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this week, Musk has escalated from targeting government agencies to singling out individuals—sparking his online army of followers to launch blistering critiques of ordinary federal employees.

One recent post by the billionaire zeroed in on Ashley Thomas, a little-known director of climate diversification at the U.S. International Development Finance Corp., after another user on Musk’s social-media platform X questioned her role.

The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed Facebook's appeal of a lower court order reviving a shareholder lawsuit brought against the social media giant in light of consulting firm Cambridge Analytica's 2015 misuse of millions of Facebook users' data.

In its first opinion of the term, the high court issued a one-line unsigned decision dismissing Facebook's appeal. The court's ruling indicates it believes it should not have taken up the case, though the Supreme Court did not explain its reasoning.

A campaign by social media giant Meta to force app store giants Google and Apple to verify the ages of their users is picking up momentum with legislators in Congress.

Federal and state lawmakers have recently proposed a raft of measures requiring that platforms such as Meta’s Facebook and Instagram block users under a certain age from using their sites. The push has triggered fierce debate over the best way to ascertain how old users are online.

Last year Meta threw its support behind legislation that would push those obligations onto app stores rather than individual app providers, like itself, as your regular host and Naomi Nix reported. While some states have considered the plan, it has not gained much traction in Washington.

The top US consumer watchdog will supervise Apple Inc. and other major technology firms that offer digital wallets and payment apps, finalizing a proposal from last year with several changes.

The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will now treat those companies more like banks as long as they handle more than 50 million transactions a year, conducted in US dollars, according to a statement Thursday. The original proposal set the supervision threshold at 5 million annual transactions.

“Digital payments have gone from novelty to necessity and our oversight must reflect this reality,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in the statement.

Apple Inc. is racing to develop a more conversational version of its Siri digital assistant, aiming to catch up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other voice services, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The new Siri, details of which haven’t been reported, uses more advanced large language models, or LLMs, to allow for back-and-forth conversations, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the effort hasn’t been announced. The system also can handle more sophisticated requests in a quicker fashion, they said.

Revamping the 13-year-old Siri service is part of Apple’s efforts to become a force in artificial intelligence. The company debuted its much-ballyhooed Apple Intelligence platform last month, but it still lacks many of the features offered by other tech giants.

Efforts by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to address cybersecurity issues faced significant criticism this week from government watchdogs, members of Congress and regulated companies.

A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on Tuesday said four of the six cybersecurity recommendations made to TSA since 2018 have still not been addressed — including one centered around the agency’s efforts to protect companies from ransomware.

“For example, in January 2024, GAO reported that ransomware was having increasingly devastating impacts in the sector and found that TSA’s security directives did not align with ransomware leading practices,” said Tina Won Sherman, director of Homeland Security and Justice at the GAO.

“GAO recommended that DHS determine the extent to which the transportation systems sector is adopting leading cybersecurity practices that help reduce the sector's risk of ransomware. As of November 2024, this recommendation was not yet implemented.”

The multi-trillion-dollar artificial intelligence boom was built on certainty that generative models would keep getting exponentially better. Spoiler alert: they aren’t.

In simple terms, “scaling laws” said that if you threw more data and computing power at an AI model, its capabilities would continuously grow. But a recent flurry of press reports suggests that’s no longer the case, and AI’s leading developers are finding their models aren’t improving as dramatically as they used to.

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