A Look Inside Russia’s Creepy, Innovative Internet

hello world it's time for a thought experiment let's imagine the cold war went another way after the nazis surrendered [Music] the soviet union flexed its muscles and asserted its imperial might from tokyo to tacoma [Music] memorials to the fatherland popped up around the globe this would be the washington monument this could have been your morning commute [Music] and now let's fast forward these were the first semiconductors this is your keyboard this was the first ibm computer this is facebook headquarters this is silicon valley well that didn't happen but in modern russia it's easy to get confused with an extra helping of spycraft technology here developed a world apart from silicon valley and that didn't change when the soviet union collapsed 25 years later russia has copied large parts of the web the rest of us know and love they built a russian internet and with new laws cooked up by the kremlin and rubber stamped in moscow more and more it's a sovereign internet like anything sovereign it needs walls to protect it and virtual walls are going up today to find out exactly how the russian web works there was only one thing to do i had to upload myself [Applause] now that i'm inside i'll meet a tech oligarch [Applause] travel to siberia to dive into a surprising and very remote startup scene and chase the ever elusive russian hacker using the machine learning you could create a technology which helped to predict a crime let's enter this parallel universe together on this episode of hello world silicon valley may be home to some of the biggest tech giants in the world but it's being challenged like never before crazy tech geniuses have popped up all over the planet making things that will blow your mind my name is ashley vance i'm an author and journalist and i'm on a quest to find the most innovative tech creations and meet the beautiful freaks behind them in moscow over the past decade the tsar's gilded churches and monuments to the proletariat have given way to the symbols of modern russia opulent capitalist towers that poke through the clouds at the heart of this is where i met dimitri grisham hello domitri he's the co-founder of mailroo group and one of only a few people east of helsinki who can drive me to the office in his own tesla i organized the drive for all my employees like 3 000 people because they want all to test how accelerate dimitri sits atop a russian tech empire and runs an investment fund for robotics with its roots in silicon valley that doesn't make you want to move there you have so much going on here maybe one day never say never right overall then do you consider the russian taxi in competitive yes and you know it's interesting things that it's very few countries where local players are very strong and comparing for example with china this internet is fully closed we have facebook instagram all kind of western players and still uh pretty successful so i think we have pretty pretty tough competition why are russian engineers so good i think it's type of education in russia still like mathematics and anything around engineering they give you very broad view so if you want to be very creative in technology this is i think very good education this is the guy charging station here okay so everybody knows when you're in the office yeah [Music] dimitri's tried to copy silicon valley culture here in moscow where male root group operates two instant messaging networks a search engine a price comparison website and a ton of online games they also control the three largest russian social networking sites the biggest one is vk the facebook knockoff dimitri and mail root group took over vk in 2014 after its founder pavel durov refused to reveal information about ukrainian activists to the kremlin durov lost his company and now lives in self-imposed exile dimitri is also one of the world's biggest investors in robotics he put a hundred million dollars into american firms that produce some familiar faces what's been the biggest hit of all your robotics companies so i like all my investments i can say [Music] definitely i like bb-8 a lot they also zipline who do drones long-range delivery and now they start to do blood delivery in rwanda [Music] dimitri ships all kinds of nerd gear to moscow to try it out and see if he wants to invest what's the point of the game we should kill robots that's so good for you as someone who puts all this money into robots aren't you oh it's really cool [Music] to get a taste of the high life of a tech oligarch [Music] dimitri and i headed for a bite to eat at the tallest restaurant in europe 354 meters above the moscow traffic tell me a little bit about your family history so well yeah i have pretty pretty much engineering family and i was born in city called kapustiniar1 [Music] kapustin yar was the soviet union's answer to area 51. a top-secret city where rocket scientists like dimitri's grandfather tested ballistic missiles and rockets during the space race dimitri grew up programming on computers that plugged into soviet tvs but things really took off when he enrolled at moscow state technical university in 1995. and the same year microsoft announced windows 95 this famous song from rolling stone started me up next two years i try to write my own windows it's so expensive windows maybe you can just cheap cheap version so sitting writing it but after some time i say uh okay no it's too hard [Music] he might have failed to rewrite the world's most popular operating system but he did stumble on the copycat business model that became mailroo group and at the height of the 2001 tech crash he had to find a way to keep the new company alive with no cash i became the ceo of the company and my idea was like let's try to survive no matter how we try to do a lot of tricks for example by coming with my car it was a ladder russian russian car we put several servers like physically and move them to more cheaper data center [Music] it's hard to imagine now but in 2004 only 9 of russians had internet access what was the russian government's assessment of the technology industry they didn't know that they exist that all changed in 2012. russia had become the biggest internet market in europe some people use the web to complain about putin and organize protests against his reelection the kremlin responded in full orwellian glory with a series of laws that allows them to flag opposition sites as extremists and blacklist them ever since it's been hard to tell where the vlad web begins and ends i think in the us the idea is that the russian government and the tech companies are just intertwined and the if the government wants to read people's emails whatever they want to do they're going to let them do that if you follow the law you're okay definitely the laws became more complicated right and sometimes it's definitely the way how to interpret the law if you have right now laws that government can shut down any service which is uh not hosting the service inside of russia they can there's law definitely you can have big discussion as this law is good or bad but this only way how to you can operate those new laws passed this year would make edward snowden weep into his bush they demand all sites russians can access move their servers here including the googles and facebooks of the world once on russian soil they have to store six months worth of data about people's every move online and then give the kremlin access russian companies like melrou protested they said these measures would take a ridiculous amount of storage space but they obviously lost american companies have said there's no way they're moving to russia so now their criminal enterprises here and that's how you build a sovereign internet when we grow our business our concept was that internet was a global system no border at all users everywhere can connect to everywhere data can be immigrating everything so it's really was global phenomena but now i think that fundamental global shift everywhere that you have country you have borders and inside these borders you have different kind of rules how data is moving how connectivity is moving who can connect to what who can do what so we're not having like global internet we have some kind of some global internet but a lot of like local internets and for me this is big set in terms of change just a couple of weeks after we visited dimitri he stepped down as ceo of mailru the government approved ceo vk is taking his place the new guy also happens to be the son of the head of russia's largest state-run television channel [Music] coming up next it's off to siberia where the russian government is trying to build a tech utopia in the taiga this is useful in order to make plasma thrusters for space ships to find out how russia makes tech magic happen all you have to do is hop on a flight from moscow to siberia yes that's siberia it's not just for gulags anymore it's hard to wrap your head around just how big siberia is and even harder to understand how most people live here so to get acquainted i found another dimitri this one a real natural-born siberian man to initiate me into the ways of the russian wilderness i'm sure this is a good idea right perfect idea a trip to the banya is an ancient and some would say masochistic russian bonding ritual it consists of three delightful steps okay ashley inferno is ready for entrance step one nearly have heat stroke [Music] step two shrinkage step three get whacked what does this do keep silent please when he's not beating other men with birch branches my new russian friend dimitri is a philosophy professor here in academic that's my destination a small town hours by plane from moscow and about 30 minutes outside russia's third largest city novosibirsk nikita khrushchev's government declared 60 years ago that this would be the siberian home of the soviet academy of sciences built from nothing in the middle of a remote tiger forest that stretches halfway around the planet academic it was the first soviet technopolis and it was a good opportunity for many young scientists how has it changed over the last 40 years in comparison to soviet time we have not so much opportunities but we love our place because it's wonderful 40 institutes a real scientific community show toast well we'll test here no beauty to the enemies of science cheers [Music] soaked swatted steaming and having proven my loyalty to science i was ready to explore akadem goradak [Music] here the soviets hid temples to science in the trees with shrines to match like this one to all the mice they sacrificed on the altar of genetic research [Music] inside the nuclear physics institute it feels like i walked under the set of dr strangelove these analog dials laser contraptions and miles of metal pipes were all built to push nuclear science to its summit replicating the sun's power by smashing atoms together people have been chasing fusion for decades what's still encouraging and exciting about this field the scientific problem is like a huge mountain and for 60 years people are trying to get to the top everything around the base of the mountain is like a trash dump bodies and stuff but you can imagine the results you can achieve when you get to the top professor alexei beklumichev researches something called open trap mechanisms to encourage fusion in theory it's a shortcut to the top of the mountain with a smaller load this is also useful in order to make plasma thrusters for space ships so you could use this to power a spaceship going to mars yeah at the moment it is just an idea it needs a lot of refinement so this is more of like a 2080 sort of thing yeah the soviet government attracted brilliant minds like alexeis to siberia with spacious apartments in the kind of prestige they could only get in a town founded as a utopian nerdocracy but when the soviet union fell so did the walls keeping scientists here and many of them bolted to work at ibm or mit or boeing for those who stayed the utopia has lost its luster over time the difference in pay between scientists and say bus drivers went in favor of bus drivers if you are overworked and without pay you want to go elsewhere ten years ago the russian government decided it needed to hit refresh on the entire town to pull siberian science out of its post-soviet slump they're turning to a new generation of engineers plucked from the taiga to lead the way and one of the most successful so far is dimitri tribitsin yes another dimitri today akadem gardok is changing now there are not only scientists but there are also a lot of companies more like startups yeah more like startups dimitri's company theon started off making king size air filters for hospitals and other businesses as far as starting a company here you didn't think now that i have this idea i'm going to run off to silicon valley you decided this was the spot where you would give it a go well it's very comfortable place and there are a lot of good smart people here also have very fresh air here and it's very useful yeah it's very useful for our company because we can we can compare the air we produce with the cleanest air in the world today dimitri is the poster boy for a siberian startup success story and he feels like he's close to the finish line on phase one of his vision phase two takes him to china where his company is rapidly expanding there he hopes to get his devices out of hospitals and into homes with this little guy that detects pollutants in the air you just blow over the top it doesn't matter like co2 that's enough look it goes down so the lights are going down yeah it means that air quality is not very good now it tried to increase the speed of fan in breezer in this room to lower the concentration of carbon dioxide cool it seems to work dimitri is not a holy self-made man teon's success belongs to him but it's built on a blueprint drawn up by the russian government his headquarters is on a sprawling government-funded campus called academ park with this crazy tower in the middle of it not recommended if you have a fear of heights this place is a prime example of one of the big ideas in russian tech a cradle cradle-to-grave genius factory [Music] across the country they start them young with a strictly uniform education heavy on math and science they pull the best out of siberia and send them down the street to nova sabirsk state university from there they used to funnel their brains to places like the nuclear institute but now that that's a bit retro many of them end up here in the tech tower here it's like someone visited a few silicon valley startups punched the copy button ran it through google translate and then hit paste in the middle of siberia here's the living wall only here it's dead here's the makerspace and the 3d printed putin here's the gym only it's siberia so it comes with bear hello innovation case in point my new friend carrill where are you from originally uh i was born here in academic was your father mother engineers as well yeah yeah they graduated from north civil state university and they was a computer engineer soviet computer engineer with big computers okay you can tell by the terminator looking device on the table that karil makes drones he says his drone is special because it can take off vertically and then fly very very far very very fast thrill sees an optoplane drone flying miles along high tension power lines checking for breaks we're zooming to the site of forest fires and floods across siberia a team of engineers barely out of high school and most definitely still in college built this carbon fiber prototype by hand in four months it's quite a challenge to start a drone startup in russia because of low constraints because of investment climate traditions of of mind of our clients is not so easy to break this is seen as sort of radical yeah it's kind of radical technology so this drone company started in a russian government-funded incubator is too radical for its clients who maybe you guessed it or part of the russian government optoplane's first contract came from the russian version of fema and it built this first prototype with money from a government-backed venture capital firm they wouldn't exist without the government and they barely exist because of it russia is a very centralized country so the united states for example with state laws is faster than in russia you have to get exceptions to test your drones and fly them around here and that's difficult to do yeah yeah so are there many drone companies in russia not so many as then in america it looks really cool it looks good yeah like uh skynet it's through the sheer force of their engineering smarts and passion that optoplane has gotten off the ground out here in siberia they're part of one grand experiment in state-supported innovation we'll have to see what the next 60 years bring to the silicon forest up next on hello world i find myself at a party for cyber cops and hit the streets in moscow to shatter what remains of your illusions of personal privacy i would say that the implications of this very scary there's never been a better time to take in the epicness of modern russia the oil wealth that poured into the country for a decade has remade central moscow into a classy european capital only super-sized after all this is the land of tchaikovsky and pushkin tolstoy and the bolshoi now it's home to bohemian cocktail bars and some of the best restaurants in the world the result is something intimidating and well romantic if you come from the west you can live like an oligarch on the cheap sanctions and low oil prices have cut the ruble in half doubling the fun for outsiders like me but ask anyone here and they'll tell you that the tensions with the west won't diminish the russian soul [Music] russia's power comes from the force of its intellect and that's on display here at the treichakov gallery where the country's most iconic modern artists hang from the walls it got me thinking what is art really an object an idea a young expression of a super personal alien impulse that creativity imposes on its creator oh this one's swirly i wonder what this app does this app gets five stars for sure it's called prisma and its creator alexei moysenkov uses machine learning magic to rebuild your photos into something that could hang in a museum this painting is done by alexander exter does it look like one of your filters yeah it's similar to a gothic filter in our app what would prisma pick up on yeah so for example like finding the right colors finding the right shapes for example these circles and then it will try to find the right structure in your photo and redraw it from scratch prisma topped 2 million downloads a day earlier this year they program a vast network of computers to study great artists and then repaint your pictures from a blank canvas compared to that instagram filters are weak sauce they just tweak the color and exposure of your photos how do you train a neural net to do something like that you you need only one stylized picture so you take like a picasso and then and then a lot of a lot of a lot of simple photos and then use picasso to transfer that picasso style to these details these past few years russia has honed the art of turning computer science nerds into ai building geniuses to put another foot soldier in that ai army to the test i went right across the street from the treichekov gallery to one of moscow's spectacular public spaces gorky park just five years ago this was a decaying soviet relic today it's buzzing with people on wheels and friendly russian faces and my goal here is to find a few hi would you mind if i take a photo of your face i'm trying to do a little bit of an experiment can i take a photo of your face i just take a photo of you and then see we see if it can find your vk profile you might find me on facebook it doesn't work on facebook yet because they don't let you search the database findface is an android app that lets you take a picture of a new friend or a complete stranger in a few seconds it scans all 250 million photos from vk the russian facebook knockoff and then finds a match all right let's see what happens moment of truth here we go oh it's me oh it's me yes yes it's me and your hair is so different in the photo definitely find me first yeah so it works yeah it's really cool do you think it's strange it's strange but cool you like some girl and you take a photo and you can find her and text her or something yeah so you you guys like it i wouldn't like this so if i forgot if this is my son or not i can be check it with my phone okay this year fine face took its algorithm to america for something called the mega face challenge there it beat google and a lot of other face spotting software to find out how they did it nice to meet you nice to meet you i went to meet the algorithm's creator at the office of his company and tech do you mind showing me how the technology works a little bit yeah can we try me so these are my russian brethren my cousins is it ranked in order by who they think looks the most like yes this is like a 60 year old with a machine gun another guy with a gun i want to show you something else why am i a bear so the similarity is very low but yes algorithms that there are some some similarity sometimes it's difficult to say why neural network works this way but but it works arction programmed a neural network that approaches face finding differently than others he fed it thousands of image matches and after about six months of training voila it learned to read faces essentially you don't even know what the neural network is seeing in the beginning neural network gives random answers and the accuracy is close to zero and during training if everything goes well the accuracy grows and there are also neurons some combinations of this neurons responsible for rays some combinations responsible for type of eyes if you can efficiently find the exact person among huge data sets it opens a lot more interesting use cases like for example you can search for criminals in real life among all the street cameras in the city are we creeped out yet maybe we should be entech has already signed a contract with the moscow city police though archum won't talk about it and he says they already have agreements with other law enforcement agencies both inside and outside russia it's easy to imagine what the fbi or its russian counterpart the fsb could do with this kind of technology so it's a little bit controversial right because anyone can identify you now out of the crowd i would say that the implications of this very scary i think f is searching us right there i'm companies here are big companies corporations and governments definitely know everything about you but for random people this makes it much easier you have to be careful if you go it outside in the street or in the facebook or any other social network you've done it you're open to to be recognized [Music] this idea that you're not anonymous when you walk the street anymore somebody can just snap your photo and identify who you are you must have thought about that when you were developing the technology when we were developing we were thinking only about accuracy and how cool it is but apply washi finish when you have smartphones with you because they can track all the information about you it's a battle between technology and privacy [Music] my personal guess that technology will win [Music] on the outskirts of moscow you'll find skokama this is the mothership of state-sponsored innovation the kremlin is coaxing companies and workers here with promises of government support i came here to take in its hugeness and to meet one of skokova's rising stars a criminologist named ilya sachikov hello ilya hi how are you i'm good nice to see you nice to see you yeah illya heads group ib a private company based in moscow that tries to find ever elusive russian hackers unmask them and then hand them over to the authorities we something like the superheroes in our field we help our clients to solve very very difficult cases we use the branding like fbi look at your picture man you look like james bond this is photoshop group ib specializes in investigating fraud and theft the type of stuff that makes up 99 of cyber crime people look on the cyber crime like an iceberg they could see only the upper thing but underwater a lot of infrastructure a lot of politicians a lot of corrupt people from the different organization and this is the future they walk a tightrope cooperating with russian law enforcement while also serving major international clients like citibank and microsoft you have foreign clients today huge companies but as the tensions between china and the us and russia they just seem to be escalating especially when it comes to cyber security actually we had office in new york it was really funny experience because every week we have had excursion from phoebi from the new york police they ask what are you doing here it just seems like that will make it so much harder for you guys to expand your business i think with our knowledge that we really have good understanding of russian cyber crime so i think this is competitive advantage but do you think with the tensions between the us and russia right now that russia would be upset if you had an office in silicon valley i think yes we have some toxic knowledge about the organized crime and cyber crime and i think it's not a government it's some people in government private companies without any control do investigations get some knowledge of course they are not happy [Music] you think of hackers as these guys sitting in their basement with their hats and their hoodies on well this is what the people look like who hunt them this is russia's largest cyber crime event recognition competition by google [Music] [Music] [Music] in college with a few buddies one of them is dimitri volkov the company's head hacker hunter [Music] uh attacking i visited group ib's moscow office to find out more about how dimitri chases cyber criminals is the russian hacking community is that the the biggest cyber crime community in the world we're different so russian speaking hack is so famous because we share knowledge we development tools we share information about how to attack banks how security measures applied on different systems so a huge amount of information is available on the ground community what's the art of that and the technique main goal is to get the full history of hacker's activity because when hacker starts he do a lot of mistakes we have more than one hundred thousand profiles about hackers who communicated on the russian-speaking underground community this is fully automated we have artificial intelligence implementing the security solutions we have special algorithms to detect unknown programs and it's always interesting to see and of course to track how khakis are good operate techniques and tools to do attacks what does a russian hacker look like who are these people if he's an attacker who is doing just technical job usually he lives alone but if we talk about organizers of affordable schemes usually these people are very rich we don't wear hoods where you're driving good cars living in good houses have very beautiful women i can say it's like a muffin [Music] group ib now occupies an uncomfortable position at the intersection of cold war geopolitics and organized crime like the mafia from russia's unruly caucuses during an early group ib investigation ilia learned that one of their targets had ordered the mobsters to kill him if you know about the kafkas and organized group it's not funny at all and do you have bodyguards i had bodyguards for two years but i didn't i understand if someone would like to do something bad they will do [Music] [Music] peace on cyber earth may come but just in case russia is building a series of startup cities to increase the might and reach of its sovereign tech to an outsider like me the depth of russia's state influence on companies feels flat out backward and wrong it's hard to imagine a true tech utopia springing up in a place like this edward snowden yes he's somewhere out there would say the u.s has its eyes everywhere too whether you're on this internet or that one you're never alone anymore [Music] up next on hello world i travel to chile's atacama desert to go hunting for the origins of the universe and find myself with the help of a shaman and some low-tech frog poison [Music] you

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 1,665,536

Rating: 4.3801308 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg, Russia, technology, tech, innovation, internet, hacking, kremlin, apps, startup, Putin, ashlee vance

Id: tICL-lwI7KM

Length: 43min 22sec (2602 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/twenytwelve]

Well, this was misleading...

[u/CDWEBI]

Really trashy "look inside" tbh.