Tech Roundup: MacPaw Setapp App Store, Meta Threads API & More

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

• Indian IT watchdog MeitY issues an advisory asking developers to seek "explicit permission" before deploying any AI models or AI-backed algorithms for users in the country; instructs companies to label all synthetically created media and text or to embed such artificially generated content with unique identifier or metadata so that it is easily identifiable.
• Microsoft announces a new multiyear partnership with French AI startup Mistral by investing €15 million, as it looks beyond OpenAI; comes as Mistral releases Mistral Large, its latest AI model for "complex multilingual reasoning tasks, including text understanding, transformation and code generation."
• Meta's Instagram confirms it's working on a Friend Map feature, which is similar to Snapchat's Snap Map and allows users to see their friends' locations in real-time; drops its lawsuit against Israeli web scraping company Bright Data after a U.S. court ruled the social media giant had not presented sufficient evidence that the firm had scraped anything other than public data.
• Caller identity services company Truecaller launches call recording and transcription for paid users in India, more than six months after introducing the former in the U.S.
• OpenAI asks U.S. federal court to dismiss parts of the New York Times' copyright suit against it, alleging it "paid someone to hack OpenAI's products" (aka prompt engineering) and violated OpenAI's terms of use to generate 100 examples of copyright infringement for its case. (The company is also facing three new fresh lawsuits from The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet, who have sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement, including the removal of author, title and other copyright information while training AI models. The publications have also pointed out how OpenAI offers an opt-out system so website owners can block content from its web crawlers, meaning that the company must be aware of potential copyright infringement. In a related development, Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, accusing them of betraying an agreement from OpenAI's founding to develop AI toward the "benefit of humanity" over profits, a claim the company has rejected.)
• Google's YouTube Music adds support for offline downloads on desktop web; updates Google Photos with an improved memories features that leverages users' activity data for added personalisation, and rolls out support for glanceable directions in Maps on Android and iOS.
• Apple winds down its long-running effort to build an autonomous electric car, codenamed Project Titan, after spending more than US$ 10 billion and investing more than a decade into the efforts.
• Substack debuts direct messaging, letting users have private one-on-one conversations on the newsletter platform.
• Adobe unveils Project Music GenAI Control, a platform that can generate audio from text descriptions or a reference melody and let users customise the results.
• Axel Springer and 31 other media groups in Europe file a US$ 2.3 billion lawsuit against Google, alleging that they suffered losses due to its digital ad practices.
• Indian streaming services JioCinema and Disney+Hotstar to merge after Reliance, its portfolio company Viacom18, and Disney combine their businesses in the country in a deal valued at US$ 8.5 billion. (The joint venture is expected to reach more than 750 million viewers across India and complete by the end of March 2025.)
• Automattic, which owns Tumblr and WordPress, enters into talks with AI companies Midjourney and OpenAI to provide training data scraped from users' posts; adds a new setting that will allow users to opt-out of data sharing with third-parties, including AI firms.
• Bitcoin surges, briefly touching $64,000 for the first time since November 2021.
• Indian government announces proposals for a facial recognition system that spans its massive railway network by installing face-detecting CCTV cameras across 44,038 coaches.
• Messaging app Telegram launches an ad revenue sharing system for channel owners in nearly 100 countries, with a 50/50 split with channel owners that will be paid out in toncoin.
• Google says it's working with under-resourced publishers to test a generative AI platform designed to produce news articles and "create aggregated content more efficiently by indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, and then summarizing and publishing them as a new article."
• Apple debuts a new Heavy Rotation Mix playlist on Apple Music, offering users easy access to songs that they listen to most.
• Brave launches AI-powered assistant Leo to help create real-time summaries of webpages or videos, and generate long form content.
• Microsoft launches Copilot for Finance in public preview, allowing users reconcile data in Excel and summarise relevant customer account details in Outlook; updates Windows 11 with Copilot improvements and the ability to select and remove unwanted objects in photos via Generative Erase.
• X (formerly Twitter) adds a feature that lets Spaces hosts enable live video when they create a new session; comes as Mastodon makes it possible for users to share their profiles via QR codes; quietly reinstates deadnaming and misgendering policy that aims to "reduce the visibility of posts that purposefully use different pronouns to address someone other than what that person uses for themselves, or that use a previous name that someone no longer goes by as part of their transition" after dropping it in April 2023.
• Stack Overflow launches OverflowAPI to give AI companies access to its knowledge base; partners with Google to "surface important knowledge base information and coding assistance capabilities to developers."
• Google announces a trio of new features for Chrome browser, letting users get search suggestions based on what others are looking for, see more images for suggested searches and find search suggestions even with a poor connection.
• HP introduces a print subscription service All-in Plan that starts at US$ 6.99 per month; allows users to choose a printer of their choice, a specific amount of printed pages, get ink delivered and an option to upgrade after two years.
• Software development company MacPaw announces plans to launch Setapp as an alternative app store in the European Union next month with a curation of "carefully selected assortment of apps."
• Meta says its Threads API will be broadly available to developers by June 2024 and plans to deprecate the Facebook News tab in the U.S. and Australia in early April 2024 after deprecating the feature in the U.K., France and Germany last year; to stop signing deals for traditional news content in those countries.
• Apple backtracks on removing support for progressive web apps in the E.U. after criticism; says a number of government agencies in the region and elsewhere have voiced concerns about security risks associated with sideloading apps, a key requirement of the Digital Markets Act. (Apple's "proposed scheme for compliance" has also been met with disapproval from Spotify, Epic Games, Deezer and others, who said the new terms "make a mockery of the DMA and the considerable efforts by the European Commission and EU institutions to make digital markets competitive.")
• Google confirms it's blocking RCS-based messaging features on rooted Android devices in a bid to prevent spam and abuse; pulls more than 12 popular apps such as Shaadi, Matrimony.com, Bharat Matrimony, Naukri, 99acres, Kuku FM, Stage, Altt and QuackQuack from the Play Store in India for persistently not complying with billing policies by either integrating Google Play's billing system or an alternate solution, escalating a three-year dispute in the country. (Some of these apps have been reinstated on the Play Store sans in-app purchases features.)