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I assume that Meta has a backdoor into WhatsApp conversations

They don't need a back door when they control the front door: the app. End-to-end encryption doesn't protect the endpoints.

(In other words, your concern is warranted.)

You're absolutely right. End-to-end encryption protects message content, but WhatsApp still collects metadata, which is incredibly valuable.

Even though they can't read your messages, they know who you talk to, how often, when, and for how long. They also track your device info, IP address (which can reveal your location), network details, and app usage patterns.

And this data isn’t just sitting there—Meta uses it. For example, if you chat with a business on WhatsApp, you might start seeing ads for that business on Instagram or Facebook. They don’t need to read your messages when they can infer so much just from how you use the app.

Disclaimer: Comment translated from Spanish and corrected by Chat GPT.

Even though they can't read your messages

I've long wondered if this is actually true.

If I have a closed-source app and claim (and can verify!) E2EE, surely I could still read every message from my closed-source app, within the app itself, and you'd never know.

I've never been a mobile app developer but I've been a desktop and web developer since the 90s so I don't know what apps can and cannot see but in a desktop app or web app, if it's on the screen, it's decrypted and I can put code in to read/steal it.

Am I missing something here?

At about 2:33:15 here, Zuckerberg somewhat alludes that Meta can take screenshots of WhatsApp messages.

https://youtu.be/7k1ehaE0bdU?t=9189

Does it even need to be screenshots?

Surely when I open up a chat in Whatsapp it would be as easy as doing a foreach on every msgElement.text value on screen and copying it to the mothership in plain text. After all, when I am reading them, they're decrypted.

Or, when I send a message, as soon as I press the "Send" button, send a copy to the mothership.

Perhaps I'm not seeing it right but it must be this simple. Right?

At least with an open source app you can inspect the "Send" code and see if it calls "SendToMothership" when it also calls "SendToRecipient".

What I got from your comment and from that interview were very different. He starts that bit with “when I text you on WhatsApp”. The “we” refers to Mark and Joe (Alice and Bob), not Meta (Eve).

It's true in a sense - using an iPhone or an Android phone Apple/Google could be streaming your screen contents constantly, so even e2ee wouldn't help.

I just don't know if that is actually true, or if meta doing e2ee and then pinging your messages around from the app after they're delivered is true. I've no reason to believe either is.

And the default/largest homeserver, matrix.org, uses cloudflare, so all your data belongs to them as well.

It is disappointing that they use Cloudflare, especially since most Matrix metadata hasn't yet been moved to the end-to-end encrypted channel.

(Arathorn: is e2ee metadata still on the roadmap?)

But no, not all your data is exposed. The e2ee parts, like message content in encrypted rooms, are opaque to Cloudflare.

yup, encrypted metadata is very much on the roadmap. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/425... is one of the more recent proposals for it.

Self-hosted Matrix with all the bridges is awesome and brings back that Pidgin/Adium life of one chat app for all of my friends. Too bad Apple has an uncanny ability to avoid consequences with iMessage.

It's wonderful that it seems work well for you but my experience in bridging group chats with XMPP or IRC was terrible. Lost messages, bridge crashes, puppet accounts getting randomly broken/duplicated with discarded messages.

From the bridges I've run, only the Telegram bridge is somewhat stable for me but it also has it's warts.

Might be different if you run a strictly personal server for 1:1 conversations but I'd say from an ux perspective the bridges idea largely failed IMHO.

I don't think it's the fault of element/matrix it's a difficult problem and I guess with limited resources they made a lot of progress and made things possible that weren't before but it's not plug and play, at least it wasn't for me.

In general I've found it's also difficult to communicate in group chats if there are two worlds with a slightly different view (missing reactions, some elements of the messenger are not supported like captions, polls and so on...)

While I generally agree, the slidge bridge for XMPP has been working quite well for me, especially whatsapp, but it is really new.

slidge bridge

Didn't knew about this one. Thanks I'm looking into it!

Signal doesn't have a web interface, but being able to use a desktop app is OK for me.

The big downside for me is not being able to use it on two devices. All the other services, privacy concerns or not can now do this. It's one reason why I stopped donating to / advocating for signal.

Settings -> linked devices?

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007320551-Li...

This lets you use the desktop application and a phone at the same time, which I use.

It doesn't allow you to use multiple phones at the same time.

It's something I've just recently run into trying to set it up on an Android tablet. The funny thing is they allow it on an iPad. It'd be great if they allowed just any phone or tablet to link to the primary device. I'd complain but it's been deaf ears for the last 4 years to get them to put gifs back into the desktop app.

Thanks I didn't know that

You mean you access all these on Matrix/Element via the bridge? Or you actually mean you convinced all of them to ditch their chat apps and migrate to Matrix, or at least install Element as well in addition to the other ones? It’s a feat if it’s the latter without or without ditching. Is this a very privacy conscious demographic?

Wasn't there a big falling out between the Matrix team and Element or am I misremembering what happened?

Element is the company formed by the team who created Matrix to work on Matrix, almost all of whom are still there; there is no falling out :)

The Matrix Foundation is the non-profit set up by the Matrix team in 2018 to keep Matrix itself independent of Element and other Matrix vendors - to act as a steward of the protocol and a standards body. Originally Element donated almost all of its code on Matrix to the Foundation (e.g. Synapse, the original Matrix server) as permissive Apache-licensed FOSS, assuming that if Matrix was successful, folks would want to fund it.

In practice, by 2023, Matrix was very successful... but it transpired that the vast majority of folks commercially building on the Foundation's Apache licensed code failed to route any funding back to the Foundation (as the hosting body) or to Element (as the primary code contributor), despite many polite requests. As a result, there wasn't enough $ to pay folks at Element to keep working on the core Matrix projects as their day job. So, to keep the lights on, Element stopped donating their work to the Foundation, and changed license to non-permissive AGPLv3 in order to sell AGPL-exceptions to the folks commercialising it. This has helped the situation somewhat (although Element isn't at breakeven yet). Meanwhile, it's left the Foundation focused on governance, the Matrix standards process, trust & safety and hosting core libraries like E2EE and matrix-rust-sdk.

There's no beef between the Foundation and Element over this. In a utopia the projects would certainly have stayed as Apache licensed code in the Foundation - but then again, other standards bodies like W3C or XSF don't publish code these days: it's a phase that a given protocol grows out of once third party organisations get busy building implementations.

Disclaimer: i'm conflicted on this, being project lead/co-founder for Matrix, and then CEO/CTO at Element.

I say this all the time, but the point of the permissive licenses is you're making a donation to private industry.

There are reasons to do this, for example if you believe that private industry adopting some technology is good and you want to make that happen.

But people keep seeming surprised by the fact that these donations aren't reciprocated (or at least people don't seem to plan for them to never be reciprocated). It sounds to me like the AGPL license was more consistent with their goals.

Not quite. The point of permissive licenses is that you're making a donation to everyone. If private industry uses your donation fine, if not that's fine too. But it's certainly true that if you have a problem with private industry using something you freely gave them, permissive licenses aren't for you.

If you wanted to make a donation to everyone, you'd use a copyleft license.

The point of permissive licenses is to grant the ability to exclude people from the enjoying the benefit of improvements.

I.e. they're not for creating public goods. They're grants for making it easier to create excludable goods.

The point of permissive licenses is to grant the ability to exclude people from the enjoying the benefit of improvements.

I find this comment to be incredibly disingenuous, and just plain false.

Excluding people would only be done if someone took a permissive license and then re-licensed it to something more closed... you've entirely made up a malicious assumption about what people do with the software. And you're even assuming people ARE doing something like this with the software.

A permissive license simply lets you do just about anything you want with it. Some will agree this is more "free". But, freedom TO vs freedom FROM is a common argument.

You don't need to re-license permissively licensed software to include it in your code.

Apple, as far as I know, doesn't release the FreeBSD fork they use in Mac OS.

Companies generally use a ton of permissively licensed software and don't release forks of it under any license because the entire point of the license is that you can take the code, make modifications, and you have no obligations to give anything back when doing so.

There was an attempt to rebrand "free software" -- meaning software focused on user freedom -- as "open source" -- referring to software permissively licensed for use by corporations. This was the point of the OSI. [0]

The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code....The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.” Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term “open source”, originally suggested by Christine Peterson.

So literally a decision by a committee of industry folks to play down the idea of freedoms or giving back and focus instead on the business case.

So they killed the ethical argument that favored copyleft licenses in favor of the business argument that favored permissive ones.

Now people are saying "hey it's unfair that you're not giving back." Fair enough, but that's an ethical argument. That's what the OSI was trying to get rid of.

The OSI approach has its place. We wouldn't have Mac OS or Google or Meta without it. But its place is allowing industry to standardize and to reduce costs. Those benefit consumers indirectly since we have fewer competing standards and reduced development costs can imply reduced end user costs. But that only works because each company can make improvements and exclude others from using those improvements; i.e. they can make proprietary improvements.

[0] https://opensource.org/history

You don't need to re-license permissively licensed software to include it in your code.

If the project you include it in does not use the same license, then I think you are technically re-licensing it.

But either way, I don't see how the rest of your comment applies to what I said.

Wake up. That's what's happening to your gifts you released under permissive licenses. Enterprises like AWS, Apple etc. build their business on them and don't want to give anything back.

I know that's what is happening, and they are fully within their rights to do so when I use a permissive license. If people are using a permissive license and then getting upset that others are 'stealing without giving back', well, then they chose the wrong license in the first place.

I find this comment to be incredibly disingenuous, and just plain false.

I wonder if there will be any justification for this remark :-)

Excluding people would only be done if someone took a permissive license and then re-licensed it to something more closed

Yes, that is the only way they can be distinguished. If nobody ever distributes proprietary software including the permissively-licensed code, then it might as well be copylefted.

you've entirely made up a malicious assumption about what people do with the software. And you're even assuming people ARE doing something like this with the software.

I think this is your point of departure with reality. This happens constantly! Anyone who ever includes permissively licensed code in a proprietary codebase is denying the users of that codebase from the freedoms the upstream developers gave them. The freedom to do this is the freedom to withhold rights from other people. You can choose not to care about that, if you want. But that's what is happening.

I think we need to distinguish using and abusing. IMO a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.

When corporations utilize the code and make a good faith effort to contribute back something, no matter how trivial, they are using the source.

Just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right and I feel confident given the current state of the world saying that we should start expecting more from corporations. The idea “they only exist to make money” is how you break the social contract.

a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.

What I'm saying is that's the point of the license. That's why universities use the licenses (e.g. MIT, Berkeley) and why Apache uses it. They're designed to stimulate the private sector by moving IP from research into industry (universities) or by industries pooling resources to make software purchases cheaper (Apache).

I don't think it makes sense to describe using them in this way as abusive or bad faith.

IMO a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.

I don't agree. Releasing under a permissive license is explicitly saying "dDo what you want with this, including using it commercially without giving back". And if you're saying that, you can't cry "abuse" when someone does exactly what you told them they could do. Because that's what you've done: the license terms explicitly say that.

"Legal" has nothing to do with it; if you want other people to have to contribute their changes publicly, you use a copyleft license. If you don't care, you use a permissive license, and then there's no such thing as "abuse", as long as people follow the letter of the license.

FWIW I think AGPL is the right license choice for you. The more experience I gain the more I lean toward AGPL for products, MIT for libraries.

I don't think there's anything wrong with permissive license for a piece of software. But if you're running a business that needs to pay developers, it's really not a good idea. Very few, if any, people are going to donate to your project out of a sense of duty to help you keep the lights on.

I don't disagree, but I think the bigger risk is just that big companies who can and should throw some financial support your way, just won't if it's permissively licensed. They've demonstrated repeatedly that they'll just take the software and use it, including making (sometimes substantial) money on it, and none of that will flow back up.

The LGPL hits the sweet spot for libraries in my opinion.

I understand now. Thanks for clearing that up for me.

There are ways to get web interfaces for Signal.

But I think the bigger issue is that any platform that controls the javascript sent to you from a web page, can also backdoor/MITM/inject malicious code at any time without you knowing.

You should not use it ! Xmpp is the answer with its few issues and matrix requires hell of system resources as well.

For me the issue was contact names tbh. Is that solved? It used to be that the contact name was set by the contact and not by me/my address book.

lol Telegram

Did I miss something? what's wrong with telegram?

I'll tell you what's right about Telegram: I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat application in 2025.

I maintain that someone should fork their codebase and bolt on a different backend (Signal, Matrix, whatever). It's right there and it's very, very good.

(Yes, I know it's not as simple as "bolt on a different backend". You know what I mean.)

I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat application in 2025.

Precisely because they don't spend so much effort for privacy. If your server can read all your messages, it's suddenly easier to provide great features. For instance, GMail can add your next hotel stay to your calendar automatically because it has access to your emails. That's great UX, but poor privacy.

This is not entirely true. For example, Calendar.app does the same by locally extracting the .ics out of Mail.app without ever sending anything to Apple.

I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy, but they do seem to start with UX then do what's needed to support it. That does give them an edge. (Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good.)

This is not entirely true.

My point is that it's generally harder to add those features in a privacy-preserving way. GMail couldn't do it if it couldn't read the content of the emails, period. It doesn't mean that there is no way to have nice features in a privacy-preserving way. I just said it's harder (sometimes impossible).

I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy

Not exclusively, but it is obviously a lot easier! Take a web client: if the server has access to the data, your client can just fetch it. If the server doesn't even know about the existence of the group, that's harder. Why do you think only the "secret chats" are E2EE in Telegram (and those don't support groups)?

then do what's needed to support it

What do they do to support privacy? They don't have E2EE except in the secret chats! That hasn't changed in a decade!

Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good

This keeps getting further from what I said :). Of course, it's possible to do worse than Telegram!

This is such an odd comment.

What on earth makes you think that the same engineers responsible for fluid and smooth UI/UX are the ones who’d ever influence the cryptography/privacy/security? Whether or not the chats are encrypted has zero to do with this.

Telegram has almost universally smooth scrolling, things work well across platforms, it’s native pretty much everywhere with low memory usage and mostly platform specific behaviors. Signal half asses this, and Element is… shoddy, at best, in comparison.

Unless you're extremely privileged, privacy does play a role in every feature. There is no user experience if you're imprisoned for speaking your mind and your government intelligence has pwned Telegram servers.

Making a smooth app isn't that hard. Inventing the cryptographic protocols to enable group management without server-side control, and proving their security is the hard part. Something Telegram's developers haven't the faintest idea of how to do.

People communicated via unencrypted phone calls and SMS and other unencrypted mediums for decades so you might just be massively overstating the importance of E2E message encryption for an average person.

That was the time before we lived our half of our social lives online in group chats and social media.

My calls and texts used to be about me agreeing with my buddies when to hang out. They weren't nearly as private as me keeping in touch with buddies I rarely see IRL, online.

Also, there was a period of transition. Had I known the MSN messenger was completely unencrypted, in that everyone, not just Microsoft, could listen in, I might have felt my privacy violated. I sure as hell feel that in hindsight.

What the hell was MSN messenger plaintext over unencrypted transport? I'm genuinely shocked, I didn't know! I naively assumed it was at least encrypted to Microsoft. But now that you say it, it makes sense...

Also feels like missed opportunities :D.

The world has been changing a lot over those decades, and the technological and surveillance capabilities of state actors (and malicious, non-state actors, for that matter) has increased dramatically. Not needing E2EE a few decades ago has nothing to do with whether or not we need it now.

And how exactly has that surveillance changed the life of an average westerner?

The world was fine without Internet for most of its history. What's your point?

Unless you're extremely privileged, privacy does play a role in every feature.

No, dude. Come on - you really think that plays a role in how smooth a listview renders? Or whether it follows the correct tab focus order? I don't think I could be more clear about what I'm saying in my last comment. Their client side app is incredibly smooth and well built. Signal, Element, etc do not stack up.

Making a smooth app isn't that hard.

Yes, it surprisingly is. Multiple chat apps in 2025 still fail at this.

Inventing the cryptographic protocols to enable group management without server-side control, and proving their security is the hard part. Something Telegram's developers haven't the faintest idea of how to do.

This isn't even in the realm of what my point was.

Come on - you really think that plays a role in how smooth a listview renders?

That's not a feature. Stickers is a feature. Calls are a feature. Messages are a feature. Group chats are a feature. Group video calls are a feature. Link thumbnails are a feature. Forwarding messages is a feature.

Their client side app is incredibly smooth and well built.

Yes, and the Trojan horse was so beautiful John Oliver would totally have hit on it.

Telegram UI is fine, I'll give you that. But it was created at the expense of designing the app private. Move fast yolo security isn't the justification.

They'd have to re-design the protocol from scratch to make it E2EE by default. Hell, you can't even get feature parity with secret chats. E.g., stickers do not work.

Signal might not have every bell and whistle like pinned messages, but when it eventually does, I will know it's done with proper privacy design.

I get that your point is to bore exclusively in the UI/UX with, admiring the forest from the trees. I'm saying the true beauty is with the ridiculously seamless and easy to use end-to-end encryption for everything Signal provides. Both phone app, and all desktop apps stay in sync, all 1:1 chats are E2EE and they are available on all platforms, unlike Telegram where they're limited to phone only. All group chats are E2EE and they're available on all platform, unlike Telegram that doesn't have E2EE for group chats. All chats are E2EE by default, unlike Telegram where no chat is E2EE.

Privacy and security are integral part of every feature. Everything else is a footgun. Arguing about how well the footgun is polished, doesn't make it any less of a footgun.

Signal has over time polished its secure features.

Telegram isn't in the process of securing it's polished turd of a protocol.

privacy does play a role in every feature

It really depends. People discuss and communicate in public channels like IRC or Discord.

A large chunk of chatting is shitposting with anonymous identity.

Secure chat is only needed in some scenarios.

What on earth makes you think that the same engineers responsible for fluid and smooth UI/UX are the ones who’d ever influence the cryptography/privacy/security?

Did you even read my comment? I gave an example of how privacy directly impacts UX: GMail couldn't automatically add your events to your calendar if it could not read the content of your emails. I never talked about engineers, just the technical reality. If you don't have it, you can't read it. That seemed absolutely obvious to me: the best UX for a car would be one that doesn't need a source of energy, fits in my pockets and instantly teleports me anywhere I want. Go ask your engineers to make a car that allows that perfect UX, and see how they react.

Telegram has no E2EE except for the secret chats. Last time I checked, the secret chats were not synchronized between devices (i.e. the privacy has an obvious impact on the UX).

So no, I don't think it was an odd comment. It just feels like you don't know how it works technically.

Did you even read my comment?

I'm not even sure you read mine.

It just feels like you don't know how it works technically.

You're disregarding what I've said and trying to have a different discussion. Please pay attention.

I am not discussing - nor do I consider it relevant to my point - privacy/security/etc contexts for Telegram's client side applications. Whether or not it's encrypted has zero to do with how smooth and well built a chat UI is. I am commenting on the frontend client side engineering and how Telegram has, hands down, the best implementation. Other apps need to catch up.

Whether or not it's encrypted has zero to do with how smooth and well built a chat UI is.

Ok, let's talk with concrete examples.

1. Say you open the Signal Desktop app: either you don't get the history of the messages, or you need to wait a fairly long time for them to arrive. With Telegram, you get the whole history immediately. Does that count as "smooth and unrelated to encryption" to you?

2. Say you send a message to a group on Telegram and on Signal/Element. On Telegram you see that the message was received noticeably faster than on the others. Does that count as "smooth and unrelated to encryption" to you?

3. Let's talk about GIFs and stickers: I'm sure Telegram has many more than e.g. Signal. Is that something you consider when you say Telegram has a better implementation and it is unrelated to the privacy concerns?

4. Telegram has bots that enable a lot of feature. Does that count?

You're telling me that for the stuff that isn't impacted by privacy concerns, Telegram is better. You seem very sure of that, and maybe that's right. But can you give concrete examples? Because until now, what I've been reading from you is that the UI/UX is not impacted by the privacy, and this is obviously wrong.

So let me ask this: would you agree that at least some UI/UX is impacted by the privacy concerns?

Every single point that you want to try here has nothing to do with implementing a smooth scrolling, buttery UI/UX of a chat application. Please stop moving the goalposts if you want to actually discuss this.

I also frankly don't even get what you're trying to say with point 1, because Signal loads messages instantly for me on Desktop. There's zero delay. The UI/UX of the scrolling and chat display is the problem.

what I've been reading from you is that the UI/UX is not impacted by the privacy, and this is obviously wrong

It is not obviously wrong, and you've done nothing but attempt to loop the conversation back to some level of privacy/encryption/etc. These things do not matter in this conversation, full stop.

This (my thread, not the greater thread we're in) is a design and frontend implementation discussion, not a privacy/security discussion. If that is not clear to you, I don't know what to say anymore.

This (my thread, not the greater thread we're in)

Well, you're answering to my thread, if we go like this. Where I said that one reason the UX is better in Telegram is that they don't care about privacy.

Every single point that you want to try here has nothing to do with implementing a smooth scrolling, buttery UI/UX of a chat application.

Then we fundamentally disagree on what UX means. If it takes 2 days to receive a message because a human has to check that it is not spam, wouldn't you say that it's bad UX? Or is "scrolling" the only thing that you put into "UI/UX"? Do you actually know what UI/UX is?

It is not obviously wrong, and you've done nothing but attempt to loop the conversation back to some level of privacy/encryption/etc.

Because that's my goddamn point from the beginning on. Privacy has an impact on UX (which means "user experience", by the way), period.

If that is not clear to you, I don't know what to say anymore.

Same here. You don't seem to understand how privacy works technically, and you don't seem to understand what UI/UX means.

These things do not matter in this conversation

The largest UX hit is when launching a client after it's been powered off for a while.

Telegram uses a symmetric session key. The client can with SINGLE AES-IGE decryption operation decrypt a massive packet containing every message received to every non-secret chat.

Signal uses Diffie-Hellman ratchet or SCIMP ratchet for every received message. That means there's X25519 and AES-CBC involved for every message. It is not, and will never be as fast as Telegram's insecure approach.

Thus the security design will absolutely affect the smoothness of the experience.

But Signal has blazing fast search function since it's local only. Telegram's search functionality freezes when you go over the server's chat history cache limit, to try to find years old posts.

The UI/UX of the scrolling and chat display is the problem.

My desktop computer loads messages from my Signal history as fast as I can scroll my mouse.

My cheap smart phone loads messages from my Signal history as fast as I can swipe my fingers.

You can solve this with faster hardware.

Telegram certainly has an excellent UI/UX. On the Element side, its quality bar has very much been the target for Element X - and (in my biased opinion) we are getting very close, if not exceeding it in some places. For instance, we just landed The Event Cache in Element X and matrix-rust-sdk (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/3280 - closed 2 days ago after a year of solid work), which provides seamless offline support and local encrypted-at-rest caching of the messages it's seen, which in turn then makes the native SwiftUI and jetpack-compose UIs go brrrrrr.

its quality bar has very much been the target for Element X

I sincerely hope you get there, but it's really hard to believe it at the moment. You're not even at feature parity with the app (Element vs Element X) you're replacing, and it's been out for a bit now.

i.e, you have significant user experience related features that keep people using Element (open graph previews, just to name one).

Arathorn I'm a bit confused that Element pushes Element X so much already when your own Element One service doesn't support it yet?

It's just because all the effort has gone into EX over the last ~2 years, and it's a way way way better app (even if it doesn't have threads/spaces yet).

Meanwhile, Element One will support it shortly - the missing piece was MAS in production, which is now happening on matrix.org as per the OP.

I assume it's the lack of end-to-end encryption by default on basic features.

Good service btw, but not the best from a privacy point of view.

Besides that there it's also them choosing to roll their own crypto instead of using established cyphers and protocols.

And every time someone makes this comment. MTProto 2 uses standard crypto primitives. Besides this, do you know who else rolled their own crypto? Moxie. You don't get to roll your own crypto first and then weaponize this against your opponents but that's exactly what he did along with abusing words like "plaintext" to describe any encryption not E2EE.

AES-IGE is not best practice. Neither is this https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/telegram-ecdh/

The difference is Moxie isn't an amateur when it comes to cryptographic design. Wikipedia actually lists him as a cryptographer. The company has also employed an actual mathematician/cryptographer, Trevor Perrin.

Meanwhile, Telegram employed the CEO's brother who's a geometrician, which is not the same. You wouldn't hire a dentist to perform brain surgery even though both studied medicine.

Signal protocol's double ratchet is considered best practice by pretty much every competent cryptographer.

MTProto's main issues are not the teething issues of the yester-years. It's the fact every chat is sent to the server that can then read the messages. Telegram only has E2EE in internet debates about it's non-existent E2EE in practice.

Are you aware the article you link to technically critiques MTProto 1, including links to web archives of the MTProto 1 docs?

MTProto's main issues are not the teething issues of the yester-years. It's the fact every chat is sent to the server that can then read the messages. Telegram only has E2EE in internet debates about it's non-existent E2EE in practice.

Telegram does in fact have E2EE available in the form of Secret Chats, so that's just an incorrect statement from you.

Regardless, that wasn't what I was rebutting. If anyone is going to have a reasonable debate about Telegram's problems, at least do so reasonably, without resorting to well-worn and facile language invented by the person who has the most to gain from its use. Moxie is not at all innocent in any of this and I'm glad he's no longer involved with Signal, which I use every day.

Telegram does in fact have E2EE available in the form of Secret Chats, so that's just an incorrect statement from you.

But if you turn that on, other features turn off.

Exactly. I have friends that outright refuse to use secret chats because stickers are so important to them. They literally have said to my face "stickers > human right to privacy".

Telegram E2EE only 1:1 that is opt-in vs Signal E2EE everything by default.

Its clear which is an actually private chat app. Defaults matter

Are you aware the article you link to technically critiques MTProto 1, including links to web archives of the MTProto 1 docs?

Yes, but surely you realize a competent cryptographer wouldn't have implemented a backdoor looking design in the first place?

Telegram does in fact have E2EE available in the form of Secret Chats, so that's just an incorrect statement from you.

No it's 100% correct and you just made my point for me.

1. Secret chats are not used by default, meaning most of users don't even know about it.

2. Secret chats are not available for group chats, not even small ones that have reasonable expectation for privacy.

3. Secret chats are not available for desktop chats, so you can not really use them seamlessly. I've spent six hours in front of my computer today. My phone is 30cm from my left hand. And I absolutely can't be arsed to pick it up every time my friend would send me a secret chat. Telegram's backdoor works exactly this way. They know I'm lazy. They make it my fault. Whereas with Signal, I can just alt-tab into the chats and reply there.

When I said Telegram only has E2EE in internet debates, that means people like you who love to point out it's technically there, but who also fail to understand what it takes for such feature to be even used on a daily basis.

facile language invented by the person who has the most to gain from its use.

I've been criticizing Telegram for over a decade now. You trying to make it sound like it's Moxie who's the devil pulling all the strings and making my arguments for me, makes you look like an astroturfer employed by Telegram: https://tsf.telegram.org/

When I said Telegram only has E2EE in internet debates, that means people like you who love to point out it's technically there, but who also fail to understand what it takes for such feature to be even used on a daily basis.

But you are being dishonest when you make an incorrect statement like this. Don't do that.

EDIT:

makes you look like an astroturfer employed by Telegram: https://tsf.telegram.org/

I just read the linked page through: this is a request for volunteers to answer support questions for Telegram. How did you make the mental leap from a request for support volunteers to recruitment ad for astroturfers?

The content is lies. E.g.

https://tsf.telegram.org/manuals/e2ee-simple#are-cloud-chats...

Talks about "unique distributed architecture" which I have debunked here

https://security.stackexchange.com/a/243172

When people parrot those lies, they're being useful idiots, which Russia has used for ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot Durov is trained in information warfare and propaganda https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/technology/once-celebrate... He knows what he's doing.

You've gone way off base here and have made a colorful array of unfounded accusations, including strongly hinting I must be part of an astroturfing brigade, that Secret Chats only available on mobile devices constitutes an intentional "backdoor", that I am a "useful idiot", that for the purposes of internet argumentation E2EE chats don't actually exist, etc.

What I asked you to do was to stop misrepresenting your own bizarre theories as fact and stop linking microblog posts and blog posts describing vulnerabilities of a completely rewritten protocol that have nothing to do with its current. That is dishonest and not a reasonable basis for any argument.

There are many ways of honestly portraying the problems of Telegram without resorting to false inventions, such as its immense problem of spam and ads and the fact that E2EE is not available across all devices and for group chats.

Yeah ok I reviewed some of your post history and figured this isn't the first time you're being called out for your opinions. You've been downvoted about this topic for the past several years. It's not even the first time we two are having this discussion. You obviously aren't someone who changes their mind when presented with arguments so it makes zero sense to continue. Take care my weird Russian oligarch defending Dane.

https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by...

It's nice to see their reasoning, but the issue remains: Telegram can read most direct messages (because almost no one uses private chats) and everything sent in groups.

It's a good service and in some cases it can compete with Matrix, Signal, etc, but most direct chats and all groups have no privacy from Telegram (and anyone with access to their servers).

https://telegra.ph/Why-you-should-stop-reading-Durovs-blog-p...

What a bizarre explanation. Element does E2EE just fine, with the caveat that you have to record your own encryption keys. But if you want E2EE and backups, what would you expect?

This is exactly it.

I don't understand why you're downvoted for this question.

What's wrong with Telegram is the privacy story. It's not end-to-end encrypted, meaning that the server can read the content of your messages.

I hear that Telegram has a great UX, which makes it popular. But in terms of security... it's wanting.

Telegram is a joke in professional cryptography circles https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/726428912968982529

To me it's just not an encrypted messaging app. I don't even get all the discussions about it...

It's a bit like if we analysed the E2EE guarantees of email over and over again. Every year, multitudes of people would publish a post explaining how email is "badly encrypted". Well, email is not E2EE, period. If you want E2EE, use a system that has E2EE.

That would be fine unless Telegram

1) Didn't say it was "Heavily encrypted" on its front page.

2) Didn't claim it was more private than WhatsApp which is always end-to-end encrypted with Signal protocol.

3) Didn't claim secret chats were somehow adequate.

You're again linking to old critiques of an old protocol no longer in use. Can you stop doing that, please?

No. I will not stop pointing out the hubris and nepotism in the company. No real changes have been made in who's designing security for Telegram, so their past is their future. Incompetent people doing crap job.

Except to the protocol, which you continue to post aged posts identifying vulnerabilities that have nothing to do with the rewritten version. That is not honest presentation of the facts.

That is not honest presentation of the facts.

They have f'd up in the past, and since they still employ the same incompetent nepo-hirings, they will continue to f up in the future.

Until they own their mistakes and E2EE everything, like they should have done in the first place, I will keep pointing out their incompetence, past and present.

You do not get to rewrite their history by telling people to shut up.

That's all well and good, but be truthful in your presentation.

1. It's not end-to-end encrypted by default.

2. No group chat, even a small one between close friends is end-to-end encrypted.

3. Almost all desktop clients support no end-to-end encryption for 1:1 chats, meaning if you use the desktop client as part of your workflow, you're forced to drop using the end-to-end encrypted secret chats.

4. No cryptographers have ever worked in the company.

5. Horrible teething issues for the protocol:

Telegram hosted a cracking contest back in 2013. Everyone in the industry know they are bullshit, and this was discussed back in 2013 The Fallacy of Cracking Contests (1998) | Hacker News The tldr is, Moxie issued a counter challenge to Telegram where he presented the same goals with already broken primitives like MD5, to break the encryption. Telegram never proved the challenge could be won even under those conditions. (Also again, given that Telegram’s built in backdoor of “people are lazy” exists, the cracking contest was pointless. It doesn’t matter how good the encryption is if the adversary wears you down to hand over the keys).

http://unhandledexpression.com:8081/crypto/general/security/...

https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20160425091011/http://www.alexra...

https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/telegram-ecdh/

https://mtpsym.github.io/

Also this:

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...

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I set firefox to clear cookies, also using cookies to "strict"

This somehow causes a huge pain to connect to mozilla's matrix instance, and I never understood why. This is a bit ironic since firefox has that feature to clear cookies.

I had to reset password, and do other weird things, I can't remember what exactly.

I hope this MAS thing fixes it.

So unusable for people like me who only surf in private mode

Putting tracking protection to strict essentially makes Firefox violate certain web standards. Developers aren't going to test against that, and if they are they're probably not going to be able to do much about the problems strict tracking protection causes.

If MAS fixes this, it'll be by accident and it'll probably break in the future. Firefox warns against this kind of breakage if you enable strict tracking protection in the settings. You can't have strict tracking protection + websites doing cross-domain authentication working.

I mean, yeah, tracking prevention features basically completely break cross-domain authentication. There are a surprising number of valid use cases that need cross-domain auth (or make the user experience a lot easier). While there are workarounds these days, sometimes it does require deep changes in how auth works

There are a surprising number of valid use cases that need cross-domain auth

I am not a web developer, but I would disagree with that.

Either web standards respect privacy or they don't, but I would not sacrifice privacy for anything.

Firefox was right to prevent tracking, it highlights how webstandards are just not good. I something doesn't work properly in a firefox private window, to me it should not exist.

Authentication requires the opposite of privacy. If you don't want to be identified, you can't restrict anything to your identity.

It kind of depends. See Kagi Privacy Pass ("Allows you to use Kagi Search with Privacy Pass, which cryptographically ensures that Kagi cannot tie that request to an account and allows for further privacy and anonymity."): https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

... which requires an addon to the browser, or for it to be built in specifically for that company.

That's not something companies like Matrix can use. If you're installing software already, why not skip the browser engine and install a full Matrix client instead?

I wasn't responding directly to Matrix's use of MAS. More generally I aimed to make the parent poster aware of a new technology that allows for private authentication, which they claimed was impossible.

Privacy Pass is currently being standardized by the IETF, so we may see more widespread adoption eventually: https://privacypass.github.io/

Just to make the claim clearer: it can't matter what the authentication mechanism is.

If a Privacy Pass token is needed for access to your email, then redeeming the token tells the service you (the client) can access your email. That's identified you.

If I'm authenticating with server A. I shouldn't have to carry ephemera from server B. A can interact with B on its own if necessary.

Bubbling up these architectural details to the front end is a symptom of the webdev cargo cult coming up with broken ideas that get fossilized as the status quo.

With OIDC, both occur: the client is redirected to the authentication server where they directly authenticate, then carries a token cross-domain back to the service. Finally, the service validates the token against the auth server.

The alternative would be something where I enter my Google username/password on random websites, and trust that they will forward it to Google and not do anything nefarious. This is less secure and less private.

The status quo appears to involve handing over your account password to your chosen client. That's worse than this.

If you don't trust your matrix client, why use it at all?

It's also a bit disheartening to see Matrix putting all that "Log in with Google", Apple, Facebook etc so prominently on their login page. The whole idea of decentralised services was getting out of those walled gardens.

Yeah, I would argue it's less about removing trust from the client (which will ultimately get an auth token in addition to secrets and plaintext messages) and more about allowing for centralized authentication and authorization policies.

But you already trust your client with all the private keys and message plaintexts for your account.

I struggle to see why I should trust it with those things but not the account password.

Not necessarily, you could give restricted access to a client

my google account has way more power over me than whatever i ever wrote in matrix in my life (ever, ever)

How do you prevent them from collecting "Interaction Data"?

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#bookmark-how-...

I vaguely remember an old MSC or TWIM or something that described (the possibility of) a new authentication mechanism whereby I could set up either a dummy homeserver or something in .well_known that would allow me to use my own domain but without needing to use my own homeserver for the actual traffic. Sort of like an auth-only homeserver, if you will.

Is that part of MAS? Was that initiative ever fully-baked? Or am I just misremembering?

That's .well-known based delegation, which was proposed in MSC1708 in Nov 2017: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/old... and merged into the spec in Jan 2019 (prior to Matrix 1.0 in June 2019): https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/commit/0347e873efc...

So yes, fully-baked and part of Matrix since 1.0!

Next Gen Auth via OIDC is instead a key part of the (upcoming) Matrix 2.0 spec release - see https://areweoidcyet.com and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/386...

Afaik that's not related to this, that was already possible as a domain alias. I think that feature is called a delegation if I remember correctly.

Love matrix. Improving the onboarding is a great step. I've seen less technical people have issues in that area until now.

Mostly a desktop/web user myself, hoping all that Element X work will trickle down to us.

* Is all matrix.org's server-side for this open source, and able to be self-hosted?

* Do all the Matrix clients need to be modified to support this authentication method?

The new authentication server (MAS) is at https://github.com/element-hq/matrix-authentication-service (AGPLv3) and entirely self-hostable - e.g. https://github.com/element-hq/ess-helm for the brand new official helm charts from Element, or https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo for a very quick and dirty docker-compose setup i threw together.

MAS provides backwards compatibility for the old Matrix auth APIs for existing Matrix clients, so they do not need to be modified to keep working. However, to get the most out of all the new auth features (2FA, MFA, QR login etc. etc.) then clients will need to be upgraded to speak OIDC natively. Element X for instance is already OIDC-native.

https://areweoidcyet.com has more details.

1. Yes. Even the public website is open source. The license is AGPLv3: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse

2. Yes.

No more typing your password in every client you’d like to log in to.

So. . . how will we log in? This post is heavy on vague promises of greatness but light on concrete details of UX.

If you use e.g., "Sign in with Google" today, you get redirected to your web browser, log in, and get redirected back to the client. This means you can use the saved passwords of your browser, and if already logged in there, you just have to click "continue" instead of logging in again.

With MAS, every login works like that. If you click "sign in", instead of getting redirected to Google, you get redirected to the website of your homeserver, where you can login and authenticate before being redirected back to the client.

The primary benefit of using a standard OIDC flow is that your authentication server can easily add support for passkeys, webauthn, TOTP or captchas, without having to wait for every single client to support these features.

While matrix.org uses MAS for this, providing the same login features as it used to, your organization might want to use Keycloak to connect their homeserver directly to LDAP.

The downside is that you need a full browser to authenticate this way.

So. . . how will we log in?

I think you will log into your server, and then the server will offer you to give access to the client. The screenshot right below the line you quote seems to show exactly that.

I guess I can believe that, but it's unclear because there's nothing to tell me what that's a screenshot of. The icon in the screenshot is the Element icon, which is a client, so at first glance I figure it's a screenshot of Element. After reading your comment I can infer that it's actually something else (a website?) showing me the icon of the client that wants access. That makes sense, but it's not obvious just from the screenshot.

One reason I ask about this is I always wonder how it will work for someone writing their own client, perhaps a very basic client (or a bot). Any answer that involves "you will click on X" doesn't apply there. As long as there's a straightforward API based way, that's cool. And I assume there is one here. But my experience has been that such changes aimed at "greater security" often make things more cumbersome for small-time developers.

But we'll see. Certainly a smoother login (and logout!) experience for Matrix would be welcome so hopefully this will be a plus overall.

The blog mentions right at the start that it's based on OAuth 2.0/OIDC, similar to how you log in to your Google account in Thunderbird for example.

I always wonder how it will work for someone writing their own client, perhaps a very basic client (or a bot).

For interactive clients, it'll be the standard OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code flow[1]. For non-interactive services they say in the proposal[2] that one uses the existing method but they will implement the standard OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials flow[3], which is effectively like a traditional username/password deal, though the "password" is not the account password.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity-platform/v2...

[2]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/002...

[3]: https://developer.okta.com/docs/concepts/oauth-openid/#clien...

Read the whole blog, and it directs you further for more details. But this blog does tell you they're moving to oidc. That means you will get all the non password flows oidc supports.

This is a reading comprehension problem more than a blog writing problem

This sounds great for large and corporate servers, but a pain for small self-hosted ones. More configuration and external dependencies. Plus additional confusion for non-techy users on those smaller servers.

I don't think this will be required for other servers any time soon, if ever. Clients are going to have to support logging in the oldschool way indefinitely, especially since most Matrix servers are basically unmaintained.

You say that, but Element X (Android & iOS) already lacks full support for the oldschool way. It only supports certain flows therein AIUI.

Yeah, I realize that, but that's exactly why it's Element X and not Element. Element was actually planning on dropping support for older servers, but for ecosystem reasons they had to can that indefinitely. I don't think Element will become Element X anytime soon with the ecosystem in such bad shape.

Several years ago, Riot.im messenger had a branch called RiotX with some additional features. Then RiotX (or its codebase) became the first version of Element, while the original Riot.im stopped being supported. And this was when Synapse was the only server option and it was a hog for memory.

Congrats to Quentin and all the other contributors to this project.

I quickly looked at the MSCs and seems “MAS” and associated MSCs enable OIDC/OAUTH authentication flows (basically integration with your favorite identity provider such as Google or Apple).

I was hoping for matrix homeserver to act as an identity provider as well to give us an alternative to big tech for “identity”.

I suppose I could just setup Ory or other open source IdP, but would have been nice to have an all in one package.

MAS can be used as an OIDC IdP, and in future MAS will be embeddable in Synapse so you can use your homeserver as an IdP in the way you want, all in one package.

That said, MAS is deliberately not a very featureful IdP - it's focused on being the glue between Matrix and OIDC. If you want a more sophisticated IdP then you'll still want to run a dedicated one.

Discord's ongoing enshittification may create a market opportunity for alternatives in the near future. I'd like to think that Matrix could be a beneficiary of that, but the common-case UX needs to be polished damn well when the time comes if they want to capitalize.

MAS and Next Gen Auth open up the way to things like QR-login (complete with syncing all E2EE state and verification!) which should help enormously with common-case UX.

See https://youtu.be/ZiRYdqkzjDU?t=966 for a demo of it from The Matrix Conference in Sept, or https://youtu.be/lkCKhP1jxdk?t=1832 showing it working in on a fresh instance of element-docker-demo at FOSDEM 2025.

Eh... Discord's enshittified client is still a hundred times more usable than Element — for all its faults, at least Discord is able to deliver and display messages reliably ("unable to decrypt message", anyone?). And for the more technologically oriented, client mods do a lot to improve the Discord UX.

Element X is supposed to improve things, but it's stuck on Android and iOS for the foreseeable future.

I haven't seen that message in literal years.

So Matrix is the new XMPP?

Did XMPP ever use these protocols for authentication?

fwiw, there's a XEP for OIDC in XMPP from last year: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0493.html. ATproto is also moving to it as its primary auth mechanism: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/2656.

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Does actually exist matrix servers for warez?

Anybody tried Simplex? - https://simplex.chat/