Truecaller has introduced a new feature called Auto-Block Spam, specifically for iPhone users, aimed at improving the way unwanted calls are handled. This feature takes Truecaller’s existing spam-blocking capabilities to a new level by allowing users to automatically block calls from known spammers, fraudsters, or telemarketers without having to manually reject them. The new Auto-Block Spam feature is designed to block these calls before they even ring on your phone, reducing interruptions and making it easier for iPhone users to focus on their day. This upgrade promises a seamless, stress-free experience for those tired of constant spam calls.
The Auto-Block Spam feature is an upgrade to Truecaller’s existing capabilities. While Truecaller has always helped identify unknown callers, this new feature takes things a step further by proactively blocking spam calls before they reach you. Users can choose between two levels of protection: –Block Top Spammers: This setting blocks only the worst offenders, such as repeat scammers or fraudsters.
–Block All Spammers: For users seeking a completely spam-free experience, this option blocks all numbers flagged as spam by Truecaller. However, it’s important to note that legitimate calls could also be blocked.
Tag: science & Tech
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Truecaller introduces auto-block spam feature for iPhone
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This is how OpenAI aims to fight deepfakes with ‘Voice Engine’ in election year
As world leaders scramble to tackle the menace of deepfakes in a global election year, Sam Altman-run OpenAI is trying to develop beneficial AI, with a text-to-speech model called ‘Voice Engine’.
The AI model uses text input and a “single 15-second audio sample” to generate natural-sounding speech.
“It is notable that a small model with a single 15-second sample can create emotive and realistic voices,” according to OpenAI. The company admitted that generating speech that resembles people’s voices has serious risks, which are especially top of mind in an election year.
“We are engaging with the US and international partners from across government, media, entertainment, education, civil society and beyond to ensure we are incorporating their feedback as we build,” said OpenAI.
The partners testing ‘Voice Engine’ have agreed to OpenAI’s usage policies, which prohibit the impersonation of another individual or organisation without consent or legal right.
“In addition, our terms with these partners require explicit and informed consent from the original speaker and we don’t allow developers to build ways for individual users to create their own voices,” the company said in a blog post.
Partners must also clearly disclose to their audience that the voices they’re hearing are AI-generated, the company added.
“Finally, we have implemented a set of safety measures, including watermarking to trace the origin of any audio generated by Voice Engine, as well as proactive monitoring of how it’s being used”. -
NASA selects 3 firms to develop vehicle to explore Moon’s surface
The US space agency NASA has selected four companies — Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab — to develop a lunar terrain vehicle (LTV) that Artemis astronauts will use to travel around the Moon’s surface. The vehicle will help conduct scientific research during the agency’s Artemis campaign at the Moon and preparing for human missions to Mars, NASA said in a statement.
“We look forward to the development of the Artemis generation lunar exploration vehicle to help us advance what we learn at the Moon,” said Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“This vehicle will greatly increase our astronauts’ ability to explore and conduct science on the lunar surface while also serving as a science platform between crewed missions,” Wyche added.
NASA intends to begin using the LTV for crewed operations during Artemis V.
The contract with “firm-fixed-price task orders” has a combined maximum potential value of $4.6 billion for all awards. Each provider will begin with a feasibility task order, which will be a year-long special study to develop a system that meets NASA’s requirements through the preliminary design maturity project phase.Between Artemis missions, when crews are not on the Moon, the LTV will operate remotely to support NASA’s scientific objectives as needed.
Outside those times, the provider will have the ability to use their LTV for commercial lunar surface activities unrelated to NASA missions, said the space agency.
“We will use the LTV to travel to locations we might not otherwise be able to reach on foot, increasing our ability to explore and make new scientific discoveries,” said Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Through Artemis, NASA will send astronauts – including the first woman, first person of colou, and its first international partner astronaut – to explore the Moon.
White House asks NASA to create special time zone for the moon
NASA has been assigned a new task by the White House. In a letter issued Tuesday, officials said that the office wants the US space agency to establish a unified standard time for the moon and other “celestial bodies.” The request comes as an effort to create a standard for “timekeeping.”
The White House states that the proposed Coordinated Lunar Time, LTC, is aimed at making space missions more efficient by providing enhanced assistance. The new time zone must be developed by the end of 2026, the White House added.
Arati Prabhakar, the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, explained in the letter that a special time zone is “fundamental to the scientific discovery, economic development, and international collaboration.” Prabhakar notes that standardising time for the moon would make space operations safer and acknowledged “important implications” associated with the creation of LTC. -
India’s Aditya-L1 to track the Sun during Total Solar Eclipse
India’s maiden solar probe, Aditya L1, will track the Sun as it gets cloaked by the moon, creating a brief period of darkness in several parts of North America, during the Total Solar Eclipse. The Total Solar Eclipse will occur on April 8 as the Sun, Moon and Earth align in a straight line leading to darkness during the daytime. The cloaking will create a period of totality expected to last over four minutes, illuminating the enigmatic outer layer of the Sun that is not visible from Earth.
The Adiya L1 mission has six instruments as it observes the Sun from Lagrange Point 1, nearly 15 kilometres from Earth. Of the six, two instruments could be primed to observe the Sun during the eclipse. These are the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC) and the Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT).
The coronagraph studies the Sun’s outer layer, the corona, by blocking the Sun’s disk and creating an artificial eclipse onboard the spacecraft. Meanwhile, the Suit images the Solar Photosphere and Chromosphere in near ultraviolet.
During the eclipse, the Sun’s corona is visible as the Moon blocks the solar disk and reveals the outer bright layers shining, and can be seen from Earth for a brief moment. The corona is not visible, otherwise, from the planet. -
We now have a chip for generative AI era, says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
As big tech companies aim to lead the generative AI race, Nvidia Founder and CEO Jensen Huang has said that they have created a processor for the GenAI era. Huang introduced the company’s new Blackwell computing platform at the GTC conference in the US, saying that increased computing power can deliver for everything from software to services, robotics to medical technology and more.
“Accelerated computing has reached the tipping point — general purpose computing has run out of steam,” Huang told more than 11,000 attendees during his keynote address.
Delivering a massive upgrade to the world’s AI infrastructure, Huang introduced the Nvidia Blackwell platform “to unleash real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models”. Huang also presented Nvidia NIM — a reference to NVIDIA inference microservices — a new way of packaging and delivering software that connects developers with hundreds of millions of GPUs to deploy custom AI of all kinds. -
Signal to ramp up hiring after WhatsApp controversy drives download surge
Messaging app Signal has seen “unprecedented” growth following a controversial change in rival WhatsApp’s privacy terms and is looking to hire more staff as it seeks to bolster the service and supporting infrastructure, the head of its controlling foundation said. Along with another encrypted app, Telegram, Signal has been the main beneficiary of online outrage around the changes announced last week, which require WhatsApp users to share their data with both Facebook and Instagram. Telegram said on Wednesday it had surpassed 500 million active users globally. Brian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp before selling it to Facebook and then co-founding the Signal Foundation, declined to give equivalent data for Signal but said that the expansion in recent days had been “vertical”. “We’ve seen unprecedented growth this past week,” Acton said in an email to Reuters. “It’s safe to say that because of this record growth, we’re even more interested in finding talented people.” He also said Signal was working to improve its video and group chat functions, allowing it to compete better with WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, and other conferencing apps that have become vital to day-to-day life over the past year. Signal was downloaded by 17.8 million users over the past seven days, a 62-fold rise from the prior week, according to data from Sensor Tower. WhatsApp was downloaded by 10.6 million users during the same period, a 17% decline.
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Chinese hackers luring Indian WhatsApp users into ‘part-time’ jobs
In fresh trouble for WhatsApp, which is facing backlash over its upcoming user data policy in India, New Delhi-based think-tank Cyberpeace Foundation said on Monday that China-based hackers are targeting WhatsApp users in the country with the promise of ‘part-time’ jobs. Such proliferating messages on WhatsApp, which come with attached links, claim that one can earn Rs 200 to Rs 3,000 in a day in 10 to 30 minutes. “There are multiple links that redirect to a common URL and each link uses different numbers to send a message,” the foundation said in a statement. “It can be observed that the same outgoing link is used for all the links with variation in the numbers. The parameter in the links indicates that they can be redirected to WhatsApp in all regions and in languages other than English,” said the report. The CyberPeace Foundation along with experts from Autobot Infosec Private Ltd has launched an independent investigation into the matter. “In all the links, the same redirection and outgoing sources were generated. However, in one link, a different URL was found and one new IP address that belongs to one of China’s hosting company Alibaba Cloud,” the report said. When the URL is manipulated, an error code is displayed in Chinese language, the report said, adding that the domain names found during the investigation seem to have been registered in China.
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‘Galaxy-sized’ observatory sees hints of gravitational waves
Scientists have used a “galaxy-sized” space observatory to find possible hints of a unique signal from gravitational waves, or the powerful ripples that course through the universe and warp the fabric of space and time itself.
The new findings, which appeared recently in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, hail from a U.S. and Canadian project called the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav). For over 13 years, NANOGrav researchers have pored over the light streaming from dozens of pulsars spread throughout the Milky Way Galaxy to try to detect a “gravitational wave background.” That’s what scientists call the steady flux of gravitational radiation that, according to theory, washes over Earth on a constant basis. The team hasn’t yet pinpointed that target, but it’s getting closer than ever before, said Joseph Simon, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author of the new paper. “We’ve found a strong signal in our dataset,” said Simon, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. “But we can’t say yet that this is the gravitational wave background.” In 2017, scientists on an experiment called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves. Those waves were created when two black holes slammed into each other roughly 130 million lightyears from Earth, generating a cosmic shock that spread to our own solar system.
That event was the equivalent of a cymbal crash — a violent and short-lived blast. The gravitational waves that Simon and his colleagues are looking for, in contrast, are more like the steady hum of conversation at a crowded cocktail party. Detecting that background noise would be a major scientific achievement, opening a new window to the workings of the universe, he added. These waves, for example, could give scientists new tools for studying how the supermassive black holes at the centers of many galaxies merge over time.
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IBM uses light for ultra-fast computing in AI systems
IBM researchers have developed a way to dramatically reduce latency in Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems by using light, instead of electricity, to create ultra-fast computing. The IBM team, along with scientists from the universities of Oxford, Muenster and Exeter, achieved this by using photonic integrated circuits that use light instead of electricity for computing. The light-based tensor core could be used, among other applications, for autonomous vehicles. In a Nature paper, they have detailed combination of photonic — demonstrating a photonic tensor core that can perform computations with unprecedented, ultra-low latency and compute density. “Our tensor core runs computations at a processing speed higher than ever before. It performs key computational primitives associated with AI models such as deep neural networks for computer vision in less than a microsecond, with remarkable areal and energy efficiency,” IBM said in a blog post.
Telegram crosses 500 mn subscriber mark
Messaging service Telegram crossed 500-million subscriber mark globally and added 25 million new users in the last few days as it gained ground amid the controversy over WhatsApp’s latest privacy policy update.
While Telegram did not specify India-specific user numbers, it said 38 per cent of the new users are from Asia, followed by Europe (27 per cent), Latin America (21 per cent) and MENA (Middle East and North Africa at 8 per cent). In a statement, Telegram said it surpassed 500 million monthly active users in the first week of January, and “has continued to grow with 25 million new users joining Telegram in the last 72 hours alone”. Reports citing Sensor Tower data indicated that Telegram had 1.5 million new downloads between January 6-10 in India.
India is the world’s second-largest telecom market and the biggest consumer of data. As on October 30, 2020, the total telephone connections stood at 117 crore, of which 115 crore were mobile connections.
A report by Ericsson had stated that Indians used about 12 GB data per month on an average in 2019, the highest consumption globally, and this is expected to rise even further to about 25 GB (gigabytes) per month by 2025.
In a recent blogpost, Telegram CEO and founder Pavel Durov said global user addition has seen a “significant increase” compared to last year when 1.5 million new users signed up every day, and that with its current growth rate, Telegram is on track to reach billions of users in the near future.