Edit: thanks to all the replies. I am smarter now.
Durov seems very keen on supporting the myth of his "dissent" (to the point of outright lying) and very shy about the actual location of Telegram's developers and servers. Guess why
[1] https://lenta.ru/news/2017/03/20/durov/ (in Russian)
[2] https://tjournal.ru/p/durov-back-in-ussr (in Russian)
but you are right, article 2 talks about him being in Russia some time in early 2014. It also states that one of the reasons to be there was for selling a datacenter. He left shortly after that with the comment that he had no intentions to return to Russia arguing that the country is incompatible with doing internet business.
> Я уехал из России и не собираюсь возвращаться. К сожалению, в данный момент страна не совместима с ведением бизнеса в интернете
As for the office being in the same building as VK's - that is definitely weird. Even though I know that they also have offices in Berlin and London. Same goes for the fact that they also have multiple datacenters around the world for speed and security. There probably is also going to be a DC in Russia. I don't feel like my data is unsafe due to that.
And where did he lie about the location of developers or servers? I'd be very interested in seeing that. With that you could convince me that something fishy is going on.
Russophobia seems to be the only acceptable form of Xenophobia these days. And a wildly popular one, at that.
There are proponents who want to eliminate any type of generalization based on nationality/religion/etc which is also heavily flawed. Somewhere in between is the rational approach.
With this comment, the idea is that crypto software built in Russia could easily be compromised by the rather un-free Russian government, which seems pretty reasonable. Of course, the fact that this fellow no longer lives in Russia scuttles it, but that's just not being fully informed, not "xenophobia."
That's a very generous assessment.
If only accusations of "speaking to a Russian" were qualified by the conversation actually involving something malicious or illegal before suggesting it was improper then I'd be in much more agreement.
The fact is besides Michael Flynn who was immediately fired once people with real power found out, there hasn't been anything that has come out that was bad on the administrations part. Even the accusations against Kushner seemed to be the handy work of Flynn who was at the only meeting he had with a Russian official.
Even the level of manipulation of the election results was seemingly marginal. If leaking Clinton/Podestas/DNC's emails was the limit of the interference (assuming they even leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks), despite most Americans on the left falsely believing it involved manipulating actual votes, then I really don't think it was as bad as people seem to think.
At most the worst that can be said is that Trump/RNC's emails weren't also leaked but everyone knows Trump doesn't use email so the damage would be limited to the RNC who Trump attacked on multiple occassions.
That would be a preferred scenario to Clinton/DNC emails never being leaked IMO.
So overall I don't see the total effect of Russian manipulation having a deciding factor. Especially considering the reason he won was in poorly educated industrial swing states where things like the latest Wikileaks Podesta email isn't as big news as a Trump ralley getting people excited over populist messaging.
Lying under oath to Congress is pretty bad, and when you lie about never meeting Russian officials, and then it turns out you met Russian officials, it's even worse.
Most of your comment is downplaying the consequences of Russian interference, which doesn't make any sense to me. I don't care if Russian interference resulted in +10% of the vote for Hillary, a foreign power screwing with our democracy is capital-B Bad, and if there was in fact coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, then it's capital-T Treason.
We also have a reason to connect "American company" with "NSA Spy"... and it's probably not really true for all US companies is it? :)
It's kind of ironic that Telegram is being attacked for being Russian by people coming from US of all places.
I also avoid as best as I can giving any data to usa companies or buying privacy-sensitive products from them.
> Don't suppose this would be one of Putin's patriotic citizen artists spreading fake news do you?
You might be missed it, but Pavel lost business he built to Putin's oligarch friend.
Source?
And messages that are not E2E encrypted are unsafe by default.
A few years ago, Kremlin tried getting their hands on Vkontakte (to be able to more easily monitor/censor), but Durov kept rebuffing them. Eventually, they intimidated him into selling his majority stake to one of their pet oligarchs. As you can imagine, Durov is pretty bitter about his company being taken away from him (and generally bitter about security services trying to mess with people's rights). After cashing out, he's moved to the EU and become a consistent critic of the Russian government.