Amazon is trying its best to ban unscrupulous listings that capitalize on the coronavirus outbreak, Twitter is testing tweets that only lasts a day, and HP and AMD are working together to build the world’s fastest supercomputer.
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Thank you for tuning into Hashtag Trending, it’s Thursday, March 5th, and I’m your host, Alex Coop.
Amazon is continuing to curb unscrupulous sellers on its web store by removing price gougers and fake products. According to ABC News and trending on Reddit, Amazon has removed tens of thousands of sellers who inflated products due to demand, as well as over one million products that have false health claims. After the outbreak, prices of household sanitary products like masks and hand sanitizers surged to incredible prices. Wired reported that in one instance, the cost of face masks rose to five times what it was before. Many other sellers falsely claimed that their products can the coronavirus, and some even sold counterfeit masks. Needless to say, they’re all against Amazon’s selling policies.
Twitter is testing tweets that only last 24 hours. Trending on Bing, the new feature will be called fleets and will initially be localized in Brazil. Because they’re transient, fleets won’t be re-tweetable or have a like counter. People can still respond to the tweet, but only the original poster would be able to see them. These safeguards mean that they’re less authoritative than a regular tweet. This feature is still in its infancy, so don’t expect them to come to us anytime soon.
Trending on Google, HP Enterprise and AMD are working together to create the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Named El Capitan, the new supercomputer will be used to model nuclear tests. El Capitan will use AMD’s unreleased Genoa CPU and four AMD GPUs for AI acceleration. The project would be completed in 2023, and once it does, AMD says El Capitan will be able to perform two exaflops, or two exa floating-point operations per second. In its press release, AMD claims that El Capitan would be faster than today’s top 200 supercomputers combined.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. I’m Alex Coop, thanks for listening.