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As the Trump administration considers “extreme vetting,” visitors to the U.S. may have to hand over their phones and Facebook passwords before they get a visa. The White House is also weighing what to do about the spouses of high-skilled immigrants, signaling in a court filing that it’s reviewing an Obama-era visa program. [Tony Romm / Recode]
Amazon is paying $50 million to stream Thursday night NFL games this year (sorry, Twitter). You’ll need to be an Amazon Prime subscriber to watch for free. Amazon shares rose above $900 for the first time yesterday, making the e-commerce giant worth more than $430 billion — nearly twice the market value of its rival, Walmart. [Peter Kafka / Recode]
Spotify finally locked in a long-term deal with the world’s largest music company, Universal Music Group, paving the way for Spotify’s long-discussed IPO. The deal lets Spotify reduce its royalty payments if it hits certain revenue targets, and gives Universal acts the ability to make new albums available only on Spotify’s paid tier for two weeks after release. [Robert Levine / Billboard]
A philanthropic initiative established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar will contribute $100 million to support investigative journalism, fight fake news and counteract hate speech around the world. Facebook, Mozilla and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark are among the contributors to the News Integrity Initiative. [Margaret Sullivan / The Washington Post]
Apple did a very un-Apple thing: The famously secretive company admitted that it needs to rethink its hard-to-upgrade high-end Mac Pro, which was last revised in late 2013. [Dan Frommer / Recode]
When you’re in charge of a company like Uber that’s facing a public image crisis, how should you respond? On the latest episode of Recode Decode, Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia offered some advice for Uber CEO Travis Kalanick: Deal with your issues quickly, before they spiral out of your control. [Eric Johnson / Recode]
Top stories from Recode
Twitter lost its NFL streaming deal, and now it has to decide if live TV is still its future. Football and Donald Trump couldn’t help Twitter’s cause in 2016.
Trump fears have helped double downloads for Signal, the private messaging app. Encrypted messaging is the new regular messaging.
Lawmakers want border agents to get a warrant before searching your smartphone. A new effort by Sen. Ron Wyden comes as such border searches are on the rise.
A black woman in tech makes $79,000 for every $100,000 a white man makes. These charts show how those inequalities play out in tech workers’ paychecks.
It’s getting harder and harder to tell Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter apart. As social media companies have evolved, they’ve started to borrow product ideas from each other in the hope of building an all-in-one experience.
This is cool
How Scarlett Johansson became our finest post-human movie star. Recent films like “Ghost in the Shell,” “Her,” “Lucy” and “Under the Skin” show an actress interested in exploring the limits of humanity. [Kevin Lincoln / Vulture]
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
