Tech Roundup: ByteDance Resso, Twitter Fleets & More

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

• India restores internet access — including access to social media — in Kashmir for two weeks, although mobile data restrictions remain, following Supreme Court ruling that the ban cannot not be indefinite; development comes eight months after the restive region was stripped of its statehood and semi-autonomy and a total communications blackout was enforced.
• India's Supreme Court strikes down Reserve Bank of India's two-year-old ban on cryptocurrency trading in the country, potentially raising hopes for projects such as Facebook's Libra initiative.
• Apple agrees to pay up to US$ 500 million to settle a U.S. class action lawsuit accusing it of quietly slowing down older iPhones without users' knowledge.
• China's all-in-one messaging platform WeChat is found censoring content related to the coronavirus pandemic, expanding its scope last month to include "criticism of government, rumours and speculative information on the epidemic, references to Dr. Li Wenliang, and neutral references to Chinese government efforts on handling the outbreak that had been reported on state media."
• Alphabet's moonshot subsidiary X unveils Tidal, a new project to track thousands of fish using computer vision and AI to protect the ocean and help feed humanity sustainably.
• Google shows off plans to stop adding gender classification tags for its cloud-based computer vision API, instead tagging images of people with neutral terms such as "person" in a bid to "avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias."
• Chinese antivirus firm Qihoo 360 publishes a new report accusing the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of running an 11-year-long hacking campaign against several Chinese industries and government agencies, including aviation organisations, scientific research institutions, petroleum, and Internet companies, between September 2008 and June 2019.
• Uber reportedly sold Uber Eats business in India to rival Zomato for US$ 206 million, instead of US$ 350 million as previously reported, in return for a 9.99% stake, according to The Economic Times.
• Uber plugs a data leak that would have allowed anyone to track in real time the start and end points of trips on its Jump electric bikes or scooters — and therefore, the location of the people riding them through a public API that revealed the scooter name, along with the real-time latitude and longitude of where that particular scooter started and ended a trip, cutting to the heart of a growing debate about how tech companies share data with local governments, what rules should govern that data sharing, and whether it's even possible to do it in a way that protects people's privacy.
• Retail giant Amazon is reportedly working on a secret project, dubbed "Project Gesundheit”, to develop a cure for the common cold.
• Facebook is said to be altering its plans for its Libra cryptocurrency project following months of severe regulatory pressure; to no longer make the Libra token the centrepiece of its digital payments strategy, instead adding support for government-backed currencies, like the U.S. dollar and the euro alongside the token, and updating its Calibra digital wallet to support multiple currencies, of which Libra will be just one.
• Controversial facial recognition firm Clearview AI, best known for scraping the public internet, including social media to amass an estimated three billion photographs, reportedly worked to build a national database of every mug shot taken in the United States during the past 15 years, according to OneZero. (It's not clear what became of this project.)

Spotify for web gains support for Sign in with Apple

• Corellium, which was sued by Apple over its iOS virtualisation software, demos Project Sandcastle, which uses checkra1n jailbreak to install Android on iPhone 7.
• Kunlun, one of China's largest mobile gaming companies and owner of LGBTQ dating app Grindr, announces plans to sell the service it acquired in 2016 to investor consortium San Vicente Acquisition for about US$ 608.5 million following increased scrutiny of app developers over handling and safety of personal data and concerns that Kunlun's ownership of Grindr was a national security risk.
• TikTok's Chinese parent Bytedance launches Resso "social music streaming app" in India and Indonesia, with a free tier and a premium tier costing US$ 1.35/month on Android and $1.62/month on iOS as it enters a cut-throat market populated by Gaana, JioSaavn, Apple Music, YouTube Music and Spotify.
• Smartphone maker OnePlus to roll out Door Step Service for repairing devices at users' homes or offices in six cities in India, including Delhi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad.
• Popular photo editing app VSCO debuts Montage, an editing tool that lets users stack and layer multiple photos and videos to create a collage, as it continues to shift focus to video.
• DuckDuckGo makes available Tracker Radar, a tool detailing 5,326 domains used by 1,727 companies and organisations that track users online.
• Apple updates its App Store review guidelines to allow third-party apps to serve ads in the form of push notifications if users opt in; comes as the iPhone maker has been criticised for bending its own rules to send out push notification ads promoting Apple Music and its Carpool Karaoke show.
• Facebook says it has developed a more efficient machine learning tool — called Deep Entity Classification — to spot fake accounts; says the technology has already helped it take down 6.6 billion such accounts in 2019.
• Popular stock trading platform Robinhood suffers unprecedented outage, taking down the service offline for more than 16 hours; blames it on heavy loads, highly volatile and historic market conditions, record volume, and record account sign-ups, offering registered users three months of service for free. (A US$ 15 discount seems woefully paltry given that users could have missed out on investment opportunities, including buying stocks that rallied during the period it was down.)
• Former Uber self-driving unit head Anthony Levandowski, a key figure in the Uber-Waymo trade secrets trial who was accused of stealing intellectual property from Google and Waymo to start his own rival company, is ordered to pay US$ 179 million to Google over breach of contract. (On a side note, Levandowski personally has filed today for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stating that the presumptive US$ 179 million debt quite exceeds his assets, which he estimates at somewhere between US$ 50 million and US$ 100 million.)
• Google rolls out new Google Assistant feature that makes of text-to-speech engines to read entire web pages aloud on Android devices by issuing the command "Hey Google, read this page."
• Microblogging platform Twitter becomes the latest service after Facebook, Netflix, Spotify and YouTube to test its own version of Stories, called "Fleets," which disappear after 24 hours.