Tech Roundup: iPhone Throttlegate, Not OK Google & More

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

• Google employees stage a walkout on Thursday (with support from Sundar Pichai) in protest of the recent sexual harassment revelations made by The New York Times last week; Richard DeVaul, co-founder of Alphabet's balloon-powered internet subsidiary Loon LLC, is fired from the company with no severance package after sexual misconduct allegations come to light.
• Snapchat partners with Hooked to debut a new longform sci-fi thriller story called Dark Matter told in the form of a series of texts; joins hands with 17 U.K. media brands like The Guardian to create new short, original shows of 3-7 minute duration as it seeks to further monetise the ephemeral messaging service with more ads.
• Apple investigating claims that student labour was used by Taiwanese supplier Quanta Computer to manufacture Apple Watches.
• Google takes a leaf out of Yahoo!'s playbook; throws minimalism out of the window by filling search home page (only on mobile devices for now) with news articles and sports scores.
• OnePlus announces OnePlus 6T with 6.41-inch AMOLED display, 3,700 mAh battery, dual cameras (16MP + 20MP), in-display fingerprint scanner, no headphone jack and no wireless charging support for US$ 549 (128GB).
• Indian government's telecom department once again tells internet service providers to ban 827 websites for hosting pornographic content, three years after trying to unsuccessfully block it.
• Google Pay launches in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, bringing the total number of supported countries to 25; updates Gmail for iOS with a unified inbox to view emails from multiple inboxes.
• Sony continues to benefit handsomely from revenues from PlayStation, financial services and semi-conductor units even as smartphone sales decline (blame it on a confusing strategy, not to mention those random names to the Xperia models).
• Waze brings support for Pandora, Deezer, and TuneIn (following Spotify last year) to let users control their music/podcast experience more seamlessly.
• Privacy-focussed messaging service Signal strips off sender metadata further by putting them inside the encrypted message as part of a new feature called Sealed Sender. 
• Amazon shaves off US$ 250 billion in market value eight weeks after hitting 1 trillion as fears of competition abound. (It took the company 18 years to hit $250 billion after going public in 1997.)
• Ride-hailing startup Uber introduces a new US$ 14.99 monthly subscription called Ride Pass (only in Los Angeles, Austin, Orlando, Denver, and Miami, US$ 24.99 if you are in LA) that allows riders to book discounted rides, saving them up to 15% on monthly travel.
• New WhatsApp chief, Chris Daniels, confirms the obvious; says ads are coming to Status (WhatsApp's take on Stories) as a "primary monetisation mode for the company as well as an opportunity for businesses to reach people on WhatsApp."
• Apple pulls watchOS 5.1 update hours after it was released following reports that it bricks some Series 4 watches; quietly confirms that last year's iPhone models (iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X) include performance throttling feature with iOS 12.1 update.
• Facebook's daily active users hit 1.49 billion (monthly at 2.27 billion), but sees zero growth in the U.S./Canada and loses a million monthly users during the period July-September and reports an average revenue per user of US$ 6.09 (US$ 27.61 per user in the U.S./Canada, US$ 8.82 in Europe, US$ 2.67 in Asia-Pacific, and US$ 1.82 for the rest); CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook will deprioritise News Feed in favour of private chat, video and Stories.
• Google beefs up sign in security; asks users not to disable JavaScript in their browsers to login to Google accounts.
• Movie streaming service Netflix slightly tweaks its business model to release its originals Roma, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Bird Box in theatres ahead of their streaming debut.
• SmugMug-owned photo-sharing service Flickr ends 1TB storage caps for free users; limits their uploads to 1,000 photos, but gives paid customers (US$ 49.99/year Flickr Pro) unlimited storage for photos and videos at full resolution and no ads, in addition to removing Yahoo! login.
• Google upgrades status of Project Fi and rebrands the cellular service as Google Fi complete with new logo; rolls out Chrome OS 70 with UI tweaks and floating keyboard.
• Music streaming service Spotify hits 87 million paid subscribers; begins aggressively promoting family accounts by partnering with Google to give account owners who signup on November 1 a free Google Home Mini.
• Apple sells 46.9 million iPhones, 9.7 million iPads and 5.3 million Macs between July and September bolstered further by price hikes even as revenue from services division (Apple Music, iCloud etc.) hits US$ 10 billion; market cap falls below US$ 1 trillion in early hours on Friday (but recovers to US$1.002T at day's close) after it announces that it will no longer report unit sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs going forward.
• Photo-sharing social platform Instagram gets a new update that allows users to share their IGTV videos to Instgram Stories.
• Travel and restaurant review service TripAdvisor partners with location-sharing network/enterprise location data platform Foursquare to help users serve contextually relevant, real-time information based on their location.