Tech Roundup: Apple HomePod, YouTube Go Expansion & More

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

• Apple offsets slowing iPhone demand with higher cost margins, increased revenue from Services and improved sales of iPad and Apple Watch; Amazon continues to mint money from Amazon Web Services, Echo devices and its bets on physical retail stores even as Alphabet remains the indisputable leader in ad market (despite mounting traffic acquisition costs), with Facebook coming a close second, in addition to reporting its first-ever decline in daily active users in the U.S. and Canada by 700,000 in response to mounting criticism that the platform enabled foreign manipulation of U.S. Presidential elections, gave rise to fake news, and made people feel bad.
• U.K.'s Court of Appeal rules Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA), which is set to be replaced by Investigatory Powers Act, illegal citing its intrusive surveillance capabilities.
• Lyft says nearly 250,000 of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017; opens investigation into Uber-like allegation that it spied on its riders without explicit permission (via The Information).
• Twitter revises the number of users who engaged with Russian troll accounts during U.S. election campaign to 1.4 million, up from the initial 677,775 estimate.
• Facebook unveils plans to remove unwanted bloat from Messenger, as it hits 1.5 billion monthly active users on WhatsApp; brings support for scheduling posts (only business profiles), GIFs and text-only content in Instagram Stories, while adding new option to show when users were last active.
• Yahoo! to end support for Aviate Android homescreen launcher on March 8.
• Google releases data-friendly YouTube Go for Android in over 130 countries (with the exception of United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France and England).
• Zelle, U.S. banks' answer to mobile payment services like PayPal and Venmo, claims a total of $75 billion in peer-to-peer payments in 2017 through 247 million transactions, up from $55 billion the year before.
• Microsoft takes on Chromebooks with US$ 189 Windows 10 laptops for schools; addresses concerns that Windows 10 devices collect extensive telemetry data with new data collection viewer, adds app integrations and app store to Teams office communication software and makes it mandatory to upgrade to a Windows 10 device to be able to install upcoming new version of Office 2019.
• Popular social news aggregation platform Reddit adds support for two factor authentication.
• Snap Inc. lays off at least two dozen employees amid slowing user growth and engagement (all thanks to Instagram); to make Stories available on the web and opens a new Snap Store in Snapchat to "buy Snapchat stuff".

Bitcoin's wild ride over the last one year (Screengrab from Coinbase)

• Google tests a new crowdsourced tool to report and publish hyperlocal news stories called Bulletin, as Facebook unveils its latest News Feed algorithmic change that prioritises updates from trustworthy sources and local news over other events.
• Apple makes HomePod smart speaker officially available for purchase (US$ 349) after months of delay.
• Chinese handset maker Xiaomi emerges the top-selling smartphone brand in India with sales of 8.2 million smartphones. (Samsung comes second with shipments of about 7.2 million phones.)
• Amazon raises monthly Prime membership fees from US$ 10.99 to US$ 12.99 (yearly subscriptions will continue to cost US$ 99); experiments with its own QR code variant called SmileCodes (like Pinterest's Pincodes) and opens its first checkout-free grocery store Amazon Go in Seattle.
• Google's parent Alphabet launches a new cybersecurity offshoot called Chronicle to help organisations better fend attacks from hackers; tests new augmented reality features in Chrome, makes it possible to permanently mute websites that autoplay videos in latest Chrome 64 update, brings audiobooks to Play Store and announces July 2018 search algorithm update to favour fast loading websites in search results over slower ones.
• Music streaming service Spotify tests a new playlist-based music app called Stations (Australia only for now); launches Spotlight, a fresh multimedia take on podcasts.
• Vivo X20 Plus UD, the world's first phone with an in-display fingerprint sensor, will cost ~US$ 565 in China.
• Natural Cycles, a digital contraceptive app that became certified in the E.U. as a form of birth control, faces investigation after it gets blamed for causing 37 unwanted pregnancies.
• Researchers from Kaspersky Lab discover Skygofree Android malware with never-before-seen spying capabilities, relying on five different exploits to gain root access in order to take pictures, capture videos, and gain access to call records, text messages, geolocation data, calendar events and other information stored in the device.
• Facebook begins testing anti-spam measures on WhatsApp to check spread of fake news on the messaging platform; acquires biometric ID verification startup Confirm.io that offers an API to let companies verify if a user's government-issued identity card is authentic.
• Mozilla updates Firefox browser with support for Progressive Web Apps, FLAC playback and a host of other improvements; promises more privacy tweaks starting with Firefox 59.
• OnePlus says that up to 40,000 customers were affected by a security breach that caused the customers' credit card information to be stolen while they were purchasing OnePlus products on the website between mid-November 2017 and January 11, 2018; the company shuts down credit card payments for its online store as a result of an ongoing investigation.