Telegram

Durov introduces Telegram's take on ads in his Russian channel.

The translated channel post (translated with DeepL):

Soon, official advertising messages will appear in Telegram channels for the first time. Most users will hardly notice this change - for three reasons:

1. Telegram will not show advertising messages in chat lists, private conversations, or groups. The ads will only affect large channels - services where there are already ads and whose support results in the largest expenditures on the part of Telegram.

2. No personal information will be used to show ads. User privacy is paramount to Telegram. The content of advertising messages will depend only on the topics of the channels in which they are displayed, and not on users' personal data.

3. Official Telegram advertising messages will be unobtrusive. Only short texts without external links or photos will be allowed in them. An advertisement may appear only after all new messages in the channel have been viewed.

Ads posted by Telegram channel owners themselves in the form of regular messages are now found in Telegram channels. The official advertising messages that Telegram is introducing will be much more comfortable for users. The income from such advertisements will allow Telegram to continue providing users with a free and unlimited service.

Documentation:

• Telegram Ad Platform
• Telegram Ad Platform Explained
• Ad Policies and Guidelines

As far as I know, official apps still don't support sponsored messages, but they're probably going to support them in the next version, which should be released in a couple of weeks.

This thing has not been publicized by Telegram itself yet - it has been announced just on Durov's russian personal channel

I believe these new features were supposed to be included in the recent 8.0 major update, but they weren't done with the migration to 64 bit IDs yet at the time so they had to leave something for the inevitable 64 bit IDs update's changelog

After Telegram was forced to stop the development of its TON project, an open letter from the open-source community asking for Telegram to transfer to the community the ownership of the ton.org domain and the GitHub organization has been showed a lot of support from the community that evolved around the project over the last two years.

Telegram recently embraced the request with a comment on that issue

[16/07/2021] Security analysis of Telegram that exposes 4 cryptographic weaknesses in MTProto. The vulnerabilities have been disclosed to Telegram on 16 April 2021, and have been addressed with the release of version 7.8.1 for Android, 7.8.3 for iOS and 2.8.8 for Telegram Desktop. They do not compromise the plaintext payload carried in transit-encrypted communications through standard MTProto, and the paper concludes that "MTProto can provide a confidential and integrity-protected channel if special care is taken when implementing the protocol". However, it also highlights how properly implementing the protocol is not a trivial task, that might lead to a brittleness/weak implementation: even the three major popular apps needed to be patched to mitigate the highlighted weaknesses.

direct link to the paper

Telegram's answer:

• MTProto Analysis: Accessible Overview
• MTProto Analysis: Comments for the technically inclined

Android: v7.8.1

iOS: v7.8.3

Changelog:

Message Sending Animations (Android)

• Send messages with improved animations­­ – your input text smoothly transforms into the message bubble as it flies into the chat.

Password Recovery

• Use the new prompt in Settings to practice your Two-Step Verification password.

• Reset your Two-Step Verification password even if you forgot your old password and don’t have a recovery email.

• To do this, you must be logged into your account. The reset takes 7 days and can be cancelled from any of your devices.

An interesting thing about videocalls: Telegram missed both deadlines Durov announced in an informal way about video calls (not by much):

1. "we will be adding a video dimension to our voice chats in May"
2. "later this Spring: TV station"

It's a simple python bot that makes it easier for me to manage my qBittorrent torrents, without having to publish and use qbittorrent's web interface, which is a bit of an hassle from mobile

The bot makes it easier to add new torrents (magnet link/.torrent file), to see what is currently downloading/seeding, to enable/disable/change your alternative speed limits, and to manage individual torrents (pause/resume/force-start/increase priority/re-check and so on). It can also notify you when a torrent completes

My torrenting setup is extremely trivial: raspberry pi 3 + headless qbittorrent + ProtonVPN + this bot + 1 TB mechanical hard drive

We have so many options through which to communicate with our friends and relatives during the lockdown, thanks to our smartphones and the number of apps that serve all possible needs. Impressive as they are though, a smartphone is not suitable for everyone.

On the top of the box is a microphone with push-to-talk switch, a small thermal printer, and a set of 1/4″ jack sockets with associated jump lead. Each socket corresponds to a relative, and an audio message to that relative can be posted via Telegram simply by speaking into the microphone with the button pressed. Replies are then printed through the thermal printer. Meanwhile, behind the scenes is a Raspberry Pi holding it all together.

Telegram of course has an easy-to-use API that can facilitate such communications for free, and Python was used for the coding. He has described the process in the Twitter feed but is aiming to make a proper post about it and publish the code to Github.

See https://hackaday.com/2021/04/25/keep-in-touch-with-grandma-with-this-lo-tech-interface/

#technology #opensource #raspberrypi #telegram #Yayagram

This hasn't been officially announced yet (will probably be announced with the release of Telegram 7.7), but a new ticket appeared on the bugs & suggestions platform introducing two new web clients:

• webK (source code)
• webZ (source code)

From the ticket:

Can they replace the native app I'm using on my device?

Both of the new versions support most of the features you are likely need for your day-to-day Telegram usage.

Why are there two versions?

Because we believe in internal competition. Both new apps work equally well on mobile and desktop devices.

They are likely the outcome of the JavaScript contest that took place during 2020 on multiple rounds. One of these two apps is going to replace the long-dead old web client

More or less one week ago, Telegram started to publish the Android app's APK on its website.

The website app has a different package name and can be installed along with the PlayStore build. It's already updated to v7.7, which is undergoing stores reviews.

One interesting thing about the "stand-alone" version is that will display groups, channels and bots that are not accessible from the PlayStore app because of PlayStore's privacy policy. From the sourcecode, by the way, as far as I can tell, it looks like content restrictions are ignored if the package name doesn't match the package name of the PlayStore build - that means that forks (such as Telegram-FOSS) are automatically able to display restricted content

Quoting @durov's announcement:

🎉 More good news – I am happy to share that Telegram has raised over $1 billion by selling bonds (a form of debt) to some of the largest and most knowledgeable investors from all over the world. This will enable Telegram to continue growing globally while sticking to its values and remaining independent. These resources will also fuel the monetization strategy I outlined in December.

As I said when launching Telegram almost 8 years ago, the end goal for Telegram is to become a financially sustainable project that can serve humanity for decades (or centuries) to come. Today's news is another step towards that goal.

This is a pretty big (and from a certain point of view also concerning) news. Telegram infrastructure is entirely proprietary and operating it requires around ~120 million $/year (according to TON's most recent whitepaper). Telegram's plan to launch TON and use its ICO money ($1.7 bn) to finance its development for the upcoming years was crashed by the SEC. Considering Durov finances are not a bottomless pit, it was quite predictable that emitting bonds was the only way to fund Telegram in the short term, while they figure out a way to monetize the service. It will be interesting to follow the development of this closely to see what's going to happen in the near future, hopefully the list of investors will be published soon

This is basically the realization of @[email protected]'s post about the XDA leak

Of course some of us have already deleted our WhatsApp accounts, but I did actually backup a few of my chats, so I'll be trying this out when it gets to Android.

Even if you are an iOS user who has deleted your WhatsApp account, this will still work for any chats that you did export.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/telegram-7-4-makes-easy-migrate-whatsapp-chat-history

#technology #telegram #deletewhatsapp

I swear the guy comes out with really weird takes sometime