Tech Roundup: RIP AOL Instant Messenger, RIP Windows Phone & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

Google adds 'About' and 'Store' links to top left of homepage

• Anthony Levandowski, ex-Googler who was fired from Uber over allegations of trade secret theft during his tenure at Google, founds a new religious organisation called Way of the Future, whose purpose is to "develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence."
• Australian investigators deliver their final report on the disappearance of Malaysia airlines flight MH370; say the inability to bring closure for victims' families was a "great tragedy" and "almost inconceivable" in the modern age.
• Walmart acquires New York-based logistics firm Parcel as it escalates its retail war with Amazon for same-day deliveries on online purchases.
• Verizon, which owns AOL, plans to shut down AOL Instant Messenger, one of the first mass-market instant messaging services to grace the Internet, after 20 years on December 15, 2017. (Related read: Regulate Facebook like AIM)
• Google pulls YouTube support for Amazon Echo Show; says "Amazon's implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show violates our terms of service, creating a broken user experience."
• Yahoo! says every single user account that existed as of August 2013 was compromised in the massive data breach that year, tripling the estimate of breached accounts to 3 billion.
• Amazon Alexa and Echo expands to Indian market (but by invitation only for now); to land in Japan later this year.
• DeepMind, U.K.-based AI company acquired by Google in 2014, launches a new ethics unit to conduct research across six "key themes" — including privacy, transparency and fairness, economic impact, governance and accountability, managing AI risk, AI morality and values.
• European Commission takes Ireland to court for failing to recover back taxes from Apple; the European Union orders Luxembourg to recoup around US$ 295 million in back taxes from Amazon, following a three-year investigation into a special tax deal that dates back to 2006.
• Microsoft's Edge browser arrives on Android and iOS as beta; revamps Arrow home screen launcher for Android as Microsoft Launcher.
• Snapchat sees nearly 40% growth in Stories engagement since launching Snap Maps, according to a new report from Axios.
• Google unveils Search for Health, making use of search-based health data to develop visualisations to show how health-related internet searches map to the actual spread of diseases like cancer, depression, diabetes and more; launches a new browser experiment to called Teachable Machine to help understand the basics of machine learning by using your webcam to train a very basic AI program.
• Ride hailing startup Uber to remove Apple-granted unprecedented API access from its iOS app after it was discovered it could be used to record a user's screen.
• Facebook releases a dedicated WhatsApp app for business (Android only); tests explaining media sources, with information about the publisher, as it attempts to fight fake news (aka computational propaganda) on the platform.
• YouTube changes its search algorithms to display more reliable and trustworthy sources after the deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas on October 1 saw a spike in misinformation and hateful content appear on the site, reports The Wall Street Journal (paywall).
• Google becomes the latest company after Facebook and Twitter to uncover Russian-bought ads on YouTube, Gmail and other platforms during the 2016 U.S. presidential election season, reports The Washington Post.
• Microsoft officially declares Windows Phone platform dead; says it will "continue to support the platform (in terms of) bug fixes, security updates, etc. But building new features aren't the focus."