The prosecutor's office said it raided 21 addresses in Belgium, according to local media.

Google says it is aware of an issue impacting some Chromecast devices and is working to fix.

Waymo now has more than 300 driverless vehicles zipping passengers around San Francisco, but while they follow traffic laws, parking is another matter entirely. According to city records cited by the Washington Post, these rolling robots wracked up 589 citations totaling $65,065 in fines last year for parking violations that ranged from blocking traffic to […]

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As the tit-for-tat tariff fight between the U.S. and Mexico, Canada, China and the European Union continues, marketers are watching closely — and worrying.

To recap: President Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs in February then put them off for a month before re-tabling the issue last week, leading to another postponement for Mexico and Canada. The U.K. and Europe haven’t been granted the same grace and this week’s retaliatory tariffs from the E.U. are, at the time of writing, still set to go into force, pending legislative approval in April, as are Canada’s reciprocal steel, sports equipment and computer tariffs. (Bloomberg has a running tally).

The constant change has left marketers’ and agency execs’ heads spinning.

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It’s been almost a year since Google rolled out its AI-generated search feature AI Overviews, and publishers still know very little about how it’s impacting their referral traffic.

Last week Google introduced AI Mode, an experimental feature for search, which lets users ask follow-up questions without leaving the page, as part of an overall AI Overviews update, which will now be powered by its Gemini 2.0 AI model.

AI Overviews, which provides generated summaries of information from multiple sources to answer a user’s search query, will also be available to more people, including teens and users not signed into Google accounts. AI Mode, which resembles the same kind of experience provided by Perplexity or ChatGPT Search, is only being made available to Google AI One Premium subscribers.

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Brian O’Kelley has made a career out of rewiring the ad tech machine. The AppNexus co-founder has spent much of the past two decades deep in the weeds of programmatic advertising — an industry that, for all its ubiquity, remains an opaque, arbitrage-fueled mess. Now, he’s back with a new mission: tear down its inefficiencies and rebuild something cleaner, leaner and, ideally, more honest.

How? By using AI to rebuild ad tech from the ground up, Scope3’s agentic advertising platform optimizes media buying for efficiency, sustainability and brand safety.

If there were ever a moment for such a reckoning, this is it: marketers, long resigned to the system’’s flaws, are losing patience. Real-time bidding, the lifeblood of programmatic, is running low on both trust and liquidity. And then there’s the latest scandal, which landed like a bomb in the middle of an already shaky industry: revelations that major brands’ ads had appeared alongside child sexual abuse content. The fallout was swift. 

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YouTube is turning 20 next month and if there’s one thing the company wants you to know, it’s just how big it is. The numbers are staggering, but what do they really mean?

Digiday has sifted through the data to find the numbers that actually matter. Here’s what you need to know:

YouTube has become huge

Over the past 20 years, YouTube has cemented itself as one of the most dominant platforms in the digital landscape. Launched in 2005, the same year as Reddit and just a year after Facebook, it emerged at a time when social media was still a novelty.

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Creators are utilizing Substack’s live video co-hosting features to grow their audiences — and their subscriber counts.

It’s been one month since Substack enabled video posts — previously a desktop-only function — on its mobile app, and two months since the platform expanded live video to all creators, with the ability for creators to team up and pool viewers as one of the features.

It’s early days, but so far seven creators have told Digiday that they are pleased with the results. 

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There’s a talent problem in the media agency world, and it starts at the bottom — meaning the entry level. 

(There’s a whole different talent problem in the C-suite as well, as a steady dribble of executives leave one holding company for another — but that’s a story for another time.)

The rising use of AI for entry-level and sometimes menial tasks has started to jeopardize the ability of young people to break into the agency business. At a Town Hall discussion held during the Digiday Media Buying Summit in Nashville on March 12 — a meeting that was held under Chatham House Rules, which guarantees anonymity for the agency attendees — some media agency folks spoke of that very problem. 

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Chinese start-up to concentrate resources on building machines with humanlike cognitive capabilities

It’s been two weeks since the iPhone 16e arrived in stores and in the hands of early adopters. Unfortunately, some of them have been experiencing issues with Bluetooth audio, especially when using wireless headphones. At least based on multiple reports from iPhone 16e owners.

more…

Universal Studios just previewed tons of merch for its upcoming new theme park—and the monsters are a standout.

The team working at the Social Security Administration appears to be among the largest DOGE units deployed to any government agency.

In the same way that genome sequencing determines the genetic makeup of an organism, Bryan Johnson — the investor and founder behind the Don’t Die movement — wants to start “foodome” sequencing.  “We’re going to sequence the U.S. ‘foodome,’ which means test 20% of foods that constitute 80% of the American diet based on stuff […]

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MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler and her senior executives are in the midst of preparing for the network to be spun off from the NBCUniversal News Group and join the newly-created SpinCo later this year. The network is in the process of looking for new office and studio space. It also recently hired Scott Matthews to...

Orlando Fox owned station WOFL has released footage of its studio getting hit by a tornado on Monday. The tornado destroyed two homes, according to officials. No injuries were reported. The footage from Fox 35's cameras showed swirling winds knocking down equipment on the station's weather deck. The camera lens then gets blocked by wind...

T-Mobile is letting some legacy plan customers know that a price increase is coming, 9to5Google reports. Many Reddit users on r/tmobile said the carrier sent them text messages that their plans will raise by $5 per month per line starting on April 2nd.

In an internal memo obtained by CNET, T-Mobile consumer group president Jon Freier says the price increase addresses “rising costs” for the company. The memo noted that affected customers would be notified by the end of the day today.

CNET says it’s unclear which legacy plans will be affected but notes that Go5G, Go5G Plus, and Go5G Next subscribers won’t be subject to the price hikes. T-Mobile had already increased the rates of some of these older plans by $2 to $5 last year, and Freier apparently notes in the memo that “no line that received a prior increase will receive an additional adjustment as part of this initiative.”

“While most customers are not included, we’re wrapping up the price adjustments that began last year in response to rising costs,” T-Mobile says on its support account on X. “We are still committed to providing low prices and the most value across all plans.” The account also says that these changes should not affect customers with Price Lock.

Jesse Watters Primetime had a massive showing in the Adults 25-54 demo for Fox News with 550,000 viewers tuning in on Wednesday. Primetime also joined The Five in reaching 4 million total viewers, with that 5 p.m. show being the most-watched program of the evening across all three networks. Meanwhile, The Rachel Maddow Show continued...

Apple’s AirPods 4 are down to the lowest price ever on Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy, where you can pick them up starting at $99.99. That’s about 22 percent off the $129 list price. 

These are the newest version of Apple’s base AirPods, launched in September with the iPhone 16. They support spatial audio with dynamic head tracking, which is a weird effect that makes it sound like audio is coming out of the device you’re listening to instead of just pumping stereo sound into your ear drums. I usually turn it off. 

I like the open design of the AirPods 4, though, which sometimes feels more comfortable than the silicone tips on my second-gen AirPods Pro. I also dig the compact case and solid battery life. Pro tip, though: if you want to splurge just a little bit, you should probably get the AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation. They’re on sale at Amazon and Walmart for $148.99 (17 percent off), which is about $10 shy of their all-time low. The higher-end model also adds Adaptive Audio and a transparency mode, along with a case that juices up via an Apple Watch puck or any Qi-compatible charger. 

Are they worth the extra $50? Maybe. I think the active noise cancellation is a good option when you find yourself on a rowdy NJ transit train heading to a NY Jets game. Just kidding, nobody does that.

Read our full AirPods 4 review.

And Ahsoka Tano too, but we all know it's Jar Jar's world and we're just living in it.