dsmk

I'm not Ukrainian, so it's not my place to tell them to just bend over and take it. If they want to continue fighting, then it's their right and I support their position.

I'm also not sure if a compromise is possible when the positions of both sides are so far apart. Ukraine thinks they can win, Russia still thinks they're the 2nd best army in the world and that all is going well, so even if you trust Putin or Russia (which you shouldn't, see the 2nd Chechen War), I'm not sure how both sides can agree on a middle ground. There are still too many cards to be played before we reach that point.

Those who truly worry about human life should keep in mind that if it's too easy for aggressors to start wars, they'll keep doing it because it works. Do nothing, appease the aggressors, and you might end up with even more dead people.

But hey, it’s just Slavs killing Slavs, right?

All I see is Russia invading another country (2014 and then again in 2022) and bringing war, death, and destruction to a land that had its problems but was fairly peaceful. Them being "slavs" matters little here.

I personally don't want anyone to die, but it's not like Ukraine asked Russia to invade them, steal their land and kill their people.

If you (user 1) are talking with your friend (user 2) through me (telegram) and I have the encryption keys, then for me (telegram) communications are essentially in plain text. I can even encrypt them 100 times... I have the keys and can read your (user 1 + user 2) messages.

You're again talking about storing messages (not sure why). Telegram might encrypt their storage (I never claimed they didn't), but they have the keys and therefore can read what's stored. They also have the keys for the messages, so there's no hypotheticals or claims here: they have the keys for everything, so they can read everything.

E2EE is opt-in and currently only available for direct chats. Unless you manually start a "secret chat", there's no E2EE MTProto 2.0 to help you. They can read everything.

The audit done in 2020 goes over how Telegram encrypts their cloud chats and those encryption keys are not stored on the same servers. While E2EE is preferable, the reason why Telegram works the way it does is because how messages are handled by default.

So... Telegram has the keys to decrypt your messages?

I mean, it's not hard to understand. The party that holds the keys can read the messages.

I didn't say anything about them "storing messages in plain text". I said that they don't do E2EE by default and since they have the keys for the TLS that encrypts data in transit, they can read the content of your messages. Encrypting their drives - something that any decent service does - only protects you if someone "steals" a drive: Telegram has the keys and can obviously read the contents of their drives.

I found this Kaspersky blog post which provides a nice tl;dr. They even make the same point as me:

Let’s go straight to the root of the problem: Telegram is a unique messenger with two types of chats: regular and secret. Regular chats are not end-to-end encrypted. Only secret ones are.

No other messenger does this: even the notorious WhatsApp, part of Mark Zuckerberg’s data-hungry empire, uses end-to-end encryption by default. The user doesn’t need to do anything at all, there are no special checkboxes or anything: messages are protected from all outsiders (including the service owners) right out of the box.

[...]

This is not new. Back in 2015, Edward Snowden had this to say about Telegram's defaults:

I respect @durov, but Ptacek is right: @telegram's defaults are dangerous. Without a major update, it's unsafe. [source]

To be clear, what matters is that the plaintext of messages is accessible to the server (or service provider), not whether it's "stored." [source]

In practice, they're no different from Messenger, Slack, Discord or a direct message on Reddit. Most messages on Telegram can be read by them, just like Google can read all messages in your Gmail.

Why is Signal or WhatsApp better? Because they do E2EE for all messages. It doesn't matter if they forget to encrypt their servers, all they see and store is encrypted messages. You hold the keys, not them.

WhatsApp uses the Signal Protocol. Is it as private as Signal? No, it "leaks" way more metadata. Have I personally checked if they're encrypting messages? Also no, although others have. Is it possible that they're doing something "funny" and no longer encrypt? Yes, but is there any suggestion or proof of that being the case?

Should you use WhatsApp? No, but the suggestion above was to use Telegram, a service that doesn't do end-to-end encryption by default and leaks the same type of data as WhatsApp. Going from Messenger to Telegram is a sideways move. From Messenger to WhatsApp would be at least a small upgrade (with the benefit of having more contacts there than Telegram, at least in some countries).

I understand the point about it also being a Meta app. I guess the question is what do you trust more? Telegram and the people behind it with your plain text messages or a Meta app with end-to-end encryption? I don't trust either, so I pick encryption.

I'm not anti Telegram or anything like that. It's a nice app, lots of features, smooth, etc, and I use it, but privacy was never their main priority.

I use Telegram every day, but without end-to-end encryption (by default and on groups), it's as private as Facebook Messenger. They can read everything. The only difference is that currently people trust them more than they trust Facebook, but everything turns to shit eventually.

If Signal is too "boring" or no one uses it in your circles, try WhatsApp. Yes, it's also from Meta, but at least comms are encrypted (same protocol as Signal) and a lot of people use it.

Hmm, I'm not experiencing that. Could Android (well, the flavour used by your phone) be killing background apps too aggressively or something like that?

Edit: could also be a RAM thing. I have 12GB.

Yes, but that already used to happen before if the thieve had an iPhone.

I'm loyal to good products.

For a while I was a bit of a OnePlus "fanboy". The OnePlus One was an amazing phone for someone like me. I liked it so much that at one point everyone at home had one (4 in total). It was much better and cheaper than anything we had used until that point. Then I got a 3T and OnePlus was going down hill... promises of improvements that never came, Carl Pei fking lying, so that was it. I learned my lesson. My next phone was a Galaxy S10 and when that broke, I managed to get a good deal on a OnePlus 8 Pro and since it was cheaper and it had official LineageOS support, it was a good option.

I have no idea what my next phone will be. Maybe Asus Zenfone. Maybe some Xiaomi/Poco. Maybe OnePlus. Heck, if Google improves their SoC, maybe I can get a Pixel. I know I won't back to Samsung as I like to tinker with my devices, but as long there's some modding going and the brand is not hostile to modding, I'm open to consider it.

I tried the alternatives people were suggesting on reddit at the time:

• Some are clean (no trackers, etc), but change the experience too much and I want a traditional launcher.
• Some work like I expect them to, but Exodus ( https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/ ) shows lots of trackers... moving from one that might track in the future to one that already tracks is not a good move.
• Open source alternatives, which I prefer, either move very slow (Neo Launcher) or are dead.
• Not all handle gesture navigation or Android 12/13 well.

So I'm still on Nova. I did upgrade to the beta as after a certain A13 update the stable version started bugging out, but that's it. I use LineageOS and can remove internet access from apps, so that's what I did. My hope is that Neo Launcher becomes more active, but until a few things are improved/fixed, I'll stay on Nova.

I could just use the stock launcher on LineageOS btw... the reason I don't is that it's easier to backup an app and restore it after a reset/moving ROMs.

My home screen is essentially one page with 2 rows of folders. Each folder has a name (eg: Messaging, Games, Tools, etc). Apps I want to keep are inside those folders. The apps I'm testing, temporary apps, etc, are on my home screen (outside the folders), so I always know I have to deal with them (either remove them or keep them/move to a folder).

For the apps I already have, since I have to open the folders regularly, I can see what's there. If I see something I won't use anymore, I remove it. I might keep more than one app installed for the same purpose while testing, but eventually remove the ones I don't want.

To keep my device's storage clean, I use a normal file manager (Material Files on F-Droid).

So I don't really have the need for any cleaning app or Android feature. I also don't have "cleaning days" as I clean the phone as I use it or when I'm not doing anything.

It doesn't work even after rebooting the phone again? Weird. Cleaning app data for these apps does stop them from working, but opening the Play Store and doing something inside (eg: checking for app updates) and then rebooting makes everything work again on my devices.