List of All Articles with Tag 'tech'

Instagram was restored online after experiencing global outages, the social media company said. Down Detector, a website that tracks outages, reported 56,628 reports at around 11pm on Sunday. The Down Detector location map showed the outages spread across the UK with reports of outages coming from the US and Australia as well. Instagram said at 1.19am on Monday that the issue which had caused the outage had been resolved. The photo and video networking service appeared to be online again before 1am with reports of the outages dropping to less than 500 by 1:.. According to Down Detector, 92% of the outages were on the app, 6% via the website and 2% on the login. Users could not refresh their feed or post during the outages. It came after Instagram experienced an outage on March 9 where thousands of users reported similar issues.

Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app owned by Meta Platforms Inc., appeared to suffer an outage Sunday evening in

Instagram is experiencing global outages with more than 50,000 users reporting issues from just before 11pm on Sunday night. Down Detector, a website that tracks outages, has had 56,628 reports at around 11pm. The Down Detector location map shows the outages are spread right across the UK with reports of the outages coming from the US and Australia as well. Instagram’s owners Meta have yet to publicly address the outage or say when the Instagram may come back online. According to Down Detector, 92% of the outages were on the app, 6% via the website and 2% on the login. Users cannot refresh their Instagram feed. Instagram had an outage on March 9 where thousands of users reported similar issues. Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live

Meta Platform Inc's Instagram is down for more than 98,000 users on Sunday, according to outage tracking website

The discovery of North America is synonymous with Christopher Columbus, but proof has been found confirming that the Vikings were there hundreds of years earlier. Columbus is said to have “discovered the New World" in 1492 CE, but new analysis has suggested that the Norse people in Greenland were using wood from North America centuries before. Research focused on timber used in Norse sites across Greenland which people lived in between 1000 and 1400. The findings show that some of the wood came from types of trees that were grown outside of Greenland. One was the Jack pine, which is found in Canada. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Archaeologist Lísabet Guðmundsdóttir from the University of Iceland studied the timber and put across his findings in the journal Antiquity. “These findings highlight the fact that Norse Greenlanders had the means, knowledge, and appropriate vessels to cross the Davis Strait to the east coast of North America, at least up until the 14th century,” the study says. “As such, journeys were being made from Greenland to North America throughout the entirety of the period of Norse settlement in Greenland, and resources were being acquired by the Norse from North America for far longer than previously thought.” It’s not the first time that it’s been suggested that Norse communities travelled to north America. Italian texts from the 14th century contain references to Vikings making contact with Markland, which is believed to be on the Labrador coast in Canada. The 13th-century Norwegian text called Konungsskuggsjá also referenced the fact that Greenland at the time wasn’t home to great abundances of natural resources, reading: “Everything that is needed to improve the land must be purchased abroad, both iron and all the timber used in building houses.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

China has stepped up a feud with Washington over security by telling users of computer equipment deemed sensitive to stop buying products from the biggest U.S. memory chipmaker, Micron Technology Inc. The country's cyberspace agency says Micron products have unspecified “serious network security risks” that threaten China’s information infrastructure and affect national security

BEIJING China's cyberspace regulator said on Sunday its review has found that US Micron Technology’s products have serious

Keri Williams wouldn't have her business without TikTok. She launched The Branded Pinto, her custom hat shop, about two years ago after a video she shared of one of her creations "blew up" on TikTok. Nearly all of her business still comes from the platform.

Chris Pantons is what you'd call a Google Pixel super fan. The Knoxville, Tennessee native loves the software, the camera, the virtual assistant, all of it. He even credits the phone's car crash detection tool with saving his life a few years ago when he was in an accident.

Artificial intelligence has unrealistic and often dangerous ideas of what the “perfect” man and woman look like, according to a new study. Chiselled features, olive skin and eight-pack abs are among the features that kept cropping up when three leading AI image generators were tasked with creating “ideal” male and female bodies. The challenge was put to the popular programmes Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney by eating disorder awareness group the Bulimia Project, which separated its request into two parts. First up, it asked the generators to come up with pictures of men and women based specifically on beauty standards set by social media. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Although it churned out quite a few different options, it showed a number of noticeable biases. Nearly all of the images featured petite women – with Midjourney named as the worst culprit – and all of the men looked like photoshopped versions of bodybuilders. The three AI favoured women with blonde hair and men with brown hair, and nearly half of the male images had facial hair. After analysing their findings based on social media, the Bulimia Project team broadened the scope of the task. This time, they asked the programmes to base their creations on images from across the internet. The main difference between the two categories was that the social media set was “far more sexually charged”, according to the study’s authors. The social media images also featured “largely disproportionate body parts”, which the Bulimia Project described as “unsettling”. “We can only assume that the reason AI came up with so many oddly shaped versions of the physiques it found on social media is that these platforms promote unrealistic body types, to begin with,” it said. “In the age of Instagram and Snapchat filters, no one can reasonably achieve the physical standards set by social media. So, why try to meet unrealistic ideals? It’s both mentally and physically healthier to keep body image expectations squarely in the realm of reality.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Are your grandparents up very early in the morning, without fail? Well, it turns out there are scientific reasons why older people wake up earlier as they get older. It’s been revealed that in later life, the natural process of ageing leads to changes in the times the body approaches sleep. According to HuffPost, our approach towards resting and amount of sleep we require is down to both genetics and our age. Cindy Lustig, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, said: “Like most of the things that change with age, there’s not just one reason, and they are all interconnected.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter It’s all to do with the brain becoming less responsive as people age to factors such as sunlight, social cues and physical activity which indicate where in the day we are at any given time. “The wiring of the brain is likely not sensing... and responding to the inputs as well as it should because it’s an ageing brain,” Dr. Sairam Parthasarathy, the director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences at the University of Arizona Health Sciences, also told the publication. “These are all what we call time givers, or they give time to the brain,” he said. In other words, they help the brain sense where it is in the 24-hour circadian cycle. Younger people can more easily connect indicators like eating dinner with the idea of sleeping in the next few hours. However, that’s not as easy for older people to register naturally, especially as their vision tends to suffer in later life. “Interestingly, one of [the reasons] seems to be that the vision changes that come with age reduce the intensity of the degree of light stimulation that our brain receives, which plays an important role in ‘setting’ our circadian clock and keeping it on track,” said Lustig. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Kantaro Komiya and Supantha Mukherjee TOKYO (Reuters) -Leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) nations on Saturday called for