Du Rove's Channel

2022-05-18 17:39:03 The media often calls me a billionaire, but, unlike most billionaires, I don't own jets, yachts, cars or houses.

Creating things always seemed to me a more rewarding activity than engaging in consumption. Open / Comment

2022-05-11 17:28:32 The world is on the brink of a global food crisis. Hundreds of millions of people are facing starvation.

To help those in need, last month the UAE ran the successful 1 Billion Meals initiative – a fundraising campaign aimed at providing a billion meals for the most vulnerable people in 50 countries.

Hundreds of donors participated. The founder of the campaign, Sheikh Mohammed, donated 400 million meals, and I contributed a modest 12 million. Hopefully, many more people can join the initiative in the following years and we can collectively achieve the Zero Hunger goal set by the UN. Open / Comment

2022-04-27 21:28:17 In 2022, Telegram is again among the top 5 most downloaded apps in the world (just like in 2021). Of these top 5 most popular apps, Telegram is the only one that doesn't spend billions on marketing to buy downloads. In a way, we are the only app that is on the list purely because it is genuinely loved by the people Open / Comment

2022-04-18 21:29:55 Telegram shipped another historic update this past weekend. In addition to features that redefine the boundaries of what a messaging app can do (never before have bots been so powerful or notification options so flexible), we introduced half a dozen other improvements. Among them is support for more languages in message translations (to turn on the Translate button, head to Settings > Languages).

We recognize that Telegram has become the main source of information from Ukraine, and we hope that the tools we provide can help inform more people and save more lives. To ease the work of journalists around the world, all public channel posts in Ukrainian now always offer the translate button by default. Open / Comment

2022-03-19 01:20:41 It seems that we had an issue with emails going between our telegram.org corporate addresses and the Brazilian Supreme Court. As a result of this miscommunication, the Court ruled to ban Telegram for being unresponsive.

On behalf of our team, I apologize to the Brazilian Supreme Court for our negligence. We definitely could have done a better job.

We complied with an earlier court decision in late February and responded with a suggestion to send future takedown requests to a dedicated email address. Unfortunately, our response must have been lost, because the Court used the old general-purpose email address in further attempts to reach us. As a result, we missed its decision in early March that contained a follow-up takedown request. Luckily, we have now found and processed it, delivering another report to the Court today.

Because tens of millions of Brazilians rely on Telegram to communicate with family, friends and colleagues, I ask the Court to consider delaying its ruling for a few days at its discretion to allow us to remedy the situation by appointing a representative in Brazil and setting up a framework to react to future pressing issues like this in an expedited manner.

The last 3 weeks have been unprecedented for the world and for Telegram. Our content moderation team was flooded with requests from multiple parties. However, I am certain that once a reliable channel of communication is established, we'll be able to efficiently process takedown requests for public channels that are illegal in Brazil. Open / Comment

2022-03-07 20:19:03 If you follow my posts, you know that on my Mom's side, I trace my family line from Kyiv. Her maiden name is Ukrainian (Ivanenko), and to this day we have many relatives living in Ukraine. That's why this tragic conflict is personal both to me and Telegram.

Some people wondered if Telegram is somehow less secure for Ukrainians, because I once lived in Russia. Let me tell these people how my career in Russia ended.

Nine years ago I was the CEO of VK, which was the largest social network in Russia and Ukraine. In 2013, the Russian security agency, FSB, demanded that I provide them the private data of the Ukrainian users of VK who were protesting against a pro-Russian President.

I refused to comply with these demands, because it would have meant a betrayal of our Ukrainian users. After that, I was fired from the company I founded and was forced to leave Russia.

I lost my company and my home, but would do it again – without hesitation. I smile with pride when I read my VK post from April 2014, which shows the scanned orders from the FSB and my trademark response to them – a dog in a hoodie.

When I defied their demands, the stakes were high for me personally. I was still living in Russia, and my team and my old company were also based in that country.

Many years have passed since then. Many things changed: I no longer live in Russia, no longer have any companies or employees there. But one thing remains the same – I stand for our users no matter what. Their right to privacy is sacred. Now – more than ever. Open / Comment

2022-02-03 17:17:24 Messages on WhatsApp were left open to potential attackers for years, as detailed in recent leaks about Boldend – a US cyber-warfare startup (more here).

Since the creation of WhatsApp, there's hardly been a moment in which it was secure: every few months researchers uncover a new security issue in the app. I wrote about this in detail 2 years ago (read here if you missed it). Nothing has changed since then.

It would be hard to believe that the technical team of WhatsApp is so consistently incompetent. Telegram, a far more sophisticated app, has never had security issues of such severity. Open / Comment

2021-12-31 19:05:15 2021 was a phenomenal year for Telegram. It became the most downloaded app in the world in January, managed to welcome 70 million new users in just one day in October, and was declared the fastest growing app of the year in December.

We know we owe this growth to you – our users – so we carefully listened to your feedback and kept making Telegram better for you throughout the year. Yesterday we released our 12th major update this year, packed with the features you requested – like reactions and message translation

With each update we try to not simply add a missing feature, but instead expand its boundaries and redefine how it looks, feels and works. We hope that this approach can improve the quality of human communication and bring more efficiency, happiness and joy to the world

The spoiler animations we just rolled out are pure magic, while the custom animated QR codes in this update make QRs sexy again. The newly added message reactions are already spectacular, but it's just the start: we are now busy finding ways to make them even more stunning

I'm grateful for your love of Telegram and excited by what we can do for you in 2022. Thank you – and have a glorious New Year! Open / Comment

2021-12-28 15:13:11 A recent report has proven that Telegram sticks to its promise of keeping its user data private, while apps like WhatsApp give real-time user data to third parties, and despite their numerous claims about "E2E encryption", can also disclose message contents.

The report has confirmed that Telegram is one of the few messaging apps that doesn't breach their users’ trust.

I am not surprised. Most other apps couldn't guarantee privacy to their users even if they wanted to. Because their engineers reside in the US, they have to secretly implement backdoors in their apps when the US government orders them to. If an engineer speaks publicly about it, then can go to jail for breaching a gag order.

In most cases the agencies don't even need a court order to extract private information from messaging apps such as WhatsApp, and in other cases, court documents are shrouded in secrecy. Some supposedly secure apps have been funded by government agencies from their inception (e.g Anom, Signal).

For many years the National Security Agency (NSA) has been making sure that international encryption standards are in line with what the NSA can decipher, and all other approaches to encryption are labeled as "non-standard" or "home-brew". Through their proxies in the encryption industry (like this one), the NSA imposed flawed standards onto the encryption used by the rest of the world, cautioning everyone else from "rolling out their own encryption".

No wonder US-based apps such as WhatsApp are plagued with backdoors – intentionally planted security loopholes that governments (and anybody else) can use to hack smartphones and extract private data from people.

I hear our US-based competitors are frustrated that they can't match Telegram's growth, despite heavily investing in marketing (something Telegram has never had to invest in). But in order to match our growth, they have to first make sure their actions match their marketing claims. Until then, data breaches and security issues in their apps will, unfortunately, remain unavoidable. Open / Comment

2021-12-23 13:07:01 When Telegram said goodbye to TON last year, I expressed the hope that future generations of developers would one day carry on with our vision of a mass-market blockchain platform.

So I was inspired to see the champions of Telegram's coding contests continue developing the open TON project, which they rebranded to Toncoin.

I'm proud that the technology we created is alive and evolving. When it comes to scalability and speed, TON is still years ahead of everything else in the blockchain realm. It would have been a shame to see this project not benefitting humanity.

Unlike the original TON, Toncoin is independent from Telegram. But I wish its team the same success. Coupled with the right go-to-market strategy, they have all they need to build something epic Open / Comment