Tech Roundup: Alexa Everywhere, Yahoo! Redesign & More

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

• Hackers with suspected Chinese links targeted Airbus, Rolls-Royce, and French tech firm Expleo over the past year in search of commercial secrets, reports AFP.
• The intricate mobile cyberespionage campaign targeting the Uyghur Muslim minority in China using compromised websites to infect targets with Android and iOS malware was also directed at senior members of Tibetan groups, according to new research; the details — disclosed by University of Toronto's Citizen Lab and TechCrunch — reveal that the targets were sent specifically tailored malicious web links over WhatsApp, which, when opened, exploited browser vulnerabilities on iOS and Android devices to install spyware, and surreptitiously steal private and sensitive information.
• Malaysia Competition Commission steps up its anti-monopoly probe into ride-hailing startup Grab following multiple complaints from last year accusing the company of monopolistic practices after it bought Uber's Southeast Asian operations; Indonesian ride-hailing and payments rival Gojek enters streaming fray with GoPlay video on-demand platform with exclusive access to a library of original movies and TV shows, as the firm makes a big push into online content in Southeast Asia's largest economy.
• India's Department of Telecom directs all handset manufacturers to submit IMEI numbers of their customers within the next two months to its Central Equipment Identity Register (CEIR), a centralised database of IMEI numbers of all mobile devices in the country which was launched earlier this year for security purposes.
• TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network owned by ByteDance, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong, giving an insight into China's censorship machine; revelations come amid rising suspicion that discussion of the Hong Kong protests on TikTok is being censored for political reasons after a Washington Post report earlier this month noted that a search on the site for the city-state revealed "barely a hint of unrest in sight."
• Facebook to acquire CTRL-Labs, which develops non-invasive neural interfaces for computing, like a bracelet,for a deal worth between US$ 500 million and US$ 1 billion.
• Kik to officially discontinue its messaging app and will reduce its headcount to 19 people in an attempt to focus on its Kin cryptocurrency amid a heated battle with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission investigates over its potentially illegal US$ 98 million initial coin offering (ICO) in late 2017. (The SEC maintains that Kin be classified as a security, but Kik is of the opinion that there is not one party with control over the cryptocurrency and that it is not a cause for financial speculation. Kin is already the third most used cryptocurrency in terms of transactions made on the network. Then there are the child abuse concerns. Kik became notorious as a destination for child exploitation. As reported by "48 Hours", 13-year-old Nicole Lovell was murdered in 2016 by a man she met over the app. The chat tool was also linked to more than 1,000 child sexual abuse cases in the U.K., according to a BBC investigation.)
• Google unveils Play Pass subscription for US$ 4.99/month (US$ 2 a month for the first year) in the U.S. with access to over 350 unlocked Android apps and games that are free of ads and micro transactions like in-app purchases; to preinstall YouTube Music on all new Android 9 and Android 10 devices, replacing Google PlayMusic.

• Google tightens privacy controls over Google Assistant voice assistant after it was found that the smart speakers get a very human intelligence boost from contractors who transcribe and review customer audio snippets without their permission; says it doesn't retain Assistant audio recordings by default and it is increasing privacy protections during the human transcription process and that it would "delete the vast majority of audio data associated with your account that's older than a few months" for users who choose to opt-in.
• Apple has since issued an apology and rolled out plans for an opt-out, Amazon has made it easier for users to understand how their data might be used and control whether or not it is eligible for review at all, and Facebook, for its part, also confirmed it was collecting Portal audio clips, some of which were transcribed by human contractors alongside voice messages sent via Messenger app, but says the second-generation Portal devices will offer an opt-out option.
• Snapchat reportedly kept a dossier of Facebook's hardball tactics and anti-competitive moves in an internal document called 'Project Voldemort'; accuses Facebook of undermining Snap's business by blatantly copying its Stories format, preventing users from linking to Snapchat profiles, blocking searches to #snapchat hashtag, and even threatening influencers that they will lose their verified status if they continue to share Snapchat content on their Instagram feeds.
• Facebook — the Silicon Valley heavyweight known for squashing rivals, co-opting their best ideas or buying them outright to cement its dominance of social media — twice tried to acquire Snapchat and was twice rejected. In 2013, Snap turned down a US$ 3 billion takeover offer, and in 2016, Facebook reportedly once again made overtures to the firm, which instead went forward with an IPO early in 2017. The repeated snubs prompted Facebook to aggressively clone many of Snapchat's most popular features, rolling out Instagram Stories in August 2016 followed by Facebook Stories in March 2017.
• Facebook is already under the U.S. FTC scrutiny for its monopolistic practices, including the acquisition of would-be rivals and its use of Onavo tech to gather usage data for Snapchat. Between that and the Justice Department's sweeping review of tech competition, Project Voldemort could prove to be a major thorn in Facebook's flesh.
• If anything, consumer attitudes towards big tech have been changing in recent years. While Facebook — whose business model hinges on knowing as much about its users as possible — is routinely demonised, social media tech platforms in general have been criticised toxic swamps full of trolls, liars and bots. What's more, the techlash has forced companies to rethink their approaches when it comes to handling user information.
• In 2017, Tristan Harris began leading a consumer movement accusing Google, Facebook and others of creating a "digital attention crisis" by "hijacking our minds." Within a few months of Harris' work gaining attention, Google, Facebook, and Apple had all introduced robust digital wellbeing features into their services.
• Then in 2018, the Cambridge Analytica data scandal went supernova. It caught Facebook by surprise, in large part because the basic facts of the case had been public for years. What turned it into crisis was global consumer outrage — outrage that has contributed to dramatic changes in Facebook's product roadmap, most notably this year's pivot to privacy. One simply can't understand Cambridge Analytica as anything other than a groundswell of consumers suddenly awakened to the ways, both real and imagined, that social media can manipulate their behaviour.
• Security researcher Axi0mX publishes new iOS exploit could lead to a permanent, unblockable jailbreak on hundreds of millions of iPhones, resulting in major implications for iOS device security; dubbed "checkm8," the exploit — affecting every Apple device with an A5 through A11 chipset, meaning every iPhone model from 4S to X — hinges on a bootrom vulnerability that could give hackers deep access to iOS devices on a level that Apple would be unable to block or patch out with a future software update.
• Since it concerns a memory in the processor that contains the fundamental code that runs first when a device powers on, even if an older device is running the recently released iOS 13, it's still affected because the chip inside it is vulnerable. But it's also worth noting this exploit works only in memory, so the changes (or the malicious code injected) don't persist after reboot. Before checkm8, the most recent known bootrom exploit for an iOS device was for the 2010 iPhone 4.
• What's more, the exploit doesn't present much of a security risk, since an attacker would need physical access to a device and because the changes will be wiped out as soon as a compromised device is rebooted. Additionally, the exploit still won't grant access to data protected by Apple's Secure Enclave unless an attacker already has a device's PIN or Touch ID.
• iOS app developer Riley Testut releases AltStore, an alternative App Store for the iOS platform that can used to distribute software without having to jailbreak the devices.
• Verizon-owned Yahoo! gets a major design overhaul in six years, complete with a new logo and a redesigned email app (Yahoo! Major acquisitions Tumblr and Flickr have since been sold to WordPress-owner Automattic and SmugMug respectively, while Yahoo! Mail suffered a catastrophic breach of all 3 billion of its users in 2013, not to mention it was caught scanning users' emails for data to sell to advertisers as recently as August 2018.)
• Digital marketplaces feature products (video games, songs, search results, apps, consumer goods etc.) that they think will increase their overall value, according to a new study, with the machinations having the ability to make or break products and tilting the playing field in favour of what benefits the platform most. (This is no different from what happens in a brick and mortar store, but just goes on to show that what shows up on a platform is what's best for the platform, not necessarily its customers.)

• Google will not have to apply right-to-be-forgotten globally after the E.U. Court of Justice sides with the tech giant over France data protection agency CNIL's order to delete links to personal information on request across the world if they lead to websites that contain out of date or false information that could unfairly harm a person's reputation. (Since 2016 the company has used so-called "geoblocking" to filter all Google site results to Europeans so they won't see information a person in their country wants to limit.)
• WeWork CEO Adam Neumann steps down from his role weeks after the embattled shared office space business delayed its IPO amid concerns about its corporate governance and valuation; Vice Chairman Sebastian Gunningham, a former Amazon executive, and CFO Artie Minson, formerly of AOL and Time Warner Cable, will take over as co-CEOs. (On a side note, did you know that WeWork has acquired 21 startups in the last four years, including Meetup, SpaceIQ, a college messaging service called Islands Media, and a real estate investing app named Waltz?)
• Amazon pilots Amazon Care in Seattle, a virtual primary care clinic with an option for nurses to visit employees in the home and help Amazon employees get fast access to healthcare without an appointment.
• Microsoft opens registrations for public preview of its cloud game streaming service Project xCloud; arrives next month in the U.S., the U.K., and Korea, starting with Android devices.
• Tinder launches first interactive series called Swipe Night, a four-episode choose-your-own-adventure series that lets users swipe right or left to advance through different twists and turns in the show to unlock potential matches in the app.
• Facebook shutters stories in Groups merely nine months after launch. (Stories has become one of the most used features on Facebook's digital properties, with over 500 million daily users each across Facebook + Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. In contrast, Snapchat — the app that first introduced a stories feature — only has about 190 million daily active users.)
• Microsoft says Windows 10 is running on more than 900 million devices, up from 700 million last September and 800 million earlier this March; includes standard Windows 10 desktops and laptops, as well as the Xbox and niche devices like the Surface Hub and Microsoft’s HoloLens.
• Google releases a dataset of ~3,000 deepfake videos with the help of consenting actors to help researchers develop deepfake detection techniques, weeks after Facebook created a library of deepfake videos in order to train and improve tools to combat the threat of such videos plaguing the platforms.
• Google to stop including snippets of news stories in France from E.U. publishers, saying it will not pay European news publishers for the right to show their content on Google News, which will be mandatory under the E.U.'s new copyright directive that will come into effect next month; will only show headlines and thumbnails, unless publishers ask to add previews.
• Alibaba unveils its first AI inference chip, the Hanguang 800 that it says makes performing machine learning tasks dramatically faster and more energy-efficient; currently being used to power features on its e-commerce sites, including product search, translation and personalised recommendations, with availability for Alibaba Cloud customers coming later. (Alibaba says it usually takes Taobao an hour to categorise the one billion product images that are uploaded to the e-commerce platform each day by merchants and prepare them for search and personalised recommendations, but with Hanguang 800, Taobao was able to complete the task in only five minutes.)
• Google to shut down hyperlocal news app Bulletin it launched in early 2018; to launch Android 10 (Go edition), aimed at low-end devices with less than 1.5GB RAM, this fall with speed and security improvements.
• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sues Match Group (which owns Tinder, OkCupid, and others), alleging Match.com connected daters with accounts known to be fake to get them to subscribe, leading to 499,691 new subscriptions.
• Web hosting services provider Cloudflare launches Warp VPN for iOS and Android for optimising and securing traffic, with a faster tier available for US$ 5/month.
• Boston Dynamics begins selling its four-legged Spot robot for companies that can put it to practical use and develop custom modules that can be attached to its back to help perform specific tasks.
• Facebook officially confirms plans for an augmented reality glasses; says it's already building a massive "Real World Index" system to collect photo scans of indoor and outdoor spaces and associated metadata.
• China's ByteDance reportedly in talks to sell its overseas news app TopBuzz as it tries to do away with products that are underperforming in order to focus on its popular app TikTok.
• Refurbished Samsung smartphones running /e/ operating system, a Google-free, pro-privacy fork of LineageOS, officially goes on sale in Europe.
• Samsung Electronics to provide offer quick and easy loans to all prospective smartphone customers in a bid to boost smartphone sales in India where it faces fierce competition from rivals such as China's Xiaomi.

• Amazon frees Alexa from its typical hardware confines and makes it available on the go as a wearable voice assistant; unleashes a dizzying ensemble of Echo-fitted products — including earbuds, eyeglass frames, finger rings, smart speakers called Echo Flex that attach to a wall outlet, multicolour smart lamps, microwaves, aside from smart speakers and displays — a new wireless mesh network system called Amazon Sidewalk for linking connected devices at long range (Amazon also unveiled Ring Fetch, a dog tracker that uses the Sidewalk protocol), and says its working on its own facial recognition regulations to prevent abuse of the technology.
• Amazon, which is constantly looking for new ways to insert Alexa, is now more than a trojan horse, and has become a common thread tying together its entire smart home lineup. It's no longer a simple third-party app on Google and Apple's operating systems. It's no longer just confined to kitchens and living rooms. It wants to be everywhere, be the wearable that people will put in their ears, over their eyes, and on their fingers — a paradigm called ambient computing — tracking, listening to them every place they go.
• This kind of connective tissue, a deep-rooted integration, is what sets it miles apart from its rivals Google and Apple, both of whose voice assistants are the defaults on Android and iOS, giving the companies immediate access to billions of devices.
• Amazon, which found itself in an awkward spot without a 'smartphone' vector to keep drawing users to Alexa, effectively had to create a new product category that we didn't know we wanted until Echo came along and upended the smart home market forever. With Amazon's own phones and tablet ambitions coming to a grinding halt, the Loop, Frames and Buds all represent its most aggressive attempts yet.
• The menagerie of affordable smart devices not only join the growing cadre of first- and third-party products that tap into Alexa, but also extend Alexa's ever-increasing reach through an all-encompassing exclusive IoT network — a walled garden of tiny proprietary computers with locked-down ecosystems for our kitchens and homes — that makes it easy for developers to create new Alexa Skills and plug into more devices, at the same time strategically penetrating the market in India.
• Amazon may have gotten its fingers burnt with the Fire phone and tablets, but its latest product extravaganza attempts to fill the missing product gaps, while making Alexa the linchpin of its ecosystem play. What's more, using Alexa on smartphones may never be as good as Google Assistant or Siri, but if putting it on a pair of headphones would entice users into summoning the voice assistant to get things done without having to pull the phone out of their pockets, that's a win for Amazon.
• The big question will be whether these products can either offer enough value on their own to justify their continued use as Alexa catches up to out-of-home use cases from a software perspective. And most importantly if its new Alexa wearables and big partnerships can convince consumers that Alexa isn't just for the living room and it can play a role in all your daily tasks.
• As a home increasingly becomes a personalised environment where technology responds to your every need, it's also likely to be the place where the next privacy battle will be waged, with companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook trying to stake a claim to all the data generated within it. Because let's face it: data collection is the plumbing of the modern web, and voice assistants are but one of millions of pipes.
• The more voice-activated computer assistants morph from standalone pieces of technology that sit on our tables or counters into software built into nearly every essential gadget in our homes, the more the trade-offs we need to make in the name of convenience, underscoring the myriad ways personal data could someday be exploited, all the while giving an illusion of seamless integration.
• But make no mistake. Amazon's plans for Alexa is to corner every room, whether it's the kitchen, living room or your child's bedroom. As they say, one more room means one more customer. And just as Google became eponymous with search, Facebook with social media and iPad with tablet, it wouldn't be a surprise if Alexa soon became eponymous with "virtual assistant."
• DoorDash confirms a data breach on May 4 affecting 4.9 million customers, contract drivers, and merchants, with profile information, last-four digits of payment cards, and driver's license data stolen.
• Facebook begins a limited test to hide the public display of numbers of Likes, Reactions, and video views, starting with Australia; says it will "gather feedback to understand whether this change will improve people's experiences" without bringing down user engagement.
• Uber overhauls its app to become "the OS for everyday life," merging ride-hailing and food delivery, boosting alternate modes of travel such as public transit, as rival Lyft tweaks its app to make it easier for customers to switch between different modes of transportation, and adds new safety features, including the ability to request a unique four-digit PIN number to make sure riders are getting in the car they ordered, a new button to report safety concerns while driving, and a "text to 911" option if the situation escalates; announces Uber Incubator to let its employees and others develop products and services on top of the Uber platform.
• OnePlus unveils 7T smartphone with a 6.55" 90Hz display, Snapdragon 855 Plus, in-screen fingerprint sensor, and a new super macro photo mode for US$ 599; to ship with new AI-powered feature smart SMS feature that automatically groups messages together by different categories, like promotions, OTP, transactions etc.
• Amazon-owned live game streaming platform Twitch gets a redesign ahead of this year's Twitchcon in North America, bringing a new logo, new purple colour, and new font (called Roobert) to the streaming site’s branding.
• Microsoft rolls out new feature that allows users to control Xbox One via Google Assistant; to work with any Assistant-enabled device, including iOS and Android phones.
• Vimeo, the popular ad-free video platform, faces fresh lawsuit in the U.S. alleging it stored people's facial biometrics without their consent or knowledge; lawsuit alleges the company's Magisto short-form video editing app of collecting and storing thousands of "face templates" from videos uploaded by users.