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Telegram Faces Major DDoS Attack; Claims China is Behind it

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Telegram, one of the most secure encrypted messaging service took it to Twitter, Today, to reveal that it was dealing with and has recovered from a powerful DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on Wednesday. The company tweeted that the users in the U.S. and the other countries may face issues in the connection, due to the attack.

Telegram
Image Source: fortune.com

On Wednesday, the platform was hit by DDoS, and it took down the app for over an hour. While dealing with the attack, the company even went to Twitter to explain to its 200 million users how the attack works.

Telegram tweeted through its official account, “A DDoS is a “Distributed Denial of Service attack”: your servers get GADZILLIONS of garbage requests which stop them from processing legitimate requests. Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald’s in front of you – and each is ordering a whopper.” The company stated in the next tweet, “The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place – but there are so many of them that the server can’t even see you to try and take your order.”

The company also Tweeted about how the attackers accomplish a DDoS attack, and then, it also confirmed that users that the users’ data is safe.

The company has been the main target of countries like Russia, Iran and Indonesia, providing the reason that the app has been used to encourage terrorism and political protestors. These companies even blocked the service for a long time. But this time, Telegram has clearly indicated that the attack has come from China.

The CEO of the company, Pavel Durov, tweeted, “IP addresses coming mostly from China. Historically, all state actor-sized DDoS (200-400 Gb/s of junk) we experienced coincided in time with protests in Hong Kong (coordinated on @telegram). This case was not an exception.”

The protesters in Hong Kong are protesting in response to the law that gives China the authority under the “one country, two systems” principle, through which it can extradite its citizens to China. According to the sources, these protesters used Telegram for communication, and even, the Telegram group administrator had been arrested in Hong Kong claiming that he conspired to commit public nuisance.

Google Drive and Google Photos Will No Longer Sync Together

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Although Google Photos and Google Drive work independently, many of the people use both to store their images and videos by syncing them with each other. This way, the data is kept safe and can be accessed easily. But, based on a few feedbacks from the users, now Google is going to make some changes on how the two platforms will share the content with each other.

Google drive and google photos
Image Source: phandroid.com

According to a blog post, Google has got many feedbacks regarding the confusion the relation between the two platform cause among the users, and now, it will make some changes to both, in order to ‘simplify’ things.

“We’ve heard feedback that the connection between these services is confusing, so next month, we’re making some changes to simplify the experience across Google Drive and Google Photos,” stated Google in the blog post.

Usually, the pictures and the videos uploaded over either the platforms get synced to both the platforms and gets stored on it. But now after the changes, if the pictures/videos are uploaded to Photos, these won’t get stored to the Drive, automatically, and the same will happen if done other way around. Also, if a picture is deleted from Google Photos, it won’t affect the same picture in the Drive and vice-versa. This way, the pictures/videos will be safe from any accidental deletion.

Now with another new feature, named Upload From Google Drive, the users will have better control over the two platforms. Since the automatic syncing is already out of option, the users will be able to select the pictures and videos they want to import to Photos from Drive. Even though the images and the videos are imported from the Drive, these are not related to each other. And yes, the same image in both platforms will occupy space separately and will be counted in the storage quota. The users will still be able to upload items to both the platforms with the Backup and Sync option, altogether.

According to the company, the changes will take place starting from 10 July. The images and the videos that are already in both the platforms will remain as it is, even after the changes.

Uber Finally Showcases the Internal Design of its Ride Sharing Air Taxi

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Uber is excited for the launch of its another arm, i.e. Uber Air, and have been working to finalise the design for its air taxies. Finally, after going back and forth with various designs, Uber has teased a reference design for its air taxi, which is more like the design of a spacious helicopter.

Uber Air
Image Source: theverge

The company revealed the reference design at its third annual Elevate conference, an event based on flying taxies, going on in Washington DC, started on June 11th. The showcased design represents how the company envisions its aerial taxis’ internal design to look like.

The company has taken the initiative of offering air taxies to help in reducing the congestion and traffic on the roads and plans to kick off the service starting from 2023. Since there is a lot of time left for the launch of Uber Air, the company took the pains to build a simulated design of the air taxi, to showcase the details of its internal design.

For the design, the company has partnered with aircraft interior designer Safran Cabin. The air taxi has got four seats, arranged in pairs in two rows. Behind the backseat, the passengers will get the space to place their luggage. Since the taxi is for short rides, the company has not paid much of efforts in embedding luxuries to it. The aerial taxi has to comply with the eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) standards, so the design has been kept sleek and simple.

“Together with Safran Cabin, we’ve designed for the first time in history, a bespoke aircraft cabin that is truly mission-driven for aerial ridesharing on Uber Air. Starting with the customer experience, it’s highly considered from the inside-out, yet extensible across different fuselage profiles, and carefully engineered with a path to certification.” Uber Elevate’s Head of Design, John Badalamenti, said in a statement.

Uber is making quite the efforts to become one supreme transportation company, and for its aerial taxies, it has even got companies, like Boeing, on board. Along with Boeing Uber has also partnered with Bell Helicopters and Jaunt.

At the event, the company also revealed the designs of the Skyports it will be building for the passengers to get a Uber Air. Uber even reported that it will be building its first non-US Skyport in Melbourne Australia, the city becoming the third official pilot city for Uber Air, after Dallas and Los Angeles.

Telegram’s ICO Token Is Finally Open for Public Sale

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Telegram, the famous and most secured chat app, will be organising a sale for its crypto token, ‘Gram’, open for its retail investors through a limited listing. The sale will be carried out prior to a full public sale to be hosted by the company in coming October, starting from July 10.

gram token from telegram
Image Source: news.bitcoin.com

Telegram has previously hosted a massive token sale in the month of February and March in 2018, where it raised a record-high $1.7 billion, despite the sale being limited only to accredited investors. It was the biggest fundraiser organised by a crypto token offering. The fundraiser was to support the development of the Telegram Open Network (TON), a blockchain project that was targetted to decentralise the operations, including file sharing, carried out through digital communication on Telegram.

The sale will go live on the crypto exchange Liquid and is a limited offering. According to the Gram sale page on Liquid’s website, the sale is open globally, except for nations, including the U.S., Korea and Japan, due to some security issues. Though the investors can buy the tokens in exchange for the U.S. dollars or the USDC stable coin.

The website also states that the sold tokens won’t be tradeable as soon they are sold. “The tokens being sold will not be released until after TON goes live (mainnet release), in accordance with the delivery schedule. Purchasers will not be able to transfer, withdraw, or trade the Grams before they are released.” says the gram sale page on the Liquid website.

Telegram has not revealed on the cost and the number of the tokens to be sold. But it has revealed that it will disclose the number of tokens held by Gram Asia. Gram Asia is a Korea based organization, which claims to hold the biggest share of the Gram tokens in Asia.

The company has not commented on the news yet, and an unofficial TON channel has requested the investors to wait for the piece of official information from Telegram.

Google Makes Changes to its Searches; Only Two Listings From One Site

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It is quite common that when you search for a particular keyword, Google may show multiple links of web pages from a single site in the results. This has been a big issue for every site owner, as this makes all their SEO practices failed. But now, Google has decided to work on the issue and provide diverse search results for its users.

Google search
Image Source: komando.com

The company has said that the step has been taken “to provide more site diversity” in the search results, the users’ constant feedbacks on the issue being one of the main reasons behind the tweak. According to Google, now there will be no more than two listings from one website in the searches unless it is too relevant and even, depending upon the expertise of the website on that particular keyword. “We may still show more than two in cases where our systems determine it’s especially relevant to do so for a particular search,” said Google.

The appearance of links of multiple web pages from one website creates confusion on which web page is the most relevant to the searched keywords, and moreover, it annoys the users too. With the new tweak, the other sources will get to make their place on the first page of Google searches, and maybe, at the top of it. Due to the dominance of the single website on the first page, those websites get disappeared even from the users’ consideration.

This way, the users will get to see more options for their keyword search and will be able to evaluate the quality of information by looking upon all the other sources as well.

Google has said that the new changes won’t change the way the websites rank, but it will only change the number of links form a single website that will be displayed in the results. The change in the search result is domain based, so the subdomains and their root domains will be treated as part of a single website.

Though according to Google, the changes are already out, many of the Google users have reported that they can still see more links from a single website in the results. Upon which Google has given a statement, that it is still working to improve that.

G20 to Double their Efforts in Wrapping Up the Digital Tax by 2020

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Facebook, Google, Amazon, Uber, these are some of the top tech giants that are working globally, and in the past few years, questions have been raised on the tax these companies have been cutting off by shifting to low tax countries. The financial authorities of the developed countries have always seen this as an unfair move, as they earn complete profits but pay lesser tax.

G20
Image Source: middleeastmonitor.com

To resolve this problem, the finance ministers of the G20 countries have finally agreed on imposing new rules on those tech companies, such that they will now pay taxes based on their profits and in which countries they are serving, instead of where they are based.

G20 is an international organisation, comprising of world’s 19 biggest economies and the Europian Union, making a total of 47 countries, that works towards economic stability.

Reuters reported the news first, through a draft communique obtained by the former, according to which, the G20 companies will compile common rules to close the loopholes for the tech companies. Though the low tax had been beneficial for small countries to attract international tech giants.

The new rules will include a two-pillar approach. According to the first pillar, the tax will be based on two things, what are the services or goods that the companies will be providing and where these companies are operating. The second pillar will impose a minimum tax rate on every company, such that even the services are moved to another country, the basic tax will be the same.

“We welcome the recent progress on addressing the tax challenges arising from digitization and endorse the ambitious program that consists of a two-pillar approach. We will redouble our efforts for a consensus-based solution with a final report by 2020.” stated the draft communique.

For the support of the agreement, countries like France and Britain have been quite supportive as the tech giants strategically pay lesser tax in those countries. But upon this, the U.S. based companies have also raised the concern of being most targeted by the European countries.

The finalisation of the rules for the taxes to be imposed on the global tech companies is still under process. But according to the reports, G20 will release the final report on the new rules in 2020.