Tech Roundup: Google Essentials, Telegram CEO Arrest & More

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

• Telegram's chief executive and founder Pavel Durov gets arrested in France over its lax moderation policies, allowing extremist and malicious activity to thrive on the platform.
• Allegations against Durov, who is also a French citizen, include that his platform is being used for child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, and that Telegram refused to share information or documents with investigators when required by law.
• While encryption has been a long-running point of friction between governments and tech companies around the world, it bears repeating at this stage that Telegram is not encrypted by default.
• Pakistan's internet speeds drop 30% to 40% over the past few weeks, leading to speculations that the government is testing a nationwide firewall.
• Apple unveils iOS changes to comply with the E.U.'s Digital Markets Act (DMA), including browser choice screen updates, a default app settings section to manage default apps, and the ability to delete certain system apps such as as App Store‌, Messages, Camera, Photos and Safari.
• Google debuts a new AI-powered troubleshooting tool to help select YouTube content creators recover access to their hacked accounts; removes support for YouTube picture-in-picture mode in Google Messages for Android.
• Meta-owned Instagram announces a Myspace-like feature to let users add 30 seconds of a song to their profile from Instagram's library of music and announces support for adding text, layering images and stickers to photo and carousel posts; confirms users can now cross-post from Instagram and Facebook to Threads globally, after rolling out Instagram and Facebook cross-posting in 2021. (Meta is also shutting down all third-party face filters and AR effects on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, along with the tools used to create them, on January 14, 2025.)
• Microsoft says Recall will be available to Windows Insiders in October 2024, after delaying the launch of the AI feature in June over privacy and security concerns; launches a single unified Teams app that allows switching between work, personal and education accounts on Windows and Mac.
• Apple debuts Podcasts on desktop web, letting users log in to listen to podcasts, view the Up Next queue and library, and browse new shows, at podcasts.apple.com, weeks after launching Apple Maps on the web.
• Microsoft confirms the Windows Control Panel, which debuted in 1985 with Windows 1.0, is "in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app."
• Zomato acquires Indian payment giant Paytm's entertainment ticketing business for US$ 244.1 million; comes as PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm account for 12.3 billion out of 14.4 billion UPI transactions in July 2024.
• AMD agrees to buy New Jersey-based ZT Systems, founded in 1994 to design and make servers, server racks and other infrastructure, in a deal worth for US$ 4.9 billion.
• Raspberry Pi launches a Raspberry Pi 5 with 2GB of RAM for US$ 50, alongside the existing 4GB model for US$ 60 and 8GB for US$ 80.
• Microsoft releases three Phi-3.5 models designed for basic and fast reasoning on Hugging Face, as OpenAI launches fine-tuning for GPT-4o, letting developers customise a version of the model with their own datasets to improve domain-specific performance; updates its Service Agreement to reflect that "AI services are not designed, intended, or to be used as substitutes for professional advice." (The development comes amid reports that Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service uses AI-generated performance metrics to single out individual workers, effectively enabling employee surveillance.)
• Meta says it is testing ephemeral posts on Threads that disappear within 24 hours with a limited number of users, as it says it's not testing ads on the platform after references to sponsored posts and ads are discovered in the app's source code; reportedly cancels plans for a premium mixed reality headset codenamed La Jolla due to costs associated with using MicroOLED displays.
• Neuralink says it has successfully implanted in a second trial patient, who had a spinal cord injury, its device designed to give paralysed patients the ability to use digital devices by thinking alone, and 400 of the implant's 1,024 electrodes are working; says the individual can design 3D objects and play Counter-Strike 2.
• The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMS) accepts Meta's ad rules changes to ensure that Meta doesn't use Marketplace advertisers' data to improve Marketplace, without having to opt in or out; temporarily closes a pair of investigations into Apple and Google's respective app stores, citing impending "digital markets competition regime."
• Google tests a new tab declutter feature in Android that moves inactive tabs to a separate panel; faces legal setback after a U.S. appeals court revives a class action suit by Google Chrome users who say the company collected personal information without their consent even if Chrome was not synced with a Google account.
• Zoom announces a new single-user webinar feature that allows up to 1 million attendees for webinars.
• NVIDIA faces criticism for engaging in unlicensed data scraping, using movie and game footage from across the internet (including Netflix and YouTube) to train its artificial intelligence products, as OpenAI aims to address the copyright problem by signing new deals with major online publishers (barring The New York Times) to gain access to their entire archives and surface recent and authoritative content on a wide variety of topics. (In a related development, Anthropic has been sued for misusing "hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books" to train Claude.)
• Google adds a Polish feature that edits existing drafts to Gemini in Gmail, on top of Formalise, Elaborate, and Shorten, for Google One AI Premium and Workspace; makes it easier for users to access their saved passwords, bookmarks and addresses on Android and desktop web by simply signing into their Google accounts without having to enable Chrome Sync, following last year's rollout on iOS.
• Amazon-owned livestreaming service Twitch plans to raise its new Tier 1 sub and gift subscription prices on mobile in more than 40 countries on October 1, 2024, to US$ 7.99.
• Google's YouTube expands its partnership with Shopify to onboard more brands for its YouTube Shopping affiliate program, allowing content creators to tag thousands of new brands to tag in their shopping videos; debuts a new Windows desktop app called Essentials that packages a few Google services, like Messages and Photos, and includes links to download many others.
• Social media giant ByteDance's video-editing app CapCut and chatbot Doubao lead global artificial intelligence (AI) app downloads in July 2024 at 38.42 million and 27.45 million downloads, outpacing OpenAI ChatGPT's 19.81 million in the same period.
• India's Open Network for Digital Commerce expands into financial services, starting with APIs for digital lending, and adds nine lending service providers.