FORT LAUDERDALE, FL - MARCH 14: Elana Goodman joins with other protesters to ask that woman be given the chance to have equal pay as their male co-workers on March 14, 2017 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The protest was held as the legislation in the state of Florida looks at passing the Helen Gordon Davis fair pay protection act that would strengthen state laws in terms of equal pay. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

The tech sector in Los Angeles has grown in the last decade — but women who work in the field here have been falling behind. According to data compiled by LiveStories based on the most recent American Community Survey, the gender pay gap in tech in Los Angeles has worsened. From 2006 to 2010, women in tech in LA made 97 cents for every dollar men made, one of the highest ratios in the country. But by 2015, women in tech in LA were only making 82 cents for that same men's dollar — a drop of 17%.

That's still higher than the 80 cents for every dollar that the average woman in the U.S. makes. Still, not only has no other occupation in the area become so much less equitable so quickly according to the survey data, but this also places LA among the worst places in the country for income parity in tech. In an industry dogged by pay disparity issues — in addition to several well-publicized sexual harassment and gender discrimination lawsuits — it's troubling that, at least in LA, this disparity has grown. (LiveStories' data encompasses the City of Los Angeles where Facebook, Google, Snap and YouTube all have offices. Santa Monica, which also hosts a number of tech companies, is not included.)

It's particularly surprising since, as a recent study by Hired.com showed, the wage gap is lowest at seed stage companies. According to the study, "Smaller companies have more institutional transparency into the salaries of everyone on the team, which can ultimately negate possible gender pay disparities."

But tech jobs aren't just at small startups. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs in this sector include a wide swath of professions — computer scientists, computer programmers, web developers, and database administrators, but also actuaries and mathematicians.

The most recent year for which American Community Survey data is available is 2015. That's also the year that California passed a Fair Pay Act, mandating that men and women be paid equally in the private sector starting Jan. 1, 2016. Employers are also barred from pay disparities that stem from differences in past salaries. It's possible, given the new law, that the pay disparity in LA will decrease in the coming years. But with companies like Google resisting orders to reveal pay data, it may take some time before we know.

Paul Marotta / Getty Images

You can’t block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook. Or his wife, Priscilla Chan. But the company is working to rectify the situation, Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News.

Currently, when you try to block Zuckerberg or Chan, Facebook displays an error message. “Block Error. Sorry, there was a problem blocking Mark Zuckerberg. Please try again,” the app said when BuzzFeed News tried to block Zuckerberg on a mobile device last week. A similar message appears when you try to block Chan.

Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News his team is working on a fix for this problem, but it’s a technical challenge that could take some time.

The error has been around since at least August 2010, when TechCrunch noticed it. And it doesn’t only prevent people from blocking Zuckerberg and Chan, but anyone who’s been blocked frequently in a short amount of time, a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. Facebook doesn’t have any “unblockable” accounts — its system simply gets busy.

“I can tell you that people trying to block a profile or Page may see an error message if it has been blocked many times within a short period,” the Facebook spokesperson said. “This temporary message does not prevent people from reporting profiles or Pages that they think are in violation of our Community Standards.”

In 2010, Facebook shed more light onto why it coded the system this way: It’s meant to limit the unintentional damage of targeted blocking campaigns. ”In very rare instances, a viral campaign will develop instructing lots of people to all wrongly block the same person,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable at the time. “The purpose of this system is to protect the experience for people targeted by these campaigns.”

But much has changed for Facebook since 2010, and for Zuckerberg, too. In August 2010, an estimated 400 million people used Facebook, which was 18 months ahead of its IPO. Today, more than 2 billion people use Facebook, now a publicly traded company worth $492 billion.

Facebook’s rise has propelled Zuckerberg into one of the most powerful positions on the planet. Followed by more than 95 million people on Facebook, Zuckerberg has used his influence to speak up on a variety of political issues, most recently in support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which is currently under threat. He’s also traveled the United States this year, meeting with people around the country and reporting back what he’s learned about issues such as fracking and preservation. Zuckerberg's steering of the Facebook product also has a subtle but profound impact on the way his platform’s users share and receive information.

With such influence, Facebook limiting its users ability to block Zuckerberg’s profile seemed, to many, a bit off. Now, the company is on its way toward resolving the issue.

The new smartphone has an impressive dual-lens camera, and a slightly smaller battery.

If there’s just one thing you need to know about Samsung’s Galaxy Note devices, it’s that they are, and always have been, Big Smartphones.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed

The Note was originally marketed as a “phablet,” a horrible portmanteau of “phone” and “tablet” that insinuates the thing is both portable and productive, or something. Power users (aka people who do a lot of shit on their phones) have historically gravitated towards the Note because of its roomy screen and its precious tiny stylus — two features that differentiated the Note from Samsung’s more popular Galaxy line, which aren’t as large and don’t come with a pen tool.

This year’s model, the Note 8, is still designed to be a workhorse. But it’s also so much more.

There are multi-tasking and note-taking features out the wazoo in this phone. But, for the first time, the Note is now *the* Samsung phone photographers (or, rather, phonenographers) should consider, because it has the best camera the Korean tech conglomerate has ever made. In other words, the Note’s stylus is no longer its only major selling point.

Aside from the impressive dual-lens camera, all other features are incremental improvements or carry-overs from last year’s disastrous Note 7, which shipped with faulty, exploding batteries and was recalled twice before finally being discontinued. The 8 has all the Samsung-y stuff: wireless charging, Gear VR compatibility, biometric security (iris and fingerprint scanning, and face recognition), 6GB RAM with 64GB of upgradable storage (mini SD cards up to 256GB), and compatibility with DeX, which is a dock, sold separately, that allows you to connect the phone to a monitor and use keyboard and mouse input.

The Note 8 has a smaller, more conservative battery, and Samsung says it’s “committed to quality” now more than ever, with an eight-point battery safety check that includes extreme testing and X-ray inspection, plus additional testing by a third-party company, UL. All of that sounds like a good thing.

I’ve spent a week with the Galaxy Note 8, and though I’m still not a fan of the company’s TouchWiz interface (all of the extra stuff Samsung adds to the phone on top of the Android operating system), it’s clear that this is the most capable Samsung phone ever made.

Let’s get right to it: that camera.

Most phones have one, wide-angle lens that forces you to zoom with your feet or zoom digitally (causing pixelation). The Note 8 has two 12-megapixel lenses: one standard wide-angle lens (f/1.7) and one telephoto lens (f/2.4) for close-ups, which you can take advantage of in a variety of ways.

The most obvious is being able to zoom in 2x, which is great for whale or bird watching or whatever. The second is that when you capture a close-up with the telephoto lens, the Note 8 automatically snaps a picture with the wide-angle lens too, so you can switch between the zoomed in and zoomed out versions of the pic.

(Click on the images below to see them up close.)

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

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Houseparty

With Facebook reportedly hard at work cloning its group video chat service, Houseparty is playing some offense.

Houseparty, an app which connects people with their friends in spontaneous video chats, is today releasing its first major product update — a new feature that lets users form groups of up to 16 people and call them in organized video chats.

The new feature differs from Houseparty’s current dial-in-and-see-who’s-there functionality and could appeal to users looking to use the app for more practical purposes, such as study group calls.

Houseparty has 20 million users and an average session time of 51 minutes, the company told BuzzFeed News. Those are solid metrics, but the company needs to bolster its feature set if it's to defend against an impending copycat offering from Facebook, codenamed “Bonfire.” With Groups, Houseparty hopes to encourage people to quickly create video-calling groups for everything from sports teams to families. That could help it retain users who might be tempted to switch over to a similar Facebook service should the social network launch one.

“If you already have your group somewhere — if everybody’s already there — why would you move?” Houseparty CEO and founder Ben Rubin told BuzzFeed News.

It’s a reasonable question. But a look at Snapchat’s struggles shows how devastating a Facebook clone can be, even for well-established app with a strong network. A year ago, Snapchat was riding high, heading towards an IPO with a fast-growing user base and a Stories feature that had people creating loads of fun, casual posts. Then, last August, Facebook copied Stories, bringing the cloned product first to Instagram and then to Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger as well. Now Instagram Stories alone boasts more users than Snapchat. Meanwhile, shares in the app’s parent company, Snap Inc., are trading well below their IPO price.

Even Rubin, as optimistic as he is, concedes the prospect of competing with Facebook is a daunting one. "Nothing is invulnerable," he told BuzzFeed News.

Houseparty

Like Meetup, which is currently under assault from Facebook’s Groups product, Houseparty’s pitch — "empower people to have more frequent conversations with the people they care about" — very closely aligns with Facebook’s new mission, “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." Given that, a Facebook clone of Houseparty seems an inevitability more than anything else.

With the launch of Facebook's Houseparty clone rumored for later this year, Rubin is bracing himself for a fight. But he won't let it become a singular focus. "We'll persevere," he said. "We'll focus on our users; we'll think about our mission and we'll fucking grind it."

One minute you’re the toast of the ‘net. The next, you’re just problematic.

A screenshot of Justin Caldbeck's new title on LinkedIn.

(Ryan Mac/BuzzFeed News)

When investor Justin Caldbeck resigned from his San Francisco-based venture capital firm amid allegations of sexual harassment, he issued a statement thanking the women who had spoken out against him.

“I am deeply ashamed of my lack of self-awareness,” said the Binary Capital cofounder. “The dynamic of this industry makes it hard to speak up, but this is the type of action that leads to progress and change, starting with me.”

Privately, however, Caldbeck is threatening legal action against one of his accusers, who continues to talk openly about her experiences with the disgraced venture capitalist. BuzzFeed News has learned that Caldbeck’s lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter to Niniane Wang, one of three women who went on the record with sexual harassment accusations, demanding that she stop saying that he intimidated a reporter and threatened professional retribution against other potential accusers. The letter, which was given to BuzzFeed News by a source familiar with the situation, also asked that Wang issue a public retraction of some statements she made about Caldbeck at a July business conference.

"... It has come to our attention that you have made a number of false statements about Justin in the media, most recently at a well attended Fortune media conference," reads the letter. "The intent of this letter is to request that you stop making these false statements and that you correct them."

Wang declined to comment on the letter. Caldbeck also declined to comment.

In a June article, technology news publication The Information revealed Caldbeck’s history of alleged sexual harassment, publishing accusations from six different women, including three who went on the record with their full names. Wang was one of those three; she recounted a yearlong period of alleged harassment from Caldbeck starting in August 2010 when she claims he tried to date her and on multiple occasions asked her to sleep with him. At the time, Wang, an experienced engineer who oversaw the creation of Google Desktop, was running a coworking space that was sponsored by Caldbeck’s then-employer. She initially agreed to meet with him with the understanding they would discuss business.

“There is definitely a cost to speaking out,” Wang told The Information when explaining her motivations to go public with her experience. She added that she hoped her story would encourage other women to speak out about misbehavior or unwanted advances in work settings.

Caldbeck initially denied all wrongdoing in a statement to The Information that ran when the story was published. He later issued a second statement that did not specifically address the accusations made by the women who'd accused him, but said he was “disturbed by the allegations.” Later, The Information revealed Caldbeck had threatened reporter Reed Albergotti with legal action via text message shortly after the story was published.

“Go fuck yourself reed [sic],” Caldbeck wrote. “Our lawyers will be in touch.”

Caldbeck subsequently apologized for that message, according to The Information editor Jessica Lessin.

Following the publication of the Information story, Wang continued to speak about her alleged experiences with Caldbeck. In a response to a June blog post commenting on Caldbeck’s statement, she claimed that “she had been trying for seven years” to expose the venture capitalist, and that he allegedly “kept threatening reporters,” making it difficult to get the story out.

“I do not believe that someone can harass women for 10 years, tell the people who exposed him to go fuck themselves, and then 24 hours later, thank them for bringing him self-awareness,” Wang wrote.

Niniane Wang speaks at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech Conference in Aspen, Colorado, in July.

Stuart Isett/Fortune

Following the The Information's story, another female entrepreneur, Lindsay Meyer, told the New York Times that she had been groped and kissed by Caldbeck. Other reports also said that Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake had complained about Caldbeck's behavior to her investors, causing him to be removed from his position as a company board observer.

In July, Wang appeared at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech Conference in Aspen, Colorado, and explained how she had worked closely with Albergotti on the story, joking that it had become her second job.

“In the past few months I had been working with a reporter and Justin had harassed many women by this point, including groping them, kissing them, warning them they’d never work in the industry again if they didn’t do what he wanted,” Wang said during an onstage interview. “He was very litigious and threatening. The reporter had a new mortgage and a small child and was very afraid he would lose his mortgage if Justin made good on his threats.”

Caldbeck’s letter, dated on July 27 and sent by Ivo Labar, a partner at San Francisco law firm Kerr & Wagstaffe LLP, disputed those statements from Wang. The document contends that Caldbeck never threatened Albergotti prior to the publication of the story and disputes Wang’s claims that the venture capitalist threatened people who spoke out against him.

"While Justin disputes a number of the specific allegations that have been made against him and has a different recollection of the events with you, he continues to have deep regret over making you feel uncomfortable and recognizes that it is not ok," reads the letter. "That being said, repeating other stories as facts when they are not is not something he can allow."

Lessin, when asked about Wang’s allegations, said that Caldbeck did not personally threaten Albergotti before the story’s publication. She noted, however, that the reporter had heard that Binary Capital had sent a note to its limited partners “a few weeks” prior to publication suggesting that it would defend itself and Caldbeck against any allegations.

“We were certainly under the impression that he’d fight the story vigorously,” Lessin said.

In another allegation, the letter also challenges Wang's claim made in a Pando story that Caldbeck tried to pay her off in exchange for silence. The letter includes an excerpt of an email exchange between Caldbeck and Wang purportedly from February, but it is unclear what the messages show, if anything, besides the fact that the two were communicating prior to the publication of The Information's story in June.

Labar claims that his client was given "no indication whatsoever that you were angry or uncomfortable with him." And while Labar repeatedly states the letter is not a threat and reiterates some of Caldbeck’s apologies to Wang, he also says that his client reserves the right to litigate the matter.

Labar’s letter claims that Wang’s statements injured Caldbeck’s reputation and demands that she cease making them. It also asks that Wang make a public declaration to correct the statements Caldbeck contends are false, implying there may be legal consequences should she fail to do so. Two people close to Wang told BuzzFeed News they believe Wang has no plans to comply with Caldbeck’s demands.

It’s not yet clear if Wang replied to the letter, which requested a response within 10 business days from the date it was sent; she declined to comment for this story. But the threat of legal action has not seemingly discouraged her and she discussed her experience with Caldbeck on an Aug. 9 podcast for tech publication Recode.

“A big part of the reason why I said I didn’t believe Justin Caldbeck could change overnight was that he had been doing this for 10 years and had been actively thwarting attempts to reveal him,” Wang said. “So it was not as though he was ignorant of what he was doing.”

Beyond the cease-and-desist letter his attorney sent to Wang, Caldbeck, who has not taken any legal action against his accuser, has kept a low profile. He’s avoided interviews — and further scrutiny. He has, however, updated his LinkedIn page to show that he is no longer involved at Binary Capital.

He is now “Head of Self-Reflection, Accountability & Change.”

Here is a copy of Justin Caldbeck's cease-and-desist letter to Niniane Wang:

Via youcaring.com

In the immediate aftermath of the Trump administration’s repeal of DACA — the Obama-era rule that allowed some immigrants to work and go to school in the United States — activists, undocumented immigrants, and nonprofit organizations have taken to crowdfunding platforms like YouCaring and GoFundMe, raising thousands of dollars in only a few days to support those impacted.

The new rule gives some DACA recipients, or DREAMers, just one month to renew their documents. The application costs $495. According the Federal Reserve, nearly half of all Americans would be unable to come up with $400 in the face of an emergency.

Prior to the Trump administration’s announcement on Tuesday, a number of DACA recipients were already using crowdfunding platforms to raise money for application fees, airfare and lodging to join a DACA rally in Washington, DC, or school tuition. But the amount of money being directed at these causes has spiked dramatically since the weekend.

Ernesto Lopez is a development manager with the Puente Human Rights Movement in Phoenix, which has so far raised $5,264 on YouCaring.

“I put this up at 8 p.m. [Tuesday] night, and in less than 24 hours, we were close to $5,000,” Lopez told BuzzFeed News. “People are energized, and want to do something, but sometimes people don’t know what to do. This is an opportunity where money actually makes a big difference.”

Puente helps undocumented immigrants file their paperwork with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS); Lopez said the money the organization raises, which so far is enough to cover about 10 applications, will be distributed directly to people coming into their offices looking for help.

Another group, this one called Fuerza Colectiva in Seattle, raised more than $10,700 in less than two days. One of the group’s members, Leo Carmona, said the inability to afford the application fee is one major reason that undocumented immigrants don’t renew their permits.

“I myself am a DACA recipient. Thankfully, I just renewed my permit, but as someone who has been a student or who has lacked the resources to fund a $500 application, I saw the need of fundraising,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I think given the timeline, knowing it's only a month that they have to renew their permits, I felt it was extremely urgent for us to act.”

Rather than cover application costs in full, Carmona said his organization is asking applicants how much they can afford to pay and offering to cover the rest.

In the case of one GoFundMe campaign, just a single tweet made a major impact. Muna Mire of BET tweeted about Cecilia Sierra’s request for $1,000 to help cover the cost of her DACA renewal. Mire’s tweet was retweeted more than 500 times, and Sierra met her goal in just a few hours.

(BuzzFeed News reached out to Sierra for comment, but didn’t immediately hear back.)

A spokesperson for YouCaring said the number of campaigns related to immigration issues has increased by 75% since last week. “We are also seeing that these campaigns are gathering momentum faster than usual and hitting their goals and even surpassing their funding goals in a matter of days, most likely thanks to the elevated profile of this particular cause in the news cycle and a heightened sense of urgency around it,” she wrote in an email statement.

GoFundMe said it has also seen an increase in campaigns supporting undocumented immigrants. “We are working with the campaign organizers to ensure the Dreamers receive the funds transferred as soon as possible,” a GoFundMe spokesperson wrote via email.

Other campaigns have raised far more with the help of social media. A group of activists named Zacil Vazquez, Graciela Marquez and Nube Cruz posted a campaign to YouCaring over the weekend. In less than a week, it had raised $57,372 from over 1,500 donors after being shared 6,000 times. Vazquez attributed the success of the campaign so far to the fact that all four organizers are undocumented immigrants or DACA recipients with roots in the activist community.

"We grew tired of nonprofits and others taking advantage of this to further their growth and decided to fundraise on our own," said Cruz. "By us for us."

In addition to wanting to help other DACA recipients, Cruze himself was worried about being able to get together enough money to pay for his own application. He used his Facebook page to ask for donations via Venmo; his fees were covered by donations from friends within 24 hours.

Meanwhile, in Texas, a campaign led by Dr. Dona Kim Murphey raised over $43,000 in just a week. Murphey started the campaign after Hurricane Harvey devastated a number of undocumented families in Houston. Murphey’s original goal was to set up a fund that would support four families with donations of $5,000 each, which they could use at their discretion for things like rebuilding homes, buying cars, covering lost wages, or paying lawyers. Having exceeded her initial goal, Murphey now hopes to support as many as 10 families, if donations continue apace.

Afp / AFP / Getty Images

Facebook is facing a new push to reveal how its vast power is being used after it disclosed that roughly $100,000 worth of political ads were purchased on its platform by fake accounts and pages connected to a Russian troll operation. Open government advocates and researchers who study political ads tell BuzzFeed News that Facebook’s massive reach and lack of transparency about ads on its platform represent a risk to the democratic process.

Alex Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for government transparency, said highly targeted online ads can be “weaponized against liberal democracies” because they do not meet the same levels of disclosure and visibility as traditional radio, TV, and print ads.

“It removes our ability to have transparency into who is trying to influence our politics, and any accountability for that influence,” Howard said. “And it takes away from the capacity of the traditional organs of democracy — that being the press and regulators and other institutions — to figure out out who is behind political messaging, particularly at crucial times.”

Facebook and other tech giants have largely steered clear of major regulation in the United States despite their huge role in society. But concerns about the manipulation of political advertising by foreign entities and other parties is likely to increase government and regulatory scrutiny.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, today said there may be a need to introduce new requirements for social media platforms running political ads.

"An American can still figure out what content is being used on TV advertising. ... But in social media there's no such requirement," Warner said, according to CNN. "There may be a reform process here. I actually think the social media companies would not oppose, because I think Americans, particularly when it comes to elections, ought to be able to know if there is foreign-sponsored content coming into their electoral process."

Howard said the social platforms either need to come up with their own solution, or be prepared to face government intervention.

“There’s two different ways this can go,” Howard said. “Either these technology companies can show that they understand that transparency and disclosure of political ad spending on their networks is now a matter of significant public interest, and act to voluntarily disclose…. Or we’re going to see governments be reactive, and traditionally that’s when bad laws are made.”

Of particular focus for critics and congressional investigators is the use of so-called “dark post ads” by Russian trolls, as well as by campaigns, PACs, and other entities, to target specific Americans by geography, interest, and other data points. The Trump campaign invested tens of millions of dollars in targeted Facebook ads, and campaign strategists have openly credited this approach as being a major factor in victory.

Dark post ads — which Facebook calls “Unpublished Page post ads” — appear in a person's News Feed like any other ad, but are only visible to those being targeted. There is no way to identify the dark post ads being run by a particular page or account on Facebook. That means academics who have spent decades tracking and analyzing political ads, as well as fact checkers who try to keep campaigns and PACs honest, might never see the messages being fed to voters.

“It’s just very one sided and that’s when you get into aspects of propaganda in my mind,” said Shawn Parry Giles director of the University of Maryland's Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership, which runs a project to track and analyze political advertising.

She believes campaigns and PACs will invest more of their advertising budgets in targeted online ads, fundamentally changing the way political advertising is done in the US.

“It’s gonna change how the campaigns are operating from this point forward and I don’t know that any of this is really good,” she said.

Erika Franklin Fowler, director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads aired on broadcast television during state and federal elections, said the trend is toward less knowledge and accountability for political ads, rather than more.

“I think it is unlikely that we will ever have as much knowledge about the content of advertising as we had previously,” Fowler told BuzzFeed News by email. “This poses challenges for researchers but it also poses challenges for accountability in democracy. If candidates (and outside groups) can say different things to different voters, it is harder to hold them accountable for campaign promises.”

Facebook’s deputy chief privacy officer previously told Reuters that the company does not disclose advertising details because it considers ad campaign information to be confidential.

“Advertisers consider their ad creatives and their ad targeting strategy to be competitively sensitive and confidential,” said Rob Sherman. “In many cases, they’ll ask us, as a condition of running ads on Facebook, not to disclose those details about how they’re running campaigns on our service. From our perspective, it’s confidential information of these advertisers.”

That’s generally true for ad campaigns in general. However, the rules are different in the United States when it comes to political advertising. Last year the FEC adopted expanded rules requiring TV service providers and licensees, as well as radio stations, to share their political advertising files in a single online database.

Howard of the Sunlight Foundation says Facebook, Google, and other major platforms should have to meet the same level of disclosure.

“If we’re going to say that the political ad files for television and and radio stations should be available online, I don’t see why we shouldn’t have that for the social networks too,” he said.

“It is very clear that between Facebook and Google they have upwards of 80% of online ad share, and that brings with it great responsibility,” Howard said, adding that “political speech is increasingly hosted on these platforms.”

He said unless platforms or regulators find a way to provide meaningful disclosure of online political ads, it’s “virtually inviting autocratic governments to take advantage of [our] openness to weaken us. And it’s gonna happen again and again and again.”

Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP / Getty Images

In the US, when it comes to your employer watching you at work, the law is clear: it can, and it probably does. The company you work for has wide latitude to peek into your Slack chats, monitor which sites you visit, read your emails, and record your every keystroke. It’s all legal. But in Europe, a new court ruling may start to limit employers that engage in this type of surveillance. These limitations may well extend to your American company, too — if you work for a multinational corporation that also employs people in Europe.

On Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that companies can surveil their employees’ email — but only if workers are given an explanation about the policy in advance. At issue is a case that goes back to July 2007, when a Romanian man named Bogdan Mihai Barbulescu was fired after his bosses presented him with transcripts showing he used computer software to chat with his fiancée and brother at work. After the court ruled against him, Barbulescu escalated his case to the Court, which in its final ruling this week said Barbulescu’s right to privacy had indeed been violated — because he hadn’t been properly notified about the corporate surveillance.

“The European Court of Human Rights ruling is clear — workers do not leave their human rights at the doorstep of their workplace,” Esther Lynch, confederal secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, told BuzzFeed News in an email.

According to James Froud, a partner at the international law firm Bird & Bird, the court’s final decision was not particularly surprising. ”The courts in Europe have pretty much always taken the view that the right to privacy extends into the workplace,” he says. But Froud told BuzzFeed News that this case could force employers to be clearer about their surveillance policies in the future. “Employers are likely to be required to do more,” Froud said. “It may no longer be enough to have a notice in an employment contract or hidden away in a policy.”

In Europe, privacy is widely held to be a fundamental human right, one that should be protected as much as possible in every setting. But at work, you’re using equipment, software, and an internet connection provided by your company. Every byte of data you send and receive is effectively owned by your company, which has the right to its property. And companies often lay out as much in their employment contracts.

This is just the application of pre-digital legal doctrine to the digital age, said Vivek Krishnamurthy, assistant director of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, who specializes in international internet governance. “There’s a long line of court cases that deal with employers intercepting employee communications” in order to know whether they needed to discipline that employee, said Krishnamurthy. “Courts almost always come out favoring the employer.”

Nowadays, it is widely understood — and well-accepted — that every employee will use company resources to do some (reasonable) amount of personal life management at work. But the law hasn’t formally caught up to how people use technology at work. More sophisticated employers are starting to create policies that match up to the expectations of a modern employee (and if you’re lucky, you work for one of them). But they aren’t legally bound by duty to do so. “It’s a freebie,” Krishnamurthy said.

This latest ruling by Europe’s human rights court could nudge more companies towards that direction. “US multinational employers will need to take into consideration that there is a greater emphasis, from the European perspective, on the privacy of European employees,” said Stephen Ravenscroft, a London-based partner in the law firm White & Case who specializes in employment law.

But for everybody else, this ruling doesn’t change much. “There are relatively weak expectations of privacy at work,” said Krishnamurthy. For better or for worse, this is still the norm — and you should act accordingly.

“The proper way to approach what you’re doing at work is, just think your employer could be watching you, for any number of legitimate reasons — network security, monitoring bandwidth, you name it.” If you don’t want your employer finding out you’re doing something at work, just don’t do it, he said. “At a certain point, it’s just common sense."

Twitter has built a feature that will allow you to post tweetstorms directly inside the app.

The tweetstorm composer, spotted by The Next Web's Matt Navarra, currently exists within Twitter's product, but the company is not currently testing it. That said, once it's in the product, a test may be on the way soon.

Some of Twitter's most recognizable features, including the hashtag, were built by the company after it saw popular behavior emerge on its platform. The tweetstorm format, pioneered by the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, seems like it could fit with that trend. In the age of Trump, tweetstorms have emerged as a format used regularly by Twitter users to share viewpoints and analyze the news. They've become so important, The New York Times now publishes its journalists' tweetstorms in print.

Last year, Twitter considered a feature that would allow people to post tweets of up to 10,000 characters, far more than its current limit of 140. That feature still hasn't seen the light of day, but the Tweetstorm composer could capture its spirit, giving users a way to share more extensive thoughts while keeping the 140 character limit.

Reached by BuzzFeed News, Twitter declined to comment.

PewDiePie

Ben Stansall / AFP / Getty Images

Felix Kjellberg, a 27-year-old Swede better known by his online name PewDiePie, has found himself embroiled in another controversy after he was recorded saying a racial epithet during a video game livestream.

On Sunday, while playing the game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Kjellberg called another player by the n-word before laughing into his microphone.

"What a fucking nigger," he said. "Jeez, oh my god. What the fuck? Sorry, but what the fuck? What a fucking asshole. I don't mean that in a bad way."

Kjellberg, who has 57 million subscribers on YouTube, lost a brand deal with Disney's Maker Studios and an original show with YouTube Red earlier this year after media reports questioned his use of anti-Semitic jokes and imagery in videos. The Wall Street Journal counted nine different videos of his that included anti-Semitic content since August 2016.

Many have been swift to condemn Kjellberg's comments, including video game designer Sean Vanaman, whose San Francisco-based Campo Santo studio is behind Firewatch, a title played by Kjellberg.

"We're filing a DMCA takedown of PewDiePie's Firewatch content and any future Campo Santo games," he wrote on Twitter. "There is a bit of leeway you have to have with the internet when u wake up every day and make video games. There's also a breaking point."

"I am sick of this child getting more and more chances to make money off of what we make," he added.

In a video following the events in Charlottesville last month, Kjellberg attempted to distance himself further from those who suggested he was aligned with Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists.

“If for some reasons Nazis think it’s great that I’m making these jokes, I don’t want to give them that benefit,” Kjellberg said. “So I’m going to stop doing it. Nazi memes, they’re not even that funny anymore. It’s sort of a dead meme. So just to make it clear, no more."

“It’s not me censoring myself," he added, "it’s more like I don’t want to be part of this.”

youtube.com

Kjellberg has yet to respond online to the criticism following Sunday's livestream remarks. He did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment from BuzzFeed News.

When contacted by BuzzFeed News on Sunday, Vanaman outlined his hesitance in using a takedown request through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but said that Kjellberg's comment was "the straw the broke the camel's back."

"I love streamers," he said. "I stream and I watch streamers literally every day. I’m sure a lot of them say things that I hate and have political views that are different than mine, but I don't care because we just play video games together.

"Nevertheless we made a choice to have Firewatch not associated with his channel anymore, not because he's the most offensive person, but because
he’s the biggest."

Vanaman said he issued one takedown notice to YouTube for one of Kjellberg's videos that featured his company's game. The video, which had been watched more than 5.7 million times, was removed by YouTube on Sunday night.

"I wish there was a clear way to say we don’t want our work associated with hate speech, even accidental hate speech if that's what it was," Vanaman told BuzzFeed News. "I regret using a DMCA takedown. Censorship is not the best thing for speech and if I had a way to contact PewDiePie and take the video down, I probably would. He’s a bad fit for us, and we’re a bad fit for him."

In a matter of hours, the world will be buzzing with talk of augmented reality. The technology, which places digital elements on top of the real world, has long been a clunky, hobbyist passion. But that’s about to change. In recent months, Apple and Google have released technology frameworks that do much of the heavy lifting for AR developers, helping them create applications they never could before. And tomorrow, the public will get a good look at the true scope of what these frameworks can help produce when Apple pulls the curtain back on the final version of iOS 11, and the first set of apps built with its ARKit framework along with it.

Though many AR developers are keeping their work under wraps until Apple’s big reveal, a small but fascinating Twitter account called @madewithARKit has been sharing a preview of what’s on tap. The account, which curates videos from still-unreleased AR apps, has featured a steady stream of intriguing AR use cases. One app it’s highlighted transforms your driveway into a virtual Tesla showroom, another turns your phone screen into an accurate tape measure, and one more lets you arrange virtual furniture in your living room to see how it would look in real life.

“It’s got all the makings of a platform shift."

The excitement building in anticipation of these apps’ release harkens back to the early days of the iOS App Store, when Apple debuted a platform that developers quickly used to distribute their apps to hundreds of millions of people. It took some time for these developers to push out applications that changed the way people lived their daily lives, and some started out silly — fart apps and other goofy things. But the App Store eventually became a key channel through which major apps like Uber, WhatsApp, and Snapchat reached the masses. And similar hopes exist for ARKIt and Google’s rival, ARCore.

“It’s got all the makings of a platform shift,” David Urbina, who is building an augmented reality app called Neon using ARKit, told BuzzFeed News. “Apple is essentially turning a light switch on.”

@ARKitweekly / Twitter / Via Twitter: @ARKitweekly

Neon has a number of features that layer the digital world on top of the real one, including a friend locator that uses your phone’s camera display to place arrows above contacts within 100 meters. Before ARKit, Neon could only accurately locate your contacts if you stood still, so if you took a few steps, you’d need to refresh the app. With ARKit — which offers lighting-fast image processing and measurement capabilities that allow a phone to understand where it is in space — Neon gives you a consistently accurate read, so the app is actually useful now.

Applications like Neon were hardly feasible when the term “augmented reality” was coined by a Boeing researcher in 1990, and would’ve been a pain to use just a few months ago, but the technology is now finally capable of supporting them. “To truly, credibly represent virtual objects in the world, it requires a lot of puzzle pieces to come into place that are technically challenging,” Jon Wiley, ‎director of immersive design at Google, told BuzzFeed News. Those puzzle pieces include powerful processors and accurate image-recognition technology, Wiley said, both of which are now advanced enough to the point where AR can be unleashed.

Fire-breathing dragon in your backyard, built with ARCore

YouTube / Via youtube.com

We've seen glimpses of AR's potential before — in Pokémon Go and in Microsoft's HoloLens demos — but this moment marks AR is coming to public at scale, a major milestone. “Three to five years from now, we’ll look back at this time as an inflection point,” Todd Richmond, director of the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Southern California, told BuzzFeed News. “This is really taking AR to the masses.”

“Three to five years from now, we’ll look back at this time as an inflection point."

Apple has been stoking expectations for ARKit. “We actually have hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads that are going to be capable of AR,” Apple's senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi said when introducing ARKit at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this year. “That’s going to make overnight ARKit the largest AR platform in the world.”

But the key test of this technology is whether it can be used to develop applications that change the way we interact with our devices or the way we do things in daily life. Technology industry experts BuzzFeed News spoke with for this story struggled to name an AR use case that might transform a common behavior in the way that, say, Uber transformed transportation. But both Google and Apple appear willing to take a wait-and-see approach, putting the tools in the hands of developers and waiting for what happens next. Asked to name use cases that display the power of AR, Wiley compared it to the personal computer. “That’s a little like saying — what are PCs good for? They’re really good for spreadsheets, that's true. But they've also completely transformed everything else we do in the world.”

What’s clear is that ARKit and ARCore will pave the way for apps that never would’ve seen the light of day before. Both provide developers with the ability to create augmented reality apps that work as you move up, down, right, left, forward, and backward — otherwise known as the six degrees of freedom. And developers are finding ways to make use of this technology — even if the applications are novel at first.

Game developer Ridgeline Labs, for instance, began building a pet dog game for virtual reality last fall, not even considering AR due to the technical challenges. At the time, it was impossible for the company to make a digital dog to walk around with you in augmented reality, or jump on your couch, or walk around your furniture, aware of where it was. But after Apple introduced ARKit, that all changed, and the team is now on track to release an AR app this fall in which the dog does all those things.

@madewithARKit / Twitter / Via Twitter: @madewithARKit

“It just wouldn’t exist without ARKit,” Ridgeline Labs cofounder Jeremy Slavitz told BuzzFeed News, of his app. “You couldn’t really walk around a dog, or pet a dog if it weren’t in ARKit. It just wouldn’t know where you were moving, there’s no way.”

Along with gaming, retail will likely be one of the first industries to embrace AR. Ikea, for instance, is expected to debut a new app called Ikea Place that will allow its users to place “true to-scale” Ikea furniture inside their homes using AR, potentially saving them hours inside the furniture giant that can turn agonizing for many.

With both Apple and Google in the game, developers are starting to become more interested in an AR world that feels ripe with possibilities and has a big potential market. Their enthusiasm could quickly lead to a major surge in AR apps, including those designed with a daily use case in mind, not just novel experiences like a virtual pet dog.

Urbina is thinking about how to get Neon used every day, and is planning to include a feature where people can leave digital messages for friends on top of the physical world along his friend finder tool. It will be people like Urbina, with more permanent uses in mind, that determine the future of the technology — the only question is what that will be. “There’s only so many times you’ll be able to anchor a piece of furniture or a cartoon in the room before you get tired of that,” he said. “The leaders in AR are going to have to establish a level of persistence in order to move past the novelty.”

23andMe

After collecting more than 2 million people’s DNA and winning hard-fought federal clearances to sell certain health tests, 23andMe has big plans — including using its customers’ genetic data to develop drugs of its own. To get there, it’s raised $250 million in a round led by powerhouse venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, the company announced today.

23andMe, which extracts genetic information about your health, ancestry, and physical traits from mail-home saliva kits, has now raised a total of $491 million. TechCrunch first reported that the company was raising its first round since 2015. The latest round’s pre-money valuation was $1.5 billion, according to Axios. (A spokesperson declined to comment on valuation.)

The new influx of capital indicates that 23andMe doesn’t plan to go public in the near future, despite launching more than a decade ago in 2006.

Under its CEO and cofounder Anne Wojcicki, the Silicon Valley startup has been working for two years to create therapeutics based on genetic targets found in its massive customer database. That team, made up of Genentech veteran Richard Scheller and 40 employees, works out of a lab in South San Francisco separate from 23andMe’s headquarters, Emily Drabant Conley, vice president of business development, told BuzzFeed News. She said the team is investigating oncology and disorders of the skin, immune system, liver, and heart.

23andMe’s future success depends on it expanding its database. The more DNA it collects and the more surveys customers answer about their health and lifestyles, the more data 23andMe has to develop drugs internally. It also has more to offer big-name pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Genentech, which pay to access much of that information. (About 85% of 23andMe’s customers opt in to letting the company use their data for research, the company says.)

Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe

Kimberly White / Getty Images

“It’s one-of-a-kind in the world,” Drabant Conley said. “We’re the largest database of genetic information and health information together.” In just the last few weeks, she noted, this database was the basis for publications about pre-term births and Parkinson’s disease in high-profile scientific journals. A month ago, 23andMe and the pharmaceutical company Lundbeck started recruiting 25,000 customers to participate in a study on depression and bipolar disorders; Drabant Conley says they’re nearly done.

So Drabant Conley said that the new funding will also be spent on advertising and recruiting new customers. And what helps 23andMe stand apart from the now dozens of personal genetic-testing companies in existence is that it’s the only one that can tell people about their health risks, without going through a doctor or a genetic counselor.

In 2013, the FDA banned 23andMe from telling customers their risks for 254 diseases and conditions. Two years later, the company got clearance to provide health information again, but to a much more limited extent, for about 36 relatively rare genetic diseases. And this April, the company won yet another victory when the agency agreed to allow reports for 10 more diseases, including serious ones like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

“It’s been game-changing,” Drabant Conley told BuzzFeed News when asked how customers have responded to the approvals. “The FDA clearances enable us to provide the information that is most valuable to consumers. The genetic health risks are things consumers really care about.”

23andMe also announced that two directors are joining its board, bringing its member total to five: Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, and Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer for YouTube and a Google senior vice president, who joined in July. (It’s worth noting that Wojcicki’s sister, Susan, is the CEO of YouTube.)

Over the last year, a handful of executives have departed 23andMe, including President Andy Page (now CEO of diabetes startup Livongo). A spokesperson said the company does not plan to replace him at this time. 23andMe also let go of a team last summer dedicated to next-generation sequencing, even as competing startups are making the technology a core part of their business.

LINK: White Supremacists Use DNA Tests To Prove Their Racial Purity Online. But Companies Won't Necessarily Kick Them Off.

LINK: 23andMe Has Abandoned The Genetic Testing Tech Its Competition Is Banking On

Apple

With the new third-generation Apple Watch, users won’t have to be near their phones to make calls, stream music from Apple Music, and find directions thank to the wearable’s new LTE connectivity.

The Apple Watch could previously only load data over a Bluetooth connection with an iPhone, and limited data (Siri, iMessages, and smart home control) over Wi-Fi.

Now, the Apple Watch Series 3 will be able to download data on its own, without being tethered to an iPhone or a Wi-Fi network — that is, if you sign up for an additional data plan with a cell provider (for now, AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile are the first US carriers at launch). The number on your watch will be the same number as your iPhone, and third party apps like WeChat will work as well.

The display itself acts as the antenna — and there’s an embedded electronic SIM card in the device’s hardware. The watch’s form factor is largely the same, which means bands bought for previous Apple Watches will be compatible with the new device. Only the side dial (called the “digital crown”), which now has a red accent, looks different.

There’s an option to turn cellular connectivity on and off, as well as add cellular-related information (or “complications”), like connection strength and ability to make/receive calls, to your watch face.

Apple

Like Series 2, the watch features built-in GPS and waterproofness up to 50 meters deep, as well as an OLED Retina display.

WatchOS 4 is the new software shipping with the Apple Watch Series 3, though the update will also be available to older versions of the Apple Watch on September 19. It includes new watch faces, including a Siri-based version that proactively displays information it thinks you need (eg. traffic info, reminders, and airline tickets from Apple Wallet). The Workout app has a new high intensity interval training (HIIT) mode, enhanced pool swim tracking, and the ability to exchange information with certain gym equipment. When you start a new workout in watchOS 4, the watch will also turn on Do Not Disturb simultaneously, so it doesn’t buzz during your workout class.

There’s better Apple Music integration, too (personalized playlists like New Music Mix are auto-synced). Person-to-person Apple Pay (launching with iOS 11 for phones and tablets) is also available on the watch.

You can preorder the watch on Sept. 15, which starts at $329 for the non-cellular version and $399 for cellular in a variety of colors and finishes. Both ship Sept. 22.

Apple made progress towards a more independent smartwatch with last year’s fitness-focused and newly swim-proof Apple Watch Series 2, which added GPS, so runners, cyclists, and swimmers could track their routes. But the ability to connect to an LTE network may finally fulfill the smartwatch’s original promise: to be a computer on your wrist. The original Apple Watch was too reliant on the iPhone to add any additional benefit for many users. The second-generation watch was more palatable for those interested in health and fitness, but it still wasn’t the device for those who’d rather wear their phones than carry it.

Apple

The Apple Watch Series 3’s ability to temporarily replace your phone will be contingent, however, on how the data connection affects the watch’s battery life. Features like LTE data, built-in GPS, near-field communication for mobile payments, and heart rate sensing are notoriously energy draining. Using GPS on the Apple Watch Series 2, for example, reduces the battery from about 18 to 5 hours.

To compensate for power drain, many smartwatch-makers that have already implemented LTE data, including Samsung for the Gear S3 and LG for the Watch Sport, have simply increased the size of the battery, making the wearables incredibly bulky. Apple, on the other hand, has not had to increase the size of the watch and maintained its 18 hour battery life.

Only real-world testing will tell if the Apple Watch can meet these battery specs. If you were looking forward to a wearable-only future, stay tuned for our full Apple Watch Series 3 review.

Apple

Today, for the first time, the annual September iPhone launch event was hosted at Apple’s new Cupertino-based campus, in a new theater named after its late founder, Steve Jobs. The first phones unveiled in the new venue are the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, which feature a new glass and aluminum design, a faster processor, and wireless charging support.

This keynote is no ordinary one: this year marks the tenth anniversary of the iPhone, which first shipped in June 2007. The device ushered in a wave of touchscreen smartphones—and now makes up 70% of the company’s revenue.

The phones are still 4.7 inches and 5.5 inches, respectively, and have Retina displays.

Like the previous models (the 7 and 7 Plus), the 8 and 8 Plus water-resistant (up to 30 minutes of submersion, 1 meter deep), and, sadly for headphone traditionalists, there’s still no headphone jack.

What really sets these new devices apart is their stainless steel borders, and glass front *and* backs, reinforced by steel. It’s the “most durable glass ever in a smartphone.” This means they can be charged wirelessly, without a cable. It’s this new design that warranted the name iPhone 8, rather than a more incremental 7s, as is typical for years between bigger releases.

The new iPhone 8 and 8 Plus work with Apple’s own wireless charging pad accessory, as well as all chargers with the Qi wireless charging support. Third-party offerings from mophie and Belkin will also work. Next year, Apple will sell its own non-Qi, iPhone 8-compatible mat called the AirPower, which can simultaneously charge the Apple Watch Series 3 or the new wireless charging case for AirPods.

The 12 MP camera has a new sensor, and a new color filter.

The iPhone 8 can capture photos faster, with more vibrant colors. It also has a new LED flash with “Slow Sync” which helps create more uniformly lit backgrounds and foregrounds. While the 8 has one new larger and faster sensor, the 8 Plus has two new sensors for its dual-lens camera.

Apple

The Plus has a dual-, rather than single-, lens camera, with both a wide angle and telephoto lens (the non-Plus iPhone has just one wide angle lens). The dual-lens camera powers the Portrait Mode feature, which adds a professional camera-esque blur to the image’s background. Apple is now introducing Portrait Lighting, which simulates different lighting effects. The feature will launch in beta for the new 8 Plus and 7 Plus. There’s Contour Light, Natural Light, Stage Light, Stage Light Mono, and Studio Light.

Both the 8 and 8 Plus also have the "highest quality video recorder ever in a smartphone," according to Phil Schiller, VP of marketing at Apple. Slo-mo can now be shot at 1080p and 240 frames per second, double the frames of what was available previously.

The new chip inside is A11 Bionic (Six-core CPU, 64-bit design). Its performance cores are 25% faster than A10.

The GPU is 30% faster, which is best seen in machine learning and gaming apps. This processing power is designed for machine learning, AR, and games—but you’ll also see faster low-light autofocus, pixel processing for sharpness, and noise reduction when capturing photos.

Both devices will ship with iOS 11, which includes a slew of new features for the iPhone, including a new GIF-esque Loop mode in pictures, person-to-person Apple Pay within iMessage, a new male voice for Siri, photos that take up less space on your device, a redesigned Control Center, and a Do Not Disturb While Driving mode. Best of all: you don’t need a new device to get the update. It will be free to download for those with the 5s, SE, 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, and 7 Plus, too.

The iPhone 8 starts at $699 at 64GB. The 8 Plus starts at $799, and can be preordered on Sept. 15.

Both ship on Sept. 22. The devices are available in silver, space gray and a new gold finish. Through the iPhone Upgrade Program,

Apple

To mark the iPhone's 10th anniversary, Apple revealed its most expensive smartphone ever, iPhone X.

On Tuesday, the world's most valuable company announced updates to its Apple Watch and Apple TV. But after unveiling a new line of smartphones, the iPhone 8, Apple CEO Tim Cook added "one more thing" to close the event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California.

Starting at $999, the iPhone X (yes, the company skipped the iPhone 9) has some of the most significant updates to the gadget since 2014.

With its edge-to-edge display and buttonless face, the new iPhone looks remarkably different from past iPhones. At 5.8 inches diagonally, its screen is taller and larger than the 4.7-inch iPhone, but smaller than the larger 5.5-inch iPhone Plus. The Galaxy S8–esque screen has a hardly noticeable border around it, making all kinds of content — video, articles, apps — appear full-screen.

The display’s immersiveness is largely due to the fact that instead of a home button, there’s just more screen.

It’s an update that’s likely to be just as controversial as the removal of the headphone jack last year, and the change from the 30-pin to Lightning connector in 2012.

Apple

No home button means that the way you interact with the phone will be different. Instead of tapping the button to see your homescreen, you’ll flick up from the bottom of the screen. To force-restart the phone, you’ll now long-press the power and volume-up buttons, and to invoke Siri, you’ll double-click the power button.

But the real change is the screen.

The iPhone X has an OLED screen, versus the LCD (liquid crystal display) in older models, which Apple is calling the “Super Retina Display” (that’s 458 pixel/s per inch, for you nerds). It also supports HDR, including Dolby Vision and HDR10 standards.

OLED screens display darker blacks, brighter whites, and more vibrant colors, and Apple is including a number of new wallpapers to show off the display. These screens are also more power-efficient and thinner than LCD screens, because they don’t require an always-on backlight layer. Both Samsung and LG have implemented OLEDs in various devices. In fact, the new iPhone’s display is reportedly made by Samsung.

True Tone, a feature that makes the screen easier on the eyes and was originally announced for the iPad, will also be available on the iPhone X. It can detect the color temperature of the room. So, for example, if the room has warm, yellow lighting, the phone’s display will look warm too (the same way a piece of white paper reflects the light around it).

The display has rounded screen corners (older iPhones have square corners) and completely covers the front of the device, except for a thin notch at the top. Because of this notch, the time has been moved to the top left, while the wireless icons are on the top right. This notch houses the earpiece (for calls) plus a new array of cameras and sensors designed to detect your face. Your FACE. Which brings us to...

Apple is the latest to add face-scanning tech to its phones with what it’s calling Face ID.

Apple

The new phone has a "TrueDepth camera system" (flash and an infrared sensor for low-light detection) in the front of the device to, first, validate that it is actually you who is using the phone and, second, unlock your phone. Previously, the only form of biometric authentication (aka using your body’s data) on the iPhone was through Touch ID on the home button, which sensed your fingerprint.

The A11 Bionic neural engine inside the phone powers the machine learning algorithm processing for Face ID. It can perform 600 billion operations per second, allowing it to understand your face with a different hairstyle, with glasses, at night, and during the day. Apple claims that it can't be duped by a high-res photograph.

Compared to Touch ID (which fails 1 in 50,000 times), Face ID fails 1 in 1,000,000 times. That's the chance that a random person can unlock your phone. It can work with Apple Pay and all apps that work with Touch ID.

This same tech is also used to customize a new form of emoji, called Animoji, which projects your facial expressions and voice onto emojis.

There are dual 12-megapixel cameras — just like the iPhone 8 Plus — but oriented vertically instead of horizontally.

It also has dual optical image stabilization (for *both* wide-angle and telephoto lenses) for more stable photos, especially in lower light. There's a quad-LED True Tone flash for two times more uniformity of light.

Apple

The selfie camera on the iPhone X can also take "Portrait Mode" (adds blurry background to photos) and "Portrait Lighting," which simulates different lighting effects, and is only available on the rear camera of the 8 Plus.

Apple

The battery life has been increased, too, to two more hours than the iPhone 7 (14 hours with LTE use).

Like the 8 and 8 Plus, the new iPhone supports wireless charging and is water- and dust-resistant. Apple is also releasing a charging pad that can charge the iPhone X, 8, 8 Plus, and new AirPods case.

The iPhone X comes in 64GB ($999) and 256GB ($1150) sizes in silver or space gray, and can be preordered starting on Oct. 27. It ships on Nov. 3.

*Price Is Right theme song…* Which is more than $999?

Apple

Apple has announced a brand new version of the Apple TV called Apple TV 4K that will let you play back 4K HDR video, which will provide significantly better video quality than current high-definition video.

The Apple TV’s cheaper rivals — Google’s Chromecast, Amazon’s Fire TV, and the Roku — have been offering 4K HDR playback for some time now, but both 4K content and televisions that support the new standard have only started going mainstream in the last year or so. Apple’s been in talks with Hollywood to bring 4K content to the iTunes Store, and if you own any high-definition movies or TV shows on iTunes, it will automatically upgrade them to 4K HDR versions at no additional charge.

Apple

To handle the higher resolution video, the new Apple TV 4K has an A10X fusion chip — the same chip that powers the iPad Pro — that’s twice as fast as the chip in the last Apple TV, and provides four times its graphics performance, claims Apple.

Apple’s also upgrading tvOS, the software that powers Apple TV with a dedicated Sports tab that will change games depending on the season. You’ll also get notifications when your favorite team is playing.

The new Apple TV will cost $179 and will be available to order on September 15. It will be available on September 22. Make sure your TV supports 4K HDR and you have a fast enough internet connection to stream 4K content before you head over to the Apple Store.

Worth $999 of chuckles!

Read all about the event HERE.

@kait_tiffany / Twitter / Via Twitter: @kait_tiffany

@RMac18 / Twitter / Via Twitter: @RMac18

@zamosta / Twitter / Via Twitter: @zamosta

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North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency released this photo Sept. 12, 2017, showing North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un at a photo session with teachers in Pyongyang.

Str / AFP / Getty Images

Beset by international sanctions, the North Korean government has begun hacking into cryptocurrency exchanges to steal bitcoins, researchers say.

At least three South Korean bitcoin exchanges have been targeted by North Korean military hackers in 2017, according to a report from the cybersecurity firm FireEye.

Major cryptocurrencies have surged in value in 2017, with the value of a single bitcoin rising from $963 at the beginning of the year to $4,222, and Ethereum jumping from $8 to $299. That makes them a ripe target for theft, said Luke McNamara, a FireEye senior analyst.

“I see there being two macro drivers of this threat activity,” McNamara told BuzzFeed News. The first is the tightening sanctions on North Korea's economy, he said. “But you also have cryptocurrencies appreciating significantly since the beginning of the year. So you see cryptocurrency exchanges, particularly in South Korea, becoming a logical target," he added.

One exchange believed to be targeted by North Korea is Bithumb, South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency company. Bithumb was hacked in February, though it didn’t notice the breach until June, and it was only made public in July. A number of users reported bitcoin and ethereum stolen from their accounts, with one customer claiming more than a million dollars’ worth of digital currency was stolen, according to local news report.

“This is very consistent with what I would expect North Korea to be doing,” said Claire Finkelstein, a national security expert and faculty director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law. The fact that cryptocurrencies are decentralized, an appealing feature to enthusiasts who tout that bitcoin and similar technologies aren’t regulated by any outside agency, also makes them appealing to criminals, she said.

“Bitcoin is a high risk currency because it’s so easily manipulated,” Finkelstein said. “And when you combine the fact that the North Korean government operates substantially like a criminal enterprise, it’s not at all surprising to learn that they’re very interested in cryptocurrencies.”

North Korea was first observed stealing money, instead of merely conducting more traditional espionage on financial institutions, in 2016, when, according to many researchers, including the US National Security Agency, it hacked into the Bangladesh Bank, that country’s central bank, and wired away $81 million.

That same hacker group, McNamara said, is behind not only other attacks on Asian banks, which have gone unreported and which he declined to name because they are FireEye clients, but also the more recent attacks on South Korean bitcoin exchanges.

All those attacks saw the same pattern of hackers targeting employees with spearphishing emails to their personal accounts, reusing passwords to gain access to company networks, then using some variant of a type of custom malware that FireEye has dubbed “PEACHPIT” to create a backdoor into a victim’s networks.

Spearphishing emails to employees of cryptocurrency exchanges, McNamara said, focused on bitcoin financial regulations and new tax rules, reflecting the difficulties those companies face in keeping up with frequently changing laws and regulations.

“Given a lot of the regulatory concerns in most countries regarding cryptocurrencies, that would be something especially interesting or of interest to someone who works at those exchanges,” McNamara said. “I think they were very clever in the lures they used for these operations.”

If international sanctions helped spur North Korean hacking and theft, that’s unlikely to end soon. On Monday, the United Nations agreed to yet more sanctions against the country.