Tech Roundup: Apple March 25 Event, World Wide Web Turns 30 & More

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

• The World Wide Web turns 30 years old; founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee says there are sources of dysfunction affecting today's web: deliberate, malicious intent, a platform that facilities perverse incentives where user value is sacrificed for clickbait and other ad-based revenue models, and polarisation of online discourse, and that "Governments must translate laws and regulations for the digital age. They must ensure markets remain competitive, innovative and open. And they have a responsibility to protect people's rights and freedoms online."
• U.K. government bans online pornography as part of Digital Economy Act, stoking privacy fears; mandates online users to hand over credit card details or scans of government-issued IDs while visiting porn websites and verify they are above 18.
• Russia blocks secure email service provider ProtonMail after the state Federal Security Service (erstwhile KGB) accused the company and several other email providers of facilitating bomb threats.
• WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton, who sold the company to Facebook in 2019 for US$ 19 billion and left the company in 2017 to start his own non-profit, calls on users to delete their Facebook accounts again in an interaction with students at Stanford University; says his motivation to sell the company was driven by naïveté, "idealistically thinking that he and Koum could keep doing things their way by introducing a way to diversify revenue," and that he tried in vain to push for "a service model, possibly by charging WhatsApp users a small fee to use the app ... to counter Facebook's traditional revenue driver: advertisements." (Facebook did away with US$ 1/year subscription fee post acquisition.)
• IBM reportedly took a million photos from Flickr to figure out how to reduce bias when training facial recognition algorithms, reports NBC News, adding dataset, called Diversity in Faces, was released without user consent.
• Facebook faces new criminal probe over data-sharing deals it arranged with handset manufacturers, reports The New York Times, adding federal prosecutors have subpoenaed records from "at least two" large companies. (The deals, most of which have been discontinued, brought native Facebook integration in their platforms like iOS, BlackBerry OS and Windows Mobile in exchange for letting platform providers gather data about the users necessary to make these functions work.)
• Google confirms that it agreed to pay two of its senior executives Andy Rubin and Amit Singhal a total of US$ 135 million, who were accused of sexual harassment, as part of their severance packages to quietly leave the company instead of outright firing them, a cover-up that prompted widespread walkouts among Alphabet employees last year. (Andy Rubin eventually received US$ 90 million, and Singhal, US$ 15 million, reduced from US$ 45 million after he joined rival Uber, from where he was fired for not disclosing the allegations.)
• Apple confirms March 25 event with a tagline "It's show time," suggested it's planning to unveil its long-rumoured TV/video streaming service, along with news subscription features in Apple News; also sets June 3-7 dates for its annual developers conference and reveal updates to iOS and macOS.
• Facebook undergoes a massive executive reshuffle a week after CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveils a new product direction and pivots to private messaging to compete with WeChat; Chris Cox, chief product officer and originally part of the News Feed team, and Chris Daniels, head of WhatsApp, to depart the company as work towards bringing Facebook's family of apps closer gains traction.
• YouTube Music, Google's new music streaming service that's set to replace Google Play Music (GPM), arrives in India weeks after Spotify debut; undercuts rivals with a price tag of Rs. 99/month, same as that of GPM (Spotify costs Rs. 119/month and Apple Music, Rs. 120/month and Amazon Music, Rs. 83.25/month, although it's part of the larger Rs. 999/year Amazon Prime bundle), for ad-free music and background listening, with YouTube Premium costing Rs. 129/month for all the above features plus access to YouTube originals and additional download capabilities. (YouTube Music/Premium is also now available in Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, South Africa, and Uruguay.)

YouTube Music lands in India a week after Spotify's debut

• Google shuts down Allo messaging app three years after launch as it pivots to RCS-based Messages, Google Voice (available only in selected countries), Duo and Hangouts Chat/Meet. (Let's not forget there is also a built-in messaging feature in YouTube!)
• Facebook's family of apps (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp) experience extended outage for more than 15 hours as a result of a "server configuration change", costing small advertisers thousands of dollars (who will see sponsored ad when the service is down?), even as users flock to rivals Twitter and chat app Telegram, which sees three million new signups for the service; CEO Pavel Durov takes a subtle dig at Facebook, stating "We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone."
• Mozilla officially debuts Firefox Send, a file transfer service that allows users to share large files across the web for a limited amount of time.
• Microsoft begins testing updates to Your Phone app for Windows 10 that lets Android users to mirror a phone screen directly to PCs.
• Google adds DuckDuckGo as a search engine option for Chrome web browser in over 60 counties, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Denmark, India, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, U.K., and U.S., as it attempts to quell antitrust concerns arising out of making Google search the default option.
• Apple acquires machine learning startup Laserlike, a Silicon Valley startup that develops an personalised interest-based search engine, delivering results relevant tailored to each user.
• Cloud storage service Dropbox removes unlimited device linking for free users; restricts to three devices for single account unless users upgrade to a paid plan.
• Google reportedly moving dozens of employees from its laptop and tablet hardware teams to other divisions within Google and Alphabet, according to Business Insider, citing "roadmap cutbacks."
• Facebook adds a new gaming tab in its home page to quickly access games, streams and other gaming-related content as it takes on rivals Twitch and YouTube; rival Snap reportedly launching a new gaming platform for Snapchat as early as next month, according to Cheddar, allowing developers to create games that reside within the ephemeral messaging app. (Probably a lot like Games in Facebook Messenger?)
• Social microblogging service Tumblr witness 30 percent drop in traffic after it banned sexually explicit content last December citing discovery of child pornography on the service. (Apple removed Tumblr's iOS app from App Store following the incident, leading to it taking down all NSFW content off the platform.)
• Facebook launches a proactive A.I. tool to detect revenge porn even before it's reported, as it continues to fine-tune the platform to get rid of abusive content.
• Google brings Google Translate support to its iOS version of Gboard keyboard, making translations possible without having to visit an external app. (Android has had this feature since 2017.)
• Twitter said to be working new feature that allows users to subscribe to specific threads so as to be notified of new replies in a discussion.
• Tinder announces it has tweaked its algorithm to stop ranking people by desirability/ attractiveness (the more the people swiped right a person's profile, the higher their assigned score went up); says the "current system adjusts the potential matches you see each and every time your profile is Liked or Noped, and any changes to the order of your potential matches are reflected within 24 hours or so."