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Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then shared with third parties and used for targeted ads.

In the proposed class-action settlement—which comes after five years of litigation—Apple admitted to no wrongdoing. Instead, the settlement refers to "unintentional" Siri activations that occurred after the "Hey, Siri" feature was introduced in 2014, where recordings were apparently prompted without users ever saying the trigger words, "Hey, Siri."

I was told that I had to move to Cupertino. Immediately. Or else.

I did not wish to move to the States. I liked being in Europe. Ultimately, after much consideration, many late night conversations with my wife, and even buying a guide to moving, I said no.

They said ok then. We’ll just tell Steve you did move.

LSSU received submissions from across the globe this year, including entries from Canada, Australia, Denmark, Germany, India, South Africa, and the United States. The fact that some of the same banished word suggestions came from different parts of the world underscores the universal struggle of dealing with challenging words and phrases.

Here are the 2025 words and phrases selected for banishment, along with the reasons they made the list:

Then, on Thursday evening, he added this: "No, we’re going straight to Mars. The moon is a distraction."

These are definitive statements that directly contradict NASA's plans to send a series of human missions to the lunar south pole later this decade and establish a sustainable base of operations there with the Artemis program.

In a post to her Substack on Friday, Telnaes claimed an editor at the paper killed a cartoon depicting billionaires groveling to President-elect Donald Trump this week. The shared rough draft of the comic included Post owner Jeff Bezos holding up a bag of money at the feet of a looming Trump.

“I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now,” Telnaes said. “The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.”

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“I’m really bullish on the future of YouTube. We’re still in the first or second inning,” Mohan said in an interview at its San Bruno headquarters, 15 minutes north from where YouTube was founded. “We haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg in what we’ll be able to do with technologies like generative AI.”

YouTube is an increasingly vital business line as Google’s core search and advertising divisions face threats from antitrust lawsuits and as artificial intelligence rivals chip away at its dominance of mobile and desktop search.

After declining for much of 2023, YouTube’s advertising income has bounced back, growing 15 per cent to $25.7bn in the first nine months of 2024. While this is a fifth of the $144bn brought in by search-linked ads revenue, Alphabet needs the cash. It has ramped up spending to $38.3bn as it races Microsoft and Amazon to build data centres and develop chips to power its AI ambitions.

Apple Fitness+ today announced a slew of new content to kick off the year, as well as a new integration with the popular social fitness app Strava.

Fitness+ users will now be able to easily share their completed workout sessions to Strava, with rich details like episode image, music genre, and metrics. Strava subscribers will also be able to redeem a free trial of Fitness+.

Apple says Fitness+ offers the largest library of 4K fitness and wellness content in the world, with more than 6,500 workouts and meditations across twelve workout types.

New content for 2025 includes new programs for progressive strength training, and a conditioning program for pickleball.

This enforcement action marks the first significant implementation of India’s 2022 regulatory framework governing VPN apps. The rules mandate that VPN providers and cloud service operators maintain comprehensive records of their customers, including names, addresses, IP addresses and transaction histories, for a five-year period.

The stringent requirements prompted pushback from major industry players. Leading brands like NordVPN, ExpressVPN, SurfShark and ProtonVPN voiced significant reservations about the rules, with several announcing plans to withdraw their server infrastructure from India.

NordVPN, ExpressVPN and SurfShark continue to maintain services for Indian customers, though they have stopped marketing their apps in the country.

Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO, among other publishers, sued Anthropic in Tennessee federal court in 2023, accusing it of copyright infringement for training its AI system on lyrics from at least 500 songs from artists such as Katy Perry, the Rolling Stones and Beyoncé. One example: When asked the lyrics to Perry’s “Roar,” which is owned by Concord, Claude provided an near-identical copy of the words in the song, according to the complaint.

At the heart of the lawsuit were allegations that there’s already an existing market that’s being undercut by Anthropic pilfering lyrics without consent or payment. The publishers pointed to music lyric aggregators and websites that have licensed their works.

While Davila issued a preliminary injunction barring the state from enforcing these two elements, state Attorney General Rob Bonta's office is free to enforce the remainder of the law. Companies will need to create a private mode for minors that would prevent strangers from viewing or responding to children’s posts, and he rejected NetChoice's claims the law is too vague to stand.

Though the act’s language applies to companies who offer covered feeds as a “significant part” of their services, these terms are not out of the ordinary in our laws.

“They are an unavoidable part of the law,” said the judge.

Davila also noted his order is preliminary and the litigation over the law will proceed.

New codes that contain sell-by dates, product instructions, allergens and ingredients, as well as prices, will mean “we will say goodbye to the old-fashioned barcode”, according to GS1, an international non-profit that maintains the global standard for barcodes.

Tesco has started using them on some products, and other trials have suggested that waste of perishable food such as poultry can be cut by embedding sell-by dates in the new QR-style codes, allowing for more dynamic discounting.

QR (quick response) codes will allow customers to instantly access more information about the product, including how to recycle batteries, clothes and building materials when tougher environmental regulations bite.

But they will also put a greater demand on the world’s cloud computing resources, where the extra data they contain will be stored – meaning a potentially greater carbon footprint.

The proposed measures include implementing multi-factor authentication and encrypting patient data to safeguard it in case of a data breach. Organizations in the sector would also be required to undergo compliance checks to ensure their networks meet cybersecurity rules.

The proposals are now in a 60-day public comment period, during which industry players, such as healthcare firms, can provide feedback. However, the new changes won’t come cheap. Reuters reports that Anne Neuberger, the US deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, told reporters the proposals are projected to cost $9 billion in the first year and $6 billion in the following two years.

At least five Chrome extensions were compromised in a coordinated attack where a threat actor injected code that steals sensitive information from users.

One attack was disclosed by Cyberhaven, a data loss prevention company that alerted its customers of a breach on December 24 after a successful phishing attack on an administrator account for the Google Chrome store.

Among Cyberhaven's customers are Snowflake, Motorola, Canon, Reddit, AmeriHealth, Cooley, IVP, Navan, DBS, Upstart, and Kirkland & Ellis.

The hacker hijacked the employee’s account and published a malicious version (24.10.4) of the Cyberhaven extension, which included code that could exfiltrate authenticated sessions and cookies to the attacker's domain (cyberhavenext[.]pro).