One of the first interviews with Kim Dotcom since his stroke.
Kim Dotcom is a German-Finnish internet entrepreneur, hacker, and political activist best known as the founder of Megaupload, once one of the world’s largest file-sharing sites. In 2012, US authorities shut Megaupload down and charged Dotcom with criminal copyright infringement, racketeering, and money laundering, triggering a New Zealand police raid on his home and a legal battle over extradition that has run for more than a decade. He is a vocal critic of government surveillance and internet censorship.
How do you communicate when the government censors the internet? With a peer-to-peer mesh broadcasting network that doesn’t use the internet.
That’s exactly what Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters are doing now, thanks to San Fransisco startup Bridgefy’s Bluetooth-based messaging app. The protesters can communicate with each other — and the public — using no persistent managed network.
And it’s led to swift growth for Bridgefy: downloads are up almost 4,000% over the past 60 days, according to Apptopia estimates (Apptopia is an app metrics company).
