Tech Digest daily roundup: Leak reveals Samsung launch event details

Just one week before the next Galaxy Unpacked 2022 event, all the upcoming Samsung products have been leaked. Legendary leakster Evan Blass (@evleaks) published high-resolution press renders of the Galaxy Z Flip 4, Galaxy Z Fold 4, Galaxy Watch 5, Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, and the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro in all their regular color variants. This is not the first time press renders of these devices have leaked. Still, it’s good to see them in all their colors. The Galaxy Z Flip 4 can be seen in Black, Bora Purple, Light Blue, and Pink Gold. The phone looks extremely similar to its predecessor, the Galaxy Z Flip 3. So apart from their software features and official pricing, there doesn’t seem to be anything unknown about these upcoming Galaxy devices. Sammobile 

Want to watch a top-secret government flight live? Track a drug kingpin’s movements in real time? Or know how much Taylor Swift’s jets are polluting the air? They’re all streaming live on the sleeper hit of the summer: online flight trackers. On Tuesday, viewers set new records on Flightradar24, one of the largest flight tracker websites in the world, as they watched the seven-hour flight of Nancy Pelosi from Kuala Lumpur to Taipei. The trip, shrouded in secrecy until its final moments, grabbed international attention after China made military threats in the weeks leading up to the visit, and then launched live-fire exercises once she had departed. Many Taiwanese people were glued to the flight trackers: one told me their friend’s child had asked to stay up late to watch the live tracker. The Guardian 

Apple will delay the release of the iPadOS 16 software update for iPads well into October, about a month after the September release of the iPhone’s iOS 16. The news comes from a report in Bloomberg citing people with knowledge of the matter. Typically, Apple releases iPadOS—which is closely related to iOS—very close to or shortly after the iOS launch, which comes in September alongside new flagship iPhone models. It’s arrived slightly later in the past, but this would be an unusually large gap in releases. According to the report’s sources, the delay can be blamed at least partly on the upcoming overhaul of the iPad’s multitasking features, including the new Stage Manager feature that is also coming to Macs in macOS. Ars Technica

Facebook owner Meta is quietly curtailing some of the safeguards designed to thwart voting misinformation or foreign interference in U.S. elections as the November midterm vote approaches. It’s a sharp departure from the social media giant’s multibillion-dollar efforts to enhance the accuracy of posts about U.S. elections and regain trust from lawmakers and the public after their outrage over learning the company had exploited people’s data and allowed falsehoods to overrun its site during the 2016 campaign. The pivot is raising alarm about Meta’s priorities and about how some might exploit the world’s most popular social media platforms to spread misleading claims, launch fake accounts and rile up partisan extremists. AP News 

Streaming company SoundCloud is cutting about 20 percent of its global workforce. Billboard reported on August 3rd that SoundCloud CEO Michael Weissman told the staff in a company memo that the change is mostly due to the current economic climate. Employees affected would be notified over the next several days. “Today’s change positions SoundCloud for the long run and puts us on a path to sustained profitability,” Weissman wrote in the memo. “We have already begun to make prudent financial decisions across the company and that now extends to a reduction to our team.” The Verge