If you’ve been including some, shall we say extended family, in your Spotify family plan subscription, a reckoning could play out soon.

Spotify is contacting some subscribers to its Premium for Family plan, asking them to confirm the family members all reside at a single address via GPS, according to multiple media reports and social media posts.

“If you don’t confirm, you may lose access to the plan,” the emails say.

The streaming service began offering the family plan four years ago, letting subscribers add up to five more users who reside at the same address for $14.99 monthly. Those users get the service as do individual subscribers to the $9.99 monthly Premium plan, which has no advertisements and lets you skip tracks and download music for offline listening – significant upgrades over Spotify’s free service.

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But some family plan users have recently gotten emails from Spotify asking them to confirm their home address using GPS, according to posts on Twitter and reports in Quartz and Spiegel Online.

Many users posting about the situation brought up the fact that not all families live in the same home, with many having some members who live in different locations, even overseas.

Such a location-based requirement, should it be permanently enforced, could be seen to run counter to a recent agreement with Ancestry.com to encourage users to listen to music based on their DNA – an experiment that could collate music from across the world.

Some said the decision could make them consider Apple Music, which has a similar family plan at the same price. “Pretty aggressive,” is how Philip Battin, an executive at Google, characterized Spotify’s move on Twitter in his post showing the notice from Spotify.

For its part, Spotify is not confirming the process and offered this statement in response to a query about the family plan situation.

“Spotify is currently testing improvements to the user experience of Premium for Family with small user groups in select markets,” it said. “We are always testing new products and experiences at Spotify, but have no further news to share regarding this particular feature test at this time.”

Follow USA TODAY reporter Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider.

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Sen. Jeff Flake announced on Friday morning that he would vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, who’s been accused by three women of sexual misconduct, to the Supreme Court — and faced immediate backlash from protesters, some of whom were survivors of sexual violence.

Minutes before the Senate Judiciary Committee met on Friday morning to vote on the nominee, Flake and an aide were cornered in a Senate elevator by several women.

“I told the story of my sexual assault. I told it because I recognized in Dr. Ford’s story that she is telling the truth,” one woman said, referring to Christine Blasey Ford, who testified before the committee on Thursday about her allegation that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in the 1980s when they were in high school.

“What you are doing is allowing someone who actually violated a woman to sit in the Supreme Court,” the protester said. “This is not tolerable.”

She added: “I have two children. I cannot imagine that for the next 50 years they will have to have someone in the Supreme Court who has been accused of violating a young girl. What are you doing, sir?”

Flake, who had been seen as a possible swing vote in the confirmation, nodded and said he needed to get to the vote.

“You’re telling all women that they don’t matter, that they should just stay quiet because if they tell you what happened to them you’re going to ignore them,” said another protester who was close to tears.

“That’s what you’re telling me when you vote for him,” she added. “Don’t look away from me.”

Another protester said, “You have power when so many women are powerless.”

Flake released a statement on Friday morning explaining his vote.

“After hearing more than 30 hours of testimony from Judge Kavanaugh earlier this month, I was prepared to support his nomination based on his view of the law and his record as a judge,” he said.

Flake described Ford’s testimony as “compelling” and Kavanaugh’s subsequent testimony denying the allegation as “persuasive,” but he said he would never know for sure which person is telling the truth. Flake never called for an FBI investigation.

“I wish that I could express the confidence that some of my colleagues have conveyed about what either did or did not happen in the early 1980s, but I left the hearing yesterday with as much doubt as certainty,” Flake said.

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Six countries including the main Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations met in New York City for the first time since a rift led to a blockade on Qatar 15 months ago.

Friday’s meeting took place on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, and was the first gathering of its kind since Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt severed diplomatic and trade ties with Qatar on June 5, 2017.

The blockading quartet accuse Qatar of having close ties to regional rival Iran and harbouring “terrorism” – allegations Doha strongly denies.

Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from New York, said the move was “quite significant” since it was the first time all parties met face to face over the issue.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spearheaded the talks.

“The idea behind this meeting is that the Americans are trying to build some sort of regional alliance called an Arab NATO to contain what the US sees as Iran’s growing influence in the region,” Ahelbarra said.

Among things discussed were the strengthening of military ties, as well as economic and diplomatic relations.

Pompeo said earlier this year during a visit to Saudi Arabia that “Gulf unity is necessary and we need to achieve it”.

‘Productive’ meeting

Immediately after the meeting, Qatar’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told Al Jazeera the talks were “productive”.

“[The meeting was] about the Middle East strategic alliance and the GCC relations with the US, plus Egypt and Jordan,” he said.

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said at UNGA earlier this week the blockading nations could wait decades for Doha to meet their controversial list of demands. 

When asked for Qatar’s response to the remarks, Sheikh Mohammed replied: “We have to address the challenges in our region first.

“A year from now, no one will know what the future of the countries will be… Qatar can also wait forever,” he added.

“Diplomacy means communication and engagement, and this is Qatar.”

Middle East condundrum

Ahelbarra noted the challenge facing the United States, which wants the parties to agree on a number of regional issues including the conflicts in Syria and Yemen.

“How can you bring together all of these people when they defer on every regional conflict,” Ahelbarra said.

“Unless you have all the parties agree, I don’t see how the Americans can build a regional alliance to contain all the problems in the region,” he said.

The US State Department said the ministers agreed on the need to confront threats from Iran and had productive discussions on setting up what is to be known as the “Middle East Strategic Alliance” to promote security and stability in the region.

The GCC is a political and economic alliance of six countries in the Arabian Peninsula: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Before the crisis, citizens of the GCC enjoyed a great deal of freedom of movement between the six member states, but that ended with the blockade. With close tribal ties, over generations thousands of intermarriages have been celebrated between Qataris and other GCC nationals, and those families are no longer able to see each other.

Rachel Mitchell, the Arizona prosecutor who questioned Christine Blasey Ford at Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee, privately told GOP senators she would not prosecute Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh based on the evidence she heard, according to the Washington Post.

That detail was spotlighted Friday by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, whose office sent out  a news release Friday referring to Mitchell’s conclusion.

Mitchell was hand-picked to lead the questioning of Ford, who has accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault when both were high school students in the posh suburbs of suburban Maryland.

Mitchell avoided a high-decibel grilling Thursday and instead displayed a considerate, business-like manner befitting an experienced sex crimes prosecutor.

Cornyn, who as Senate majority whip is deputy to GOP Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told Fox News’ Fox & Friends Friday morning that he thought Mitchell performed admirably.

“I spent 13 years as a judge back in Texas, and I recognize the need to have somebody who does this for a living day after day carefully question somebody who has claimed to be a victim of sexual assault,” he said. “I thought she did a good job getting the basic facts out.”

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Slack is planning to go public in 2019.

The upcoming IPO — which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed to Business Insider by a person familiar with the matter — is scheduled to take place by fall 2019 and could value the company around $7 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal’s sources.

A spokesperson for Slack said that the company does not provide comment on “rumors and speculation.”

In 2017, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Bloomberg that an IPO was still a long way off. The company most recently closed a $427 million funding round in August led by Dragoneer Investment Group and General Atlantic, which valued it at more than $7 billion.

While the San Francisco-based company has yet to hire underwriters, the Journal’s sources report that the company is actively preparing to go public.

Slack was founded in 2009. Its popular work chat software is estimated to be used by 8 million people daily.

Cities like Los Angeles, New York, London, Madrid, and Paris have all acknowledged the bubble-like hotter temperatures within their cities, known widely as the Urban Heat Island effect. 

Though some cities have tried a couple of different ways to combat the heat — like Madrid’s car-less day or New York’s movement to paint rooftops white — the higher temperatures still remain. 

Now a team of researchers at Columbia University thinks they’ve found a new solution in the form of a high-tech paint.

The scientists created a substance that works like a paint but is actually a polymer coating that reflects both sunlight and radiating heat into the atmosphere. The polymer should help cool not only buildings coated with it but surrounding areas as well, according to a study published in the journal Science. 

“Now is a critical time to develop promising solutions for sustainable humanity,” lead researcher Yuan Yang said in a statement. “It is essential that we find solutions to this climate challenge, and we are very excited to be working on this new technology that addresses it.”

Usually people turn to air conditioning to cool off in cities around the world, however, many AC units aren’t energy efficient.

One alternative to air conditioning, called passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC), offers cooler temperatures with little-to-no energy expended. 

So far, however, many PDRC methods are too expensive or too difficult to widely implement. But that’s where the new polymer comes in.

White paint is currently considered the standard PDRC since it’s cheap, easily implemented and can reflect light. However white paint, like regular paint, still absorbs heat energy which makes the new polymer coating a potentially better PDRC, according to the new research. 

The coating is unique in its ability to cool because researchers replaced paint pigment with little holes, called air voids, which reflect all light energy including heat.

“There are plans to commercialize the product,” Yang said in an interview. “We do plan on engaging the government as well.”

But lead author Jyotirmoy Mandal said in an email that a few coated rooftops here and there will not have an effect. 

“A large scale implementation in multiple buildings is required, and I would say that requires the involvement of public policy and industrial circles,” he explained. 

Some other tech options that could cool down our cities include designing buildings with better air flow, adding heat-blocking films to windows, and creating more energy efficient AC units. 

The team of researchers hope that this futuristic paint will be added to this list of solutions.