Skip to main content

Russia blocking Telegram showed us how fragile the internet is


Certain governments have been censoring web content for years; with China, Iran and Turkey among the biggest offenders. But if there was something unique about Russia’s block of the Telegram messaging service in April, it was the extent to which the government was willing to go to. Russia went for a wholesale, indiscriminate blocking of major cloud service providers’ IP addresses (to overcome Telegram’s attempt to port its services there). This incident exposed three unsavory truths about the modern-day internet: Single points of failure abound When the Russian government started blocking Google- and Amazon-based services, initial reports estimated more than…

This story continues at The Next Web

from The Next Web https://ift.tt/2IDACum

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

TNW Podcast: Boris comes over to co-host; Slack’s Cal Henderson talks European tech

 Welcome to the new episode of the TNW Podcast — the show where we discuss the latest developments in the European technology ecosystem and feature interviews with some of the most interesting people in the industry. In today’s episode, Andrii is joined by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, co-founder, member of the board, and former CEO of TNW. The topics discussed include the jobs created by Dutch startups, giant state funding for energy projects, translations of the word ‘computer’, and a bunch of other things in between. In the interview section, we’re featuring a conversation with Cal Henderson, co-founder and… This story continues at The Next Web from The Next Web https://ift.tt/jUgcNFD

Meet the lawyer-turned-artist behind classical cryptocurrency paintings

Over the past 10 years cryptocurrency, blockchain, and art have become the most surprising and unlikely of bed fellows. Street art, graffitti, and memes are quite common, but the words cryptocurrency and fine art rarely appear in the same sentence. But that’s changing as one artist is making these worlds collide to produce something as individually unique as a Bitcoin wallet private key. Toronto-based fine artist – Nelly Baksht – is one of a growing community creating works specifically for the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry. But she hasn’t always been interested in the decentralized technology. For Nelly her love of… This story continues at The Next Web from The Next Web https://ift.tt/2V9tfRS

Defining humanlike intelligence and entrusting it with our lives, explained by an AI researcher

TNW Answers is a live Q&A platform where we invite interesting people in tech who are much smarter than us to answer questions from TNW readers and editors for an hour.  Yesterday, Melanie Mitchell, the author of ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans’ and the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, hosted a TNW Answers session where she spoke about how much we should really trust AI, her worries surrounding the technology, and defining humanlike intelligence in machines.  [Read: Chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov predicts AI will disrupt 96% of all jobs] Most fears around AI usually… This story continues at The Next Web from The Next Web https://ift.tt/2w7anvS