Tech Roundup: E.U. TikTok Probe, Samsung Galaxy Ring & More

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

• The European Commission opens formal probe into TikTok to assess whether the company has breached the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to the "protection of minors, advertising transparency, data access for researchers, as well as the risk management of addictive design and harmful content."
• Investigations into "child influencer" accounts on Facebook and Instagram have found that Meta is knowingly allowing parents who sexually exploit their children for financial gain on the platform using its paid subscription tools, according to separate reports published by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
• Messaging app Signal finally rolls out usernames in beta, letting users conceal their phone numbers.
• Apple debuts a monthly Apple Music Replay, offering statistics about users' listening habits on a more regular basis and tests a new feature that allows users to import songs and playlists into their library from rival streaming services like Spotify; warns users against putting their iPhones in a bag of rice, saying "doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone."
• Adobe launches AI Assistant in Acrobat in beta, to summarise and generate insights from PDFs, answer and recommend questions, allowing paying users "easily chat with documents."
• Microsoft announces plans to deprecate Publisher in 2026.
• Tinder plans to roll out its new ID checks in the U.S., the U.K., Brazil and Mexico, after tests in Australia and New Zealand, to combat AI scams and dating crimes.
• Meta's WhatsApp rolls out support for bulleted and numbered lists, block quotes, and inline code to highlight and organize messages across platforms; tests letting users cross post from Facebook to Threads.
• Apple debuts Apple Sports, a free app offering scores and stats for the NBA, NHL, Premier League and others in the U.S. Canada and the U.K.; says the iPhone 15 lineup can retain up to 80% of its original battery capacity at 1,000 charge cycles, up from its original estimate of 500 charge cycles.
• Apple secures top seven positions in the global list of best-selling smartphones in 2023 for the first time, led by iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Pro Max and iPhone 14 Pro, according to Counterpoint Research.
• Google rolls out a new sign-in page; unveils two open models Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B that it says were "used to create the Gemini models" and officially debuts Gemini for Workspace.
• Walmart-backed PhonePe launches an Android app stpre Indus Appstore in India to take on Google; comes with over 200,00 apps from Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Spotify and other developers.
• Reddit reports 73 million 73 million average daily active users and 267 million average weekly active uniques, as it files to go public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "RDDT."
• Bluesky opens up federation, letting anyone run their own server that connects to Bluesky's network using the AT Protocol. (However, it's not interoperable with Mastodon, which uses a different protocol called ActivityPub.)
• Newsletter platform Substack surpasses 3 million subcribers on its platform, up from 2 million in February 2023; allows writers to curate and share a list of publications for their readers to subscribe to.
• Google announces a new "Help me write" feature in Chrome browser to get writing suggestions and says it will "pause the image generation of people" via Gemini and "re-release an improved version soon" in order to fix its race inaccuracy errors; to discontinue peer-to-peer payments via GPay in the U.S., as it urges users to transition to Google Wallet. (As The Atlantic succintly puts, Google — and other generative-AI creators — are trapped in a bind. Generative AI is hyped not because it produces truthful or historically accurate representations: It's hyped because it allows the general public to instantly produce fantastical images that match a given prompt. Bad actors will always be able to abuse these systems.)
• Stability AI debuts a preview of Stable Diffusion 3, its next-gen flagship text-to-image model, aiming to offer improved image quality and better performance.
• Meta's Instagram launches its creator marketplace tool to connect brands with creators for paid partnerships or ads in eight new countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, New Zealand, and the U.K.; comes as Spotify announces AUX, its in-house music advisory agency for brands to "deepen the connections between artists, brands and fans."
• X starts rolling out audio and video calling to all users, after previously limiting the feature to Premium subscribers.
• The Browser Company's Arc launches a "pinch-to-summarize" AI feature in its Arc Search app that puts a webpage's main points into a neatly formatted summary.
• Privacy-focussed messaging apps Signal and Threema say they don't have any plans to offer compatibility with Meta's WhatsApp after the latter said it intends to open the platform with other messaging services to comply with the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA); says doing so "would mean a deterioration of our data protection standards."
• Microsoft announces "Generative erase", which uses generative AI to remove objects and people from images; to be available in the Photos app in Windows 10 and Windows 11.
• Apple faces scrutiny in the E.U. over its decision to completely block progressive web apps, as the antitrust regulators begins probing third-party developers.
• Google announces new Wear OS updates, including revamping notifications to improve battery life, Google Maps public transit directions and Google Wallet passes; adds options for handwritten annotations to Docs and AI-powered text summaries for Android Auto, and debuts a new feature called Chat with Gemini in its Messages app for Android to "draft messages, brainstorm ideas, plan events or simply have a fun conversation."
• Samsung unveils Galaxy Ring, its latest wearable that comes with heart rate and sleep monitoring; also integrates with AI to give deeper insights into a person's health.