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by lenovouser 3293 days ago
You can't be more wrong and uninformed. Russia-bashing seems to be a common and accepted theme now. He actually left Russia and his old company because the Russian government tried to censor it (VK) and he refused to do so. So basically he and Putin are in some kind of fight / disagreement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov#Dismissal_from_VK
1 comments
lambdadmitry 3293 days ago
He didn't leave Russia as in "exile", he did leave Russia as in "it's nice to leave somewhere else". Here [1] is a news report about him throwing out someone's phone for trying to make a photo of him in one of Saint-Petersburg's malls. Here [2] is an article from 2014 stating that he's visiting Telegram's office daily. By the way, Telegram's developers sit in the same building as VK's (also in [2]).

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)

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lenovouser 3291 days ago
I never stated it was for exile.

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.

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