• CrazyLikeGollum@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    He didn’t use encrypted everything. He had a public telegram group chat in which he stored a lot of his material. Which, as many people in the comments on the article pointed out, is not encrypted, but is presented by telegram as if it is. That’s likely how they caught him.

      • Deello@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        Recent events have taught me that only individual chats are encrypted*. Group chats don’t have that feature.

        • Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 months ago

          In telegram nothing is e2e encrypted unless you specifically ask it to be and when you do, it kills all the functionality that makes it better than others.

          • Deello@lemm.ee
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            2 months ago

            That’s what I said. The person I replied to said that all messages are encrypted* with the asterisk being only if you specifically enable it. I clarified that it doesn’t apply to group chats though. I don’t use Telegram so the loss of functionality is actually a bigger deal to me than the argument around E2EE. Can you explain what features are lost when you enable it? It’s a messaging app so I’m curious what you sacrifice for E2EE.

      • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        Telegram groups are not E2E.

        Chats are encrypted, but the servers hold the encryption keys (I believe).

        There are one-to-one chats that are full e2e, but you have to enable it. And it has all sorts of compromises.

        Qualifier: this is as dicumented by telegram. Since it’s not open source, we can’t really verify it

      • uzay@infosec.pub
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        2 months ago

        There is no point in encrypting a public group chat since anyone can join and decrypt it anyway.

        • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 months ago

          The secret chats feature isn’t between anyone I believe, it’s between two people. But I don’t actually know for certain because I’ve not looked into it beyond a cursory googling.

          That said, you’d be correct in that just like any service out there, the moment you let random people join there’s no level of encryption that can keep your secrets secret.

          • uzay@infosec.pub
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            2 months ago

            If you restrict it, then it isn’t public. I’m not saying that encrypted group chats are useless. But if it is public and anyone can join anyway, then encryption adds no secrecy.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              2 months ago

              Right, I’m just saying that other platforms give you the option of E2EE group chats, which makes sense if you know your group will remain fixed to a certain size. For truly public groups, yeah, encryption just adds a lot of processing overhead without much benefit.

              I, personally, would prefer a platform that gives me the option rather than doesn’t.