Just yesterday I setup a bot which is easy via botfather
And also, setup an app (claude built it but I had to fiddle with it, it works like pagerduty) but uses cloudflate worker to push downtime/errors (via fcm) in production (from graphana) via webhooks to "full screen, by pass dnd, alerts, with loud music, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IQBWWabuU )
I named the app "Siren".
It's not straightforward to have durable hard to miss alerts about your production enviornment but good thing is this doesn't cost a cent.
Telegram group alerts are from my teammates (small team 3 members) via bot.
And Siren is for only me as I am responsible for the backend with 10 microservices, centralized logging via graphana, alloy, loki, and for metrics Prometheus.
It's all working reasonably well for me, this makes your life so much better as you fix the issues before they turn into nightmare.
I personally don't use whatsapp because I like it, but because all my contacts in my country are over there. It is officially more used than SMS here. It is not optional in my case :/
Maybe, as I don't know if I got a special version that exfiltrates data to somewhere else. But this does not improve SMS security in any way. Another software also potentially being bad has no influence here.
Saw this exact claim on a billboard not too long ago
It's a strangely worded statement. What about data collection, metadata, other third parties
Maybe it's related to the fact that plaintiffs lawyers are now trying to verify what's going on inside Meta with WhatsApp through litigation discovery:
You can't unless you've chosen to back up your WhatsApp messages to iCloud/Google in which case it's Apple/Google responsible for preserving the messages and subject to their encryption standards, nothing to do with Meta.
Try logging in on a new device and putting your main device into aeroplane mode as soon as the login succeeds. Loading of old messages on the new device will stop.
Moxie Marlinspike (founder of Signal) [0]implemented the same E2EE algorithm as Signal (Signal Protocol) into WhatsApp, but that was 10 years ago, so who knows if things have changed since then.
Practically speaking, it isn't secure; no closed app can be. It receives regular compulsory updates (old versions refuse to work) and there's nothing at all stopping Zuck from sneaking in backdoors targeted at you personally.
Nobody gives a damn. What matters is that it works even on a potato.
SMS security only became a problem due to 2FA, which is just one of many use cases, and the failure isn't even technical here but organizational. I agree it should've prompted more pressure to secure the system against SIM-swapping; alas this is too close to the Real World, so the tech industry instead responded with alternative that side-steps the problem by offering zero customer support. No humans to talk to = no humans to social engineer = secure. So much win.
(I'd also say the 2FA proliferation is itself a problem, but that's an unpopular opinion and for a separate discussion.)
> Nobody gives a damn. What matters is that it works even on a potato.
It doesn't work on my computer, nor does it work on my phone when I'm traveling (different SIM), so I give a damn. WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal etc. do both. I really wish there was an open, federated standard (and no, RCS is neither), but until then, I'll use what actually works for me.
SMS just sucks, and I hate that it's become so ubiquitous an authentication method when it's not even secure.
You can rent a virtual mobile number in your home country and consult SMSs on the web or even redirect them to email. I have done this for years, using Twilio for 2€ a month. Can't say the UX is great but it certainly fixes the whole problem.
I've never understood why so many people still chain their identities to physical SIM or even eSIMs. It's so fragile.
Yeah, that's a good workaround. Google Voice can work too.
Unfortunately, more and more services are declining to send to VoIP numbers because of seCurItY, so it's a game of cat and mouse.
Fortunately SMS is so expensive in parts of Europe and it's not allowable anymore to use SMS by itself for online payment authentication, and both issues combined have slowly been pushing companies to explore alternatives.
There unfortunately seems to be no such pressure in the US. Passkeys could solve the issue, but probably increase support request volumes enough for most companies to not bother unless forced.
It's easy and cheap to determine the original carrier (or its sucessor) for a US phone number. It costs money to do a porting lookup to determine the current carrier.
Most of the reason to deny voip users is that many voip services give phone numbers away like candy and then those phone numbers are used to abuse other services, so checking the original carrier tends to be enough for abuse screening.
Some use cases want more though. Banking KYC has some back channel to get subscriber identification or be alerted when ownership changes; those institutions may be willing to pay for current carrier lookups and deny usage of numbers where they don't have a back channel to the current carrier.
I thought that too but many carriers around me don't allow porting any VoIP-using number back to cellular. (Not sure if you were making a distinction between landline and cellular)
Unfortunately that means that my cell number which I wanted to temporarily park into VoIP while abroad is now permanently VoIP.
In the US, I belive there are three number categories in the NANP porting database (wireline, cellular, and VoIP), and SMS senders can definitely tell, even though it might take a while (presumably there's a lot of caching going on).
If you're lucky, the service you care about only validates at number registration time, not at text sending time, and you can get away with it indefinitely, I suppose.
> I've never understood why so many people still chain their identities to physical SIM or even eSIMs. It's so fragile.
Living in a place where getting a replacement sim is gated behind obtaining an id from the police tied to your national id number, I wish there were other identity systems which were as robust. Much easier to get back to normal operations when the id device becomes damaged or lost with a physical sim you can shove into a cheap replacement device, than relying on backup services you need one of your digital id devices to access in the first place, especially if they're all lost at the same time in a house fire or something. The police will presumably get all my photo backups and savings if they ask nicely anyways, so the big threat to the single point of failure doesn't have a great marginal impact, while I dread the possibility of having to recover the accounts I can't get back through the local legal system given the poor 2fa recovery ecosystem.
>Much easier to get back to normal operations when the id device becomes damaged or lost with a physical sim you can shove into a cheap replacement device
If the device can get damaged or lost, then the SIM can too. To buy a physical SIM or rent a virtual number online, in most jurisdictions you need to provide ID docs these days, so nothing is changed there.
Second this. Their API is such a breeze and it is so much more automation friendly than any other messenger platform. It has a good adoption % too, otherwise Signal is the real winner if we account for privacy.
It's a bit less automation-friendly because the UX is not great when the bot doesn't have its own phone number (which costs money). I think it has better privacy, though. Matrix server operators can read message metadata.
From what I understand you can have secure chats e2ee ? I like that I can login from multiple devices and continue the conversation. This was always annoying with whatsapp and signal. Worst case is mildly embarrassing stuff leaks.
whatsapp, facebook messenger, imessage all support multi-device and it's pretty convenient, in fairness to telegram they launched a bit before double ratched was invented, but still, they've had over a decade to switch to it...
That's still one device. If you turn the primary phone off, the secondary device stops working. WhatsApp just proxies everything through the primary device, it's like WhatsApp Web.
They used to, but that hasn't been true for a few years now.
Now it uses the Signal protocol's native multi-device capabilities, specifically in the "key per device" variant (unlike signal itself, which uses "key per account" if I'm not mistaken).
> You can now use the same WhatsApp account on multiple devices at the same time, using your primary phone to link up to four devices. You’ll need to log in to WhatsApp on your primary phone every 14 days to keep linked devices connected to your WhatsApp account.
It's not true for Signal either. Why don't you try it for yourself instead of spreading outdated (at best) information? Signal supports native multi-device capabilities without relaying everything through the "primary" device.
Messenger seems to be properly multi-device, but you pay for this by some PIN code bullshit (maybe they removed that, I haven't seen a popup about this for over a year now?) and having to sync chat history in the background, through a process that is, of course, broken and unreliable.
I'm actually still jaded about this. Messenger worked fine before they broke it by introducing E2EE; it took years for them to fix the problems this caused (at least the ones that were immediately user-perceptible).
yeah messenger still has the pin code thingy, i'm curious why they do it at all that way, can't you just have your keys on fb servers encrypted with another set of keys derived from your password, which is much stronger than a 4-6 digit key?
It's still broken if you're like me and you clear cookies
"Let's take people's years-long history between each other and just utterly break it. Why? 'privacy'" but they've never cared about it, they're opportunistic fucks. It's Zuckerberg's company to do with it "as he wishes" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16770818
It's called iMessage. It's possible, Telegram just doesn't care. All their differentiating features (large groups, channels, device sync) is directly enabled by the lack of encryption.
they do have encryption, just not e2ee, and in fairness to them, it doesn't make sense to have e2ee on a channel or a group with 100k ppl in it, also device sync is possible with e2ee, it's just a slower
What are you talking about? WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal all have multi-device support and are E2E encrypted, just to name a few very popular options.
I'll second the "Telegram is great for bots". It's the reason OpenClaw users use it.
I stopped using OpenClaw a while ago, but I did vibe code the very basic automations I had used OpenClaw for. Getting it to work with Telegram was trivial.
I don't use Telegram for chatting. In fact, I try not to use any IM tools with humans. ;-)
please provide a proof. if this is the case, then telegram is not to be trusted. but it needs to be proven. otherwise a lot of people trust their business and personal data to telegram.
Just yesterday I setup a bot which is easy via botfather
And also, setup an app (claude built it but I had to fiddle with it, it works like pagerduty) but uses cloudflate worker to push downtime/errors (via fcm) in production (from graphana) via webhooks to "full screen, by pass dnd, alerts, with loud music, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IQBWWabuU )
I named the app "Siren".
It's not straightforward to have durable hard to miss alerts about your production enviornment but good thing is this doesn't cost a cent.
Telegram group alerts are from my teammates (small team 3 members) via bot.
And Siren is for only me as I am responsible for the backend with 10 microservices, centralized logging via graphana, alloy, loki, and for metrics Prometheus.
It's all working reasonably well for me, this makes your life so much better as you fix the issues before they turn into nightmare.