Tails

#5 Updated by sajolida 2017-10-26 10:13:06

Today I tried the desktop version of Telegram on Debian over Tor and it worked like a charm!

See https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/telegram-desktop

You can configure Tor as a SOCKS5 proxy in the configuration. The traffic seems to go through HTTP.

When first starting the app, you have to enter your phone number and validate it through an SMS. Then you get all your messages and conversations back, even your stickers!

So it’s not anonymous in the sense that it’s linked with your phone number but it’s super easy :)

I bet it works fine with Tails. It could be documented once we have Additional Software.

#6 Updated by spriver 2017-10-26 15:40:48

sajolida wrote:
> Today I tried the desktop version of Telegram on Debian over Tor and it worked like a charm!
>
> See https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/telegram-desktop
>
> You can configure Tor as a SOCKS5 proxy in the configuration. The traffic seems to go through HTTP.
>
> When first starting the app, you have to enter your phone number and validate it through an SMS. Then you get all your messages and conversations back, even your stickers!
>
> So it’s not anonymous in the sense that it’s linked with your phone number but it’s super easy :)
>
> I bet it works fine with Tails. It could be documented once we have Additional Software.

I started working on this topic in the last days (gathered and started to read some whitepapers, etc.) and also stumbled upon Telegram in Debian (: It also works inside of Tails (after configuring the SOCKS proxy inside of Telegram). There’s also a working icon in the top bar. I did not test it to configure it persistently, but it’s maybe possible as the config, data etc. is stored in ~/.local/share/TelegramDesktop/. I’ll test it more in the next days as I’m using Telegram (confession time (; ) on a daily basis and I’d be super happy to have it working well integrated into Tails.

#7 Updated by spriver 2017-11-01 19:18:13

Signal (https://signal.org/) announced that the until now used Chromium-based desktop application is deprecated, it’s going to be replaced by a (Electron framework https://electron.atom.io/ based) standalone application, thus dropping the requirement of installing Chromium to use Signal Messenger on a Desktop system.

So far the application is available in the repo of Signal, I don’t know if it’s going to be available via the Debian native repositories someday.

Edit after some brief testing (in Tails):

• adding the repo is only possible when apt-transport-https is installed, the repo is refusing plain HTTP connections
• the executable is huge:
  Need to get 97.3 MB of archives. After this operation, 226 MB of additional disk space will be used.
• starting the app is no problem, but it’s not possible to configure a proxy. the app won’t boot at all when it’s started via torsocks in CLI -> AFAICT the application is (atm) not usable in Tails. The issue tracker of signal-desktop has an open ticket wrt. adding SOCKS proxy support (https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop/issues/1430)
• settings/data are stored in ~/.config/Signal/

#10 Updated by Anonymous 2018-01-19 10:11:22

I’ve created the (missing) blueprint and added all the information provided. Also created subtickets on Feature #14567 to test the software further in Tails.