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Yesterday Strava sent out an e-mail to users, outlining a change that’s occurring almost immediately, regarding 3rd party apps and the way apps are allowed to access and process data from Strava. All of these changes impact what is known as the Strava API (Application Programming Interface). That’s the piece that lets your Garmin watch push your workout to Strava, and then lets an app like VeloViewer or others access your data.

There are countless apps that use Strava’s API, literally tens of thousands according to Strava. Some of these are tiny, some of them are massive. Virtually every company in the space uses Strava’s API, including Garmin, Wahoo, TrainerRoad, VeloViewer, Xert, and plenty more. It’s become the defacto data hub for millions of athletes, some 100m+ according to Strava’s press release.

Google is tightening its rules against “parasite SEO” content, or articles and pages that often have little to do with the site’s focus but that exploit the website’s Google ranking.

An example of parasite SEO content is a news blog that publishes online shopping coupon codes in a hidden part of its website or an educational site publishing unrelated affiliate marketing content. In March, Google announced it would crack down on this kind of “site reputation abuse,” and now it’s making it clear that it doesn’t matter if the publisher created the content themselves or outsourced it — it’s a search policy violation regardless.

To minimize the odds that a lawsuit could flush out comments that might be incriminating, Google said, employees should refrain from speculation and sarcasm and “think twice” before writing one another about “hot topics.” “Don’t comment before you have all the facts,” they were instructed.

The memo became the first salvo in a 15-year campaign by Google to make deletion the default in its internal communications. Even as the internet giant stored the world’s information, it created an office culture that tried to minimize its own. Among its tools: using legal privilege as an all-purpose shield and imposing restraints on its own technology, all while continually warning that loose lips could sink even the most successful corporation.

A joint investigation by WIRED, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), and Netzpolitik.org reveals that US companies legally collecting digital advertising data are also providing the world a cheap and reliable way to track the movements of American military and intelligence personnel overseas, from their homes and their children’s schools to hardened aircraft shelters within an airbase where US nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.

A collaborative analysis of billions of location coordinates obtained from a US-based data broker provides extraordinary insight into the daily routines of US service members. The findings also provide a vivid example of the significant risks the unregulated sale of mobile location data poses to the integrity of the US military and the safety of its service members and their families overseas.

Carr argues that the largest technology companies, including Meta (Facebook) and Alphabet (Google), use content moderation techniques including shadow banning and demonetization to censor conservatives on their platforms, without having to offer detailed reasoning for their motives.

Currently, tech companies have broad scope under the First Amendment to moderate their privately owned platforms as they fit.

even though robots are starting to take over some repetitive and cumbersome jobs, there are still many tasks they are not good at, making it difficult to know when or if robots will be able to fully automate this industry.

Despite the rise in automation, warehouses remain big employers of humans. Federal data show that nearly 1.8 million people work in this corner of the supply chain. While that number is down 9 percent from its peak in 2022, when logistics companies went on a hiring spree to handle the pandemic e-commerce boom, it is still up more than 30 percent since early 2020.

More recently, Carr has argued that the FCC should take action against social platforms for content-moderation choices that impede right-wing views and favor left-wing views. He’s made that point via his account on X—a platform that has swung decidedly to the right under Elon Musk—almost every day since Election Day, with Musk amplifying his posts.

"The censorship cartel must be dismantled,” Carr declared in a Friday thread that denounced Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft for either supporting NewsGuard, one of a few organizations that aim to flag social-media misinformation, or enabling their users to employ that service, such as by installing NewsGuard’s browser extension.

Historically, the FCC’s involvement with social media has been limited to posting on it. The commission did not even try to regulate online forums until a 2020 attempt under the first Trump administration to have the FCC reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the 1996 law that holds social platforms generally not liable for things their users post.

The Commerce Department has provisionally awarded most of the $39 billion of grant money allocated under 2022’s Chips Act to re-energize U.S. chip production. But nearly $30 billion of that is tied up in complex government negotiations, leaving those deals in limbo as a new administration prepares to take over.

Intel INTC -2.89%decrease; red down pointing trianglewas given the largest preliminary award—up to $8.5 billion in grants for factory projects, plus up to $3 billion for defense-industry manufacturing facilities. It is counting on the funds to pay for massive facilities in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio and Oregon as the company’s core business making chips for personal computers and servers is struggling.

The proposal would see Cupertino-based Apple invest almost $100 million in Southeast Asia’s largest economy over two years, the people said, asking not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak publicly. Apple’s previous investment plan of close to $10 million would have involved the company investing in a factory making accessories and components in the city of Bandung, located southeast of Jakarta, Bloomberg News reported earlier.

After Apple submitted its increased offer, Indonesia’s Ministry of Industry, which last month blocked a permit allowing the sale of the iPhone 16, is now demanding that the technology behemoth alter its investment plans to focus more on research and development for its smartphones in the country, the people said. The Ministry of Industry hasn’t made a final decision on Apple’s newest proposal, they added.

Amazon's AI-powered Alexa upgrade could launch with several major partners handling specific tasks such as ride-hailing, grocery shopping, and restaurant reservations, Business Insider has learned.

The companies under consideration are Uber for ride-hailing, Ticketmaster for ticketing, Vagaro for local business booking, OpenTable for restaurant reservations, Grubhub for food ordering, Instacart for grocery shopping, Fodors for travel advice, and Thumbtack for home services, according to an internal document obtained by BI.

Amazon’s race to create an AI-based successor to its voice assistant Alexa has hit more snags after a series of earlier setbacks over the past year. Employees have found there is too much of a delay between asking the technology for something and the new Alexa providing a response or completing a task.

The problem, known as latency, is a critical shortcoming, employees said in an internal memo from earlier this month obtained by Fortune. If released as is, customers could become frustrated and the product—a particularly critical one to Amazon as it tries to keep up in the crucial battle to launch blockbuster consumer AI products—could end up as a failure, some employees fear.

Coca-Cola is facing backlash online over an artificial intelligence-made Christmas promotional video that users are calling “soulless” and “devoid of any actual creativity.”

The AI-made video features everything from big red Coca-Cola trucks driving through snowy streets to people smiling in scarves and knitted hats holding Coca-Cola bottles. The video was meant to pay homage to the company’s 1995 commercial “Holidays Are Coming,” which featured similar imagery, but with human actors and real trucks.

If your Instagram recommendations have been feeling a little stale, you’ll soon have a way to make the app’s algorithm forget everything it thinks it knows about you. Meta is testing a new feature that will allow users to reset the algorithmic suggestions that power the app’s feed, Reels and Explore section.

The company described the feature as a “test,” but said the update “will soon roll out globally.” With the change, users will be able to “reset suggested content” from the content preferences section in Instagram’s settings. This will, according to Meta, allow you to “start fresh” and provide an opportunity to re-tune the app’s suggestions.

Right now, text highlighting is broken for anyone using recent Chromium-based browsers on some websites. The cause appears to be a change to selection styling that doesn’t play nicely with Tailwind CSS. We’ve noticed it on our site, and so have several people posting about the issue in threads on Github and Chromium.

For affected sites, you may still be able to select, copy, and paste text on websites but there’s no visual indicator that you did so. Or you may not be able to copy and paste text at all or have other unexpected behaviors when you try to select specific text. Tailwind has updated its CSS tools and offered a workaround, but not every site has implemented the fix. That includes The Verge (we’re working on it!), Bloomberg, and some areas on X, like inside the post composer. It’s not clear how widespread the issue is.

According to the New York Times, Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defense minister, believes that undersea cables connecting Finland and Germany that were severed on Monday were not damaged by accident, the New York Times reports. Another cable connecting Lithuania and Sweden was also cut on Sunday. The internet connection between these countries remains active despite disruptions.

Pistorius said that “nobody believes these cables were severed by accident,” and he thinks anchors dropped from ships wouldn’t damage the cables like this. He claimed it was sabotage, but admitted he doesn’t yet have solid proof for this assertion.

As spotted by 9to5Mac, the latest beta of tvOS 18.2 released this week introduced a new framework called “AdBlocker.” Although at first glance the name suggests that this would be a mere online ad blocker, we went deeper and found something intriguing about this new framework.

The new AdBlocker framework is linked to ShazamKit, which is the API for apps to use Shazam – the song identification platform acquired by Apple in 2018. At the same time, the framework also links to the process responsible for managing the “Siri” and “Hey Siri” voice commands on Apple devices.

Code suggests that “AdBlocker” will download audio fingerprints from Apple’s servers and then use the Shazam API to match them against audio captured by the device’s microphones using the Hey Siri API. When certain audios match, the new framework will temporarily disable Siri’s trigger commands.

Presumably, Apple will use audio fingerprints from its TV ads and keynotes to prevent any mentions of Siri from triggering the virtual assistant on users’ devices.

Spirit Airlines said Monday that it has filed for bankruptcy protection and will attempt to reboot as it struggles to recover from the pandemic-caused swoon in travel, stiffer competition from bigger carriers, and a failed attempt to sell the airline to JetBlue.

Spirit, the biggest U.S. budget airline, filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition after working out terms with bondholders. The airline has lost more than $2.5 billion since the start of 2020 and faces looming debt payments totaling more than $1 billion in 2025 and 2026.

The airline said it expects to continue operating normally during the bankruptcy process. Spirit told customers Monday they can book flights and use frequent-flyer points as they ordinarily would, and said employees and vendors would continue g

DOJ Will Push Google to Sell Chrome to Break Search Monopoly Antitrust officials also to seek data licensing, AI measures Google says the proposals would harm consumers and developersThe judge has set a two-week hearing in April on what changes Google must make to remedy the illegal behavior and plans to issue a final ruling by August 2025.

The agency and the states have settled on recommending that Google be required to license the results and data from its popular search engine and give websites more options to prevent their content from being used by Google’s artificial intelligence products, said the people.

But Microsoft’s seemingly straightforward commitment belied a more complex, profit-driven agenda, a ProPublica investigation has found. The proposal was, in fact, a calculated business maneuver designed to bring in billions of dollars in new revenue, box competitors out of lucrative government contracts and tighten the company’s grip on federal business.

The White House Offer, as it was known inside Microsoft, would dispatch Microsoft consultants across the federal government to install the company’s cybersecurity products — which, as a part of the offer, were provided free of charge for a limited time.

But once the consultants installed the upgrades, federal customers would be effectively locked in, because shifting to a competitor after the free trial would be cumbersome and costly, according to former Microsoft employees involved in the effort, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared professional repercussions. At that point, the customer would have little choice but to pay for the higher subscription fees.

UK-based mobile operator Virgin Media O2 has created an AI-generated "scambaiter" tool to stall scammers. The AI tool, called Daisy, mimics the voice of an elderly woman and performs one simple task: talk to fraudsters and "waste as much of their time as possible."

Here's how Daisy works: O2 added phone numbers linked to its AI tool to the lists used by scammers to target vulnerable people. When a scammer dials a number linked to Daisy, the AI tool can have random conversations about its made-up family and hobbies or provide fake bank details to beat scammers at their own game.

Both Musk and Jones are known allies of President-elect Donald Trump. Musk has allowed Infowars to broadcast on X while Infowars’ fate is in limbo.

Jones has used Infowars as a platform to promote conspiracy theories, far-right ideologies and misinformation. He often focuses on events and social issues to sell related products like supplements and survival gear.

Previous M-series MacBook Pro models used a red KSF phosphor film to enable the miniLED backlighting to produce a wider color gamut than would normally be possible.

This film is also very efficient, but there’s an even better film available, known as quantum dot. Display analyst Ross Young reports that Apple quietly introduced this to the M4 MacBook Pro.

Big Apple display news, they have adopted quantum dots for the first time. The latest MacBook Pro’s (M4) use a quantum dot (QD) film rather than a red KSF phosphor film.

Young says this provides the latest models with two advantages over earlier models.

Better color gamut and better motion performance.