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Once Celebrated in Russia, Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile

nytimes.com

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Re: Once Celebrated in Russia, Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile

#31

Post by [deleted] »

rjaco31 wrote: post #20
michaelhealy wrote: post #6

Pavel seems to be a great person, building a gift to society & mankind. He puts the users/people before himself, stands behind their rights and believes in strong ideals such as freedom of speech and privacy. I don't think you can say the same about many other internet companies/services. If you look at his previous company VK. It is by far a superior experience to Facebook, given how intuitive, fast and sleek it is.…

Telegram? Ain't that the team that proposed this shitty crypto challenge when people started to poke holes in their crypto schemes? I agree with the first part of your comment, but I really don't see the link with the future of some garbage crypto app.

[deleted]

Re: Once Celebrated in Russia, Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile

#32

Post by huhtenberg »

osipov wrote: post #8
michaelhealy wrote: post #6

Pavel seems to be a great person, building a gift to society & mankind. He puts the users/people before himself, stands behind their rights and believes in strong ideals such as freedom of speech and privacy. I don't think you can say the same about many other internet companies/services. If you look at his previous company VK. It is by far a superior experience to Facebook, given how intuitive, fast and sleek it is.…

Pavel is widely seen by the Russian developer community as a sort of a douchebag who flaunts his wealth in ways that would seem crass to someone from Silicon Valley. Just look at the guy throwing paper planes made from money at a crowd of onlookers: http://youtu.be/2pxTpFqX6rI?t=25s

Perhaps I am looking at the wrong part of the said developer community, but I haven't noticed that. In the mainstream news he was indeed painted as a nouveau riche, but then you have to wonder if that was (not) related to the hostile vKontakte takeover by the state.

Any other douche incidents aside from these money paper planes?

Re: Once Celebrated in Russia, Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile

#33

Post by valar_m »

During the standoff with the SWAT team, which took place soon after, he wouldn’t answer the door. They went home after an hour.

Wait, what? Is that what police in Russia normally do? This would never, ever happen in the United States. LAPD actually even has a "Wrong Doors Unit" which goes around repairing broken down doors when the cops raid the wrong address.[0]

[0] http://www.dailynews.com/20080316/repairs-help-rebuild-lapds...

Re: Once Celebrated in Russia, Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile

#34

Post by moxie »

There's been a lot of controversy over the Telegram encryption protocol. Any cryptographer that looks at it cringes, but Telegram has deep pockets and has done a decent job building hype.

Beyond doubts with the protocol itself, I think the more important consideration is that most people never use it. Telegram is not encrypted by default. Users have to create a special "secret chat" with contacts that is ephemeral, and some Telegram clients don't even support that mode. Last I checked, there was no way to have group "secret chats" in any client at all.

The result is a situation where many users seem to think that Telegram is somehow secure by default, when it definitely isn't. Telegram even stores plaintext copies of everyone's entire message history on the server for multi-device sync.

I think what Telegram is doing right now is dangerous, and potentially another Lavabit in the making. I'd like to see them incorporate a modern end to end encryption protocol, and enable it by default.

To be transparent, I work on TextSecure and am involved with the WhatsApp end-to-end encryption project.

Re: Once Celebrated in Russia, Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile

#35

Post by desireco42 »

moxie wrote: post #34

There's been a lot of controversy over the Telegram encryption protocol. Any cryptographer that looks at it cringes, but Telegram has deep pockets and has done a decent job building hype. Beyond doubts with the protocol itself, I think the more important consideration is that most people never use it . Telegram is not encrypted by default. Users have to create a special "secret chat" with contacts that is ephemeral,…

Thank you for bringing this up, I was under impression telegram would be secure by default.

Re: Once Celebrated in Russia, Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile

#36

Post by Energy1 »

valar_m wrote: post #33

During the standoff with the SWAT team, which took place soon after, he wouldn’t answer the door. They went home after an hour. Wait, what? Is that what police in Russia normally do? This would never, ever happen in the United States. LAPD actually even has a "Wrong Doors Unit" which goes around repairing broken down doors when the cops raid the wrong address.[0] [0] http://www.dailynews.com/20080316/repairs-help-reb…

Is there one-to-one correspondence between the damage done and repair job? How about the emotional distress?

Re: Once Celebrated in Russia, Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile

#37

Post by eklavya »

I think people ignore one very important aspect of Telegram which is privacy. All other chat apps just want all my private data. There is no privacy at all, I feel almost naked. After coming to know about Telegram I couldn't be happier. I don't care if the encryption in strong or not, at last I have a chat app which many people use and isn't a total privacy nightmare.

Re: Once Celebrated in Russia, Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile

#38

Post by acqq »

ajuc wrote: post #3

> 67 years ago Stalin defended from Hitler his right to suppress Soviet people Great quote.

But still it's not Stalin that defended the right, the people were involved. A lot of them. There were 20-28 MILLION people from USSR killed by Nazis during the war.

AFAIK, independent from that Stalin was also responsible for a lot of deaths of people of USSR (at least http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin "a total of about 2.9 million officially recorded victims in these categories") But these acts don't cancel one another by any logic.

Re: Once Celebrated in Russia, Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile

#39

Post by spacefight »

osipov wrote: post #10
Evgeny wrote: post #5

A few weeks later, he and other VKontakte executives folded 5000-ruble notes — worth about $155 at the time — into paper airplanes and threw them out an office window, sparking a fight in the street below. I'm wondering if that can be qualified as "mean". Doesn't look like a nice thing to do. I also can't see what was the motivation other than "Look, I'm rich".

Both Zuck and Durov were approached by secret services by their respective countries. Zuck caved in and gave up Facebook information to NSA. Durov decided to fight and ended up exiled.

[citation needed]

Re: Once Celebrated in Russia, Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile

#40

Post by michaelhealy »

osipov wrote: post #8
michaelhealy wrote: post #6

Pavel seems to be a great person, building a gift to society & mankind. He puts the users/people before himself, stands behind their rights and believes in strong ideals such as freedom of speech and privacy. I don't think you can say the same about many other internet companies/services. If you look at his previous company VK. It is by far a superior experience to Facebook, given how intuitive, fast and sleek it is.…

Pavel is widely seen by the Russian developer community as a sort of a douchebag who flaunts his wealth in ways that would seem crass to someone from Silicon Valley. Just look at the guy throwing paper planes made from money at a crowd of onlookers: http://youtu.be/2pxTpFqX6rI?t=25s

I believe this was after a VK executive received a bonus from the company and someone had made a joke along the lines of "look you've made it".

The employee responded to say that money wasn't his motivation. Instead, it was the idea of creating and building stuff.

To prove his point, he threw the bonus money out of the window in paper planes.

This could imply that money really wasn't/isn't the motivation.

Maybe, this was slightly foolish given the media's/public interpretation. I don't think this act had a "douchebag" intention.

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