Tech Roundup: Apple Ads Expansion, Twitter Blue Rollout & More

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

• Apple is building an advertising network as part of its deal to start streaming Major League Soccer (MLS) games in the U.S. next year; comes amid its broader plans to place ads in other apps beyond App Store and Apple News to Maps, Podcasts and Books apps and concerns that the anti-tracking privacy changes (called App Tracking Transparency) is boosting its own advertising business at the expense of its rivals. (What's more, app makers have been found engaging in privacy-hostile fingerprinting of users designed to bypass ATT, in violation of Apple's policies.)
• Meta's Facebook appears to have silently rolled out a tool in late May 2022 for users to check if their phone numbers and email addresses have been uploaded to its address book database and delete them by adding the information to a block list so that it's not re-uploaded.
• Twitter updates it iOS app to revamp its Blue subscription, which costs US$ 7.99 per month for account verification, lesser amount of ads, priority ranking for quality content, and support for long-form videos; new owner Elon Musk says "Twitter will soon add ability to attach long-form text to tweets, ending absurdity of notepad screenshots," incorporate search improvements and "creator monetization for all forms of content," and permanently suspend account handles "engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying 'parody'" without warning.
• Google's YouTube gears up to roll out "Go Live Together" co-streaming feature to select creators.
• Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web in 1989, says " Web3 is not the web at all," adding he doesn't view blockchain as a viable solution for building the next iteration of the internet.
• Microsoft is reportedly low-cost Windows computers that's supported by subscriptions to Microsoft 365 and ads; faces lawsuit from GitHub programmers for allegedly violating their open-source licenses and using their code to train Microsoft's AI tool called Copilot, which auto-generates code snippets across different languages.
• Apple is reportedly working on shortening the "Hey Siri" trigger phrase to "Siri" by 2024 and plans to integrate Siri deeper into third-party apps and services; warns of shipment delays for iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max models due to temporary COVID-19 restrictions at its primary Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, China, which it said is "currently operating at significantly reduced capacity."
• New investigation from ProPublica finds evidence of Google placing ads from Amazon, Spotify, and other brands on non-English news sites that spread false claims on such topics as vaccines, COVID-19, climate change and elections.