Messaging apps have become our preferred way of communication, giving us the opportunity to connect with our friends anytime and anywhere. And while Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are the most famous of them all, there's one app that has recently emerged to disrupt the market by claiming to be the most secure of them all. That app is called Telegram Messenger.
What is Telegram?
Telegram is an online messaging app that works just like popular messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This means that you can use it to send messages to your friends when connected to Wi-Fi or your mobile data. Telegram is cloud-based and claims that it prioritizes security and speed, making it a good alternative to other popular messaging apps. The service launched in 2013, and since then it has reached 200 million active monthly users.
Distinctive features
In order to forward the WhatsApp messages to Telegram or share Telegram media to WhatsApp it is not possible directly because of the different architecture of these two apps. But we can share the files from Telegram to Whatsapp or vice vera and here is the way How to share media from Telegram to Whatsapp: 1). Similar to WhatsApp, we can find someone on Telegram, invite friends and add contacts to the telegram. But Telegram has some distinct useful feature, like opening secret chat session, end-to-end encryption messages, better privacy, and security, which makes it the best alternative to WhatsApp. How to set up and use Telegram on PC.
Founded by Russian Pavel Durov, who's also behind Russia's largest social network VKontakte (VK), Telegram claims to combine the speed of WhatApp with Snapchat's ephemerality. Like WhatsApp, Telegram has also the ability to show a friend's status online and attach and share photos, videos, location, contacts and documents.
Telegram's distinctive feature is security. It claims that all its activities including chats, groups and media shared between participants, is encrypted. This means that they won't be visible without being deciphered first. The app also lets you set self-destruct timers on messages and media that you share which can range from two seconds to one week through its built-in feature ‘Secret Chat'. It also offers end-to-end encryption, leaving no trace on Telegram's servers.
There's also the ability to check the security of your ‘Secret Chats' using an image that serves as an encryption key. By comparing your encryption key to a friend's, you can effectively verify that your conversation is secure and less vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
How to use it
Telegram can be used and installed just like other messaging apps. You can download it from Apple's App Store or from Google's Play Store – look for the paper airplane logo. After flipping through the welcome screen, you'll be prompted to enter your phone number and then add your name and a picture. The next step is to find friends and start a chat.
The app can be used on smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. Telegram is available for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows NT, macOS and Linux.
Are you using Telegram, and do you have any questions about the app that you'd like addressed? Let us know in the comments below.
Next ArticleWhat is Discord, how do I use it, and is it secure?
Communication access in Ethiopia has significantly been disrupted over the last week. Internet access and Short Message Services (SMS) were disconnected intermittently across the country.
During the first half of the week, internet connectivity was shut down completely. After access was restored, both WhatsApp and Telegram were blocked. A few days ago, Ethio Telecom (the only telecom in the country) published a notice, acknowledging the internet disruptions, but came short on details about the extent of communication disruptions or why they occurred in the first place.
These events coincided with Ethiopia's national high school exams and it is believed that internet access may have been restricted in an attempt to prevent students from cheating.
In this report, we share OONI measurements which reveal the blocking of WhatsApp and Telegram in Ethiopia (mainly) between 15th to 18th June 2019. We also share our custom experiments, which confirm the SNI filtering of WhatsApp and the IP blocking of Telegram.
To demonstrate the internet blackouts (between 11th to 14th June 2019), we share IODA data and Google traffic data from Ethiopia.
In 2016, some copies of the Ethiopian high school national examination were leaked on Facebook by activists to reportedly sabotage the government and act as a political statement against what they saw as an unfair examination for students from protest zones who had involuntarily missed school for long durations, while their peers from other regions were uninterrupted. The government had to cancel the exam and organize a fresh one in a month's time. It is during this second exam that access to online social media was blocked in the country to evidently avoid a repeat of the leakage.
Amid a wave of protests by ethnic groups, the internet was again shut down completely in August 2016. In collaboration with Amnesty International, we published a research report which documented the blocking of WhatsApp and of numerous local media websites during these persistent protests. The blocks also included political opposition, LGBTQI, human rights, and circumvention tool sites.
In 2017, Ethiopia shut down the internet just before the planned national high school exams evidently informed by the 2016 leakage. During the 2018 national exams week, there were no known instances of internet disruptions, a clear departure from a practice which was gaining traction - national exams as moments of internet disruptions.
While last week's censorship events are quite similar to previous attempts to curb cheating during national exams, they probably mark the first time that access to social media is blocked nationally in Ethiopia under the leadership of a new Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed. His government is widely regarded as promising a relatively open society, and a host of reforms on expression and access to information have been introduced, including the reported unblocking of 264 websites. In collaboration with Access Now, we conducted a study to collect network measurements and we were able to confirm the unblocking of almost all the websites that we previously found to be blocked in Ethiopia.
The recent internet disruptions in Ethiopia buck the current government's public trend on reforms. Convert numbers to xls online. The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) sought to understand this phenomenon and we hereby present our user-led, open, and reproducible research data and findings.
The Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) project of the Centre for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) measures internet blackouts worldwide in near real-time. Their data, which is openly available, provides signals of three internet disruptions in Ethiopia over the last week, as illustrated via the following chart.
Source:Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA): Ethiopia
The first disruption appears to have been relatively brief. It started at ~ 7:00 UTC on 11th June 2019 and lasted until ~ 12:00 UTC on that day. The second disruption started a few hours later on the same day, at ~17:00 UTC on 11th June until ~6:30 UTC of the next day (12th June 2019). The third disruption, which was the longest, started at ~ 17:45 UTC on 12th June 2019 and lasted for more than 24 hours, ending at ~12:15 UTC on 14th June 2019. Thereafter, IODA data does not show any signs of any subsequent internet outages in Ethiopia.
Google traffic data corroborates the metrics presented by IODA. Copy files from computer to android.
Source:Google Transparency Reports: Traffic and disruptions to Google
The above chart, which is based on Google traffic data originating from Ethiopia, illustrates disruptions during the same three time periods as IODA data.
Data shared by both IODA and the Google Transparency Reports strongly suggest that internet outages occurred in Ethiopia between 11th to 14th June 2019, and that internet access has since been restored in the country. Call of duty 2 online. These internet outages were also reported by NetBlocks for the same time periods.
During the brief window of connectivity on 12th June 2019, between 06:30 UTC and 17:45 UTC (when the second disruption ended and the third started), even though the internet was switched back on, locals in Ethiopia noticed that they couldn't use WhatsApp. They therefore ran OONI's WhatsApp test in an attempt to measure potential blocking.
This test is designed to measure the reachability of both WhatsApp's mobile app and web version (web.whatsapp.com) by attempting to perform an HTTP GET request, TCP connection, and DNS lookup to WhatsApp's endpoints, registration service, and web version over the vantage point of the user. All measurements collected by OONI Probe users running this test are openly published every day.
An analysis of OONI WhatsApp measurements collected over the last month reveals that WhatsApp's registration service and web version (web.whatsapp.com) were blocked in Ethiopia between 12th to 17th June 2019, but WhatsApp's mobile app was not blocked.
It's quite unclear when exactly the blocking of WhatsApp started on 12th June 2019, as only one measurement was collected on that day (at 15:56 UTC). Unlike previous WhatsApp measurements collected over the last year, that measurement (collected on 12th June 2019) provided a signal of blocking, since the HTTPS connections to the WhatsApp registration service (v.whatsapp.net) and web interface (web.whatsapp.com) failed. No further OONI measurements were collected until 15th June 2019, most likely due to the internet blackout that followed until 14th June 2019.
Once internet access was restored, OONI Probe users in Ethiopia performed tests and shared their findings on Twitter.
Source: Tweet by Atnaf Brhane: https://web.archive.org/web/20190619132827/https:/twitter.com/AtnafB/status/1140018473994719233
All OONI WhatsApp measurements collected between 15th June 2019 (at 07:00 UTC) to 17th June 2019 (at 09:40 UTC) consistently suggested blocking of WhatsApp's registration service and web version (web.whatsapp.com), as illustrated below.
Source:OONI measurements: Ethiopia (CSV data)
However, the block does not appear to have been implemented very reliably, as a request went through at 08:16 UTC on 15th June 2019. All other OONI WhatsApp measurements collected during this time period (07:00 UTC on 15th June 2019 to 09:40 UTC on 17th June 2019) provided strong signals of blocking, since HTTPS requests to WhatsApp's registration service failed, and HTTPS requests to web.whatsapp.com were consistently failing (which were not previously observed as part of longitudinal testing).
OONI measurements suggest that WhatsApp was unblocked sometime between 09:40 UTC (when the last measurement showed blocking) and 10:10 UTC (when the first measurement showed that WhatsApp was accessible again) on 17th June 2019. All other OONI WhatsApp measurements collected thereafter suggest that the instant messaging app has been unblocked, since recent measurements successfully connect to WhatsApp's endpoints, registration service, and web version.
SNI filtering
To investigate further and to confirm the blocking of WhatsApp in Ethiopia, we ran some custom experiments using the curl command line to understand how whatsapp.com and whatsapp.net were interfered with.
These experiments confirmed the SNI filtering of whatsapp.com and whatsapp.net.
The following curl output shows that when using the www.whatsapp.com [SNI] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication) and connecting to an unrelated TLS server (kernel.org), the connection is aborted following the TLS Client hello message:
This shows that the censor used the SNI field to implement the blocking of WhatsApp.
It's worth noting that the block also affected v.whatsapp.net (which is the service used by WhatsApp for the registration of a new client):
Other experiments show that the block also affected whatsapp.net subdomains indiscriminately, including those that don't exist (such as no-exist.whatsapp.net):
Telegram is one of the most popular communication platforms in Ethiopia, more than WhatsApp and Viber.
Telegram Vs Whatsapp
Once internet access was restored in Ethiopia by 15th June 2019, Telegram was blocked along with WhatsApp. OONI Probe users measured the blocking of Telegram in Ethiopia as well.
OONI's Telegram test is designed to measure the reachability of Telegram's mobile app and web version (web.telegram.org) by attempting to perform an HTTP POST request, TCP connection, and HTTP GET request to Telegram's endpoints and web version over the vantage point of the user.
The following chart illustrates that most measurements collected between 12th to 18th June 2019 showed blocking of Telegram's endpoints, suggesting that Ethio Telecom attempted to block access to the Telegram mobile app.
Source:OONI measurements: Ethiopia (CSV data)
It's worth noting though that not all Telegram endpoints were blocked. OONI measurements show that while most connections to Telegram endpoints failed, some were successful. Out of 10 Telegram IPs that were measured, we found that connections to 8 of them were consistently blocked, while connections to 2 Telegram IPs were consistently successful throughout all testing. This pattern suggests that Ethio Telecom may have blocked a static list of Telegram IPs.
Connect Whatsapp To Telegram App
That said, it's worth acknowledging that the testing was limited to the hardcoded IPs used by the Telegram desktop app and, therefore, may not reflect entirely what was experienced by Telegram mobile app users in Ethiopia over the past week. It is evident though from the testing that there were attempts at disrupting the availability of the Telegram mobile app.
While it's quite unclear how successful the blocking of the Telegram mobile app was in practice, the relatively high volume of failed attempts to establish TCP connections to Telegram endpoints strongly suggests that Ethio Telecom attempted to block the app over the last week (and that it, therefore, was probably inaccessible for many users in Ethiopia).
Telegram Web (web.telegram.org) also appeared to not work as expected. In order to determine if this HTTPS service was blocked in the same way as WhatsApp Web, we ran a series of custom curl experiments to check for SNI filtering.
We did not notice any sort of SNI based filtering when accessing the Telegram web interface (web.telegram.org):
Instead, we observed connection timeouts (similarly to what we found through OONI measurements), strongly suggesting that Telegram was blocked by means of IP blocking:
In addition to the mobile app, Telegram Web (web.telegram.org) appears to have been blocked too, since its testing presented timeout errors. If it was blocked intentionally though, Ethio Telecom would have likely added web.telegram.org to their SNI filtering list (similarly to how they blocked access to web.whatsapp.com) to obtain much higher blocking accuracy (in comparison to the IP blocking of the site).
Our experiments therefore suggest that Telegram Web (web.telegram.org) was probably not blocked intentionally. Rather, the blocking of web.telegram.org was likely the collateral damage of the blocking of Telegram's endpoints.
Between 11th to 14th June 2019, Ethiopia experienced three internet blackouts, as suggested by IODA and Google traffic data.
Telegram Vs Whatsapp Vs Signal
Internet connectivity was restored thereafter, but OONI data shows that access to WhatsApp and Telegram was blocked between 15th to 18th June 2019.
Both WhatsApp's registration service (v.whatsapp.net) and web interface (web.whatsapp.com) were blocked by means of SNI filtering, but the blocks were lifted by 10:10 UTC on 17th June 2019. Many Telegram endpoints were blocked between 15th to 18th June 2019, strongly suggesting that Telegram's mobile app was blocked (though connections to some Telegram endpoints were successful). The IP blocking of Telegram's mobile app appears to have resulted in the (likely unintentional) blocking of web.telegram.org as well.
These censorship events possibly occurred in an attempt to prevent high school students in Ethiopia from cheating during the national exams, similarly to previous years. This seems to be a step back from the new government's attempts in securing a free and open internet in Ethiopia (through the unblocking of websites last June).
As this study was performed using free and open source software and open data, it can potentially be reproduced and expanded upon.
We thank all OONI Probe users in Ethiopia who made this study possible.
