“[B]y transgressing [the Father’s] commandment we became His enemies. And therefore in the last times the Lord has restored us into friendship through His incarnation, having become ‘the Mediator between God and men;’ propitiating indeed for us the Father against whom we had sinned, and cancelling our disobedience by His own obedience;” - St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies (5.17.1)
“[B]y transgressing [the Father’s] commandment we became His enemies. And therefore in the last times the Lord has restored us into friendship through His incarnation, having become ‘the Mediator between God and men;’ propitiating indeed for us the Father against whom we had sinned, and cancelling our disobedience by His own obedience;” - St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies (5.17.1)
Crude oil prices edged higher after tumbling on Thursday, when U.S. West Texas intermediate slid back below $110 per barrel after topping as much as $130 a barrel in recent sessions. Still, gas prices at the pump rose to fresh highs. Telegram was co-founded by Pavel and Nikolai Durov, the brothers who had previously created VKontakte. VK is Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, a social network used for public and private messaging, audio and video sharing as well as online gaming. In January, SimpleWeb reported that VK was Russia’s fourth most-visited website, after Yandex, YouTube and Google’s Russian-language homepage. In 2016, Forbes’ Michael Solomon described Pavel Durov (pictured, below) as the “Mark Zuckerberg of Russia.” Despite Telegram's origins, its approach to users' security has privacy advocates worried. This ability to mix the public and the private, as well as the ability to use bots to engage with users has proved to be problematic. In early 2021, a database selling phone numbers pulled from Facebook was selling numbers for $20 per lookup. Similarly, security researchers found a network of deepfake bots on the platform that were generating images of people submitted by users to create non-consensual imagery, some of which involved children. On February 27th, Durov posted that Channels were becoming a source of unverified information and that the company lacks the ability to check on their veracity. He urged users to be mistrustful of the things shared on Channels, and initially threatened to block the feature in the countries involved for the length of the war, saying that he didn’t want Telegram to be used to aggravate conflict or incite ethnic hatred. He did, however, walk back this plan when it became clear that they had also become a vital communications tool for Ukrainian officials and citizens to help coordinate their resistance and evacuations.
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