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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Russia is one of only a handful of countries to have developed its own internet [bloomberg.com], including its own search engines, e-mail systems, and social networks. To get to the roots of this sovereign internet, I spend a day hanging out with Dmitry Grishin, co-founder and chairman of Russian internet giant Mail.Ru Group [corp.mail.ru]. Grishin is a technology legend in Russia. We cruise Moscow in his Tesla, check out his gadget collection at the Mail.Ru offices, and dine at the highest restaurant in Europe, because that’s what Russian techno oligarchs do.

As for the budding tech oligarchs, well, there are plenty of those running around Moscow, too. Over the past few years, Russia’s wealth of smart, aggressive entrepreneurs has yielded a new generation of world-class technology companies. There’s Prisma [prisma-ai.com], which uses artificial intelligence to turn your photos and videos into works of art, and Group-IB [group-ib.com], one of the world’s top cybersecurity firms, which has an unmatched track record when it comes to hunting down hackers.

But the most stunning—and creepiest—software developed in Russia is something called FindFace [findface.ru]. It’s an app that lets you take a picture of a stranger and then almost instantly, using a facial-recognition algorithm, find the person on a social network. If you’re hoping the software doesn’t work that well, you’ll be disappointed: When I tested the app, it found the right faces all the freaking time. Privacy is so 2015.

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