SAN FRANCISCO — Apple introduced a pop-up window for iPhones in April that asks people for their permission to be tracked by different apps.

Google recently outlined plans to disable a tracking technology in its Chrome web browser.

And Facebook said last month that hundreds of its engineers were working on a new method of showing ads without relying on people’s personal data.

The developments may seem like technical tinkering, but they were connected to something bigger: an intensifying battle over the future of the internet. The struggle has entangled tech titans, upended Madison Avenue and disrupted small businesses. And it heralds a profound shift in how people’s personal information may be used online, with sweeping implications for the ways that businesses make money digitally.

At the center of the tussle is what has been the internet’s lifeblood: advertising.

More than 20 years ago, the internet drove an upheaval in the advertising industry....

Having survived a recall vote, the governor is free to focus on the state’s homeless population and housing shortage. He has more room to maneuver than he did when he first took office.

One of the most compelling dealmaking sagas this year hasn’t been in tech, pharma or another industry that often dominates the news. It is a bidding war among railroads — what century is this again? — that has generated high drama. At stake was possibly the last major acquisition of a railroad, ending a long period of consolidation in the industry.

Canadian Pacific has emerged as the victor in a long-running battle to acquire Kansas City Southern, putting it in position to become the first railroad operator whose network spans the U.S., Canada and Mexico, allowing it to capitalize on trade flows across North America. Most notably, it won with a lower offer than rival bidder Canadian National, which announced yesterday that Kansas City Southern was terminating the merger agreement the companies signed in May.

The key was “to avoid a bidding war,” Canadian Pacific’s C.E.O., Keith Creel, told DealBook. So how did it prevail with a lower price? Hop aboard for a quick...

The internet is changing, including how much we pay for content and the ads and brands we see.

That’s because Apple and Google, two hugely influential tech companies, are rolling out privacy protections that hinder marketers from gaining access to our data when they show us ads. The changes have major repercussions for online advertising, which are a business foundation for the free apps and websites that many of us use, like Facebook, TikTok and the Weather Channel. Those sites and apps now have to come up with new ways to show ads or make money.

Here’s what that means for you.

Wading into an acrimonious debate over booster doses, researchers in Israel reported on Wednesday that a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine can prevent both infections and severe illness in adults older than 60 for at least 12 days.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the latest salvo in the conflict over whether booster doses are needed for healthy adults and whether they should be given out, as the Biden administration plans to do, when so much of the world remains unvaccinated.

Several independent scientists said the cumulative data so far suggest that only older adults will need boosters — and maybe not even them.

Vaccination remains powerfully protective against severe illness and hospitalization in the vast majority of people in all of the studies published so far, experts said. But the vaccines do seem less potent against infections in people of all ages, particularly those exposed to the highly contagious...

Cities and large parts of the economy continued to bounce back this year, as if returning to some sense of normalcy. But when the pandemic’s path veered, so did our sense of where the finish line was.

A fire in a cable connecting the British and French power systems sent already overheated British electricity rates soaring Wednesday.

National Grid, the British electric power company, said that the fire had occurred at a facility in Sellindge, near the English Channel, and that the cable would be out of service for about six months.

The cause of the fire was said to be under investigation.

The Kent Fire and Rescue Service said Wednesday morning that it was fighting the blaze with as many as 12 fire engines and making “progress,” though firefighters were expected to remain on the scene for hours.

News of the outage jolted the markets. A measure of wholesale electricity, British day-ahead power prices, reached as high as 481.88 pounds per megawatt-hour, according to Epex Spot, a trading platform. That level is several times what is normal, though prices had been soaring in recent days.

Living on the South Carolina coast means living under the threat of dangerous weather during storm season. But the added peril of the pandemic made Ann Freeman nervous.

“What do I do if there’s an evacuation or there’s a storm and you have all this coronavirus and problems with hotels?” Ms. Freeman said. “So I said, ‘Maybe now is the time.’”

That’s why Ms. Freeman spent $12,400 last year to install a Generac backup generator at her home on Johns Island, a sea island near the Charleston peninsula. The wait — about three months — seemed long.

But she was lucky: The wait is twice as long now.

Demand for backup generators has soared over the last year, as housebound Americans focused on preparing their homes for the worst, just as a surge of extreme weather ensured many experienced it.

Living on the South Carolina coast means living under the threat of dangerous weather during storm season. But the added peril of the pandemic made Ann Freeman nervous.

“What do I do if there’s an evacuation or there’s a storm and you have all this coronavirus and problems with hotels?” Ms. Freeman said. “So I said, ‘Maybe now is the time.’”

That’s why Ms. Freeman spent $12,400 last year to install a Generac backup generator at her home on Johns Island, a sea island near the Charleston peninsula. The wait — about three months — seemed long.

But she was lucky: The wait is twice as long now.

Demand for backup generators has soared over the last year, as housebound Americans focused on preparing their homes for the worst, just as a surge of extreme weather ensured many experienced it.

Cities and large parts of the economy continued to bounce back this year, as if returning to some sense of normalcy. But when the pandemic’s path veered, so did our sense of where the finish line was.

Canadian Pacific has emerged as the winner in a long-running battle to acquire Kansas City Southern, putting it in position to become the first railroad operator whose network extends from Canada to Mexico.

Its rival in the bidding, Canadian National, said on Wednesday that it had received notice from Kansas City Southern that it was terminating a merger agreement they signed in May.

“The decision not to pursue our proposed merger with KCS any further is the right decision for CN as responsible fiduciaries of our shareholders’ interests,” Jean-Jacques Ruest, the chief executive of Canadian National, said in a statement.

At stake was possibly the last major acquisition of a major railroad; mergers have consolidated the industry to seven railways from more than 100. The key component of the deal is access to Mexico, as railroads look to capitalize on trade flows across North America on the heels of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which was signed into...

A fire in a cable connecting the British and French power systems has sent already overheated British electricity rates soaring Wednesday.

National Grid, the British electric power company, said the fire occurred at a facility in Sellindge, near the English Channel, and that the cable would be out of service for about a month.

The cause of the fire was said to be under investigation.

The Kent Fire and Rescue Service said Wednesday morning it was fighting the blaze with as many as 12 fire engines and making “progress,” though firefighters were expected to remain on the scene for hours.

News of the outage jolted the markets. A measure of wholesale electricity, British day-ahead power prices, reached as high as 481.88 pounds per megawatt-hour, according to Epex Spot, a trading platform. That level is several times what is normal, though prices have been soaring in recent days.

Living on the South Carolina coast means living under the threat of dangerous weather during storm season. But the added peril of the pandemic made Ann Freeman nervous.

“What do I do if there’s an evacuation or there’s a storm and you have all this coronavirus and problems with hotels?” Ms. Freeman said. “So I said, ‘Maybe now is the time.’”

That’s why Ms. Freeman spent $12,400 last year to install a Generac backup generator at her home on Johns Island, a sea island near the Charleston peninsula. The wait — about three months — seemed long.

But she was lucky: The wait is twice as long now.

Demand for backup generators has soared over the last year, as housebound Americans focused on preparing their homes for the worst, just as a surge of extreme weather ensured many experienced it.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — A key whistle-blower against Theranos, the blood testing start-up that collapsed under scandal in 2018, testified on Tuesday in the fraud trial of the company’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes.

The whistle-blower, Erika Cheung, worked as a lab assistant at Theranos for six months in 2013 and 2014 before reporting lab testing problems at the company to federal agents at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in 2015. Her first day of testimony revealed to a jury what those following the Theranos saga most likely already knew: The company’s celebrated blood testing technology did not work.

Her testimony is expected to continue on Wednesday.

In a crowded courtroom, Ms. Cheung said she had turned down other job offers out of college to join Theranos because she was dazzled by Ms. Holmes’s charisma and inspired by her success as a woman in technology. Ms. Holmes said Theranos’s machines, called Edison, would be able to quickly and cheaply...

When the next SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Kennedy Space Center this week, it’ll be a space mission unlike any that has come before.

There will be four people inside the capsule on top of the rocket, just like the last two SpaceX missions that took NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. But this time, none of the four passengers work for NASA or any other space agency.

This mission, called Inspiration4, is the brainchild of Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of Shift4, a company that provides payment processes services. Three other people — none of whom Mr. Isaacman knew before he recruited them for the launch — will join him on a trip that will circle Earth for three days before splashing down off the coast of Florida.

This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. Here is a collection of past columns.

I’m going to pose an intentionally provocative question: What if smartphones are so successful and useful that they are holding back innovation?

Technologists are now imagining what could be the next big thing. But there may never be anything else like the smartphone, the first and perhaps last mass market and globally transformative computer.

I may wind up looking like a 19th-century futurist who couldn’t imagine that horses would be replaced by cars. But let me make the case that the phenomenon of the smartphone may never be replicated.

First, when people in technology imagine the future, they’re implicitly betting that smartphones will be displaced as the center of our digital lives by things that are less obvious — not slabs that pull us away from our world but technologies that are almost indistinguishable from the air that we breathe.

Con 15 millones en fondos privados, la empresa Colossal intentará crear miles de mamuts lanudos para que vuelvan a Siberia. Algunos científicos son profundamente escépticos ante la posibilidad de que eso suceda.

Living on the South Carolina coast means living under the threat of dangerous weather during storm season. But the added peril of the pandemic made Ann Freeman nervous.

“What do I do if there’s an evacuation or there’s a storm and you have all this coronavirus and problems with hotels?” Ms. Freeman said. “So I said, ‘Maybe now is the time.’”

That’s why Ms. Freeman spent $12,400 last year to install a Generac backup generator at her home on Johns Island, a sea island near the Charleston peninsula. The wait — about three months — seemed long.

But she was lucky: The wait is twice as long now.

Demand for backup generators has soared over the last year, as housebound Americans focused on preparing their homes for the worst, just as a surge of extreme weather ensured many experienced it.

A fire in a cable connecting the British and French power systems has sent already overheated British electricity rates soaring Wednesday.

National Grid, the British electric power company, said the fire occurred at a facility in Sellindge, near the English Channel, and that the cable would be out of service for about a month.

The cause of the fire was said to be under investigation.

The Kent Fire and Rescue Service said Wednesday morning it was fighting the blaze with as many as 12 fire engines and making “progress,” though firefighters were expected to remain on the scene for hours.

News of the outage jolted the markets. A measure of wholesale electricity, British day-ahead power prices, reached as high as 481.88 pounds per megawatt-hour, according to Epex Spot, a trading platform. That level is several times what is normal, though prices have been soaring in recent days.

When the next SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Kennedy Space Center this week, it’ll be a space mission unlike any that has come before.

There will be four people inside the capsule on top of the rocket, just like the last two SpaceX missions that took NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. But this time, none of the four passengers work for NASA or any other space agency.

This mission, called Inspiration4, is the brainchild of Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of Shift4, a company that provides payment processes services. Three other people — none of whom Mr. Isaacman knew before he recruited them for the launch — will join him on a trip that will circle Earth for three days before splashing down off the coast of Florida.