Tech Roundup: Bangladesh Internet Shutdown, Global IT Outage & More

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

• Bangladesh faces a near-total national internet shutdown as the government attempts to quell widespread student protests against the quota system (which requires a third of government jobs to be reserved for relatives of veterans who had fought for Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan in 1971) that have resulted in the deaths of at least 114 people.
• A flawed configuration update pushed by cybsecurity company CrowdStrike causes global havoc (with the exception of China) after it cripples 8.5 million Windows devices, making it one of the most disruptive cyber events in history. (Unsurprisingly, the panic caused by the CrowdStrike crash has given criminals an opening to take advantage of impacted customers.)
• ByteDance-owned TikTok faces legal setback after the E.U.'s General Court says TikTok is large enough to fall under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
• Meta says it plans to withhold future multimodal AI models in the European Union due to what the company says is a lack of clarity from regulators; to only offer text-only models; decides to suspend its generative AI tools in Brazil after the government objected to Meta's new privacy policy on using personal data to train AI models.
• The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opens a formal investigation into Microsoft's Inflection AI investment by hiring its former employees and if it has "resulted in the creation of a relevant merger situation" and, if so, caused a "substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services."
• Italy's antitrust agency launches a probe into Google and Alphabet over alleged unfair commercial practices related to how the company obtains consent from users in the European Union to link their activity across its apps and services for purposes of ad targeting; also faces scrutiny in the E.U. over whether its multi-year AI deal with Samsung hinders rival chatbots on the South Korean company's smartphones.
• Spotify launches an AI DJ that speaks Spanish in beta for Premium users in markets where its English-language DJ is available, alongside Spain and Latin America.
• Google unveils Project Oscar, an open-source platform to help product teams monitor software issues or bugs using AI agents.
• Apple's India revenue rises ~33% YoY to almost US$ 8 billion from March 2023 to March 2024, and up from US$ 4.1 billion the year before, in part driven the sales of high-end iPhones, as global smartphone market grows more than 6% in Q2 2024, the highest YoY growth in the last three years.
• Swiss privacy-focussed company Proton launches a "privacy-first" AI writing assistant for email called Proton Scribe that's based on Mistral 7B and runs locally on-device.
• Meta's Instagram expands Notes, its temporary away status-like feature, to let users optionally leave Notes on Reels and grid posts; allows users to add up to 20 audio tracks in a single reel.
• X is reportedly working on a new feature that allows users to disable links in replies in an effort to cut down on spam.
• Xiaomi unveils two new foldable devices, the Mix Fold 4 and the Mix Flip, its first flip foldable, in China.
• Microsoft researchers unveil SpreadsheetLLM, an encoding method designed to enable large language models (LLMs) to efficiently understand and analyse complex spreadsheet data.

• OpenAI details an algorithm by which LLMs can learn to better explain themselves to their users and improve the legibility of their outputs and showcases a safety technique called "instruction hierarchy" to prevent misuse and unauthorised instructions that are designed to circumvent a model's safety guardrails and generate unintended responses; incorporates into its latest "cost-efficient" model GPT-4o mini, as it unveils new compliance and administrative tools for ChatGPT Enterprise to better support compliance programe and data security. (OpenAI has also partnered with Amazon, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, PayPal and others to form the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI) to share best practices and open-source methodologies for secure AI deployment.)
• Google announces plans to end its Notes experiment, which debuted in December 2023 as a way to let users leave "helpful tips about an article" directly on Search; to discontinue goo.gl URL shortener links after August 25, 2025, years after the company stopped generating new goo.gl URLs in March 2019.
• Apple announces plans to launch new immersive video content for the Vision Pro over the next few months to address the problem of content drought in the platform.
• Anthropic Apple, NVIDIA come under criticism for training their AI models on datasets created by EleutherAI that contan YouTube video transcripts; Apple says its OpenELM model doesn't power any AI features, including Apple Intelligence.
• Microsoft launches its AI-powered Designer app out of preview on iOS and Android, letting users create images and stickers, as Anthropic debuts its Claude chatbot app for Android, more than two months after launching an iOS app.
• Google tests "AI-generated conversational radio" in YouTube Music, allowing Premium users in the U.S. create a custom radio station by "describing exactly what they want."
• Yandex finalises a US$ 5.4 billion deal to sell its Russian business to a consortium of Russian investors, including Lukoil, and renames the new offshoot as Nebius Group, months
• Apple adds a "Recovered" album to the Photos app that shows previously lost or damaged photos and videos in iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia; comes after a database corruption bug in iOS 17.5 resurfaced deleted photos.
• DeepL releases a new LLM with support for translating German, Japanese and Simplified Chinese to and from English; Haiper launches Haiper 1.5 model that lets users to generate 8-second-long clips from text, image and video prompts; and Mistral debuts two 7 billion parameter LLMs: Codestral Mamba, for code generation, and Mathstral, for math reasoning and scientific discovery, and releases Mistral NeMo, which offers a large context window of up to 128,000 tokens and claims to offer "reasoning, world knowledge and coding accuracy."
• Apple approves free PC emulator UTM SE for the App Store on iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro, making it possible for users to emulate old versions of Windows OS, macOS and Linux to play classic software and games on Apple devices, reversing an earlier rejection that cited violations of its guidelines and that "PC is not a console."
• Meta launches a small pilot program to let some researchers access Instagram data for up to about six months to study the app's effect on the well-being of teens and young adults; rolls out a revamped version of its Quest mobile app, now called Meta Horizon, that links it more closely with its 3D social platform Horizon Worlds.
• Google slashes Maps API pricing for Indian developers by about 70% and starts accepting payments in rupee, after Indian startup Ola began offering one-year free developer access to Ola Maps; improves support for composing with Markdown in Google Docs on web with new import/export features and the ability to convert Markdown to Docs content on paste.
• Ride hailing service Uber introduces a new feature that lets users see average wait times and costs for rides in more than 10,000 cities, as it announces the launch fo Uber Boat and Yacht services in Europe.
• Meta-owned WhatsApp announces the release of a filter called Favourties that lets users "quickly find the people and groups that matter most at the top of your calls tab and as a filter for your chats."
• Apple partners with Taboola as one of its "authorised advertising resellers" on Apple News and Stocks, replacing Yahoo, to serve native ads.
• Online dating platform Tinder jumps into the AI bandwagon with Photo Selector to allow users to "choose their profile pictures from a curated selection of photos retrieved directly from their devices."
• Google reportedly offered Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), a trade group of E.U.-based cloud firms, US$ 512 million as an attempt to derail an antitrust settlement with Microsoft over allegations that the company made it difficult for business customers to change their cloud service providers, according to a report from Bloomberg.