Tech Roundup: Apple's China Play, Smart TV Tracking & More

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

1. Apple removes Taiwan flag from the emoji keyboard of users that have their iOS region set to Hong Kong or Macau; takes down HKmap.live maps app merely days after approving it, once again highlighting the complicated relationship that Apple has with China, as Google suspends Google has suspended role-playing app associated with the Hong Kong protests called The Revolution of Our Times due to a policy that prohibits developers capitalising on ongoing conflicts.
2. Facebook's Libra coalition begins to fall apart as eBay, Mercado Pago, Stripe, Visa and Mastercard exit the association a week after PayPal, as regulatory requirements dealing with fraud, money laundering and sanctions enforcement loom large; David Marcus, former PayPal executive who leads the blockchain project, tweets "Change of this magnitude is hard. You know you're on to something when so much pressure builds up."
3. New study from Princeton University and University of Chicago unearths trackers on 69 percent of Roku channels and 89 percent of Amazon Fire channels that leverages automatic content recognition, device serial number, Wi-Fi network, TV's IP address and advertising ID as a unique fingerprint to target ads; comes close on the heels of a similar research from Northeastern University and Imperial College London that found smart TVs to be leaking sensitive user data to companies including Netflix (whether or not the user had a Netflix account), Microsoft, Spotify, Google and Facebook even when some devices are idle.
• The study, once again, highlights the implicit barter that most netizens have blindly agreed to — data is a major reason why most IoT and smart home products are so cheap; their privacy policies and terms of service give companies a 'legal' free hand in collecting personal information and viewing habits in exchange for a free service, with users accepting it as the cost of admission to managing their online lives, either consciously or otherwise via "dark pattern" designs that make them choose things that aren't in their best interest.
4. Adobe shuts down service in Venezuela in order to comply with US executive order 13884 issued in August that prohibits trade with the country; informs users that their accounts would be deactivated after October 28, urging them to download any content stored in their accounts.
5. The Chinese regime announces new rule (effective December 1) which requires residents to pass a facial recognition test in order to apply for an internet connection via smartphone or computer and mandates that no cell phone or landline number can be transferred to another person privately; Xuexi Qiangguo, a propaganda app developed by China's Communist Party, takes citizen surveillance to the next level, enabling authorities to retrieve messages, photos, contacts, and even record audio via a backdoor, according to a new report from The Washington Post.
6. "Dozens" of Amazon employees based in Romania and India are tasked with reviewing footage collected by Cloud Cams — the e-commerce giant's app-controlled, Alexa-compatible indoor security devices — to help improve AI functionality and better determine potential threats; the human workers found to be responsible for reviewing and annotating roughly 150 security snippets of up to 30 seconds in length each day that they worked, according to Bloomberg.
7. Office-rental company WeWork reportedly needs to raise cash by "no later than the end of November," as it struggles to cut costs and recover from a bad turn of events, including the ouster of its CEO Adam Neumann, the withdrawal of its IPO, putting Neumann's private jet and its three of side businesses that handle office cleaning services (Managed by Q), group meetups (Meetup) and marketing services (Conductor) up for sale, and announced plans to shut down early education school WeGrow later this year and lay off hundreds to thousands of workers.
8. Google to mandate new devices launching with Android 9 or later to come with a wellness app and parental controls, either Google's own apps or third-party ones, and support for USB-C PD chargers to enable fast charging.
9. Russia's Google, Yandex, unveils Yandex.Station Mini to compete with Amazon Echo Dot and Google Home Mini, more than a year after launching Yandex.Station for US$ 61.
10. Amazon launches US$ 110 Kindle Kids Edition, a repurposing of the standard Kindle for children, with a choice of four cases, one year free FreeTime Unlimited movie subscription, and features like achievement badges as they make progress toward pre-defined goals.
11. Instagram to remove Activity feed's Following tab, which showed users what their friends were liking; says the feature wasn't used frequently and that the company suspected many users didn't know it existed.
12. Apple officially releases macOS Catalina with new apps Find My and Screen Time, as well as Music, TV, and Podcast apps to replace iTunes; patches zero-day vulnerability in iTunes for Windows that was exploited by attackers to deliver BitPaymer/iEncrypt ransomware.
13. Apple reportedly in early discussions with record labels about bundling Apple Music and Apple TV+ as part of a "super-bundle of media content" for a discounted monthly rate, according to a report from The Financial Times.
14. Microsoft expands Airband, its U.S. rural broadband initiative, to Latin America and Africa; aims to bring the internet to 40 million people globally by 2022.
15. Opera Software releases Opera 64 with support for native tracking protection that will make it harder for advertisers and others to track users while browsing the web.
16. Google's makes Grasshopper, its learn-to-code mobile app for beginners, available on the desktop in the form of a web-based app; unveils a stream transfer feature that lets users move ongoing music and video streams between devices, coming first to Chromecast, Google Home, and Nest.
17. Twitter says it unintentionally used some email addresses and phone numbers provided for account security purposes for ad targeting.
• It's not entirely surprising that Twitter used the phone numbers users provided for purposes of account security was used to target ads. This isn't the first time that a social network has taken information explicitly meant for one thing, and then quietly or accidentally use it for something else entirely. Facebook did something similar with phone numbers provided by users for two-factor authentication, as the company confirmed last year.
• What's surprising is that we still expect big corporations to put privacy before profit. The lapse, if anything, proves that it's time to sunset phone numbers — which are increasingly used as IDs and usernames — as a means for two-factor authentication.
• And you know what's dumb? Twitter making this option mandatory even if you were to use an authenticator app or a hardware security key for 2FA. Deleting a phone number from a user's Twitter settings all but immediately withdraws the account from Twitter 2FA.
• Cybersecurity expert Matthew Green tweeted, "whose idea was it to use a valuable advertising identifier as an input to a security system. This is like using raw meat to secure your tent against bears." The sooner Twitter decouples the phone number requirement from 2FA, the better. That having said, SMS-based 2FA is still better than not having 2FA at all.
18. Facebook says its Workplace social platform for professional has 3 million paid users, up 1 million in the past eight months; introduces Portal video chat support for offices to take on Skype and Zoom.
19. Sony confirms PlayStation 5 launch ahead of holidays in 2020; to come with new features, including sophisticated haptics in the controller, hardware ray tracing, and a user interface that lets users see in-game information before launching a game.
20. Facebook unveils Captum, a PyTorch tool to help developers understand decisions made by ML models, adds PyTorch support for app deployment on iOS and Android.
21. Pinterest says its use of AI to identify and hide content that displays or encourages self-injury reduced reports of self-harm content by 88 percent.
22. Chinese handset maker OnePlus unveils 7T Pro, a month after releasing 7T and six months after the OnePlus 7 and OnePlus 7 Pro, with 6.67-inch QHD+ OLED display, 16-megapixel front camera, and 4,085mAh battery.