Haha I literally setup this exact thing yesterday, and then spent ages making Telegram notifications that delete themselves after a set time, so as not to clog up the feed. Because what’s the point of knowing that someone was at the door after they’ve left?
Are you my brain? This exactly the sort of thing I think about when I say I’m paranoid about self-hosting! Alas, as much as I’d like to be able to add an extra box just for that level of isolation it’d probably take more of a time commitment than I have available to get it properly setup.
The attraction of docker containers, of course, is that they’re largely ready to go with sensible default settings out of the box, and maintenance is taken care of by somebody else.
A VPS makes sense insofar as keeping things thoroughly isolated from my own systems, but the overhead of maintaining a box that’s directly connected to the Internet like that isn’t something I’m keen on and I’m not convinced I’d have the expertise to do it right from the outset.
This reminds me of working for a UK developer back in the PS2 days. From what I remember, one of the coders there wrote a tool that enabled the comparatively cheap QA test kits that would only boot from a CD/DVD to appear to dev PCs as full blown dev kits (that cost 4 or 5 times the price) and boot code pushed to them over the network.
They didn’t have as much memory or processing grunt so there was still need for a few proper dev kits, but it saved them a fortune in hardware costs. Pretty sure it was an open secret that Sony reluctantly allowed, and most of the UK dev studios were using it at one point.
I’m not saying Telegram is perfect by a long shot, and they’ve made some questionable decisions around crypto and paid-for services, but it grinds my gears when people suggest that it’s “unencrypted”.
E2E encryption means that yours and the other person’s device are the only ones that have the keys for decryption and are typically the only places where chats are stored.* The conversation is secured end-to-end.
Telegram has the master copies of your chats on their servers to enable certain extra functionality that you can’t get with E2E messengers, but it does not mean that the data is stored or transmitted unencrypted. The data at rest is encrypted and it’s encrypted when it travels to and from your device.
Sure, there’s the argument that governments could compel Telegram to hand over the keys to your chats, but considering that the platform is outright banned in more than one country with questionable regimes, it’s reasonable to conclude that they don’t give in to such demands. Honestly, if your government wanted copies of your chats so badly it’d be far easier for them to go through you and your device directly, and then no amount of E2E encryption is going to help you.
All that said, Telegram does actually have E2E encryption in the form of Secret Chats which, while having no method of backup, allows you to have two very different conversations with the same person and provides a level of plausible deniability that E2E only platforms cannot.
*Until you or the other party chooses to export a plain-text backup and store it on Google Drive where it’s far easier for governments to subpoena. I’m looking at you, WhatsApp.
I was with you until you suggested it would use 5kWh every hour. That’s an insane amount of power even if they were using an electric griddle, which is unlikely. A small generator would be enough to power the lighting and refrigeration and then the griddle would run on gas, which is way cheaper than electricity (or the petrol for the electric generator).
I’d imagine energy costs would be a fraction of what you’ve calculated, and would scale up along with any increase in sales volume.
The indifference of the parent just staring at their phone in the first panel really hits home. Sure they could be recording the event but the expression says otherwise.
I hadn’t even seen Alien when I first saw Spaceballs, but my god this scene had me in absolute stitches. It’s the way he puts on the little hat while eyeballing everyone. It’s making me chuckle just thinking about it.