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Finally got rid of telegram, congratulations to me
(sh.itjust.works)
It was a many months transition, and it's finally done
Fun thing, you can actually make a backup of all* your messages, groups, contacts, etc. So before leaving you can have all of your data in case you need that one contact or something
The final red flag was as that allegedly Russian authorities were messing with people's deleted messages. Not for the first time there are news that they could read, modify, delete, see location, and etc. Screw it, this is unsafe, I'm out.
Also, these days telegram is really at the state of a pile of garbage, bloated, buggy, and shady messenger.
Session was at first a fork of Signal without usernames.
Now by design it uses their own custom tor-like service (instead of just... using tor) and does not support forward secrecy or deniable authentication, so anyone who collects the messages in transit can either find a vulnerability in the encryption scheme, or spend enough GPU resources to crack it, and they have confirmation of who sent and received the message and what the contents of the message are. And is headquartered in Australia, which is 5EYES and much more against encryption than the US. Oh, and the server is closed-source.
Regarding Australia's 2018 bill...
Regarding the 'vulnerability or cracking them later' bit...
From Session's own FAQ:
I wouldn't touch it with a 12ft ladder.
Between forking Signal to make their desktop and mobile clients, and forking Monero to make their cryptocurrency... I'm surprised they came up with Lokinet.
Edit: I'm pretty Session doesn't even use Lokinet. So much for the claimed resiliency from "hackers"
Session does use the Oxen network which is the renamed Lokinet, unless they made a change I'm wholly unaware of.
I must have been thinking of their past implementations. Their FAQ says things were different:
It was even less clear to me because this is what it says in the app itself:
Not "the Oxen network" but "Session's network."
And then it has a graph of
You're not wrong. Lokinet and Session are both products from the same parent company. Lokinet was renamed to the Oxen protocol, and they run all the servers AFAIK, so it would be like tor, if tor ran every guard, entry, and exit node. AKA worthless. So you're spot on, it's a joy to the intelligence community and after the Encrochat debacle and Session stopped using Signal's encryption algorithms and code, I would suggest no one use it for anything sensitive.