The detainment of the murky messaging service’s founder in France shows online moguls can no longer act with impunity On 24 August, a Russian tech billionaire’s private jet landed at Le Bourget airport, north-east of Paris, to find that officers of the French judicial police were waiting for him. He was duly arrested and whisked away for interrogation. Four days later he was indicted on 12 charges, including alleged complicity in the distribution of child exploitation material and drug trafficking, barred from leaving France and placed under “judicial supervision”, which requires him to check in with the gendarmes twice a week until further notice. The mogul in question, Pavel Durov, is a tech entrepreneur who collects nationalities the way others collect air miles. In fact it turns out that one of his citizenships is French, generously provided in 2021 by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. Durov is also, it seems, a fitness fanatic with a punishing daily regime. “After eight hours of tracked sleep,” the Financial Times reports, “he starts the day ‘without exception’ with 200 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and an ice bath. He does not drink, smoke, eat sugar or meat, and saves time for meditation.” When not engaged in these demanding activities, he has also found time to father more than 100 kids as a sperm donor and to rival Elon Musk as a free-speech extremist. Continue reading...

Pavel Durov said the feature – which has had issues with bots and scammers – would be replaced The chief executive of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has announced the messaging app will improve moderation on the platform and has removed some features that have been used for illegal activity. The app’s founder unveiled the changes on Friday hours after calling his arrest by the French authorities last month “misguided”. Durov has since been charged with allegedly allowing criminal activity on the app. Continue reading...

Russian-born billionaire detained last month in France denies app is ‘anarchic paradise’ The founder of the Telegram messaging app, Pavel Durov, under investigation in France, has said that French authorities should have approached his company with their complaints rather than detaining him, calling the arrest ‘“misguided”. Durov, writing on his Telegram channel early on Friday in his first public comments since his detention last month, denied any suggestion the app was an “anarchic paradise”. Continue reading...

In isolation, Alexander Grothendieck seemed to have lost touch with reality, but some say his metaphysical theories could contain wonders One day in September 2014, in a hamlet in the French Pyrenean foothills, Jean-Claude, a landscape gardener in his late 50s, was surprised to see his neighbour at the gate. He hadn’t spoken to the 86-year-old in nearly 15 years after a dispute over a climbing rose that Jean-Claude had wanted to prune. The old man lived in total seclusion, tending to his garden in the djellaba he always wore, writing by night, heeding no one. Now, the long-bearded seeker looked troubled. “Would you do me a favour?” he asked Jean-Claude. Continue reading...

Pavel Durov will probably use French legal disputes to position himself as a champion of free speech, say observers When Pavel Durov came under criticism from Russian regulators over the spread of pornography on the VKontakte social media platform he founded, the tech entrepreneur responded mockingly by changing his Twitter handle from “VK CEO” to “Porn King”. More than a decade later, Durov’s anti-authoritarian stance and hands-off approach to moderation have landed him in more serious trouble. Continue reading...

On Saturday 24 April, the billionaire founder of the Telegram social media and messaging app, Pavel Durov, was arrested by French authorities as he disembarked from his private jet in Paris on his way from Azerbaijan. Officials said the arrest was part of a cybercrime inquiry into criminal activity on the platform and a lack of cooperation with law enforcement. Durov has since been formally charged.  Durov, also known as the 'Russian Mark Zuckerberg' for having founded a similar platform to Zuckerberg’s Facebook in Russia called VKontakte, is a self-styled champion of free speech and has cultivated a reputation for being unwilling to work with authorities to censor and more closely control what happens on his platform. But his arrest has raised important questions about the extent to which tech executives are responsible for how users employ their social media networks. Chris Stokel-Walker, a technology journalist, explains the implications of Durov's arrest for the tech sector * Telegram CEO charged in France for ‘allowing criminal activity’ on messaging app * What the Telegram founder’s arrest means for the regulation of social media firms Continue reading...

Pavel Durov, who has French citizenship, faces prosecution over alleged failure to suppress spread of sexual images of children and calls for violence The head of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has been charged by the French judiciary for allegedly allowing criminal activity on the messaging app but avoided jail with a €5m bail. The Russian-born multi-billionaire, who has French citizenship, was granted release on condition that he report to a police station twice a week and remain in France, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement. Continue reading...

Once nicknamed the ‘Russian Zuckerberg’, Durov has boasted of being the biological father of more than 100 children The Russian-born tech entrepreneur Pavel Durov has founded wildly popular social networks as well as a cryptocurrency, amassed a multibillion dollar fortune and locked horns with authorities in Russia and around the world. Still a few months shy of his 40th birthday, the man once nicknamed the “Russian Zuckerberg” after the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg now finds himself under arrest in France after being detained at a Paris airport this weekend. Continue reading...

Billionaire CEO, who was travelling aboard his private jet, was subject of arrest warrant, according to TV reports Pavel Durov, billionaire co-founder and chief executive of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at the Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, TF1 TV said, citing an unnamed source. Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France. Continue reading...

The 35-nation Iter project has a groundbreaking aim to create clean and limitless energy but it is turning into the ‘most delayed and cost-inflated science project in history’ It was a project that promised the sun. Researchers would use the world’s most advanced technology to design a machine that could generate atomic fusion, the process that drives the stars – and so create a source of cheap, non-polluting power. That was initially the aim of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) which 35 countries – including European states, China, Russia and the US – agreed to build at Saint-Paul-lez-Durance in southern France at a starting cost of $6bn. Work began in 2010, with a commitment that there would be energy-producing reactions by 2020. Continue reading...