10 things in tech you need to know today

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Wednesday.

1. iPhone sales cratered 15% in Apple's worst holiday results in a decade, and the forecast looks just as grim. Apple's guidance calls for sales to fall by as much as 10% and for its earnings per share to plunge by as much as 22%.
2. Apple hinted that it might lower iPhone prices to counteract the sales fall. CEO Tim Cook said the firm was re-pricing the iPhone in some markets to prevent customers being impacted by the strong dollar.
3. Apple revealed that its business in China is cratering. Sales in the Greater China region plunged in its first quarter by $4.8 billion, or 36%, from the same period a year earlier to $13.2 billion.
4. Facebook got caught paying people $20 a month to let them spy on their phones. Tech news website TechCrunch discovered the social network was asking some users to give them deep access to their phones and install virtual private networks in exchange for cash.
5. A U.S. judge rejected Yahoo's proposed settlement for the largest data breach in history. The settlement called for a $50 million payout, plus two years of free credit monitoring for about 200 million people in the United States and Israel with nearly 1 billion accounts.
6. Huawei is accused of attempting to copycat a T-Mobile robot, and the charges read like a comical spy movie. Emails included in a Justice Department indictment involve one set of employees trying to avoid wrongdoing and another engineer getting caught putting part of the robot into his bag.
7. Payment provider Stripe has raised $100 million at a $22.5 billion valuation, according to The Information. The additional funding comes from Tiger Global Management.
8. SAP says 4,400 employees will leave as part of a big corporate restructuring after showing signs of weakness. SAP will take a restructuring charge of up to 950 million euros ($1 billion) to reshape its business after growth slowed in parts of the software maker over the last three months.
9. Apple disabled group FaceTime calls after a bug allowed people to listen in before a call. Apple's FaceTime bug was compounded by the fact that it surfaced on Data Privacy Day.
10. IBM released a new dataset containing 1 million images of diverse human faces, in a bid to reduce bias in artificial intelligence algorithms. AI has conventionally had a tougher time identifying dark-skinned faces.
    

Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.

NOW WATCH: Roger Stone explains what Trump has in common with Richard Nixon