Telegram now has a blogging platform to go along with its popular messaging app. It’s called Telegraph and, according to VentureBeat, offers fast publishing and anonymous posting — without requiring you to register an account or sign in through social media.
The app’s user interface looks very similar to Medium and allows for easy embeds. You can also embed images from your computer by clicking on the camera button. In comparison to Medium, the loading time for embeds is relatively fast. Publication is instantaneous upon hitting “publish.” Posts are shareable on social media platforms but are designed to work best on Telegram’s new Instant View layout, which works similarly to Facebook’s Instant Articles feature.
The simplicity and speed of Telegraph are not without its downsides. As TechCrunch points out, the lack of user history means that if you accidentally delete the link to your published post, it would be very difficult to track down unless you have cookies enabled on your browser. The anonymous nature also opens up opportunities for abuse, potentially paving the way for internet trolls and spreaders of fake news — a problem that has put tech giants like Facebook and Google under scrutiny.
Telegram’s user base has grown significantly since its inception, though it continues to lag behind WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. In February this year, founder Pavel Durov announced that the company hit 100 million active users.
The introduction of Telegraph continues Telegram’s expansion beyond just messaging. The company recently added games, and in a blog post, it teased “Something big is brewing in our secret dungeons. Stay tuned.”
It’s probably not going to catch on with teens anytime soon, but scientists have found a new way to send text messages: with chemicals. we take it for granted that modern communication systems — everything from smartphones to the internet — use electronics to send and receive messages, but what if that weren’t the case? A group of researchers from Stanford are exploring an alternate system that uses chemicals instead of electricity as the base unit of communication, and have even managed to send a text message with it.
At heart, Stanford’s setup is structurally similar to modern-day electronics, but instead, of using electric signals to send instructions, it uses chemicals. The 1s and 0s of binary communication are just replaced with pulses of vinegar (an acid) and glass cleaner (a base) sent through plastic tubes. A traditional computer is used to converted researchers’ instructions into this chemical format, and a pH sensor on the receiving end converts the pulse of liquid back to traditional binary.
But, you’re asking, if the system depends traditional electronics to interpret the chemical signals, what’s the point of using them in the first place?
The answer isn’t obvious now, but there are many potential applications for a fully developed chemical communication system in the future. For a start, they could be used in places where traditional electromagnetic systems have difficulty with communication — underwater, for example, or in places with lots of metal. They could also be useful in the human body, where high-frequency signals can damage organs, or, in the event that the electric grid is knocked out.
"It’s just so ‘out there,’ like science fiction," said Andrea Goldsmith, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, in a press statement. "What are all the exciting ways that we could use this to enable communication that is impossible today? That’s what I would want someone to walk away thinking about."
The Nigeria CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele who is already runing out of ideals is back again I the news. Emefiele who was a keynote speaker at the annual Bankers Committee Dinner and delivered a speech about alternative source of revenue for the government.
In providing an alternative to source of revenue for the government, the CBN Governor suggested that the government imposes a telecoms tax for phone call conversations above 3 minutes. He also suggested that we introduce a tax on properties. Here is CBN Governor Emefiele in his own words;
“There are several ways we can raise additional revenue to finance the increased expenditure that is needed to engender fast and sustainable growth in the economy,” Emefiele said.
“I think we can consider introducing a negligible telecom surcharge to be entirely borne by the initiator of a call. In order to protect the poor and vulnerable amongst us, we could structure it to only take effect after the third minute of talk.
“Some analyses have indicated that the government could earn about N100 billion per annum from this alone. Obviously this surcharge will mainly be borne by middle and upper class people since I do not know many poor people who make calls for more than 3 minutes,"
