Tech Digest daily roundup: Spotify rolls out a big TikTok-style change

It’s the TikTok-ification of Spotify. On Wednesday, Spotify unveiled a massive change to its design which users are not too thrilled about. Now, Spotify’s homepage will include a TikTok-like feed where users can scroll to discover new music, podcasts, books, and more. The homepage will feature vertical videos when possible for music covers and podcasts. New music will also feature a small caption describing the song or artist, similar to Instagram photos. Users can scroll, similarly to Instagram or TikTok, where new music, podcasts, recommended playlists, books, and more will appear. Indy100

The Chinese government could use TikTok to control the data of millions of American users, according to the FBI. Addressing a US Senate hearing on Wednesday, FBI director Christopher Wray said the Chinese-owned video app “screams” of security concerns. He told a Senate Intelligence Committee on worldwide threats to US security that China’s government could use the social media platform to control software on millions of devices, as well as drive narratives to divide Americans over Taiwan or other issues. Sky News 

If you’re thinking about buying an electric car, you need to know that they do not like Britain’s chilly winters and when temperatures drop they will not perform to the levels quoted. That’s according to a new study published this week. It found real-world ranges of popular electric vehicles (EVs) can fall by up to a third when it’s particularly cold outside. The least impressive performer among the selection of EVs was China’s new Ora Funky Cat. The study – conducted by consumer magazine What Car? – found it could only go for 130 miles before the battery ran flat. ThisIsMoney

Elon Musk said that Twitter’s finances are improving to the point that the social media company could return to posting positive cash flow next quarter, as the chief executive attempts to cut costs, lure back advertisers and navigate the platform’s tech woes. Speaking at a Morgan Stanley investor conference on Tuesday, Musk said that cash flow at the company he bought for $44bn last year would break even in the second quarter, adding that it might even become positive in that period. FT.com

Apple’s announcement of the yellow iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus earlier today contained a lot of small interesting tidbits aside from the phones themselves. We already told you about Apple Pay finally landing in South Korea, effectively ending a near-monopoly held by Samsung in the country in the mobile payments realm. But there was another revelation tucked into the news too, and this one has to do with satellites. Apple’s Emergency SOS via Satellite service will expand to six additional countries starting later this month. They are Austria, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Portugal. GSM Arena

  
Apple’s Emergency SOS via Satellite

DuckDuckGo launched a beta version of an AI search tool powered by ChatGPT Wednesday called DuckAssist. The addition to the company’s privacy-focused search engine uses ChatGPT and Anthropic’s language parsing capability to generate answers scraped from Wikipedia and related sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica. The tool is free and available on the DuckDuckGo web browsing apps for phones and computers as well as the company’s browser extension starting today. Gizmodo