Japan's internet is so fast it can download all of Netflix in 1 second: Check speed and others details here
Notably, this test was not limited to a short distance either. The researchers transmitted data over 1,808 kilometres (about 1,123 miles), using a setup that looped the signal through 19 different circuits, each 86.1 km long. A total of 180 data streams were transmitted simultaneously, resulting in bandwidth of 1.86 exabits per second per kilometre.'Our goal was to demonstrate that incredibly fast internet speeds can be achieved using infrastructure that already exists,' said NICT.Real-world possibilitiesNow, if you're wondering what kind of real-world tasks could benefit from this speed — think big. Really big. From downloading the entire English version of Wikipedia (with all revisions) thousands of times per second, to instantly streaming 8K ultra-high-definition video, the possibilities with this massive internet speed are endless. In the future the high-performance cloud computing, AI model training, large-scale remote collaboration, and global data storage systems would all benefit from this internet speed immensely.Notably, while this technology is still in the research and development stage, the fact that it utilises standard-sized fibre cables makes real-world implementation more feasible in the near future. For now, there's no specific timeline for public rollout, but the record does offer a glimpse into the future of internet connectivity.- Ends
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Mint
an hour ago
- Mint
AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?
Around the beginning of last year, Matthew Prince started receiving worried calls from the chief executives of large media companies. They told Mr Prince, whose firm, Cloudflare, provides security infrastructure to about a fifth of the web, that their businesses faced a grave new online threat. 'I said, 'What, is it the North Koreans?'," he recalls. 'And they said, 'No. It's AI'." Those executives had spotted the early signs of a trend that has since become clear: artificial intelligence is transforming the way that people navigate the web. As users pose their queries to chatbots rather than conventional search engines, they are given answers, rather than links to follow. The result is that 'content" publishers, from news providers and online forums to reference sites such as Wikipedia, are seeing alarming drops in their traffic. As AI changes how people browse, it is altering the economic bargain at the heart of the internet. Human traffic has long been monetised using online advertising; now that traffic is drying up. Content producers are urgently trying to find new ways to make AI companies pay them for information. If they cannot, the open web may evolve into something very different. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, people have embraced a new way to seek information online. OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, says that around 800m people use the chatbot. It is the most popular download on the iPhone app store. Apple said that conventional searches in its Safari web browser had fallen for the first time in April, as people posed their questions to AI instead. OpenAI is soon expected to launch a browser of its own. Its rise is so dramatic that a Hollywood adaptation is in the works. As OpenAI and other upstarts have soared, Google, which has about 90% of the conventional search market in America, has added AI features to its own search engine in a bid to keep up. Last year it began preceding some search results with AI-generated 'overviews", which have since become ubiquitous. In May it launched 'AI mode", a chatbot-like version of its search engine. The company promises that, with AI, users can 'let Google do the Googling for you". Yet as Google does the Googling, humans no longer visit the websites from which the information is gleaned. Similarweb, which measures traffic to more than 100m web domains, estimates that worldwide search traffic (by humans) fell by about 15% in the year to June. Although some categories, such as hobbyists' sites, are doing fine, others have been hit hard (see chart). Many of the most affected are just the kind that might have commonly answered search queries. Science and education sites have lost 10% of their visitors. Reference sites have lost 15%. Health sites have lost 31%. For companies that sell advertising or subscriptions, lost visitors means lost revenue. 'We had a very positive relationship with Google for a long time…They broke the deal," says Neil Vogel, head of Dotdash Meredith, which owns titles such as People and Food & Wine. Three years ago its sites got more than 60% of their traffic from Google. Now the figure is in the mid-30s. 'They are stealing our content to compete with us," says Mr Vogel. Google has insisted that its use of others' content is fair. But since it launched its AI overviews, the share of news-related searches resulting in no onward clicks has risen from 56% to 69%, estimates Similarweb. In other words, seven in ten people get their answer without visiting the page that supplied it. 'The nature of the internet has completely changed," says Prashanth Chandrasekar, chief executive of Stack Overflow, best known as an online forum for coders. 'AI is basically choking off traffic to most content sites," he says. With fewer visitors, Stack Overflow is seeing fewer questions posted on its message boards. Wikipedia, also powered by enthusiasts, warns that AI-generated summaries without attribution 'block pathways for people to access…and contribute to" the site. To keep the traffic and the money coming, many big content producers have negotiated licensing deals with AI companies, backed up by legal threats: what Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp, has dubbed 'wooing and suing".His company, which owns theWall Street Journalandthe New York Post, among other titles, has struck a deal with OpenAI. Two of its subsidiaries are suing Perplexity, another AI answer engine. TheNew York Timeshas done a deal with Amazon while suing OpenAI. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. (The Economist's parent company has not taken a public position on whether it will license our work.) Yet this approach has limits. For one thing, judges so far seem minded to side with AI companies: last month two separate copyright cases in California went in favour of their defendants, Meta and Anthropic, both of which argued that training their models on others' content amounted to fair use. President Donald Trump seems to acceptSilicon Valley's argument that it must be allowed to get on with developing the technology of the future before China can. He has appointed tech boosters as advisers on AI, and sacked the head of the US Copyright Office soon after she argued that training AI on copyrighted material was not always legal. AI companies are more willing to pay for continuing access to information than training data. But the deals done so far are hardly stellar. Reddit, an online forum, has licensed its user-generated content to Google for a reported $60m a year. Yet its market value fell by more than half—over $20bn—after it reported slower user-growth than expected in February, owing to wobbles in search traffic. (Growth has since picked up and Reddit's share price has recovered some lost ground.) The bigger problem, however, is that most of the internet's hundreds of millions of domains are too small to either woo or sue the tech giants. Their content may be collectively essential to AI firms, but each site is individually dispensable. Even if they could join forces to bargain collectively, antitrust law would forbid it. They could block AI crawlers, and some do. But that means no search visibility at all. Software providers may be able to help. All of Cloudflare's new customers will now be asked if they want to allow AI companies' bots to scrape their site, and for what purpose. Cloudflare's scale gives it a better chance than most of enabling something like a collective response by content sites that want to force AI firms to cough up. It is testing a pay-as-you-crawl system that would let sites charge bots an entry fee. 'We have to set the rules of the road," says Mr Prince, who says his preferred outcome is 'a world where humans get content for free, and bots pay a tonne for it". An alternative is offered by Tollbit, which bills itself as a paywall for bots. It allows content sites to charge AI crawlers varying rates: for instance, a magazine could charge more for new stories than old ones. In the first quarter of this year Tollbit processed 15m micro-transactions of this sort, for 2,000 content producers including the Associated Pressand Newsweek. Toshit Panigrahi, its chief executive, points out that whereas traditional search engines incentivise samey content—'What time does the Super Bowl start?", for example—charging for access incentivises uniqueness. One of Tollbit's highest per-crawl rates is charged by a local newspaper. Another model is being put forward by ProRata, a startup led by Bill Gross, a pioneer in the 1990s of the pay-as-you-click online ads that have powered much of the web ever since. He proposes that money from ads placed alongside AI-generated answers should be redistributed to sites in proportion to how much their content contributed to the answer. ProRata has its own answer engine, which shares ad revenue with its 500-plus partners, which include theFinancial Timesand theAtlantic. It is currently more of an exemplar than a serious threat to Google: Mr Gross says his main aim is to 'show a fair business model that other people eventually copy". Meanwhile, content producers are rethinking their business models. 'The future of the internet is not all about traffic," says Mr Chandrasekar, who has built up Stack Overflow's private, enterprise-oriented subscription product, Stack Internal. News publishers are planning for 'Google zero", deploying newsletters and apps to reach customers who no longer come to them via search, and moving their content behind paywalls or to live events. Audio and video are proving legally and technically harder for AI engines to summarise than text. The site to which answer engines refer search traffic most often, by far, is YouTube, according to Similarweb. Not everyone thinks the web is in decline—on the contrary, it is in 'an incredibly expansionary moment", argues Robby Stein of Google. As AI makes it easier to create content, the number of sites is growing: Google's bots report that the web has expanded by 45% in the past two years. AI search lets people ask questions in new ways—for instance, taking a photo of their bookshelf and asking for recommendations on what to read next—which could increase traffic. With AI queries, more sites than ever are being 'read", even if not with human eyes. An answer engine may scan hundreds of pages to deliver an answer, drawing on a more diverse range of sources than human readers would. As for the idea that Google is disseminating less human traffic than before, Mr Stein says the company has not noticed a dramatic decline in the number of outbound clicks, though it declines to make the number public. There are other reasons besides AI why people may be visiting sites less. Maybe they are scrolling social media. Maybe they are listening to podcasts. The death of the web has been predicted before—at the hands of social networks, then smartphone apps—and not come to pass. But AI may pose the biggest threat to it yet. If the web is to continue in something close to its current form, sites will have to find new ways to get paid for content. 'There's no question that people prefer AI search," says Mr Gross. 'And to make the internet survive, to make democracy survive, to make content creators survive, AI search has to share revenue with creators."
Time of India
11 hours ago
- Time of India
Active lifestyle at any point in adulthood may extend lifespan: Study
London: Adopting a physically active lifestyle at any stage of adulthood significantly lowers your risk of dying from any cause, especially from cardiovascular disease . A sweeping analysis of 85 studies confirms that those who stay active consistently reduce their mortality risk by 30-40%, while even those who become active later in life enjoy a 20-25% reduction. The study has been published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The findings prompt the researchers to conclude that switching to a more active lifestyle at any point in adult life may extend the lifespan, and that it's never too late to start. Currently, it's recommended that adults should aim for 150-300 weekly minutes of moderate intensity physical activity, or 75-150 weekly minutes of vigorous intensity physical activity, or a combination of the two, note the researchers. But while these recommendations were based on the best evidence available, most of it captured measurements of physical activity at only one point in time, which might hide the potential impact of changing patterns during adulthood, they add. The researchers therefore wanted to find out if differing patterns of physical activity, as well as its cumulative impact during adulthood, might be associated with a lower risk of death from all causes, and specifically from cardiovascular disease and cancer. They scoured research databases for relevant studies that assessed physical activity at two or more points in time, and included in their review 85 studies published in English up to April 2024, with sample sizes ranging from 357 to 6,572,984 participants. Fifty nine of the studies looked at long term patterns of physical activity across adulthood; 16 looked at the average benefits of different physical activity levels; and 11 explored the potential impact of cumulative physical activity on risk of death. To overcome the challenges posed by different analytical methods used, the researchers carried out separate analyses for each of them. Pooled data analysis of the study results showed that, overall, a higher level of physical activity was associated with lower risks of all the included outcomes. Consistently active people (32 studies) had around a 30-40% lower risk of dying from any cause, while those who increased their levels of physical activity (21 studies) from below those recommended had a 20-25% lower risk of death from any cause. Specifically, participants who switched from being physically inactive to being active were 22% less likely to die from any cause than those who remained inactive, while those who increased their leisure time physical activity levels were 27% less likely to do so. On the other hand, swapping an active lifestyle for an inactive one wasn't associated with a lower risk of death from any cause. Generally, the associations observed between a high level of physical activity and a lower risk of death were more evident for cardiovascular disease than for cancer. Compared with participants who were consistently inactive over time, those who were consistently active, overall, or only in their leisure time, were around 40% and 25% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and cancer, respectively. But in general, the evidence for the associations between physical activity patterns and death from a specific cause remained inconclusive, especially for death from cancer. The pooled data suggested that people who were consistently active or who became active had lower risks of death from any cause, and specifically from cardiovascular disease, when meeting the recommended weekly physical activity levels. But being consistently physically active and clocking up more than the recommended maximum weekly amount of moderate to vigorous intensity exercise was associated with only a small additional reduction in risk. Maintaining or increasing physical activity at levels below the recommended weekly amount, however, was associated with appreciable health benefits, indicating that some physical activity is always better than none, say the researchers. The researchers acknowledge some limitations to their findings, including that most of the studies included in the pooled data analyses relied on subjective assessments of physical activity, which may not always have been accurate.
Economic Times
14 hours ago
- Economic Times
Cancelling Netflix, Amazon Prime memberships could get harder; here's what might drive the change
A US court has blocked a rule for easy cancellation of streaming subscriptions. The rule aimed to simplify cancellation on platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. It also focused on transparency for free trials and promotional pricing. The court said that the FTC did not conduct a proper economic analysis. This decision could impact cancellation processes in India. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads How it matters to Indian audience A US federal appeals court has blocked a a major consumer protection rule that forces streaming platforms to simplify their cancellation regulation, known as the 'click to cancel' rule, was proposed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Of not blocked, it would need companies like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney Plus, and HBO Max to make cancelling subscriptions as simple as signing rule also aimed at increasing transparency by establishing clear consent while converting free trials into paid plans, and mandating that platforms disclose when promotional pricing would appeals court, however, ruled that the FTC failed to conduct a necessary economic impact analysis before enforcing the rule. The regulation has now been suspended indefinitely, and streaming companies are under no obligation to maintain user-friendly cancellation many streaming platforms allow users to cancel subscription with a few clicks, platforms may now opt to increase the number of steps, bury the cancellation option deep in account settings, or even require users to call customer platforms already use such tactics. In 2023, an investigation revealed that cancelling Amazon Prime Video involved navigating four separate pages, making six clicks, and responding to 15 individual ruling only applies to the US. However, it could influence global practices, including in India. For many subscribers, particularly in price-sensitive markets, the ability to cancel and resubscribe easily is essential for managing rising streaming companies standardise complex cancellation processes across countries, Indian users may soon find it harder to opt out of platforms they no longer use and could result in higher monthly expenditures.
