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Instagram down

Instagram Goes Down Again; Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter Also Faces the Outage

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Reportedly, the major social media apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Twitter, went down for over an hour on Wednesday at 8:45 a.m. ET. The users of these apps around the world reported issues while downloading and sending images, audios, and videos for some time.

It has become quite common for Instagram to go down, in the past few months. But this time, the other three prime apps, FB, Twitter, and Whatsapp, were also facing the same issues at the same time.

Instagram down
Image Source: telegraph.co

Every time the users were trying to see an Instagram post, it was showing the error, “Couldn’t refresh feed” or “Couldn’t load the image. Tap to retry”. Though, the app was able to load the caption under it. Same issues went with Whatsapp multimedia sending and downloading, whereas Facebook was unable to publish the posts.

Twitter users, on the other hand, were unable to direct message. It was showing notification of unread messages, even after the users read the message.

Facebook, while facing these issues, said on the behalf of all its apps in a report, “During one of our routine maintenance operations, we triggered an issue that is making it difficult for some people to upload or send photos and videos. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Where Facebook gave a proper explanation for its app going down, Twitter did not say anything on what caused the issue. But after resolving the issue, Twitter took it to its support handle and wrote, “almost at 100% resolved. There may be some residual effects for a small group of people, but overall your DMs should be working properly now. We appreciate your patience!”

Around 8 p.m. ET, Facebook also said, “The issue has since been resolved and we should be back at 100% for everyone.”

Instagram has been facing such troubles quite often. Last time, it was three weeks ago when the platform faced the interruptions, that too for two hours. Before the four apps went down yesterday, apps like OKCupid, Peloton, Feedly, Discord and DownDetector have also gone down the day before yesterday, after an outage at Cloudflare.

GeForce RTX Super

Nvidia Launches the Super GeForce RTX GPUs; Better Performance at Same Price

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Nvidia, the American technology company, is all set to launch the ‘super’ version of its gaming-focused graphics cards, GeForce RTX 2060, 2070, and 2080. The company will be bringing the RTX 2060 Super, 2070 Super, and 2080 Super, today, as an addition to its RTX graphic lineup, which according to Nvidia, are faster and better at the performance.

The much-awaited set of graphics cards from Nvidia have already been the topic of discussion, and the rumours have already been making the rounds about the features of these new desktop cards.

GeForce RTX Super
Image Source: techradar.com

The reports suggest that the GeForce RTX 2060 Super and the GeForce RTX 2070 Super will render 15 per cent faster performance than their counterpart, whereas the GeForce RTX 2080 Super is a high-end graphics card version, which will exhibit 20 to 25 per cent faster performance than RTX 2080 (non-super version). The GeForce RTX 2070 is now supporting additional CUDA cores, i.e., a total of 2560, at the higher base and boost clocks (1605MHz and 1770MHz, respectively). On the other hand, RTX 2060 Super at the higher base and boost clock, i.e. 1470MHz and 1650MHz, respectively, is supporting a total of 2176 CUDA cores. The high-end RTX 2080 Super will be coming with an additional 128 CUDA cores.

The three graphics cards have also been revamped, in the terms of memory, with a wider 256-bit GDDR6 memory interface and an additional 2GB of GDDR6 memory making it a total of 8GB memory.

“Dubbed the ‘graphics holy grail,’ real-time ray tracing brings cinematic quality lighting effects to interactive experiences for the first-time. The world’s most advanced GPU architecture, Turing fuses next-generation shaders with real-time ray tracing and all-new AI capabilities. Turing’s hybrid graphics capability represents the biggest generational leap ever in gaming GPUs, delivering up to 6x more performance than previous 10 Series Pascal GPUs”, the global head of marketing for the GeForce business at Nvidia, Matt Wuebbling, stated in a blog post.

The company has revealed that it will be shipping the GeForce RTX 2060 Super and the GeForce RTX 2070 Super starting from July 9, whereas the RTX 2080 will be dropped by the end of this month. The prices of all the three cards have been kept similar to their current versions. That means, the RTX 2060 Super will be available for $399, the price of the RTX 2060 is $499, and the RTX 2080 will be sold for $699.

Neural Network Training

Intel and China’s Baidu Collaborates to Develop Neural Network Training Chip

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Baidu is hosting its Create conference for AI developers at Beijing, and it has announced a new partnership with Intel at the same. The two companies have plans to work together to build a new Nervana Neural Network Processor for training, aka NNP-T 100.

Neural Network Training
Image Source: themarketreportsworld.com

The Nervana Neural Network Processor for training is a 16nm NNP-T, and as the name suggests, it is specifically designed for the purpose of deep learning and research of the neural network. The two companies have collaborated for both the software and hardware manufacturing of the chip, such that it will provide full support for the Baidu’s PaddlePaddle deep learning framework. The PaddlePaddle framework focuses on deep learning and research of the neural networks, to utilize it for the AI applications. Intel already provides its support for the framework through its Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

The chip is being built under the code name Spring Crest and is based on a new class AI model. According to Intel, the chip has got a different architecture than the other chips made by Intel. The new NNP-T 100 is enabled with image recognition and has got the software support for the on-chip memory. The company claims that the chip is much faster at performance and has been equipped with the high-speed on- and off-chip interconnects.

The corporate vice president of Intel Naveen Rao made the announcement during the event, where he said, “The next few years will see an explosion in the complexity of AI models and the need for massive deep learning compute at scale. Intel and Baidu are focusing their decade-long collaboration on building radical new hardware, codesigned with enabling software, that will evolve with this new reality – something we call ‘AI 2.0.’”

The company had released the first version of NNP in 2017 and plans to ship this version of NNP by the end of this year. The two companies have been working together since 2016, and their future collaborative plans also include MesaTEE, a memory-safe function-as-a-service (FaaS) computing framework based on the Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology.

Samsung Launches the Bixby Marketplace to Offer Third-party Capsules

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After Apple’s Siri became popular as the smart assistant for iPhones, other rival companies, including Google, also started working to bring their own smart assistants for their mobile users. Though Google brought Google Assistant for Android, other companies focused on bringing smart assistants for homes. This way, Amazon introduced ‘Alexa’, Microsoft brought ‘Cortana’, and Google chose to expand its Android assistant, Google Assistant, as the home assistant. Samsung too, following the league, finally, launched Bixby.

Bixby
Image Source: xda-developers.com

Being a bit late, the smart assistant from Samsung could not make the mark. But Samsung had to do something, so it introduced third-party integration to Bixby and opened the platform for third-party developers. Opening Bixby for third-party developers was a great idea as it started getting the updates that Samsung had promised while launching the app. But still, the company need to do a lot more to get the product to success.

For the same, the company has launched a new marketplace, called ‘Bixby Marketplace’, where the users will get the ‘Bixby capsules.’ The capsules are nothing but the services that Bixby will be providing to its users with third-party app integration on their voice instructions. The popular third-party apps, including Spotify, Yelp, YouTube, NPR, iHeartRadio, and Google Maps, have already been made available as capsule through the store. And, Samsung has claimed that it will also bring the other famous and useful capsule to the platform in the coming future.

“To add even more customization, users can set a capsule as the ‘preferred capsule’ for certain types of requests. For example, if a user says ‘Get me a ride to San Francisco airport’, Bixby will prompt the user to pick one of the supported Rideshare capsules. Users will have the option to set their favourite provider as their preferred Rideshare capsule. Once that is set, any Rideshare request would automatically go to the user’s preferred provider, even if the user does not mention the capsule name. The ability for users to customize their own personal Bixby experience allows them to easily incorporate a wide range of capsules into their everyday lives.” Samsung said during the launch announcement.

The Bixby Marketplace is already opened for the U.S., South Korea and Spain users. The company is looking forward to luring more users to Bixby and has also integrated the smart assistant to many of its home appliances, including its smart TVs.

Nasa to Fly Dragonfly a Drone-like Lander on Titan to Find the Traces of Life

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Our solar system and space beyond have always been the topic of interest for the humans. For a few years now, most of the big space agencies are exploring the Martian surface, and now, the American space organisation, NASA has decided to explore ‘Titan’, one of the 62 moons of Saturn.

Nasa has revealed that it will send a drone-like lander, named Dragonfly, on the surface of Titan, capable of flying 8 or 9 miles in an hour. The Dragonfly will be a 10-foot-long, and 10-foot-wide dual-quadcopter, similar to the size of the Mars rover and will be a look-alike of a giant drone.

Nas's drangonfly on Titan
Image Source: sciencemag.org

Since the Titan has the best environment for flying rather than walking or rolling over the surface, the drone is specifically designed to hop and fly over it. The gravity of Titan is equal to one-seventh of the Earth’s gravity and has a far thicker environment than that of the Earth, providing the suitable conditions for Dragonfly to fly in it.

According to Nasa, the drone will be exploring the surface of Titan and will discover places for landing over it. It will be collecting samples for research, observe the weather conditions and will notify the agency if it finds something unusual. The drone is equipped with drills and probes, to investigate the surface and has got cameras embedded to it, through which will it will be sending HD pictures of the objects found on Titan back to Nasa. Dragonfly will spend about 16 days at a single place and examine the environment. After 16 days, it will move further with the help of the eight rotors it possesses.

Elizabeth Zibi Turtle, the lead investigator of the mission, said during the announcement that Nasa will launch Dragonfly in 2026, which will land on the dune-filled equatorial region of Titan through a parachute. The drone will be back to Earth in 2034.

Nasa has already touched down the surface of Titan with the Huygens probe via the Cassini mission earlier, but according to Turtle, with Dragonfly, it will be a more in-depth mission and will discover major alien things on it.

“We know that Titan has rich organic material, very complex organic material on the surface. There’s energy in the form of sunlight, and we know there’s been water on the surface in the past. These ingredients, that we know, are necessary for the development of life, as we know it is sitting on the surface on Titan. They’ve been doing chemistry experiments, basically, for hundreds of millions of years, and Dragonfly is designed to go pick up the results of those experiments.” said Turtle.

With the rivers and other organic material found on Titan, it has always been considered as a prototype of Earth, before life on Earth. So the interest of the researchers has always been to find the traces of life over it.

India Plans on Building its own Chat App for Official Use After Huawei U.S. Ban

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A report from Economic Times has revealed that the Indian government is looking forward to bring an official messenger or chat app, similar to Whatsapp, to be used by the government employees for official communications.

According to the report, the Delhi government said on Thursday that it is considering to develop a chat application, email, and the other homegrown secure communication networks, for the government officials, in order to insulate the intimate communication with one another.

indian communication app
Image Source: express.co.uk

The decision has come as one of the results of the U.S. government banning Huawei and some other Chinese companies from operating in the country, due to the friction with Beijing. In fact, Washington has recently set up the sanctions against many Chinese companies, which the U.S. tech giants, like Google and Facebook, have already started working upon.

Also, there has been some cold vibes between the U.S. government and the Indian government, as result of removal of the South Asian nation from a special trade program by the U.S. government, as India could not assure the U.S. president Donald Trump of India “providing equitable and reasonable access to its markets” to the U.S.

This incident has caused tension among the two nations. “Tomorrow, if the U.S. finds us unreliable for some reason, all they need to do is ask their companies to slow down networks in India, and everything here will come to a standstill. We are vulnerable, and we must take steps to cover that,” an unnamed official said over the matter.

Though it will be the first time that Indian government will be taking an initiative in developing mediums for the messaging and emails for the official communication, it is not the first time that any other nation is building such software for the government-only use.

At the beginning of this year, France released its official chat app, named Tchap, an open source app, which can only be used by France’s government officials. Other than France, there are nations like China and North Korea, that have got their own operating systems for use in government offices.

Even the Indian government has attempted on building its own Linux-based desktop operating system named BOSS, but with least success, Microsoft‘s Windows is still the most common OS in the government offices of India.