Tech Roundup: Adobe-Figma Acquisition Termination, Apple iMessage Scrutiny & More

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

• Adobe and Figma agree to terminate their proposed US$ 20 billion merger, announced in September 2022, after seeing "no clear path" to U.K. and E.U. regulatory approval. (As a result, Adobe will now be required to pay Figma a reverse termination fee of US$ 1 billion in cash.)
• The European Commission opens an official investigation into X under the Digital Services Act (DSA), focusing on illegal content, disinformation, ad transparency, "deceptive design" and data access.
• Apple pauses sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 in the U.S. starting December 21 due to an ongoing patent dispute with medical tech company Masimo related to blood oxygen sensing, as it explores a software workaround to get around the ban.
• ByteDance-owned TikTok updates its app for tablets and foldable devices, adding streamlined navigation bars and a landscape mode, as the company seeks to compete with YouTube.
• Flipboard plans to replace its entire social back end with ActivityPub and by April 2024 let any Flipboard user follow any fediverse account from within its app.
• The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) says it will recommence its investigation to probe Apple and Google's dominance in mobile browsers and cloud gaming on 24 January 2024, more than a month atfer the U.K. Court of Appeal reversed a previous decision that ruled in Apple's favour, stating the CMA took a long time to open a probe.
• OpenAI lays out plans to address safety risks in its most advanced models, including allowing its board to reverse safety decisions.
• Google proposes facial age estimation technology to help it prevent children from accessing websites with restricted content in the U.K. and comply with the Online Safety Act, which requires companies to implement age barriers to access certain kinds of content online.
• Alphabet's Google, Honor, Lenovo, Lynx, Meta, Motorola, Nothing, Opera, Qualcomm and Wire team up for Coalition for Open Digital Ecosystems (CODE) in an effort to promote more open platforms and systems to boost growth and innovation in Europe.
• Samsung's Self-Repair program includes foldable devices for the first time, the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Z Fold 5, and expands to 30 additional countries in Europe.
• Stability AI debuts Stability AI Membership, with free, US$ 20/month, and custom pricing enterprise tiers, limiting commercial use of its models to the paid tiers.
• Microsoft intergrates generative AI music app Suno to Copilot, allowing users to compose songs, including lyrics, instruments, and voices, from a sentence; plans to deprecate Windows Mixed Reality and remove the feature in a future Windows update.
• Beeper throws in the towel and say it's giving up on its mission to bring iMessage to Android after Apple took steps to neuter Beeper Mini; notes that the fix requires users to have access to a jailbroken phone, significantly curtailing its use.
• Beeper has also noted that "by blocking Beeper Mini, Apple is actively harming their own iPhone customers by forcing them to fall back to insecure SMS chats."
• Needless to say, the development has prompted the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to intensify their investigations into Apple's alleged anti-competitive practices, according to The New York Times. The FTC said that it would scrutinise "dominant" players that "use privacy and security as a justification to disallow interoperability" between services without taking any names.
• Google announces a US$ 700 million settlement in an antitrust lawsuit filed by 50 U.S. states; says it will "continue to technically enable Android to allow the installation of third-party apps on Mobile Devices through means other than Google Play" for seven years and allow developers to offer an alternative in-app billing system for five years, among other concessions.
• Google tests new feature in Android that lets users to remotely uninstall an app on another device; releases a Chrome browser update that automatically runs Safety Check in the background to alert "if passwords saved in Chrome have been compromised, any of your extensions are potentially harmful, you're not using the latest version of Chrome, or site permissions need your attention."
• Meta-owned WhatsApp trials a "Share status" feature that makes it possible for users to cross-post their status on Facebook and Instagram; also pilots option to share their phone's screen along with audio for immersive communication.
• The E.U. designates Pornhub, XVideos, and Stripchat as Very Large Online Platforms under the Digital Services Act, requiring the companies to comply with stricter rules on age verification and illegal content.
• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) proposes stronger data protections for children, including making targeted advertising opt-in and banning push notifications encouraging them to use their services more.
• Researchers discover over 1,008 instances of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in LAION-5B, a machine learning dataset comprising more than 5 billion images, possibly helping AI to generate CSAM; prompts the non-profit behind it LAION (aka Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network) to take it down out of an "abundance of caution" to "ensure they are safe before republishing them." (The development comes as AI is automating the creation of fake news, spurring an explosion of web content mimicking factual articles that propagates false information about elections, wars and natural disasters. It also follows reports about how generative AI chatbots like Bing Chat are making up false scandals about real politicians and inventing polling numbers.)
• Apple publishes new research that explores the possibility of running computationally expensive large language models (LLMs) on device as opposed to the cloud, offering improved privacy benefits to users.
• Decentralised X rival Bluesky releases a public web view, allowing users to view posts on the platform without being logged in, and unveils a new logo with a blue butterfly.
• France proposes a new tax that will impose a levy of what is expected to be between 1.5 and 1.75% on all music-streaming services, with the proceeds going toward the Centre National de la Musique (CNM), which was established in 2020 to support the French music sector.