11mo ago

You may be offered a free premium Telegram subscription – but please don’t accept

Telegram is giving away FREE Premium subscriptions! All they need from you is to use your cell phone as a relay to text out their OTP codes! And the recipient of the OTP sees your phone number! What could POSSIBLY go wrong with this deal?

PLEASE don't use Telegram! I personally recommend Matrix as it's totally FOSS, you can self host, there are tons of front end clients to choose from. Or even use Signal. I have my own issues with Signal, the fact they don't allow third party clients, you can't self-host, they have a proprietary shim in their stack that only they know what it does, they were pushing crypto, etc, but at least Signal is better than this garbage.

86 comments

I imagine SMS authorisation texts are Telegrams biggest single expense, they are for Signal https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/
Telcos know that authentication is about the only remaining use case for SMS and are not going to turn down the revenue stream.
That said this idea from Telegram sounds absurd. Not least I expect most contracts prevent reselling free SMS’s like this. The security implications have got to be significant too.
- Telcos know that authentication is about the only remaining use case for SMS and are not going to turn down the revenue stream.
  And it can't die fast enough, as it's essentially the same as broadcasting your sensitive information over unencrypted radio.
  Apart from security, phone number based user identification is such a half-assed approach and I still don't get why Signal wants to die on that hill. It's inconvenient, yet trivial, for anyone to register a second, third or tenth phone number. With a bit more knowledge and inconvenience, even anonymously. It adds so little.
  
  It's pretty drastically harder to register 100 phone numbers, especially in your target region, than 100 email addresses. Major spammers and such work with automation across many accounts, this isn't designed around someone with 10 accounts.

People in the privacy community need to get over the unrealistic dream that regular people will adopt Matrix when we can't even get them to use Signal. The only way Matrix will have mass adoption is through getting a lot of corporate clients. Then the workers might choose to use it personally too after being familiar with it.
- Matrix still doesn't have a multi account client with threads.
  I don't mind Matrix, but every time I bring this up to a hard core Matrix defender to how the clients are lacking, they don't have much to counter.
  
  I'm writing a new Matrix client that's focused specifically on being a Discord-like dead simple experience for professional people -- it's under GPLv3 and written in pure Dart
  Probably will have the first actual release in one to two months -- please tell me what you would like in terms of features so I can shove it into my already massive backlog
  
  Gajim, Dino, Conversations support multi-account clients. Threading doesn’t tend to work the same way tho.
- Sometimes even anything other than SMS kn the US because ppl just assume everyone have iPhones
  
  Far from the truth. Most of my U.S. friends own androids.

Wow, that's super sketchy.
I'm trying to get my wife to use something decent, and I think Signal is the way to go. It's focused on P2P communication so it's a better replacement for SMS and whatnot, but it also has groups so it can also replace MMS. She likes Discord, but I don't think she'll be as keen to try out Matrix since she'll just wonder why I don't just use Discord.
- Try Simplex Chat
  
  Looks cool, thanks! I'm interested in P2P platforms in general, and this seems like an interesting middleground between P2P and centralized.
- My wife and a few family members use telegram, it's perfectly fine for using as just a regular chat app, you can join spam or sketchy groups but if you don't join premium or enable contact access, and generally be smart about using it, etc you will be fine.
- My wife knows that if she doesn't use Session, she needs to call me and hope I pick up. Granted, she only uses it with me, but that's already a win in my book.
  
  IDK, forcing someone to use a certain app to contact you seems a bit extreme, and something that could cause conflict in a relationship. But that's just me, I obviously don't know your situation.

Man this is so scuffed! Offering free subscriptions in exchange for using your personal phone as a relay for OTP codes is a recipe for disaster.

Or good old XMPP!
- XMPP doesn't support modern features and the protocol is older than some of the people here
  
  It has more "modern" features than Simplex 🤷‍♂️
  
  Define "modern features"?
  HTTP is old too, what's your point? It get's constant updates via XEPS, and currently runs: WhatsApp, Messenger, Zoom, iMessage, and more. It's perfectly capable. And offers federation out of the box.
  The single reason XMPP died off in the tech crowd is that Signal killed it.

What could POSSIBLY go wrong with this deal?
No jokes, I'd like to know. How is it different from sending sms to random numbers?
- ... people just send SMS to random phone numbers?
  
  No but what exactly stops anyone from doing that? A privacy consideration? I'd think it's just a waste of time at best.
- The issue here is that you could potentially read the content of a 2FA sms that wasn't intended for you. It makes it easy too break 2FA if you have many devices
  
  Logic suggests OTPs are locked to login sessions of corresponding users and also expire. Besides telegram would be able to tell if OTPs meant to be sent through you tend to not reach the recipients.

ok but, why don't use telegram for this? scammers are everywhere but how is this telegram's fault
- Ma dai what a logical fallacy laden answer. Idk which one cause I aint that sharp but you know well you’re trying to smudge the point
  
  what
  
  Eeeeh, how? He's asking a valid question and making the valid assertion that it's not telegram's fault that some people try to scam you?

Also Simplex but I find element client very comfortable to use.

I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts about Signal and DeltaChat for messaging
- Signal and DeltaChat, as well as Simplex and some others e2e communication solutions, are adequate from a technical point of view.
  The main issue is always adoption. You can have the most convenient way to safely communicate with people, it'll be useless if nobody you're talking to wants to use it.
  So, since Signal is very easy to set up and use as well as the most adopted, it's currently the best pick for regular conversations.
- Been using Deltachat for about a year, so far so good. I dunno how secure it really is (never took the time to check) but it's been reliable. Multi-device was kinda quirky at first but has gotten better.
- Signal good, I've never heard of Deltachat
- Signal is fine for a drop-in WhatsApp replacement. I use it for chatting to my friends casually. For something you need more security for you could do encrypted emails as that doesn't require exchanging phone numbers, or ideally just arrange to meet up in-person and discuss things so you don't leave any kind of digital or paper trail.
  
  Yes, meet up, place your phones on the table, and discuss 👍 Facebook ads won't change at all 😉
  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- Signal is pretty broken. A chat app shouldn’t require a SIM card & an iOS/Android device just to create & maintain an account (too bad Linux or KaiOS users or folks that otherwise don’t want a smart phone). Multi-devdice setups seem to have issues. The desktop app being Electron is a waste of resources. They still don’t want to support UnifiedPush while highly encouraging you download the app from the Google Play Store & send notification data thru Google-controlled FSM. There’s also the missing history of the server code which is probably has something to do with US intelligence injecting code.
  Is it better than a lot of things, sure, but it should be put on a pedestal nor seen as exemplary for private chat in UI or philosophy.
- I said Signal, meant to say Sessions
- Deltachat is a clever idea that I wish it became more widespread.

Reading the discussion here. I'd never heard of xmpp. Probably just never registered as a messaging alternative. Just checked out https://xmpp.org/. Wow! Tons of apps. Even some android apps on fdroid. Guess I've got some exploring to do.
- XMPP is an old protocol. GTalk (google talk) and Whatsapp used it, then extended it, then didn't give back to the community. So here we are...
  The problem with alternative protocols and apps and whatnot is that people are reluctant to change and won't try anything new if only 2-3 other people use that protocol/service. I can't even convince my best friends to use Signal, let alone XMPP.
- https://joinjabber.org is also a good resource for learning about XMPP.
- Xmpp died. Don't try to bring back the dead
  
  XMPP died for no good reason, we absolutely should be bringing it back instead of trying to reinvent the wheel again and again unsuccessfully.
  
  Nah, just call it retro.

One can never expect power of any kind to not be abused!

Thanks for the heads up

I think this is a bit panicky... am I going to use it? Nah.
But also, my phone number has been leaked by plenty of entities... some random person getting a text from it wouldn't even be that weird considering SMS spoofing. Someone could be using my number for a nasty spam attack right now and I wouldn't know.