Today, it’s almost possible to leave your wallet at home and not pay using your phone. In the not-too distant future, stores could even use facial recognition, or fingerprint scanning, so you don’t even need a device — just grab your items, and walk out. Consumers seem to want this frictionless payment as much as retailers do, but why?

Some 94% of libraries offer e-books to borrowers, but now Macmillan, one of the five biggest book publishers in the United States, said it’s going to limit each library to just one copy for the first eight weeks after publication. So get ready for longer waits to borrow them. Jessamyn West, a librarian in Vermont, said it’s reflective of a lot of upheaval in the book world right now.

Some entrepreneurs think technology can help prevent gun violence. A handful of companies are creating artificial intelligence to identify active shooters. The problem is AI requires a lot of data to learn what is a weapon and what isn’t. One startup is creating its own data by holding film shoots.

PG&E has said it could take a decade to upgrade its infrastructure so it’s less likely to spark deadly fires. On Thursday, the utility reported a $1.6 billion loss in the third quarter related to fire charges. A group of California mayors think PG&E should be turned into a publicly owned cooperative utility. Is the answer here just to get off the grid or for utilities to split up into lots of smaller microgrids?

After a very dramatic bidding process, U.S. Department of Defense last month awarded a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft. Several companies, including Oracle, claimed the process was rigged and that President Donald Trump threatened to personally intervene in the choosing process because he’s been a critic of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

As the amount of data coursing through the internet grows, so does the infrastructure needed to keep all that data flowing. Huge data centers are popping up around the country, but data centers don’t always make good neighbors due to their noise. Bianca Bosker, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, wrote about Chandler, Arizona, where a group of neighbors have taken on data center giant CyrusOne.