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On Wednesday, that prediction looked spot on. Wielding the social media platform he purchased for $44 billion in 2022, Mr. Musk detonated a rhetorical nuclear bomb in the middle of government shutdown negotiations on Capitol Hill.

In more than 150 separate posts on X, Mr. Musk demanded that Republicans back away from a bipartisan spending deal that was meant to avoid a government shutdown over Christmas. He vowed political retribution against anyone voting for the sprawling bill backed by House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Apple Inc. has halted work on a project to build an iPhone hardware subscription service, according to people familiar with the matter, retreating from an attempt to change the way consumers buy its flagship device.

The idea was to make owning an iPhone like subscribing to an app — with consumers paying monthly fees and getting new phones each year — but Apple recently wound down the effort, according to people familiar with the matter. The team was disbanded and reassigned to other projects, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work was confidential.

U.S. authorities are investigating whether a Chinese company whose popular home-internet routers have been linked to cyberattacks poses a national-security risk and are considering banning the devices.

The router-manufacturer TP-Link, established in China, has roughly 65% of the U.S. market for routers for homes and small businesses. It is also the top choice on Amazon.com, and powers internet communications for the Defense Department and other federal government agencies.

As noted by Chris Carley, it’s now possible to use Look Around in the web version of Apple Maps. According to the Look Map website, which lets users check the coverage of the main map platforms, the feature was added by Apple around December 11.

For those unfamiliar, Look Around is Apple’s version of Street View. The feature was introduced in 2019 with iOS 13 and lets users explore their surroundings with 360-degree panoramic views. Where available, Look Around can be accessed by tapping or clicking on the binoculars icon in Apple Maps.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday said it will take up a challenge to a new law that could lead to a ban on TikTok in the U.S, setting up a showdown over access to a widely popular app used by tens of millions of Americans.

Arguments will be heard by the high court on Jan. 10, an expedited timeline that allows for the court to consider the issue before the law takes effect on Jan. 19.

The Supreme Court said in a brief order that the Justice Department and lawyers for TikTok, as well as a group of users who separately challenged the law, should be prepared to argue whether the ban passed by Congress violates the First Amendment.

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The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday issued long-awaited rules requiring companies to display the full price of a hotel room, concert ticket or sporting event up front to customers, rather than hiding any extra charges — often called “junk fees” — until the very end of the checkout process.

The new regulations seek to crack down on “bait and switch” pricing practices, according to FTC Chair Lina Khan, who said the agency has received a groundswell of complaints about service charges, amenity fees and a raft of other potentially obscure, last-minute additions to consumers’ bills.

The BBC has complained to Apple after the tech giant's new iPhone feature generated a false headline about a high-profile murder in the United States.

Apple Intelligence, launched in the UK earlier this week, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications.

This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.

A spokesperson from the BBC said the corporation had contacted Apple "to raise this concern and fix the problem".

Apple declined to comment.

In the immediate aftermath of the decision, Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg asked for his account to be deleted from the Post Status Slack, which is a popular community for businesses and people who work on WordPress’s open-source tools.

“It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this,” he wrote in that Slack, according to a screenshot viewed by 404 Media. “I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted.” His username on that Slack has been changed to “gone 💀”

Fortunately, I’m an investigative reporter. I already knew that fake product reviews were a dime a dozen, but this seemed to go further. Now that anyone can use artificial intelligence to write convincing marketing and construct sharp-looking websites, the spin has become harder to spot.

Harder, yes, but not impossible. Using my dad’s shopping expedition as a case study, I created this list of how you can avoid falling for fake reviews and iffy products.

Marc Andreessen, an influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist who endorsed Mr. Trump during the campaign, said in a podcast interview this week that he had spent about half of his time since Election Day working on the presidential transition. He framed Mr. Trump’s win as a cultural moment for a “techno-optimist” ideology.

“It’s morning in America, so I’m very happy,” Mr. Andreessen said. “People are finally poking their heads out of the frozen tundra of the culture and realizing that it’s actually OK to build things, hire on merit, celebrate success, and fundamentally be proud of the country and be patriotic.”

Apple designers are developing something akin to a giant iPad that unfolds into the size of two iPad Pros side-by-side. The Cupertino, California-based company has been honing the product for a couple of years now and is aiming to bring something to market around 2028, I’m told.

Apple’s goal for a foldable device is to avoid the crease that current products have when they’re in the open position. And the company has made progress on this front: Prototypes of this new product within Apple’s industrial design group have a nearly invisible crease. But it’s too early to tell if Apple will can get rid of it altogether. Samsung Electronics Co., which launched its first foldable phone five years ago, has tried unsuccessfully to remove the crease.

Last week, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the law, clearing the way for it to take effect on January 19. Days later, TikTok asked the court to issue a temporary pause on the ban while the company asks the Supreme Court to review its challenge to the law. The appeals court unanimously rejected that bid in a brief, unsigned order that called such a block “unwarranted.”

The TikTok ban has been one of the most closely watched pieces of federal legislation in recent years, and it’s been widely expected that the law would eventually land before the conservative-majority Supreme Court.

On Thursday morning, YouTube TV sent a stunning message to subscribers, informing them that they were raising the monthly price of their base plan. But this wasn’t just an incremental price hike, mind you. This was a whopping $10 monthly price increase.

The monthly price of $72.99 for the YouTube TV base plan is now all the way up to $82.99. And it starts next month on January 13, 2025.