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Amazon expanded its Amazon Scout autonomous delivery service. eDelivery reported that the company started testing the service in Irvine, southern California Wednesday. It initially tested the service back in January 2019, in Snohomish County, Washington.

A small number of the cooler-sized robots will begin delivering from today (7 August) in Irvine, part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, in daylight hours from Monday to Friday . They will follow pre-set delivery routes while accompanied by an Amazon employee. They travel at a walking pace, with the ability to avoid obstacles in their path… Customers in the area order as they normally would via the site or app and can choose from the same delivery options including same-day, one-day and two-day shipping for Prime members.

Apple quietly conducted a record buyback of stock in the second quarter of 2019. It totaled $24 billion. AppleInsider analyzed the move.

It appears clear that Apple expects its share price to grow much higher in the future. So rather than carefully timing its repurchases to only occur when the stock price hits its lowest levels, Apple continues to buy shares back nearly as fast as it can all the time, even as the stock price jumps up and down as it continues to increment higher. Since 2012, Apple has now funded a total of $271.3 billion in stock buybacks. Most of these shares were repurchased at what would today be an incredible discount. While analysts have occasionally picked out a given trough in Apple’s stock price and declared that its buybacks were a huge mistake, it’s hard to imagine in hindsight how Apple could have better invested $271 billion of its past iPhone profits.

Apple is reportedly set to launch a Mac bug bounty program before the end of August. Forbes also reported it handed out special iPhones to top hackers.

The iPhones will be given to the rock star hackers that participate in the Cupertino company’s invitation-only bug bounty program, where participants disclose bugs in Apple products in return for monetary rewards. The payments can go as high as $200,000, as announced at the 2016 Black Hat conference. What makes these iPhones special? One source with knowledge of the Apple announcement said they would essentially be “dev devices.” Think of them as iPhones that allow the user to do a lot more than they could on a traditionally locked-down iPhone. For instance, it should be possible to probe pieces of the Apple operating system that aren’t easily accessible on a commercial iPhone. In particular, the special devices could allow hackers to stop the processor and inspect memory for vulnerabilities. This would allow them to see what happens at the code level when they attempt an attack on iOS code.

Huawei tweeted last week asking followers to give their opinion on who owns them. The Next Web reported that the final replies were probably not quite what the company wanted, with many claiming it is run by the government.

This seems like a risky move for a $100+ billion company that’s just had a major scandal, but maybe Huawei is just giving up on traditional sterile PR maneuvers and is actually reaching out to get the public’s perspective… Basically, it’s almost impossible to verify Huawei‘s ownership, but the real issue has also always been about who controls the company — #WhoRunsHuawei. The weirdest thing about Huawei‘s poll, however, is that the whole drama surrounding its ties to the Chinese government has pretty much died down in the press. There are still some political complications, but the US is easing up on Huawei, and countries like the UK have said there’s no technical reason to leave the company out of 5G infrastructure.

Spotify was amongst the tech firms that revealed their financial results last week. After a deep dive into the numbers, Music Business Week found that that the streaming service spent a total of $375 million in cash on podcast companies so far in 2019. The deals are valued at $404 million. They demonstrated just how seriously Spotify wants to challenge Apple in the podcast game, and they company might not be finished yet.

Spotify has previously confirmed that, in February, it spent approximately €300m ($343m) on two US-based ‘cast firms: distribution software company Anchor, and independent content producer Gimlet Media. Now we know exactly how much Spotify spent on these two firms, in addition to true crime podcast maker Parcast (trading as Los Angeles-based Cutler Media LLC) which it bought in April. The upshot: if Spotify sticks to its previously-announced plan of spending between $400m and $500m on acquisitions this year, it has about $100m left in the tank.

Netflix canceled The OA on Monday. And that sucks. It was a fascinating show that used unconventional story-telling structures. While I’m bummed, I’m not necessarily surprised. See the afore-mentioned note about unconventional story-telling structures. Netflix has cut a couple of other shows in the wake of a worse-than-expected quarterly earnings report for the June quarter. TechCrunch covered the cancelation, and here’s their description:

Created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, “The OA” begins with the reappearance a young woman named Prairie Johnson (played by Marling), who disappeared several years earlier. The ensuing story goes in some pretty wild directions to explain where the previously blind Johnson has been for the past few years, how she regained her sight and why she now calls herself The OA.