Apple Daily Report: Apple Pay in Australia, Till Quack leaves Apple for Mapillary

Since Steve and I can’t cover everything, at the end of each week day, we’ll offer this wrap-up of news items you should check out.

Apple Pay is reportedly coming to Austria within the next few months. Negotiations with Apple are being undertaken on behalf of all Austrian banks by Payment Service Austria (PSA), according to a derStandard report.

Mapillary, a Malmö, Sweden-based map technology startup, has hired a computer vision expert away from Apple. Till Quack, who worked at Apple as an engineering manager overseeing augmented reality and self-driving efforts, will become Mapillary’s vice president of product, the company told Reuters. Quack had earlier worked at chipmaker Qualcomm Inc after selling a startup to the San Diego company in 2014.

Deadline reports that Mimi Leder has boarded Apple’s untitled morning show drama series as executive producer and director. The Emmy winner is rounding out an all-female core creative team on the Media Res-produced series, which includes executive producers and stars Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston and writer, executive producer and showrunner Kerry Ehrin.

A bug in iOS 11.3 – which was fixed in iOS 11.4.1 – revealed that Apple censors the Taiwanese flag on iPhones whose region is set to China. The bug came to light when security researcher Patrick Wardle received a message from a Taiwanese friend, reporting that iMessage, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger all crashed when she typed the word “Taiwan” or received a message containing the emoji for the Taiwanese flag.

Apple supplier Foxconn will likely be assembling most of the 2018 iPhones, but some of them will be built by one of the tech giant’s smaller partners, Wistron. Orders at Wistron “may not be as high as previously expected” but are still happening, DigiTimes says.

Adobe has released a huge patch update that resolves over 100 vulnerabilities in a range of software. Adobe Flash, Acrobat, Connect, Experience Manager, and Reader are all affected. The bugs impact macOS, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS systems. In total, 112 vulnerabilities have been patched, the majority affecting Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader.