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they think because he inherited a recovering economy, that he himself had some major part in it.

Happens more than we’d like to believe. The mans dad wasn’t actually even dead in the case linked below. The policy will continue to make these mistakes until the consequences of their failures comes directly out of their pay.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-01/fontana-police-coerced-false-murder-confession-with-lies

I bought a 20TB external hard drive a year ago for 0.015 cents per GB. This was after taxes, so it was technically cheaper.

$301.69/20,000 = 0.0150

nor any evidence of them selling or allowing anyone access to their servers and recent headline news backs this up

The entire point is that you shouldn’t have to put your trust that a third party (Telegram or whoever takes over in the future) will not sell/allow access to your already accessible data.

There’s no evidence that MTProto has ever been cracked, nor any evidence of them selling or allowing anyone access to their servers and recent headline news backs this up

Just because it’s not happening now does not mean it cannot happen in the future. If/when they do get compromised/sold, they will already have your data; it’s completely out of your control.

Google, on the other hand, routinely allow “agencies” access to their servers, often without a warrant

Exactly my point. Google are using the exact same “security” as Telegram. Your data is already compromised. Side note - supposedly RCS chats between Android is E2EE although I wouldn’t trust it as, like Telegram, you’re mixing high/low security context, which is bad OPSEC.

WhatsApp - who you cite as a good example of E2E encryption - stores chat backups on GDrive unencrypted by default

1. Security is about layers. E2EE is better than not having E2EE. Same as transport layer encryption is better than none. Would you prefer anyone on the wire can read your messages just because it’s not perfect in every single use case? No, and for that same reason, E2EE is better.
2. Backups can be made E2EE [1]. Is this perfect? No. But its significantly better than Telegram.
3. I’m only pointing out that Whatsapp is better for privacy than Telegram - I still don’t personally use or recommend it.

… can you be sure the same is true for the people on the other end of your chats?

Valid concern, but this threat exists on almost every single platform. Who’s to stop anyone from taking screenshots of all your messages and not storing them securely?

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/whatsapp-encrypted-backups

Signal is completely open source and auditable by anyone: https://github.com/signalapp

if you were to create your own clone, it would not interoperate with the real one.

The FBI can’t just force them to add malicious code. A bad actor could try to contribute bad code, but Signal’s devs would likely catch it.

Lacking end-to-end encryption does not mean it lacks any encryption at all, and that point seems to escape most people.

Not using end-to-end encryption is the equivalent of using best practice developed nearly 30 years ago [1] and saying “this is good enough”. E2EE as a default has been taking off for about 10 years now [2], that Telegram is going into 2025 and still doesn’t have this basic feature tells me they’re not serious about security.

To take it to its logical conclusion you can argue that Signal is also “unencrypted” because it needs to be eventually in order for you to read a message. Ridiculous? Absolutely, but so is the oft-made opine that Telegram is unencrypted.

Ridiculous? Yes, you’re missing the entire point of end-to-end encryption, which you immediately discredit any security Telegram wants to claim:

The difference is that Telegram stores a copy of your chats that they themselves can decrypt for operational reasons.

Telegram (and anyone who may have access to their infrastructure, via hack or purchase) has complete access to view your messages. This is what E2EE prevents. With Telegram, someone could have access to all your private messages and you would never know. With E2EE someone would need to compromise your personal device(s). One gives you zero options to protect yourself against the invasion of your privacy, the other lets you take steps to protect yourself.

the other hand, if you fill your Telegram hosted chats with a whole load of benign crap that nobody could possibly care about and actually use the “secret chat bullshit” for your spicier chats then you have plausible deniability baked right in.

The problem here is that you should not be mixing secure contexts with insecure ones, basic OPSEC. Signal completely mitigates this by making everything private by default. The end user does not need to “switch context” to be secure.

[1] Developed by Netscape, SSL was released in 1995 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1.0,_2.0,_and_3.0

[2] Whatsapp gets E2EE in 2014, Signal (then known as TextSecure, was already using E2EE) - https://www.wired.com/2014/11/whatsapp-encrypted-messaging/

Telegram, for all their security claims, is basically not actually encrypted at all.

Apex Legends. Its a difficult game to master, but every once in a while I get “in the zone” and pull moves/plays that impress myself. It’s not often, but feels nice when it happens. I still enjoy it even though I “suck” most of the time. I basically play it as a survival game >90% of the time.

anything specific you can call out for those of us who have zero interest in moving to another centralized platform?