World

Hong Kong media relies on blockchain to secure 2019 pro-democracy protest archives

Hong Kong media is using blockchain to preserve its coverage of 2019 pro-democracy protests that rocked the autonomous region claimed by China as its own.

A decentralised publishing infrastructure on the Cosmos blockchain, LikeCoin, is being used to preserve these archives as ‘Hong Kong Connection,’ city’s current affairs programme, as public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong announced earlier in May that it will erase archive content over a year old, Quartz reported.

One such episode ‘7.21 Who Owns The Truth’ reportedly showed Hong Kong police tactics and attacks against the protestors, which helped in raising awareness, was backed at LikeCoin.

The report said the infrastructure of LikeCoin is that of a repository not of content but of metadata—details like author, title, publication date and location, as well as a distinctive fingerprint. This metadata is unique immutable and generated the first time a piece of content is published.

LikeCoin uses a digital registry protocol called the International Standard Content Number (ISCN) to catalogue metadata, which is similar to a unique International Standard Book Number (ISBN) of a published book. ISCN can flag any change made to the content.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a statement called on Hong Kong authorities to drop charges filed against people merely for standing for election or for expressing dissenting views.

(Input from Reuters)

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