Tech Roundup: OpenAI Public Benefit Corporation, YouTube Playables & More

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

• Apple removes the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus and third-generation iPhone SE from its online stores across the European Union as a regulation requiring smartphones with wired charging capabilities to be equipped with a USB-C port in the region comes into effect on December 28, 2024.
• OpenAI spells out its transition to a for-profit company in 2025 by creating a public benefit corporation; says its non-profit arm would receive shares in the new public benefit corporation at a valuation determined by independent financial advisors and that the nonprofit will pursue charitable activities in health care, education and science.
• Apple gets a legal reprieve after a Brazilian judge overturns an injunction that would have forced Apple to enable iOS sideloading by the end of December 2024, calling the regulator's decision "disproportionate"; defeats a U.S. lawsuit that accused the company of illegally deceiving customers into paying for iCloud storage.
• AI company Anthropic updates its Responsible Scaling Policy, setting benchmarks for when an AI model's abilities reach a point where additional safeguards are necessary.
• Google's YouTube experiments with multiplayer mini-games under its collection of lightweight, free games dubbed Playables; tests a new "Play something" button that shows random videos based on user preferences.
• Microsoft releases Windows 11 ISOs for Arm64 PCs, letting users clean install Windows via official offline media directly on Arm64 hardware, including the latest Snapdragon X Copilot+ PCs.
• Goldman Sachs and Apple face a collective fine of US$ 89 million in penalties and customer refunds from the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) over widespread service failures and deceptive practices in their joint Apple Card venture; gets accused of deceiving users about interest-free payment plans for Apple devices, affecting hundreds of thousands of cardholders since 2019. (The CFPB has also proposed a rule limiting data brokers' ability to sell Americans' sensitive personal and financial information.)
• Adobe adds AI tools to Photoshop, like Distraction Removal, and makes features like Generative Fill and Generative Expand generally available; debuts Project Know How to link ownership of an image or video across any online platform and adds the ability to attach content credentials to an image even when it is printed and displayed on a physical object.
• Proton expands Scribe, an on-device AI-powered assistive text composer in Proton Mail, to all its paid plans, and adds support for French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Japanese.
• Google makes it easier for drivers to find and reserve parking in Canada and the U.S. via an integration with SpotHero on Search and Maps.
• AI search engine Perplexity partners with several news organisations as part of its publisher program that allows it to share ad revenue when its chatbot surfaces their content in response to a user query via its related questions feature. (As the company puts: "Brands can pay to ask specific related follow-up questions in our answer engine interface and on Pages. When Perplexity earns revenue from an interaction where a publisher's content is referenced, that publisher will also earn a share."
• Embattled genomics and biotechnology company 23andMe raises privacy concerns as it deals with financial woes and a data breach, prompting worries about the future of genetic data that has been collected from millions of customers to date.
• Adult entertainment platform OnlyFans generates revenue worth US$ 6.6 billion in 2023, as the company faces allegations that it hosts hundreds of sexually explicit videos and images of minors and that as many as 26 accounts featured suspected child sex abuse.
• Venezuela's top court fines TikTok US$ 10 million over viral challenge deaths, citing a failure to take necessary measures, and orders it to open an office in the country.
• Kyivstar, Ukraine's largest mobile operator, signs a deal with Starlink to roll out text messaging in Q4 2025, with plans to add voice and data in later stages.
• Telegram blocks access to channels belonging to major Russian state-owned news outlets across much of Europe, including Poland, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy and Latvia, for violating local laws; Russia calls the action "an act of political censorship" and that it will implement "symmetrical retaliatory measures" if international human rights organizations do not intervene.
• The Indian government strikes a landmark US$ 715 million deal with 30 global academic publishers to provide nationwide free access to nearly 13,000 research journals as part of the "One Nation One Subscription" initiative that launches in January 2025.
• Zoom offers US$ 18 million to settle a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) probe from 2020 over the company's privacy policies and misleading claims that its service was end-to-end encrypted, when it was not the case; comes nearly four years after it settled with the Federal Trade Commission for making engaging in a "series of deceptive and unfair practices that undermined the security of its users."
• The Court of Justice of the European Union says Booking.com's restrictions on hotels offering lower rates on their websites or on rival sites are unnecessary and may reduce competition, but notes that they are not anti-competitive.
• Google-owned YouTube debuts a new 'supervised experience' for teens that notifies parents when a video is uploaded; also enables parents and guardians to link their accounts to the accounts of their teenage children.
• Airbnb launches a Co-Host Network that makes it possible for hosts to provide personalised hosting support.
• Indian National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) extends a deadline for implementing a 30% cap on any company's share of transactions on UPI payments network to December 31, 2026, providing relief to Google Pay and PhonePe; also removes a 100 million user cap on WhatsApp Pay, letting Meta roll out the mobile payments service to all of its more than 500 million users in the country.
• A New York Times investigation finds that dozens of potential pedophiles have exploited the child influencer industry, portraying themselves as photographers or social media experts to get close to children.
• The Open Source Initiative (OSI) releases its official definition of "open" artificial intelligence, requiring companies developing such systems to reveal information about the data used to train their models, the complete source code, and the settings and weights from the training. (The definition directly challenges Meta's Llama, which is promoted as the largest open-source AI model, given that it does not provide access to training data.)
• The AI boom leads to rise in power consumption, raising concerns over price increases and even widespread outages as more data centres are built; new evidence shows AI data centres may also be distorting the normal flow of electricity for millions of Americans, according to Bloomberg.
• Meta says it intends to populate its social media platforms with AI-generated users, adding "they'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI."