Bytes: What’s new in tech
Microsoft’s China problem
Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, has been censoring searches of names of people who are politically sensitive for China, said Aaron Tilley in The Wall Street Journal. “Bing’s autofill system, which offers guesses on what users are searching for after a few keystrokes, often fell silent” when users looked for even highprofile Chinese names, including President Xi Jinping. The findings, reported by the Citizen Lab cybersecurity group, affected searches not just within China but in North America too. Microsoft has maintained “a long presence in China,” and since Google was blocked there, Bing occupies a bigger share of the search market—although it still lags well behind China’s Baidu. Microsoft blamed the autofill glitch on a “misconfiguration,” but this is not the first such mistake; last year, Bing blocked U.S.based searches for images and videos of the iconic Tiananmen Square figure “Tank Man.”
A cyber war in Costa Rica
Costa Rica’s president said the country is “at war” with a Russia-linked ransomware group that has infiltrated numerous government institutions, disabling the country’s payment system for municipal services as well as its tax and customs systems, said Carly Page in TechCrunch. The hacking group, known as Conti, has doubled its original ransom to $20 million and threatened to “overthrow the government by means of a cyberattack,” urging citizens to “go out on the street and demand payment.” Cybersecurity experts say Costa Rica was likely “unlucky and targeted as part of a wider operation.” Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves, whose term only began on May 8, has blamed his predecessor for not taking cybersecurity seriously enough.
Apple changes subscription rules
Apple changed its App Store rules to allow subscriptions to auto-renew for a higher price without asking, said Mitchell Clark in The Verge. Previously, “users would have to manually opt into a subscription renewal if it came with a price bump.” Now you will still be notified about a price increase, but Apple is no longer preventing apps from automatically renewing by default. The company says it wants “to avoid the situation where users unintentionally lose access to a subscription because they missed an opt-in message.” Apple rules still prevent developers from raising monthly subscription prices by more than 50 percent or $5, or annual ones by more than $50, without asking users for approval.