Top of the big era

This Purbhakar Rahman has a very high status in the computer academic circle, far higher than Shen Xiangyang. However, Ziweixing is a commercial company, facing the market, and its academic status is irrelevant. It must be market-oriented scientific research.

It is impossible for technology companies to do pure scientific research. They cannot do scientific research for the sake of scientific research. The ultimate goal is to make money through commercialization.

In the scientific research industry, it is composed of universities, scientific research institutions funded by the state finance, and private technology companies. Technology companies are only the last link, the link for commercialization and realization.

It seemed that Yahoo was in decline and could not find a truly suitable top scientist, so it chose an American academician and academic master to lead Yahoo's global research institute.

The chief scientists of the truly top technology giants, such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Oracle, are often far away from the academic circle. They may have never published a paper in their lives and are engaged in market-oriented scientific research.

If technology companies are allowed to do the work that universities and state-funded scientific research institutes should undertake, it will really be a huge waste of scientific research for the company, and no company can afford it.

At the beginning, Silicon Valley was just the technology park of Stanford University.

Domestic technology companies are criticized in the field of research and development. The most important reason is that the entire scientific research industry system has not been established. It is impossible to expect technology companies to excel in the last link without establishing the first few links.

What’s more, the previous steps may have produced results, but they belong to the country and must be cautiously opened to private capital. This is even more embarrassing. Ma Pingshan even had to go to South Korea to make drones. Japan buys technology and relies on universities on Hong Kong Island to provide technical support.

Zhou Buqi wanted to change the direction of scientific research, mainly Ziweixing International.

The existing domestic scientific research industry structure dictates that it can only be imitated.

The support provided by upstream universities and research institutes is limited. Technology companies lack sufficient reference when conducting scientific research, so they can only follow the existing relatively mature directions abroad.

Therefore, Yahoo only has one research center for applied scientific research, which is located in the domestic capital. Domestic scientific research elites are concentrated in this field.

As for Yahoo’s research institutes, they are mainly based in the United States.

However, this does not mean that the route taken by Yahoo Research is necessarily correct. The current dean, Purbhakar Rahman, is an academic leader. I am afraid that he has not stepped out in his thinking and is prone to staying in the understanding of university scientific research. It is scientific research for the sake of science, and scientific research for the sake of scientific research. It is not good to leave the upstream tasks of the scientific research industry to Yahoo, which is downstream.

It not only wastes a lot of scientific research funds, but also makes it difficult to produce too many scientific research results.

Zhou Buqi said: "Yahoo's scientific research business will be integrated into Ziweixing International's research institute system. It will still be a bicameral system, with the research institute and the engineering institute."

Shen Xiangyang said: "We can let him serve as the director of the research institute of Ziweixing International."

"oh?"

"He has a wide network of contacts, a high status in the industry, and students all over Silicon Valley."

"Yeah." Zhou Buqi nodded, "Okay, let him report to you anyway. Are you now the senior vice president and chief technology officer of Ziweixing International?"

Shen Xiangyang smiled, "Almost, chairman of the technical committee."

Zhou Buqi said: "Then let's arrange it this way. Anyway, you will be at the helm of all technical matters. I don't doubt Rahman's level, but I'm afraid that his scientific research ideas are too academic, so he needs to master this balance. "

Shen Xiangyang said: "Yahoo has a very strong technical foundation, much stronger than Ziweixing."

"What's the use of technology?" Zhou Buqi disagreed. "Hasn't it been defeated commercially? How much practical value can the technological achievements accumulated by Yahoo have?"

Shen Xiangyang was silent for a moment and said slowly: "It's always good to have accumulation. It's like a warehouse. There are a lot of things stored in the warehouse, which may not be used once in several years. But when you really need to use it, buy it now and make it now. It’s slower. You can take out the stuff at the bottom of the box directly from the warehouse. Ziweixing International is developing very fast, but there is a huge hidden danger in that there are too few things in the warehouse. Once we encounter sudden changes in technology, we If you cannot keep up in time, you will easily be left behind by the times. Things in the warehouse may never be used, but their existence is a kind of guarantee."

Zhou Buqi blinked, "Technology updates so quickly, does it not become outdated?"

Shen Xiangyang smiled and said: "It will indeed become outdated, but the most important thing about technology is to choose the right route. Once the route is decided, just update the remaining details."

"Um."

Zhou Buqi nodded.

He knew this very well.

These scientists in Ziweixing basically never write code. For example, Dr. Wang Jian, the chief technology officer of Ziweixing, is jokingly called a "Doctor of Psychology" internally. He is a layman who guides an expert. Some people suggested that he write a few pieces of code. , show it out for everyone to see!

Dr. Wang Jian happily agreed.

But I never wrote it.

At this level, it is more about the choice of technical direction. He determined the technical direction and provided a simple research idea, and then let a technical team composed of young people implement it.

Shen Xiangyang said: "In my opinion, the greatest value of acquiring Yahoo is secondary to the commercial aspect. If Ziweixing International wants to stand shoulder to shoulder with the technology giants in Silicon Valley, it must have enough inventory in the technology warehouse. This is A family with a foothold in Silicon Valley. In the past few years, Ziweixing International has achieved great success at the commercial level, but it is strong on the outside and weak on the inside."

Zhou Buqi twitched his lips, "Is it so serious? Aren't we the best artificial intelligence company in the world, comparable to Google?"

Shen Xiangyang said with a smile: "There are countless technological exploration directions, and artificial intelligence is only one of them. In the past few years, our main scientific research direction has been on cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and we are still far behind in other fields." Woolen cloth!"

"for example?"

"For example... last time Lander talked to me about Helo, hoping that I could provide a brand new communication encryption technology called E2EE, but it was shelved because of technical issues."

"What?"

Zhou Buqi was slightly startled.

Helo is a flagship product, how can it be hampered by technical bottlenecks?

This is a big deal!

Shen Xiangyang said: "E2EE mainly refers to end-to-end encryption. Nowadays, most of the information sent on the Internet is sent in clear text. If I send you a signal, it may be intercepted by a third party in the middle. You know what we are sending What is the content? E2EE's point-to-point encryption means that there is an exclusive key between the sender and the receiver. No one in the world knows it, not even the platform, only they know it. The process of sending information , the sender encrypts it first, and the receiver relies on the key to decode it to read the information. Even if a third party intercepts the signal halfway, it cannot crack it without the key."

Zhou Buqi was a little surprised, "Isn't this technology unusual? Someone told me... yes, Guo Pengfei told me at the beginning. When Friends Network and Xiaonei Network were doing email, they used this kind of encryption."

Shen Xiangyang said with a smile: "He used public keys, which is the previous technology. Now it has been upgraded and it is end-to-end encryption."

Zhou Buqi asked: "What do you mean?"

Shen Xiangyang explained in detail: "It was indeed used in email at the earliest. Especially in the United States, email has legal effect and can be used as evidence in court, while instant messaging chat records are not considered evidence. So there were many Hackers will intercept email messages, then modify, forge, and then send them out. This will cause heavy losses to many companies. End-to-end encryption has emerged, represented by Yahoo Mail."

Zhou Buqi smiled and said: "Yahoo has strong technology in this field?"

Shen Xiangyang said: "Yes, it is very strong, and it can be regarded as a representative of the industry. However, the public key system was used at that time, that is, Yahoo, as the mailbox platform, holds the public key. In other words, Yahoo mailbox customers and customers It is true that outsiders cannot steal emails sent between each other, but as a platform, Yahoo can use the public key to crack the email content."

"ah?"

Zhou Buqi was a little surprised.

Shen Xiangyang said: "It's not surprising. Emails all over the world do this. How do you distinguish spam? The reason why the platform can distinguish which of the user's emails is valid and which is spam is very important. The reason is that its content can be analyzed.”

Zhou Buqi twitched his lips, "No wonder big companies have their own email addresses!"

Shen Xiangyang smiled and said, "Yes, that's the reason. If you use someone else's email address, they will clearly record everything you send."

Zhou Buqi then asked: "Can new technology solve this problem?"

Shen Xiangyang said: "Indeed, this E2EE end-to-end encryption technology allows the sent message to be unknown to any third party except the sender and receiver, including the platform. There is no public key here, any Both users have independent randomly assigned keys, which ensures that communication messages will not be stolen by routers, switches, telecom operators, platforms, hackers, national security and other departments."

Zhou Buqi vaguely understood, "That's complicated enough!"

The previous public key system was a set of keys for all customers. It was similar to the password war during World War II. Once a set of codebooks was cracked, all intelligence could be cracked.

This end-to-end encryption is obviously a huge technological advancement, and there is an independent set of keys between any two users. Even if a set of codes is cracked, it only unlocks the information between these two people and has no effect on others.

Helo currently has 160 million users, and every two people have a set of keys, which requires at least 128 billion key sets. Even if a single user's key could decrypt the information of many different other users, at least 160 million key groups would be needed.

It is almost impossible to crack this.

The larger the scale, the higher the technical difficulty will be.

However, instant messaging products like Helo do need similar technology to ensure that users' privacy will not be stolen.

When making products in overseas markets, the most important thing is privacy protection.

In contrast, in China, there is no need for it, and even if it is available, it will not be used.

Once this technology is applied, many criminals can use this technology to communicate secretly and use the Internet to transmit illegal information, but the national security agencies are unable to supervise and detect in time.

Just like the riots in Paris, France, all methods can't solve it.

Later, an expert came up with a trick - Paris cut off the internet.

It'll be fine now.

The North Africans who were rioting in the streets could not communicate through instant messaging tools, so the organization collapsed and the incident subsided.