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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

#111

Post by dmishe »

caractacus wrote: post #11
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.…

> When people refer to VK being a clone of Facebook The 'clone' label comes mainly from the fact that the site was originally a copy of FB right down to the colour scheme. The two sites have diverged significantly since then, of course, but if you'd removed the logos and presented the two sites to someone in the first couple of years, they would have been hard pressed to pick them apart. VK is also remarkably popular…

VK was a total clone of FB UI of that time. And it still is in many ways, but the irony is that UI is so much better than what FB did afterwards, just night and day.

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

#112

Post by electic »

smtddr wrote: post #94
electic wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram bashing aside, this is very wrong. It is always better to have the source code to inspect the entire package. Without the source code, there is no way to fully verify the security of a solution. For Telegram and WhatsApp, the clients and server code should be released if you want to make sure.

No, you're wrong. People can give you whatever source code they want. That doesn't meant it's the same as what's running in production. While this is tin-foil-hat paranoia, when it comes to encryption software in this post-snowden world it is definitely more reliable to reverse-engineer the binary & network traffic than to just believe the provided source-code to encryption in a popular social app. Or compile the app…

> Without the source code, there is no way to fully verify the security of a solution.

So you are telling me if you had the source code you would not be able to verify the code and also use the code to fully verify the expected behavior of the binary?

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

#113

Post by desdiv »

Karunamon wrote: post #49
Htsthbjig wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can permit law enforcement to make warranted requests against specific users or groups while still not allowing them access to all the data." Can you? With the Patriot Act? The fact is that the US gobertment can talk to any worker of any company of the US and blackmail her into doing whatever they want. If this person tells anybody, he goes to jail. "You don't have to choose between "revolutionary hero" and "let…

As much as i admire Levison, at least part of that problem was his own making, namely by being a dick to the agents and charging rates for the work that is way too high. It is possible to disagree with police without being outright antagonistic to them.

...and charging rates for the work that is way too high.

Funny, when I read about the $3500 part I was surprised at how little he asked for. My impression from various HN threads[0][1] is that someone of Levison's caliber could easily fetch $200 per hour.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5769348

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182369

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

#114

Post by teddyh »

incanus77 wrote: post #44

I met and talked with Pavel last year in St. Petersburg at the VK office and I found him very curious, humble, and quiet. I enjoyed it a lot and I appreciate his sense of humor. In fact he showed me their conference room, which is decorated like a medieval torture chamber: http://tinyurl.com/nm7pqt2 We didn't get into the details but I appreciate that he didn't take the standard approach to plain old conference rooms…

You broke the formatting on this page.

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

#115

Post by ivanca »

spacefight wrote: post #39
osipov wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/10/23...

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

#116

Post by jhasse »

moxie wrote: post #85
zeitg3ist wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Telegram even stores plaintext copies of everyone's entire message history on the server for multi-device sync. Really? In their FAQ [1] they state: > ordinary chats use client-server/server-client encryption and are stored securely encrypted on our servers What's your source? [1] https://telegram.org/faq

This is a great example of deceptive marketing at work. You can check out their API here: https://core.telegram.org/methods#working-with-messages ...where's the encryption on message histories? There is none. If the data is encrypted server-side, it's with keys that live on the servers. In other words, the encryption provides no value and the servers are "trusted." The point of end to end encryption is not to have to…

As stated in the FAQ normal chats are NOT end to end encrypted. Of course the server has to store the messages in plain text to make cloud sync work (without requiring a password).

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

#117

Post by shiven »

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.…

Playing with encryption is like playing with fire. Much worse actually. There are no partially broken encryption products, only 'not yet broken' and 'broken'. Time and time again, here on HN and elsewhere, people with cryptographic capital have staked their reputations on calling out Telegram as 'broken'. So why would anyone even want to touch it with a barge pole? It may turn into a 'not yet broken' product someday. But that day is not today. By pushing Telegram as 'secure' i.e. 'not yet broken', you and others are doing a disservice to the users at large and the crypto community in general. So stop calling the bloody shovel a spade.

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

#118

Post by tptacek »

electic wrote: post #112
smtddr wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're wrong. People can give you whatever source code they want. That doesn't meant it's the same as what's running in production. While this is tin-foil-hat paranoia, when it comes to encryption software in this post-snowden world it is definitely more reliable to reverse-engineer the binary & network traffic than to just believe the provided source-code to encryption in a popular social app. Or compile the app…

> Without the source code, there is no way to fully verify the security of a solution. So you are telling me if you had the source code you would not be able to verify the code and also use the code to fully verify the expected behavior of the binary?

It is not as easy to verify source code as it sounds.

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

#119

Post by psykovsky »

tlear wrote: post #75
valar_m wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should have been more clear -- The article doesn't say, but I was assuming that the SWAT team was there to execute a search warrant. Perhaps they did not and that's why they didn't force entry, but the SWAT team showing up without a search warrant makes even less sense to me.

It was a threat, they were letting him know that his time in Russia was coming to an end. He took the hint and bailed before he got into an "accident"

That's almost nice of them, you know. Giving you a shot to get out of there and all.

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

#120

Post by electic »

tptacek wrote: post #118
electic wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without the source code, there is no way to fully verify the security of a solution. So you are telling me if you had the source code you would not be able to verify the code and also use the code to fully verify the expected behavior of the binary?

It is not as easy to verify source code as it sounds.

and it is not easy to do black box testing either.
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