![]() In Putin’s Russia, the policy is to block any means of communication that escapes government control.īefore creating Telegram in 2013, Pavel Durov, dubbed by some the Russian Mark Zuckerberg, had set up VK, which became the most successful social network in the country, but in 2014, the government basically took it off him with the connivance of pro-government investors and by using an April Fools’ letter of resignation he had written. WhatsApp faced a similar situation in Brazil last year, although that was largely due to ignorance and stubbornness of a judge. Every Telegram conversation is encrypted by means of a randomly generated code, and the company doesn’t have them. Why would Telegram do that, knowing what was at stake? Aside from its commitment to user privacy, the simple fact is that no such backdoor exists. Why is the Kremlin putting all these resources into blocking Telegram? The official version is that Telegram refused to provide a backdoor to decipher conversations on the service. A relatively small company has left the Kremlin with egg on its face and highlighting concerns for the future of the internet in Russia. Nevertheless, says Durov, Telegram continues to operate with relative normality and the company has not detected a significant drop in user activity in Russia. ![]() Roskomnadzor’s attempts to block Telegram amount to a denial of service attack on the Russian internet: many sites and services unrelated to Telegram are now blocked as part of this Soviet-style exercise in censorship. ![]() Aware that growing numbers of people were evading the blockade through proxies or VPNs, the government agency has begun to stifle all ways of connecting to Telegram, wiping out more than 17 million IP addresses from Google and Amazon’s servers (you can see the number grow in real time here), in the process, while disrupting all types of services from online games to mobile apps or cryptocurrency exchange pages. ![]()
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