Apple To Announce New iPads on October 30

* Apple will hold its next big product announcement in New York later this month, the company said today.

BuzzFeed News: It’s the first time Apple, which usually holds these events in the Bay Area, will roll out new devices in New York City. It’ll happen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, on October 30.

The company is widely expected to refresh its iPad and possibly the MacBook Air lineups at the event.

iPad with smaller bezel, faceID (look more like an iPhone X)

Apps Installed On Millions Of Android Phones Tracked User Behavior To Execute A Multimillion Dollar Ad Fraud Scheme

* A new investigation uncovers a sophisticated ad fraud scheme involving more than 125 Android apps and websites, some of which were targeted at kids. None were installed on Apple hardware

Last April, Steven Schoen received an email from someone named Natalie Andrea who said she worked for a company called We Purchase Apps. She wanted to buy his Android app, Emoji Switcher.

But right away, something seemed off. “I did a little bit of digging because I was a little sketched out because I couldn’t really find even that the company existed,” Schoen told BuzzFeed News. The We Purchase Apps website listed a location in New York, but the address appeared to be a residence. “And their phone number was British. It was just all over the place,” Schoen said.

It was all a bit weird, but nothing indicated he was about to see his app end up in the hands of an organization responsible for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in ad fraud, and which has funneled money to a cabal of shell companies and people scattered across Israel, Serbia, Germany, Bulgaria, Malta, and elsewhere.

The Google Play store pages for these apps were soon changed to list four different companies as their developers, with addresses in Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Russia, giving the appearance that the apps now had different owners. But an investigation by BuzzFeed News reveals that these seemingly separate apps and companies are today part of a massive, sophisticated digital advertising fraud scheme involving more than 125 Android apps and websites connected to a network of front and shell companies in Cyprus, Malta, British Virgin Islands, Croatia, Bulgaria, and elsewhere.

More than a dozen of the affected apps are targeted at kids or teens, and a person involved in the scheme estimates it has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from brands whose ads were shown to bots instead of actual humans.

This means a significant portion of the millions of Android phone owners who downloaded these apps were secretly tracked as they scrolled and clicked inside the application. By copying actual user behavior in the apps, the fraudsters were able to generate fake traffic that bypassed major fraud detection systems.

Silicon Valley’s Dirty Secret: Using a Shadow Workforce of Contract Employees To Drive Profits

* As the gig economy grows, the ratio of contract workers to regular employees in corporate America is shifting.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber and other Silicon Valley tech titans now employ thousands of contract workers to do a host of functions — anything from sales...