Tech Roundup: Disney+ Streaming Service, Samsung's Foldable Smartphone & More

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

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield says the Ebola outbreak in conflict-ridden Congo is so serious that it can never be contained and instead will become a persistent presence.
• China's state-run Xinhua News Agency launches an artificial intelligence (AI) news anchor in partnership with Chinese search engine Sogou.com in what it claims to be a world first.
• Researchers discover new ways of browser history sniffing in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer, and Brave that takes advantage of the CSS properties (:visited and :link selectors) to see if a particular URL is in a user's browsing history.
• Cyber criminals turn to Amazon and Microsoft to impersonate a brand via email because of their ubiquity in enterprise environments in what appears to be growing threats categorised as business email compromise (BEC).
• Google responds to employees walking out in protest at the company's handling of sexual harassment by bringing about policy updates; limits drinking at work and threatens more serious action if things don't change.
• GCHQ, U.K.'s intelligence agency, opens its own Instagram account, more than two years after it launched on Twitter.
• Google-owned Android officially turns 11; to let users continue using Android apps while they are being updated in the background.
• Online dating service Tinder hits 4.1M paying users, with its parent Match's (which also owns Hinge, OkCupid and PlentyOfFish) total number of paid subscribers hitting 8.1 million.
• Facebook is granted a new patent that makes it possible for it to identify wireless signals from mobile devices of users to detect "physical" proximity and duration so as to suggest to new friends; begins rolling out Unsend feature in Messenger that lets users remove the message (or photo) within 10 minutes of sending it (compared to WhatsApp's 1 hour).
• Tencent, owner of China's extremely popular messaging service WeChat, says it has over 1 million mini programs (lightweight apps that can be installed and run inside the chat app instead of having to download them separately), making the WeChat app ecosystem half the size of Apple App Store, which recorded 2.1 million apps in April.
• Samsung finally shows off its much-anticipated dual-screen foldable smartphone; Google updates Android to support foldable displays even as the South Korean chaebol unveils a radically redesigned TouchWiz user interface called One UI with system-wide dark mode a la OnePlus. (C'mon Apple and Google, you can do this!)

Samsung's foldable smartphone (GIF: TechCrunch)

• Disney officially confirms its video streaming service launch; says Disney+ is coming late 2019, right around the time its contract with Netflix ends, and to double down on Hulu (which it has a 60 percent stake in post its buyout of 21st Century Fox early this year) by releasing more original content and expanding internationally in what appears to be an escalating war challenging Netflix's dominance.
• Facebook's dating service expands trials to Canada and Thailand, two months after launching in Colombia; starts shipping Messenger-based Portal video chat device (with built-in Alexa support but no YouTube) and assures users that "Facebook does not listen to, view or keep the contents of your Portal video calls, so this information cannot be used for advertising." 
• Microsoft-owned source code management and developer collaboration platform GitHub hits 100 million repositories.
• Dom Hofmann, founder of now-defunct video app Vine, teases a new looping video app called Byte; sets a release date for spring 2019.
• Chinese handset maker Xiaomi continues its push in European market with the opening of its first retail store in London following its launch in Spain, Italy and France.
• Nintendo Switch gaming console gets a native YouTube app.
• Google confirms the obvious; says dark mode is good for the phone's battery life. (No wonder then, the company has been busy adding a dark theme option to some of its apps of late!)
• Pinterest redesigns Following feed (a dedicated section to show users pins from users/brands they follow) by removing the tiles-like format in favour of Instagram-like single column of posts, in addition to showing account recommendations to follow.
• Facebook officially goes after 15-second video-recording/lip-syncing app TikTok (now that it’s done with Snapchat); quietly releases Lasso for Android and iOS as it tries to win over teens who are fleeing Facebook for other services like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.
• Amazon strikes a new deal with Apple to bring a more wide selection of Apple products on its website, including the newly launched iPad Pro, iPhone XS, iPhone XR, Apple Watch Series 4 and Beats headphones. (Only in marketplaces in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan and India)
• Google's Android chief Dave Burke confirms a fix for the super-laggy share UI on Android is on its way; says "we're working on a redesign with a different underlying data model that will be much faster and nicer to use."
• Apple announces a new display replacement program for the iPhone X to replace the phones' displays exhibiting touchscreen responsiveness issues due to a faulty display module component several months after the problem was initially reported. (Apple has not provided an option to check for affected serial numbers or a specific time period when such devices were shipped, meaning this display issue can affect any iPhone X device. Was this also why the iPhone X so quickly discontinued?)
• Google gets rid of Play Newsstand section in Play Store after its features were merged into Google News earlier this May; to ad-block an entire website in Chrome (version 71) starting next month if it shows abusive ads and doesn't clean up its act within 30 days of reporting.