[liberationtech] About Telegram

[Ximin Luo]

On 20/03/14 07:55, Maxim Kammerer wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 4:04 AM, Ximin Luo <infinity0 at pwned.gg> wrote:
>> Welcome to 2014. Telegram has more of these, more severe, more obvious, and from further in the past. OTR also did not claim they were secure because it was written "by a team of PhDs", and a bunch of other disingenuous marketing gimmicks.
> 
> Thought I would add the precise quote for other butthurt appreciators
> on this list:
> 
> “The team behind Telegram, led by Nikolai Durov, consists of six ACM
> champions, half of them Ph.Ds in math. It took them about two years to
> roll out the current version of MTProto. Names and degrees may indeed
> not mean as much in some fields as they do in others, but this
> protocol is the result of [thoughtful] and prolonged work of
> professionals.” [1]
> 
> This whole story is simply priceless. Where else would a bunch of
> butthurt self-proclaimed “experts” attack a developer and a product
> for voluntarily offering a contest for breaking a protocol? With an
> obvious conflict of interest, no less. Moreover, the “brilliant”
> attack consists of trivial and obvious accusations that the contest
> cannot cover certain types of weaknesses, whereas the contest
> organizers later paid half the sum to some guy who found a weakness
> that was actually not covered by the contest. I am actually laughing
> while typing this.
> 

These points have already been discussed before and dismissed. Repeating them doesn't make it more true.

I'll repeat my earlier suggestion that you sound like the butthurt one. Short of laughing, you ought to respect the fact that honest people did not take dishonest people's money under bullshit conditions.

> The theme of Ph.Ds also reminds me of some Q&A of Nadim that I
> watched, where he referred to potential “people with Ph.Ds” performing
> a product review with such reverence that I thought: “Wait, I thought
> these guys dismiss education, because they usually don't have any.” I
> guess it depends on whether you agree with the Ph.Ds!
> 
> [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6916860
> 

He wrote this in a developers' mailing list, without trying to make it sound like a stamp of quality. He did not market this as a major security point to end-users.

-- 
GPG: 4096R/1318EFAC5FBBDBCE
git://github.com/infinity0/pubkeys.git