Jun
20
BBCMinistry of Defense acquires government’s first quantum computerThe Ministry of Defense is embarking on a year-long project into the possibilities of quantum computing..1 week ago… Read More
Author: believegod
LONDON/WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) – The US government has pushed new, increased funding into three technology companies since the start of the Ukraine conflict to help Russians sidestep censors and access Western media, according to five people familiar with the situation.
The financing effort is focused on three firms that build Virtual Private Networks (VPN) – nthLink, Psiphon and Lantern – and is designed to support a recent surge in their Russian users, the sources said.
VPNs help users hide their identity and change their online location, often to bypass geographic restrictions on content or to evade government censorship technology.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Reuters spoke to executives at all three US government-backed VPNs and two officials at a US government-funded nonprofit organization that provided them with financing – the Open Technology Fund (OTF) – who said the anti-censorship apps have seen significant growth in Russia since President Vladimir Putin launched his war in Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Between 2015 and 2021, the three VPNs received at least $4.8 million in US funding, according to publicly available funding documents reviewed by Reuters. Since February, the total funding allocated to the companies has increased by almost half in order to cope with the rise in demand in Russia, the five people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The funding flows through the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) – a federal agency that oversees US government-backed broadcasters, including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – as well as via the Washington-based OTF, which is funded entirely by the US government and overseen by the USAGM.
Laura Cunningham, president of the OTF, said the organization had increased its support to the three VPNs because “the Russian government is trying to censor what their citizens can see and say online in order to obscure the truth and silence dissent.”
Censorship evasion tools, including the VPNs, backed by OTF averaged more than 4 million users last month in Russia, Cunningham added.
In a statement, USAGM also said it was supporting the development of a range of censorship circumvention tools, including VPNs. It also did not give precise data on their funding.
“With the Kremlin’s escalating crackdown on media freedom, we’ve seen an extraordinary surge in demand for these tools among Russians,” USAGM spokesperson Laurie Moy said.
Russia’s foreign ministry did not respond to an emailed request for comment. In a statement, the Kremlin rejected allegations of online censorship: “We don’t censor the Internet. Russia regulates certain Web resources, like many other countries in the world.”
Martin Zhu, director of engineering at nthLink, said his app’s daily users in Russia had recently soared after it was promoted heavily by US government-funded news websites such as Voice of America: “The graph went from 1,000 one day to 10,000 the next day , to 30,000 the day after that, to 50,000 and straight up.”
“There are a lot of people in Russia who don’t trust Putin, and government media,” he
BBCBitcoin: Why is the largest cryptocurrency crashing?The value of Bitcoin is at an 18-month low, as the cryptocurrency market continues to tumble..5 days ago… Read More
China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily, which then appeared to have deleted the report and posts about the discovery.
The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye — the world’s largest radio telescope — differ from previous ones captured and the team is further investigating them, the report said, citing Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team co-founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley.
It isn’t clear why the report was apparently removed from the website of the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China’s science and technology ministry, though the news had already started trending on social network Weibo and was picked up by other media outlets , including state-run ones.
In September 2020, Sky Eye, which is located in China’s southwestern Guizhou province and has a diameter of 500 meters (1,640 feet), officially launched a search for extraterrestrial life. The team detected two sets of suspicious signals in 2020 while processing data collected in 2019, and found another suspicious signal in 2022 from observation data of exoplanet targets, Zhang said, according to the report.
️ Limited Time Offer | Express Premium with ad-lite for just Rs 2/ day Click here to subscribe ️
China’s Sky Eye is extremely sensitive in the low-frequency radio band and plays a critical role in the search for alien civilizations, Zhang is reported to have said.
The suspicious signals could, however, also be some kind of radio interference and requires further investigation, he added.
Cryptocurrency prices are plummeting. A so-called stablecoin lost all its value in a matter of days. A newfangled crypto bank halted withdrawals. And investors have been plunged into financial ruin.
Now the crypto industry is grappling with an even grimmer prospect: The worst may be yet to come.
Best of Express Premium
Premium
Premium
Premium
PremiumConcern is mounting over another potential vulnerability in the crypto market: Tether, a company whose namesake currency is a linchpin of crypto trading worldwide. Long one of the most scrutinized companies in the industry, Tether is facing heightened pressure from regulators, investors, economists and growing legions of skeptics, who argue it could be another domino to fall in an even bigger crash.
“Tether is really the lifeblood of the crypto ecosystem,” said Hilary Allen, a finance expert at American University. “If it imploded, then the entire facade falls down.”
Tether is the dominant issuer of stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency pegged to a stable asset such as the US dollar. Unlike traditional cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether, whose monetary value can fluctuate widely, stablecoins are typically designed to maintain a constant price of $1 and are backed by large reserves of funds or other financial engineering. That consistency allows crypto traders to conduct safe, predictable transactions without relying on banks or other financial gatekeepers.
But many of these coins are stable in name only. Last month, when cryptocurrencies melted down, the crash was triggered partly by the failure of TerraUSD, a stablecoin with a $1 peg that was algorithmically linked to a sister cryptocurrency called Luna. When the price of Luna plummeted, TerraUSD also fell, creating a “death spiral” that shook the broader market.
By contrast, Tether claims its stablecoins are backed by cash and other traditional assets, making its reserves essential to the health of the crypto market. In theory, anyone who wants to exchange Tethers for US dollars can do so quickly and easily.
But the company’s financial statements show that a significant portion of its reserves are tied up in unsecured corporate debt known as commercial paper. Such financial instruments are riskier and harder to quickly convert into cash, especially during financial turmoil. In 2021, New York’s attorney general fined Tether $18.5 million and said the company had lied about its reserves, calling it “a stablecoin without stability.”
Critics say Tether basically acts as a loosely regulated bank. Traders hand over millions of dollars and, in return, receive millions of stablecoins, which they use to bet on more volatile cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Dogecoin. Tether currently has 70 billion coins in circulation, making it more than three times the size of TerraUSD before the crash.
In a worst-case scenario, critics say, a downturn could spark the crypto equivalent of a bank run. Traders might all rush to exchange their Tethers for dollars, only to discover that Tether could not fulfill those orders. Investors would lose billions of dollars, forcing them to sell their other crypto holdings, causing a potentially