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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

#21

Post by danabramov »

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.

IIRC they did pay out to people who found holes.

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

#22

Post by drzaiusapelord »

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

To be fair, that's bush league in the realm of Russian wealth douchbaggery.

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

#23

Post by tomp »

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 view money planes as a joke. In any case, which is better, openly giving money away, or secretly colluding to keep employee wages down? Personally, I prefer his "crassness" to the crassness of the SV elite.

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

#24

Post by skylan_q »

myth_drannon wrote: post #2

Life is too short to be a revolutionary hero. Be a law abiding citizen and do what Zuckenberg,Page and other American CEOs did, quietly give control control over our privacy to the government. Social networks are too important for mass surveillance. Russians are too optimistic because only 20 years ago they had an attempt of a complete governance system change.

I was reading the article with Zuck in place of Pavel. I don't think any westerner would be courageous enough to do what Pavel did.

But this falls into the narrative that "Russia bad, America good".

How do you think the Russian media spins stories about Facebook's and Google's co-operation with US intelligence?

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

#25

Post by known »

myth_drannon wrote: post #2

Life is too short to be a revolutionary hero. Be a law abiding citizen and do what Zuckenberg,Page and other American CEOs did, quietly give control control over our privacy to the government. Social networks are too important for mass surveillance. Russians are too optimistic because only 20 years ago they had an attempt of a complete governance system change.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw

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

#26

Post by higherpurpose »

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.…

Will Telegram finally have end-to-end encryption by default for all users, just like TextSecure, and now even Whatsapp? I fail to see how an app can claim to be "the most secure in the world", when 99 percent of its users don't even use end-to-end encryption.

From the link, this paragraph was cringe-worthy:

> We use SHA1 for integrity check The SHA1 in question is for raw unencrypted data. The message key is SHA1-dependent. Note that the AES key and iv depend on that SHA1.

Glad to see they're using this super-secure "SHA1" hash function for integrity checking and that everything else is dependent on it. In a few years they could even brag about how they're using SHA1 for longer than Microsoft!

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

#27

Post by asgard1024 »

osipov wrote: post #12
ajuc wrote: post #3

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

A very naive view targeted at equally naive Western audiences. Repression in USSR after WW2 was negligible compared to 1930s.

It wasn't negligible in my country (Czechoslovakia), where the USSR was the model. I think almost everybody felt relief when Stalin (and Gottwald) died. Maybe Stalin didn't oppress people much after the war, but he still got the _right_ to do so, and the Durov's sentence is 100% correct.

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

#28

Post by stefantalpalaru »

osipov wrote: post #12
ajuc wrote: post #3

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

A very naive view targeted at equally naive Western audiences. Repression in USSR after WW2 was negligible compared to 1930s.

Educate yourself, comrade: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_repression_in_the_Sov...

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

#29

Post by jpatokal »

osipov wrote: post #12
ajuc wrote: post #3

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

A very naive view targeted at equally naive Western audiences. Repression in USSR after WW2 was negligible compared to 1930s.

True enough, but that doesn't invalidate the quote, since it was still Stalin at the helm. There were still an estimated 1.7 million people in the camps after WW2, many of them Soviet POWs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#mediaviewer/File:Gulag_Pr...

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

#30

Post by V-2 »

osipov wrote: post #12
ajuc wrote: post #3

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

A very naive view targeted at equally naive Western audiences. Repression in USSR after WW2 was negligible compared to 1930s.

Negligible? Gulag population was on the rise. It surpassed 1939 levels by 1950.
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