Posted by e_daigle 12/15/2025
The website doesn't really spark any confidence.
Never heard of it and I'd be surprised if they have more than 100 users.
That said, the analysis itself is interesting and worth a look, if nothing else it's a general pattern you can follow for many chat applications to see how secure it is.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.freedomcha...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.freedomcha...
You never questioned it wasn’t a real service. When confronted you pretend it doesn’t matter that it’s a security lapse in a tiny no name project.
looks at Signal
Oh.
Also, Telegram is not private.
1. It's not E2EE by default
2. It's not E2EE for groups on any platfrom
3. It's not E2EE 1:1 on desktop clients forcing you to downgrade from secret chats to insecure chats
4. It's collecting 100% of your metadata, including
* who you talk to, when, how much, what type of data you exchange,
* your IP-address which sort of defeats the purpose of having no phone number, and
* when you enable secret chats
Telegram is also not transparent about its funding, about who develops it, and who has access to the plaintexts stored on their server (meaning, anyone with a zero day or two).
Journalists who went to look for Telegram's office in Dubay found out no-one in the neighboring office had ever seen Telegram staff enter the space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg8mWJUM7x4
Telegram was built with blood-money from VKontakte, and Durov has been marketed as living in exile, when in reality he has visited Russia on average once every 2.4 months since the exile began, and strangely Durov has not had his underwear poisoned and windows have been kind to him despite supposedly betraying Putin's interests.
tl;dr Telegram reeks of FSB/SVR honeypot.
>Telegram reeks of FSB/SVR honeypot
Btw interesting connection between Durov/TON and Jan Marsalek (alleged Russian spy) was recently uncovered by FT:
>In 2018 Marsalek invited Ben Halim and other backers of the Libya projects to invest in a new crypto token being launched by messaging platform Telegram, whose founder Pavel Durov had met Marsalek and invited him to participate.
>A special purpose vehicle was set up for them to pool their money and invest but Credit Suisse, which was organising the sale of the token, blocked the transaction. It turned out the bank was happy to take money from Marsalek, whose role in the biggest corporate fraud in recent European history had yet to be revealed, but was wary of his Libyan friends.
>As a workaround, Ben Halim and others decided to let Marsalek invest their money in his name, sidestepping Credit Suisse’s money laundering checks. However, the US Securities and Exchange Commission blocked Telegram’s issuance of the tokens and Marsalek refunded his Libyan associates.
Not even. If you actually try you will discover at the last step (after full KYC, signing some dubious agreements, and linking an existing TG account) that the Fragment "market" is actually fully centralized and has not been open for new buyers-users for a good while. No secondary markets out there (maybe not even possible on their network) afaik.
I think Telegram is filth as much as the next guy, but I'm just making that technical point.
> Neither of us had prior experience developing mobile apps, but we thought, “Hey, we’re both smart. This shouldn’t be too difficult.”
I think, 40 years from now when we're writing about this last decade or so of software development, this quote is going to sum it all up.
That… is not a real degree.
But the way it's phrased and worded... at best, it's the kind of really bad typo that shows rank incompetence; at worst, it's outright fabrication that is actively lying about the credentials; and what I think most likely, it's obfuscation that's relying on credentialism to impart an imprimatur of credibility that is wholly undeserved (i.e. "I got an unrelated degree at Stanford, but it's Stanford and how could anyone who goes there be bad at CS?").
I was aware of all this before, but the experience has tainted my opinion even further of higher education. Graduates of the for-profit tech school are likely to face professional discrimination, while students from the more prestigious university will receive interviews and opportunities because of a name listed on their resume.
It's not laziness. It's populism rejecting what they consider elitism, which includes expertise and experience.
I think we've all been the one who got fooled in some relationship. Maybe for you it wasn't a political party. But I bet it still hurt.
If you reject the best and only easy option from the outset because you don’t want actual healthcare, then yeah… whatever remains is going to be “hard”.
What the US has right now is a complex entrenched system of financial middlemen that refuse to abandon their rent seeking. They provide only(!) financial “services” and will fight actual healthcare tooth and nail.
Trump wasn’t strong enough — or simply didn’t care enough — to fight these people.
"ChatGPT, write an essay about software development during the smartphone social networking boom. Find a good quote to sum it all up."
>"Now, anyone who has read Mindset by Carol Dweck, Grit by Angela Duckworth, or The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., knows that you can be, do, and have whatever you want."
The gap between "read" and "understood" swallows so many. Also, did he use TR's "Man in the Arena" quotation? Reader, of course he did.
There's a general zeitgeist of "Experts don't know what they're talking about" that has fed both pieces of this space. It's an Age of Doubt, as it were, but the hubristic kind of doubt, not the questing kind.
Great example of how perception and reality can differ vastly
But for a commercial messaging app you expect better...
> We did it not because it was easy, but because we thought it was easy.
Original title is: “Super secure” MAGA-themed messaging app leaks everyone’s phone number
I think that's incredibly important context. Instead of conferring with actual experts in the field, the populist, fascist segment of our society just decided to wing it with technology.
They BELIEVED they were more secure, with no evidence to back it up.
Well obviously we can't be seen as non-neutral (I wish I would be joking, but I have a feeling that is the thought process on a good day)