Fraud prevention and user experience have long been treated as opposing forces: tighten security, and you risk alienating legitimate customers; loosen it, and you open the door to account takeovers, synthetic identities, and payment fraud. But modern threat intelligence platforms are dismantling that false choice.

Today’s most effective fraud prevention strategies operate silently in the background, combining dozens of risk signals in real time to block bad actors before they cause damage, without ever asking a legitimate user to jump through an extra hoop.

Security friction is not a neutral tax. Every unnecessary CAPTCHA, every step-up authentication prompt served to a legitimate user, and every false positive that blocks a good customer from completing a transaction carries a measurable cost. Cart abandonment rates spike when checkout flows become cumbersome.

New user registrations drop when signup forms are burdened with verification delays. And customer service costs rise when account recovery processes are opaque or slow.

At the same time, the cost of under-detection is catastrophic. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimates that organizations lose approximately 5% of annual revenue to fraud each year.

Payment fraud, account takeover, promo abuse, and synthetic identity fraud are not edge cases – they are persistent, organized, and increasingly automated. Fraudsters are running bots, rotating proxies, and leveraging credential stuffing toolkits that would make any IT professional’s hair stand on end.

Fraud at Signup: The Battle for Clean Accounts

Signup is the highest-leverage intervention point in the fraud lifecycle. Stop a fraudster from creating an account, and you prevent every downstream attack that account would have enabled — account takeovers, payment fraud, promo abuse, referral fraud, and synthetic identity monetization.

The challenge is that signup is also the highest-volume, highest-visibility touchpoint for legitimate new users, making false positives especially damaging to business growth.

At signup, the signals available to a fraud team are rich but must be evaluated with speed. Email address analysis should go far beyond simple syntax validation.

Is the domain newly registered? Is the mailbox active and deliverable? Has this address appeared in breach databases? Is it associated with a pattern of fraudulent registrations?

Similarly, phone number intelligence should evaluate carrier type (VOIP vs. mobile), line activity, porting history, and whether the number has been flagged across fraud networks.

Fraud at Login: Defending the Account Layer

Login fraud – primarily account takeover (ATO) – represents one of the most damaging attack vectors in digital fraud. Credential stuffing attacks can compromise even accounts with strong original passwords if those credentials have been reused.

The scale of these attacks is staggering: automated toolkits can test hundreds of thousands of credential pairs per hour against a single target, and residential proxy networks make them difficult to block with traditional rate-limiting or IP filtering.

Frictionless ATO prevention requires detecting the anomaly without punishing the legitimate user. Legitimate logins follow recognizable patterns: familiar devices, typical geographic locations, consistent time-of-day windows, normal session velocities.

Deviations from these patterns, even subtle ones, can be powerful risk signals when combined with network and identity intelligence.

Fraud at Checkout: Protecting Revenue at the Finish Line

Checkout fraud sits at the intersection of identity fraud, payment fraud, and social engineering. At checkout, the convergence of identity and transaction signals is most powerful.

The email and phone attached to a new order should be evaluated for consistency with the claimed billing identity. The IP address should be checked not just for proxy use but for geographic consistency with the shipping address.

Device signals should be compared against the account’s login history. Payment instrument intelligence, including velocity across merchants, prior chargeback rates, and card BIN data, adds a financial risk dimension that purely identity-based approaches cannot provide.

How IPQS Operationalizes Frictionless Intelligence

IPQS represents the class of platform-level fraud intelligence tools that operationalize the multi-signal, layered approach described above.

While offering discrete point solutions for IP reputation, email validation, or phone verification, IPQS operates as a unified intelligence platform that evaluates all of these signals through a shared data model and returns composite risk scores optimized for real-time decision-making.

A tiered response strategy maps risk score ranges to response types that are proportional to both the likelihood and severity of fraud at each threshold.

High-risk sessions can be challenged with targeted, lightweight verification, a single tap push notification to a registered device, for example, rather than a full OTP flow. Only the highest-risk sessions, where the composite evidence strongly suggests fraud, should result in hard blocks or declines.

For the vast majority of legitimate users, who will score in the low-risk tier, the experience is entirely seamless. For the small cohort of genuinely high-risk sessions, the additional friction is proportional, defensible, and targeted at exactly the sessions that warrant it.

IPQS provides unparalleled fraud prevention by producing the freshest and richest data available.

We offer real-time fraud prevention solutions with unmatched accuracy through our cyberthreat honeypot network, covering IP, device, email, phone number, and URL scanning worldwide. Our suite of tools provides tight security with customizable scoring settings and a simple fraud score for easy detection.

Book a free fraud consultation with one of our specialists today!

Sponsored and written by IPQS.

In short: Samsung SmartThings and IKEA announced that 25 new IKEA Matter-over-Thread devices can now connect directly to a SmartThings hub without requiring IKEA’s own DIRIGERA hub, with smart bulbs starting at $5.99 that undercut competitors by half. The integration leverages Thread border routers already embedded in Samsung TVs, soundbars, and appliances since 2022, meaning millions of Samsung hardware owners have the infrastructure for Matter devices without knowing it, as the smart home market heads toward 800 million Matter-compatible devices by year end and a projected $537 billion market by 2030.

Samsung SmartThings and IKEA announced on Monday that 25 of IKEA’s new smart home devices can now connect directly to a SmartThings hub using Matter over Thread, eliminating the need for IKEA’s own DIRIGERA hub as an intermediary. The change sounds incremental. It is not. It means a $6 IKEA smart bulb can now join the same system that controls a Samsung television, refrigerator, and washing machine, all communicating locally without cloud dependency, through a protocol that also works with Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa. The smart home has spent a decade promising interoperability. This is what it looks like when the promise starts to work at a price point that does not require justification.

The 25 devices span IKEA’s new Matter-over-Thread lineup: KAJPLATS smart bulbs in 11 variants starting at $5.99, GRILLPLATS smart plugs, scroll wheel remotes, smart buttons, a MYGGSPRAY motion sensor at $9.99, a MYGGBETT door and window sensor at $7.99, a KLIPPBOK water leak detector at $9.99, and an ALPSTUGA air quality sensor at $29.99 that measures CO2 and PM2.5 at roughly a quarter of the price competitors charge. The bulbs, plugs, and remotes connect directly to a SmartThings hub through Matter. The sensors require a hub, either IKEA’s DIRIGERA or a third-party alternative. Blind and shade control will be added later this year.

Why this matters technically

The previous integration required both an IKEA DIRIGERA hub and a SmartThings hub, with DIRIGERA acting as a Matter bridge between IKEA’s Zigbee devices and the SmartThings ecosystem. The new devices use Matter natively over Thread, a low-power IPv6 mesh networking protocol that allows devices to communicate directly with any Matter-compatible controller. Samsung and IKEA conducted multiple rounds of validation to ensure connectivity stability and built a dedicated user experience within the SmartThings app for IKEA device management.

The technical significance is in the protocol stack. Matter is the application layer, defining how devices describe themselves, receive commands, and report state. Thread is the networking layer, creating a self-healing mesh where devices act as routers for each other. SmartThings was the first platform to adopt Thread 1.4, which enables cross-brand network unification: a SmartThings hub can join an existing Thread network from another ecosystem, or allow a third-party border router to join its own. The result is that all Thread border routers in a home, regardless of manufacturer, operate as a single unified mesh.

Samsung has been quietly building Thread border routers into an expanding range of hardware. Every Samsung smart TV from 2022 onward, including QLED, Neo QLED, OLED, and Lifestyle models, contains one. So do Samsung soundbars, refrigerators, and washing machines. Millions of Samsung TV owners already have the infrastructure for Matter-over-Thread devices in their homes without having purchased anything specifically for smart home use. IKEA’s $6 bulbs give those TV owners something cheap enough to try.

IKEA’s pricing as strategy

IKEA’s pricing is the most consequential element of the announcement. A KAJPLATS smart bulb at $5.99 undercuts Philips Hue Essential at $15, Nanoleaf Essentials at $12, and Aqara T2 at $15 by half or more. The ALPSTUGA air quality sensor at $29.99 competes with devices from Awair and IQAir that cost more than $100. IKEA has stated that its goal is to make smart home technology “easy to use, easy to understand, and within reach for the many,” and the pricing reflects that ambition with unusual directness.

The strategy is a full-range revamp. IKEA announced 21 new Matter-compatible products in November 2025 and has committed to making Matter and Thread its default smart home protocols going forward. The DIRIGERA hub has evolved from a Zigbee controller to a Matter bridge in September 2024 to a full Matter controller in mid-2025, capable of onboarding devices from other manufacturers. IKEA is not just adding Matter support. It is rebuilding its entire smart home lineup around it.

Jaeyeon Jung, executive vice president of SmartThings at Samsung, framed the partnership explicitly in terms of accessibility: “By connecting IKEA devices to SmartThings, even first-time smart home users can enjoy a familiar and easy connectivity experience without financial burden.”

The state of Matter

Matter launched in October 2022 to considerable enthusiasm and a slow initial rollout. Early devices had reliability and setup issues that undermined the standard’s promise of seamless interoperability. Three and a half years later, the standard has matured. More than 1,000 devices have been certified across Matter 1.0 through 1.2. Matter 1.5, ratified in November 2025, added support for cameras, soil moisture sensors, and energy management. The Connectivity Standards Alliance projects 800 million Matter-compatible devices in use by the end of this year, which it calls the fastest adoption of any home technology standard in history.

The practical effect is that a Matter-certified device now works across Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung ecosystems simultaneously without additional configuration. The competition among platforms has shifted from device compatibility, which Matter has made universal, to software quality, AI integration, and user experience. SmartThings, with 430 million users as of January and on track to cross 500 million by year end, 4,700 connected device types, and 390 partners, is positioned as the platform with the broadest hardware integration, given that Samsung embeds SmartThings into televisions, appliances, and wearables.

Apple is expected to make its own significant push into the smart home this year with a touchscreen hub, a HomeKit camera, and smart glasses that function as ambient input devices. Google Home and Amazon Alexa continue to expand their own Matter support. The convergence means users are increasingly choosing platforms for their software and AI capabilities rather than for which devices they can control, because Matter ensures all platforms can control the same hardware.

What it means for the market

The smart home market was valued at $127.8 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $537 billion by 2030, growing at 27% annually. The primary barrier to adoption has been fragmentation: incompatible protocols, multiple hubs, and the constant risk that a device purchased today will not work with a system purchased tomorrow. Matter addresses the protocol problem. IKEA addresses the price problem. Samsung addresses the infrastructure problem by embedding Thread border routers into products that people buy for reasons that have nothing to do with smart home automation.

The combination of a $6 smart bulb, a universal protocol, and a television that already contains the networking hardware to support it is closer to mass-market smart home adoption than anything the industry has produced in the decade it has spent talking about it. The technology is no longer the constraint. The constraint has been making it cheap enough and simple enough that the average household does not need to understand what Matter, Thread, or a border router is in order to benefit from them. IKEA and Samsung, between them, appear to have solved both problems at once.

from the lying-liars-and-the-lies-they-tell dept

Talk about pathetic.

CBS has announced that the now-Larry Ellison owned network will be hosting a lavish dinner this week praising Donald Trump and his (nonexistent) dedication to the First Amendment. The dinner will be hosted at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, which the State Department claimed in December 2025 was being renamed “The Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”

Truly banana republic type shit.

Oliver Darcy got a hold of the original invite for the dinner, and it’s everything you might expect:

Trump is, as regular Techdirt readers may recall, arguably the worst president in a century when it comes to trampling press freedom, free speech, and the First Amendment. When the administration isn’t trying to destroy comedians for telling jokes about the president, it’s busy crushing whatever was left of public media in the U.S., or threatening the broadcast licenses of networks that do basic journalism.

CBS management doesn’t care about any of that, of course, because it’s owned by billionaire right wing Trump ally, Larry Ellison. And Larry and David Ellison are desperate to have the government sign off on their job-destroying merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers. The Warner Brothers board is voting to approve the deal on the same day as the dinner.

Despite some pretense that the Trump DOJ is doing its due diligence to review the deal, there’s little real doubt that the feds will rubber stamp the transaction. The real question mark rests with a likely antitrust lawsuit from a coalition of state attorneys general to block the transaction.

It’s worth noting that Larry Ellison’s son David couldn’t attend a hearing last week on the massive problems with the Paramount Warner merger due to a purported death in the family (nobody seems able to determine who died), but he was able to make an appearance at Cinemacon a day earlier to make all sorts of empty promises about how wonderful the merger will be:

“David Ellison…made a unexpected appearance at CinemaCon, the annual gathering of theater owners. He took the stage to reassure exhibitors they have nothing to fear, whether it be the new regime at Paramount, or his pending acquisition of Warner Bros.”

They of course have everything to fear. The massive $108 billion in debt from the Warner Brothers deal will inevitably result in mass layoffs, price hikes, and sagging product quality due to the need to cut corners to service the debt. This is before we even talk about the layoffs already happening at CBS.

It’s simply not up for debate: this happens absolutely every single time folks like the Ellisons delude themselves into thinking mass consolidation does anything useful outside of generate tax breaks, drive short-lived stock boosts, and let guys like David Ellison pretend they’re “savvy dealmakers.”

Pre-merger promises about release windows (or anything else) are absolutely meaningless. But with just a handful of people at the top financially disincentivized from learning anything from history (including the three previous disastrous Warner Brothers mergers), the dysfunction just repeats itself indefinitely. We’ve seen merger dysfunction and chaos before, but this one has the potential to outdo them all.

Filed Under: consolidation, corruption, david ellison, dinner, donald trump, first amendment, free speech, journalism, larry ellision, media, mergers, regulators

Companies: cbs, paramount, warner bros. discovery

Motorola has a busy week ahead. The Edge 70 Pro is set to launch in India on April 22, but it looks like that’s not the only device worth watching. Prolific leaker Evan Blass has shared high-resolution render images of the Motorola Edge 70 Pro+, giving you an early look at the more premium sibling, the Edge 70 Pro+ in the lineup.

What colors and finishes is the Motorola Edge 70 Pro+ coming in?

The renders reveal five color options for the Edge 70 Pro+. You’re looking at white, dark blue, light blue (turquoise), brown, and maroon color, along with a curved display and slim bezel. While these aren’t the official names, what makes this more interesting than a standard color drop is the variety of finishes on offer.

The blue and turquoise versions feature a fabric back, the white version gets a marble surface, and the brown variant sports a wood-inspired look. Motorola is clearly focusing more on materials and finishes than on a total redesign in 2026.

The overall design won’t surprise you if you’ve seen other recent Motorola devices, as it closely follows the same aesthetic as the Edge 70 Fusion+ and Moto X70 Air Pro.

What to expect from the Motorola Edge 70 Pro+

The complete specs, price, or launch date for the Motorola Edge 70 Pro+ are still under wraps. Going by the naming, it’s likely positioned as a more powerful version of the Edge 70 Pro. The difference will probably come down to a faster processor and possibly better cameras.

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The Edge 70 Pro gives you a solid baseline in the meantime as the phone packs a 6.8-inch 1.5K AMOLED display with a 144Hz refresh rate, a 6,500mAh silicon-carbon battery with 90W charging, and a MediaTek Dimensity 8500 Extreme chip. It also carries IP68 and IP69 certifications.

Both the Edge 70 Pro and Pro+ have appeared on the HDR10+ certification website, confirming richer contrast and better detail in bright and dark scenes. The Pro+ is expected to step things up with a faster processor and improved cameras.

The UK’s online safety regulator has opened a formal investigation into Telegram under the Online Safety Act, examining whether the messaging platform has complied with its duties to protect UK users from child sexual abuse material. It is Ofcom’s most significant enforcement action against a major messaging platform to date.

The UK’s online safety regulator Ofcom has opened a formal investigation into Telegram under the Online Safety Act 2023, examining whether the messaging platform has met its legal duties to protect UK users from child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

The investigation, reported by Reuters, marks a significant escalation in Ofcom’s enforcement of the Act against one of the world’s most widely used messaging services, and a platform that has long drawn scrutiny for its approach to illegal content.

The investigation follows Ofcom’s established enforcement template under the Online Safety Act, which requires user-to-user and search services to assess and mitigate risks of UK users encountering illegal content, including CSAM, and to take it down swiftly when identified.

Ofcom has the power to fine companies the greater of £18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue for non-compliance, and in cases of serious ongoing non-compliance can apply to a court for business disruption measures, which could include requiring internet service providers to block a platform in the UK.

The opening of a formal investigation does not in itself constitute a finding of wrongdoing. Under the Act’s process, Ofcom first gathers and analyses evidence to determine whether a breach has occurred. If it concludes a compliance failure has taken place, it issues a provisional decision to the company, which then has the opportunity to respond in full before any final decision is made.

The process typically takes several months. The same framework is currently being applied in Ofcom’s ongoing investigation into X, opened in January 2026 following reports that its Grok AI chatbot was being used to generate and distribute sexually explicit images of children.

Telegram’s relationship with UK regulators has been evolving. As recently as December 2024, the platform joined the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a UK-based organisation that identifies and removes CSAM, and committed to deploying IWF’s detection tools across public parts of the platform, including hash-matching technology to identify known CSAM and tools to block AI-generated abuse content.

Ofcom’s March 2026 annual review acknowledged that Telegram, alongside X, Discord, and Reddit, had introduced age controls in response to the Online Safety Act.

The new investigation therefore represents a shift: Ofcom, despite that prior progress, has concluded there are sufficient grounds to open a formal probe into whether Telegram’s compliance with the specific CSAM-related duties under the Act has been adequate.

The tension at the heart of the Telegram case is one that has defined debates about the platform for years. Telegram’s architecture is divided: public channels and groups are more accessible to outside detection tools, but the platform’s encrypted private messaging, the feature that has made it popular with activists, journalists, and dissidents in authoritarian states, creates a structural limit on what content moderation is possible.

The NSPCC, in responding to Telegram’s IWF partnership in December 2024, noted the distinction directly: welcoming the step on public content while arguing that “there should be no part of the service where perpetrators can act without detection.”

The Online Safety Act’s provisions on end-to-end encrypted messaging remain the most contested part of the regime, with Signal having previously warned it would withdraw from the UK if forced to scan private messages.

Ofcom has signalled it is not currently minded to mandate client-side scanning.

The investigation comes in a period of sustained regulatory pressure on messaging and social media platforms across the UK.

Ofcom has now opened investigations into nearly 100 services since the Online Safety Act came into force in 2025, issued nearly a dozen fines, and in March 2026 wrote directly to six of the largest platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube, demanding evidence of further child safety improvements by 30 April.

The Telegram probe adds a major messaging platform to an enforcement list that, to date, has concentrated more heavily on pornography sites and niche image boards.

Telegram did not immediately respond to a request for comment at the time of the Reuters report. Ofcom has said it will provide updates on the investigation as soon as possible.

Agentic coding workflows are now routinely generating costs that exceed what users pay per month. GitHub’s response, pausing new sign-ups for Pro, Pro+, and Student plans and tightening usage caps, signals that the era of unlimited AI assistance at fixed prices is ending.

GitHub has paused new sign-ups for its Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student plans and tightened usage limits across all individual tiers, citing a fundamental mismatch between how developers now use the product and the infrastructure it was built to support.

The company’s VP of product, Joe Binder, said in a blog post that agentic coding workflows, long-running, parallelised sessions in which AI agents and subagents tackle complex problems autonomously over extended periods, are now routinely consuming more compute than users pay for in a month.

“It’s now common for a handful of requests to incur costs that exceed the plan price,” Binder wrote.

The change, effective 20 April, leaves Copilot Free as the only plan still accepting new individual sign-ups. Existing users retain access to their current plans and can upgrade between tiers, but GitHub has given no timeline for resuming new subscriptions.

Pro and Pro+ subscribers who contact GitHub support between 20 April and 20 May can cancel and receive a refund, with no charge for April.

The usage changes that accompany the pause are structured to push heavier users towards the pricier Pro+ tier. GitHub is tightening both session and weekly token limits on individual plans, caps that govern how many tokens a user can consume in a given time window, separate from the premium request entitlements that determine model access.

A user can have premium requests remaining and still hit a usage limit because the two systems operate independently. Pro+, at $39 per month, now offers more than five times the limits of the $10-per-month Pro plan.

Usage warnings are being added to VS Code and the Copilot CLI so developers can see approaching limits before hitting them mid-workflow.

Model access is also being restructured. Opus models, Anthropic’s heaviest and most capable models, are being removed from the Pro plan entirely.

Opus 4.7 remains available on Pro+. Opus 4.5 and 4.6, previously announced for removal from Pro+, are being removed from that tier as well. The pattern is straightforward: the most compute-intensive models are migrating exclusively to the most expensive individual tier.

The economics behind the move are unusually candid for a Microsoft product announcement. Copilot was originally designed for code completion, short, stateless suggestions that consume modest compute per interaction.

Agentic coding, by contrast, involves sessions that can run for hours, spawn multiple parallel threads, and generate token volumes that bear no resemblance to the autocomplete interactions that shaped the original pricing structure.

GitHub’s own Copilot features, including the /fleet command for parallel workflows, are now listed among the behaviours GitHub is asking its own users to limit.

This is not the first sign of strain. The week before the sign-up pause, GitHub had already suspended Copilot Pro free trials due to abuse, a narrower measure that hinted at the broader capacity pressure to come.

And the sign-up pause itself arrives at a politically awkward moment for GitHub with its developer user base.

In late March, the platform came under significant backlash after developers discovered that Copilot had been inserting promotional “tips”, including an advertisement for productivity app Raycast, into pull requests, in some cases appearing as if written by the developer rather than the AI.

The feature was disabled the same day, with GitHub’s VP of developer relations, Martin Woodward, saying the behaviour had become “icky” after Copilot’s reach was extended to pull requests it hadn’t created.

GitHub described it as a programming logic issue, not an advertising strategy. More than 11,000 pull requests were affected before the rollback.

The broader pattern, analysts say, is structural. Charlie Dai, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, said the move shows how agent-driven coding is shifting workloads towards longer-running and parallel sessions that create higher and less predictable compute demand.

“Cost structures built for lightweight assistance no longer hold,” Dai said, “and this puts pressure on GPU capacity, reliability, and unit economics.” He added that similar usage restrictions from major model providers suggest capacity rationing is likely to become a feature of the industry as agentic development becomes routine.

For enterprise engineering leaders, Dai said the episode is a reminder to evaluate AI coding tools as metered infrastructure rather than unlimited productivity layers.

Faisal Kawoosa, founder and chief analyst at Techarc, said the dynamic is a familiar one. “First you give users access to a tool with relatively open usage, and then gradually start defining limits as adoption grows,” he said.

Kawoosa added that the next step is likely to be more differentiated plans that create clearer monetisation opportunities, noting that GitHub’s depth of integration into developer workflows gives it unusual leverage: “a developer can live without an email ID, but not a GitHub account.”

Whether competitors, including Claude Code, Cursor, and Codeium, can move quickly enough to absorb frustrated Copilot users before GitHub recalibrates its pricing structure is the open question the market is now watching.

TL;DR Don’t choose something with ultra-high amounts of sodium, carbohydrates, or sugar unless you need to based on your exercise levels or a sweat test.

Amy Brownstein, a registered dietitian nutritionist at MyNetDiary, says electrolytes are minerals that exist naturally in your body. These include magnesium, calcium, chloride, sodium, potassium, and phosphorous. The role of electrolytes is to help your body rehydrate or stay hydrated by helping your system actually absorb the water you drink.

Heather Gosnell, a pediatrician, sodium is the key ingredient for effective rehydration. She also says a little sugar and carbohydrates help your body absorb water but to avoid high-sugar drinks.

Electrolyte powders usually contain these, as well as the aforementioned minerals, all of which can help with absorption. But how can you know which powder is best for you?

Shelley Balls, RDN, says humans usually lose sodium when working out or spending time in hot temperatures and also that carbohydrates are important to help replenish and preserve muscle glycogen stores to prevent fatigue, especially if active for more than 30 minutes. Basically, if you’re working out a lot and not replenishing lost carbs, you’ll feel fatigued much faster. That’s especially true for intense workouts or long sporting events, in which case she recommends re-upping carbohydrates every 30 to 45 minutes. Sugars like glucose serve similar purposes, helping to replenish muscle glycogen as well.

If you’re just looking for supplements for day-to-day life or to soothe your hungover brain, you don’t need as high a concentration of sodium or carbohydrates in your electrolyte powder. Brownstein says to choose an option within the context of your daily habits and diet. Most people already consume the recommended 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day, she says, so if you’re not depleting sodium stores with intense exercise, you probably don’t need a powder with a high sodium content. The same is also true for sugar.

The best way to figure out exactly what you need is by undergoing a sweat test, which analyzes the contents of your sweat. But if that’s not a medical need, your best bet is to choose a powder that lives somewhere in the middle of ingredient concentration. That is, unless you’re sweating a ton, working out in high heat, or training in high altitudes, in which case, you should prioritize higher concentrations of sodium and sugar. Brownstein adds that if you notice white, chalky residue on your skin or clothes after working out, you might need to up your sodium intake.

When it comes to synthetic dyes, Balls says the right answer ultimately comes down to personal choice. Luckily, if you want to avoid these ingredients, many of our recommendations omit them.

To avoid stomach upset, Balls suggests looking for powders that are lower in magnesium (which can have a laxative effect in high amounts). She also says that because calcium and iron can interfere with the absorption of each another, it’s best to choose a powder that has balanced, lower amounts of the two supplements. Brownstein says that high sugar and sodium content can also upset some peoples’ stomachs, and that you should read the labels to help you avoid over-supplementing (or over-caffeinating). If something contains 100 percent of your daily recommended zinc content, for example, you want to make sure you’re not also taking a multivitamin with the same amount of zinc.

Balls says to look for a powder that includes the key electrolytes lost: sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium. She says, if possible, to avoid drinks with artificial sweeteners.

Hallie Zwibel, director of the Center for Sports Medicine at New York Institute of Technology, says “in addition to causing upset stomach and reduced fluid absorption, repeatedly consuming high-sugar foods and beverages can lead to diabetes, as well as potential weight gain.” He adds that “while electrolyte packets can help replenish essential minerals lost through sweat, they should not replace daily water intake.”