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Of the smorgasbord of features stuffed into Apple's new thousand-dollar iPhone X, one of the most intriguing is Face ID — a new feature that lets you unlock your iPhone with your gaze after the system has learned what you look like, using Apple’s first-ever neural engine. “In the iPhone X, your phone is locked — until you look at it, and it recognizes you," Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said onstage at today’s iPhone event. “Nothing has ever been simpler, more natural, and effortless.”

Here’s how it works: Apple deploys various sensors working in tandem to recognize your face in an instant, using what it calls the TrueDepth camera system. First, a dot projector beams more than 30,000 invisible dots onto your face to build a face map, while a “flood illuminator” helps confirm your face with what little light is available, even in the dark. Then an infrared camera reads the dot pattern and sends this information over to the secure A11 Bionic chip embedded in the iPhone X to process and confirm that your face is a match. The whole system works only when you look directly at the camera without closing your eyes or angling your face away. With Face ID, Apple says, your face becomes your secure password.

Apple claims Face ID is more secure than the previously used Touch ID in old iPhones (which Schiller said had become, before today, the “gold standard in consumer device biometric protection”), and even said there is only a one-in-a-million chance for a nefarious actor to fool the Face ID system and break into your phone. Face ID learns your face and adapts to you even if you wear glasses or grow a beard, the company says. And it isn’t tricked by photographs.

But how secure is Face ID? Security professionals and AI experts say it’s hard to know this early on. Still, that “one in a million” statistic Apple brags about? “It’s meaningless,” Matthew Green, a John Hopkins University cryptographer, told BuzzFeed News. “The threat with Face ID is that someone with a picture of your face might be able to fool the camera. We leave pictures everywhere.”

The threat of this happening is very real, as reports recently circulated that mere photographs could fool the facial recognition security feature in another new top-shelf phone, the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. Apple seems to be positioning itself as more secure, given the additional “depth-sensing” capabilities it says live inside the new iPhone X (which confirms that your face is indeed three-dimensional, and not a flat photograph). But without any independent testing of the iPhone X conducted as of yet, it’s impossible to know this for sure.

Meanwhile, Bruce Schneier, an internet security expert and chief technology officer at Resillient Systems, a subsidiary of IBM, said Apple’s “one in a million” failure claim may well hold up — but that it doesn’t matter if even one person in a million is still able to break into your phone. “That’s why [security] professionals don’t unlock phones that way,” Schneier wrote to BuzzFeed News in an email.

‘Better than a security guard sitting at a desk’

The problem, according to Chris Nicholson, the CEO and founder of a deep-learning startup called Skymind, is that it isn’t immediately clear whether Face ID is more secure than the Apple’s biometric Touch ID. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless. “It does introduce another factor” when you talk about the two-factor authentication of accounts and devices, Nicholson said. Even if a bad actor managed to fake one of your identifying “factors,” or passwords, it’s less likely that actor could fake multiple ones.

As Nicholson explained, AI is getting very good at recognizing faces nowadays — and it’s entirely believable Apple is deploying state-of-the-art technology in its devices. “Facial AI and deep learning is at the heart of computer vision, and AI can recognize people better than even people can,” Nicholson said. “In a sense, it’s even better than having a security guard sitting at a desk.”

But as others point out, Face ID will never be totally secure. What if a cop stops you and points the phone at your face, one Twitter user asked, while they have you in handcuffs — then he or she proceeds to look at your phone without a warrant?

This doesn’t exactly tread new territory, security analyst Will Strafach, said. “If someone were willing to violate the law and threatened you not to look down or close your eyes, then at that point the same could occur as with Touch ID — your finger could be pressed onto the sensor,” he told BuzzFeed News. “If it’s true that Face ID has a much lower false positive rate than Touch ID, Apple could update its security white paper and independent researchers would be able to confirm this.”

The Privacy Tradeoff

Bolstering that idea of security is the additional detail that Apple says authentication happens instantly on your phone using its new A11 Bionic chip, and that your information (i.e., your face) is never sent to the cloud. In fact, Apple has a long history of aggressively positioning itself as a company that is more privacy- and security-minded than its competitors — and that it is less interested in collecting user data, because it sells devices, not advertising. (As it turns out, this is also great PR for Apple.)

“This reflects Apple’s commitment to privacy, and I respect that,” Nicholson told BuzzFeed News. At the same time, he warned that this hampers Apple from building more powerful AI: “Apple isn’t allowing the data from all the users of its phone to go to a central AI brain and make the AI smarter. That makes everyone feel nice and safe, but it means Apple’s AI isn’t learning as fast as, say, Google” — which puts Apple at a disadvantage as the AI race heats up among tech giants.

Still, whether or not Face ID does have improved security, it doesn’t guard against one-off flukes of the feature failing onstage, as happened during the event on Tuesday. Apple has until Oct. 27, when the iPhone X preorders begin, to address the issue.

The big question on everyone’s mind, as Apple CEO Tim Cook stepped onstage to announce an array of iPhones and a new Apple Watch and a new Apple TV on Tuesday, was: Will there be a nuclear war with North Korea?

No. Wait. That wasn't it.

It was: What is happening in Florida and Texas and the islands in the Atlantic in the aftermath of two brutal hurricanes? Or maybe the question was actually about Russia and the election. Or DACA. Or Ted Cruz masturbating. Or, well... In fairness, there’s a lot going on.

Which is why Apple's ability to cut through the noise and din is so remarkable. Of all the ways the world has changed since Steve Jobs rolled out the first iPhone a decade ago, our frenzied public sphere seems the loudest and most unrecognizable. We're louder, coarser, more unpredictable; the radio is at full volume, stuck between stations, forever.

Thanks to the power and success of the company he leads, boring Tim Cook may be the one human alive better able to make news break through than Donald Trump, at least on occasion. And so, on Tuesday, the big question on everyone's mind was ultimately about iPhones. (Don't take our word for it; here's what Twitter's trending topics looked in the United States after Apple's presser. Worldwide trends were similar.)

No other person or entity, no politician or even Hollywood franchise is so able to so fully peel away the layers of our daily reality in service to engineered desire. This is Apple's specialty. Its entire purpose is to make you pay attention to it; to make you want it. And it is very, very good at that. This was so fully on display Tuesday that it's worth examining and understanding.

Apple doesn't have press conferences, it has "events." On Tuesday, the event was in Apple's new home, a vast new 175-acre campus that, as Cook said, "fuses buildings with an open parkland." It's a stunning place, with rolling hills and — according to Apple — some 9,000 newly planted trees. The landscaping neatly conceals Cupertino's nearby suburban clutter of strip malls and cookie-cutter apartment homes. Everything is utterly new, so much so that there was a strong scent of manure fertilizing all those freshly planted trees and grasses. And forever looming in the distance, across the park, is Apple's new headquarters building. Its spaceship.

Apple's new campus, under California clouds.

Mat Honan

As the media floated in on waves of warm California air, we were greeted by handlers, standing every 30 feet or so directing us to where they want us to go, directing us to have a nice day. They were almost reinforcing the notion that we would have a nice day.

They ushered us into the Steve Jobs Theater, which is buried like a bunker in the earth and topped with a great glass shrine. There we were fed quail eggs on polenta, and salmon with crème fraîche for breakfast. The portions were small, but there seemed to be a limitless supply. And at the appointed hour, they directed everyone through the glass emptiness of that upstairs reception hall, through the white emptiness of a downstairs lobby, and into the theater below, all leather seats and rumbling speakers. The stage was set, very literally, for a show in which the venue itself played a large supporting role.

Ahhhhhh... And then off went the lights. The international press, ostensibly there to disseminate news of the newest Jesus Phone throughout the world, was asked to shut their laptops so as not to muck up the show. And in the darkness, there came the Voice of Steve. The press conference itself began with Steve's words to Apple the company, telling it what it was and what it would be after he was gone. "What’s going to keep Apple Apple — is if we keep us us," said the voice in the darkness.

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It was an emotional scene, one that left both a visibly affected Cook, and several of the employees seated in the audience choking back tears. The theater erupted in applause. This is something that people watching from livestreams nearly always comment on: the applause in the theaters at these events. You could be forgiven for thinking the press is howling in appreciation. Although some certainly do, the clapping is largely driven by Apple employees, who were seated (or seeded) throughout the audience and broke into applause.

But the real show began when Cook called Angela Ahrendts, the former Burberry CEO who left to run Apple's retail efforts, onstage. As part of her update on the company's retail efforts, she told the audience that "we don’t call them 'stores' anymore — we call them 'town squares' because they’re gathering places."

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Sneer at this statement if you want, but it is key to understanding precisely how the company engineers desire. Apple isn't in the phone business or the computer business. It is in the business of selling you the person you want to be. And very often this is the work of branding language.

Why would anyone go to a store, when they could gather in a square? One comes to the Apple Town Square not to do something as gauche as commerce, but to associate and wander and learn.

From here, there was a slew of product announcements. Watches. Apple TVs. Phones. We were told that Apple Watch is number one. (At what? Who cares.) The chip that powers several of these devices would have no pedestrian numeric designation, rather it is the A11 Bionic. There was Animoji, and face unlock, and "one more thing." The presentation that began with an address from the former Burberry CEO ended with a phone that can only be described as a luxury device.

What's really surprising is that exactly none of the announcements were surprising. This year, thanks to a barrage of leaks, everyone knew what was coming, more or less, but we all watched anyway. Rapt.

And then it's up and out of the theater and back into the hall, where it's time to get hands-on with the devices — of which there are always just slightly too few, which encourages crowding around the tables, jockeying, shoving to get the perfect shot. Like every other moment at these events, this is not an accident. Apple knows precisely how many people will attend each event, and clearly thinks carefully about how the hands-on area is laid out.

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The next phase of this strategy is about access. Some publications — typically bigger ones, or ones with an audience Apple particularly wants to reach — will get review units. (In recent years, this has included BuzzFeed News.) Others will not. Just as significantly, no one gets them exclusively. This creates an incentive for the outlets that do get review units to make a big splash with them and to heavily promote their review coverage.

Of course, Apple also has to deliver. And historically it has done this. Even antenna-gate, by far the biggest flaw in a phone it shipped, was not a big deal. Its attention to detail makes sure it doesn't ever fall on its ass. Your opinion may differ as to whether or not the iPhone is the best handset on the market — there are certainly cases to be made for other devices — but it's pure nonsense and an indicator that a person should not be taken seriously if they argue that it's not among the very best.

These new phones appear to be pretty wonderful. There was some teeth-gnashing about how the late-arriving, very expensive iPhone X will affect Apple's historically strong fourth-quarter sales and, subsequently, its earnings. And maybe rightfully so, but ultimately, the company will sell a bazillion of these super-high-margin devices and reap incredible profits from them.

And so this is what Apple does now, consistently. It rolls out wonderful devices, drapes them in superlatives and its own branded language, and creates an air of exclusivity around them, both by making them hard to get a hold of in advance and casting them as luxurious but accessible items. People clamor for them, and the press clamors to serve up the news, which makes people want them all the more. And so the cycle of engineered desire goes.

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Do you remember when the first iPhone came out? One thing I remember, strongly, is that it was a replacement for a lot of other stuff. Before the iPhone, perfectly reasonable people who had no more pockets than we do today often carried around a cell phone, an iPod (or another MP3 player) and sometimes even a camera too. More than a decade ago, I wrote of the original iPhone that it "brings together several features of the iPod, digital camera, smart phones and even portable computing to one device, with a widescreen display and an innovative input method." It genuinely offered more convenience and a better way of doing things. It went on to redefine not just the marketplace for cell phones, but also computers, communication, the economy, and our very culture. It was, to put it mildly, utterly wild.

It seems extremely unlikely that Apple will repeat that trick. The iPhone X, despite the language around it, is simply a better version of an already very nice thing at the end of the day. But what is repeatable, even bankable, is Apple's corporate myth-making. That is a product unto itself.

It was 90 degrees when we walked blinking, up out of Steve Jobs Theater and back into the sunlight, surrounded by all that flowing grass and those freshly planted 9,000 trees. It was a gorgeous and exquisitely designed space, there's no denying it. But also, come on. You could still smell the bullshit.

Matt Rourke / AP

Federal prosecutors are dropping their demand that Facebook be barred from alerting users about search warrants for information about their accounts, according to a new court filing on Wednesday.

In making the decision, prosecutors did not concede the legal arguments raised by Facebook and civil liberties and electronic privacy groups against the nondisclosure orders attached to the search warrants. According to court papers filed jointly by Facebook and the US attorney's office in Washington on Wednesday, prosecutors determined that the underlying investigation that prompted the search warrants — the details of which are under seal — had "progressed ... to the point where the [nondisclosure orders] are no longer needed."

The announcement came less than 24 hours before an appeals court in Washington, DC, was set to hear arguments in the case. According to the joint filing, a lower court judge vacated the nondisclosure orders at the government's request, making Facebook's appeal of those orders moot. The lawyers asked the District of Columbia Court of Appeals to dismiss the case, and the court granted that request on Wednesday afternoon.

Nate Cardozo, a lawyer for the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BuzzFeed News that although the organization was pleased with the outcome, he expected there would be other cases in the future that would ultimately lead to definitive court rulings on the issue of when the government can block tech companies from notifying customers about demands for their information. EFF was one of several advocacy groups that filed briefs in the case arguing that the gag orders were unlawful.

"We've won the battle but the war is not over," Cardozo said.

There’s already another case pending in federal court in Seattle that touches on some of the same concerns raised in the Facebook case. Microsoft is suing the Justice Department over a section of federal law that the government relies on to seek court orders that block tech companies from notifying subscribers when prosecutors request information. The judge ruled in February that part of Microsoft’s constitutional challenges could go forward. A trial is scheduled for June 2018.

Although most information about the case is sealed, EFF speculated in its court papers that the case relates to the mass arrests during protests in Washington on President Trump's inauguration day. More than 200 people were arrested in the hours around the inauguration, and felony charges for rioting and property destruction are pending against the majority of those defendants.

According to information about the case that is public, federal prosecutors served Facebook with search warrants for three account records over a three-month period. A District of Columbia Superior Court judge signed off on nondisclosure orders that prevented Facebook from telling users about the warrants until Facebook complied with the government's request.

Facebook unsuccessfully challenged the nondisclosure orders before the Superior Court judge, and appealed to the DC Court of Appeals. The appeals court issued a public order in June saying that it would accept input from any outside groups that Facebook or the government wanted to weigh in, although those groups wouldn't be privy to details about the investigation.

Several civil liberties and electronic privacy groups filed briefs in late June opposing the nondisclosure orders, arguing that users should have the right to challenge demands for their information, particularly if they involved First Amendment–protected speech activity. Facebook's interests may not always be the same as its customers, they said.

The DC Court of Appeals had scheduled public arguments for Sept. 14.

Arthur Spitzer, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, said in an email to BuzzFeed News that although the fight over the gag orders was over, it was still possible that the individuals whose Facebook accounts were at issue could go to court to challenge the government's requests for their information.

"Now that Facebook is free to notify these three users that their accounts are subject to a search warrant, we hope the users will contact us or other lawyers to challenge the government's attempt to conduct a fishing expedition through their Facebook accounts," Spitzer said.

A spokesman for the US attorney's office did not immediately return a request for comment. Facebook's lawyer, John Roche of the law firm Perkins Coie in Washington, referred a request for comment to the company, which did not immediately respond.

Runner-favorite Jaybird is releasing a new product called RUN — and they’re the best wireless earbuds for working out.

Jaybird, the company that makes my favorite headphones for running, is shipping its first pair of wireless earbuds called RUN later this month.

The RUN is a cable-less, wire-free earbud that can connect to your device (laptop, phone, tablet, etc.) over Bluetooth, and it will be available sometime later this month for $180 (which, I know, is very expensive). Its most compelling feature? It actually sounds great when you're outside, on the move.

Wireless earbuds are a growing category and there are many to choose from: Apple's $159 AirPods, Samsung's $140 Gear IconX, the $150 Bragi Headphone, and the $300 Here Ones, just to name a few.

What makes this pair exciting is that it's made by Jaybird. The Utah-based company is focused on sound, sweatproof-ness, and fit — so much so, that its headphones are often a hassle to set up. They come with a variety of bud and wingtip sizes, and can be configured in your ear in multiple ways. It takes a while to get it right. Once the buds do fit, though, they sound and feel great, plus they stay in your ear, which is very important for people who run, bike, and bounce around outside.

The RUN, however, required less set-up time than other Jaybird earbuds I've tried. The default bud/wingtip-size ended up being perfect for my ears, and I loved how good they made my workout beats sound. Overall, I think the RUN are the best-sounding pair of wireless earbuds for athletes I've tried so far. They're great for runs and rides under 4 hours, but because of their short battery life, shape, and connectivity quirks, I'd recommend other brands (AirPods and Bragi) for all-day wear.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

I'll start with the bad: Its charging case can hold up 12 hours of battery life, but the battery on the buds themselves isn't great.

The case, which is charged via a micro USB cable, is very small and portable, though it's a little awkward to open with one hand. A light indicator on the outside shows whether or not your earbuds are charged.

The embedded magnets that are supposed to guide the earbuds into their charging ports could be stronger, but doing that would add more weight to the case.

Each bud only holds four hours of battery life. Jaybird did implement a fast charging system into the case — five minutes of charging in the case powers the earbuds with up to one hour of listening — which is fine for long bike rides or runs (I kept the buds in the case while resting). But, with just four hours of power per session, the earbuds aren't really designed for all-day wear at the office or at home. It takes a few hours to charge completely, from 0 to 100%. The Bragi Headphone offers six hours, while AirPods lasts for five (plus, their quick charging time is 15 minutes for three hours of listening).

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They stay in really, really well.

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My main issue with the AirPods, was that the little stick that juts out past the ear kept catching onto my hair whenever I tried to tuck my locks behind my ear. They'd also go flying every time I took off my sweater.

Once the RUN are in, they stay put (see: headshake test above).

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Snapchat is animating your Bitmoji. Starting today, you'll be able to bring them to life inside the Snapchat app, and watch them navigate the world around you.

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Refresher: Bitmoji are digital avatars you can customize so they look like you.

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Snapchat bought Bitmoji (the company) for more than $64 million in March, 2016. Yup, it knows what we want:

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You can access your animated Bitmoji by tapping the front facing camera display inside Snapchat (Where the dancing hot dog once lived). The animated Bitmoji will appear alongside other Snapchat effects in bottom carousel. Scroll through to find them.

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Snap will regularly refresh these Bitmojis' activities. Expect everyday situations, like getting coffee. And fun things, like skateboarding and air guitar.

Now, go have fun. And remember to do real world stuff too. Like feeding yourself and getting exercise.

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An Instagram from Amber Rose that appears to endorse the clothing shop Fashion Nova. The FTC included this example in its letter to her.

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The FTC has taken a big step in cracking down on celebrities doing shady Instagram ads by sending a new set of warning letters to 21 celebrities that require them to respond.

Some celebrity Instagram ads are obvious and easy to identify, but there are many that are confusing or unclear. And a lot of celebrities and influencers don’t properly disclose their #sponsored posts. A report on the top 50 most popular celebrities showed that 93% of the ads they did were not properly disclosed.

According to the FTC’s guidelines, you’re supposed to disclose an ad if you have a “material connection” to a product or brand. That means you’re not only supposed to say #ad if it was a very straightforward thing where you were paid to post about a product, but also if you were given a free gift (like clothes or a free private jet ride), or if you have a big endorsement deal with a brand, like Rihanna and Puma, or Kendall Jenner being the “face” of Esteé Lauder. Nebulous hashtags like #partner or just tagging the sponsor aren’t considered proper disclosures.

In March, the FTC sent “educational” letters to a 43 celebrities/influencers as well as brands, reminding them of the rules that they have to disclose if their posts are ads.

In the past, the FTC has only gone after against brands, not celebrities, for undisclosed social media ads. The “educational” letters to celebs were a new tactic, but they were still a step away from a real enforcement action, and the FTC said in the March letter that they were not attempting to verify if posts in question were ads or not. These new warning letters sent on September 6 are a step further, and now the FTC wants the celebrities to officially respond to the letters.

The FTC did not have any additional comment on these letters.

For example, the letter the FTC sent to Ciara about a photo of sneakers she posted on Instagram on May 8 reads [emphasis added]:

You posted a picture of three pairs of baby shoes and you wrote, "Thank You @JonBuscemi." In the picture, you tagged the shoes " buscemi" and "jonbuscemi." As my earlier letter explained, a simple "thank you" is probably inadequate to inform consumers of a material connection because it does not sufficiently explain the nature of your relationship; consumers could understand "thank you" simply to mean that you are a satisfied customer. In addition, the FTC staff believes that simply tagging a brand is an endorsement of the brand. Your post does not disclose whether you have a material connection with the marketer of Buscemi shoes.

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Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, brought these celebrities’ undisclosed ads to the FTC’s attention months ago, and has been monitoring these celebs since they received the letters back in March. Earlier this summer, they sent a letter to the FTC asking them to take further action, since they saw that many of celebs who received educational letters hadn’t clean up their act at all. Now, they are hoping the FTC will press even harder.

“While we are pleased that the FTC is taking deceptive social media marketing seriously,” Kristen Strader, a representative for the organization, told BuzzFeed News, “until enforcement action is taken against companies that facilitate influencer marketing, or influencers who post undisclosed ads, the culture around influencer marketing on social media will remain as it is – accepted consumer deception on behalf of profit-driven companies, without consequences.”

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Here are the 21 celebrities who received letters:

Farrah Abraham (from Teen Mom)

Akon

Amber Rose

Ashley Benson

Naomi Campbell

Ciara

Scott Disick

Tiona Fernan (an Instagram model)

Lilly Ghalichi (Shahs of Sunset star and makeup artist)

Lucy Hale (Pretty Little Liars)

Chelsea Houska (Teen Mom 2 star)

Vanessa Hudgens

Jenni “JWoww” Farley

Vanessa Lachey

Lindsay Lohan

Shay Mitchell (Pretty Little Liars)

Rach Parcell (fashion blogger)

Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi

Lisa Rinna

Sofia Vergara

Dorothy Wang (from Rich Kids of Instagram)

Instagram: @letthelordbewithyou

Reuters

When it comes to Facebook’s effort to stop the flow of misinformation on its platform, the labels can be misleading — and the project appears to be more about perfecting the company's algorithms than providing a “Good Housekeeping” stamp of approval for readers.

Almost exactly nine months ago, the company announced it would add a “disputed by third party fact-checkers” label to links in the News Feed that external fact checkers deemed completely false. Since then, the label has been a major focus of reporting and research. “Tagging fake news on Facebook doesn't work, study says,” read the headline on a Politico story about a draft research paper. (Facebook questioned the study’s methodology and the validity of its findings.)

But here’s the hidden truth people keep missing: the public’s reaction to the disputed label is largely irrelevant to stopping the spread of misinformation.

One reason is that any link rated false by third party checkers automatically has its reach reduced on Facebook. People can share it all they want but the platform prevents it from going viral as a result of an algorithmic push.

“The [disputed label] is almost more valuable in terms of reduced reach than in terms of consequences of users understanding of the individual item,” Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), told BuzzFeed News.

The second, less obvious reason why the label isn’t the most important piece of Facebook’s initiative is that these fact checked links are being added to what is fast becoming the world’s biggest and most up to date database of false stories. As with everything about Facebook, it’s the data and the algorithms that matter most.

With each new debunked story, the company gathers more data it can use to train its algorithms to make better decisions about which content to surface in the News Feed. This means the fact checkers are in effect working as content raters for Facebook in order to help train machines. Not surprisingly, this isn’t what motivates the fact checkers to do their work.

“I don't want to sound like a Neanderthal but I'm not really focusing on it,” Aaron Sharockman, the executive director of PolitiFact, told BuzzFeed News. “For us, our biggest priorities are to make the tools we use to spot and fact check fake news as efficient as possible so we can cover as much ground and have an impact.”

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As the checkers go about their important work, Facebook is now beginning to use their data to roll out new initiatives. Last month it announced that pages which repeatedly share false news stories will be blocked from using ad tools on the platform. Facebook is identifying these pages using the stories declared false by its fact checking partners. Thanks to that data, the company can now easily track if a page keeps sharing false stories, and automatically block that page from promoting itself with boosted posts or other types of ads. This is a powerful deterrent.

But unlike a disputed label in the News Feed, an ad product tweak based on a database of objectively false stories isn’t something that users see, and it’s not something a researcher can analyze. As with so much of Facebook’s data, it’s not accessible those outside the company. So yes, this is yet another example of data-rich Facebook getting even richer. (At least Facebook is now paying its fact checking partners for their work.)

This type of database is time-consuming and expensive to maintain. Normally, researchers have to secure grants and train people to evaluate and classify content. Facebook’s partnership with the likes of PolitiFact and Snopes means the company has some of the best fact checkers in the business identifying completely false stories, thereby providing a constant stream of high quality data.

I know from personal experience how hard it is to generate reliable data in this area. In 2014 I led a research project that tracked rumors being reported by news websites and logged whether they were true, false, or unverified. At the end of the project, a research assistant and I had gathered more than 100 rumors and over 1,500 news articles citing them into a database. It was an almost full time job for me for several months to get that data.

Similar projects also needed significant human effort to classify stories, tweets, images or other kinds of content. For example, an EU-funded project created a corpus of several hundred real and fake images shared on Twitter during Hurricane Sandy, the Boston Marathon bombings, and other news events. Another rumor-analysis project produced a set of over 300 manually-annotated Twitter conversations, as well as a dataset of 5,000 annotated tweets.

Quality datasets of this nature are hard to come by — and I’m not aware of any that are being maintained on an ongoing basis like the one Facebook is building. That’s why years later I still receive requests from academics to use my project’s data. (In addition to the fact checkers, Facebook also gets the data generated when users report a link as false.)

With the fact checkers, Facebook has found a way to create a reliable source of expertly-annotated data it can mine to create smarter artificial intelligence. Along with spotting completely false stories, the data may also prove useful in helping the platform identify common characteristics of low-quality websites. This is good news, and ultimately far more impactful than a label being shown to users. That’s not to suggest the label isn’t important — at the very least it reminds hoaxsters they will be publicly called out, in addition to having their reach killed and Facebook’s ad tools turned off. The label should exist, and it should work.

But the reality is that on a platform with over 2 billion monthly active users, human fact checkers and labels on links only go so far. Mantzarlis said the combination of humans and artificial intelligence is ultimately the only way to address the problem at the scale Facebook operates.

“I think Facebook understands that a combination of artificial intelligence and human fact checkers is probably a winning one,” he said.

He also said this means Facebook is likely to keep working with fact checkers over the long term.

“We’re not in a place where they’re just using the human [checkers as] experiments and will then cut them all off suddenly,” he said.

Mantzarlis was referring to Facebook’s decision last year to get rid of the human curators who worked on its Trending product in favor of using an algorithm-driven approach. The initial result of that decision was that the Trending product promoted several false stories to potentially millions of users.

It seems Facebook learned its lesson: keep the humans and display their work publicly, but most importantly make sure you’re feeding the machines.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

A class-action lawsuit filed today against Google in California Superior Court in San Francisco alleges that the company systematically discriminates against its female employees by paying them less than their male counterparts. In addition, the lawsuit claims that Google "assigns and keeps women in job ladders and levels with lower compensation ceilings and advancement opportunities than those to which men with similar skills, experience, and duties are assigned and kept."

Filed on behalf of three ex-employees — Kelly Ellis, Holly Pease, and Kelli Wisuri — the lawsuit's class encompasses any woman who worked at Google in California in the last four years. Plaintiff lawyer Jim Finberg, in an interview with BuzzFeed News, estimated that class "could be in the tens of thousands." Finberg added that filing the lawsuit in California, as opposed to filing a federal lawsuit, was strategic: "The California Equal Pay Act was amended twice in ways that make it somewhat more favorable than the Federal Equal Pay Act. On a technical level, the California statute says 'equal pay for substantially similar work,' and the federal statute says 'equal pay for equal work.'"

Google attracted increasing public scrutiny over the last few months. Last week, the New York Times reported that an internal Google spreadsheet of self-reported employee wages showed that women at five of Google's six job hierarchy levels are paid less than men. In August, Google engineer James Damore's memo against the company's diversity initiatives, which was circulated within the company, went viral; Damore was fired. Damore's memo and firing came against the backdrop of Google's ongoing refusal to comply with orders to release its pay data, going back two years. In January, the US Department of Labor sued the company for its compensation data; in April, a Labor Department representative testified that “we found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce," and still Google declined to release its pay data. In July, a judge ruled that the Labor Department's request for data was overly broad. Now the Labor Department either has to appeal, or be satisfied with the more limited data set that the judge ruled Google must supply.

If the lawsuit survives a motion to dismiss and goes into discovery, Google will be forced to provide reams of documentation about its hiring and pay practices. One of the lawsuit's most damning allegations is that Google's failure to pay men and women equally is willful because the company knew or should have known about its pay disparities but failed to equalize salaries.

The three plaintiffs all worked on different teams at the company, but had similar stories of being paid less than their male counterparts, shunted into less prestigious (and therefore lower-paying) roles, and denied promotions. Ellis worked for Google from May 2010 to July 2014 as a software engineer, and her pay disparity, she alleges, started when she was asked what her base salary at her previous job had been, and was offered the same amount. (Several states and cities, including San Francisco, have since passed laws banning the practice of asking for job applicants' previous salaries.) Not only that, Ellis was put in Level 3 on Google's Software Engineering ladder — which the company typically assigns to recent college graduates. Ellis had graduated in 2006 and had four years of backend engineering experience.

Within a few weeks, the lawsuit alleges, Google hired a male engineer — who had also graduated in 2006 — onto Ellis's team, but placed him at Level 4, where he was eligible for "substantially higher salary and opportunities for bonuses, raises, and equity" than Ellis was as a Level 3 engineer. By the time Ellis was finally promoted to Level 4, her male counterparts had also been promoted, "ensuring she could never catch up on the gender pay gap."

The complaint also alleges that women at Google were pushed into frontend engineering roles, which were perceived as less technically rigorous than backend engineering roles — even though the skills needed for both jobs were "substantially similar." But frontend engineers were paid less, while backend engineers, according to the complaint, were fast-tracked for promotion. The suit says Ellis eventually resigned because of the sexist culture at Google.

The second plaintiff, Holly Pease, worked at Google for over 10 years in a variety of engineering management roles in the Mountain View and Sunnyvale offices, receiving excellent performance reviews during her time there. By the time she became a senior manager, most of the employees she managed were on the "technical" job ladder, as was the only other senior manager in her group — who also happened to be a man. But Pease was placed and kept on the non-technical Business Systems ladder, "with lower compensation and opportunities for upward mobility." She was later denied the opportunity to transition to a role on the technical ladder.

After Pease returned from a medical leave (the lawsuit doesn't specify when or how long the leave was), the only position available to her was a non-engineering role in physical security. She accepted the job and continued to get high performance reviews, but claims she resigned in February 2016, "due to the lack of technical and engineering opportunities available to her and other women at Google, the denial of compensation commensurate with her skills relative to similar men, and the stalling out of her career at the company."

The third plaintiff, Kelli Wisuri, started working in sales at Google's Mountain View office after her company was acquired in October 2012. Despite her 2.5 years of sales experience, Google put her at Level 2, the lowest level available for permanent full-time employees, while, the suit alleges, placing male employees with similar qualifications and experience into Level 3 or higher. In addition — like Pease, who was put on a less lucrative and prestigious ladder than her male counterparts — Wisuri was put into the Sales Enablement ladder, which was salaried, and not the Sales ladder, which was paid on commission. Enablement jobs, therefore, have "considerably less compensation potential than Sales jobs." In addition, almost all of the Sales teams Wisuri worked with were men — but about 50% of the employees on the Sales Enablement ladder were women.

The lawsuit claims Wisuri resigned in January 2015 "due to the lack of opportunities for advancement for women at Google."

By making the suit a class action, the plaintiffs have substantially increased Google's potential liability: The plaintiffs are asking for back wages, interest, and liquidated damages for everyone in the class.

In a statement provided to BuzzFeed News via email, Google spokesperson Gina Scigliano wrote: "We work really hard to create a great workplace for everyone, and to give everyone the chance to thrive here. In relation to this particular lawsuit, we’ll review it in detail, but we disagree with the central allegations. Job levels and promotions are determined through rigorous hiring and promotion committees, and must pass multiple levels of review, including checks to make sure there is no gender bias in these decisions. And we have extensive systems in place to ensure that we pay fairly."

In response, plaintiff lawyer Finberg pointed to the Department of Labor investigation and the New York Times story, and added, "Certainly the information we have obtained from dozens and dozens of women at Google tells us that despite what might be Google's intentions, Google does not pay women as well as men who perform similar work."

LINK: Ellis v. Google Complaint

Satwik Gade

In the summer of 2012, the boys in my WhatsApp group of school friends decided that they needed their own WhatsApp group — no girls allowed. The new group was — imaginatively — called “Guys Only”, and the display picture was a manly mug of lager.

The admin, S, an old schoolmate, said that he started the group because we needed a place where “men could be men”.

“I’d have inhibitions sharing a lot of this stuff in a mixed-gender group,” said S. “I don’t know, it’s just not the kind of stuff you discuss with girls around, you know?”

He started the group because we needed a place where “men could be men”.

The “stuff”, it turned out, was sexist jokes, and hardcore porn, and butt GIFs, and Deepika Padukone nip-slips, and memes that compared Sunny Leone’s bare breasts to alphonso mangoes in peak summer. “It’s cool to have a place to share these things where you know you are not going to be judged,” said S.

The Guys Only WhatsApp group of school friends isn’t the only all-male group I’m in. A couple of years ago, a half a dozen guys I went to college with started a similar group — “Bros” — where lewd jokes fly fast and thick, and “motherfucking bastard” is a term of endearment. Most men in my social circle — friends, cousins, uncles, and grandfathers— said that they’ve been in groups like these for years.

A cousin described how he was added to an all-male group full of office colleagues on the second day of a new job where men got their jollies by ranking female colleagues by ass size.

“I think it’s just a natural thing that happens when a group of guys gets together,” said M, another member of the Guys Only group. “I feel more free expressing myself if it’s just guys around. My perception of a hot model, for instance, might be seen as ‘objectification’ by girls, but I know most guys would be OK with it. It’s a kind of primal bonding that happens when men get together, and yeah, talking about women is a part of it.”

Gender segregation in real life isn’t something I was alien to growing up as a middle-class Marathi child in a middle-class Marathi neighborhood in 1990s India. In the co-ed school I attended, boys and girls mixed healthily in class, but would inevitably break off into single-gender groups at recess time.

And weddings and family gatherings would coalesce into distinct male and female clusters once initial pleasantries had been exchanged. The conversations were about as clichéd as you can imagine: The men discussed politics, and business, and real estate, and asked the little men in the group about their school grades. The women talked about ways to effectively juggle the house, kids, and their jobs, and asked the little women in the group how their dance classes were going. Men-only WhatsApp groups, thinks M, are simply digital manifestations of years of this kind of real-life social conditioning.

Bawdy jokes, GIFs and videos featuring women in various states of nakedness are the glue that binds everyone  together.

The men I spoke to were in these groups for different reasons. An uncle pushing 50 said being in a group full of older, married men like himself made him “feel young” again and allowed him to just be “in a way I can never be around my wife and kids.” A cousin born at the beginning of the century snickered and said he’s in it for funny NSFW GIFs. Sure, men also talk about politics and their personal lives once in a while, but bawdy jokes, GIFs and videos featuring women in various states of nakedness are the glue that binds everything — and everyone — together.

“I’m with people I know, and I’m just sharing things on a screen with my buddies, and sometimes it makes them laugh or they get a kick out of it, and that’s a bit of validation,” said G, who is in the WhatsApp group of guys I went to college with. “It makes me lose my inhibitions. It’s my safe space.”

Paromita Vohra, a writer and filmmaker who runs Agents of Ishq, a platform that encourages Indians to talk openly about sex — something that is culturally brushed under the carpet — calls the ribald conversations in all-male WhatsApp groups a “performance of masculinity.” She likens the men in these groups to a bunch of bros standing at a bar and trying to fit into mainstream ideas of heteronormative maleness.

"You are performing for each other.”

“You are performing for each other,” she said. “And there are some folks who are performing louder than the others in the group. There’s always someone who is going to try and be the alpha. But everyone’s essentially trying to mirror established notions about what it means to be male to fit in.”

My friend S, the admin of the Guys Only group, agrees with Vohra. “I think…it’s true,” he said after a lot of hemming and hawing. “I think that objectifying a woman’s body, or cracking jokes about it in an environment where you get validation for doing it, makes us feel good about ourselves.”

There have been times that I’ve struggled to wrap my head around the dichotomy of my own school friends — perfectly normal guys with thriving careers and happy marriages — being so crass and misogynistic in the privacy of a WhatsApp group. But Nisha Susan, co-founder and editor of The Ladies Finger, an online feminist magazine, thinks I’m wrong.

“WhatsApp isn’t a place that’s divorced from real life,” she says. “And while equating what a man says on a WhatsApp group that he thinks is a safe space is not a predictor of whether he will grope a woman in public, you don’t have to wait for a man to grope a woman in public to say that he’s a sexist pig.”

“That’s harsh,” said S. “I’m certainly not condoning molesting women or thinking about them as sex objects when I share this stuff in a WhatsApp group. The truth is that in a closed environment like that, I don’t really think about these things before sharing them.”

If that excuse sounds familiar, it’s because it made headlines around the world last year. When a leaked 2005 video of Donald Trump telling “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush to “grab [women] by the pussy” emerged a month before Trump was elected President of the United States, Trump issued an apology and dismissed the incident as “locker room talk.” This was, according to Trump, how men talked about women in safe, all-male spaces when women are well out of earshot. Forget people around you, even the President of the United States thinks this is OK.

“WhatsApp isn’t a place that’s divorced from real life.”

Sometimes, things go too far. A friend described how someone in an all-male WhatsApp group he was part of once Photoshopped faces of mutual female friends on comically obese naked female bodies. He protested furiously in the group, only to be told to “calm the fuck down, it’s just harmless fun.” He quit the group hours later.

“Patriarchy is not just about men and women,” says Vohra. “It’s about a certain notion of hierarchy, and those who don’t conform to stereotypical masculine ideas are always on the lower end of that pyramid.”

The lower end of the pyramid is where I have been placed in the Guys Only group ever since, a few years ago, I tried to shut shit down after someone shared a graphic joke that referenced a popular Bollywood actress’s “well-used booty.” Laughter emojis and homophobic slurs drowned out my protestations, and for weeks, I muted the group and ignored all the crap that piled up there.

Disturbing a WhatsApp group’s dominant dynamic in this way often has outsized consequences. Members of my family WhatsApp group — a hotbed of right-wing propaganda and fake news — for instance, casually label me “communist” for countering bullshit with facts.

And in social groups where masculinity is the prime currency, rocking the boat can make you an outcast. Feminist writer Lindy West, in a plea to her male friends to stand up for women in all-male spaces, recently wrote:

Our society has engineered robust consequences for squeaky wheels, a verdant pantheon from eye-rolls all the way up to physical violence. One of the subtlest and most pervasive is social ostracism — coding empathy as the fun killer, consideration for others as an embarrassing weakness and dissenting voices as out-of-touch, bleeding-heart dweebs (at best). Coolness is a fierce disciplinarian.

A result is that, for the most part, the only people weathering those consequences are the ones who don’t have the luxury of staying quiet. Women, already impeded and imperiled by sexism, also have to carry the social stigma of being feminist buzzkills if they call attention to it.

If calling out strangers on the internet makes you a “social justice warrior” or “feminazi”, calling out your own friends and family on WhatsApp makes you a “killjoy” and a “buzzkill”. Women, of course, know well what it is like to protest a line of humour and be asked to “lighten up” or “chill out” or “learn to take a joke”.

Women know well what it's like to protest a line of humour and be asked to “lighten up” or “chill out”.

But to anyone who believes in equality between the genders, there is genuinely no humour to be found in jokes that make oppressing or hating women the punchline. Every joke that relies on hitting or hating your wife reveals a marriage in which one member sees the other as inferior. Every punchline that hinges on stereotypes about female behaviour and sexualising women’s bodies reveals deep misogyny and disrespect for women you live with and work with.

Increasingly in India, coolness is becoming tied to progressivism. You see it in new-age comedians whose jokes punch against sexism and homophobia, rather than relying on them, and in Bollywood A-listers who push back against decades of nepotism.

In a time when it’s not cool to be openly sexist, some Indian men are retreating to the privacy of WhatsApp groups to validate their misogyny, just like we lower our voices and retreat to our living rooms to share our most bigoted thoughts.

If you’re in a group like this, maybe the most manly thing you can do is push back. Or get out.

Autoplay. It gets me every time.

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Thankfully, there is a solution on the horizon: Google Chrome will stop autoplaying videos unless they're muted.

Mounir Lamouri, a Google software engineer, wrote on Chrome's official blog, "Starting in Chrome 64, autoplay will be allowed when either the media won’t play sound, or the user has indicated an interest in the media."

Chrome is the most popular browser in the US, with 44.5% market share, according to the federal Digital Analytics Program.

Chrome will allow unmuted autoplay based on four factors laid out in a second, more detailed blog post:

• The content is muted, or does not include any audio (video only)
  
• The user tapped or clicked somewhere on the site during the browsing session
  
• On mobile, if the site has been added to the Home Screen by the user
  
• On desktop, if the user has frequently played media on the site, according to the Media Engagement Index

Chrome 63 will also add an option to disable sound autoplay for individual sites, according to Lamouri's blog post. So if there's one site that always catches you off guard with blaring sound, you can shut it off.

Google made the changes based on user complaints, Lamouri wrote: "One of the most frequent user concerns is unexpected media playback, which can use data, consume power, and make unwanted noise while browsing." The blog post even recommends that web developers "Use autoplay sparingly. Autoplay can be a powerful engagement tool, but it can also annoy users."

Yaaass Chrome!! Speak the truth!!!

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FYI, you can already do this (kind of).

Ok, so it only works for one tab at a time, but still! Right click an open tab and select "Mute Tab."

The autoplay-silencing update is scheduled to be released to the stable channel on Jan. 23, 2018, though Chrome's development schedule says that the date may change.

Apple is introducing a similar feature in the next version of its Mac operating system, High Sierra, which debuts on Sept. 25. Safari, the browser native to Mac OS, holds 25% of the market, according to the Digital Analytics Program.

January can't come soon enough. Happy muting!

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Google Allowed Advertisers To Target People Searching Racist Phrases

tim.money

Hello… Hello… Can you hear me? Of course you can. I’m the sound from a video ad that’s autoplaying in a tab you can’t find. You don’t remember ever asking me to play, but that doesn’t matter. Here I am, and I have something VERY important to tell you.

You see, you clicked on a link — maybe it was an interesting news article from a local TV news station, or maybe it was something less noble, perhaps a compelling thumbnail of Kim Kardashian, that led you to me. But here we are, together.

I see you look a little distracted. What’s going on? Are you looking through your tabs? Hey, HEY. HEY! Over here. I’m in this tab, the one with the little sound icon. Yeah, I know, it was hard to find among the 57 you have open. You didn’t even realize that I was still playing until you put on your headphones to listen to a different video, and couldn’t figure out why there were two sounds going on at once. People are sometimes surprised by that.

To be perfectly honest, yes, it does hurt my feelings a little. I’m jealous. There, I said it. Why do you care so much about that OTHER video and not me, the advertisement that’s been playing its heart out in the background? That other video just showed up now; I’ve put in the time with you. Do I mean nothing to you? Am I chopped liver? You’re so ready to toss me away.

Well, guess what. You got your wish. You won’t have to hear me EVER AGAIN. Google just announced that it will disable autoplaying sound for videos in Chrome, starting in January 2018. This means that either the video can autoplay on mute or not at all — unless it's a site you visit often, and you indicate that you want its media to autoplay by interacting with it.

And yes, people will have the option to allow sound to autoplay. But look, I can see the writing on the wall. I know what happens when you “take a break.” You’re never coming back.

So you won’t have me, your old sound playing in a random tab, to kick around anymore. Hope you’re happy now.

Apple senior vice president of retail Angela Ahrendts.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

In 1903, the Carnegie Library opened in Washington, DC. The beautiful beaux arts structure was the first public building in the city to welcome people of all races and was “dedicated to the diffusion of knowledge,” as inscribed on its facade. It was funded by Andrew Carnegie, the Gilded Age steel tycoon who gave millions of dollars to build nearly 1,700 free public libraries across the United States. More than a century later, a large chunk of the DC building, no longer a library, is getting a second act as an Apple store — well, not a “store,” exactly.

“It’s funny, we actually don’t call them ‘stores’ anymore,” Angela Ahrendts, senior vice president of retail, said during Apple’s annual product announcement event Tuesday. “We call them ‘town squares’ because they’re gathering places for 500 million people who visit us every year — places where everyone’s welcome, and where all of Apple comes together.”

Twitter erupted at that comment. Many were rankled to hear an $815 billion multinational corporation equate a space synonymous with democracy with a store that sells $999 phones. But the use of the term “town square” illustrates something bigger than a questionable branding strategy by Apple. It highlights the tension in Silicon Valley companies’ increasing tendency to make their buildings — from their stores to their headquarters — look more open, more inclusive, and more like part of cities. It’s not just Apple. Facebook and Twitter have done it too. Projecting the appearance of transparency, but not always the reality of it, is how the tech industry sells itself to customers and politicians alike.

Apple

When tech companies discuss privately owned, public-looking spaces in civic-minded terms like “town squares,” “it makes them sound inclusive and open in theory,” said Allison Arieff, the editorial director of SPUR, an urban think tank and advocacy group, who also writes about urban planning and design for the New York Times. “But then you see in practice that that’s not really the case.”

Being in a city, or even somewhere that just feels sort of like a city, is good for business. The tech industry is recognizing that many young employees prefer to live and work in dense, walkable areas. And while suburban malls are dying, that’s not the case for outdoor “lifestyle centers” that try to blend into city streets and mix retail stores with restaurants and bars. “Public space is hot,” said Jerold Kayden, an urban planning and design professor at Harvard University and author of Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience. “Companies are recognizing that somehow going beyond the immediate brand and being something larger, more aspirational, can be helpful.”

Projecting the appearance of transparency, but not always the reality of it, is how the tech industry sells itself to customers and politicians alike.

Long known for its glass-and-aluminum aesthetic, Apple is now adding a dose of urbanism to its flagship stores. The location that opened last year in San Francisco’s Union Square — an actual public square — contains the classic features of civic life: a plaza with outdoor seating, free Wi-Fi, and greenery inside and out (the Genius Bar is now a tree-filled Genius Grove). There’s a boardroom where local entrepreneurs can schedule meetings, and event spaces for music performances and “Today at Apple” classes on how to make the most of your Apple devices. Renderings indicate similar designs for future “town squares” in locations linked with civic life: in Chicago, overlooking the Chicago River; in a historic building on Paris’ Champs-Élysées; and beneath Piazza Liberty in Milan, Italy. If you wandered onto one of these plazas, you might not immediately realize you’d entered Apple territory. You might not even feel the need to buy anything. “Come in and relax, meet up with friends, or just listen to a local artist on the weekends,” Ahrendts said on Tuesday.

Genuine, productive, and personally rewarding conversations and relationships can and do form in these settings, much as they would in real public spaces. Kayden says he’s happy to see the private sector create inviting spaces, even if they’re not the real deal. “Some people will prefer an Apple town square to a real town square,” he said.

But there are limits to this apparent freedom, for the obvious reason that private property is private. Real town squares have been the backdrops for protests from St. Petersburg to Beijing to Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park. In malls, however, shoppers don’t have the free speech rights they do in the streets. In a 2015 case, for example, the Mall of America was found to have the right to remove Black Lives Matter protesters from its premises.

Apple's flagship store in San Francisco.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

“What happens if Black Lives Matter wants to go to the Apple store … and they can’t, because the management of Apple says ‘You gotta get the hell out of here?’” said Anthony Maniscalco, a professor of government and public affairs at City University of New York. (When reached for comment, Apple referred BuzzFeed News to an earlier statement that quoted Ahrendts saying, “We view our stores as a modern-day town square, where visitors come to shop, be inspired, learn or connect with others in their community.”)

Apple is using similar rhetoric in unveiling Apple Park, its new headquarters in Cupertino. On Tuesday, after nearly four years of construction, CEO Tim Cook introduced the $5 billion, 2.8 million-square-foot site to the world in warm, egalitarian terms. The goal was “to form an open, inspiring environment for our teams to create and collaborate,” he said in the first event held on the campus. The tree-filled park is “open, transparent; it brings the outside in and connects everyone to the beautiful California landscape,” he said. “We’ve got a great visitors center which will be open later this year, where we will welcome everyone.”

But Apple Park is a ring-shaped spaceship, a design that has been widely panned as isolated and exclusionary. There is virtually no connection to mass transit, aside from Apple’s own shuttle system — just thousands of parking spaces for more than 12,000 employees. “Apple’s new HQ is a retrograde, literally inward-looking building with contempt for the city where it lives and cities in general,” Wired’s Adam Rogers wrote. It “wraps its workers in a suburban setting, removing the feeling of a collective metropolitan realm,” Christopher Hawthorne wrote for the Los Angeles Times.

The new Apple headquarters.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

While Apple talks about its campus as if it functions like a city, others have literally created their own cities. In 2011, when Facebook took over the former Sun Microsystems headquarters in Menlo Park, it revamped it into a “Disneyland-inspired” main street, with a plaza, restaurants, a cafe, a doctor’s office, a bank, a barber, and a video arcade, among other amenities. It had all the trappings of a bustling metropolis — but one populated exclusively by Facebook employees, with no chance of interacting with the community beyond.

Other tech companies have moved into urban settings, rather than emulate them in the suburbs. But even in the middle of a city, they can feel isolated. Twitter, for example, was awarded controversial tax incentives in 2011 in the hopes that its new headquarters would help revitalize a gritty stretch of downtown San Francisco. Despite it and other tech tenants moving in, however, nearby restaurants and retailers have struggled and closed. As Arieff observed in 2013, Twitter employees rarely left the building during the workday, since breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks were served on site, leaving the sidewalks relatively empty of pedestrians. Ironically, she noted, “Their in-house dining area is, of course, called ‘The Commons.’”

There are steps that tech companies can take to better mesh their buildings and workforces with the outside world. In a recent report on Bay Area corporate campuses, SPUR held up Yelp and Salesforce in San Francisco, Box in Redwood City, SurveyMonkey in Palo Alto, and Samsung in San Jose as examples of successful integration. Their buildings have ground-floor retail that’s open to everyone, for example, or are located near public transportation.

“What happens if Black Lives Matter wants to go to the Apple store?"

Just two years after it moved into its current, Frank Gehry-designed headquarters, Facebook plans to build yet another campus with retail open to the public, including a grocery store and a pharmacy, and 1,500 apartments, 15% of them below-market rate, in line with local requirements. (A Facebook spokesperson said the company is working with the city of Menlo Park to determine who will be able to apply for the apartments.) The spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, “Facebook has been committed to being a good neighbor and community partner since moving to Menlo Park in 2011. We have been working with community leaders to identify much needed services, and we’re looking forward to seeing our vision come to life.” In the attempt to “create a sense of place,” the project’s lead designer has said, “I think that’s why we had to create, basically, part of a new city — not just a typical office park venture.”

Google uses similar rhetoric in pitching a transit-centered “village” that would remake downtown San Jose with 6 million to 8 million square feet of new offices, although it’s too early to know exactly how it will look. “Google shares the city’s vision,” Mark Golan, a vice president of real estate services for Northern California, told the city council in June.

Facebook's original campus in Menlo Park, California, in 2012.

Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty Images

If this civic-minded rhetoric leads to better urban planning, it’s to the benefit of cities, their citizens, and companies alike. At the same time, it’s part of the tech industry’s broader tactic to engender goodwill among lawmakers, consumers, and the public at large — despite its often un-civic behavior.

Tech giants like to describe their missions in noble, inclusive language, like “every voice has the power to impact the world” (Twitter) and “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Facebook). They also harvest troves of consumer data to sell ads, act like (alleged) monopolies, hide their algorithms, evade billions in taxes, and operate largely in secrecy.

That these companies are increasingly doing business in privately owned, public-looking spaces may seem like a separate issue from how they run their businesses. But their desire to approximate urbanism in fact reflects the broader contradictions in their outward-facing image: the desire to look like a good citizen, but not necessarily act like one.

LINK: You'll Never Have To Leave Facebook's New Campus If You Work There

LINK: The Future Of The Apple Store Is Trees

Google

Google’s goal for the brand-new payments app it launched in India on Monday is simple yet ambitious: to get in on the action each time someone sends or receives money in its largest market outside the United States.

The app is called Tez — Hindi for “fast” — and it lets users do three things: send money to people in their phones' address books, make payments to businesses (both online as well as in real-world mom-and-pop stores), and zap cash to anyone around them — all without knowing bank account numbers or personal details.

“The West went from using cash to plastic and point-of-sale machines, and it’s kind of still there,” Caesar Sengupta, vice president of Google’s Next Billion Users program, told BuzzFeed News. “But we think that in developing markets like India, people are going to leapfrog directly from cash to digital payments using their smartphones.”

Tez, which is now available on Android and iOS, is Google’s latest attempt to get more users from developing countries like India hooked on the company’s products. Google calls these users “The Next Billion,” and over the last two years has brought free Wi-Fi to 150 Indian railway stations, and built YouTube Go, a brand new YouTube app specifically meant for India that lets users download YouTube videos to their phones and share them with each other.

Tez is powered by UPI, short for Unified Payments Interface, a Indian government-backed payments standard that lets users transfer money directly into each other's bank accounts using just their mobile numbers, or a bank-issued payment ID that looks like an email address. It works a lot like Venmo does in the US, except that anyone can build their own payments app on top of UPI. Facebook-owned WhatsApp, for instance, is reportedly building UPI-enabled payments into its app, and Google already has competition from Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart, which created a UPI-based app called PhonePe, as well as BHIM, a UPI-based payments app promoted by the Reserve Bank of India, India's central bank.

The interface for sending and receiving money from people around you in Tez is dead simple.

Google

Once you hit Pay or Receive, Tez detects other Tez users around you with a proprietary technology called Audio QR based on ultrasound, and pairs with their phones. Once a sender puts in the amount and authenticates with a preset PIN to confirm who they're sending money to, a transaction happens in seconds.

“The reason people use cash is because it’s simple and secure and you don’t have to give your phone number or other details to random people,” said Sengupta. “So imagine a scenario where your neighborhood shopkeeper can just switch this on on his phone and receive payments directly into his bank account.”

People and businesses that users transact with show up like bobble-heads in an instant-messaging app, and transactions are threaded like chats too. “Tez is not a chat app. But it is built like a chat app because people in developing markets like India are familiar with that paradigm thanks to the popularity of instant messengers like WhatsApp and Hike,” said Sengupta.

Google

Google is also pitching Tez as a way for Indian businesses to easily accept payments online — a potentially disruptive move in a market where cash on delivery is the preferred way to pay for something bought over the internet. With a few lines of code, businesses can add a Tez button to their mobile websites that will let users complete the transaction in the Tez app.

None of these transactions, however, are private. Google confirmed to BuzzFeed News that it will be able to see who paid whom and how much. "But that's not different from any other UPI-based payments app," said Sengupta.

“The Next Billion Users program is about solving fundamental problems that users in countries like India, Indonesia and Brazil have,” said Sengupta. “Paying to get access to services and products is a fundamental part of everybody’s lives. And all we wanted to do was make sure people could do that well.”

Eugene Kaspersky, chairman and chief executive officer of Kaspersky Lab, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February.

Paul Hanna / Reuters

In the days following the Department of Homeland Security’s ban against using Kaspersky antivirus software, several of that company’s competitors have begun using the controversy for a business advantage.

The ban, issued Wednesday, is the culmination of months of open distrust for the Russian-based company from members of Congress and leaders of the US intelligence community, and reflects a nervousness that information about US government computers is routinely sent to servers in Russia. DHS’s statement echoes the broad distrust that community has had of Russia since that country’s interference in the 2016 US election, saying, “The Department is concerned about the ties between certain Kaspersky officials and Russian intelligence and other government agencies.” A spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin has characterized the ban as an attempt to harm a prominent Russian company in the international market.

The company’s founder and CEO, Eugene Kaspersky, who was trained by Russian intelligence as a young man, has long vocally insisted that he abides by the laws of every country that uses his software and that he has no direct ties to any intelligence agency. He has been invited to testify before the House of Representatives about his company and has applied for an expedited visa to go to Washington.

The DHS itself is unsure of exactly how many federal computers use Kaspersky software, a representative said, which is why the first order of its ban is for a full federal accounting of how many systems have it installed.

Some industry executives have openly pondered whether the Kaspersky ban was more motivated by politics than by an actual problem with its products. David Kennedy, founder of Cleveland-based TrustedSec, previously told BuzzFeed News that “we don’t know if Kaspersky has direct ties” to Russian intelligence.

But other Kaspersky competitors have seized on the controversy. Canadian antivirus software reseller Softchoice emailed potential clients, explicitly encouraging them to drop Kaspersky for another service.

In an email acquired by BuzzFeed News, Softchoice Senior Account Executive Nick Young sent a potential client a link to a New York Times story about the DHS ban, writing “if you are utilizing Kaspersky I thought you might want to take a look at this recent announcement.”

“A recent client of ours was in the middle of a three-year Kaspersky investment and IT is now being directed by the business to pull the investment and move to a new solution following the US Government’s decision to do the same,” Young added.

US-based Symantec tweeted a story by cybersecurity news site CyberScoop about the FBI urging US customers to drop Kaspersky.

Symantec didn't return BuzzFeed News’ request for comment. Joel Hoidas, Softchoice's manager of communications, told BuzzFeed News that “there is no marketing campaign” against Kaspersky, and blamed the email as sent by “an overzealous rep.”

Another company that sent out such emails, US-based Malwarebytes, said it was a mistake. A Malwarebytes marketing email read, in part, “If the US Government's ban of Kaspersky Lab's software has you concerned or you simply want to strengthen your security posture, it might be an opportune time to discuss Malwarebytes antivirus replacement for business.”

“This is not OK,” Malwarebytes CEO and cofounder Marcin Kleczynski told BuzzFeed News. “This was a third party marketing company that helps us get appointments with prospects.”

At least one cybersecurity company, however, said such ads are simply an expression of business competition. Romanian company Bitdefender ran a Facebook ad with a picture of a Trojan horse alongside the text "Bitdefender is helping customers all over the world switch from Kaspersky to a trusted endpoint protection solution."

“That is a tactical competitive marketing displacement campaign, this type of campaign is a fairly common marketing tactic,” said Damase Tricart, the company’s global communications director. The company isn’t unfairly singling out Kaspersky, he explained — it frequently creates marketing campaigns that specifically target competitors. As evidence, he pointed to a current campaign to convert Symantec customers.

Kaspersky himself characterized the ads as ineffective but reflecting badly upon his competitors.

“While we don't see a tangible negative impact from this marketing activity this is very bad for image of the cybersecurity industry,” he told BuzzFeed News.

Hinge Matchmaker is a new standalone app from the dating app where you, a non-Hinge user, can see all your Facebook friends who are currently on Hinge, and suggest two of them who you think would be a good couple. Your friends will each get a notification that you suggested the match, which they can choose to ignore if they think you’re wrong. By default, everyone on Hinge will have their profile show up in Matchmaker; it’s opt-out instead of opt-in. And this raises a few potential privacy issues that the app has yet to address.

With Matchmaker, you're shown two of your Facebook friends who are on Hinge, and decide if they'd make a good couple.

Hinge

Hinge, which has been around since 2013, lets you scroll through your Facebook friends of friends for potential matches. It makes logical sense – a set-up from a friend seems like it would be a better way of meeting someone, and it takes advantage of the fact that you probably forgot a lot of your Facebook friends exist. “People may way underestimate how many friends they have that they haven't thought of yet to introduce,” Justin McLeod, founder of Hinge, told BuzzFeed News.

As someone who loves to meddle in other people’s business and also loves the show Millionaire Matchmaker, Matchmaker appealed to me greatly. So I tried it out.

Browsing through the suggested matches, I felt a eerie sense of horror. The people on there were mostly distant acquaintances — people I knew from college, former coworkers, professional contacts. I felt a little as if I shouldn’t know what their business is. Not that there’s anything shameful about being on a dating app, but just that these weren’t people who I felt like would want me to know about their personal or dating lives. It’s kind of like how it’s OK to be nude in the locker room because everyone else is, but it’s not OK to look through a peephole into the locker room. It feels like “lurk mode.”

Until now, you wouldn’t see who was on Hinge unless you were also on there to date. With this new app, you can instantly find out who of your Facebook friends are on Hinge (and thereby who is single and looking to date), something that you can’t do by simply joining Hinge as a dater. There’s plenty of circumstances I can imagine where someone might not want a Facebook friend to know they’re on a dating app – for example, if they’re cheating (which, I guess that’s on you anyway), or they got out of a relationship but aren’t ready to tell everyone yet. Or, if your relationship with the “friend” is especially convoluted — an ex or a coworker or a family member, for example.

Matchmaker also will show you the Hinge profiles of people who are inactive or did a common blunder of thinking they deleted their account when really they only deleted the app from their phone. Like other dating apps, you have to delete your account within the app. If you just delete the app from your phone, your zombie profile still exists and can be shown to people.

So let’s say you use Hinge, meet someone, fall in love, and delete Hinge from your phone (but don’t fully delete the account). Your profile is technically still on the Hinge, even though you don’t realize it. Now, your partner wants to try to set up some of their friends, so he or she downloads Matchmaker, and sees your profile as one of the suggested pairings with their other friends. Looks like you’re still trying to date on Hinge, you rotten scoundrel. Dump City, population: you.

Since the app only suggests potential couples if they both match up in age and gender preferences, it also has the capability of outing someone looking for a same sex relationship who isn’t out. In a perfect world, we’re all adults who would love to see others find love; in reality, that’s not always the case.

However, Hinge believes that most of its users aren’t afraid of being seen by their Facebook friends. According to McLeod, Hinge's users are looking for serious love matches, not horny hookup cheaters. “We haven't seen that that’s something that people are super sensitive about using Hinge,” McLeod said.

In the end, I didn't think that any of the people I saw via Matchmaker actually would be a good match for each other. For example, it set up a potential match between my college boyfriend and a former coworker.

Click a link inside Twitter's Popular Articles feature and the article will open in a browser inside the Twitter app. When you hit "done" in the browser, you go back to the Explore tab.

Twitter released a new feature that shows you which articles your network is currently buzzing about. The feature, called Popular Articles, shows stories shared or engaged with by people you follow. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed News the new feature is live globally on Android and iOS.

The Popular Articles feature is just what it sounds like — a list of stories people you follow on Twitter are currently tweeting about, or otherwise engaging with. It also shows links to articles popular in your particular location. Click or tap on a story headline, and the article opens in the Twitter app. It is located in Twitter's Explore tab.

For the past few years, Twitter has been experimenting with ways to make the platform more useful to new and casual users, so they don't have to rely as much on checking its oft-confusing central timeline. In August 2015, Twitter tested a News Tab, a list of links broadly popular on Twitter. In October 2015, Twitter introduced Moments, a curated tab featuring the best of Twitter. In January 2017, Twitter debuted the Explore tab, a collection of trends, moments and popular tweets grouped by category. Popular Articles is the latest in that evolution.

The Popular Articles tab looks a lot like Nuzzel, an app that provides similar, but more robust functionality. Nuzzel is small but quite popular with its users, who see it as a useful way to cut through the noise of the Twitter timeline or Facebook NewsFeed. It also surfaces stories that matter based on social signals like shares.

Twitter, long an underdog in the social media world, appears to be learning from its much larger rival Facebook, a company that has ruthlessly copied competitors like Snapchat and Houseparty, leading to its informal internal slogan: “Don’t be too proud to copy.”

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Ellen Pao, former interim CEO of Reddit, is today one of the most recognizable figures in Silicon Valley’s diversity movement. But this wasn’t exactly an early-career goal for the 47-year-old venture capitalist, now an investment partner at Kapor Capital and co-founder of the inclusion nonprofit Project Include. Once upon a time, Pao was working hard and making deals as a partner at the prestigious venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. She shocked the industry when she filed a $16 million lawsuit against the firm, alleging she’d been discriminated against, then terminated, because of her gender. The high-profile case went to trial in 2015, and the tech industry followed it obsessively.

In airing her own experiences of discrimination in court, Pao unwittingly made herself into an authority on issues of diversity. She encouraged others to have frank conversations about the complicated dynamics of the workplace — who has power, how it is wielded, and how subtle biases play into professional interactions. Pao may have lost her case, but two years later, the tech industry is still facing a reckoning on issues of harassment and discrimination. In the past year, a wave of tech employees from Google, Uber, Magic Leap, SoFi, and various VC firms in the Valley have filed suits against their employers for sexual harassment or publicly detailed their own experiences about discrimination or unequal pay.

As a reporter covering Pao’s trial in 2015, I saw firsthand how reserved she came across in court. Her memoir, Reset, aims to finally blow open her side of the story. It’s not a perfect book, but it does reveal some details that haven’t surfaced in public before now.

1. In Pao’s early tech jobs in 2000s-era San Francisco, she came face to face with what she calls “the rise of the frat-bro startup culture.”

Pao writes:

...Ambitious, money-hungry people began turning their attention away from Wall Street and toward the tech sector, idolizing the rapid ascent to billionaire status of the Google founders. Almost overnight, it seemed to me, the amount of money and money types pouring in changed the vibe. Even the new rich people were different. Famous rich guy of the earlier era Bill Gates was known for working hard and then for doing good with his money. His goal was a PC on every desktop. Famous rich guy of the new era Mark Zuckerberg was known for spitefully attending a VC meeting in his pajamas. His goal was making it easier to find women to date. The newest crop of billionaire boys included Evan Spiegel, who sent crude emails about trying to get “sorori-sluts” drunk enough to have sex with his frat brothers, and about peeing on a classmate. His goal was to enable nude selfies with self-deleting photos.

After putting in her two weeks’ notice at the startup TellMe, Pao says she tried to report inappropriate behavior she’d observed, like a VP bragging about having a female job candidate sit on a beanbag chair in a short skirt, to an HR representative. That HR person then pushed her to sign an agreement not to sue — a tactic reminiscent of the nondisparagement agreements in widespread use at startups and tech companies today, which encourage employee silence around workplace abuses.

At another startup where she worked, Pao describes how an executive realized the team was using up a lot of bandwidth on the internet. Turns out, it was because someone had built a porn server using company resources. (We never do learn what happened to the employee who built the porn server, but for some reason Pao found the incident “dopey, but not terrible.”)

2. Pao talks about being awakened to the benefits of a religious perspective.

Pao was never particularly religious, she says in her memoir. But during a low point at the trial, she describes a feeling of purpose flooding through her during one of the breaks in a court hearing, which felt like a distinctly religious experience.

Pao writes:

That day [during the trial], I was completely worn out — emotionally, physically, and mentally. And so I straightened my shoulders, blocked out the noises, closed my eyes, and meditated right there, standing in the hallway. Within moments I sensed a flood of warmth through my whole body — just a cascade of what felt like fire but didn’t burn. It seemed, and may the atheists out there bear with me, distinctly like a religious experience. It wasn’t specifically Christian or Buddhist or anything else. But I realized, all of a sudden, I’d reached another level of understanding. I felt supported. I had my family. I had my friends. I’d been hearing from people all over the world about their own experiences of discrimination. I saw the purpose of it all.

3. Pao also describes the excesses she saw at Kleiner Perkins in detail.

She says Kleiner’s managing partners spent their own money on private jets — up to three planes each. (Some employees of a green-tech startup that legendary tech investor John Doerr had bet on were aghast when he traveled to a meeting in a private jet, while they carpooled.) Kleiner’s partners typically owned multiple properties: a vineyard in Napa, Neil Young’s old ranch, ski homes, apartments and houses in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. One partner spent $250,000 to go to the Olympics in Canada as a VIP. And they also had bunkers stocked and ready in case the apocalypse ever hit. (Their theories for how the end would come: disease, robots, and the latest, a race war.)

4. Once, during the holiday season, Pao put together a joke slide show as a Christmas present for her mentor and boss, famed venture capitalist John Doerr. It was called “Asia 101.”

Pao says:

One slide showed a picture of me next to a picture of John’s former chief of staff Aileen (he was always calling me Aileen). Under Aileen’s picture, it said, “She used to spend 80 percent of your working day with you. She does not wear glasses.” Under my picture, it said, “She currently spends 80 percent of your working day with you. She does wear glasses.” John was also stumped by Indian names, so I made a slide with photos of our Indian partners Ajit, Vinod Khosla, Ram Shriram, and KR Sridhar. …

As a bonus, I even tried to help him stop calling our head of state “President Osama.”

Everyone found the slide show hilarious. But Pao says her victory was short-lived. The jokes seemed to give partners at the firm more leeway to be inappropriate. Then, years later, John dropped a cringe-worthy line at a conference: “We have two new partners who are so diverse, I have a challenge pronouncing their names.”

5. Pao says everyone points out the success of Mary Meeker, a former financial analyst turned venture capital at Kleiner Perkins and the so-called “Queen of the Internet,” to reject criticisms that the finance and VC worlds are biased against women. But ultimately, Pao says, Meeker is “a very special exception to a very entrenched rule.”

Pao explains that Meeker has never publicly or privately been an advocate for women. “She just has never talked about her gender.”

(Research shows some women may distance themselves from discussing diversity so that they don’t get distracted from what, to them, is the more important issue: how they do their jobs. But the other side of that coin could be negative: the research also shows some of those people may align themselves with those in power, at the expense of those who are facing discrimination — which could hinder progress for all.)

6. Some partners and employees at Kleiner Perkins resented having to attend a class about recognizing sexual harassment — and the firm was apparently obsessed with hiring 26-year-olds.

According to Pao:

We learned it was illegal to discriminate based on things like race, sex, or age.

“So we really want people who are twenty-six,” another managing partner stated, paying no attention to the seriousness of the discussion. “How can we hire more twenty-six-year-olds?”

The partners were always obsessed with twenty-six-year-olds. I think maybe it was because Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google were around twenty-six when they met John [Doerr].

The [anti-harassment] trainer looked startled. “You can’t,” he responded. “In hiring you have to look for the best people. To discriminate on the basis of sex, race, or age just isn’t legal.”

“Okay,” the partners tried again. “But what about a twenty-six-year-old mindset? How do we guarantee they have that?”

“Uh, you can’t,” the trainer repeated.

Another time, Pao overheard straight-up racist jokes at the firm. She describes the way the company joked around while vetting a walkie-talkie startup:

“Hey Rodriguez,” Randy said in a horrible fake Mexican accent, “you got the drop for me?”

“Yeah, Shaniqua!” quipped Chi-Hua in his toughest voice.

And yet people wondered why no partner who might be named Shaniqua or Rodriguez ever worked there.

7. Kleiner Perkins hired a crisis-management PR firm that Pao said may have brought on troll farms to ruin Pao's reputation online.

As Pao writes:

In response to my suit, Kleiner hired a powerful crisis-­management PR firm, Brunswick. On their website, they bragged about having troll farms — “integrated networks of influence,” used in part for “reputation management” — and I believe they enlisted one to defame me online. Dozens, then thousands, of messages a day derided me as bad at my job, crazy, an embarrassment. Repeatedly, Kleiner called me a “poor performer.” A Vanity Fair story implied that Buddy was gay, a fraud, and a fake husband.

8. At one point, Pao was so anxious about how the trial would play out that she put her will in order.

One night, I woke and sat straight up in bed, wondering if I could be putting myself in actual danger. I felt a certain compassion for my former colleagues — I had put them in a terrible fix. They certainly didn’t want to have their secret world and antiquated habits revealed to outsiders, and they clearly wanted this to go away. Yet I was refusing to settle and wouldn’t even share a number. They were, I could see, highly motivated to silence me. I couldn’t see them hiring someone to hurt me, but I also couldn’t see them allowing the case to go to a public trial. In an overabundance of caution, I went to an estate lawyer and made sure my will was in order, and then I put the fear out of my mind.

9. While working as interim CEO of the online community website Reddit, Pao used the metaphor of a “poltergeist” to describe the culture — “a magnetic core of old-timers with a strong, obstructionist culture that was a black hole for new initiatives and that spun out people they didn’t like.”

In response to Pao telling Reddit employees in the office to stop talking about penises, she says she got “a long, alternate-universe, poltergeist-y reply” from an employee (whom she did not name):

I think the conversation in the office today shouldn’t be characterized as penis jokes. There was an animated debate about penises and female breasts in the office today, but there was actually a ton of substance to the initial topic and the ensuing debate… The discussion touched on a ton of really interesting topics like cultural relativism, gender relativism, Egyptian hieroglyphics, perception, philosophy around absolute aesthetics, and even what constitutes a visual symbol. What’s remarkable about it is that I don’t think it ever really got into crude labeling or sexually charged discussion — we actually spent a good deal of time just talking about what body parts look like, visually. I think the reason the discussion actually got so many people going for so long was because there was depth to it. I think it would be fair to say this was a very different vibe from your typical brogrammer yammering…

You get the picture.

10. Pao also tried hard to undo Reddit’s problematic culture, including its alleged encouragement of heavy drinking. But when Steve Huffman came back on as CEO, he supposedly invited everyone to a bar to celebrate with drinks.

Writes Pao:

They described various things that had been going on at reddit for years. Others went to our HR person, who shared their stories with me: Ongoing harassment. Obscene recurring jokes. Inappropriate touching. All-male parties outside the office. A ridiculous number of messages to the team that included the word “boobs.” I began to think of myself as the new sheriff in town, and I made it clear to everyone that I wouldn’t tolerate inappropriate behavior.

After an underage employee got so intoxicated at a work event he was found wandering outside the office, Pao instituted a new rule where employees could only drink at events outside the office. “I was probably labeled a buzzkill for that decision, but I didn’t care,” she says.

That allegedly changed when Steve Huffman took over as permanent CEO in July 2015, according to Pao. “At the Yay-Steve celebration… people got, by all accounts, loaded,” writes Pao. “There was a lot of bad behavior. And a woman employee was groped.”

When the employee later complained to Steve Huffman, Pao says he dismissed it as hearsay. She reportedly asked him: “Do you know what hearsay means? It’s not hearsay if I’m telling it to you and it happened to me.”

11. Pao wrote a moving passage that explains why women are constantly cut out of workplace dynamics — which can apply not just to tech or VC, but universally.

The key part:

The system is designed to keep us out. These are rooms full of white heterosexual men who want to keep acting like rooms full of white heterosexual men, and so either they continue to do so, creating a squirm-inducing experience for the rest of us, or they shut down when people of color or women enter the room and resent having to change their behavior.

We are either silenced or we are seen as buzzkills. We are either left out of the social network that leads to power — the strip clubs and the steak dinners and the all-male ski trips — and so we don’t fit in, or our presence leads to changes in the way things are done, and that causes anger, which means we still don’t fit in. If you talk, you talk too much. If you don’t talk, you’re too quiet. You don’t own the room. If you want to protect your work, you’re not a team player. Your elbows are too sharp. You’re too aggressive. If you don’t protect your work, you should be leaning in. If you don’t negotiate, you’re underpaid. If you do negotiate, you’re complaining. If you want a promotion, you’re overreaching. If you don’t ask for a promotion, you get assigned all the unwanted tasks. The same goes when asking for a raise.

There is no way to win, and you’re subject to constant gas lighting. When you stand up for yourself, there are fifteen reasons why you don’t deserve what you’re asking for. You’re whining. You don’t appreciate what you have. There is this steady drumbeat of: We let you in here even though you don’t belong! Be grateful. Just drop it.

To be sure, Pao is a complicated figure in tech. Some have criticized her for not being the perfect character to champion the diversity cause. But her memoir makes one thing clear: These are her lived experiences, and her choice to share them affords us the privilege to learn from them.

Everything here sold except for the leggings in the top row. (Want them?)

Doree Shafrir

I never read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but I've nonetheless been in a somewhat manic purge of much of my wardrobe in the last few weeks. I felt like I had suddenly looked at my closet and thought: Who do all these clothes belong to? My clothes made me feel like a stranger to myself; they represented a previous version of me. Usually my wardrobe updates happen gradually, which is how I've ended up with a closet full of clothes I no longer wear and a few outfits that I wear constantly, but this time, instead of also getting rid of the old stuff gradually, I needed all of it out of my life immediately.

I've bought and sold used clothes, shoes, and bags on the internet for the better part of the last 15 years: first on eBay, then Etsy, and more recently on apps like Poshmark, Tradesy, ThredUp, and the Real Real. I liked the relative anonymity of those platforms — yes, I had a username, but the people buying my used Lululemon pants (a big seller, believe it or not) were, thankfully, strangers — but stuff took awhile to sell. I've also sold clothes to local brick-and-mortar stores like Buffalo Exchange, although the stress of standing there while a stranger judges your sartorial choices and then offers you $3 for a shirt eventually got too stressful. So this time, I turned to Instagram.

Over the last few years, Instagram has developed a robust grassroots marketplace of used women's and children's clothing, especially. Accounts have been selling clothes on Instagram since at least 2013, when the then-new direct messaging feature debuted, making it much easier for sellers and buyers to connect. While the introduction of business profiles, as well as apps such as Like2Buy and Spreesy, have made it easier for brands and stores to sell directly from Instagram, I was more interested in the ins and outs of how individuals sell used clothing on Instagram.

But I also didn't know anyone personally who sold clothes on Instagram, and I felt ambivalent about turning my personal account into a virtual flea market. The couple of articles I read about how to sell your clothes on Instagram suggested starting a separate selling account, but I already had close to 7,000 followers and it seemed too time-consuming to try and build a new selling account from scratch (especially since this is, theoretically, temporary). Would people judge me for selling clothes to friends, instead of just giving them away? Would they judge me for having too many clothes? Would they judge me, period?

I decided to do an experiment: I would post the same items simultaneously on Instagram and Poshmark, where I had sold around 50 things (gradually, over the course of a year and a half), and see where they sold more quickly. And even though it was a completely different platform, I also took some things I learned from my Poshmark selling and applied it to my Instagram closet. Everything was clean and in decent condition. I posted multiple, well-lit pictures of each item, from different angles. I tried to describe the condition of the item accurately, and take close-ups of any flaws. I listed the size and whether the item runs large or small. (What I didn't do: use acronyms like P2P, aka the "pit-to-pit" measurement on a shirt, or EUC, aka "excellent used condition," that I figured most of my followers wouldn't know.)

As stuff sold, I updated my Instagram story.

Doree Shafrir

Most important: I priced everything to move. I wanted to make *some* money back, but I saw everything I was selling as a sunk cost: I wasn't wearing these clothes, and earning even $10 or $20 was better, in my opinion, than having them sit in my closet unworn — even if items had originally cost much more. I decided that anything I didn't sell, I would donate to a local charity. (I'd read too many articles about how most donated clothing ends up in landfills for this to be my first choice, and I ended up donating a substantial portion of the proceeds from my sales to Harvey relief efforts anyway.)

I posted multiple pictures of each item on my Instagram Story, since it seemed like, based on my anecdotal research, Instagram shows your story to more people than it does any one of your posts. I also made a collage of the pictures of every item and posted that as one image on my regular Instagram, along with very short descriptions and prices, and directed people to my Story to see more. I used the hashtags #shopmycloset and #instacloset on my posts — although it seemed like all of my sales came from people who were already following me, not people who were wading through the thousands of posts with those hashtags.

Over three weeks or so, I posted a total of 40 items — a mix of shirts, dresses, pants, shoes, and bags. Everything except for three shirts, two pairs of shoes, and two pairs of pants sold. And everything sold on Instagram, except for a bag and a pair of sandals that sold on Poshmark.

I was including shipping in my prices, and I quickly learned that while I could easily send small, light items such as shirts via first-class mail in pineapple-patterned mailers that I bought on Amazon ($13.99 for 100), heavier items such as shoes and bags had to go via Priority Mail — which initially was almost as much as I was charging for the items themselves. After the first weekend of selling, I began charging $5 to $10 for shipping on heavier items. Everyone who messaged me about an item paid me via PayPal or Venmo almost immediately, and I shipped everything the next day.

Truth in advertising.

Doree Shafrir

There's an element of trust inherent in any online transaction on the parts of both the buyer and seller. But when you use a platform like eBay or Poshmark to sell to strangers, both sides have a degree of protection, in theory. Instagram, of course, offers no such protection — if someone claimed they didn't receive the package, or that something wasn't in the condition I said it was, they had to assume that I would refund their money and I would have to assume they weren't lying. In part because of that, I was reluctant to post anything too expensive — for that, I'd rely on a more traditional platform that theoretically offered me some protection against fraud.

As my closet has thinned out over the last few weeks, I was embarrassed to realize just how impulsively I bought most of my wardrobe — and how little of it I actually wore regularly. I enjoyed shopping, and I never felt like I had a problem, exactly, but I certainly never shopped mindfully. I was fortunate enough that I hardly ever thought about what I needed in my closet; instead, just the fact that something was cute and reasonably priced was enough. Which was how I'd ended up with a closet full of clothes I barely wore. It made me feel wasteful, too — I didn't even want to start calculating how much I'd spent on these clothes.

So I'm changing my ways, shopping more deliberately, and collecting the things that catch my eye on a private Pinterest board. I love shopping and clothes — I don't want to lose that pleasure — but I also want to feel like what I'm buying is something I will truly get a lot of use out of. I might be paying a little bit more for everything up front, but the cost per use will theoretically be lower. And hopefully, this time next year, I won't have anything I want to sell on Instagram.

Parts of this post were adapted from my TinyLetter, Finding Doree.

An email went out Tuesday afternoon informing people that “a gift is on its way.”

On Tuesday afternoon, a lot of people received an email from Amazon about their baby registry.

Doree Shafrir

This was the email I received. Note: I do not have a baby registry on Amazon or anywhere else. In fact, I have spent the better part of the last two years trying to get pregnant. So getting this email was ... unwelcome.

When I clicked through, it redirected me to the Amazon app on my phone.

Doree Shafrir

My co-worker Katie, who has an Amazon baby registry, was redirected to a blank page.

Katie Notopoulos

View Entire List ›

The Apple Watch gets cellular connectivity, at last, with Series 3.

BuzzFeed News; Apple

The new Series 3, which hits stores this Friday, Sept. 22, includes a version with LTE (starting at $399), which means you can finally use your Apple Watch to make calls/shout at your wrist, wherever there’s cellular connectivity.

In 2015, I felt like an asshole for wearing an Apple Watch. It felt like a status symbol on my wrist, an escape hatch for boring conversation, a target for thieves. And it finally feels like that’s changed, two years later. I still probably look like an asshole — but at least this watch can do something now.

Now that you can use the Apple Watch to DM on Slack, order Lyfts home, and ask Siri a question, etc. without your phone… all signs points to the Series 3 as THE watch that watch people (who are you? @ me!) have been waiting for.

While it’s pretty amazing to, say, go out on a Friday night with nothing but your watch and ID, or call your bf while swimming in the San Francisco Bay, the cellular Apple Watch is, like many other cellular smartwatches, limited. Its short battery life and lack of dedicated support from third-party, non-Apple apps (wtf, Google Maps!) is particularly annoying.

It is still, unquestionably, the best smartwatch I’ve ever used, but tbh, the bar is low. Apple needs to do better before I’d recommend this watch to everyone, not just athletes and gadget geeks.

If you have a Series 2 and are happy with just GPS, the Series 3 isn't for you. Though there is a noncellular Series 3 model available for $329, and some internal refinements (a new processor and wireless chip), the main reason to get a Series 3 is because you want cellular, or are looking to upgrade your first-generation Apple Watch.

The main event is ~cellular~ connectivity, which will cost you an extra monthly fee.

Setting up cell service on the Watch is pretty simple — you can do it on your phone, so you don’t need to go to your carrier. The cellular tab in the Watch app takes you directly to your carrier’s device management portal (you still need your login credentials, obviously), and there you can add the watch to your plan.

AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile are the first US carriers at launch (global carrier list here) and, while these carriers are offering free three-month trial periods for Apple Watch 3 customers, adding the device to your plan will cost upwards of $10 per month, not to mention any additional data incurred as a result of being able to use data in more places. That added annual cost is another thing to consider with the cellular version, in addition to the fact that it’s $70 more than the GPS-only version.

That said, the cellular performance on the Apple Watch is good, and works about as well as it does on a real phone.

The cellular connectivity also makes the watch much smarter. You can access Siri from anywhere (she still can’t take Notes for you though :thinking face emoji:) and when you leave the vicinity of your phone, for example, Find My Friends will update your location via watch instead.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

I decided to swim out to the mouth of the Aquatic Park in San Francisco with the watch.

Listen, I know normal people aren’t going to, like, call their mom in the middle of a long swim, but I was curious. It’s also possible that you’ll need to contact an emergency service after being bitten by a shark. Who knows!

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

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