Tech Roundup: Amazon Your Books, Threads E.U. Launch & More

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

• Meta officially brings Threads to the European Union, five months after its official launch and adds an option for users in the bloc to browse the platform without a profile; Instagram launches customisable story templates and a generative AI background editing tool in the U.S., letting users change the background for their Stories based on prompts.
• Meta is also outlining larger plans for fediverse in Threads, including options to follow a Threads account on other platforms (and vice-versa) as well as facilitate follower portability.
• Apple releases iOS and iPadOS updates with a new Journal app and support for contact key verification in iMessage.
• Beeper, which released its Beeper Mini app to allow Android users use iMessage, returns after being shut down by Apple, but now requires users to log in with their Apple ID; says it's looking into reports that some users aren't getting iMessages on Beeper Mini and Beeper Cloud, as the heated battle of whack-a-mole with Apple escalates.
• Google faces new regulatory setback after a jury in the Epic Games vs. Google antitrust case unanimously finds that the company has illegal monopoly power in the Android app distribution markets and in the in-app billing services markets; Epic Games says "Google's app store practices are illegal and they abuse their monopoly to extract exorbitant fees, stifle competition and reduce innovation" and that "Google was willing to pay billions of dollars to stifle alternative app stores by paying developers to abandon their own store efforts and direct distribution plans, and offering highly lucrative agreements with device manufacturers in exchange for excluding competing app stores."
• Meta releases Audiobox, which is described as a "new foundation research model for audio generation" built atop Voicebox; adds multimodal AI to its Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses as an early access beta in the U.S., letting Meta AI answer voice queries by taking and analyzing photos.
• Google announces plans to shut down Google Play Movies & TV app on January 17, 2024, as it transitions users to Google TV; to shorten Maps' default auto-delete history feature from 18 months to three months and let users store Maps Timeline data locally on their devices as well as delete activity related to specific places. (This also means that Google will no longer respond to 'geofence warrants,' a controversial legal tool used by law enforcement to force Google to hand over information about all users within a given location during a specific timeframe.)
• Apple releases an iOS beta with Stolen Device Protection, a new security feature that, if enabled, limits actions like Apple ID password resets when not in a "familiar location"; comes in response to reports of thefts where criminals used iPhone owners' passcodes to change their Apple accounts, access saved passwords, steal money and lock them out of their iCloud-stored photos and videos.
• Meta-owned WhatsApp lets users pin messages within one-on-one and group conversations for 24 hours, seven days, or 30 days; now allows users to post 2-second video Notes as statuses.
• Snap debuts new features for Snapchat+ subscribers that allows them to generate and send AI images based on a text prompt, and expands Dream, Snapchat's generative AI selfie feature, to include their social circle.
• ByteDance TikTok restarts e-commerce in Indonesia after it acquires a 75% stake in GoTo Gojek Tokopedia unit with a US$ 1.5 billion investment; comes two months after Indonesia banned online shopping on social media platforms in October to protect smaller merchants and users' data, forcing TikTok to shut down its TikTok Shop service.
• Meta tests making posts from Threads accounts "available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol"; plans to extend its fact-checking to Threads early next year.
• Microsoft makes available Xbox Cloud Gaming in beta on Meta Quest 2, Quest 3 and Quest Pro VR headsets for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers.
• Amazon competes with its own Goodreads (which it acquired in 2013) with the launch of Your Books, a feature that lets users organise all their books, including print, Kindle and Audible titles, and receive recommendations on the eponymous storefront.
• Google announces MedLM, a suite of AI models fine-tuned for the healthcare industry and based on Med-PaLM 2, for cloud customers; announces general availability of Duet AI for developers and for use in security operations, releases Gemini Pro for developers and enterprises via an API, and debuts Imagen 2 text-to-image technology capable of "high-quality, photorealistic outputs."
• Crypto project Worldcoin now supports World ID integrations with Minecraft, Reddit, Telegram, Shopify, and Mercado Libre, on top of Discord and others, and unveils World ID 2.0.
• Axel Springer signs a multi-year deal with OpenAI, which plans to offer ChatGPT news summaries and use Politico, Business Insider, and others to train AI models.
• Apple expands its Self Service Repair to the iPhone 15 lineup and M2 Macs, brings the program to 24 more countries, and releases a diagnostics tool in the U.S. for self service repair.
• Amazon-owned Twitch updates its guidelines regarding sexual content to allow "deliberately highlighted breasts, buttocks or pelvic region," "fictionalised (drawn, animated, or sculpted) fully exposed female-presenting breasts and/or genitals or buttocks regardless of gender," "body writing on female-presenting breasts and/or buttocks regardless of gender," and erotic dances; rescinds its "artistic nudity" portion, citing "community concern"
• Music streamer Spotify reverses course on its decision to exit the Uruguayan market, after gaining assurances from the government that the new copyright law changes won't result in the company incurring extra costs.
• Major pharmacy chains in the U.S., including CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens, hand over sensitive medical records -- such as the prescription drugs a person used or uses and their medical conditions -- to law enforcement without a warrant, raising grave medical privacy concerns.
• Google's DeepMind FunSearch model cracks the unsolved cap set problem in pure mathematics, the first time an LLM has solved a long-standing scientific puzzle; says the model "works by pairing a pre-trained LLM, whose goal is to provide creative solutions in the form of computer code, with an automated 'evaluator,' which guards against hallucinations and incorrect ideas."
• Google updates YouTube TV app to show longer but less frequent ad breaks, after testing since September 2023, and adds a countdown timer in the bottom-right corner; launches a Pixel Diagnostic App and repair manuals in English in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and the European countries where Pixel devices are sold.
• Apple begins selling a US$ 99 USB-C charging case for its second-generation AirPods Pro as a standalone purchase.
• Google announces plans to test Tracking Protection and blocking third-party cookies on January 4 for ~1% of Chrome users globally, ahead of a phased rollout in H2 2024; to merge its Nest Renew service with the OhmConnect energy management platform to form a new company named Renew Home, as it continues to streamline its portfolio, and updates its Contacts app for Android with real-time location sharing from Google Maps.
• Chipmaker Intel unveils Gaudi3 that's designed for generative AI software, as it takes on rival offerings from Nvidia (H100) and AMD (MI300X).
• Privacy-focused Swiss company Proton launches an app in beta for Windows and macOS that includes Proton Mail and Proton Calendar, ahead of a wider early 2024 launch.
• Microsoft launches its basic Office suite on the Meta Quest store for free, letting all Quests run Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in a mixed reality environment.
• Apple settles a multi-year lawsuit against Corellium, accusing the company of infringing upon its copyrights by replicating iOS in a virtual environment for security research; announces contingent pricing for subscriptions, letting developers give users a discounted price if they're actively subscribed to another subscription.
• OpenAI suspends ByteDance's account as it investigates a report from The Verge that it's violating the developer license by using GPT-generated data to train its own, competing model in China.
• Apple faces new legal trouble after its gets accused of colluding with Visa and Mastercard to stifle competition for point-of-sale payment card network services, causing merchants to pay artificially higher fees for credit and debit transactions; says Apple's lack of third-party mobile wallets forces customers to use its Apple Pay mobile wallet, with both Visa and Mastercard paying the company a portion of transaction fees for payments made using Apple Pay on their respective networks.
• Cloud storage service provider Dropbox faces privacy backlash for opting in users by default for generative AI features that transmit user data, including files, to OpenAI for Dash, its AI-powered universal search (the features are not available in Canada, the U.K. and the European Economic Area); Dropbox says "only after a customer sees the third-party AI transparency banner and chooses to proceed with asking a question about a file, will that file be sent to a third-party to generate answers" and that "neither this nor any other setting automatically or passively sends any Dropbox customer data to a third-party AI service, and customer data is not used to train third-party AI models."