5 Ukraine’s Starlink systems are coming back online
The devices have suffered outages in the past few days, leaving soldiers without any way to communicate. (FT $)
+ Odessa’s officials have removed Elon Musk’s picture from a billboard. (Motherboard)
+ Russia’s train reliance is part of its problem during the war. (The Atlantic $)
6 The US midterms have a misinformation problem
Multilingual fact-checking groups are stepping up to try to combat the falsehoods. (NYT $)
+ Why midterm “October surprises” are rarely the revelations they seem. (Vox)
7 A long-standing malaria mystery has been solved 🦟
Experts simply couldn’t work out where mosquitoes went during hot weather. (Economist $)
+ The new malaria vaccine will save countless lives. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Fake vaccination certificates are circulating in India
It doesn’t bode well for the country’s claims of high vaccination rates. (Rest of World)
9 Even AI doesn’t like math
Some language models are failing to get to grips with tricky problems. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ A new AI tool can detect sepsis. (Undark)
+ DeepMind’s game-playing AI has beaten a 50-year-old record. (MIT Technology Review)
10 Consumer tech is going solar powered
If this Swedish startup has their way, that is. (The Next Web)
Quote of the day
“Compare that to Lord of the Rings, when they scan your eyeballs just to get in!”
—Charlie Vickers, the actor who plays Halbrand in The Rings of Power, discusses the intense biometric lengths that showmakers went to in order to keep the Tolkien show a secret with the Guardian.
The big story
The uneasy coexistence of Yandex and the Kremlin
August 2020
While Moscow was under coronavirus lockdown between March and June 2020, the Russian capital emptied out—apart from the streams of cyclists in the trademark yellow uniform of Yandex’s food delivery service.
Often referred to in the West as Russia’s Google, Yandex is really more like Google, Amazon, Uber, and maybe a few other companies combined. It’s not really part of Russia’s Silicon Valley, as much as it’s a Russian Silicon Valley unto itself.
But Yandex’s success has come at a price. The Kremlin has long viewed the internet as a battlefield in its escalating tensions with the West and has become increasingly concerned that a company like Yandex, with the heaps of data it has on Russian citizens, could one day fall into foreign hands. In a world increasingly concerned with protecting borders and regulating the tech industry, Yandex’s dilemma may not be just a Russian story. Read the full story.