Tim Cook appears to be more optimistic than most about China’s response to the coronavirus outbreak. In an interview with Fox Business, the Apple CEO said he felt China was getting the illness “under control.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook told FOX Business’ Susan Li Thursday that he is “optimistic” about China managing the coronavirus outbreak, which has slowed production at the tech giant’s suppliers. “It feels to me that China is getting the coronavirus under control,” Cook said. “You look at the numbers, they’re coming down day by day by day. And so I’m very optimistic there.” He stressed that iPhone gets parts from “everywhere in the world,” including China, which has seen 2,744 deaths among 78,497 cases, mostly in the central province of Hubei.

Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it will miss its revenue guidance for the second quarter of 2020 as a result of the coronavirus outbreak, The Verge reported. Apple made the same announcement just over a week ago.

“Although we see strong Windows demand in line with our expectations, the supply chain is returning to normal operations at a slower pace than anticipated at the time of our Q2 earnings call,” Microsoft said in a press release. The company did not give a specific revenue range for the segment; instead, it said it does “not expect to meet our More Personal Computing segment guidance as Windows OEM and Surface are more negatively impacted than previously anticipated.” During its earnings call last month, Microsoft issued quarterly revenue guidance for the personal computing segment between $10.75 billion and $11.15 billion.

Amazon Transcribe has made a good step forward in protecting users’ privacy. It now allows personally identifiable information (PII) – social security numbers, credit card details and the like – to be automatically redacted, VentureBeat reported.

Amazon Transcribe is part of Amazon’s AWS cloud unit and was launched in general availability in 2018. An automatic speech recognition (ASR) service, Transcribe enables enterprise customers to convert speech into text, which can help make audio content searchable from a database, for example. Contact centers can also use the tool to mine call data for insights and sentiment analysis. However, privacy issues have cast a spotlight on how technology companies store and manage consumers’ data. Text-to-speech services can be used to search for keywords and sentiment at a later date, but phone calls often feature significant private data that may be transcribed by Amazon and stored in a searchable database — even if that information is not necessary for analysis. Meanwhile, regulations are springing up around the world to protect consumer data — including the recently implemented California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Amazon’s eero mesh routers now support Apple’s HomeKit, AppleInsider reported. They are the first mesh routers to Apple’s smart home platform.

After appearing recently appearing imminent, Eero has finally made the update available to users of its eero, eero Pro, and eero Beacon models which add additional security for smart home devices. With HomeKit support, users are able to restrict communication for smart home devices to only communicate in the home, to the default connections recommended by the manufacturer, or no restriction whatsoever. With smart home devices controlling everything from our lights to our locks, knowing that they are prevented from sending data outside your abode can offer a great deal of peace of mind. The update is installed by heading to the “Discover” tab within the eero app.

Macworld’s The Macalope is not known for pulling punches. This week the anonymous columnist joined the debate on iOS ads in typically robust fashion.

While The Macalope is not a fan of exaggeration, he’s even less a fan of junking up the iOS user experience. And that’s what ads do, even when they’re ads for Apple stuff. The Macalope has railed against Microsoft doing this on Windows so he can’t very well not rail against Apple doing the same. And there’s a problem with not complaining about it. Often if you don’t complain about bad behaviors, they never get fixed. It took five years of complaining to get Netflix to stop auto-playing previews of shows that we weren’t going to watch, but the complaining system worked eventually.