Tech Roundup: Facebook News, Google Quantum Breakthrough & More

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

1. Australia outlines plans for a new regulation that would make it harder for minors to access pornographic material online; supposedly developing a Face Verification Service which matches a person's photo against images used on one of their evidence of identity documents to help verify people who visit adult sites are actually adults — i.e. above the age of 16. (Could a teenager hold a picture of his dad up to the webcam?)
2. China passes new cryptography law, effective January 1, that's aimed at "facilitating the development of the cryptography business and ensuring the security of cyberspace and information," as the country gears up to launch its own digital currency à la Facebook's Libra that could be used across major payment platforms such as WeChat and Alipay.
3. Qatar begins air-conditioning outdoors to combat soaring temperatures during the day, installing air conditioning units in its open-air sports stadiums, malls, and markets to reduce the health risk with extreme heat that reaches upwards of 48 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit).
4. Social media giant TikTok reiterates it's focus is on entertainment, not politics, and no foreign government has a hand in its moderation policies after U.S. government raises national security concerns about the viral video app given its ownership to ByteDance, a Beijing-based unicorn and new reports that TikTok is fast becoming a new hub for terrorist outfit Islamic State to spread propaganda.
5. Facebook-owned WhatsApp sues Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group on Tuesday, accusing it of helping government spies break into the phones of roughly 1,400 users across four continents in a hacking spree whose targets included diplomats, political dissidents, journalists and senior government officials; alleges that it exploited its video calling system in order to send malware to the mobile devices of a number of users (the flaw was first came to light in May) to secretly spy on their digital lives.
• NSO Group has consistently maintained its technology is offered only to licensed government intelligence and law enforcement agencies to help them fight terrorism and serious crime, but numerous instances to the contrary have surfaced in recent months. The spyware used in the attacks, called Pegasus, has been employed by repressive governments around the world such as Rwanda and Saudi Arabia to target journalists and human rights advocates.
• With surveillance tech firms constantly working to uncover weaknesses in existing software and implant spyware directly onto devices, the incident is another reminder that technology companies should never be required to intentionally weaken their security systems via backdoors.
• NSO Group, for its part, has said that "strongly encrypted platforms are often used by pedophile rings, drug kingpins, and terrorists to shield their criminal activity. Without sophisticated technologies, the law enforcement agencies meant to keep us all safe face insurmountable hurdles. NSO's technologies provide proportionate, lawful solutions to this issue." The lawsuit, on the other hand, could be another uphill legal battle.
6. Google to stop indexing and ranking Flash content in its search engine by the end of this year; updates its search algorithm to factor all search terms in the query into consideration to serve a meaningful result instead of taking into account only the keywords by leveraging Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips and a machine learning-powered neural network called "Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers" aka BERT — which work well for data where the sequence of elements is important, making it a useful tool for working with natural language and, hence, search queries — to serve search results.
7. Facebook begins rolling out Facebook News to select audiences in the US starting today, carving a dedicated home screen tab out of its digital real estate for users to explore their news interests directly within the Facebook app; to prominently label content that fact-checkers deem false on Facebook and Instagram, and ban ads suggesting voting is pointless, as it continues to crack down on disinformation campaigns by suspending a network of Instagram accounts operated from Russia that targeted Americans with divisive political messages ahead of next year's U.S. presidential election, with operators posing as people within the country.
8. Adobe to continue offering its Creative Cloud services, including Photoshop and Illustrator, to customers in Venezuela, going back on earlier decision to delete all user accounts in the country by October 28 to comply with US government's Executive Order 13884 that prohibits trade with the country; says it's been "granted a license to provide all of our Digital Media products and services in Venezuela."
9. Australia's competition watchdog Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) files lawsuit against Alphabet's Google, accusing it of misleading Android smartphone users about how it collected and used personal location data, advancing a global crackdown on the world's biggest tech firms; says people who set up their Google accounts on phones and tablets between January 2017 and late 2018 would have incorrectly believed that "Location History" was the only setting that affected whether the company was collecting a user's location data, when in fact, the setting "Web & App Activity" also had to be switched off if users did not want their location data collected.
10. Major news publication CNN reportedly working on its own news aggregator app codenamed "NewsCo" to take on Google, Apple and Facebook that offers a mix of free (but ad-supported) and subscription news from a variety of sources; Facebook confirms plans for a dedicated News service on its platform in partnership with a variety of outlets. (After music and video, news is the next medium to get splintered.)
11. Facebook's plans for Libra cryptocurrency hangs in balance after the social media giant tries not to single itself out by touting Libra Association's independence from Facebook as an escape hatch to avoid criticism; plays on fears that China will beat out the U.S. as a global financial leader if the project doesn't take off the ground, and says it would drop out of Libra Association if U.S. regulators aren't willing to approve it and if the group eventually decided to move forward on its own without the approval.
12. Indian government to go ahead with its plan to revise existing rules to regulate intermediaries — social media apps and others that rely on users to create their content — by January 15, 2020, citing the platforms have "emerged as a potent tool to cause unimaginable disruption to the democratic polity."
13. Ride-hailing company Uber's quest to become the de-facto transportation app continues; rolls out new transport mode for users in India that makes it possible to book Metro tickets (only New Delhi for now) right from the app in the future (New Delhi is also the first city in Asia to gain public transport options); expands its finance footprint to launch Uber Money, a division for efforts like digital wallets and upgraded debit and credit cards, with imminent focus on getting its 4 million-plus drivers and couriers around the world access to a mobile bank account so they can get paid after each ride.
14. Snapchat hits 210 million daily active users after it adds 7 million for the three month period July to September.
15. Retail Goliath Amazon makes Amazon Fresh grocery delivery free for Prime subscribers, removing the US$ 14.99/month fee that it was charging for the service up to now, as it seeks to makes its service more enticing in the face of fresh competition from Walmart.
16. New research from MIT show that machine learning models aren't yet capable of effectively distinguishing false news reports; underscores the need to detect factual falseness of a text rather than determining if it was generated by a machine or a human.
17. Android Pie hits 20 percent marketshare among all Android smartphones 12 months after launch, as iOS 13 adoption reaches 50 percent just a month after release in September.
18. Beleaguered co-working space provider WeWork to get a fresh infusion of more than US$ 13 billion from SoftBank, taking the Japanese internet conglomerate's stake in the startup to 80 percent; to lay off 4,000 employees as part of a turnaround plan put in place by SoftBank Group after it takes control of the company.
19. Latest research from Pew Research Center finds that just 6 percent of U.S. adults on Twitter account for 73 percent of tweets about national politics, building on an earlier study, which discovered that 10 percent of users created 80 percent of tweets from U.S. adults.
20. Amazon acquires Health Navigator, which provides online symptom checking and triage tools to companies that are looking to route patients to the right place, a month after launch Amazon Care, a pilot virtual medical clinic for employees that allows nurses to visit them in the home.
21. Apple's mobile payment solution Apple Pay overtakes Starbucks as the most widely used payments service in the U.S. with 27.7M users, and capturing a 47.3 percent market share; faces more regulatory woes in Europe as E.U. antitrust regulators begin asking online sales companies whether they have been told to use its mobile payment platform, Apple Pay, instead of rival services.
• Apple Pay, launched in 2014, was one of earliest Apple's diversification from device sales, but the antitrust investigation hints that companies may have been contractually obligated to integrate Apple Pay into their apps and websites, thereby restricting online payments for the purchase of goods and services made via merchant apps or websites, in breach of E.U. antitrust rules. What's more, the NFC chip embedded in the Apple iPhone bars rival payment methods.
22. Samsung rolls out update to fix problems with fingerprint recognition features on its flagship Galaxy S10 and Note 10 smartphones that made it possible for them to be unlocked regardless of the biometric data registered in the device (WeChat and AliPay, two of China's leading payment giants, even disabled the fingerprint payment method on the two phones in response); says the issue can happen when patterns appearing on certain protectors that come with silicon cases are recognised along with fingerprints.
23. Google claims quantum breakthrough after its Sycamore fault-tolerant quantum computer completed in 3 minutes 20 seconds a mathematical calculation that would have taken the world's fastest supercomputer 10,000 years; researchers at IBM, Google's main quantum computing rival, says a supercomputer with additional disk storage can solve the random number problem in at most 2.5 days, with greater fidelity — or accuracy, casting doubt on Google's achievement.
24. London-based fintech startup and digital banking service Revolut expands to Singapore, marking its foray into Asia after launching in U.K., Europe and Australia.
25. Google to integrate Duo video calling into the Messages web app; releases six experimental apps to improve digital wellbeing on Android to help users curb screen time and better manage phone usage.
• One of the apps — Morph — really stands out, even in its admittedly embryonic form, teases a feature that holds a great deal of potential in a world where the boundaries between "work" and "leisure" are increasingly blurred, making a strong case for building some of its functionality directly into Android.
• Acting as an app launcher, it promises to help users focus by only showing apps that are relevant to what they are doing at a specific moment. In effect, the user creates different modes based around times or locations and then selects which apps they want to see when the phone switches to that mode.
• The crucial thing about Morph is that it automatically switches to these modes when it encounters the preset times or locations. These modes can be quit at any time, but there's perhaps just enough friction to encourage users to stay the course and curb mindless browsing.
26. Major U.S. cellular carriers Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint announce the Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative to bring RCS to Android phones in 2020 and replace SMS with the next-generation messaging standard despite many problems with it: lack of carrier adoption and cross-carrier interoperability, no end to end encryption (meaning it’s easy for governments to demand the contents of text messages sent using it), and Apple's no show (iMessage for the win!).
27. Popular work management tool Trello hits 50 million registered users, up from 19 million registered users when it was acquired by Atlassian in 2017 in a US$ 425 million deal, suggesting that joining the Australian software giant has only made it more popular.
28. Google now lets any company register .new domains, a year after rolling out ".new" links as shortcuts to create new Google documents, notes and calendar entries; Medium (story.new), Spotify (playlist.new and podcast.new), Webex (Webex.new and letsmeet.new), Stripe (invoice.new and subscription.new), Canva (canva.new and design.new), Bitly (link.new), OVO Sound (music.new), RunKit (api.new), and Coda (coda.new) come on board.
29. Ride-hailing giant Lyft rolls out Lyft Pink, a membership plan for US$ 19.99 per month with a 15 percent discount on all car rides and priority airport pickups; ditches earlier $299-per-month All-Access Plan for up to 30 rides.
30. Apple releases HomePod 13.2 software update with support for recognising up to six different users' voices, Handoff from iOS, Ambient Sounds, and other improvements; unveils AirPods Pro with active noise cancellation, transparency mode, silicone ear tip design, and water resistance for $249.
31. On-demand video streaming service Netflix begins testing new feature that allows users to fast forward or slow down playback speeds of TV shows; says "this test makes it possible to vary the speed at which people watch shows on their mobiles."
32. Samsung says its SmartThings IoT platform has over 45M monthly active users and works with more than 5,000 devices.
33. Music streaming service Spotify hits 113 million paying subscribers, even as monthly active users hit 248 million for the period July to September; launches standalone Kids app exclusive to Premium Family subscribers with hand-picked, kid-friendly audio content comprising of about 6,000 tracks.
34. Sony announces plans to shut down its PlayStation Vue live TV subscription service on January 30 after reports of a possible sale, which would've included the company's tech and a subscriber list of around 500,000, as Japanese tech giant attempts to restructure and cut losses.
35. Build-your-own-website startup Squarespace acquires Unfold, a templates app for creating Stories on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat that has 9 million monthly active users, for an undisclosed sum.
36. France and Germany purportedly working on homegrown cloud platforms to take on U.S. counterparts from Amazon, Google and Microsoft in a bid for digital sovereignty and over concerns that sensitive corporate data could be spied on in the wake of the adoption of the U.S. CLOUD Act of 2018.
37. Italy's top bank UniCredit uncovers a data breach involving the personal records of 3 million domestic clients, making it the third security incident in four years.