Apple sues an Ontario recycling partner, Excel may have caused the loss of 16,000 COVID-19 tests in England, and Spotify has a new feature.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Tuesday, October 6, and I’m your host Baneet Braich.
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Apple is suing an Ontario recycling partner for allegedly reselling more than 100,000 iPhones, iPads, and watches it was hired to dismantle. At least 11,766 pounds of Apple devices left GEEP’s premises without being destroyed, according to PCMag.com. Apple hopes to obtain at least $31 million CAD from the former partner. The recycling firm denies all wrongdoing, saying it was individual employees who stole on their own behalf, but it doesn’t deny there was a theft. Over 500,000 products were sent to the partner between 2015 and 2017. When Apple did an audit, it discovered that 18 per cent of those devices were still accessing the internet under cellular networks. That’s just LTE devices. There could be devices sold without a cellular radio.
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A limitation on an old version of Microsoft Excel may have led to the loss of 16,000 COVD-19 tests in England. Microsoft Excel’s one million-row limit could be how Public Health England misplaced the tests, according to the Guardian. The problem is that PHE’s own developers picked an old file format to track contact tracing progress – known as XLS. This meant that each template could only handle 65,000 rows of data as opposed to the million or more that Excel is capable of today. The data error means that possibly 50,000 potentially infectious people could have been missed by contact tracers. [Twitter thread]
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Spotify is getting a convenient feature, which is music to the ears of those who don’t know the title of the song but know the lyrics. You can now search for songs by their lyrics on iOS and Android. You can type in some lyrics into Spotify’s search bar then songs that match will come up. Spotify is catching up to Apple which has let users search for lyrics since 2018.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. I’m Baneet Braich, thanks for listening.