Created by the founders of Russia’s biggest social networking platform, Telegram is a new messaging app that offers speed, security and features such as secret chats with end-to-end encryption and self-destructing messages.
Brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, who launched VK (originally called VKontakte) in 2006, began working on Telegram 18 months ago as a research project because they wanted to create something that was “really secure and fun at the same time.” The importance of Telegram was underscored when Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA and PRISM were first made public in June.
“It made a lot of people really scared and concerned about the current situation. We are certainly among many, many people who started to think about ways to fix the problem,” Pavel told me in a phone interview.
Durov has had his own run-ins with Russian legal authorities. An investigation into a traffic incident Durov denied involvement in was halted for the second time earlier this month, but not before the offices of VK and Durov’s home were both searched. VK was also put on a blacklist earlier this year by Russia’s State Telecom Regulator. Though the organization later claimed the blacklisting was an accident, some analysts said it was a government attempt to intimidate online activists. (During our phone interview, Durov noted that he was using a Russian SIM card and that there was a good chance our conversation was being recorded by the Russian legal authorities.)
https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/27/meet-tel...
Posted By: Steve Williams
Wednesday, January 20th 2021 at 2:36PM
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