Tech Roundup: Bluesky Surge, Instagram Updates & More

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

• Pakistan becomes the first country to block Bluesky, as the platform crosses 22.5 million active users and 645 million posts.
• It's worth noting at this stage that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralised, and as the service continues to attract more people, it's also going to have to deal with the eventual end goal of having to make a return on its investment despite it being a public benefit corporation.
• The company has already said it will roll out ads at some point alongside options for a premium account. That said, Bluesky is also being described as an "ideological echo chamber" for liberals, just as X becomes more explicitly right wing. In an increasingly fragmented social media landscape, can Bluesky be a lasting replacement for the site that once was Twitter? It remains to be seen.)
• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) says digital payment platforms processing over 50 million annual transactions in U.S. dollars will be subject to federal supervision in a month's time, giving it the authority to examine ‌Apple Pay‌ and other services for compliance with federal consumer financial laws, including privacy protection, fraud prevention and account stability.
• Microsoft finally begins to roll out its AI-powered Recall feature to Windows Copilot Plus PCs as a preview after several delays to address privacy and security concerns; introduces Microsoft Edge Game Assist in preview that aims to offer a rich gaming-centric browsing experience within the browser.
• Verified accounts on X have been found promoting the sale of child sex abuse videos, according to a new investigation from BBC.
• Brave adds AI chat to Search that lets users ask follow-up questions to initial queries, bringing together the capabilities of chat-first and search-first tools.
• Meta's Threads tests AI-generated summaries of topics in the app's Trending Now section in the U.S., adds the ability to search with a date range or for posts from a single account, and pilots an option to set For You, Following, or a custom feed as the default feed in a move seemingly sparked by competition from Bluesky; says it's adding options to share Instagram Reels directly to Threads and rebalancing ranking to prioritise content from people that users follow and warns that creators' "unconnected" reach may go down.
• Microsoft-owned LinkedIn says it will stop supporting native audio events beginning next month, urging users to switch to LinkedIn Live.
• WordPress.com owner Automattic acquires Grammarly competitor, Harper, adding another company to its portfolio of online content creation tools and services.
• Meta plans to use its AI-based "adult classifier" tool to identify young Instagram users who are lying about their age and automatically switch privacy settings; comes as the social media platform allows users to share their locations with friends via DMs for up to one hour, and pilots letting users reset the algorithmic suggestions that power Feed, Reels and Explore after launching new settings to fight sextortion by hiding teens' follower lists from potential blackmailers and preventing the ability to screenshot or screen record ephemeral images or videos sent in private messages.
• Meta begins rolling out message transcripts on WhatsApp globally for voice messages in select languages; claims the transcriptions occur locally on the devices for improved privacy; makes it easier to organize conversations with custom chat lists.
• Music streamer Spotify adds new audiobook features for Premium users, including options for authors and publishers to submit video clips up to 30 seconds long, dedicated Author Pages, and visuals that appear while users listen.
• OpenAI expands ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode feature to the web, letting users talk to the AI chatbot right from their browser; introduces a search feature on ChatGPT for Plus and Team users that makes it possible to search through chat history on the web.
• Telegram updates "mini apps" to be able to run full screen and be pinned to home screens; also adds the ability to share location with apps and let developers offer subscriptions using Telegram Stars.
• French AI startup Mistral adds web search, image generation and Canvas for in-line editing to its Le Chat chatbot, and unveils Pixtral Large, a 124B-parameter multimodal model; also releases Les Ministraux AI models in 3B and 8B sizes with 128,000 context windows that are aimed at on-device translation and internet-less smart assistants.
• Chinese handset maker Xiaomi, the second largest smartphone vendor in India, plans to replace its GetApps app store there with PhonePe's Indus AppStore in January 2025, amid ongoing geopolitical tensions.
• Roblox debuts new parental controls and gatekeeping features, like allowing parents link accounts to a child's and banning text chat for under 13s outside games, as part of its efforts to improve safety; comes after a report from Hindenburg Research that the video game platform inflated key metrics and described it as "an X-rated pedophile hellscape, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely abusive speech."
• DeepL debuts DeepL Voice to give users real-time text translations of others speaking in one of 13 different languages.
• ByteDance-owned TikTok launches Share to TikTok, which lets users directly share music from Apple Music and Spotify in a post to their TikTok Feed or in DMs via TikTok Messages; makes its AI ad creation tool, Symphony Creative Studio, available to all advertisers and adds the ability to use content from Getty Images with the tool.
• X starts rolling out an update to let users see public posts, and following and followers lists, of users who block them, but prevents blocked users from engaging or send a DM; says it has "re-architected" the scoring system for its Community Notes feature so that notes can now appear less than 20 minutes after a post is published, and updates its Privacy Policy to allow third-party "collaborators" to train their AI models on X user data, unless users opts out.
• Hugging Face announces an open-source software offering aimed at lowering costs for building chatbots and AI tools, in partnership with AWS, Google and others.
• Huawei launches HarmonyOS 5.0 and says over one billion devices run on HarmonyOS including smartphones, PCs and cars; supports more than 15,000 apps, up 10-fold from earlier in 2024.
• Sam Altman's identify and cryptocurrency venture Worldcoin rebrands as World and unveils a new Orb powered by Nvidia's Jetson chipset; plans to integrate its World ID verification into other software.
• Apple acquires popular photo editing company Pixelmator for an undisclosed sum; launches a new repair program for the iPhone 14 Plus to address a camera issue that prevents a preview from being displayed when using the rear camera.
• Global smartphone shipments grows 5% YoY in Q3 2024 to 309.9 million units, the strongest Q3 since 2021; Samsung leads with 57.5 million units, followed by Apple at 54.5 million, Xiaomi at 42.8 million (also includes POCO), OPPO at 28.6 million (also includes OnePlus) and vivo at 27.2 million.
• Amazon unveils AI creative studio and expands its suite of AI-powered ad tools to let U.S. advertisers use generative AI to make audio ads; comes as Meta tests new AI video editing capabilities that will allow advertisers to convert a still image into a video as well as expand the borders of a video.
• Google announces new features for the Fitbit Ace LTE, its smartwatch for kids, including family group chats, messaging for siblings and a new mini-game; brings its tap-to-pay Wallet app to kids with Family Link accounts.
• Microsoft-ownd GitHub plans to update Copilot to support Anthropic, Google and OpenAI models; unveils AI web app building tool Spark.
• The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) clears Google's partnership with Anthropic, finding that Google has not gained "material influence" over the AI startup, following a formal probe that began in late October 2024; recommends investigating Apple and Google's mobile ecosystem activities for antitrust concerns, stating Apple's Safari policies prevent competitors from offering new features like progressive web apps in web browsers.
• Brazil's antitrust regulator says Apple must allow app developers to link to external payment methods and offer other in-app payment processing options within 20 days following a complaint filed by Latin America e-commerce giant MercadoLibre in 2022.