HashTag Trending – Canadians get more spammed calls; Microsoft releases fixed updates; Nvidia AI generates realistic faces

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Spam calls are on the rise in Canada; Microsoft releases Windows 10 October update again; Nvidia’s new AI generates crazy realistic faces.

If you feel like you’ve been bombarded by spam calls recently, you’re not alone. Trending on Reddit, Spam calls spiked over 300 per cent globally in 2018. The statistics came from Truecaller, a phone directory management company who compiled a report after examing 17.69 billion spam calls worldwide. The report named Canada as a country that has emerged to become one of the most spammed in the world. Truecaller says that spam calls spiked by 67 per cent in Canada year over year, accounting for over 69 perc ent of all calls. The types of calls range from scam callers to debt collectors.

Third time’s the charm, right? Nope. For Microsoft, it needs four. Trending on Google, after delaying it for two months due to technical issues, Microsoft has once again released its Windows 10 October 2018 Update. The feature update, which is supposed to bring a bevy of performance and UI enhancements, has been pulled thrice due to technical issues caused by file system mishaps and driver incompatibilities. While it’s marked as available to everyone, it will only download for if you manually check for it through the Windows update center. Hopefully, this time there won’t be any recalls.

Trending on Google again, Nvidia has generated a ton of ultra-realistic faces using a new generative adversarial networks algorithm. The new AI algorithm can piece together poses, features, even down to details like age and ethnicity. Although there are some obviously wrapped and exaggerated features plaguing some faces, many pictures are nearly indistinguishable from real portraits. It’s hard to do justice to the results, so be sure to watch Nvidia’s official videos on YouTube.

That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Do you enjoy Hashtag Trending? If so we’d love to hear from you so feel free to leave us a review. Thanks for listening!

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada
Tom Li
Tom Li
Telecommunication and consumer hardware are Tom's main beats at IT World Canada. He loves to talk about Canada's network infrastructure, semiconductor products, and of course, anything hot and new in the consumer technology space. You'll also occasionally see his name appended to articles on cloud, security, and SaaS-related news. If you're ever up for a lengthy discussion about the nuances of each of the above sectors or have an upcoming product that people will love, feel free to drop him a line at tli@itwc.ca.

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