Oh, where to begin. Telegram is wild. It may not be spyware in the traditional sense, but they’ve already handed over data to the Indian government, left a telephone number scraping vulnerability open for the Iranian government, and gotten caught with “the most backdoor looking bug” with their unwisely handmade encryption algorithm.
Telegram’s backend is proprietary software and they (very similarly to Discord for example) can just decide to read your chats whenever they want. It’s even worse then WhatsApp in this sense (at least as long as you trust Facebook that they actually encrypt your chats, again, there is no way to know if it’s proprietary software).
Telegram and signal are both central points of failure. Signal can be used with other servers, but the server address is hard coded in the app, so you have to deploy your own app. Matrix servers can keep a channel going even if the channel’s home server goes down. The more home servers there are, the more mirrors of public channels there will be.
If you see me going the extra mile, it’s probably the side-effects of me using the company’s resources to learn and do crazy experiments for my own gain.
Somebody please tell me what’s wrong with just texting? Why did half the world decide MMS needed to be replaced with a proprietary app? It works, everyone has it and there’s no confusion. Unless you are concerned about privacy or something, why not just text?
Edit: MMS not SMS. I didn’t understand the difference.
SMS doesn’t handle pictures, videos, gifs, reactions, or group conversations. Things I use all the time. MMS handles some of that, but implementation varies greatly by carrier and device. If you want consistency of that functionality, you have to go with an app. Apple and Google have created replacements for SMS and MMS that could be the next version of “texting” but Apple refuses to let anyone else use theirs (iMessage) and Google has only half opened up theirs (RCS), so those don’t really fix much.
(I guess I don’t know the difference between SMS and MMS.)
I must be using MMS for texting. All of those features work for me and anyone I text with. The only issue I’ve ever had is imessage compressing videos to and from my android.
Wait until everyone and their dogs gets back to MMS…
You know how expensive they were during the upcoming of WhatsApp? Germany paid 0,80€ (at the time. Though the price is probably not much different during the early iPhone/Android 2.3 times) per picture. Compare that to the amount of stuff sent today and at the time you will probably pay 5€ per day just to get some things across.
It’s ironic that Europe adopted SMS years before we did in America because texting was absurdly expensive here. I remember paying $0.25/SMS back in 2003 or so (it dropped to a comparable bargain of $0.10/SMS after you sent 20 messages in a month), plus we had to pay to both send and receive them. I remember having to pay my parents $20/mo extra just to have unlimited SMS/MMS on my line only a couple years later once I was old enough to get a job.
I’m surprised that Europe kept up per message charges for MMS so long, they were basically always billed at the same rate as SMS here.
It’s just that almost every phone plan includes sms (dunno about mms) nowadays. So it’s a no brainer and those that are getting pre paid sims probably only need it for calling anyways.
Why did half the world decide SMS needed to be replaced with a proprietary app
SMS is even worse in terms of openness. You won’t find a modem that runs open source baseband firmware. It’s because the radios are subject to several regulations which means customers can’t be able to modify that firmware.
Imma be honest, half my communication involves emojis on discord. Jeb with his arms up is part of my personality now and I won’t apologize. When I started seeing someone a few weeks ago I had to explain that he’s missing out on half of my personality by texting. I substitute by jebbing in person but it’s just not the same 😔
It’s unencrypted and we know with certainly that the messages are stored by federal agencies and cell carriers. It also requires giving out one’s phone number which may be undesirable in some situations
MMS doesn’t have much bandwidth available and it’ll just compress instead of failing to send, so even android to android if you send a long enough HD video the recipient will get compressed garbage. Then, of course, there’s the fact any videos sent over MMS from android to an iPhone(and vice versa iirc) becomes compressed garbage no matter how long or HD the video was, but that’s more Apple’s fault than MMS directly.
If you have friends in another country, it might cost a quarter every time you send a message.
In regions of the world (e.g. Europe, and a lot of Asia) where some countries are the size of a large city (or perhaps the entire country is one city), that’s a problem. You’d be sending international texts all day every day.
SMS and MMS are literally the worst possible option. Zero security, zero privacy, zero features, dogshit quality photos and videos (especially when messaging an Apple user).
because cellular providers are actually criminals.
Also sms (and mms, whatever the fuck else exists, it’s all terrible, shits all packets flowing through the internet, it’s the same shit) sucks, and is bad, and you shouldnt use it.
You mean text editing after sending? I would definitely not consider that a “basic” feature - we are talking about E2EE here, editing a message that you already encrypted locally and then sent on its way is by no means trivial - especially with the kind of E2EE that we have nowadays.
It actually is super easy, barely an inconvenience. When you edit an E2E encrypted message, your client simply sends another E2E encrypted message telling your contact what to replace your previous message with.
It’s high time we take control of all these wild oaks out there. Every single one has thousands of acorns any any one of those might have YOUR name on it.
We need action NOW!
We need immediate Oak controls laws. And I damn sure don’t want to hear any of that stale old BS “my oak hasn’t ever harmed anyone”…
Oaks have no place in polite society. End of discussion. Get educated!
BTW that’s all satire. I love oaks. Actually my first knothole was an oak. I love oaks.
if you made a movie where George Washington defeated the British with tactical nukes while wearing a cowboy out it would still be more accurate than Braveheart
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