Tech Roundup: Airbnb Icons, Microsoft Phi-3 & More

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

• China imposes new restrictions on the country's internet companies as part of its expanded State Secrets Law that compels social media giants Tencent, ByteDance and Weibo to take action if users post sensitive information.
• Google updates its ad policy to ban the promotion of services that generate, distribute or store synthetic sexually explicit content, starting May 30, 2024.
• The European Parliament formally adopts right-to-repair rules clarifying manufacturer obligations to provide repair services; "new rules ensure that manufacturers provide timely and cost-effective repair services and inform consumers about their rights to repair" and help consumers "assess and compare repair services."
• U.K. regulator Ofcom opens a probe into OnlyFans, an online adult content subscription service, for failing to prevent those under 18 from accessing pornography through the platform.
• Major AI companies, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Anthropic and Amazon, sign on to an initiative to add adopt "Safety by Design" principles that "guard against the creation and spread of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (AIG-CSAM) and other sexual harms against children."
• U.K.-based users sue LGBT dating service Grindr for allegedly sharing personal data, such as their HIV status, with ad companies like Localytics from May 2018 to April 2020.
• Apple gets threatened with legal action by the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo over allegations that the company's products contain minerals that are smuggled into Rwanda, despite its claims of environmental and social responsibility.
• Google paid US$ 20 billion to Apple in 2022 to be the default search engine in the Safari web browser, according to new unsealed court documents as part of the U.S. government's antitrust lawswuit against the company; internal emails from 2019 show that Microsoft's motivation for investing heavily and partnering with OpenAI came from a sense of falling badly behind Google.
• Newsletter platform Substack allows writers paywall their Chat discussion spaces as it continues to add new features to make it a viable alternative to Twitter/X; rivals Ghost and Buttondown plan to add ActivityPub support for interoperability.
• Airbnb launches Icons, a new category of experiences that lets users meet celebrities and stay in outlandish venues.
• Atlassian debuts an AI product called Rovo that gives businesses contextual search, insights, and the ability to add custom agents to handle tasks and "complete projects."
• AI company Anthropic debuts an iOS app for its Claude chatbot and unveils a Team plan for companies for US$ 30 per user per month.
• Microsoft-owned LinkedIn launches three Wordle-style puzzle games Pinpoint, Queens and Crossclimb to "spark conversations and friendly competition among professionals around the world"; launches Phi-3, a family of open cost-effective small language models (SLMs), to take on Google's Gemma 2B, Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku and Meta's Llama 3 8B.
• Amazon's Audible tests using Prime Video data for audiobook recommendations as competition with Spotify heats up.
• Google rolls out "Audio Emoji" for its Phone app for Android, letting callers select an emoji to play animated sound effects; adds option to access Gemini from Chrome's address bar using "@gemini" and finally integrates Keep and Tasks by automatically saving Keep reminders to Tasks.
• Google DeepMind co-founder and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman brands artificial intelligence (AI) as a "new digital species," stating "I predict that we'll come to see them as digital companions, new partners in the journeys of all our lives."
• Meta adds options to plan and organise events on WhatsApp and respond to invites within Communities; pilots a new feature to restrict users engaging in bulk messaging and spammy behaviour by preventing them from initiating new chats.
• X tweaks its block feature to let users see replies to their posts even by users who have blocked them, with the aim of identifying and reporting "bad content"; launches Stories on X, with news curated and summarised by Grok AI, for Premium subscribers in the Explore tab on iOS and on the web, and announces plans to launch a dedicated TV app for videos uploaded to the platform.
• Microsoft bans law enforcement from using its real-time facial recognition tech on mobile cameras in the U.S. to ID a person in "uncontrolled, in-the-wild" environments, which "includes (without limitation) police officers on patrol using body-worn or dash-mounted cameras using facial recognition technology to attempt to identify individuals present in a database of suspects or prior inmates."
• Apple adds carveouts to its €0.50 E.U. core technology fee, exempting free app developers and giving those with annual global revenue under €10 million a three-year "free on-ramp."
• Music streamer Spotify tests putting lyrics behind paywall in an attempt to push users on the free, ad-supported tier to pay for service.
• Apple says iPhone sales in emerging markets like India, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia are growing, as it attempts to downplay falling sales in China. (iPhone sales in China have fallen 19.1% YoY to a 15.7% share in Q1 2024, according to Counterpoint Research, while that of Huawei has risen 69.7% YoY to 15.5%. On the contrary, global smartphone market has grown 6% YoY to 296.9 million units in Q1, with Samsung recapturing the top spot with a 20% market share. Apple shipments recorded a 13% decline during the same period.)
• Google begins rolling out labels in the Play Store to denote official state and federal government apps in more than 14 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, the U.K. and the U.S.
• Roblox announces plans to roll out virtual billboards with video advertisements that will be displayed in its virtual worlds.
• Meta's Instagram unveils new stickers in Instagram Stories that allows users to share songs and create custom stickers from photos and videos; adds quote post controls for all Threads users, who can allow quotes from everyone on Threads, only the people they follow, or disable quote posts, and expands Hidden Words to let users filter out words, phrases, and emoji.
• Nothing announces plans to deeply integrate OpenAI ChatGPT with its smartphones and earbuds, as companies rush to bring AI technology to their products at breakneck speed.
• VerSe Innovation, the parent firm of Indian news aggregator app Dailyhunt, acquires popular digital newsstand platform Magzter.
• AWS discontinues its Snowmobile service, an 18-wheeler truck introduced in 2016 to help customers transport large amounts of on-premises data to AWS facilities; says it has released other services to efficiently migrate data to AWS and that "clients had to deal with power, cooling, networking, parking and security when they used the Snowmobile service."
• Tether teams up with The Open Network (TON) Foundation to allow customers to send crypto payments using the popular Telegram instant messaging service.
• Ecosia, the search engine that funds tree-planting initiatives with a portion of its search ad profits, launches a new cross-platform browser that's based on Google's open-source browser project Chromium, joining the likes of Brave, DuckDuckGo, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Vivaldi.
• Swiss company Proton introduces dark web monitoring to alert paying users of credential leaks associated with their email domains (@pm.me, @protonmail.ch, etc.).
• Meta opens its mixed reality OS, now called Horizon OS, to third-parties, with companies like Asus and Lenovo set to launch Horizon OS-compatible headsets.
• Buy now, pay later (BNPL) company Klarna partners with Uber to power Uber and Uber Eats payments, adding its Pay Now option in the U.S., Germany and Sweden.
• Apple acquires Paris-based artificial intelligence startup Datakalab amid its push to deliver on-device AI tools; shares OpenELM, a family of LLMs with 270M to 3B parameters, designed to run on-device and pre-trained and fine-tuned on public datasets.
• Fintech giant Stripe will let customers accept cryptocurrency payments, starting with USDC on Solana, Ethereum and Polygon, the first time it has taken crypto payments since 2018, when it dropped support for Bitcoin due to it being too unstable.
• Adobe debuts its next-generation Firefly Image 3 Foundation Model in Photoshop with higher-quality image generation, better understanding of prompts and improved photorealistic quality.
• IBM agrees to buy HashiCorp, which helps companies manage cloud infrastructure, in a deal valuing HashiCorp at US$ 6.4 billion and expected to close by the end of 2024.
• Microsoft begins rolling out Windows 11 Start menu ads that show app "recommendations" from "a small set of curated developers."
• Community publishing platform Wattpad, which had 94 million active users as of August 2022, removes the ability for users to send each other direct messages, claiming that the feature has "only been relevant to a small percentage" of its global user base.
• Sonos completely overhauls its Android and iOS apps for an improved listening experience; to discontinue its Windows and macOS apps in favour of web apps.
• Meta rolls out its Meta AI intelligent assistant in early access for the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, mainly to help identify objects, translate signs and write Instagram captions.
• Indian on-demand video streaming service JioCinema introduces a new monthly subscription plan starting from 35 cents, to edge out competitors Netflix and Amazon Prime Video in the country.
• Snapchat announces the ability to edit messages for up to five minutes after sending them; initially limits the feature to paying subscribers.
• OpenAI updates its enterprise-grade features for API customers, further enriching its Assistants API and introducing new tools aimed at enhancing security and administrative control, as well as managing costs more effectively.