Telegram settles lawsuit against ex-staffer who claimed FSB links

Wednesday 25th October 2017 11:15 GMT Anonymous Coward

Another article written on speculation

The carefully worded undertone of the article (and the subheader) seeks to imply that Telegram is directly or indirectly controlled or influenced by the Kremlin.

To this I can say that I have personal knowledge from 2.5 years ago that the Durovs' relationship with the Kremlin was mutually hostile, same as that of other like entrepreneurs, such as Mr Volozh.

Compare that with the relationship of US social media giants (in particular Alphabet) with their government. I realise that Britain has always considered Russia its enemy, but is it really necessary to twist the scarce facts available into baseless speculation every time that Russia is involved?

PS: Not defending Telegram or any other "social media" platform that is centrally controlled and totally or partially closed-source. Online messaging provides generally poor assurances of security, but if needing to use, self-hosted XMPP with OTR enabled is one of the few reasonable ways to go (and only for low-level security requirements where leaking some meta-data is not fatal).

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1. Wednesday 25th October 2017 12:47 GMT Alister
  
  Re: Another article written on speculation
  
  I realise that Britain has always considered Russia its enemy...
  
  I'm not sure that that is the case, and certainly not to the extent that America has taken it, both in the 50s, and now again in the present.
  
  I completely agree with you that the article seems determined to cast doubt on Telegram's integrity, and surely, if any software written in Russia is to be considered a security risk, then exactly the same should be said of any software written in America.
  
  I'm quite sure the NSA and other shadowy organisations are doing their best to subvert American software to their own ends, either with or without the agreement of the software companies.
  
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2. Wednesday 25th October 2017 17:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Another article written on speculation
  
  Mr. Durov said that the Telegram team is constantly traveling around the world, and the headquarter is in Berlin. But now it turned out that the office of Telegram did not move anywhere and all these years was in Russia, in the same building as the VKontakte office. Although Durov claimed that VKontakte owners are connected with the Kremlin and took VKontakte away from him because of political issues.
  
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3. Friday 27th October 2017 10:53 GMT phuzz
  
  Re: Another article written on speculation
  
  "I realise that Britain has always considered Russia its enemy"
  
  It depends if you count always as 'only for the last fifty years and no more'. Or have you forgotten that the Soviet Union was a valued ally of both the UK and the USA during the latter half of World War 2?
  
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Wednesday 25th October 2017 15:32 GMT Bob Dole (tm)

Editor Sick today?

That's potentially troubling is that while VK was founded by a chap named Pavel Durov, who in 2014 wrote that “Today, VKontakte goes under the complete control of Igor Sechin and Alisher Usmanov”.

I read that 3 times trying to decode it's meaning. Then I stopped reading the article a few paragraphs later when it was impossible to ignore that coherent thoughts are in short supply in this entire piece. Fix please.

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