here:
[https://telegram.org/apps](https://telegram.org/apps)

~~~
RubyPinch
it seems they are watching, they've uploaded the newer version

------
eddiecalzone
Signal has this as well. I trust their security (personal bias), but
unfortunately the call quality is a non-starter at the moment.

~~~
lucb1e
As does Wire, just for the record.

They are one of the newer kids on the block. Open sourced in March 2016, End
to End encrypted (everything and by default) since June 2016 (or the other way
around). Supports chats, calls, video calls, file transfers and multiple
devices (including Linux, though Electron...).

~~~
dioltas
And when I tried it, for me seemed to have the best call quality, it was
better than my network call quality.

------
Animats
The emoji out of band authentication is cool, but probably annoying. You have
to read those emoji by voice to the other end, so they can check them. That
could be a pain if the emoji are chosen randomly from the 2600 available
emoji.

The idea comes from the STU-3 secure phone, where there was a 2-digit number
display to be read back by voice. It's one of the ways to detect a man-in-the-
middle attack. If there's a MITM, the crypto bits sent and received are
different, because the MITM is re-encrypting, and this is detectable if you
have some out of band channel for comparing them. A MITM would thus have to be
able to fake the voice of the other party.

With techniques like this, you can make an MITM work arbitrarily hard to
maintain the illusion that it's the other party. I've proposed some ways to do
this for web pages.

~~~
ghughes
It's gimmicky. I prefer Signal's numeric encoding - easy to read aloud with no
room for ambiguity.

------
t3ra
But seriously how do they pay their bills? (I know VK brothers are super rich)

There are bots that relay huge media files

It's probably (imo) the fastest & most complete cloud based chat app

Everything.. Literally everything you share can be retrived over the cloud

& and now calling

That must be super expensive infrastructure? No investors no monetization

~~~
unicornporn
They're sitting on troves of data. Extremely few use the E2E encrypted "secure
chat" feature (mainly because it isn't default, but also because it doesn't
sync between devices) and all the chat logs and data are stored on their
servers (and are readable by Telegram). They also store your address book on
their servers.

I'm sure they will find ways monetize this. Data is the "new gold", as they
say[1]...

[1]
[https://www.google.com/#q="data+is+the+new+gold"](https://www.google.com/#q="data+is+the+new+gold")

~~~
jaflo
Their FAQ[1] states:

Q: Will you have ads? Or sell my data? Or steal my beloved and enslave my
children? No.

So I don't think they will make money by selling data.

[1] [https://telegram.org/faq#q-will-you-have-ads-or-sell-my-
data...](https://telegram.org/faq#q-will-you-have-ads-or-sell-my-data-or-
steal-my-beloved-and-ensl)

~~~
fenwick67
An FAQ isn't binding. What does their TOS say?

~~~
unicornporn
Are you really serious? This is a post snowden society.

> An FAQ isn't binding.

Probably not, but please beware that this service is not subject to US law,
but the laws of the Russian Federation.

> What does their TOS say?

TOS are subject to change, right? And even if it wasn't, do you really think
the TOS will stop a company run by a russian nationalist[1] offering a free
service with a million dollar bill will stick by their word (which, in this
case is literally a single word)?

[1]
[https://www.instagram.com/p/-MrPWGr7aL/](https://www.instagram.com/p/-MrPWGr7aL/)

~~~
magic_quotes
> service is not subject to US law, but the laws of the Russian Federation

They are not registered in Russia, afaik.

> russian nationalist[1] … [1]
> [https://www.instagram.com/p/-MrPWGr7aL/](https://www.instagram.com/p/-MrPWGr7aL/)

That's just Pavel's usual populism. He says the same things about Russia or
pretty much anything.

~~~
lambdadmitry
>They are not registered in Russia, afaik.

They are writing the software in Russia (right next to the VK's door to be
precise), though. Source: local Saint-Petersburg newspapers.

------
vram22
I tried [https://appear.in](https://appear.in) recently for a short call with
a student and it worked well. A friend and fellow freelancer also uses it, he
said. One good point about it is if you need to do a quick ad-hoc call - it is
browser-based (probably uses WebRTC), and also does not need to you create an
account or sign in. Plan to try it more in future, as well as TeamSpeak which
I also mentioned in this thread. I had installed Wire too, both on PC and
Android phone, but not tried it yet with anyone.

------
anotheryou
Closed source, not end-to-end encrypted by default, end-to-end only device to
device (so I can't swap seamlessly from a desktop to a mobile session). Not
even the protocoll is open, so I am bound to their clients.

Sadly it was the only nice alternative when the snowden stuff was published.
That means those of my peers who made it away from skype/fb/whatsapp are now
on telegram.

~~~
MichaelApproved
> end-to-end only device to device (so I can't swap seamlessly from a desktop
> to a mobile session)

How do you accomplish a seamless swap from desktop to a mobile session using
end-to-end encryption?

~~~
danieldk
iMessage has end to end encryption and supports multiple devices. Each device
uses its own keypair and when a message is sent, it is sent encrypted for each
of the recipient's devices.

[https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf](https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf)

~~~
samat
The hard part is how do you manage a list of trusted devices.

The thing which is really sad is that there are no end to end encrypted group
chats.

~~~
16
[https://riot.im](https://riot.im) is doing this.

e2e is in beta still, but they have key list management/verification in place
already.

------
neorex
Conference calls! That's what we need in a whatsapp/telegram like app. Make it
a reality to see the end of telco domination in the voice space.

------
sneak
This is your periodic reminder that Telegram uses sketchy crypto and should be
avoided.

~~~
tpush
Most people who I know use Telegram(me included) use it because it's frankly
the nicest(fast, looks good) Messenger out there, not because of its security
features. Personally I don't use the secret chat functionality; I would use
Signal if I wanted to communicate securely.

~~~
sneak
I don't choose my car for its seatbelts, but if they are broken, I reject the
car.

~~~
tpush
Right, because you use seat belts every time you drive. So they are always a
factor.

I do not use Telegrams security features though, so whether they are any good
isn't relevant to me(and many other people).

~~~
sneak
Whether you use them or not, intel agencies use their lack. This is the naïve
"I have nothing to hide" dodge about privacy.

~~~
tpush
As I already said, if I was concerned about intel agencies capturing my
messages I'd use proper OSS encryption via Signal, not Telegram.

There simply are situations where I do not care whether my messages are
encrypted or not, in which case I use the app that works the best for me,
which in this case is Telegram.

------
scandox
How many times has this headline been changed? I've seen 3 different ones.

------
raarts
No app wil ever accomplish consistent good voice quality over the internet.
Ever. For that it's too much of an unreliable network. You may try some calls
over Signal, think Hey! This works well! until you hit a moment where the
route between endpoints is flaky, attribute it to Signal while using another
app for that same call at that particular point in time would have given the
same result.

Only when QoS will be honored by all internet routers will we reach something
that is consistently reliable.

~~~
snackai
You are dumb if you really believe this. Technology always proves people
wrong. Just wait for it.

------
skybrian
Some artist had fun with this: we have a woman talking on her cell phone while
driving and a fully clothed man in a bathtub, with a monocle.

------
akinalci
The NN approach sounds interesting, but there are no technical details and it
might be hype-based marketing.

Is anyone familiar with solid published work on applying ML/AI to optimize
network control (or, as done here, optimize application parameters depending
on network conditions).

~~~
lloeki
Funnily enough, 10 years ago as a required entry step before being able to do
a thesis I scribbled something[0] about distributed components with probes
(some automatic, some with user feedback exactly as suggested here) and knobs
driven by some fuzzy logic feedback loop, to be e.g applied to codecs and
buffer size in an A/V streaming scenario† (possibly bidirectional). Concluded
by saying you could get better, self-improving results by using genetic
algorithms and/or AI such as NN. Was basically laughed at during defense and
dismissed as being way too sci-fi. Got sick of such constant condescending
attitudes and dumped research, pursuing my career as a software engineer. Had
I pursued I could have been the author on such a paper you're looking for!
Pretty sure I could have patented the shit out of this anyway but that's not
how I roll regarding software patents. Now I lost the LaTeX source and Java
code as well as the resulting PDF, and can't even download the thing as a
memento since it's behind some stupid paywall.

† turned out MS launched instant play adaptative 1080p streaming some years
later on Xbox 360, which was exactly that.

[0] Supervision d'une Application à Base de Composants afin de Respecter des
Contraintes Temporelles -
[https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00000787](https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00000787)

------
spiraldancing
I still vote Wire. It used to be buggy, but much better now, plus completely
Open Source (Telegram is not).

I just placed my first Wire audio call from my phone a few minutes ago: great
quality (better than my actual phone service), no noticeable lag.

~~~
kogepathic
_> It used to be buggy_

How long ago are you referring to?

I tried to use it around the end of 2016 to chat with friends and it was
nearly impossible to use. We would try to add a contact but the other person
would not appear online, despite having the app open in front of us.

Messages would frequently not be delivered, or take exceedingly long times to
be delivered (hours). Notifications of a new message were also quite hit and
miss.

Overall I liked the functionality of Wire, but the reliability was terribad.

~~~
spiraldancing
Not sure, 6-9 months ago. Texting always worked for me, but audio & video were
hit-&-miss.

Actually, thinking about it now, I haven't used video much lately, but audio
has been much better the past 1-2 months.

------
cprecioso
Can anyone familiar with the matter say how secure is the 4-emoji verification
code?

~~~
mtgx
> _Thanks to this modification, it becomes possible to prevent eavesdropping
> (MitM attacks on DH) with a probability of more than 0.9999999999 by using
> just over 33 bits of entropy in the visualization. These bits are presented
> to the users in the form of four emoticons. We have selected a pool of 333
> emoji that all look quite different from one another and can be easily
> described in simple words in any language._

33 bits of entropy seems quite low to me.

[https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-are-voice-calls-
auth...](https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-are-voice-calls-
authenticated)

~~~
jessaustin
That would be low if we were considering a long-term key. It seems fine for a
one-shot authentication token? Eve is going to have to MitM a _lot_ of calls
before she guesses this token correctly.

------
pgalus
Is it fully controlled by FSB?

~~~
eternalban
Brothers funded by loans from Swiss banks and citizens of a Commonwealth
island. From the paranoid angle try s/FSB/GCHQ.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov#Life_after_VK](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov#Life_after_VK)

------
jonotime
My problem with Telegram is I want to use it but they wont let me. I use a
budget phone service (freedompop) which apparently is technically voip, but I
did not know until I tried to register for Telegram with it. They refuse to
send me text verification. Wont work with my google voice number either.
WhatsApp does not have this problem. And what if I want to use Telegram on
desktop only? Why do I need to verify a phone number?

~~~
rz2k
It worked with my Google Voice number just now. Could they have changed the
policy? I did sign up with my iPad (with cell service) first then iPhone, so
it was probably more open to not using the device's phone number.

~~~
jonotime
Hey! What do you know? I guess they added support after enough complaints. Now
I'll give it a go.

------
BHSPitMonkey
The UI for trimming and setting the quality of sent videos is really neat.
It's still annoyingly hard in 2017 to send videos from one mobile to another
without needing to completely trash the quality via MMS or upload an often-
gigantic file (captured in 1080p or higher) to an intermediary like YouTube or
Facebook (and then wait for backend processing).

------
kylehotchkiss
This is awesome.. I have been trying to video chat with somebody more
overseas. Whatsapp video, facebook video, skype, seems like the only thing
that works for us right now is Duo.

Bad thing: this tech is trapped in Telegram which is quite political of an
app. I wish they'd break it out into something like duo.

------
ComodoHacker
I wish they allow arbitrary user identifiers, which are not tied to mobile
operators. Just for geeks.

------
pawelwentpawel
Very welcome addition. Can anyone confirm if this feature will be available on
the desktop app as well?

~~~
spechide
yes.

~~~
marksomnian
Source?

~~~
anaxag0ras
[https://twitter.com/telegram/statuses/847417578150428675](https://twitter.com/telegram/statuses/847417578150428675)

------
Numberwang
Very good. Great even. But there is a problem. Whatsapp has already won the
chat/calls app war. Watch it grow massivly in the next year, i promise. Mostly
due to incompetence of MS and Google.

~~~
konart
> Whatsapp has already won

Globaly - maybe, for now. in some countries, however, it's not as popular as
Telegram or Viber, for instance. (like Iran, for example)

~~~
dgellow
Or WeChat (China), or LINE (Thailand).

------
ausjke
Wait, I saw nobody mentioned this, but I feel this is very similar to Slack,
group-chatting basically, isn't it?

------
davidjgraph
I happened to be reading a comparison of Telegram and Whatsapp this morning
[1]. I've never used Whatsapp, is it really this bad or is the reviewer
clearly a massive Telegram fanboy/girl?

[1] [https://info.seibert-
media.net/display/Atlassian/Comparison+...](https://info.seibert-
media.net/display/Atlassian/Comparison+of+Telegram+Messenger+and+Whatsapp)

~~~
mino
Telegram is superior to Whatsapp from every perspective _except_ for its
smaller user base.

However, how can you take as unbiased a comparison table that uses adjectives
as "Incredibly fast loading times", "UNRIVALED", etc.?

~~~
unicornporn
> Telegram is superior to Whatsapp from every perspective except for its
> smaller user base.

I'd say, except for its security/encryption...

~~~
lucb1e
The encryption they _claim_ to use. Not saying they don't, just saying it's
only "sort of" superior on encryption, given this caveat.

~~~
Johnny_Brahms
The same goes for Telegram. The android client hasn't seen any updates to it's
github repo since sep 2016.

And, it is quite easy to verify that WhatsApp's encryption is doing what we
think. A friend of mine managed to reverse engineer their protocol in 2012 in
less than 24 hours, by himself. And there is quite a big chunk of the computer
security market that would disagree with the claim that something has to be
open source to be verifiably secure.

~~~
idanoeman
Couldn't WhatsApp faithfully implement the protocol, but also keylog and phone
home occasionally? How would you know?

~~~
Johnny_Brahms
Sure, but then again so could Telegram. It's a rather fruitless discussion.

~~~
idanoeman
No it's not. The fruit is: use a sideloaded Signal which you built yourself if
you really need to be secure. If you're not, Signal is still better than
Telegram or Whatsapp.

~~~
Johnny_Brahms
Well, that I agree on, but that wasn't the discussion I was having :)

------
s_dev
Are there any plans to bring group chat to Telegram?

~~~
offa
Perhaps you mean group calls? Group chat is available in Telegram.

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astannard
With talk of neural interfaces and augmentation will we have apps in the
future that support human to human encryption I wonder?

~~~
konart
With things like BLADE this is not even a far future
[http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.380...](http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.3805.html)

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anoldgangstah
a neural network learns from your and your -- typo

------
anoldgangstah
a neural network learns from your and your

------
gregn610
Pied Piper, is that U ?

------
r1ch
In a world full of bloated Electron HTML5 / JS "desktop apps", I'm very happy
to see Telegram on Windows is a native app (Qt). It feels so incredibly
responsive compared to everything else.

~~~
jsheard
The funny thing is that Qt apps used to be derided for bloat (15MB of DLLs!
_15MB!_ ) but the rise of Electron has made Qt seem featherweight by
comparison.

~~~
r1ch
I've been involved in a project that went from standard Win32 controls to Qt,
and while I was very much against Qt at the time (such bloat!), I can't deny
how easy it has made cross platform UI work. With many apps being written in
HTML/JS, a C++ Qt framework is still magnitudes faster than a JS interpreter.

~~~
owlmirror
I have zero experience with Qt but have heard that it has problems with High
DPI presentations. Now It seems that they did something in that regard in Qt
5.6, but do you have anything to say or an idea about the maturity of it?

~~~
floatboth
Qt classic (C++) apps run flawlessly on my 4K desktop (150% scale in Windows).

QML/QtQuick apps only support integer scaling for whatever ridiculous reason
("fuck your monitor we need to be pixel perfect" or whatever) so they're
either tiny or huge.

