Tech Roundup: Facebook News Plans, Samsung Galaxy Note 10 & More

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

1. AI-powered news aggregation app SmartNews hits 20 million monthly active users in the U.S. and Japan; boasts of nearly 400 U.S. publishing partners including The Associated Press and Bloomberg, in addition to competing with the likes of Apple News, Flipboard, and News360.
2. IBM warns cyberattacks against industrial targets have doubled in the last six months, with at least 12,000 workstations damaged on average when an enterprise is hit.
3. Google to shut down its Trips app for mobile; to incorporate many of the features into its Travel site, Maps app, and Search.
4. Amazon's practice of making items harder to find in its marketplace if they're priced lower on rival ecommerce platforms — thereby influencing sellers — set to draw scrutiny; merchants most often opt to raise the price on the rival site rather than risk losing sales on Amazon, according to a Bloomberg report.
5. Short-term home rental platform Airbnb acquires Urbandoor, a platform that offers extended stays to corporate clients, for an undisclosed amount, as it attempts to grow its enterprise footprint. (Airbnb already has acquired HotelTonight, and has a stake in India's OYO — a startup that manages budget hotels and other stays.)
6. Walmart-owned Flipkart revamps its shopping app by adding a video streaming service, Hindi language support, and an audio-visual assistant for first time internet users in an attempt to challenge Amazon Prime and Netflix in India.
7. Facebook sues two Asian Android app developers — Hong Kong-based LionMobi and Singapore-based JediMobi — accusing them of generating fake clicks on Facebook ads via apps available in Google Play.
8. Disney's hotly anticipated streaming service Disney+ to have a US$ 12.99 bundle that includes ad-supported Hulu and ESPN+ when it launches on November 12. (HBO Max streaming platform is rumoured to cost US$ 16-US$ 17 a month, and while Disney's bundle may or may not cause many people to switch from Netflix to Disney, it could limit Netflix's ability to raise prices.)
9. Apple reportedly making changes to iOS PushKit API for internet voice calls, limiting what apps like WhatsApp can do in the background, according to The Information.
10. 24-year-old Chinese rapper Li Jingze cuts his finger off during a livestream to prove his innocence in a sex scandal, highlighting the dangers of an unregulated live-streaming industry in the country.
11. Samsung, Huawei, and Oppo emerge the top three smartphone manufacturers, as shipments continue to decline; Apple drops to fourth spot in the face of weak iPhone sales.
12. Twitter says it may have shared users' data with its ad partners without user consent due to two ad targeting-related bugs that it claims were fixed on August 5.
13. Instagram bans "preferred marketing partner" HYP3R, after it's found scraping millions of posts per month, including Stories, and tracked users' locations; Irish Data Protection Commission says it is "working to establish" whether EU citizens have been affected by the data scraping.
14. Samsung debuts the Galaxy Note10 (6.3" screen, wide angle and telephoto rear cameras, Snapdragon 855, with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage for US$ 949), Galaxy Note10+ (6.8" display, all-screen design, Snapdragon 855, with 12GB of RAM, 256GB or 512GB storage, for US$ 1,100+) and Galaxy Book S (US$ 999 ultra-thin 13" Windows 10 laptop with LTE, a Snapdragon 8cx chipset, and a claimed 23 hour battery life, coming September); Note 10 loses its 3.5mm headphone jack to increase battery size by 2-3 percent and to improve haptic feedback, updates DeX feature for a desktop-like computing mode for its smartphones and has been expanded to work with Windows and macOS PCs, and partners with Microsoft to bundle the company's Outlook, Your Phone apps with Note10 and integrate OneDrive into Samsung's Gallery app to sync photos.
15. Facebook is reportedly rebuilding Instagram's messaging feature using Messenger tech, with Instagram's team reporting to Messenger, as the product barriers crumble.
16. Microsoft becomes the latest company to admit its contractors are listening to some Skype calls made using the app's translation service (which launched back in 2015), including intimate conversations and discussing relationship issues as well as other personal topics like weight loss; says the voice data is used "to provide and improve voice-enabled services like search, voice commands, dictation or translation services."
17. Apple faces new antitrust investigation in Russia following a complaint from cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab for abusing its dominant market position for rejecting Kaspersky Lab's Safe Kids parental control application owing to security risks.
18. Facebook once again gets back to news; to offer millions of dollars to news outlets to license their content for a dedicated news section that the company hopes to launch later this year.
19. Chipmaker Broadcom acquires Symantec's enterprise business for US$ 10.7B in cash.
20. Ride hailing firm Uber is mulling to experiment with its bus service in India to promote mass transit for value conscious riders, months after rolling out in Cairo and Latin America; imposes hiring freeze on engineering teams in the U.S. and Canada, canceling scheduled interviews with job applicants this week, as it reports record US$ 5.4 billion in operating losses in the second quarter for the period April to June.
21. Beleaguered Chinese handset maker Huawei — which has been caught in the cross hairs of US-China trade war — announces HarmonyOS, its own home-grown Android alternative, months after trademarking the name in the E.U.
22. Google begins officially rolling out ads in Discover feed (aka Google Feed) on Android phones; the so-called Discovery and Gallery ads to show up also in YouTube, Google Images, and the Promotions and Social tabs of Gmail.
23. Commission free stock trading fintech startup Robinhood gets approval to launch its service in U.K. (the app is said to have 6 million users), weeks after British rival Revolut begins offering investing services in the country.
24. Facebook quietly changes the slogan on the signup section of its homepage in the U.S. and Europe; tagline changes from "It's free and always will be" to be "It's quick and easy," implying that the service is actually not free, as users are paying with their data.