Pavel Durov (lead image) aka Paul du Rove (“vagabond” in French) doesn’t put his money where his mouth is.
This is because more than half the assets and almost half the revenues of Durov’s Telegram group of companies are digital units which Telegram itself programmes, stores, trades, values, and revalues, so the potential for concealment, deception and fraud is unaccountably large. This is the reason Durov has failed to secure the US regulator’s permission to sell shares in his $30 billion valuation of Telegram in a US initial public offering (IPO). In short, the freedom and privacy Durov claims his Telegram social media platform represents is not at all what the financial reports reveal of his money-making.
The first fraud flag was waved by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in October 2019 after more than a year of Durov’s money-raising through digital tokens he called Grams which he offered to sell for $1.5 billion. At the time, cornerstone investors in Durov included the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and other oligarchs.
Durov — announced the SEC — “seeks to obtain the benefits of a public offering without complying with the long-established disclosure responsibilities designed to protect the investing public… the defendants have failed to provide investors with information regarding Grams and Telegram’s business operations, financial condition, risk factors, and management that the securities laws require.”
In the five years since then, Durov claims to have sold another billion-dollar bond in 2021; $210 million in fresh securities in 2023; and $330 million in paper which Durov floated in March of this year. “The increased demand for our bonds shows that global financial institutions value Telegram’s growth in audience and monetization”, he said (telegrammed) at the time.
These investments weren’t exactly money for value, or vice versa. Durov has admitted he has been buying about a quarter of the debt issues himself. “Valuations are based on market inputs that are not observable,” reported a blockchain industry analyst.
PARIS, Aug 29 (Reuters) – The investigation into Telegram boss Pavel Durov that has fired a warning shot to global tech titans was started by a small cybercrime unit within the Paris prosecutor’s office, led by 38-year-old Johanna Brousse.
The arrest of Durov, 39, last Saturday marks a significant shift in how some global authorities may seek to deal with tech chiefs reluctant to police illegal content on their platforms.
The arrest signalled the mettle of the J3 cybercrime unit, but the true test of its ambitions will be whether Brousse can secure a conviction based on a largely untested legal argument, lawyers said.
In an unprecedented move against a major tech CEO, prosecutors argued Durov bears responsibility for the alleged illegality on his platform, placing him under formal investigation on organized crime charges. He is suspected of complicity in running an online platform that allows the posting of child sex abuse images, drug trafficking and fraud.
Durov’s lawyer said on Thursday it was “absurd” for him to be held responsible and that the app abided by European laws, echoing an earlier statement by Telegram itself.
Being placed under formal investigation in France does not imply guilt or necessarily lead to trial, but indicates judges consider there is enough evidence to proceed with the probe. Investigations can last years before being sent to trial or dropped. Durov is out on bail, but barred from leaving France.
Why should the state control all communications? They have consistently abused their powers. We the plebs can best affect this travesty by understanding it and being mostly on the same page with each other. On a side note, I can’t help but suspect EU bureaucrats are jealous of Durov. ABN
President Donald Trump railed against Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his upcoming book, accusing the tech tycoon of undermining him in the last election and warning of possible jail time.
Trump, 78, recounted meeting with Zuckerberg, 40, and seethed over the 2020 election in his upcoming book “Save America,” set to hit bookshelves on Sept. 3.
“We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election,” Trump wrote in the book, per a preview obtained by Politico.
The 45th president has lashed out at the Meta chief executive repeatedly in the past. Earlier this year he bucked his own party and expressed support for TikTok, warning, “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business.”
Paris CNN — Telegram founder Pavel Durov was released from police custody in France on Wednesday and transferred to court for questioning ahead of a possible indictment, prosecutors told CNN, days after his dramatic arrest at a Paris airport.
The Russian-born billionaire exited the anti-fraud office outside Paris in what appeared to be a police vehicle on Wednesday afternoon, according to a CNN producer there.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said he would now face “initial questioning and possible indictment” at a court in the French capital.
Durov, 39, was detained at Paris’s Bourget Airport on Saturday on a warrant related to Telegram’s lack of moderation. He was being investigated on charges relating to a host of crimes, including allegations that his platform was complicit in aiding fraudsters, drug traffickers and people spreading child pornography.
“You cannot make it safe against criminals and open for governments,” Durov told CNN in 2016. “It’s either secure or not secure.”
The issue comes down to the highlighted quote from Durov above. At first glance, it may seem reasonable for government, even an ideally good government, to control how criminals communicate electronically. Upon more thought, one wonders why should even an ideally good government presuppose this right of search, seizure, judgement and censorship against electronic communication? Isn’t it enough for even an ideally good government to pursue criminals as they have always been charged to do? That is, without summary search, seizure, judgement and censorship? Compounding factors are no one in their right mind trusts any real-world government with those over-the-top powers, and yet we all know they do it anyway, despite the law. So, should they alone have privacy in their communications, which they abuse against all of us, or should all of us have privacy in our communications which only some of us will abuse? ABN
The publicity circus accompanying the arrest explains why the court decided to share a press release listing the charges against Durov. According to this document, the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office opened a preliminary investigation against Durov on July 8 related to efforts to combat cybercrime.
The Centre for the Fight against Cybercrime (C3N) and the Anti-Fraud National Office (ONAF) have been involved in the investigation. In all, 12 charges have been filed against “a person unnamed” — a classic French judicial term to imply whoever is in charge of Telegram right now.
The charges can be broken down into four categories:
Firstly, Telegram’s founder has been charged with being complicit in storing and distributing CSAM content, facilitating drug trafficking and facilitating organized fraud and other illegal transactions.
Second, the court claims that Telegram refuses to cooperate with law enforcement when they file a formal request for information or documents.
Third, Durov faces several charges related to Telegram’s cryptographic features as they haven’t been formally declared or certified by French authorities. These seem to be minor offenses according to professor of law Florence G’sell.
Fourth, Durov is accused of taking part in a “criminal association with a view to committing a crime or an offense punishable by 5 or more years of imprisonment”, as well as money laundering.
The charges are both broad and technical at the same time. It’s also hard to know exactly their basis without access to the full investigation.
While France is holding Durov, the people left at Telegram will probably cave to threats that they will be similarly charged if they don’t allow police access to Telegram’s systems and, possibly, testify against Durov. ABN
According to breaking news, French media reported that Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov was detained by police in France.
Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of encrypted messaging service Telegram, was arrested at Le Bourget airport near Paris on Saturday evening. The 39-year-old French-Russian entrepreneur was detained by gendarmes from the GTA (Air Transport Gendarmerie) at around 8pm as he got off his private jet. Durov was accompanied by a bodyguard and a woman.
According to sources, Durov was on the French FPR (wanted persons file) list and was arrested on the basis of a search warrant issued by OFMIN (Office for the Protection of Minors), which is part of the national directorate of the French judicial police.
The reason for Durov’s arrest is shown as illegal content on Telegram.
Speech control ‘protects’ only those who are allowed to speak, those who have power or are designated voices of power. Speech control is legally protected narcissism. It protects the lies of those in power and nothing more.
If you think back on how many times you have been offended or badly misled by free speech, you won’t find many if you find any at all. Just pretending there is any need to censor speech is a lie.
As for X, it is a disaster. A waste of time because the algorithms, however they work, curate not just your voice but others as well, so your feed become a small echo tunnel of algorithmic repetition. Musk should have bought Reddit and removed the censorship and algorithms on that platform instead of Twitter, where he has only somewhat curated the curators, not removed them.
Reddit is capable of fostering discussions with clear contexts and promotes links to sources outside of itself, which X does not even allow without causing your voice to be muted. Right now, Reddit can be as bad as FB or X, but in some areas it can be very good. These areas are the ones where elite liars and parasites feel no need to intrude on the people’s voices. Go to any of them and notice how vibrant and informative they can be.
How often are you offended on those subs (typically apolitical)? How often do you see a need for censorship? Never. The only problem ever is a natural hive mind can develop and there can be too much silliness.
The natural hive minds you can see with regularity on Reddit are examples of basal human conformity in action. Elite censorship of speech is entirely designed to funnel people into hive minds constructed by them. The more of us who understand this, the better. ABN
AT&T suffered a massive data breach that saw data from ‘nearly all’ of its customers’ accounts illegally downloaded, the company has confirmed.
The compromised data included records of calls and texts of 110 million wireless subscribers and landline customers over a five month period in 2022, making the hack one of the biggest breaches of private communications data in recent history.
Although the exposed data did not include customer names, there are ‘publicly available online tools’ capable of connecting numbers with people’s identities, the company said.
AT&T admitted it first learned about the hack in April, but is just now notifying former and current customers who were impacted.
As the AI market matures, there is a stark realization in public sectors elsewhere that this is America’s AI world.
You can just picture Sam, Elon, Satya, and Jensen in a Silicon Valley karaoke joint somewhere belting out that ‘80s classic: We are the world.
While governments try to wrap their heads around how to legislate for the Brave New World the US tech industry has thrust upon them, they’re also jostling to grow domestic AI industries. As the AI market matures, there is a stark realization in public sectors elsewhere that this is America’s AI world — the rest of us just live here.
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Incentivize ‘Em
Reining in Big Tech means different things in different countries, of course. In China, the Great Firewall is being maintained, more or less. Starting July 9, developer access to ChatGPT will be cut off in China, and domestic rivals are flocking to fill the Sam Altman vacuum. Slightly further down the sliding scale of governmental control is the European Union, which passed the AI Act in March and recently told Meta to stop scraping people’s Facebook data (oh, Meta!) to train its large language models. But EU member states are keen to set themselves up as an AI hub — especially France, which CNBC reports is vying with ex-EU member the UK to attract AI investment.
Wikipedia’s editors have voted to declare the Anti-Defamation League “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, adding it to a list of banned and partially banned sources.
An overwhelming majority of editors involved in the debate about the ADL also voted to deem the organization unreliable on the topic of antisemitism, its core focus. A formal declaration on that count is expected next.
The decision about Israel-related citations, made last week, means that one of the most prominent and longstanding Jewish advocacy groups in the United States — and one historically seen as the leading U.S. authority on antisemitism — is now grouped together with the National Inquirer, Newsmax, and Occupy Democrats as a source of propaganda or misinformation in the eyes of the online encyclopedia.
Moreover, in a near consensus, dozens of Wikipedia editors involved in the discussion said they believe the ADL should not be cited for factual information on antisemitism as well because it acts primarily as a pro-Israel organization and tends to label legitimate criticism of Israel as antisemitism.
Nvidia (NVDA) is joining its mega-cap tech peers, becoming the fourth Magnificent 7 stock to split since 2022.
The chip giant’s 10-for-1 stock split, which will start trading on Monday, follows significant price growth, with shares up 212% in the past year. That massive rally pushed Nvidia into the $3 trillion club alongside Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT), becoming just the third US company ever to reach that milestone.
“A stock split is a vote of confidence from management that the stock will hold its value, as the stock [price] typically increases,” S&P Dow Jones Indices senior analyst Howard Silverblatt says.
Ep. 94 The social media app Telegram has over 900 million users around the world. Its founder Pavel Durov sat down with us at his offices in Dubai for his first on-camera interview in almost a decade. pic.twitter.com/NEb3KzWOg8
American Buddhist Net 