It has become one of the most divisive aspects of our time.

How do you figure out what's fake news and what is real?

There's a part solution to the problem developed by a team from University College London and UC Berkeley.

A machine learning tool identifies new domains created to generate false information.

So, instead of stopping fake news stories after they have spread, the objective is to stop them at source.

Social media will need to adopt a filtering technique, so any URLs shared from these sites are prevented from featuring in the feeds.

Social media news feeds remove the 'friction' from sharing and consumption. That makes it easy to spread both - information and misinformation

It levels the playing field for all publications, making it impossible for readers to recognise the difference.

When that changes, fake news sources can be weeded out.

The principle is the same as malware. If the URL keeps generating a stream of fake news, it should be treated like a virus and quarantined.

It should not be hard to implement but it needs news organisations to come together and make this mandatory.

The question is, who defines fake and real?

The window seat is passé

On the flight, a window seat makes sense - at least if you like panoramas.

If you have to squeeze past two adults with their knees digging into the back of your legs and a profusion of 'Sorry's'

The view during takeoff for a couple of minutes and when you come in to land is worth it.

Gliding past puffy clouds and shifting terrain, the aerial view is still an unusual perspective.

Kids these days don't care about the window seat anymore.

They want screens - either a TV or the smartphone for company.

The view from the window does not change in a flash. It eases from one landscape to another.

It doesn't go from green fields to desert dunes in an instant

Or switch between an action-packed game and a video.

The fights for the window seats, whether on trains, cars or buses were the essence of family outings.

If you were stuck in the middle, the trip felt like it would never end. 

The only other entertainment possible was to needle your cousins or complain.

Today, everybody lives their own world.

Family outings are cocoons inside cocoons.

The nuclear family is down to the atom.

The internet balloon is coming down to earth

Broadband in metros and Tier 2 and 3 cities mean very different things.

We've all seen it happen. Travel beyond city limits and mobile internet speeds and coverage drop dramatically.

Google had launched Project Loon to deliver high-speed internet access to remote locations.

It started off with hot-air balloons floating above the earth, a 100 kilometers apart.

Like a relay, the balloons are used to connect remote areas and deliver faster internet speeds to the ground areas below.

The first step was developing the technology to transmit data at high speeds through the air.

That tech is now being deployed on the ground.

Project Taara is an experiment being conducted in India and Africa. The equipment is being deployed with line of sight 20 kms apart.

Narrow data streams of 10-100 gbps are sent through the air to the next point, from where they are re-transmitted.

It's far more economical than fiber and easy to deploy quickly across diverse terrain including rivers and mountain ranges.

If the data stream is interrupted by birds in flight, the data is re-sent automatically.

The Google moonshot is coming down to earth.

And success will mean that cat videos will also stream in Chapra!

Update: Google has shut down Project Loon. The balloon will be deflated and possibly come back in another form altogether!

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