Telegram is a new messaging app that offers speed, security and features such as secret chats with end-to-end encryption and self-destructing messages. Telecom is created by the founders of Russia’s biggest social networking platform VK.
Brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, who launched VK (originally called VKontakte) Russia's most popular social networking platform in 2006, began working on Telegram 18 months ago as a research project because they wanted to create something that was “really secure and fun at the same time.” The importance of Telegram was underscored when Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA and PRISM were first made public in June.
Gaining Trust By Being Non-Profit And Open
Telegram is based on a custom data protocol called MTProto built by Nikolai Durov, a mathematician. The app’s secret chats, a separate feature from its ordinary chats, use end-to-end encryption. They cannot be forwarded and can be set to self-destruct after a certain amount of time. One key difference between Telegram’s secret and ordinary chats is that secret chats are not stored in the app’s cloud, which means you can only access messages from their device of origin.
Telegram wants to earn users’ trust by operating as a non-profit, open platform initiative. Telegram currently have about 100,000 daily active users.
Telegram’s founders say the app will remain non-profit because that enables them to avoid commercial and legal pressure. If they eventually need funds to scale up, Telegram will ask for donations from users or make additional services available as in-app purchases. These could include a virtual number that can be used instead of a real mobile number, ensuring the confidentiality.
Philosophy
Telegram’s team wants the messaging app to stand out by offering speed and security, as well as reliance on crowd-sourcing and community-driven efforts.
If Telegram received requests from government or legal organizations, it would not be able to provide data for end-to-end encrypted chats anyway because the encryption keys are generated on each user’s device and not the server.
Currently Telegram is available on both the popular mobile eco-systems Android and iOS and developers has confirmed that the messaging app will soon be available for Windows Phone devices also but the exact timeframe is not known yet.
Download Telegram for Android iOS.
via TechCrunch
Brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, who launched VK (originally called VKontakte) Russia's most popular social networking platform in 2006, began working on Telegram 18 months ago as a research project because they wanted to create something that was “really secure and fun at the same time.” The importance of Telegram was underscored when Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA and PRISM were first made public in June.
Telegram is based on a custom data protocol called MTProto built by Nikolai Durov, a mathematician. The app’s secret chats, a separate feature from its ordinary chats, use end-to-end encryption. They cannot be forwarded and can be set to self-destruct after a certain amount of time. One key difference between Telegram’s secret and ordinary chats is that secret chats are not stored in the app’s cloud, which means you can only access messages from their device of origin.
Telegram wants to earn users’ trust by operating as a non-profit, open platform initiative. Telegram currently have about 100,000 daily active users.
Telegram’s founders say the app will remain non-profit because that enables them to avoid commercial and legal pressure. If they eventually need funds to scale up, Telegram will ask for donations from users or make additional services available as in-app purchases. These could include a virtual number that can be used instead of a real mobile number, ensuring the confidentiality.
Telegram’s team wants the messaging app to stand out by offering speed and security, as well as reliance on crowd-sourcing and community-driven efforts.
If Telegram received requests from government or legal organizations, it would not be able to provide data for end-to-end encrypted chats anyway because the encryption keys are generated on each user’s device and not the server.
Currently Telegram is available on both the popular mobile eco-systems Android and iOS and developers has confirmed that the messaging app will soon be available for Windows Phone devices also but the exact timeframe is not known yet.
Download Telegram for Android iOS.
via TechCrunch
No comments :
Post a Comment