401
US: Alaska man busted with 10,000+ child sex abuse images despite his many encrypted apps (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
132 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 82 points 2 years ago (1 child)

He didn’t use encrypted everything. He had a public telegram group chat in which he stored a lot of his material. Which, as many people in the comments on the article pointed out, is not encrypted, but is presented by telegram as if it is. That’s likely how they caught him.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (4 children)

    To be clear, it’s encrypted*.

    * If you enable it

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
    •
  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Recent events have taught me that only individual chats are encrypted*. Group chats don't have that feature.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    In telegram nothing is e2e encrypted unless you specifically ask it to be and when you do, it kills all the functionality that makes it better than others.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    That's what I said. The person I replied to said that all messages are encrypted* with the asterisk being only if you specifically enable it. I clarified that it doesn't apply to group chats though. I don't use Telegram so the loss of functionality is actually a bigger deal to me than the argument around E2EE. Can you explain what features are lost when you enable it? It's a messaging app so I'm curious what you sacrifice for E2EE.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago

    Telegram groups are not E2E.

    Chats are encrypted, but the servers hold the encryption keys (I believe).

    There are one-to-one chats that are full e2e, but you have to enable it. And it has all sorts of compromises.

    Qualifier: this is as dicumented by telegram. Since it's not open source, we can't really verify it

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    There is no point in encrypting a public group chat since anyone can join and decrypt it anyway.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    The secret chats feature isn’t between anyone I believe, it’s between two people. But I don’t actually know for certain because I’ve not looked into it beyond a cursory googling.

    That said, you’d be correct in that just like any service out there, the moment you let random people join there’s no level of encryption that can keep your secrets secret.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    It works well in Matrix, and you can restrict who joins on that platform.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    If you restrict it, then it isn't public. I'm not saying that encrypted group chats are useless. But if it is public and anyone can join anyway, then encryption adds no secrecy.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Right, I'm just saying that other platforms give you the option of E2EE group chats, which makes sense if you know your group will remain fixed to a certain size. For truly public groups, yeah, encryption just adds a lot of processing overhead without much benefit.

    I, personally, would prefer a platform that gives me the option rather than doesn't.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent