Telegram, specifically P. Durov has literally sponsored Russian dissidents. He refused to give over info when he still ran VK over to the FSB instead sending them literally memes. When Telegram was banned in Russia, he spun up free proxies for people to bypass the restrictions.
From this article it sounds like he probably did give info over to the FSB when running VK after he got spooked. Though at least it does sound like after that he made changes to get out of the country so he could be more independent.
VK =/= Telegram. At this point the FSB has free reign on key requests from VK — it’s owned in majority by Usmanov, who has strong connections to the Kremlin. But in the article it says that he made that clear in his remarks as well when he was ousted.
Yeah I know VK != Telegram, but in the article when he was running VK it sounded like he got scared and handed over a lot of personal user details to the government.
It also sounded like with Telegram there was some abuse of looking up or deleting other employees chats when threatened. The culture of the company doesn’t seem great.
All of this is kind of irrelevant though. The core issue is unencrypted chats.
What a civilized response. I don’t know if this is the norm on HN, but this is incredibly constructive compared to the reddit or twitter doubling down for any stance. Cheers.
Interesting that I had to scroll this far to find a defense for the payment of the modern web. How’s this different than piracy? The unspoken agreement is that you get the content in exchange for eyeballs on ads or cash up front.
> How’s this different than piracy? The unspoken agreement...
Because movie and game studios don't rely on "unspoken agreements".
In most cases publishers don't even ask me to serve ads. They try to go behind my back by asking my browser. When my browser tells them "no", they still have the option to ask me. Some sites do, and I will either turn ads on or walk away without reading anything.
When the agreement becomes spoken it becomes an agreement. There's no agreement when there's no communication.
There are language, timezone, and legal (contract and IP enforcement) barriers to completely outsource a core engineering team. Modules, such as QA, however, are up for grabs even today.
The rumour is Limitless (the movie with Bradley Cooper in the early '10s) was modeled on Modafinil, the side effects being "inspired by" as well. I didn't have the peripheral vision failures to register, but the death like fatigue is real.
Limitless is the film version of Alan Glynn's book The Dark Fields. It was published in 2001, so it would've been written before or at most a year or two after modafinil got FDA approval, and long before modafinil was popularized by Wired, etc in the mid-2000s.
The book is really, really good. Much darker than the film, however. The ending is completely different, particularly the implications of the last paragraph.
If you're on a Dark Fields kick, Ted Chiang's 1991 short story Understand is worthwhile. Geekier and not as philosophically weighty, but way more fun.
In short - you’re posting misinformation.