Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has accused the Indian government of putting pressure on the social media company to block accounts critical of the government amid the long-running farmers’ protest in 2021. Mr Dorsey, who was still the platform’s chief at the time before its takeover by Elon Musk, said India placed “many requests” during the months-long farmers protests. “India for example, India is one of the countries which had many requests around farmers protests, around particular journalists which were critical of the government,” the former Twitter chief, who stepped down from the company’s board last year, said in a new interview with the YouTube channel Breaking Points. “It manifested in ways such as ‘we will shut Twitter down in India’… ‘we would raid the homes of your employees’, which they did; ‘we will shut down your offices if you don’t follow suit’. And this is India, a democratic country,” Mr Dorsey said. The protests in 2021 forced the Indian government to repeal laws that would have seen the biggest reforms to Indian agriculture in decades. Farmers drove tractors from agrarian states surrounding Delhi to block traffic on major roads into the capital city. Amid the protests, the Indian government allegedly threatened to punish Twitter employees with fines and jail terms of up to seven years for failing to suspend accounts deemed critical of the Modi administration. It demanded that Twitter block over a thousand accounts, including those tweeting under the hashtag “ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide”, arguing that the phrase was inflammatory. Following this, the social media company made over 250 accounts inaccessible to its India-based users, including that of the investigative news magazine The Caravan. The move was later reversed after a major public outcry. Twitter told the Indian government at the time that it would not comply with the directive to ban some accounts and tweets as they either constituted “free speech” or were “newsworthy”. Mr Dorsey compared India’s behaviour to that of Turkey. “We had so many requests from Turkey. We fought Turkey in their in their courts and often won but they threatened to shut us down constantly,” he said. Indian IT minister Rajeev Chandrashekar rejected the former Twitter chief’s claims that the Modi government put pressure on the social media company, calling it “an outright lie,” and “an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of Twitter’s history.” “Twitter under Dorsey and his team were in repeated [and] continuous violations of India law. As a matter of fact they were in non-compliance with law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only June 2022 when they finally complied,” Mr Chandrashekar said. The minister alleged that Twitter had a problem accepting the “sovereignty of India law,” and behaved “as if the laws of India did not apply to it”. “No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’ ... India as a sovereign nation has the right to ensure that its laws are followed by all companies operating in India,” Mr Chandhrashekar said. “During the protests in January 2021, there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide which were definitely fake,” the minister said, adding that the Indian government “was obligated to remove” them from the platform as it had the potential to “further inflame the situation based on fake news”. Mr Dorsey also commented on Twitter’s regime under Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, calling some of his moves “fairly reckless”. After taking over Twitter in October, Mr Musk proceeded to cut costs at the company and slash over three quarters of the firm’s workforce. “I think it set up a dynamic where he had to be very hasty, he had to be impatient, and he had to move as quickly as possible with features even if they weren’t fully thought out... It all looked fairly reckless,” Mr Dorsey said. Read More Twitter’s new chief echoes Elon Musk’s goal in first memo to employees Put ‘public good’ at heart of AI and new tech, Starmer to say Elon Musk is hilariously shut down by his ‘favourite’ podcast Bluesky, championed by Jack Dorsey, was supposed to be Twitter 2.0. Can it succeed? Jack Dorsey endorses Robert F Kennedy Jr for president Jack Dorsey says Twitter ‘went south’ after company’s sale to Elon Musk

A scientist who found the oldest water ever discovered on Earth decided the best course of action was, of course, to drink it. Professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar was leading a team of geologists studying a Canadian mine in 2016 when she made the remarkable discovery. The flowing water about three kilometres below the surface was between 1.5bn and 2.6bn years old, according to tests, making it the oldest water found on Earth. “When people think about this water they assume it must be some tiny amount of water trapped within the rock,” said Prof Sherwood Lollar. “But in fact it’s very much bubbling right up out at you. These things are flowing at rates of litres per minute – the volume of the water is much larger than anyone anticipated.” Upon tasting the ancient water, she found that it was “very salty and bitter” and “much saltier than seawater”. That was an encouraging sign, because saltier water tends to be older. In this case, where the water has been ageing for billions of years, it is hardly surprising. “If you’re a geologist who works with rocks, you’ve probably licked a lot of rocks,” said Sherwood Lollar. Her team also found that life had once been present in the water, by looking at the sulphate – the composition of salts – in it. “We were able to indicate that the signal we are seeing in the fluids has to have been produced by microbiology – and most importantly has to have been produced over a very long time scale. “The microbes that produced this signature couldn’t have done it overnight. “This has to be an indication that organisms have been present in these fluids on a geological timescale.” Fortunately, the scientist had no terrifying sci-fi movie-esq reaction to drinking the ancient water, and lived to tell the tale. The paper was published in Nature in 2016. How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Miles Morales and Spider-Man 2099 are now available for purchase in the Fortnite Item Shop as the Battle Royale begins its Spider-Verse crossover.

TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 26, 2023--

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Google is preparing for the “quantum apocalypse”. Experts have warned for years that the development of quantum computers could undermine the encryption that currently secures everything from our private messages to our banking details. Quantum computers are a still largely theoretical technology that proponents claim could dramatically beat the performance of the classical computers we have today. That could be a major positive for applications such as drug research and quantum computing – but could be disastrous for security technology. Much of that security technology depends on mathematical problems that are sufficiently hard for our computers to work out as to keep that data secure. But future quantum computers could overcome those problems in seconds, and break into any data. That is what is referred to by researchers as the “quantum apocalypse”. And an entire subset of computing – post-quantum cryptography – has grown to find ways to secure data even if that future does come about. Now Google has put some of that work into practice, in Chrome. The new technology includes new cryptography that should be resistant to attempts to break it with future quantum computers. It does so by integrating a technology known as X25519Kyber768, a long name for what is actually a hybrid of two cryptographic algorithms. Tying the two together means that data is protected both by an existing secure algorithm and one that is protected against quantum computers. The updates are part of broader work across Google to “prepare the web for the migration to quantum-resistant cryptography”. Devon O’Brien, Google’s technical program manager for Chrome security, who wrote the blog post announcing the changes, noted that quantum computers could be decades away. But remains important to secure data now in part so that it cannot be filed away, ready to break into when the technology arrives. “It’s believed that quantum computers that can break modern classical cryptography won’t arrive for 5, 10, possibly even 50 years from now, so why is it important to start protecting traffic today? The answer is that certain uses of cryptography are vulnerable to a type of attack called Harvest Now, Decrypt Later, in which data is collected and stored today and later decrypted once cryptanalysis improves.” Read More Vote to empower autonomous ‘robotaxis’ from Cruise and Waymo divides San Francisco ‘Billions’ of computers potentially affect by huge security vulnerability AI breakthrough could dramatically reduce planes’ global warming impact