Take it from Jasmine Brand, who started the celebrity news site The Jasmine Brand 10 years ago, and is still going strong.

Earlier this year, I noticed something curious: four Craigslist ads, selling the same brand of mattress, using nearly the same text, at the same location

Washington has taken a major step toward becoming the first US state to restrict companies looking to extract, bottle and sell local water supplies. On Monday night the state senate passed a bill that would ban new permits for water bottling operations. SB 6278 states “any use of water for the commercial production of bottled water is deemed to be detrimental to the public welfare and the public interest” and would apply retroactively to new permits filed after 1 January 2019.

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has intervened to raise concerns about Google’s plan to scoop up the health and activity data of millions of Fitbit users — at a time when the company is under intense scrutiny over how extensively it tracks people online and for antitrust concerns.

Six months ago or thereabouts, a group of engineers and developers with backgrounds from the National Security Agency, Google and Amazon Web Services had an idea. Data is valuable for helping developers and engineers to build new features and better innovate. But that data is often highly sensitive and out of reach, kept under lock and key by red tape and compliance, which can take weeks to get approval.

‘It’s amazing how a company most have never heard of can bring the U.S. music industry to its knees,’ said one label exec struggling to get his artists’ records into stores

“Proactive and reactively we will delete evil my brother.”

Verizon on Thursday is playing defense against a report that it was no longer interested in carrying Google's Pixel line of phones, including the upcoming rumored Pixel 4A and Pixel 5 that are expected to be released this year. "It's not true," Verizon spokeswoman Adria Tomaszewski told CNET. "We continue to work with Google and look forward to the new portfolio of devices."

Time Warner Cable has agreed to pay a $16.9 million settlement to thousands of consumers in California who did not receive the high-speed internet they paid for, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. More than 170,000 customers will benefit from the settlement, the largest direct restitution order ever secured in a consumer protection lawsuit by the DA's office, L.A. prosecutors said in a news release.

Leo Kelion investigates the rise of Amazon and its huge data-gathering operation

The historic vote comes amid growing discontent among employees at technology companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, who have started to organize.

Coding boot-camp start-up Lambda School has been valued by investors at $150 million — but its job placement rate is much lower than it claims.

Hulu is now officially the top live TV streaming service, overtaking Sling TV for the first time last quarter. Dish Network reported this morning that its Sling TV service finished Q4 2019 with 2.59 million subscribers, having lost 94,000 subscribers from the prior quarter. Hulu + Live TV, meanwhile, continues to grow, finishing last quarter with a record 3.4 million subscribers. The next closest streaming bundle competitor is YouTube TV with two million subscribers. Both Hulu + Live TV and Sling TV raised prices in Q4, but not until late December, so the full effects of those price hikes probably won’t be felt until next quarter.

HSBC on Tuesday said it would cut around 35,000 jobs and dramatically overhaul its business after its profit plunged by a third in 2019. The bank plans to reduce its global headcount by roughly 15% to 200,000 over the next three years, a company spokesperson said, although the precise figures have not been finalized.

In brief: Nvidia in its latest earnings report this week said it generated $3.11 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2020 that ended on January 26. That’s an increase of 41 percent over the $2.21 billion brought in during the same period a year ago and a three percent hike quarter-over-quarter.

Bookshop.org is looking to generate revenue for independent book stores by moving sales, and affiliate links, away from Amazon and toward independent bookstores.

Burger King is breaking the mold in its new advertising campaign. The burger chain is portraying its Whopper covered in mold in print and TV ads running in Europe and the U.S. The message: Burger King is removing artificial preservatives from its signature burger. The company, already known for irreverent ad campaigns, turned it up a notch, including a time-lapse of a decaying burger on Twitter. That imagery goes beyond the print ads that show a 28-day-old burger — a week beyond.

It’s a road map that the rest of the fashion industry should follow.

HSBC has said it will axe around 35,000 jobs as it announced profits for 2019 fell by about a third. That has spurred the bank to target $4.5bn (£3.5bn) of cost cuts by 2022 as part of a major restructuring. The bank's interim chief executive, Noel Quinn, said HSBC would scale back its headcount from 235,000 to about 200,000 over the next three years.

The cloud's been with us for 14 years now. Let's take a quick look at its history.