On the Telegram test server, an official bot (mini app) for age verification using facial scanning has been found (no, documents are not required).
It’s likely that in the future, Telegram will introduce age verification for certain features. We’ll see later 🤨

By the way, passing verification with a photo isn’t possible, as it checks for a real person.

@telelakel

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🧪Pavel Durov said he was poisoned in 2018

In an interview to Lex Fridman, Pavel Durov has claimed that he survived a poisoning attempt in the spring of 2018, but chose not to reveal the incident until now to focus on business priorities.

“This is something I never talked about publicly because I didn’t want people to freak out.”

Durov didn’t speculate about why he may have been poisoned, though the timing of the alleged incident coincides with the Russian authorities’ ban and attempted blocking of Telegram. He mentioned that he didn’t tell anybody about the incident because he “didn’t want people to freak out” at a time when he was pursuing investors for the TON project.

In his interview, Durov said he experienced intense pain, progressive loss of vision and hearing, extreme difficulty breathing and overwhelming weakness.

Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist who investigated the 2018 poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Britain and the 2020 poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny for the Bellingcat open-source investigative outlet, said the symptoms described by Durov are consistent with nerve-agent poisoning.

🧐But not everyone believes in Durov

Writing on X, Russian journalist Dmitry Kolezev laid out questions about the incident:

So, someone tried to poison him, and he just decided not to tell anyone? Didn’t even go to the police? No investigation? And he chose not to tell his colleagues at the company because he didn’t want to scare them? Did he at least go to the hospital? He says he stayed home for two weeks, but there’s no mention of doctors, hospitals, or the police in his account.
And now he decides to go public with this story, just when he’s being accused of possibly cooperating with the FSB and the Russian authorities?

He also pointed to the fact that Durov continued traveling to Russia in the years that followed.

Political analyst Fedor Krasheninnikov was also skeptical.

I don’t believe Pavel Durov was poisoned. The symptoms he describes sound like a detailed retelling of what [late opposition politician Alexey] Navalny said he experienced. But there’s a key difference:
Navalny, who actually survived a Novichok poisoning and also lost consciousness at some point, ended up in a hospital, where doctors worked to save him.

Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist, called on Durov to reveal more details about his poisoning attempt “to allow us to look into what happened to you — and who was behind it.”

📰 Pavel Durov full interview to Lex Fridman.

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
3:07 - Philosophy of freedom
6:15 - No alcohol
14:20 - No phone
20:16 - Discipline
41:28 - Telegram: Lean philosophy, privacy, and geopolitics
56:50 - Arrest in France
1:13:01 - Romanian elections
1:23:56 - Power and corruption
1:33:29 - Intense education
1:45:29 - Nikolai Durov
1:49:58 - Programming and video games
1:54:11 - VK origins & engineering
2:11:24 - Hiring a great team
2:20:40 - Telegram engineering & design
2:39:42 - Encryption
2:44:39 - Open source
2:49:26 - Edward Snowden
2:51:58 - Intelligence agencies
2:53:10 - Iran and Russia government pressure
2:56:19 - Apple
3:03:16 - Poisoning
3:35:31 - Money
3:44:23 - TON
3:54:13 - Bitcoin
3:57:12 - Two chairs dilemma
4:03:52 - Children
4:15:02 - Father
4:19:33 - Quantum immortality
4:26:05 - Kafka

(Source)