Tech Roundup: Facebook Smartwatch, Ramanujan Machine & More

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

• Researchers unveil the Ramanujan Machine, a software-based automated conjecturing system that develops new formulas for universal constants in mathematics.
• Health investigators with the World Health Organization (WHO) disclose that 90 people in central China were hospitalized for coronavirus-like symptoms months before the COVID-19 outbreak at Wuhan and the Chinese government acknowledged its existence in January 2020.
• Apple to update its Fraudulent Website Warning in Safari web browser by proxying Google's Safe Browsing — a blocklist service that provides a list of URLs for web resources that contain malware or phishing content — starting iOS 14.5 through its own servers instead of directly relying on Google as a way to limit the risk of information leak such as users' IP addresses to the search giant.
• Facebook stops generating link previews in Messenger and Instagram for E.U. users; researchers say "it is an implicit confirmation that Facebook's handling of link previews in Messenger and Instagram did not conform to privacy regulations in Europe," while hinting that "Facebook may be using this content for purposes other than generating previews."
• Facebook to begin testing downranking political content in News Feed for select users in Canada, Brazil, and Indonesia this week, and the U.S. in coming weeks, as part of its efforts to find a "new balance of the content people want to see"; said to be testing an in-house audio-chat product to compete with Clubhouse, as Instagram announces new changes to impose stricter penalties, including disabling and removing accounts, to prevent abusive and hateful content in direct messages.
• Google launches Google News Showcase, a program wherein the search giant pays to curate news content from publishers, in the U.K. and Argentina, a week after debuting the service in Australia; and says the initiative now has over 450 publications globally.

• U.S. government's plans to forcibly sell TikTok to Oracle and Walmart (it was supposed to happen on December 4, 2020) is said have been put on hold "indefinitely" amid ongoing review of handling security risks from Chinese technology companies.
• Google's advertising system allowed employers or landlords to discriminate against nonbinary and some transgender people, according to an investigation by The Markup.
• The U.S. state of North Dakota introduces new bill dubbed "Senate Bill 2333" that seeks to ban requirements that mandate developers to use digital app distribution platforms such as Apple App Store or Google Play Store and their services (such as in-app payment systems) as the exclusive mode of distributing apps, and forbids retaliation against developers for choosing to use an alternative application store or in-application payment system; Apple responds saying the bill "threatens to destroy iPhone as you know it" and that it would "undermine the privacy, security, safety, and performance that's built into iPhone by design."
• Google-owned navigation and traffic service Waze gains Audible integration, letting users with an Audible membership can access its catalog of more than 600,000 Audible Originals, audiobooks, podcasts, and other audio programs; opens Pixel-exclusive editing features previously available in Google Photos for Google One subscribers, as it switches to a paywalled subscription-only version.
• Chinese tech giant ByteDance reportedly exploring a sale of India operations of TikTok to rival unicorn Glance, owner of the short video app Roposo, as it attempts to make an exit in the wake of the short video sharing app's indefinite bank in the nation.
• Microsoft drops the price of foldable Surface Duo by US$ 400 to US$ 999; to arrive in the U.K., France, Germany, and Canada on February 18, marking the first expansion beyond the U.S.

• Disney's Disney+ subscription service hits a new high of 94.9 million paying users around the world, with Hulu now hitting 39.4 million subscribers, and ESPN+ boasting of 12.1 million subscribers.
• Google updates YouTube app for iOS for the first time in over two months, becoming one of the highest-profile Google apps to see an update since early December when Apple began requiring that developers disclose privacy practices for each of their apps in order to have their updates approved. (Many other major Google apps like its flagship search app, Google Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Meet have still not been updated and do not have privacy labels displayed on their App Store listings, while their Android versions have received multiple updates over the same period, raising the possibility that the company may be deliberately withholding updates as a result of the new privacy labeling mandated by Apple.)
• Retail behemoth Amazon is said to have built its own in-house mobile app called Mentor to track the location and rate the performance of third-party delivery drivers, a week after it emerged that the company started putting AI-equipped cameras in some delivery vans; the app, which Amazon labels as a tool for improving safety, tracks a driver's location at all times and also generates a daily score that factors into performance evaluations, with low scores potentially harming a third-party delivery company's relationship with Amazon for future contracts.
• Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm raise concerns with U.S. antitrust regulators regarding Nvidia's pending acquisition of Arm, stating the US$ 40 billion merger would harm competition, a week following British chipmaker Graphcore raised similar concerns with the U.K. antitrust regulator.
• Facebook supposedly developing an Android-based smart watch geared towards messaging and health features which it aims to launch in 2022, allowing the wearable users to send messages with Facebook services like Messenger and WhatsApp; said to work with a cellular connection without the need for a tethered smartphone.