In a statement, the regulator said the search and seizure operation was carried out against seven individuals and one corporate entity at multiple locations in Ahmedabad and Bhavnagar in Gujarat, Neemuch in Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, and Mumbai. 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.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video message on Tuesday that Ukrainian forces "destroy the invaders wherever we can." Artem Kliuchnikov and his family fled Ukraine just days before the Russian invasion. Messages are not fully encrypted by default. That means the company could, in theory, access the content of the messages, or be forced to hand over the data at the request of a government.
from hk