Instead of Telegram People Should Use Free Software (Telegram Was Always Unsafe for Use)
Having just mentioned new changes at Telegram, we sort of forgot or missed an opportunity to promote decent alternatives. Mumble is for voice chat with text on the side, but more suitable or equivalent tools exist, such as Jami [1, 2].
"The post forgot to mention that Telegram is proprietary and that the company has full access to all data transmitted via it," an associate said. "Like the phone that "Anom" replaced."
"Anom was owned top to bottom by the FBI who actually ran the company in secret*. The circumstances under which that arose match those around Telegram now almost to a tee."
I myself host Murmur (for Mumble) from home and I know some who do the same. It works for me.
Signal aficionados, be alert and wary. It's not quite what it's sold as. As the associate said:
Signal has limited privacy and is tied to a real phone number and thus to a real account via a real credit card or other monitored payment method. Jami sucked too much when I last checked it. Mumble would work but has no real mobile client. There is an unmaintained one of unknown provenance.BigBlueButton and Jitsi-Meet would work but they are browser based and the authorities have compromised the CA network.
Thus the antipathy against signing your own certificates instead of using third party certificates.
Anyway, all mention of Telegram must be accompanied by the observation that the server end is 100% proprietary and thus not secure and, presumably, always (and already) compromised.
Jitsi used to be good but it was discontinued and the name sold to the company playing with what is now Jitsi-Meet.
"Modern" so-called 'smart' 'phones' are compromised at the OS level or baseband side (they're easy to take over), so any time any application (or "app") is used on them the microphone should be presumed compromised along with everything else. Software (malware) companies like Cellebrite and tools like Pegasus or FinFisher ought to have dispelled any expectation of privacy on "mobile" or "cellphones".
The state of privacy-preserving communication isn't good and it's intentionally this way; if not by design, then by vandalism (constant efforts to undermine what still works). █
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* Many reports and official pages about it, even some from 2024, e.g. (images are clickable, leading to the source)
