• Apple has removed Fortnite from its App Store, preventing players from installing one of the world’s most popular games on iOS devices.
• It came after a Fortnite update that let players buy in-game currency at a lower rate if they bought direct from maker Epic Games, therefore bypassing Apple.
• Epic appeared to know the ban would come, announcing it had filed a legal complaint minutes after the removal.
• Apple takes a standard 30% cut of sales from its compulsory payment system.
• Fortnite has now also been removed from the Google Play store on Android devices as well.

• A flaw in Amazon’s Alexa smart home devices could have allowed hackers to access personal information and conversation history, cyber-security researchers say.
• Attackers could install or remove apps on a device without the owner knowing, Check Point Research reports.
• The hack “required just one click on an Amazon link” purposely crafted by the attacker, it says. The firm told Amazon about the flaw, which has now been fixed.
• Amazon said: “The security of our devices is a top priority” and that it did not know of any case where someone had used the vulnerability to target its customers.
• For more information on using your smart speaker safely, check out our blog here.

• Facebook has admitted it struggled to remove content that promoted suicide or exploited children after global lockdowns forced it to send content reviewers home and rely more heavily on automatic moderation.
• According to its first quarterly report on its moderation practices since the coronavirus crisis took hold, Facebook removed 479,400 pieces of content from Instagram for violating rules on child exploitation and nudity between April and June, down from 1 million in the previous three months.
• Content that broke rules about suicide and self-harm was removed from Instagram 275,000 times over the same period, down from 1.3m the quarter before.

• More than a million children in the UK don’t have British or Irish citizenship, new figures show – fuelling concerns that young people who have lived in the country all or most of their lives are having their rights “neglected”.
• A new briefing from the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford shows that 8 percent of under-18s in Britain – amounting to 1,082,000 – were not UK or Irish citizens in 2019.
• Among this cohort, 39 per cent (about 421,000) were born in the UK, and about 177,000 had been in the country for more than 10 years and were therefore eligible to become British citizens.
• Campaigners have long warned that young people without British citizenship face being barred from attending university, missing out on job opportunities and being unable to build a life in the country where they have lived all or nearly all of their life.

• Microsoft is about to launch a games-streaming service that will let subscribers play top-end Xbox games on a mobile phone.
• This is a Netflix-style service for video games, which many experts think will be the future of gaming.
• The monthly fee is set at £10.99 and will only work on Android devices.
• It is set to be launched on 15 September – but Microsoft told tech site The Verge that a beta test has been launched on 11 August, with about 30 of the promised 100+ games that will come with the full service.
• To play, gamers will need to be an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscriber to take part, download the beta version of the app from the Google Play Store and also have an Xbox controller that connects to their phone via Bluetooth.

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