The COVID-19 outbreak brought huge, in-person conferences to screeching halt. CNet has looked at how tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Google have reinvented the major set-piece events.

While many big tech conferences have been cancelled as a result, Apple, Microsoft and Sony are taking a different tack. Each company has chosen to hold its typically in-person events entirely online, giving live access to many more people than they could fit in convention centers as the companies stream their announcements on the internet. “Running a virtual event well requires stitching together several different technologies. It’s not just a webcast or several webcasts,” said Adam Preset, a senior research director at Gartner, whose clients are increasingly asking for help putting these types of events together. The challenge companies will face, in addition to technical glitches or family members suddenly interrupting at home, is keeping the audience engaged, he said.

Slack has become essential during this period of working from home. On Monday, the company unveiled a set of remote working emoji to help users communicate with their colleagues. It said in a blog post that the emoji will be rolling out over the coming days.

We’ve created a handy set of custom emoji for using in your status (or in messages or reactions) for those moments when you need to convey more information. This emoji pack for remote work is rolling out now and will be available to everyone in the coming days. You can add this set of emoji by clicking the “add emoji” button within the emoji picker. If you still need help, here’s a link to our help center article on adding custom emoji to Slack.

Some Gulf states are using COVID-19 contact tracing apps as mass surveillance tools. The issue was highlighted in research by Amnesty International, reported on by The Verge.

Amnesty International found that the Gulf states’ apps it analyzed were among the most invasive, collecting and storing GPS data and making it easy for the government to identify someone based on their account ID. Norway’s app was also flagged for putting its citizens’ privacy at risk for collecting and storing location data on a central server. But the country on Monday said it would pause the rollout of its the app, called Smittestopp, after Amnesty International shared its findings with the Norwegian government… Apple and Google are still in the process of developing a more privacy-focused system for the US and other countries that would work across both Android and iOS, while some governments have simply made their own apps along separate lines.Gul