[HN Gopher] Group Video Calls
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Group Video Calls
Author : jhabdas
Score : 125 points
Date : 2021-06-25 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (telegram.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (telegram.org)
| Saris wrote:
| Telegram has absolutely amazing UX on all platforms I've used it
| on, I hope they can roll out encryption for group chats soon and
| show somehow that we can trust that encryption.
| qwertox wrote:
| To me Telegram feels like the red corner district of a city. I
| simply don't feel like I can trust it, there's something _very_
| shady about it. I wouldn 't be surprised if Telegram reads those
| exclusive Bitcoin whale groups and uses that insider info. Group
| chats are not end to end encrypted.
|
| That being said, WhatsApp is like the authorized garage where you
| know that you'll get the service which is officially recognized
| (by the government) and will keep your car's value "at its best",
| but which screws you over in so many ways.
|
| Everything else is somewhere in between these two platforms.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd want group chats with thousands of members to
| be end-to-end encrypted. It doesn't even seem that clear what
| the actual utility of it would be.
| reader_mode wrote:
| Telegram works better as a chat app for my use case which is
| why I prefer it.
|
| I use an iPhone for iOS development and as a backup phone, I
| use Android as a daily driver - WhatsApp couldn't sync history
| when I broke my phone twice in a year and had to switch to
| iPhone. And I prefer using a desktop app over mobile one, if my
| phone dies I can still use telegram desktop (this was useful a
| few times I left my phone in the car and wife drove off with
| it, I could keep using telegram to message her, my only other
| option would be messenger at that point).
|
| I don't mind privacy implications of my random chats being read
| by telegram.
| phwak wrote:
| > Group chats are not end to end encrypted.
|
| End-to-end encrypted group chats are currently in the works.
|
| Source - https://t.me/durovschat/518625
| godelski wrote:
| I laughed at this, but am curious where you place Signal and
| Matrix in this analogy? Both feel like good services that
| aren't authorized, per say.
| pmlnr wrote:
| XMPP would be the local electrician with a mustache and a
| calm tone that can fix anything for you pennies.
|
| We used to have them in Hungary. I miss them. "Szaki"
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| I'm amazed by the pace at which Telegram ships features, and with
| what finesse.
| olah_1 wrote:
| They have the most productive and high quality engineers in the
| game. And I say this as someone that whinces at telegram for
| not having e2e encryption by default.
| fsflover wrote:
| > whinces at telegram for not having e2e encryption by
| default
|
| On desktop* there is no e2ee even among the options.
|
| * where "desktop" includes GNU/Linux phones.
| vetinari wrote:
| As far that I'm aware, it is key management/distribution
| problem and how to expose it to the user. So in order to
| not manage them, only the device with the phone number that
| the account is registered with can do it.
|
| Desktop apps are not the ones where you create Telegram
| account; you only authorize them.
|
| For another example, Threema, which is E2EE by default,
| doesn't allow more than one device with the account (to use
| multiple devices, you must create several accounts, one for
| each device and link them, and then basically any chat is a
| group chat. For desktop use, the web client uses webrtc to
| talk to your device to use it as a proxy).
| NilsIRL wrote:
| I believe this is wrong based on the following:
|
| 1. I was able to use telegram without using the
| smartphone app at first, I just needed a phone number to
| register on desktop
|
| 2. The MacOS desktop app supports E2EE
|
| 3. Some third party desktop apps support E2EE
|
| 4. Signal has synced E2EE that works on both desktop and
| smartphone (And so does Matrix)
| vetinari wrote:
| 1. Does not really matter to the argument; you cannot do
| E2EE on the desktop with such an account. But you could
| on the mobile device, once you install the app there.
| They call it "device of origin".
|
| 2. Which one? There are several and the one I'm running
| (the official one; brew cask telegram-desktop) does not.
|
| 3. They are third party and if it doesn't work nicely or
| has missing functionality ("why are not my chats from
| other devices there?"), Telegram devs can still point
| fingers that's not the official client and should be
| discussed with the third party developers. Ultimately,
| they will find out why the original Telegram doesn't do
| it.
|
| 4. Signal doesn't do cloud messages as Telegram does. You
| might have noticed that functionality like that makes
| Telegram much more popular among normal users.
| Yaina wrote:
| The Telegram Apps are all great and have so many awesome
| features that are crucially also extremely well implemented.
| Everything seems so well thought through!
|
| It's just incredibly scary not to know anything about who
| these developers are, where they are located and most
| importantly how this is all financed!
|
| I understand Pavel Durov is a very wealthy man, but
| developing and hosting a popular global messenger service
| can't be cheap.
| finolex1 wrote:
| Is there anything secretive about their developers? I see a
| lot on LinkedIn for what it's worth.
| ticviking wrote:
| TBH my threat model views Russian and Middle Eastern
| oligarchs and governments as less of an immediate threat to
| my freedoms than my own government or major US tech firms.
|
| Long run it's a problem, but until I have a app at the same
| risk/feature sweet spot I don't mind the downsides of
| telegram.
|
| (Edited cause I am utterly unable to spell)
| godelski wrote:
| Same. This has been my frustration with Signal lately.
| They've had a large growth in a userbase but feels like they
| aren't growing their team fast enough to become real
| contenders with Telegram and WA. You don't have to move fast
| and break things, but you do have to move.
| input_sh wrote:
| The only feature I can think of since that growth annoys
| the shit out of me.
|
| They've started syncing notification settings, so I can
| either have both my laptop and my phone beeping or none.
| Combine that with working within a small team that
| primarily uses Signal and it's absolutely terrible.
|
| Leave them off and you'll miss something important. Leave
| them on and my phone beeps after work hours. And since
| there's nothing in between pausing them for 8h or 1 day, I
| forget to turn them on in the morning.
|
| Went from never needing to touch those settings to having
| to change them at least 5x every fucking work day.
| godelski wrote:
| Yeah the syncing issue has been hitting me more. Not as
| bad as Slack though, but still enough that where I've
| answered something on my desktop it'll still ring my
| phone. It's better than Slack because this is at least <5
| minutes apart (Slack will message my phone >10 minutes
| after I responded on desktop). I'll admit that I'm
| willing to give Signal more leeway than Slack because
| they're small. But these things hinder growth.
|
| But the features I've seen since growth are: 1) group
| call (which happened during early growth), 2) screen
| share on desktop, 3) color hinting in chats removed
| (which now results me in messaging several people I
| didn't intend to because I've been trained for years to
| rely on colors for hinting and it takes longer to untrain
| users. Thank god delete exists...) 4) mobile coin.
|
| I'm still waiting on 1) usernames 2) channels 3) easy
| access to community based stickers (or just an official
| repository!). Things that I don't care about but the
| community does: 1) backup of messages 2) transferring
| messages between phones. Honestly after these two things
| a lot of other stuff is "cool." But these make it more
| usable. A 20 minute interaction with Signal users outside
| the community forums will illustrate how important these
| things are to people (the community forums have a real
| group think that's a big disconnect from what most users
| want). I'm all for more UX devs and making the app
| prettier, but it's no longer "early 2021" and we still
| don't have them (and have been waiting for years). It
| feels like there's a larger disconnect between devs and
| us users than there was in the past. People wouldn't
| throw a fit about MOB if the rest of the platform was
| moving along steadily and would probably be treated as
| "cool, but I'm not going to use it and have
| reservations." I'd welcome cool stuff like that, or noise
| canceling (featured in this update), or any other stuff
| if the rest of the platform was moving along.
|
| I'm losing faith in Signal. I fought so hard to get my
| friends on board (years!) and now that we have critical
| mass it feels things have slowed instead of accelerated.
| It isn't just us "hackers" and privacy conscious people
| anymore. To the devs reading this: I love you and
| appreciate the work you do, but help us out here. We
| don't understand why these weird decisions are being made
| and they feel like step backwards instead of forward.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| While the development teams at Telegram should be applauded I
| can't stress enough that it helps that they don't have E2EE and
| centralized most of the complexity to their server.
|
| Related regarding feature deployment: I got some negative
| feedback for dumping on Matrix for announcing Spaces without
| iOS client support. They should have waited until Element had
| all their major platforms covered before announcing it. It's
| maybe an unpopular take but when around 40% of my homeserver's
| users can't use a major feature, that's a shitty rollout.
| 0xy wrote:
| Telegram does have E2EE in secret chats. WhatsApp does NOT
| have E2EE because it backs up your private keys to cloud
| storage by default. Even if you don't, your contacts might.
| Therefore WhatsApp is less secure.
| jaimehrubiks wrote:
| Telegram does not have group voice nor video calls. It has voice
| (and now video) _chats_.
|
| // Unless I am not aware of any recent change, I tested this last
| month and don't see any related update ever since.
|
| Which is not the same, and actually, for me is not useful at all.
| The main difference is that a "chat" does not ring the other
| participants' phones, which is a must for me to "call" my family
| either voice or video. You must first tell them through chat that
| you will call them. For 1-on-1 it does have calls, as it rings.
| For groups, it does not.
| beigeoak wrote:
| Why can't the western titans of SV make something like Telegram?
|
| Why do billion dollar companies like FB, Google and even Discord
| consistently produce software that is low in performance?
|
| Is it an issue with western (web) development culture where
| "developer time" is "prioritized" over performance to the point
| where the developer knows everything about the business processes
| and product requirements and NOTHING about how computers actually
| work?
|
| What is it about Russian/Eastern European software culture that
| created developers capable of producing the smoothest and most
| well-thought out messaging app?
|
| If you reply to this comment, please ensure that the first
| sentence contains the phrase "E2E".
| excalibur wrote:
| Am I missing something here? This just looks like Zoom or Teams
| or any of the other video calling apps that have been running the
| world for the past year. What's so special about it?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Telegram desktop client is written in C, takes 20MB or ram and
| can download 1,000 messages in 3 seconds.
|
| Teams takes 500MB of ram and pegs a quad-core cpu to 70% to
| updates some smileys
| tptacek wrote:
| Is any of this end-to-end encrypted?
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Likely not, else they'd have confirmed it in their announcement
| and/or updated their E2E 1-to-1 video call documentation. The
| Verge asked and never got a response:
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/28/22407752/telegram-group-v...
|
| Documentation I mentioned: https://core.telegram.org/api/end-
| to-end/video-calls
| jhabdas wrote:
| And ephemeral, when desired by the user.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| This is kind of loaded. I do think Telegram does an excellent
| job at ephemerality from a practical standpoint. Without
| being able to audit their server though, we have no clue if
| 'disappeared' chats and messages are actually scrubbed from
| their server.
|
| I was once banned from the service for playing around with
| very old clients and had a back and forth with them over
| email for a week or so (it was re-enabled and they apologized
| for the inconvenience). They are prickly and refuse to give
| any details over how data is managed.
| jhabdas wrote:
| Interested to read a blog post about that story if you
| decide to write about it. Woz tought us never to trust a
| computer. Trusting software seems equally risky.
| Approaching comms from this perspective leads one to assume
| the best place to hide, so to speak, is in the open--in
| plain sight.
| tptacek wrote:
| _And_ ephemeral? Does that mean this is end-to-end encrypted?
| yewenjie wrote:
| Telegram is getting so many cool features that I really wonder
| how long can it sustain being ad-free and user-centric.
| freewizard wrote:
| They have 1 billion dollar[1], and working on ads[2]
|
| [1] https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN2BF0UP
|
| [2] https://t.me/durov/142
| rvz wrote:
| Exactly. It recently got a feature that totally obliterates
| Clubhouse out of the Pacific ocean.
|
| At this point Telegram is unrivalled and already has almost
| everything that WhatApp has, except for E2EE turned on by
| default.
| dt3ft wrote:
| As long as the Russian government is able to keep funding it?
| :)
| rvz wrote:
| Any strong evidence of this? I mean actual links or
| investigations proving that?
|
| Or are you deliberately spreading unsubstantiated claims?
| jhabdas wrote:
| Be nice if Americans could make something this good again.
| Have you seen WhatsApp lately? It's a pure travesty.
| reidjs wrote:
| I like whatsapp a lot, personally. The stickers aren't as
| good as Telegram, though.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Is it? Granted, I've only been using it for three years
| but... its hasn't really changed that whole time? It's
| fine?
| rvz wrote:
| They already have and it is called Quill. [0]
|
| Works on web, macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android and
| already looks promising to be the diamond standard of chat
| software and compete against the alternatives.
|
| Impressive piece of _extremely_ high quality software so
| rare in this software industry.
|
| [0] https://quill.chat
| anderber wrote:
| I believe the owner/founder was kicked out of Russia. It was
| also banned in Russia for a while, at least they tried
| banning it.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Can you please at least read the first paragraph of wikipedia
| before making allegations? Russian government hates telegram
| with a passion
| traspler wrote:
| It has already been announced that they will add ads to
| Telegram but only to public groups/channels over a certain
| amount of users. Everything else will stay ad free. See:
| https://t.me/durov/142
| Trias11 wrote:
| Lots of oppressive governments and controlling entities are not
| happy about it.
|
| Kudos to Telegram team!
| hda111 wrote:
| How is telegram funded? App is near perfection so I wonder how
| this can be an ad free app.
| smolyeet wrote:
| https://www.engadget.com/telegram-channel-ads-192249765.html
| bobiny wrote:
| Title is a bit misleading: many channels already have ads,
| Telegram just wants a cut now.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Pavel Durov is a billionaire and this is his (and his
| brother's) pet project. He made his money starting VK
| (Russia's Facebook)
| tptacek wrote:
| If it's not encrypted end-to-end, why exactly would it be
| alarming to an oppressive government?
| AegirLeet wrote:
| Telegram is not E2EE. Avoid.
| smolyeet wrote:
| Thanks but didn't ask. Really tired of people flooding telegram
| related posts to say shit like this. We know , but we also
| don't care. Telegram's feature set is unmatched and until that
| changes, fuck off
| vetinari wrote:
| Your info is outdated.
| AegirLeet wrote:
| As far as I know, one-on-one chats are not E2EE by default
| (there's a "secret chat" opt-in) and group chats cannot be
| encrypted at all. Has that changed?
| vetinari wrote:
| Not supporting E2EE (cite: Telegram is not E2EE) and E2EE
| being not on by default are two very different things.
|
| Not being on by default has an impact on other things, that
| the users value more. If they were on by default, they
| would lose it and Telegram would lose part of its appeal.
| This way, users themselves can choose the trade-off they
| are happy with.
| AegirLeet wrote:
| Not having it enabled by default means most people will
| never enable it at all. That's just plain reckless.
|
| Privacy is a human right; it shouldn't be part of any
| "trade-off", just like you can't sell yourself into
| slavery, even if you really wanted to.
| 0xy wrote:
| It's bothersome that you don't admit that your false
| statement was false and continue to double down with
| irrelevant discussion. Telegram has E2EE therefore you
| are wrong.
|
| "Telegram is not E2EE" is factually incorrect.
|
| WhatsApp has E2EE however it ships your private keys to
| cloud storage by default. So it's even less secure than
| Telegram.
| AegirLeet wrote:
| If you install Telegram and message someone, your message
| is not E2EE. That falls under "not E2EE" in my book.
| vetinari wrote:
| > Not having it enabled by default means most people will
| never enable it at all. That's just plain reckless.
|
| Yet, there we are. People value that other functionality
| more. You may not like it, but that's how they are.
|
| > Privacy is a human right; it shouldn't be part of any
| "trade-off", just like you can't sell yourself into
| slavery, even if you really wanted to.
|
| You are now off the rails. The problem with the trade-
| offs is not social.
| duskwuff wrote:
| E2EE is genuinely _hard_ to implement in the context of a chat
| service with server-side chat history, large (10k+ user) group
| chats, and multiple clients (including web applications).
| AegirLeet wrote:
| I'd flip that around and say that server-side chat history,
| large group chats and multiple clients are hard to implement
| in the context of an E2EE chat service. What I mean by that
| is: E2EE is a _necessity_ , not some nice-to-have feature.
|
| Building a chat service with server-side chat history but
| without E2EE is like building a car with very nice headlights
| that doesn't actually move.
| JBiserkov wrote:
| Signal has server-side chat history, no? And the protocol is
| open. So that part of the argument is moot.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Signal chat history is client-side. You have to explicitly
| "back up" and "restore" messages to move to a new device,
| and if you lose your phone, your chat history is gone
| forever.
|
| https://support.signal.org/hc/en-
| us/articles/360007059752-Ba...
| jhabdas wrote:
| https://t.me/durov/158
| EGreg wrote:
| I have long predicted that Telegram is the next facebook, but far
| better. Telegram is yet another centralized social network that
| is rolling out payments, video, etc.
|
| It's not open source backend or customizable. But it's probably
| the most libertarian/freest one from the closed source solutions,
| that won't kick you off, and the software is very good.
|
| We could consider integrating with them (for example, instead of
| connecting your mobile via sms, you could connect your telegram
| and then receive notifications there from some FTL bot).
|
| _PROBLEM_
|
| Still, of course, keep in mind it's a closed source and
| proprietary backend:
|
| https://yalantis.com/blog/whats-wrong-telegram-open-api/
|
| If you want an open source network to power "Web 2.0"
| communities, there aren't many good solutions. Diaspora, Matrix,
| Mastodon, Inrupt, etc. are just not on the same level as Telegram
| for regular users.
|
| For Web 1.0 we have Wordpress, which powers 40% of all websites
| in the world now. But somehow for Web 2.0 there are no good
| alternatives, so all our public discourse is taking place on
| privately owned platforms, and now the US government has put out
| bills seeking to break up big tech. How about trying a more
| libertarian solution first: open source.
|
| _SOLUTION_
|
| We've been building something for the last 10 years, and giving
| it away as open source: https://github.com/Qbix
|
| Here is a demo that we did for Yang's campaign two years ago, and
| kept it around as a demo, it has payments, video, etc. also but
| it uses open Web standards like WebRTC and WebPayments to do so,
| and it's completely open source: https://yang2020.app
|
| _PS_
|
| Web 3.0 is value transfer and programmable smart contracts, e.g.
| Ethereum web3 l9brary, etc. That happens to be radically open
| source (just like Web 1.0) because (for now) these blockhains and
| the code they run are all public, and you are encouraged to
| verify your smart contracts on EtherScan, etc.
| aledthemathguy wrote:
| Telegrams devs are next level
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(page generated 2021-06-25 23:00 UTC)