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Comment by mapt | Hacker News Reader

Are you at all familiar with "Telegram Dude"? A fugitive of the Russian Government, an expat whose Facebook-like social network VKontakte was seized by the Russian Government, before he fled Russia and started an encrypted messaging app in response?

I'm no expert on his current activities, but this isn't a situation without Known Context.

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there are news articles (I admit, of questionable origin) the claim he visited Russia yearly for the past decade. I do wonder if it the situation is a little more complex then he was a fugitive of the Russian Government

Further, there have been constant references, in articles from very reliable, reputable sources (see: CNN, NYT, FOX, etc.) since Russia's invasion into Ukraine about Russia's use of Telegram. I don't know that I could count the number of times I've seen phrases akin to, "based on conversations between Russian military commanders on Telegram," used as a source. The issue is that Russia's military essentially sucked at setting up their own communications channels, so they fell back to Telegram.

Even Politico and the WSJ can confirm...

https://www.politico.eu/article/telegram-ceo-arrest-pavel-du...

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-military-telegram-fo...

Thing is, Ukraine also use Telegram a lot.

It is forbidden for military to military communication, but openly used a lot for information from authorities to the public.

A reason why russia use it is because they don't have anything better.

Ukraine on the other hand had fairly advanced systems well before recent Western military aid started arriving.

>encrypted messaging app

An app that's not e2e encrypted by default, doesn't support e2e encrypted group chats, and is annoying to enable e2e encrypted messaging in.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...

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