These days almost everyone who has a smart phone uses some sort of messaging service. It just comes with the territory. As I was reading some news reports this weekend, I found out about a messaging service that (I’m ashamed to say) I had never heard of before: Telegram. According to some news reports, Telegram has become the messaging service of choice for the ISIS and pro-jihadi crowd, supposedly for the “security” of its encryption services. ISIS’s mastery of modern communications systems should never be underestimated. This is a radical revolutionary movement that spends a great deal of effort learning how to penetrate the West’s vulnerabilities.
This piqued my interest. I have been a user of WhatsApp, Viber, and Skype for a long time and have been generally satisfied with what they offer. I use all of them in one way or another, as it seems that each one has its own unique strong points. I’ve never used Telegram or known anyone who does, so I tried to do some research to see if Telegram is a messaging app worth using. I thought Return Of Kings readers would find this kind of discussion useful when deciding which messaging app to use.
Let’s first give a bit of background information about Telegram. The company was founded by two brothers, Nikolai and Pavel Durov. After founding a social network company called Vkontakte, the brothers moved to Berlin in 2014 in the wake of the political problems in the Ukraine. Telegram was founded there. As of the time of writing, Telegram has about 100 million users worldwide, while WhatsApp has well over a billion. WhatsApp has a better claim to be the “industry standard.”
Encryption
Some of the articles about Telegram that I read portrayed its encryption as being superior to what was offered by WhatsApp. The details are these. Telegram uses its own encryption protocol rather than something developed by someone else. Deleted messages on Telegram can’t be decrypted, according to the company. However, unlike WhatsApp, a user of Telegram has to request encryption. In WhatsApp, encryption is done automatically; the user has no choice in the matter. WhatsApp also does not store messages; it just forwards them on to you. The more I looked into the details, the more it seemed that Telegram’s vaunted security features where not as good as the publicity was claiming.
Flexibility
On the other hand, there are some good features to Telegram that should not be underrated. For one thing—and this is important to me—Telegram lets you sign in to its service on a desktop computer as well as on your phone. I like this feature very much. One old messaging service (apparently defunct now) I used was called MessageMe, and it employed this sign-in feature. Sometimes you want to chat with someone using a computer rather than peck out messages on a phone. Telegram also has a two-step authentication feature that WhatsApp doesn’t have.
Both services use your phone number to authenticate, but with Telegram you can also set a secondary password for extra security. Telegram also does not have to be downloaded from official app stores: it is considered “open source” in that it can be built by the user himself. For example, Telegram has browser apps for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The bottom line is that Telegram is very flexible and can be used in a wide variety of locations and platforms. You can install it on any phone or platform.
Overall Security
Another irritating thing about WhatsApp is that you have to give it access to your entire “address book” in order to use the app. I don’t think people these days are very thrilled about doing this. So rather than having to give out (or ask for) other people’s telephone numbers, you can give out a username; this allows you to keep your phone number private. This looks like a very strong point for Telegram. In recent years I’ve noticed people starting to get very protective of their phone numbers, for better or for worse.
For what it’s worth, WhatsApp has better group chat features (I never use these). It also offers encrypted phone calls, and this is something I do use. But for me the biggest selling point for WhatsApp is the fact that it is used by so many more people than Telegram. Messaging apps are only useful if people are using them. In some countries people are using WhatsApp to the exclusion of every other messaging app. That may change in the future, of course.
Conclusion
What do I conclude from all this? Telegram has some impressive features: it is probably more secure overall, and can be used in more ways than WhatsApp. But for me, these things are not enough to make me abandon WhatsApp. How much “security” does the average person who is not a criminal or a terrorist really need? Is it really that big of a deal? I also happen to believe that every electromagnetic form of communication can be decoded if someone really wants to do so. “Security” is a lot of marketing, in my opinion. None of these things are truly secure. It’s a matter of degree, of course, and I’m not saying that you should discount it completely.
Readers should probably experiment with both apps and choose the one that meets their needs. I have found, for example, that Viber’s phone calls are better than Skype’s, but not as many people use Viber. You have to consider all the factors that matter to you, and do what works for your situation.
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Use signal. It’s Snowden recommended.
Probably because he stands to profit from it
“Both services use your phone number to authenticate, but with Telegram you can also set a secondary password for extra security.”
If you want secure communication, use the U.S. Mail. Even that isn’t 100% secure, but it’s the only way you’ll have a shot at communicating with someone, without every keystroke and message being logged by one alphabet-soup agency or another.
Just like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc they were all seeded with CIA, DOD, and NSA grants.
Of course. Business as usual. Total information awareness, etc.
If any intelligence or law enforcement agency has targeted you your physical mail is even less secure. A sheet of paper isn’t going to stop intrusion, no matter how many little blue lines your “security envelope” prints on the inside.
Digital communication can at least be encrypted using methods a hell of a lot more secure than the decoder ring you got out of a cracker jack box.
From personal experience, I encountered Telegram about June or July of this year. It does offer a few neat features like the ability to search by emails or phone numbers and the whole lack of synchrony is nice. The only reason I had it originally was to mess around with this lady I knew who had a boyfriend. Either way, it was fairly easy to navigate and the whole hidden number thing made it ideal for playing the field.
In truth I preferred Whatsapp. I don’t necessarily use it to talk to women or anything but to talk with people throughout the world, I value the simplicity all the more and the group chat feature has been ideal to getting people of common interests together, especially those who don’t know each other initially. Also whenever someone is removed or added to a chat, they have no knowledge of what came before their entry. This is helpful since it is hard to tell who may or may not agree. No issues talking to friends in China or U.K. either, although it seems Asians have their own preference of WeChat.
Telegram may have an edge in the future since sharing files on Whatsapp tends to make it’s way into eating your data. If you avoid the media file downloads, Whatsapp is superior with WeChat as a distant next if you are dating Asians.
Good to see you can think this through rationally. Everyone else here wants to ride a horse drawn buggy while you and I are cruising in saloon cars…
free international texts and pics are a bonus, yes. And WeChat is not only a messaging service for Asians, it’s become a de facto substitute facebook for Chinese users since they can’t easily use the real thing behind the great firewall of China.
You can sign into Whatsapp from a PC. Just type web.whatsapp.com. After that you need to scan a code on your smartphone and you are up and running.
Problem is, it still uses your phone to send and receive messages, where telegram web app uses the connection of your computer.
Man, times are just leaving me behind. The only thing I got out of that is, I already kind of sort of know what skype is. The rest of it is just Mongolian to me. I’m an easy target for Russian hackers….or I would be if I had anything interesting to hack as I have never taken any nekkid pictures or been involved in any criminal activity, not any that was profitable anyway.
Smoke signals could cover most of my messaging needs.
.Testing
Pretty sure that whenever “the news” recommends a service, it’s basically a data mining/crowd sourced intel gathering move… just like that week when all tv, radio and internet news outlets were simultaneously flooded about Facebook and EVERYONE signed up.
It was obvious from the get go… then when the film came out to give it a credible back story, (after question started being raised) it just reinforced the fact that it’s an intel and marketing tool.
How about NOT using this trash?
Signal is what Snowden recommended and there is another one i think it’s called wckr (as in wicker).
I agree that the smart phone disease – especially text chat is a corruption of communication and gradually leads to a total loss of humanity and a state of affairs where no one dare talk to anyone directly… hide behind the safety and ubiquity of your text chat – which is btw the most inefficient form of communication… slowly thumb type… wait for the person to respond and then thumb type some more… .it’s a high speed version of 18th century mail… .that’s all it is…. the telephone was better and quicker more than 50 years ago.
That’s bollocks mate. I for one hate phone calls. They are inconvenient and time consuming. Why go to the bother of making a phone call when you can just send off a message in a heartbeat?
As for the loss of humanity… I think that’s something that only exists in your head. You can live in the past if you want but you’ll wind up like my grandmother unable to work a smartphone or a tablet. She makes the same complaints as you by the way. In the meantime I’ll be moving forward with humanity.
If you are going to use any of these messaging apps, Wickr is by far the most secure in terms of encyption and messages themselves destructing after a period of time. Worth a look – surprised Quintus Curtius didn’t know about it.
Also, you can use Whatsapp from your browser – try whatsapp web to see what I mean. Yes, you have to sign in using your phone (via a QR code), and yes, it will sometimes disconnect if your computer goes to sleep, but overall it’s a handy feature. Just not enough people using Telegram to justify any perceived advantage.
Nobody stops you from still using one of these:
http://oldphone.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/old-phone.jpg
The fact that there aren’t many of them around might be an issue.
Or its modern equivalent, the crappy £20 burner Nokia phone combined with an anonymously-bought pay-as-you-go sim card and top-up. All bought with cash, of course. Use it for whatever, then throw it away when you’re done.
Aside from its advantages when it comes to privacy, the battery in one of them can last for a week on full charge while you’d be lucky to get a day out of a modern smartphone.
I’m making over $7k four weeks doing work part time . I kept hearing other human beings inform me the amount of money they can gain internet based hence I agreed to find out it . Perfectly , this was all real so has totally changed my everyday living . This is where i started>>>
-> START WORKING IMMEDIATELY!!!! <-
Yeah whats the fucking point of sending someone a message?
Instant communication? Hogwash. Tell the butler to fetch my pigeon and a fresh quill.
I still use a pager and a pay phone.
I prefer LINE. The massive range of pictures make it fun to use. They had free voice calls for years while Whatsapp just got it recently. LINE uses less bandwidth on calls compare to Whatsapp. They also have cheap international calls. LINE just released gif (animated) profile pics.
Only teenage girls are impressed by emoticons and stickers to make chat “fun”.
I must have been a teenage girl in one of my previous lives 😉
😅😅😅
I have to say, I find LINE fucking annoying. Its for children.
Read article, realize both apps are relatively useless, gimmicks trying to replace basic text services. Realize I am neither a spy, or GOV official. So nothing I text is of any importance to a hacker.
Shrug and realize I just wasted precious minutes I could have been using to send dick picks instead of reading this article.
If you haven’t used it then you are just talking out your dick pics. Privacy issue aside.
What about bot platform of Telegram? There are plenty amount of useful bots that can be accessed right from the chat (or group chat) has a friendly API and growing a lot since it has been released. What about stickers in telegram and especially the feature to add a new one from images right from the images? What about telegraph feature of Telegram that can preview articles from popular resources like Medium or TechCrunch pretty smooth. This whole article covers really small part of the current features of the messengers.
I used telegram for work, considering the user is not yet much so it is quite quiet XD
However in my opinion the best part is it’s API, enabling integrations with several apps. I integrate it with Trello so updates can be fed to telegram
You can always go with your own solutions.
Back before anyone had encrypted mailboxes, PGP (“Pretty Good Privacy”) let you share an encryption key with your friends and send encrypted messages that were pretty hard (but not impossible) to crack.
I am not saying that this is an ideal solution, by any means. But there is always a way to add your own layer of privacy to something. Even a small thing can be tremendously powerful.
Most computer encryptions are actually just long chains of very simple things. Simple addition, simple swaps, simple rotations, and the like stacked together and protected by a key of some kind becomes unbelievably difficult to crack. So, even if you were just to put a classic Caesar cipher on your messages (shift all the letters a bit to one direction or another), you can make your messages even more difficult to decipher.
With telegram I can send 1gb movie or 50 pictures in a batch. Any kind of documents and so on. Not only 10 pics or a short movie or pdf
Edward Snowden recommended a messaging app called Signal. Supposedly the best security-wise.
I have yet to hear any compelling reasons or explanation as to why I need to suddenly stop using the texting service that comes with my phone and replace it with some app that does the same thing. I just don’t get it. I find it hard to believe a girl who gives me some account username for an app instead of her actual number is really serious anyway. If it’s about security I highly doubt some app officially distributed from the app store is going to protect me. I’m not going to juggle half a dozen fucking messaging apps and accounts just to appease paranoid female skittishness either.
Whatsapp actually works internationally, android default text is very bad internationally, especially pics and video. There are many other benefits also. I don’t care to explain it to you. What do I get? Nothing. If you haven’t tried whatsapp you don’t know what you are talking about.
Thanks for this. I wondered what Telegram is. Hopefully it will continue to grow and become a real alternative.
The majority of Telegram users are Iranian from what I know. In Iran they used to use Viber a long time ago but the connection issues were too much after a while. They still Viber for phone calls. Hardly anyone uses Whatsapp there since connections are an issue. A lot of that may have to do with governmental blocking of certain apps/sites. Literally almost everyone uses Telegram in the entire country. From little old ladies to little kids with cell phones. The messaging capability is solid there and connections are reliable with that app. But all people use it for are sending garbage and useless pics and trash they find online. Mass mind-control isn’t just in the US with Facebook and Instagram, etc.
I’ve been to 30 countries this year and the bulk of women use Whatsapp and it’s the perfect transition from tinder to getting a phone number.
The only country I’ve found to really use Viber still is in Ukraine. Whatsapp is still favored there among most of the women I’ve encountered, but about a quarter of them still say “No have whatapp. Have viber”…..
In the US, I get girls wanting to text with Snapchat. Which makes me look like a loser since I rarely use it. And it gives a low “rating” on my profile since I hardly use it. So it makes me look low-value. Luckily the Snapchat request is usually only with young girls in their early to mid twenties. Occasionally I come across an older girl (late 20s-early 30s) using Snapchat, and I’ve always found something majorly wrong with them later on, and the bang had been extra difficult to get.
I hate all these apps. Overseas it’s helps with girls so that’s my only use for them. In the US I prefer standard texting. But I feel like lately it’s been looking “weird” to younger girls that I want to text instead of using apps (especially Snapchat in the scenario mentioned above). Seems like regular texting is soon becoming the VHS tape of communication, right after the beta tape– a phone call.
Signal is anonymous. They refused to give the government information when they received a subpoena, and they’re still operating.