After denouncing a bill that would hold Web companies accountable for hosting sex trafficking, Facebook and Google are now apparently trying to reach a middle ground with lawmakers. “The shifting position illustrates the changing political reality in Washington for some of the country’s biggest technology companies,” writes The New York Times. “After years of largely avoiding regulation, businesses like Facebook, Google and Amazon are a focus of lawmakers.”

Users of the Adblock Plus browser extension are now being offered a filter designed to protect them from sites that want to use their computers’ resources to mine cryptocurrency. “The thinking is pretty straightforward,” Venture Beat writes. “If I don’t have to ask users’ permission to display ads on my site, then why should I have to ask them permission to mine cryptocurrency?”

Facebook is inviting businesses to target ads to users who have previously visited their brick-and-mortar locations. As Marketing Land reports, the company is also offering brands “the ability to retarget people based on other offline events that Facebook can track, such as in-store product purchases and calls to a business’s office or call center.” The new retargeting options will now be included in Facebook’s Custom Audiences ad-targeting portfolio.

To blame Facebook’s failure to police its ad operations on bad algorithms is missing the point, argues Slate’s Will Oremus. “In fact, the problems with Facebook’s ad tool are not mysterious or complicated, and they aren’t buried in layers of machine-learning classifiers or neural nets,” he writes. “Rather, they’re the predictable outcome of rudimentary automation coupled with bad human behavior and a lack of careful oversight.”  

Stateside, more than 30 million people are now paying for a subscription music streaming service, according to RIAA. That “pushed streaming revenue up 48 percent, to $2.5 billion, in the first half of the year,” Recode writes, citing the trade group’s data. “Streaming now accounts for 62 percent of the U.S. music business.”

CNN Digital expects to bring in north of $370 million this year. Yet, as sources tell BuzzFeed, the unit is still over budget by about $20 million, and is therefore cutting costs. “Expenses in CNN Digital have been pared down and travel for digital employees has been limited,” it writes. Still, of the 660 people who presently work for CNN Digital, a spokesman said that there are no plans for freezes, cutbacks or layoffs.

Since Trump took office, tech startups in Toronto are reporting a double-digit increase in job applications, Axios reports. “This is among the first concrete evidence that President Trump’s hard line on immigration may be impacting the global race to attract the best minds,” it writes. “The reports from Toronto suggest a threat to the United States' long edge as the preeminent magnet for the world's brightest scientific talent.”

Critics agree that Apple’s latest Watch remains a work in progress. Most disappointing, early reviewers say the phone’s LTE feature -- with which users should be able to connect directly to the Web -- is half-baked. “On more than one occasion, I detached myself from the phone … and watched the Watch struggle to connect to LTE,” according  to The Verge’s Lauren Goode. “Considering that my Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE … didn’t function like it was supposed to, I can’t recommend buying it.”

Nieman Lab’s Trushar Barot considers the promise of smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo, which he predicts will reshape publishers’ distribution models to a greater degree than smartphones. “I’d describe these smart speakers and the associated AI and machine learning that they’ll interface with as the huge burning platform the news industry doesn’t even know it’s standing on,” Barot writes.

Amazon is reportedly developing “smart glasses,” which will be directly connected to its Alexa virtual assistant. “The device, which would tether wirelessly to a smartphone, is designed to look like a regular pair of spectacles so that it could be worn comfortably and unobtrusively,” the Financial Times reports, citing sources. “A bone-conduction audio system would allow the wearer to hear Alexa without having to insert headphones into their ears.”