10 things in tech you need to know today

Baidu CEO Robin Li took being drenched by a protester surprisingly well.



  1. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Dell, and HP are all reportedly drawing up plans to move huge chunks of production out of China. For Google, Amazon, and Microsoft the main areas of concern are gaming consoles, e-readers, and smart speakers while for Dell and HP, notebooks are where they’re looking to shift production.
  2. Samsung has completed a redesign of its folding phone, the Galaxy Fold, after journalists discovered screen problems with an earlier version of the device. The design will mean Samsung can release the device in time for the holiday season, according to Bloomberg.
  3. The founder of popular email app Superhuman has issued a public apology and has committed to making changes to the tool’s controversial “read status” feature. Rahul Vohra said the team has made four immediate changes to the app: the app has stopped logging all location data, a new version of the app released Wednesday will no longer collect location data, all historical location data will be deleted, and the read status feature will now be off by default for all users.
  4. An entrepreneur in Chile who manufactured kits for troubled health startup uBiome says the firm owes him nearly $600,000. Matias Gutierrez says he hasn’t been paid in full in almost a year.
  5. A pair of Facebook advertisements for President Donald Trump’s 2020 election campaign used models to depict real supporters and stock footage of a Japanese storefront to show a US business. The videos appear to show Trump supporters such as “Tracey from Florida,” but they include small disclaimers saying: “Actual testimonial. Actor portrayal.”
  6. Facebook-owned social networking apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram experienced outages on July 3. The outages appeared to impact users in the United States, Europe, and South America, according to Downdetector.com.
  7. AI legal assistant DoNotPay has raised $4.6 million in seed funding led by Felicis Ventures with participation from Index Ventures, Founders Fund, Highland Capital, Tuesday, and Coatue Asset Management. Founder Josh Browder told Business Insider that although many of his classmates want to work at Facebook or Google, he was passionate about making the fight for justice against corporations and governments easier for all people, “from VCs to homeless people to everyone in between.”
  8. A US court has ruled that Amazon can be held liable for defective products sold on its platform. The ruling comes after a woman sued Amazon in 2016 after she was blinded by a retractable dog leash that snapped and hit her in the face.
  9. Google and Facebook are under scrutiny in the UK over their dominance of the online ad market and people’s data. The UK’s competition watchdog will look into whether consumers are “able and willing to control how data about them is used and collected.”
  10. Baidu CEO Robin Li was doused in water by a protester while he was giving a speech about AI at a conference in Beijing, China. The billionaire took the bizarre incident surprisingly well, simply asking: “What’s your problem?”

