The key difference: They showed onlymlimited amounts, but kept the data. So once you paid you got the full archive. Now they delete the old data and you can't pay to get the old stuff back.
Considering that I have somengroups where we'll never pay this is a good change l.
I can't find an app that lets me record both sides of the conversation on Android. Only my side. When I looked into, it seems that Google has disabled that part of the API that apps cannot record both sides of a conversation.
Does anyone know of a reliable way to record conversations?
I got around this by paying for a VoIP line and running 3cx to utilize it, 3cx can record calls. I've never actually done it - not even to test - because right around the time i got it set up covid hit and the people i used to spend 1-2 hours a day talking to on the phone about tech and other interesting things stopped having to drive to work so my phone usage is now down to maybe 4 hours a month on private calls that no one else would be interested in.
Technically i've been paying for a voip line for 20 years, and shoehorning it into 3cx was mostly to allow my young kid to be able to call his aunt or someone who isn't on our PBX (grandma and grandpa and his siblings are, already).
believe me i was really annoyed when android stopped being able to reliably record calls. Another alternative that i did actually use is a 3 channel breakout connector on my cellphone, a DAC/ADC, PC microphone and headphones. You could tell the OS to "monitor" the microphone, and record mix (remember those days?). Or now-a-days you'd have to use VAC(virtual audio cable) or something to manage the routing. Speaker out goes to mic in on phone, and vice versa, hit record on your PC, and both the remote side and your side will be recorded. I never got too deep into this because it's a huge hassle unless you have a phone just for this; but multi-channel recordings would let you have synchronous audio, for, say, correct transcriptions.
A friend of my recently purchased the GL-iNet Flint 2[0], and is quite happy with it. It by default runs OpenWRT. There's a recent video on LTT's sub channel ShortCircuit about it [1].
I'm not quite sure how having to reprint paper menus is cheaper than a static CDN website. Especially if you have multiple locations.
As much as Restaurants moan and complain about raising prices, having to reprint menus isn't 0 cost whenever they want to add a new menu item, or change the prices.
And then you have to pay your servers to clean them from time to time.
As much as people hate this QR stuff, it's generally better, provided it works. Paper is always reliable, but if you can figure out a static CDN website, and create a QR code for it, it's going to be better for a restaurant that wants to change their menus on a semi frequent basis.
Printing menus only costs about 2 minutes of a dev's time, anyone in the restaurant can do it, there's no need to involve a third party who may not be responsive, and the fact it never fails to work is huge. We tech people often ignore the sheer amount of grief we go through because we're used to fixing things and confident we can. A restaurant owner will experience far higher cognitive load and frustration - and if the site goes down in business time, it's total hell. Not easily worth it.
Restaurants don't often print their menus in house. They get the printed at a print shop. Which takes time, and labor. And unless you're doing them at volume, isn't a negligible costs.
Don't get me wrong, I prefer paper menus. But I see why so many restaurants want to do QR code.
I'm curious what you estimate the transaction cost would be for printing a recyclable paper menu per customer versus the cost of the tech solution per customer.
My gut says the paper is going to win every time. There are also substantial opportunities to improve the experience for your customers with servers being attentive to their tables.
The table top tablets are convenient. They go a long way to allowing a customer to have agency in improving their experience. Back in my college days, my friends and I frequented a pub where each booth had a button that would light up an indicator above our table letting servers know we needed more beer. It was far and above our favorite place to go hang out on weekends. I'm sure it was more useful than just a beer signal LOL but for our use case it was perfect.
On your smartphone? I'm not talking about looking at a menu from home, I'm talking about ordering at the table.
In any case, not being a fan of the Cheesecake Factory, I can't remember the last time that I saw a restaurant menu that spanned more than two pages. I don't think finding what you want on such a short menu is particularly problematic.
However, this may point out a critical difference: what sort of restaurant you prefer. Ones with novel-length menus may indeed present different issues.
Regardless, my experience with online-only menus and/or ordering when I'm sitting at the table has been nothing but horrible. My solution is to not go to restaurants that do this. It's better for my blood pressure that way.
> On your smartphone? I'm not talking about looking at a menu from home, I'm talking about ordering at the table.
Yes, and so am I. If I'm feeling like chicken, it'd be easy to Ctrl+F (or "Find in page" if you want to be specific about the phone function) to look for chicken.
> I don't think finding what you want on such a short menu is particularly problematic.
It generally isn't that bad, but it was a quick off the dome example that comes up particularly in physical documents vs. electronic documents. Some more specific restaurant examples might be to filter out specific allergens or preferences out of dishes: dairy free, gluten free, vegetarian, vegan, etc. Make a smaller menu for people that can't or won't have particular things, without having to print those menus.
> Regardless, my experience with online-only menus and/or ordering when I'm sitting at the table has been nothing but horrible.
The worst one I had was a restaurant that was a bit outside of town that had poor cell reception. I've never personally had many issues with using my phone except poor signal.
I should also mention my personal bias here: if I'm at a restaurant (or any other socializing event), the very last thing I want to be doing is interacting with a screen of any sort. I want to be present and enjoy the people I'm with, not using a computer.
But that's just me, not a criticism of such systems per se.
The ideal, I think, is for restaurants to have both. Printed menus for people like me (the advantage to the restaurant is that they won't lose me as a customer) as well as some sort of online thing for others who prefer that.
Another thing that wasn't pointed out: Du Rove said "Signal messages have been exploited against them in US courts or media."
This would be the same case for Telegram as well, if someone has your phone. I believe that Signal can have a lock on the client, and the database is encrypted.
The other part that Du Rove conveniently left out: Signal went against the US courts and won [0]. When subpoenaed to give all user information they gave them all that had: the unix timestamp of when the account was created, and the last date you connected to the signal service. That was in late 2021. I'm really curious as to what Telegram has told the FSB.
Telegram iirc moved it's lead developers to Dubai specifically because the FSB was demanding info from them, so you could argue that's an unfounded concern.
The bigger problem with Telegram is that it by default has insecure encryption settings (as opposed to Signal, where encrypted is the default, you need to manually activate it with Telegram + I think it's not possible to enable for all chats and clients) and to my knowledge, Telegram will outright co-operate with law enforcement agencies to just hand over unencrypted communications. I'd personally argue that's a security dark pattern - make privacy a big selling point, but then don't activate the security by default
> security dark pattern - make privacy a big selling point, but then don't activate the security by default
pretty similar to whatsapp. they boast end to end encryption, but business account (all of them now) uses the facebook server's key, so that the business can give access to several other clients to answer customers. they still call it end to end encryption, and this was actually the last crap the original founder accepted before leaving with lots of money on the table.
Good for you, you probably do not live in a country under digital colonialism where the gov allowed facebook et al to force internet providers to tax the pop with absurdly low and expensive data limits and then "not count" things like facebook and whatsapp and one music app.
In most of the global south, 100% of business have a whatsapp. In those places it pretty much replaced telephone and the green whatsapp icon is now what the current young generation recognize as the we did the black telephone outline on a business front next to a number.
and if you own a business, or is self employed, it is even worse: you live by that app.
The lack of encryption between myself and a business is less offensive than replacing an open standard (plain old telephone systems, eMail) with a proprietary and closed one, backed by a single, private corporation
i completely agree with your sentiment, but i will also say this.
As an expat, this feature has enabled me to transact with locals from the convenience of my phone, even though i don't have any local line and i will not bother to get a local SIM card, nor do i want to have a US SIM and a local one interchangeably.
It also enables me to be very effective when requesting services on demand, and cutting thru the on-hold time, disconnected calls, or the needless chitchat.
I have many bad things to say about WA, but making living more difficult in a foreign country is not one of them.
Telephony is an artificial monopoly. There's not a single reason why you cannot call everyone around the globe for mostly free, as whatsapp proves. Yet here we are.
> Telegram iirc moved it's lead developers to Dubai specifically because the FSB was demanding info from them, so you could argue that's an unfounded concern.
I'd argue it's not giving us any certainty. They could've moved away to escape. They could've moved away to a nice FSB-sponsored location while making good publicity. Ideally the tech should be good enough for this issue to not matter.
But they gave the FSB info they asked for -- the vk.com website (facebook clone, at that time it had way more massive amounts of user data than telegram). They could have deleted the data, but no, they handed it over to FSB.
I will point out, in their defence, they handed it over to an organisation that has a habit of assisting people in learning how to fly from windows. This isn't to say Telegram is secure but that it's unlikely they "could have deleted the data" and remained alive.
FSB mostly wanted to prevent people organizing, and that would serve it well. They already had another popular service (odnoklassniki.ru) where to direct people.
vk.com and telegram have nothing in common, except the founder. Durov was forced to sell his part in the vk.com and telegram development started after that as a response.
You conveniently forgot about the second part of that comment. Durov was forced out of the country and had to cell vk.com for peanuts because of his refusal to cooperate with the government. He is still pissed off at the country at large (not just the government) and refused to add the Russian translation for years, for example, despite it having absolutely nothing to do with Putin.
Since he is Russian in origin, it's okay to throw baseless accusations at him and spout nonsense like "maybe they're FSB agents" or "maybe they hired an FSB agent without knowing it". You see it here everywhere, and HN is one of the better sites in that regard. Well, maybe Signal has hired an NSA agent and doesn't know about it either? How does that sound?
> Durov was forced out of the country and had to cell vk.com for peanuts because of his refusal to cooperate with the government.
It wouldn't be the first time a cover story was ever used.
> Well, maybe Signal has hired an NSA agent and doesn't know about it either? How does that sound?
You should presume they're trying. I, frankly, presume they've succeeded, either in placing an agent or by compromising something, in virtually every prominent messaging platform.
> You can easily activated it but you aren't burdened by it for 99% of the time when e2e encryption is not needed.
So, in those 1% of the cases when you actually need it, you're instantly flagging yourself as doing something fishy? Because if it ever comes down to it, good luck proving otherwise in a court.
That's like the whole point of why it should be on by default. Not because me making dinner plans is something super-secret that needs to be e2e-encrypted, but because those two scenarios need to be indistinguishable from each other for e2e to be effective.
Yes. Additionally you are at bare minimum signalling that the metadata of the encrypted comms is worth further analysis.
For exactly the same reason if you have a paper shredder, you don't only shred confidential material, you shred a bunch of junk as well to make it harder to find which pieces to reconstruct.
The winning in this case was they had to fight to be allowed to release what they provided.
As nice as it would be to not have to provide that information, Signal proved that the only information they have to give is largely useless to law enforcement.
So they lost and have to give up the information/metadata they have. It's just good news that it wasn't much. But that's not guaranteed to always be the case.
No, you're misunderstanding the situation. Companies can't legally refuse to provide information in the jurisdiction they're in some cases, especially when there's a court order. Every company is subject to someone's jurisdiction.
Signal prepared ahead for that eventuality and designed it so that their services received stored only the absolute bare minimum of information, and that most importantly didn't preserve the metadata of chats and calls. This is unlike Meta, for instance, which does keep that data for WhatsApp even though the chats themselves are encrypted.
That means that what they provided in that particular subpoena is all they can provide from their server records for any user of Signal, not that it's all that was available in that particular case.
It would've been even more anonymous if not for the phone number requirement, but I can understand why they made that trade off and given the lack of metadata it's not that useful to law enforcement/surveillance agencies in any case.
I believe they have your phone number hashed not in plaintext, also they rolled in usernames recently and option to not expose your phone number to anyone, which addressed privacy concerns
I don't know how they store phone numbers, but hopefully not hashed since the search space is trivially tiny.
The usernames thing does not address any interesting concern. I don't care to show my friends who I chat with my name and phone. They already know these after all.
What I care about is not having to give Signal (the company) my phone number. That's not something they should have.
Durov travels freely to and from Russia and several of their employees are still based in Russia. So yeah, the FSB have leverage if they need to use it.
As I stated in a sister comment, Dubai is marginally better, but not significantly better. If it's the same original developers, they could be squeezed through their family.
Same goes for Signal devs, or any devs really. You're only stating the obvious: humans can be forced and coerced given enough motivation and resources.
Singling out Telegram, or Signal, or any other service's devs is not advancing any argument forward.
There is more reason to be concerned about Telegram than most other similar services.
Partly because it’s insecure by default, which makes a large percentage of conversations vulnerable.
And also because the team behind it is very susceptible to pressure from the Russian government, which is especially bad when it comes to these things. Even if some of them are based out of Dubai now, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t still at risk of coercion, either directly or through for example threats against family members who remain in the country.
If you don’t trust Russia, which you shouldn’t, then don’t trust Telegram with anything sensitive.
Can we trust some more than others without trusting anyone completely?
I for one trust that there are more Americans who would say no to the NSA when they have a legal basis for doing so than there are Russians saying no to the FSB.
The state of the rule of law is certainly not great anywhere in the world right now. But it's far worse in some places than in others. The difference still matters to some degree.
No, we cannot, so yours and other comments come across as picking favorites. As an Eastern European I'll state that I distrust USA as much as I distrust Russia, China and North Korea. All nations with ambitions use every dirty trick known to man.
I just found the mention of the state confusing because surely this app is equally untrustworthy regardless of its origin. American companies can't be trusted either—they've long since indicated a willingness to work with law enforcement and intelligence. E2e encryption is the only meaningful answer.
Yeah I agree with that, I am always baffled why people single out Russia as if it's the Cold War; none of the major powers can be trusted at all, some are just more covert than others but I guess "out of sight, out of mind" applies in full force even for a seemingly less-biased audience like HN.
As for E2E encryption, eh, this topic has been beaten to death many times. Its UX is difficult so many apps like WhatsApp and Telegram do UX tradeoffs, quite successfully so I'd say.
Death is death, whether it's brutal or not, your dead corpse will not care.
Still no idea what your argument is. Or that of the grand-parent comment. "Oh look, Russia is poisoning people!" Yeah, we knew that ever since the Cold War. Show me a nation that doesn't persecute people it doesn't like.
They don't have to be friends to turn a blind eye.
If Dubai had to pick between letting some nobody foreign national living on their soil get squeezed by a foreign secret police, or pissing off the Russians, what do you think they would do?
(This isn't a knock on Dubai specifically, substitute them for almost any non-NATO country in the world).
I mentioned it because people very easily single out Russia and I think that's quite the outdated sentiment. I'd start with USA, North Korea, China, Russia and Iran -- again, just as a start, and I am sure there are many others that can't be trusted.
Where Telegram's devs and business resides hardly matters IMO. If somebody truly wants to put them under their boot they'll find a way, and that goes for probably half the countries on this planet.
You didn't "mention" it, you implied that I believed this, when it wasn't even part of the discussion. You can believe whatever you want, but you really shouldn't accuse others of such things.
Also: this whole topic is about a Russian company/app and Russian citizens living in Dubai. What other country would we be talking about here, exactly?
On desktop, on Android and iOS it uses the OS keystore. It really should do on desktop as well, Windows, Mac and Linux (through freedesktop standard) all have APIs for that, there really isn't much excuse. Desktop Signal has always had terrible security, unfortunately.
I didn't really understand Bézier splines until I watched this excellent video [0] from Freya Holmér. It talks about various kinds of splines, and the various equations behind them. Explains the importance of the derivatives of splines (as other comments here have pointed out).
> And while we are at it stop tunneling my data back "home" when I travel.
Oddly enough, I found this to be a plus when I traveled to China for work. My data was unmolested by the Great Firewall of China. I was able to get on websites with my mobile data that I couldn't when using wifi in the hotels.
A stay on the ruling could happen, but that would be up to the courts. Not a lawyer, but considering that there could be damages from the removal of non competes and someone leaving to get another job, there could be a stay on the order rather than letting it go into effect. While it works its way up the court system.
