Sen. Al Franken buries his head in his hands after an exchange with Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch.
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
In a Capitol Hill hearing Tuesday afternoon, lawyers from Facebook, Google and Twitter testified under oath about Russian manipulation of their platforms during the 2016 election. The lawyers confessed their companies’ shortcomings, promised fixes, and told senators they were taking the issue extremely, extremely seriously.
But while delivering these statements, they did something else even more critical: they made clear how susceptible their companies are to future attacks on US democracy.
Throughout the hearing, the companies struggled to persuade senators that they could effectively monitor platforms of their size. Facebook was hammered by Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, a freshman Republican, in a series of questions about whether it can effectively monitor the 5 million advertisers spending money on the platform each month.
“I’m trying to get us down from ‘lala land,’” Kennedy said. “The truth of the matter is you have 5 million advertisers, they change every month, every minute, probably every second — you don’t have the ability to know who every one of those advertisers is, do you?”
In describing their policies, the platforms didn’t bear much better with senators’ questions.
Foreign agents using their real names on Facebook can try to cause chaos as long as they’re acting within Facebook’s rules, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch’s testimony revealed. “It wasn’t so much the content — although to be clear much of that content is offensive and has no place on Facebook — but the real problem with what we saw was its lack of authenticity,” Stretch said. If Kremlin agents used real accounts and abide by the platform’s rules, that implied, they could go ahead and post away.
In its testimony, Twitter made clear it doesn’t have a good response to block shell companies looking to manipulate elections from advertising on its platform. When Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse asked the company how it would prevent a lawful corporation called “Americans for Puppies and Prosperity” from trying to swing elections on behalf of a special interest or a foreign power, Twitter acting General Counsel Sean Edgett didn’t have an answer.
“I think that’s a problem,” Edgett said, explaining Twitter is continuing to look into “how do you get to know your client.”
And when Google was asked about whether it viewed itself as a media or technology company, — a question getting at whether it feels a sense of responsibility for the news on its platform — it went straight for the “don’t blame us” answer. "We are not a newspaper," Google Director of Law Enforcement and Information Security Richard Salgado said.
The platforms’ inability to monitor themselves was poked at by senators throughout the day. Minnesota Sen. Al Franken ranted against Facebook, noting how slow it was to release its findings about a $100,000 ad buy on its platform by a Kremlin-linked agency seeking to disrupt US politics. “How did Facebook, which prides itself on being able to process billions of data points and instantly transform them into personal connections for its users, somehow not make the connection that election ads, paid for in rubles, were coming from Russia?” he said. “Those are two data points: American political ads and Russian money, rubles. How could you not connect those two dots?”
At the outset of the hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham asked, “The challenge of this hearing, and of this focus, is how do we keep the good and deal with the bad?” When the hearing ended, the answer seemed as unattainable as ever.
When I tested this, it did find photos of me wearing a bra (don’t @ me, they were mostly all photos of my stomach when I was pregnant). It also found some photos of people wearing tank tops and a dress with spaghetti straps — I guess that makes sense; a robot scanning for markers would visually identify those kinds of things as a “brassiere.” There were a few other misfires: my friend in her strapless wedding dress, and a group of women in matching crop tops and shorts from a competitive wing-eating event. It also found a photo I took of my elbow when it got a weird infection:
Kinda looks like a boob?
If you start typing into your iPhone's photo search, you’ll see it suggests all sorts of categories that it is using to organize your photos. It categorized by date and location, but also weird terms like "fisticuffs" and "pooches." Not just dogs, pooches.
So it appears that Apple is teaching its AI to recognize and sort photos in a number of ways. If they’re teaching their image recognition to scan as many types of photos as possible, it makes sense to teach them to recognize items of clothing. And I did find the AI suggests these types of clothing categories:
Jeans
Denim
Denims
Blue jeans
Dinner jacket
Jacket
Lab coat
Swimsuit
Shoe
Tennis shoe
Shawls
Fedora
But they didn’t have any other “racy” types of clothing or underwear. It couldn’t find the terms like underwear, bikini, panties, nudes, nude, naked, shorts, bathing suit, penis, breasts, vagina. For some reason, "brassiere" is an outlier.
According to Bart Selman, a professor of computer science at Cornell University who specializes in artificial intelligence, this IS in fact… pretty weird of Apple. “It does seem odd that Apple has a category for it because they don’t seem to have many categories at all, Selman said. “I imagine this choice may be due to an overeager Apple coder. Although Apple uses machine learning techniques to identify objects in images, I believe the final choice of categories most likely still involved human approval.”
It's worth mentioning that Apple isn't "saving" or stealing your nudes.
This is just a way of sorting the photos that exist only on your iPhone or in your iCloud. BUT, if you're really worried about the security of your racy pics, just remember to take some precautions with your account, like locking your phone and doing two-factor authentication for your iCloud. Sext safe, my friends.
At a time when Twitter is trying to curb trolling and incendiary use of its platform, its logged-out homepage features one of its users attacking model Chrissy Teigen.
Square just introduced a full-on cash register (without cash) that’s a more robust version of the little white reader you’ve probably seen at coffee shops and farmer’s markets. The register has a touch screen for the cashier, and a second screen for the customer to see their bill being rung up. That means in the near future, the barista at the coffee shop won’t have to turn the iPad for you to sign after taking your order.
Square launched its new product at a pop-up shop for merchandise from the record label TDE (Top Dawg Entertainment), which releases music from Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q, SZA, and more. Jack Dorsey, dual CEO of both Square and Twitter, sat down with BuzzFeed News at the event.
Compared to Dorsey’s other company, Twitter, which is dealing with drama about Russian troll farms on its platform and its Gordian knot of harassment policies, Square is doing great. Its stock price is strong, and its payment processor has gone from novelty to ubiquitous. Square Cash, the company’s money-transferring service, has also recently eclipsed its competitor Venmo in app downloads.
Some have said money-sending apps like Square Cash and Venmo have made friendships weird. In situations where friends might have just said, “I got next time” as a way of keeping tabs, now you can ask them for their share of the delivery pizza and wine you shared as you dished about exes while they’re on their cab ride home.
But according to Dorsey, this isn’t anything new with the Square Cash app. “People have always been rude about money,” he told BuzzFeed News.
In addition to its payment processors – first the little dongle, and now the sleek register – Square gives out small business loans. The target client is a small business owner who wouldn’t have qualified for a traditional bank loan, say, a hairdresser who wants to put down a deposit to open their own shop. Square Capital (the loan arm) recently applied to become a industrial loan company in Utah, which is a specific type of bank charter that allows it to take deposits and act more like a traditional bank. However, Dorsey says Square isn’t trying to become a bank. “We’re not competing with banks,” he said. “We’re competing with people going to their friends and family to go beg for money.”
While the launch for Square’s new register happened at a pop-up shop that sells sweatshirts and tees for musicians, the product is not necessarily for the average touring musician who needs a simple way to run her merch table (bands love Square for merch! It’s true!). The register is for larger retailers – places with plenty of employees to train on the system, multiple locations, and a need for more speed.
Jesse Dorogusker, head of hardware, told BuzzFeed News that Square’s chip reader is much faster than the average chip reader. A helpful publicist at the pop-up offered to swipe his card for a demo purchase. It was declined (oops), but it did get declined fast! His second card seemed to go through fast, but it was hard to tell exactly how fast without a stopwatch handy to compare it to Duane Reade.
Since the register has its own point of sale software, and the demo video was set up for a bar purchase, I wondered if Dorsey was familiar with the software that’s promoted for point of sale on the reaity TV show Bar Rescue (it’s not Square). If there’s one thing I love on this planet, it’s the hoarsely bombastic tones of Jon Taffer telling some end-of-her-rope bar owner how he upgraded her cash register software during the makeover of her failing family-owned bar (the show is always sponsored by the software in the credits).
Dorsey, sadly, has never seen Bar Rescue. But he is confident they can compete against other touch screen register systems. “Yeah, most of them are pretty crappy, so it should be pretty easy.”
But employees allege that, despite the healthy lifestyle associated with the tonic shots and cold pressed juices that Kreation sells, how management has treated them has been less than wholesome.
Employees have filed multiple lawsuits against Kreation, and across these suits, failure to pay overtime is the most common complaint. But Kreation employees also allege they weren’t paid for missed breaks, didn’t get paid sick time, and, in one case, were harassed and threatened at knifepoint on the job for being gay.
In an email statement to BuzzFeed News, Kreation founder Marjan Sarshar wrote, “Kreation, as a team, values our employees as our family. We value all people from all walks of life, and we give all employees the opportunity to grow within the company. Kreation is aware of the Kaputsos lawsuit—a lawsuit titled a class action, but filed by one former employee claiming to act on behalf of others he does not represent. Those issues will be tried and decided in court later, where Kreation will continue to defend against the claims. In the meantime, as always, Kreation will continue to ensure its employees are treated justly and fairly.”
Asked to elaborate on specific allegations made by current and former employees, especially pertaining to missed overtime pay, Sarshar declined to comment further.
In December 2016, a Kreation employee named Marshall Kaputsos, who worked as a host and server in-store at various Kreation locations, filed a class action lawsuit against the company, as well as Sarshar, and her business partner, Farzin Madjidi. In the suit, which is currently pending in LA County Superior Court, Kaputsos says he’s seeking back wages for unpaid overtime (he alleges he sometimes worked more than 14 hours a day), uncompensated breaks, and unpaid sick time.
According to Kaputsos’ lawsuit, Sarshar used Kreation’s multiple business locations to conceal the fact that Kaputsos was working overtime and to avoid having to pay higher wages in accordance with California law. From the suit:
For example, during the pay period starting May 9, 2016 and ending May 22, 2016, Plaintiff received one paycheck from “Kreation Organics Inc.” to compensate him for 80 hours of work at his base rate of pay, which was $10/hour (minimum wage). For the exact same pay period, Plaintiff received another paycheck from “Kreation & 1023 Montana Inc.” to compensate him for an additional 9.27 hours of work at $10/hour. Even though the pay stubs plainly show that Plaintiff worked at least 9.27 hours of overtime during this pay period, there is no overtime compensation reflected on either pay stub.
Kaputsos also alleges that he was asked to stay at Kreation locations until 2 or 3 a.m. preparing for pest exterminators, and that on the occasion of one cockroach infestation, Kreation “required servers to stay late and deep clean the restaurant” but never paid them. The potential class, which hasn’t yet been certified by a judge, is estimated to be more than 200 individuals.
According to court filings, Kaputsos and Kreation’s lawyers attempted to reach a settlement agreement via mediation over the summer. But last week, Kaputsos’ lawyers filed an amended complaint, moving ahead toward a trial. The next hearing in the suit is scheduled for December.
“I never got paid overtime,” a former Kreation employee who is not involved in any legal action against Kreation, and asked to remain anonymous, told BuzzFeed News via private message. “I got those hours on a separate check from the juicery, which, I never worked there. I only worked in the restaurant. So when I would do overtime I got to [sic] separate checks one for 80 hrs and another one for the overtime hrs at same minimum wage.”
A second anonymous employee gave a similar account, telling BuzzFeed News, “There are a lot of people who do work overtime, but they just pay them two different checks instead of overtime and change the location of the store.”
Other workers have filed suit against Kreation independently. Donnie Ramos, who used the same law firm as Kaputsos did, filed his suit in March 2017. In his complaint, Ramos says he repeatedly brought up the issue of overtime pay with his supervisors at Kreation, but never received any. His suit alleges the same multi-address pay stub scheme that Kaputsos’ describes.
But according to his lawsuit, Ramos’ real problems at work started when a kitchen supervisor started harassing him for being gay. Ramos alleges that the harassment took place over a seven-month period, beginning with name calling (“faggot” “fucking puto” etc) and escalating to aggression (“Panchito whipped him with a wet towel on his buttocks”) and then, allegedly, assault. From the lawsuit:
On Saturday, November 5, 2016, Mr. Ramos was in the kitchen with Panchito and another cook. Panchito looked at Mr. Ramos and said aggressively, “What do you want, puta?” Before Mr. Ramos could respond, Panchito grabbed a chef’s knife with a long blade and held it out threateningly towards Mr. Ramos. He said, “Get the fuck out of here, I am going to kill you because you are a faggot,” or words to that effect.
Ramos says he reported his co-worker’s harassment and threats of violence to his supervisors at Kreation multiple times between February and November, but they didn’t take action. Following the knife-wielding incident in November 2016, Ramos says Kreation fired him (his suit includes a wrongful termination claim). According to his lawsuit, Ramos picked up a knife in self-defense during the altercation; Kreation later filed a petition for a restraining order against him, which was dismissed. Ramos’s own suit, which claims he experienced harassment in a hostile work environment and discrimination based on sexual orientation, in addition to lost pay and wrongful termination, is pending in LA County Superior Court.
In June, Kreation’s lawyers filed an answer to Ramos’s complaint, in which they denied “each and every allegation” he made against the company. His trial is currently scheduled for February.
Other workers have also sued the company in the past. An employee named Juan Romero filed a suit against Kreation in 2014, alleging that he wasn’t paid overtime, despite working for Kreation between 60 and 70 hours a week. That case was dismissed by request of the worker’s attorneys in August 2015.
Marjan Sarshar, who says she started the Kreation brand with a Santa Monica cafe in 2007, has faced legal troubles before. Her financial backer, Farzin Madjidi, filed suit against her in November 2016, alleging that she had duped him, using a secondary company, Bebegol Inc., to cut him out of the business. He says they’d agreed to split the profits from any Kreation stores or projects he helped fund fifty-fifty. Sarshar filed a counter complaint vehemently denying these allegations in April. The trial is currently scheduled for February.
In 2005, Sarshar and her husband were arrested following a police investigation into an LA opium ring; Sarshar’s husband, Mehrdad Lari, who was allegedly the “boss” of the ring, pled guilty to some charges and was sentenced to four years in prison. Sarshar was not charged.
Despite these struggles, Sarshar has successfully built Kreation into a popularbrand in LA. Celebrities are frequently photographed holding or buying Kreation products; some tweet about how much they like them. Kreation was even highlighted on Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle website, Goop.
As congressional lawmakers investigate Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election, they are looking at social media’s function in the spread of misinformation.
Facebook's admission that a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin used its ad platform to interfere with the 2016 presidential election doesn't seem to be troubling the company's advertisers. According to new data obtained by BuzzFeed News, ad spends on Facebook are on the rise despite the unprecedented crisis that has erupted around the company’s role in the Russian ad scandal. Meanwhile, some advertising industry executives are touting the episode as a testament to just how effective Facebook advertising can be.
“The discovery of Russian ads on Facebook intended to influence the US election is not a major concern for brand advertisers,” Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer of the media technology company 4C Insights, told BuzzFeed News. “If anything, it’s just another case study that ads on Facebook can be highly effective.”
“For better or worse, one key takeaway from this is how effective Facebook can be as an advertising medium.”
“For better or worse, one key takeaway from this is how effective Facebook can be as an advertising medium,” Kyle Bunch, managing director of ad agency R/GA’s social practice, told BuzzFeed News. "Many advertisers are probably asking themselves, ‘How can I make better use of data to have my campaigns get those kind of results?’”
Total Facebook ad spending has increased during the crisis, according to data from 4C, which is on track to run $1 billion in social ad spending this year. “For the quarter ended September 30th, we saw a 27% increase in ad spend on Facebook versus the previous quarter across 350 advertisers using our platform,” Goldman said. “We also saw increases in CPM (cost per thousand) and CPC (cost per click) which means that advertisers are willing to pay more for each ad.” In October, spending is up 20% compared to the first month of the previous quarter, Goldman said.
There are clear reasons for this, of course. Facebook is still an extremely effective ad platform — it’s used by so many people that omitting it from advertising plans would be irresponsible in many cases. But more than anything else, advertisers simply don’t feel that Facebook’s role in 2016's unexpected election outcome has any bearing on their business.
“People are spending most of their mobile time in Facebook and/or Instagram feeds,” Jill Sherman, senior vice president of social strategy at the ad agency DigitasLBi, told BuzzFeed News. “To think that moving money elsewhere is the answer for advertisers is akin to saying that audience doesn’t matter anymore, and that’s just not the case.”
“It was eye opening for some people that questioned the validity of ads in social platforms.”
Sherman said she’s heard positive chatter about Facebook’s effectiveness among some in the ad industry. And indeed, reports of how effective the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency’s $100,000 spend was are almost doing Facebook’s sales team's jobs for them. Some fanciful headlines have claimed that the entire state of Michigan could’ve been swayed with $42,000. And even without those reports, Facebook’s admission that the $100,000 ad buy reached 10 million people is pretty impressive to many.
“It was eye opening for some people that questioned the validity of ads in social platforms,” Sherman said.
Laura O'Shaughnessy, CEO of SocialCode — a social advertising company that works with major brands such as Heineken and Visa — told BuzzFeed News that Facebook’s Russia ads crisis hasn’t been a client concern. “In all the meetings I’m in, which is a lot, this has not come up,” O'Shaughnessy said. “It does not affect the utility and how essential these digital platforms are.”
Mike Racic, president of media services at the digital ad agency iCrossing, echoed that sentiment. “In the short term, I don’t think you’ll see advertisers moving away from Facebook if they are still getting the kind of results they want from their ad spends,” he told BuzzFeed News. “At worst, you’ll likely find CMO types or their agencies answering more questions from management, who sometimes react to headlines.”
While Facebook isn’t facing short-term revenue consequences over the scandal, the company’s failure to catch the Russian ad buy could contribute to a growing credibility issue with advertising clients who worry the platform isn’t fully aware of what’s happening inside its walls. A number of advertisers interviewed by BuzzFeed News expressed concern over a recentseries of Facebook metrics errors.
“Anything that challenges their credibility shouldn’t be taken lightly,” Brian Wieser, a senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group, told BuzzFeed News. “All of the trust issues add friction. And friction slows the pace of growth.”
This week, Facebook is in Washington, DC, for three public hearings with congressional committees to discuss Russia’s attempt to influence last year’s US presidential election. Advertisers seem to prefer that Facebook take care of its issues on its own. They want it to figure out a way to effectively self-regulate as opposed to leaving it in the government’s hands. “I don’t think the platform in and of itself is problematic. I think that Facebook simply needs to figure out the right balance of self-governance,” DigitasLBi’s Sherman said. “I would hate for a third party to come in and slow the process down and make the buy more expensive and less efficient.”
On Wednesday, the same day Facebook meets with the House and Senate intelligence committees to discuss Russian manipulation of its platform, it will also report its third-quarter earnings. As the company works to defuse a crisis in Washington, its business will likely look just fine to the bankers in New York.
The Silicon Valley cancer-detection startup Grail, which has raised $1 billion, recently lost two top executives — the latest in a handful of departures, BuzzFeed News has learned.
Franz Och, Grail’s head of data science, left in October, two people with knowledge of the company told BuzzFeed News. Before joining in September 2016, Och was the chief data scientist at Human Longevity, a genome-sequencing startup, and before that, he was the chief architect of Google Translate.
And Mark Lee, who joined in January as head of clinical development and medical affairs, left in September, according to his LinkedIn profile. Lee was previously a former top scientist at Verily, Alphabet’s experimental biotech division. He is now at the pharmaceutical giant Roche.
These departures were previously unreported. It’s not clear why Och and Lee left. They did not return requests for comment.
“We recently underwent a reorganization to focus on nearer-term, unanticipated product opportunities from our R&D organization,” Grail spokesperson Charlotte Arnold told BuzzFeed News by email when reached for comment. She said the company would soon announce new hires and updates on its clinical trials.
Och and Lee left after CEO Jeff Huber, an ex-senior Google executive, stepped down in August in an executive shuffle that occurred with little public explanation. Though he kept a board seat, he was replaced by chairman Bill Rastetter. And as Axios reported Monday, Vikram Bajaj, Grail’s head of precision medicine and translational science — and the former co-founder of Verily — recently left for a private equity firm.
Bajaj and Och have joined Grail’s scientific advisory board, Arnold said.
Grail is among a handful of biotech startups racing to develop blood tests that can detect early signs of cancer — and to get there first, it raised an eye-popping $900 million in March, on top of $100 million in 2016. It’s a spinout of the DNA-sequencing behemoth Illumina.
Its funders include tech billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates; internet companies like Amazon and Tencent; high-profile venture capital firms like ARCH Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, and GV (formerly known as Google Ventures); and pharma companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene, and Merck.
One of its competitors is Freenome, which raised $65 million in the spring from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Verily. The latter has also given Freenome lab space. Yet another rival, Guardant Health, has raised a total of $550 million.
But developing an accurate “liquid biopsy” test, which detects tumor DNA in blood, is highly difficult. And the companies racing to develop it have revealed little about the science behind their visions.
Grail, at least, published a study in August in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study followed about 20,000 men in Hong Kong, and found that a type of throat cancer could be detected in a blood test and treated early. The scientist in charge of this study merged his startup, Cirina, with Grail earlier this year.
An archive of historic documents that belonged to Hewlett-Packard founders William Hewlett and David Packard has been destroyed in the devastating Tubbs fire in Northern California.
We all already know that there are lots and lots of spooky places here on Earth. That weird abandoned house a few blocks over might give you chills when you drive by it, and graveyards are always a bit unsettling at night, but what about space? Over the years, NASA has recorded all kinds of sounds from outer space with its various probes and orbiters, and some of it is downright freaky. So, just in time for Halloween, NASA has whipped up an amazing playlist with some of its most unsettling real recordings.
Apple iPhone X reviews hit the web early Tuesday morning, with most of the reviews focused on the upgrades to the iPhone's internals, including its camera.
How hard will it be to get the iPhone X at launch? That’s the burning question before the release of Apple’s much-heralded revamp of the iPhone on November 3.
iPhones have had the samethickborders — what Apple lovingly calls the “forehead and chin” — sandwiching the top and bottom of the display for a decade. Meanwhile, Android phone screens have literally been pushing boundaries.
For the past few years, Samsung, LG, and Pixel displays inched closerandcloser to the hardware’s edge, with bright-as-heck screens that spill over the sides and disappear into their surroundings like infinity pools. This iPhone user, trapped by iMessage and the comforts of iOS, looked on longingly, wondering when I, too, would get an iPhone that looks more Minority Report and less like something from the early ‘00s.
Then, this September, Apple unveiled the iPhone X. All-screen comes to those who wait.
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News
Instead of a home button, there’s just screen. Instead of a “forehead” at the top, there’s a two-inch “notch” that looks like a tiny manila folder flap, squeezed in between more screen. And that, friends of the Internet, is the most significant hardware design update this rectangle with rounded corners has gotten since Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone in 2007.
It got a new price tag too. The iPhone X, which arrives in stores (and, for those who pre-ordered, ships) on Friday, Nov. 3, is the most expensive iPhone ever. It costs $999 for 64 GB (and $1,150 for the larger 256 GB version), not including the case you’ll want to protect your phone because screen repairs now cost $279 out of warranty. For comparison, the new 64 GB iPhone 8 Plus costs $799 and its screen repairs cost $169.
I’ve been living with the iPhone X for a week, and I’ll say right off the bat: This phone isn’t for everyone.
Do you need an edge-to-edge display and facial recognition and the ability to turn yourself into an animated poop emoji? Of course not.
The X (technically pronounced “ten,” but call it whatever you want) is really only for people who use the *heck* out of their phones. I’m talking about a ton of photo-taking, video-shooting, social media performative exhibiting, gaming, web browsing, etc. This is a device for a power user, not a casual smartphoner who texts and uploads an Instagram every once in awhile. The iPhone 7 or 8 (or, hell, even iPhone SE) are totally sufficient for those folks.
But is it a damn good phone? Yes it is.
That said, the iPhone X and I were not off to a great start.
:( :( :(
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News
I opened the box, peeled off the screen sticker slowly, because I'm dramatic (and also, it's the best part of this job), and powered up the phone for the first time. Then I accidentally pressed the flashlight shortcut on the lockscreen and swiped up, which took me to the setup page. Tried to swipe down from the top right corner, the new gesture for Control Center. Nada. Tried swiping down from anywhere. Nada again.
So I set up the phone with the flashlight on. And that was my first five minutes with the iPhone X.
(I will also mention that for the first two days, while I was finishing setup and downloading a ton of apps, the phone felt warm, like a mug fresh out of the microwave. But since then, it’s been cool, except for when I was shooting 4k video all day.)
The iPhone X’s display is OLED, instead of the LCD that older iPhones have.
OLED's main advantage is that it’s very bright and high contrast. Compared to other iPhones, it’s much easier to read text, watch videos, and, put simply, to *see* the screen, especially in direct sunlight, and even with sunglasses.
Its display is 5.8-inches diagonally, which is larger than the 8 Plus’s 5.5-inch display, but slightly taller and skinnier.
Once I learned the new finger choreography, using the new xOS was fine. But for the first day or two, I was a hot swiping mess.
The home button, the iPhone’s longtime escape key, has been replaced with a slew of different swipes and volume control/power button combos. Swipe up to get back to the home screen. Swipe down from the top right for the Control Center. Swipe up from the bottom and hold to go to the app switcher. Press and hold the side button to activate Siri. Press and hold side button and volume button to turn the device off ...and so on, and so forth.
The new app switcher
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News
Some gestures are easier to get than others. The App Switcher swipe, which sends you some gentle haptic feedback once in switch mode, is particularly satisfying, and takes about the same amount of time as double-clicking the home button.
But Reachability (a setting that pushes the top of the screen down to make it more accessible to your thumb) is tough to get used to. It's enabled by swiping up from the bottom and then throwing the app window down, and most times, I don't get it on my first try. I still suck at Reachability, and find the double home button tap on older iPhones much easier.
The all-screen experience is mostly wonderful (even with that controversial notch), but some details feel 🤔.
The time is now on the very top left of the screen, while cellular, Wi-Fi, and battery symbols are squeezed into the top right corner. The “notch” in the middle, where the front-facing camera and all of the facial recognition tech is packed in, has been called “bad,” “dumb,” and “an absolute affront."
Keyboard no man's land.
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News
Whatever. I don’t feel strongly about the notch either way, but it’s really the other end of the screen that feels awkward. It’s when the keyboard, in any app, is on screen (which, for me, is most of the time). There’s all this dead space on the bottom, where Apple could have put common punctuation, frequently used emojis, or literally anything, but instead left it blank. Other full-screen apps on other phones put navigation or other design elements in that area, and it doesn’t look crowded or crammed. It looks fine. It’s puzzling why Apple didn’t put something more useful down at the bottom, or why it didn’t add a row of numbers or emoji up top and push down the keyboard to make it more thumb-accessible.
Speaking of full-screen apps, there are already a handful optimized for the iPhone X, including Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Messenger, Pocket, LastPass, Lyft, Uber, WhatsApp, and Instagram, in addition to iOS’ default apps like Safari and Notes. Apps that aren’t optimized have an old “forehead-and-chin” border, making the phone feel like an iPhone 6 or 7 or 8. Unsurprisingly, none of the Google apps have been updated yet. Neither has Spotify or, weirdly, the Apple Store app. This, I expect, will change, as developers update their apps for X compatibility. But, as it stands, the X doesn’t feel like the “future of the smartphone” when I open some of my most-used apps. It feels like I’m looking at the same slab of glass I’ve seen for the last decade.
Another thing that doesn’t feel futuristic: Face ID — and that’s a good thing.
Simply put: Face ID is really fucking impressive. But that’s because it’s invisible.
You pick up your phone, swipe up, and you’re in. You open your password manager, a little orb swirls, and you’re in.
Android has had a face unlock feature since 2011 and Samsung introduced theirs earlier this year, but neither of those implementations work quite as seamlessly as Apple’s.
For a normal human who isn’t aware of the 30,000 invisible dots being projected on their face or the 3D map of their head encrypted somewhere deep inside their phone, there’s nothing “futuristic” about these interactions. Using Face ID is what life without a passcode — life before we all became paranoid technofreaks — felt like.
We live in a post-passcode world and, in this world, your passcode is your face.
Lol.
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News
My Face ID journey started with a mosquito.
Last week, during a heat wave in San Francisco, a mosquito targeted me while I was sleeping. On my eye. My face was the only part of my body not covered by my comforter, and I paid for it. (But, honestly, what kind of mosquito is dumb enough to try to suck blood out of an EYELID??)
It happened the night before I was supposed to drive down to Apple’s headquarters, meet with execs, grab my loaner unit, and start reviewing. That night, I popped a Benadryl and hoped that the swelling would subside by morning. It didn’t.
And so me and my ogre eye dragged ourselves to Cupertino. I set up Face ID immediately, because there was no time to waste. I was worried that my swole-eye would muck up Face ID somehow. But remarkably, over the next few days, as my face retreated back to normalcy, Face ID kept up with my changing eye, and I didn’t need to re-scan once.
(I can't believe I'm putting this on the Internet either.)
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News
Face ID felt fast, easy, and secure enough (as long as you don’t have a twin or a lookalike sibling).
Face ID worked as promised: with sunglasses, without sunglasses, with my hair up, with it down, at night in the dark, or during the day.
With the default setting, if you don’t have sunglasses on, your eyeballs need to be facing the screen for Face ID to work. (You can also turn off this requirement in Accessibility settings if you can’t physically look at the screen, but requiring attention provides another layer of security, according to Apple.) If you’re looking off to the side or both of your eyes are shut, the screen won’t unlock (possibly good to note if you ever get mugged or arrested and someone’s trying to force-unlock the phone). It also doesn’t work while yawning (me every morning).
The phone uses this “Attention” feature in other ways as well. If your alarm goes off or someone calls and it senses you looking at the screen, the volume will turn down. If it can tell you’re looking at the phone but there’s no touch activity (maybe you’re reading an article intently), the display won't go to sleep.
If you swipe up immediately on the screen when using Face ID, it's as fast as Touch ID.
Raising to wake up the phone and looking at the device will unhide your notifications on screen (the equivalent of tapping the home button on older iPhones). Immediately swiping up on the lockscreen will take you to the home screen (the equivalent of clicking the home button).
The iPhone needs to be in close range (about my arm’s length, ~1.5 feet) for Face ID to register — but it'll work with multiple angles: whether you’re holding your phone below your face (as most people do), or holding it up, as though you’re about to take a picture.
Using Apple Pay with Face ID is a little more awkward than using it with Touch ID. Instead of just laying your phone directly on a card reader while holding your thumb down for Touch ID, you need to double click the side button, authenticate with your face, and then hold the phone to the terminal.
But overall, Face ID worked great, which is surprising because so many others have tried and failed to implement facial recognition.
People were able to unlock the Galaxy Note 8 with a photo, and Android 4.1’s “liveliness check” which required the user to blink, was similarly fooled. I tried tricking the iPhone with selfies, and Face ID didn’t budge.
But that’s not to say it’s foolproof. Apple says the probability that a random person could unlock your phone with Face ID is 1 in 1,000,000 (Touch ID’s is 1 in 50,000) — but that probability goes way down if you’re 13 years old or younger (Apple says it’s because children’s “distinct facial features may not have full developed”), a twin, or even have a sibling who looks like you. In fact, my editor John Paczkowski has identical twins, and they were able to bypass Face ID’s security.
The technology that powers Face ID is called TrueDepth, which not only recognizes your face, it understands depth as well.
It’s all tucked away in that little “notch” at the top: the flood illuminator that blasts infrared light on your face, the dot projector that helps create a 3D map of it, and an infrared camera that captures those dots and infrared light.
This ability to 3D-map your face is also how Animojis — animated emojis that match your facial expressions and have your voice — work on the phone. The TrueDepth camera is pretty accurate. It even captured my swollen eye via Animoji.
My Animogre <3
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News
Apple’s opening up the TrueDepth camera information to developers too, and Snapchat just used Apple’s augmented reality platform, ARKit, to build a handful of new filters that more closely track your face and head movements. They’re cool, but it’s really too bad that they’re terrifying.
Because of the TrueDepth camera, you can also take Portrait Mode selfies now.
The rear camera is really good (but you already knew that).
The iPhone X’s rear camera is mostly the same as the iPhone 8 Plus’ (which you can read more about in my iPhone 8 review). There’s a new image signal processor in this year’s phones (including the 8) that helps optimize features like exposure, autofocus, and HDR, plus a new “color filter” that produces more vivid colors. Like the 8 Plus, the X also has two lenses: one wide-angle (for landscape shots) and one telephoto (for close ups).
The difference in the X is that its telephoto lens has a better f/2.4 aperture (vs. f/2.8 in the 8 Plus) to let in more light. It also has optical image stabilization, which reduces blur from hand shakiness, on its telephoto lens (the 8 Plus only has stabilization on the wide angle, and the X has it on both).
All of this means that stills — especially night time photos — look bright and clear using no zoom *and* 2x zoom.
The Pixel 2 actually produced a better night-time shot here, but the phone does not have a telephoto lens for 2x optical zoom.
On the Pixel 2, you can pinch to use digital zoom, but the image's resolution will be reduced.
In these day time shots, the colors on the iPhone X's camera look warmer and more vivid, while the Galaxy Note 8's photos look brighter, but a bit more washed out.
The Galaxy Note 8 is an apt comparison, because it similarly has a dual-lens camera with optical image stabilization on both lenses.
The same was true of the phone’s video capabilities, compared to Pixel 2 and Galaxy Note 8.
A whopping 126 million people using Facebook in the US could've been exposed to 80,000 posts created by a Kremlin-linked entity seeking to disrupt the 2016 US presidential election and sow discord in its aftermath, according multiplereports Monday.
The number is vastly higher than the 10 million people Facebook initially said were exposed to content created by the entity — called the Internet Research Agency — though that number referred only to its paid posts.
This revelation about the Internet Research Agency's vast reach comes as Facebook prepares to testify in open hearings before the Senate and House Intelligence Committees Wednesday about Russia's manipulation of its platform. Facebook will also appear before the Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday to discuss similar issues.
Facebook declined to comment.
The days leading to the hearings have been turbulent for Facebook, which twice updated its statement about the reach of the Russian ads.
Google and Twitter will testify at the hearings this week too, and both companies will provide new details, according to a Google blog post on Monday and reports of Twitter's testimony.
Google's post detailed that it had found “some evidence of efforts to misuse” its platforms by accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, including 18 channels that uploaded 1,108 videos to YouTube. In its findings, Google said the content was viewed 309,000 times in the US between June 2015 and November 2016, and that the videos were not targeted to the US or any particular segment of the population.
Google said it suspended 18 accounts for violations of its terms of service, but did not disclose what kind of content lead to those suspensions.
While the search giant has been under less scrutiny than Facebook and Twitter, it has still faced backlash for its role in hosting the videos from Russia Today, a Russian state-backed news network that a federal intelligence report identified as a primary tool in Kremlin propaganda efforts. Google said it “found no evidence of manipulation of our platform or policy violations” from RT. Still, earlier this summer, Google removed RT from a premium group of outlets on YouTube that brands could advertise on.
Google gave no explanation for RT’s removal from that premium package. Google also said that it found two accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency that spent $4,700 on its ad platforms, covering both search and display ads, during the election cycle. Those ads, according to the company, were not targeted to users’ geography or political preferences. The company also disclosed that it found evidence of Gmail accounts associated with Internet Research Agency's campaign being used to open accounts on other platforms. Google did not say how many Gmail accounts were associated with these activities.
Twitter, according to reports of its planned testimony, said it found more than 2,752 accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency, a significant increase from the approximately 200 it had initially reported. Twitter’s initial presentation of that number drew harsh criticism from Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair Senator Mark Warner, who called it "frankly inadequate on almost every level."
Twitter declined to comment.
This week will be a pivotal week for all three companies as they seek to show Congress that they now have their platforms under control after the Russians exploited them during and after the 2016 election season. So far, lawmakers are proving to be a difficult sell — and Silicon Valley's crisis in Washington may just be beginning.
Facebook Inc. estimates that about 126 million people may have seen content posted by Russian-backed accounts over more than two years that sought to disrupt American society, the social-media giant plans to tell congressional investigators Tuesday, according to a prepared copy of the remarks obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
An estimated 126 million Americans, roughly one-third of the nation’s population, received Russian-backed content on Facebook during the 2016 campaign, according to prepared testimony the company submitted...
US News & World Report is out with a list of the 10 best jobs for millennials (No. 1 is web developer, No. 2 is dental hygienist), and says its list took into consideration the group's priorities.
In this day and age, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of all the ways that our devices keep track of us. Many of us have simply come to terms with this new reality, but thankfully, there are others out there who are staying vigilant and doing their part to ensure that our collective privacy isn’t violated any more than it needs to be.
