I’m not Ukrainian, so it’s not my place to tell them to just bend over and take it. If they want to continue fighting, then it’s their right and I support their position.

I’m also not sure if a compromise is possible when the positions of both sides are so far apart. Ukraine thinks they can win, Russia still thinks they’re the 2nd best army in the world and that all is going well, so even if you trust Putin or Russia (which you shouldn’t, see the 2nd Chechen War), I’m not sure how both sides can agree on a middle ground. There are still too many cards to be played before we reach that point.

Those who truly worry about human life should keep in mind that if it’s too easy for aggressors to start wars, they’ll keep doing it because it works. Do nothing, appease the aggressors, and you might end up with even more dead people.

But hey, it’s just Slavs killing Slavs, right?

All I see is Russia invading another country (2014 and then again in 2022) and bringing war, death, and destruction to a land that had its problems but was fairly peaceful. Them being “slavs” matters little here.

I personally don’t want anyone to die, but it’s not like Ukraine asked Russia to invade them, steal their land and kill their people.

he would have not genocided tens of thousands of ethnic Russians since 2014

Zelensky became president in May 2019…

edit: I am really being downvoted for pointing out a fact? lol.

If you (user 1) are talking with your friend (user 2) through me (telegram) and I have the encryption keys, then for me (telegram) communications are essentially in plain text. I can even encrypt them 100 times… I have the keys and can read your (user 1 + user 2) messages.

You’re again talking about storing messages (not sure why). Telegram might encrypt their storage (I never claimed they didn’t), but they have the keys and therefore can read what’s stored. They also have the keys for the messages, so there’s no hypotheticals or claims here: they have the keys for everything, so they can read everything.

E2EE is opt-in and currently only available for direct chats. Unless you manually start a “secret chat”, there’s no E2EE MTProto 2.0 to help you. They can read everything.

The audit done in 2020 goes over how Telegram encrypts their cloud chats and those encryption keys are not stored on the same servers. While E2EE is preferable, the reason why Telegram works the way it does is because how messages are handled by default.

So… Telegram has the keys to decrypt your messages?

I mean, it’s not hard to understand. The party that holds the keys can read the messages.

I didn’t say anything about them “storing messages in plain text”. I said that they don’t do E2EE by default and since they have the keys for the TLS that encrypts data in transit, they can read the content of your messages. Encrypting their drives - something that any decent service does - only protects you if someone “steals” a drive: Telegram has the keys and can obviously read the contents of their drives.

I found this Kaspersky blog post which provides a nice tl;dr. They even make the same point as me:

Let’s go straight to the root of the problem: Telegram is a unique messenger with two types of chats: regular and secret. Regular chats are not end-to-end encrypted. Only secret ones are.

No other messenger does this: even the notorious WhatsApp, part of Mark Zuckerberg’s data-hungry empire, uses end-to-end encryption by default. The user doesn’t need to do anything at all, there are no special checkboxes or anything: messages are protected from all outsiders (including the service owners) right out of the box.

[…]

This is not new. Back in 2015, Edward Snowden had this to say about Telegram’s defaults:

I respect @durov, but Ptacek is right: @telegram’s defaults are dangerous. Without a major update, it’s unsafe. [source]

To be clear, what matters is that the plaintext of messages is accessible to the server (or service provider), not whether it’s “stored.” [source]

In practice, they’re no different from Messenger, Slack, Discord or a direct message on Reddit. Most messages on Telegram can be read by them, just like Google can read all messages in your Gmail.

Why is Signal or WhatsApp better? Because they do E2EE for all messages. It doesn’t matter if they forget to encrypt their servers, all they see and store is encrypted messages. You hold the keys, not them.

WhatsApp uses the Signal Protocol. Is it as private as Signal? No, it “leaks” way more metadata. Have I personally checked if they’re encrypting messages? Also no, although others have. Is it possible that they’re doing something “funny” and no longer encrypt? Yes, but is there any suggestion or proof of that being the case?

Should you use WhatsApp? No, but the suggestion above was to use Telegram, a service that doesn’t do end-to-end encryption by default and leaks the same type of data as WhatsApp. Going from Messenger to Telegram is a sideways move. From Messenger to WhatsApp would be at least a small upgrade (with the benefit of having more contacts there than Telegram, at least in some countries).

I understand the point about it also being a Meta app. I guess the question is what do you trust more? Telegram and the people behind it with your plain text messages or a Meta app with end-to-end encryption? I don’t trust either, so I pick encryption.

I’m not anti Telegram or anything like that. It’s a nice app, lots of features, smooth, etc, and I use it, but privacy was never their main priority.

I use Telegram every day, but without end-to-end encryption (by default and on groups), it’s as private as Facebook Messenger. They can read everything. The only difference is that currently people trust them more than they trust Facebook, but everything turns to shit eventually.

If Signal is too “boring” or no one uses it in your circles, try WhatsApp. Yes, it’s also from Meta, but at least comms are encrypted (same protocol as Signal) and a lot of people use it.

No. For most (if not all) batteries the recommendation is to avoid discharging them too much.

Having a larger battery helps here because you won’t go as deep. On a larger UPS, maybe you’ll be at 30% when the power returns instead of being at 5%. On a phone, it may reduce the number of charging cycles because you no longer need to charge during the day or have to go too deep. On EVs, a larger battery means that you won’t have to fast charge as much during trips and that you won’t have to charge it to 90% to reach the next charger or arrive with a very low state of charge.

Larger batteries also allow devices to age better. If I get a phone that barely lasts me a day, I’ll probably have to replace the battery or carry a power bank around after a while. On the other hand, if I always end the day with 20-30% left, I’ll only have problems after losing ~20% of capacity. It’s the same with a UPS. If we find ourselves going down to 5% when it’s new, then 2 or 3 years later that USP won’t be enough for our load/outages and will shutdown before power returns.

I don’t have anything to add in terms of solutions, but I think it’s worth trying to understand why your batteries only last 1 or 2 years.

If it’s because they’re too low capacity for your needs and you’re deep draining discharging them often, then you might be able to save money in the long term by getting a larger, more expensive UPS. If the environment where they operate is harsh (eg: too hot), maybe the fix is actually air con or something like that. And so on.

Batteries can last a long time, but you need to avoid the extremes: temperatures, state of charge, charging cycles, etc.

Hmm, I’m not experiencing that. Could Android (well, the flavour used by your phone) be killing background apps too aggressively or something like that?

Edit: could also be a RAM thing. I have 12GB.

Could be one of those “optimisations” some brands make. I wasn’t getting 120Hz on all apps on my OnePlus device. I had to force it with developer options or some 3rd party app. Gave up, installed a custom ROM (LineageOS), and it’s 120Hz all the time without any issues 😎