Tech Roundup: Apple Antitrust Fine, COVID-19 Havoc & More

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

All the major COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic updates:

1. Alphabet's Verily launches a limited coronavirus screening website in the San Francisco Bay area; requires that users create a Google account or connect to it using their existing Google accounts, stoking privacy concerns, as Google assures data will be stored in an encrypted format, and won't be shared with advertisers.
• Search giant Google floats a dedicated COVID-19 website with enhanced information related to the coronavirus, with details about symptoms, prevention, global statics, and locally relevant information
2. The World Health Organisation (WHO) unveils Health Alert, a fact-finding tool/chatbot on WhatsApp (+41 79 893 1892) that shows up-to-date information about COVID-19 infection rates, travel advisories, and debunked misinformation.
• The Indian government has created a separate WhatsApp bot called MyGov Corona Helpdesk that allows individuals to text +91 9013151515 to get instant authoritative answers to their coronavirus queries.
3. Major internet platforms Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube issue a joint statement saying they're working with each other and healthcare agencies to tackle fraud and misinformation about COVID-19 on their platforms as worldwide deaths cross 14,500. (It's worth noting that took 67 days from the first reported case of COVID-19 to reach 100,000 cases, 11 days for the second 100,000, and just four days for the third 100,000.)
4. Adult entertainment website Pornhub rolls out free premium membership to viewers in Italy, France and Spain, the three European countries hardest-hit by the coronavirus; sees jump in traffic in each country by a whopping 57 percent, 38 percent and 61 percent compared to an "average day," with worldwide afternoon rising as well, attributing it to more people working from the comfort of their homes.
5. Facebook fixes bug in its service that inadvertently marked legitimate coronavirus-related posts as spam due to "an issue with an automated system that removes links to abusive websites"; pledges US$ 100 million in cash grants and ad credits for up to 30,000 eligible small businesses in over 30 countries impacted by the outbreak.
• Facebook has also rolled out a COVID-19 information centre placed atop all users' feeds to help surface news and resources, and the company's WhatsApp subsidiary has unveiled a US$ 1 million grant to fact-check information related to the outbreak and an information hub to offer simple, actionable guidance, general tips and resources for users around the world to be better informed about the disease and reduce the spread of misinformation.
6. The U.S. government reportedly in talks with Google, Facebook, and other tech companies and health experts to leverage aggregate people's location data to help track the spread of COVID-19; Israel government approves emergency measures, it says lasting 30 days, for its security agencies to track the mobile phone data of people suspected to have COVID-19 in an attempt to enforce quarantine and warn those who may have come into contact with infected people.
7. Chinese citizens caught lying about their coronavirus medical history could negatively impact their social credit scores, according to a rule announced by Beijing authorities. (The controversial reputation system is an assessment of citizens' and businesses' economic and social reputation.)
8. Streaming behemoths Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and YouTube, along with Facebook and Instagram, downgrade video streaming quality in coronavirus-hit Europe for the next 30 days, in effect cutting data traffic on European networks and internet service providers and avoiding internet gridlock in a bid to tackle bandwidth constraints.
• Disney's Disney+ streaming service launch in France and India has been pushed back, but the company plans to go ahead with its roll out on March 24 for the rest of Europe.
9. Enterprise chat and collaboration platform Slack adds around 7,000 new customers in the 47 days between February 1 and March 18, compared to the 5,000 it added the previous quarter, while rival Microsoft Teams surpasses 44 million daily active users, up from 32 million earlier this month, as companies increasingly enforce work from home measures in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic.
10. Apple updates Siri to help U.S. users asking "Do I have coronavirus?," with answers coming from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC, walking users through a series of questions that checks for COVID-19 symptoms.

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic as of March 22 11:15 PM EST (Image: Bing)

And the others:

1. Apple is fined €1.1 billion by French antitrust authority Autorité de la Concurrence for anticompetitive behaviour within its distribution networks and illegally restricting how wholesalers sell Apple products following a probe it kicked off in 2012; accuses the iPhone maker and its two wholesalers (Ingram Micro and Tech Data) of agreeing "to not compete against each other and prevent resellers from promoting competition between each other, thus sterilising the wholesale market for Apple products."
2. Microsoft says one billion active machines are now running Windows 10 across 200 countries; comes less than five years after the original release, and less than six months after Microsoft hit 900 million devices on Windows 10.
3. Microsoft-owned GitHub releases official apps for Android and iOS; snaps up JavaScript packaging vendor npm for an undisclosed amount following its acquisition of Pull Panda and Semmle last year and outlines plans to "integrate GitHub and npm to improve the security of the open source software supply chain, and enable you to trace a change from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version that fixed it."
4. Leaked documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that ByteDance-owned TikTok told moderators to suppress posts from those deemed "ugly," poor, or disabled, and censor political speech in livestreams, in an attempt to attract users and achieve rapid growth, as it comes under growing scrutiny for its moderation and data collection practices.
• On TikTok, livestreamed military movements and natural disasters, video that "defamed civil servants," and other material that might threaten "national security" has been suppressed alongside videos showing rural poverty, slums, beer bellies, and crooked smiles. One document goes so far as to instruct moderators to scan uploads for cracked walls and "disreputable decorations" in users' own homes — then to effectively punish these poorer TikTok users by artificially narrowing their audiences, says the report.
5. Google Hangouts app for Android loses location sharing feature in latest as the search giant slowly continues to phase out the chat platform in favour of Google Chat. (I don't understand why they ever tried to replace it in the first place. Google Talk/Hangouts had a giant user base and was very feature rich. Google's confused approach ultimately succeeded only in pushing people into competitor products.)
6. Google Translate launches real time transcription feature in eight languages, including English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai.
7. Apple debuts new MacBook Air with a Magic Keyboard with scissor-style keys, 13" Retina display, Touch ID, and 10th-gen Intel Core CPUs, starting at US$ 999, iPad Pro with a LIDAR scanner for depth-sensing, backlit keyboard and trackpad, starting at US$ 799, and updates Mac Mini with double the storage capacity, with the US$ 799 configuration now coming with 256GB of SSD storage.
8. Slack overhauls its application with capabilities to group channels, messages and apps by topics (paid users only), a redesigned search function, a new way to compose messages to a channel or individuals, and fresh shortcuts to trigger workflows or open other applications in the app. (But will the company's freemium model help when it's competing against the likes of Facebook Workplace and Microsoft Teams?)
9. Google updates Advanced Protection Program (APP) to limit non-Play Store apps (aka sideload APK files) and turns on Play Protect malware protection automatically by default as it continues to fight malicious apps on the platform.
10. Sony details full PlayStation 5 specifications — a custom eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU, custom GPU based on AMD's RDNA 2 with 10.28 teraflops, 16GB RAM, and custom 825GB SSD ahead of its unveil later this year; says nearly all of the top PS4 games, ranked by play time, will be compatible with the PS5 at launch.
11. Facebook-owned Instagram begins internally testing Snapchat-like ephemeral feature that clears chat messages automatically after all members in the chat group have viewed the thread and closed it.
12. Anthony Levandowski, ex-Uber self-driving head, pleads guilty to trade secrets theft from Google in exchange for federal prosecutors dropping the other charges.
• A short recap: The charges stemmed from the months before Levandowski left Google in January 2016 to found a self-driving truck startup called Otto, which Uber quickly acquired for a reported US$ 680 million.
• In February 2017, Waymo, Google's sister company focusing on autonomous vehicular technology, sued Uber, alleging that it had bought Otto to get access to a trove of confidential documents Levandowski downloaded before setting up Otto.
• In a February 2018 settlement, Uber paid Waymo about US$ 245 million, but not before the judge trying the case recommended that the prosecutors consider a criminal case against Levandowski.
• In August 2019, Levandowski was indicted on 33 charges of trade secret theft and attempted trade secret theft. Earlier this month, Levandowski filed for bankruptcy after an arbitration panel ruled he owed Google US$ 179 million, related to his departure from the company.
13. Facebook starts wider roll out of its sweeping desktop redesign, bringing dark mode, tabbed home screen, larger fonts, and a cleaner profile, to all users.
14. Google's Android Go, its OS aimed at low-end devices, crosses 100 million users; announces a new Camera Go app optimised for devices with 1GB of RAM; launches Android 11 Developer Preview 2 with hinge angle support for foldable devices, improvements to native screen recorder and call screening, and a new Web-based Android installer method to flash the OS.
15. Chinese tech giant Huawei begins testing AppSearch, an app that makes it easy to search and sideload popular Android apps from third-party app stores such as Amazon, APKPure, and APKMirror without using Google Play Store, thereby bypassing the U.S. trade ban.