[Assist] Fwd: Re: Telegram & Non-Free SaaSS

[bill-auger]

On Sun, 15 Jul 2018 20:52:07 -0500 Brett wrote:
> However, could you explain to me the point of comparison between
> XMPP/IRC and Telegram? Are you suggesting that XMPP/IRC work by
> interfacing with a proprietary server-side protocol?

it's exactly the opposite of that - email/IRC/XMPP servers communicate with client using a well-established, publicly published protocol and all messages are purely passive data - none of these send code instructions that are to be executed blindly on the client

the clients for these services will only ever run their own code, and only in response to the local user or to network messages that the client is prepared to handle in a predictable way - if the server sends some message that the client is not prepared to handle, then the client will probably just ignore it; so there is little to nothing that a rogue server could do to trick a client into doing something that the user did not want to happen - if it can, then that is probably a security bug in the client

i do not know if the telegram client actually does send scripts to the client nor what the client does with them - that was a question that i posed on IRC and someone confirmed my suspicion that it did behave that way; but even so, that one particular program is only an example - my question to RMS should be considered to be a hypothetical one - i can not actually name any such program off-hand, but the electron platform is ripe and ready for it - another popular platform named: 'gnome' is said to do this with what is called: "integrating web 'apps' with the desktop"; and there will probably be many more of them coming in the future, so i thought it was worth asking
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