You forget to mention - less powerful than his old FW 13 with new mainboard/CPU.

By this metric Facebook and Google are encrypted, because TLS. Sorry, Telegram's messaging is an attempt to mislead users, plain and simple.

> The library IS used for all encryption.

They could chose to use TLS for for almost all chats, and instead they've "invented" MTProto. Why go with MTProto?

> As far as I can tell from casual use the other end does not need to be online per se.

You are wrong. Phone on other side has to accept "secret chat request" (no user interaction is needed). Until its accepted, initiator's app interface is blocked with a spinning circle. And to add insult to injury, one can't initiate secret chat from desktop client.

> Telegram client(s) are also open source.

Yes, it is very refreshing to be able to verify that they can read all of my messages. /s

> The comment was about the server and interoperability with other clients.

Signal leadership explicitly stated that they care about secure comms and don't care about ecosystem around the chat. You can create your own client, you can't market it as Signal because that might "endanger lives".

> - The phone bits in your and the other commenters response sound a little bit handwavy to me.

I issue you a formal apology on behalf of HN hive mind. /s

On serious note - palata's point is right, but a bit outdated. Functionality is still there, but it became opt-in. New users have phone number automatically hidden and phone number is collected only as an anti-spam feature.

I'll repeat my point again. Telegram is a honey pot of messengers and nobody should use it.

Correct way of speaking about Telegram is - nothing* is encrypted. (encrypted chats are not more than 0.5% of all chats). That would be a "no spin" take.

> one guy dared write a crypto library rather than using their own

Red herring. This library is NOT used for more than 99.95% of chats on Telegram. It is applied only to "secret chat", which is a torture device with horrible UX. I guess that horrible UX is the result of choice of using custom crypto library instead of going with something capable of working when addressee is not online.

> Another darling is Signal who refused to stop collecting phone numbers until recently even though they never needed it, does not allow open source or other clients to use their servers (and won't release the actual server code) and frankly does not work half as well as Telegram in terms of UX.

Phone numbers are still used as anti-spam measure. You are free to get a burner, register an account and throw away the SIM card.

> does not allow open source

Signal client is open source.

> frankly does not work half as well as Telegram in terms of UX.

It works well where it does matter. Vide Telegram's "secret chats".

> All of this is really confusing for me.

You are clearly misinformed. That explains the confusion.

How can I make confer.to work on my Linux machine? Modern CPU.

Are you speaking about Open Technology Fund? AFAIK they've contributed just 3mil, while Signal costs ~40mil a year.

  function retry {  
      until $@; do :; done  
      alert  
  }
  export -f retry

In what world? While your take is wrong, I just wonder where could you get this idea from?