Facebook opens its first small biz pop-up stores inside Macy’s

Facebook is bursting out of the ones and zeros into the physical realm with nine brick-and-mortar pop-up stores that will show off goods from 100 small business and online brands. Facebook organized the merchants to be part of The Market @ Macy’s, which first launched earlier this year to create temporary spaces for businesses. The merchants pay a one-time fee and keep all their sales revenue, with Facebook and Macy’s taking no revenue share. The stores feature News Feed post-themed displays complete with like button imagery so it feels like you’re shopping Facebook in real life.

While Facebook doesn’t earn money directly from the stores, it could convince the small businesses and others like them to spend more on Facebook ads. Alongside recent tests of advanced Instagram analytics and instant Promote ads for Stories, Facebook wants to build a deeper relationship with small businesses so this longtail of advertisers sticks with it as sharing and marketing shift from the News Feed towards Stories and private messaging.

“All over the world people are running businesses, big and small, that have inspiring stories and we want to help them succeed. We are thrilled to be partnering with one of the world’s biggest retailers to bring some of those businesses to a physical store this holiday season” writes Facebook’s Director of North America Marketing Michelle Klein. “Macy’s shoppers will have the chance to meet businesses like Love Your Melon that sells hats and apparel to help in the fight against pediatric cancer, or Charleston Gourmet Burger Company that started from a backyard barbecue and has expanded to reach customers in all 50 states.”

The nine pop-ups will open from today until February 2nd in The Market @ Macy’s in NYC, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale, San Antonio, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. The brands come from across apparel, lifestyle, food, beauty, and other verticals, and include Two Blind Brothers, Bespoke Post, Inspiralized, Mented Cosmetics and Link. Facebook seems taken with the idea of having a physical presence in the world, with the pop-ups coming just days before Facebook starts shipping its first hardware product, the Facebook Portal video chat device.

Facebook will also run a big ad campaign of its own in NYC’s Grand Central Station for the next three weeks to promote the pop-ups. Featuring 600 ad units with 36 designs across 115 locations in the public transportation hub. Facebook will also run ads for the stores on its app and Insttagram, and provide the merchants with complementary digital ad design from Facebook’s Creative Shop.

Facebook’s revenue growth has been massively decelerating, dropping from 59 percent year-over-year in Q3 2016 to 49 percent in Q3 2017 to 33 percent in Q3 2018. That’s introduced uncharacteristic share price decelines and volatility for Facebook’s historically stable business. Delighting small businesses with experiences like the pop-up stories could keep them loyal as Facebook’s ad formats shift towards more vivid and interactive formats that can be tough for budget-strapped merchants to adopt.

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Daily Digest: Technology and tyranny, lying to ourselves, and Spotify’s $1b repurchase

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Harari on technology and tyranny

Yuval Noah Harari, the noted author and historian famed for his work Sapiens, wrote a lengthy piece in The Atlantic entitled “Why Technology Favors Tyranny” that is quite interesting. I don’t want to address the whole piece (today), but I do want to discuss his views that humans are increasingly eliminating their agency in favor of algorithms who make decisions for them.

Harari writes in his last section:

Even if some societies remain ostensibly democratic, the increasing efficiency of algorithms will still shift more and more authority from individual humans to networked machines. We might willingly give up more and more authority over our lives because we will learn from experience to trust the algorithms more than our own feelings, eventually losing our ability to make many decisions for ourselves. Just think of the way that, within a mere two decades, billions of people have come to entrust Google’s search algorithm with one of the most important tasks of all: finding relevant and trustworthy information. As we rely more on Google for answers , our ability to locate information independently diminishes. Already today, “truth” is defined by the top results of a Google search. This process has likewise affected our physical abilities, such as navigating space. People ask Google not just to find information but also to guide them around. Self-driving cars and AI physicians would represent further erosion: While these innovations would put truckers and human doctors out of work, their larger import lies in the continuing transfer of authority and responsibility to machines.

I am not going to lie: I completely dislike this entire viewpoint and direction of thinking about technology. Giving others authority over us is the basis of civilized society, whether that third-party is human or machine. It’s how that authority is executed that determines whether it is pernicious or not.

Harari brings up a number of points here though that I think deserve a critical look. First, there is this belief in an information monolith, that Google is the only lens by which we can see the world. To me, that is a remarkably rose-colored view of printing and publishing up until the internet age, when gatekeepers had the power (and the politics) to block public access to all kinds of information. Banned Books Week is in some ways quaint today in the Amazon Kindle era, but the fight to have books in public libraries was (and sometimes today is) real. Without a copy, no one had access.

That disintegration of gatekeeping is one reason among many why extremism in our politics is intensifying: there is now a much more diverse media landscape, and that landscape doesn’t push people back toward the center anymore, but rather pushes them further to the fringes.

Second, we don’t give up agency when we allow algorithms to submit their judgments on us. Quite the opposite in fact: we are using our agency to give a third-party independent authority. That’s fundamentally our choice. What is the difference between an algorithm making a credit card application decision, and a (human) judge adjudicating a contract dispute? In both cases, we have tendered at least some of our agency to another party to independently make decisions over us because we have collectively decided to make that choice as part of our society.

Third, Google, including Search and Maps, has empowered me to explore the world in ways that I wouldn’t have dreamed before. When I visited Paris the first time in 2006, I didn’t have a smartphone, and calling home was a $1/minute. I saw parts of the city, and wandered, but I was mostly taken in by fear — fear of going to the wrong neighborhood (the massive riots in the banlieues had only happened a few months prior) and fear of completely getting lost and never making it back. Compare that to today, where access to the internet means that I can actually get off the main tourist stretches peddled by guidebooks and explore neighborhoods that I never would have dreamed of doing before. The smartphone doesn’t have to be distracting — it can be an amazing tool to explore the real world.

I bring these different perspectives up because I think the “black box society” as Frank Pasquale calls it by his eponymous book is under unfair attack. Yes, there are problems with algorithms that need addressing, but are they worse or better than human substitutes? When eating times can vastly affect the outcome of a prisoner’s parole decisions, don’t we want algorithms to do at least some of the work for us?

Lying to ourselves

Photo: Getty Images / Siegfried Kaiser / EyeEm

Talking about humans acting badly, I wrote a review over the weekend of Elephant in the Brain, a book about how we use self-deception to ascribe better motives to our actions than our true intentions. As I wrote about the book’s thesis:

Humans care deeply about being perceived as prosocial, but we are also locked into constant competition, over status attainment, careers, and spouses. We want to signal our community spirit, but we also want to selfishly benefit from our work. We solve for this dichotomy by creating rationalizations and excuses to do both simultaneously. We give to charity for the status as well as the altruism, much as we get a college degree to learn, but also to earn a degree which signals to employers that we will be hard workers.

It’s a depressing perspective, but one that’s ultimately correct. Why do people wear Stanford or Berkeley sweatshirts if not to signal things about their fitness and career prospects? (Even pride in school is a signal to others that you are part of a particular tribe). One of the biggest challenges of operating in Silicon Valley is simply understanding the specific language of signals that workers there send.

Ultimately, though, I was nonplussed with the book, because I felt that it didn’t end up leading to a broader sense of enlightenment, nor could I see how to change either my behavior or my perception’s of others’ behaviors as a result of the book. That earned a swift rebuke from one of the author’s last night on Twitter:

"Worse, even after reading the book, I am left completely unaware of what exactly to do with the thesis now that I have read it." Come on, I'll bet you can think of more uses for our book than 90% of books out there. https://t.co/xUkRLRxvZu

— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) November 4, 2018

Okay, but here is the thing: of course we lie to ourselves. Of course we lie to each other. Of course PR people lie to make their clients look good, and try to come off as forthright as possible. The best salesperson is going to be the person that truly believes in the product they are selling, rather than the person who knows its weaknesses and scurries away when they are brought up. This book makes a claim — that I think is reasonable — that self-deception is the key ingredient – we can’t handle the cognitive load of lying all the time, so evolution has adapted us to handle lying with greater facility by not allowing us to realize that we are doing it.

No where is this more obvious than in my previous career as a venture capitalist. Very few founders truly believe in their products and companies. I’m quite serious. You can hear the hesitation in their voices about the story, and you can hear the stress in their throats when they hit a key slide that doesn’t exactly align with the hockey stick they are selling. That’s okay, ultimately, because these companies were young, but if the founder of the company doesn’t truly believe, why should I join the bandwagon?

Confidence is ambiguous — are you confident because the startup truly is good, or is it because you are carefully masking your lack of enthusiasm? That’s what due diligence is all about, but what I do know is that a founder without confidence isn’t going to make it very far. Lying is wrong, but confidence is required — and the line between the two is very, very blurry.

Spotify may repurchase up to $1b in stock

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Before the market opened this morning, Spotify announced plans to buy back stock starting in the fourth quarter of 2018. The company has been authorized to repurchase up to $1 billion worth of shares, and up to 10 million shares total. The exact cadence of the buybacks will depend on various market conditions, and will likely occur gradually until the repurchase program’s expiration date in April of 2021.

The announcement comes on the back of Spotify’s quarterly earnings report last week, which led to weakness in the company’s stock price behind concerns over its outlook for subscriber, revenue and ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) growth, despite the company reporting stronger profitability than Wall Street’s expectations.

After its direct-offering IPO in April, Spotify saw its stock price shoot to over $192 a share in August. However, the stock has since lost close to $10 billion in market cap, driven in part by broader weakness in public tech stocks, as well as by fears about subscription pricing pressure and ARPU growth as more of Spotify’s users opt for discounted family or student subscription plans.

Per TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez:

…The company faces heavy competition these days – especially in the key U.S. market from Apple Music, as well as from underdog Amazon Music, which is leveraging Amazon’s base of Prime subscribers to grow. It also has a new challenge in light of the Sirius XM / Pandora deal.

The larger part of Spotify’s business is free users – 109 million monthly actives on the ad-supported tier. But its programmatic ad platform is currently only live in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia. That leaves Spotify room to grow ad revenues in the months ahead.

The strategic rationale for Spotify is clear despite early reports painting the announcement as a way to buoy a flailing stock price. With over $1 billion in cash sitting on its balance sheet and the depressed stock price, the company clearly views this as an affordable opportunity to return cash to shareholders at an attractive entry point when the stock is undervalued.

As for Spotify’s longer-term outlook from an investor standpoint, the company’s ARPU growth should not be viewed in isolation. In the past, Spotify has highlighted discounted or specialized subscriptions, like family and student subscriptions, as having a much stickier user base. And the company has seen its retention rates improving, with churn consistently falling since the company’s IPO.

The stock is up around 1.5% on the news on top of a small pre-market boost.

What’s next

• We are still spending more time on Chinese biotech investments in the United States (Arman perviously wrote a deep dive on this a week or two ago).
• We are exploring the changing culture of Form D filings (startups seem to be increasingly foregoing disclosures of Form Ds on the advice of their lawyers)
• India tax reform and how startups have taken advantage of it

Reading docket

• Bloomberg piece called “The $6 Trillion Barrier Holding Electric Cars Back”
• New Yorker piece called “Why Doctors Hate Their Computers ”
• Eliot Peper’s new science fiction novel Borderless.
• A new report about China’s military and its deep connections into American academic research
• “LA Is Trying to Fix its Prostitution Problem by Banning Right Turns at Night—and it Might be Working” – intriguing headline, let’s see if it follows through
• The Information’s deep dive into white collar crime and lack of prosecution thereof in Silicon Valley

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Security researchers have busted the encryption in several popular Crucial and Samsung SSDs

Researchers at Radboud University have found critical security flaws in several popular Crucial and Samsung solid state drives (SSDs), which they say can be easily exploited to recover encrypted data without knowing the password.

The researchers, who detailed their findings in a new paper out Monday, reverse engineered the firmware of several drives to find a “pattern of critical issues” across the device makers.

In the case of one drive, the master password used to decrypt the drive’s data was just an empty string and could be easily exploiting by flipping a single bit in the drive’s memory. Another drive could be unlocked with “any password” by crippling the drive’s password validation checks.

That wouldn’t be much of a problem if an affected drive also used software encryption to secure its data. But the researchers found that in the case of Windows computers, the default policy for BitLocker’s software-based drive encryption is to trust an encryption-supported drive — and therefore rely entirely on a device’s hardware encryption to protect the data. Yet, as the researchers found, if the hardware encryption is buggy, BitLocker isn’t doing much to prevent data theft.

In other words, users “should not rely solely on hardware encryption as offered by SSDs for confidentiality,” the researchers said.

Alan Woodward, a professor at the University of Surrey, said that the greatest risk to users is the drive’s security “failing silently.”

“You might think you’ve done the right thing enabling BitLocker but then a third party fault undermines your security, but you never know and never would know,” he said.

Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins, described the BitLocker flaw in a tweet as “like jumping out of a plane with an umbrella instead of a parachute.”

The researchers said that their findings are not yet finalized — pending a peer review. But the research was made public after disclosing the bugs to the drive makers in April.

Crucial’s MX100, MX200 and MX300 drives, Samsung’s T3 and T5 USB external disks, and Samsung 840 EVO and 850 EVO internal hard disks are known to be affected, but the researchers warned that many other drives may also be at risk.

The researchers criticized the device makers’ proprietary and closed-source cryptography that they said — and proved — is “often shown to be much weaker in practice” than their open source and auditable cryptographic libraries. “Manufacturers that take security seriously should publish their crypto schemes and corresponding code so that security claims can be independently verified,” they wrote.

The researchers recommend using software-based encryption, like the open source software VeraCrypt.

In an advisory, Samsung also recommended that users install encryption software to prevent any “potential breach of self-encrypting SSDs.” Crucial’s owner Micron is said to have a fix on the way, according to an advisory by the Netherlands’ National Cyber Security Center, but did not say when.

Micron did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Smart home tech makers don’t want to say if the feds come for your data

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Facebook’s election interference problem exponentially worse on eve of midterms, study suggests

An analysis of political advertisers running extensive campaigns on Facebook targeting users in the United States over the past six months has flagged a raft of fresh concerns about its efforts to tackle election interference — suggesting the social network’s self regulation is offering little more than a sham veneer of accountability.

Dig down and all sorts of problems and concerns become apparent, according to new research conducted by Jonathan Albright, of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

Where’s the recursive accountability?

Albright timed the research project to cover the lead up to the US midterms, which represent the next major domestic test of Facebook’s democracy-denting platform — though this time it appears that homegrown disinformation is as much, if not more, in the frame than Kremlin-funded election fiddling.

“Facebook’s political ad transparency tools — and I mean all of them — offer no real basis for evaluation.” https://t.co/NDsLsofqIH

— Natasha (@riptari) November 4, 2018

The three-month project to delve into domestic US political muck spreading involved taking a thousand screen shots and collecting more than 250,000 posts, 5,000 political ads, and the historic engagement metrics for hundreds of Facebook pages and groups — using “a diverse set of tools and data resources”.

In the first of three Medium posts detailing his conclusions, Albright argues that far from Facebook getting a handle on its political disinformation problem the dangers appear to have “grown exponentially”.

The sheer scale of the problem is one major takeaway, with Albright breaking out his findings into three separate Medium posts on account of how extensive the project was, with each post focusing on a different set of challenges and concerns.

In the first post he zooms in on what he calls “Recursive Ad-ccountability” — or rather Facebook’s lack of it — looking at influential and verified Pages that have been running US political ad campaigns over the past six months, yet which he found being managed by accounts based outside the US.

Albright says he found “an alarming number” of these, noting how Page admins could apparently fluctuate widely and do so overnight — raising questions about how or even whether Facebook is even tracking Page administrator shifts at this level so it can factor pertinent changes into its political ad verification process.

Albright asserts that his findings highlight both structural loopholes in Facebook’s political ad disclosure system — which for example only require that one administrator for each Page get “verified” in order to be approved to run campaigns — but also “emphasize the fact that Facebook does not appear to have a rigid protocol in place to regularly monitor Pages running political campaigns after the initial verification takes place”.

So, essentially, it looks like Facebook doesn’t make regular checks on Pages after an initial (and also flawed) verification check — even, seemingly, when Pages’ administrative structure changes almost entirely. As Albright puts it, the company lacks “recursive accountability”.

Other issues of concern he flags include finding ad campaigns that had foreign Page managers using “information-seeking “polls” — aka sponsored posts asking their target audiences, in this case American Facebook users, to respond to questions about their ideologies and moral outlooks”.

Which sounds like a rather similar modus operandi to disgraced (and now defunct) data company Cambridge Analytica’s use of a quiz app running on Facebook’s platform to extract personal data and psychological insights on users (which it repurposed for its own political ad targeting purposes).

Albright also unearthed instances of influential Pages with foreign manager accounts that had run targeted political campaigns for durations of up to four months without any “paid for” label — a situation that, judging Facebook’s system by face value, shouldn’t even be possible. Yet there it was.

There are of course wider issues with ‘paid for’ labels, given they aren’t linked to accounts — making the entire system open to abuse and astroturfing, which Albright also notes.

“After finding these huge discrepancies, I found it difficult to trust any of Facebook’s reporting tools or historical Page information. Based on the sweeping changes observed in less than a month for two of the Pages, I knew that the information reported in the follow-ups was likely to be inaccurate,” he writes damningly in conclusion.

“In other words, Facebook’s political ad transparency tools — and I mean all of them — offer no real basis for evaluation. There is also no ability to know the functions and differential privileges of these Page “managers,” or see the dates managers are added or removed from the Pages.”

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment, and to ask whether it intends to expand its ad transparency tools to include more information about Page admins. We’ll update this post with any response.

The company has made a big show of launching a disclosure system for political advertisers, seeking to run ahead of regulators. Yet its ‘paid for’ badge disclosure system for political ads has quickly been shown as trivially easy for astroturfers to bypass, for example…

Hello @Facebook. Shall we talk about how your new ad transparency "rules"?
Here's a pro-Brexit advert placed two days ago. It was "paid for by Cambridge Analytica". Posted by "Insider Research Group". And uses an image by the disgraced law-breaking campaign group, BeLeave… pic.twitter.com/8jnK2d2WfL

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) October 31, 2018

The company has also made a big domestic PR push to seed the idea that it’s proactively fighting election disinformation ahead of the midterms — taking journalists on a tour of its US ‘election security war room‘, for example — even as political disinformation and junk news targeted at American voters continues being fenced on its platform…

Facebook is giving tours of its election "war room" now. https://t.co/YFV0rMsad9

Meanwhile, the anonymous person buying attack ads in VA-10 (because FB's policy lets you write whatever "paid for by" disclaimer you want) took out another ad this morning. https://t.co/ktbuigQlCl

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) October 18, 2018

The disconnect is clear.

Shadow organizing

In a second Medium post, dealing with a separate set of challenges but stemming from the same body of research, Albright suggests Facebook Groups are now playing a major role in the co-ordination of junk news political influence campaigns — with domestic online muck spreaders seemingly shifting their tactics.

He found bad actors moving from using public Facebook Pages (presumably as Facebook has responded to pressure and complaints over visible junk) to quasi-private Groups as a less visible conduit for seeding and fencing “hate content, outrageous news clips, and fear-mongering political memes”.

“It is Facebook’s Groups— right here, right now — that I feel represents the greatest short-term threat to election news and information integrity,” writes Albright. “It seems to me that Groups are the new problem — enabling a new form of shadow organizing that facilitates the spread of hate content, outrageous news clips, and fear-mongering political memes. Once posts leave these Groups, they are easily encountered, and — dare I say it —algorithmically promoted by users’ “friends” who are often shared group members — resulting in the content surfacing in their own news feeds faster than ever before. Unlike Instagram and Twitter, this type of fringe, if not obscene sensationalist political commentary and conspiracy theory seeding is much less discoverable.”

Albright flags how notorious conspiracy outlet Infowars remains on Facebook’s platform in a closed Group form, for instance. Even though Infowars has previously had some of its public videos taken down by Facebook for “glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies”.

Facebook’s approach to content moderation typically involves only post-publication content moderation, on a case-by-case basis — and only when content has been flagged for review.

Within closed Facebook Groups with a self-selecting audience there’s arguably likely to be less chance of that.

“This means that in 2018, the sources of misinformation and origins of conspiracy seeding efforts on Facebook are becoming invisible to the public — meaning anyone working outside of Facebook,” warns Albright. “Yet, the American public is still left to reel in the consequences of the platform’s uses and is tasked with dealing with its effects. The actors behind these groups whose inconspicuous astroturfing operations play a part in seeding discord and sowing chaos in American electoral processes surely are aware of this fact.”

Some of the closed Groups he found seeding political conspiracies he argues are likely to break Facebook’s own content standards did not have any admins or moderators at all — something that is allowed by Facebook’s terms.

“They are an increasingly popular way to push conspiracies and disinformation. And unmoderated groups — often with of tens of thousands of users interacting, sharing, and posting with one other without a single active administrator are allowed [by Facebook],” he writes.

“As you might expect, the posts and conversations in these Facebook Groups appear to be even more polarized and extreme than what you’d typically find out on the “open” platform. And a fair portion of the activities appear to be organized. After going through several hundred Facebook Groups that have been successful in seeding rumors and in pushing hyper-partisan messages and political hate memes, I repeatedly encountered examples of extreme content and hate speech that easily violates Facebook’s terms of service and community standards.”

Albright couches this move by political disinformation agents from seeding content via public Pages to closed Groups as “shadow organizing”. And he argues that Groups pose a greater threat to the integrity of election discourse than other social platforms like Twitter, Reddit, WhatsApp, and Instagram — because they “have all of the advantages of selective access to the world’s largest online public forum”, and are functioning as an “anti-transparency feature”.

He notes, for example, that he had to use “a large stack of different tools and data-sifting techniques” to locate the earliest posts about the Soros caravan rumor on Facebook. (And “only after going through thousands of posts across dozens of Facebook Groups”; and only then finding “some” not all the early seeders.)

He also points to another win-win for bad actors using Groups as their distribution pipe of choice, pointing out they get to “reap all of the benefits of Facebook— including its free unlimited photo and meme image hosting, its Group-based content and file sharing, its audio, text, and video “Messenger” service, mobile phone and app notifications, and all the other powerful free organizing and content promoting tools, with few — if any — of the consequences that might come from doing this on a regular Page, or by sharing things out in the open”.

“It’s obvious to me there has been a large-scale effort to push messages out from these Facebook groups into the rest of the platform,” he continues. “I’ve seen an alarming number of influential Groups, most of which list their membership number in the tens of thousands of users, that seek to pollute information flows using suspiciously inauthentic but clearly human operated accounts. They don’t spam messages like what you’d see with “bots”; instead they engage in stealth tactics such as “reply” to other group members profiles with “information.”

“While automation surely plays a role in the amplification of ideas and shared content on Facebook, the manipulation that’s happening right now isn’t because of “bots.” It’s because of humans who know exactly how to game Facebook’s platform,” he concludes the second part of his analysis.

“And this time around, we saw it coming, so we can’t just shift the blame over to foreign interference. After the midterm elections, we need to look closely, and press for more transparency and accountability for what’s been happening due to the move by bad actors into Facebook Groups.”

The shift of political muck spreading from Pages to Groups means disinformation tracker tools that only scrape public Facebook content — such as the Oxford Internet Institute’s newly launched junk news aggregator — aren’t going to show a full picture. They can only given a snapshot of what’s being said on Facebook’s public layer.

And of course Facebook’s platform allows for links to closed Group content to posted elsewhere, such as in replies to comments, to lure in other Facebook users.

And, indeed, Albright says he saw bad actors engaging in what he dubs “stealth tactics” to quietly seed and distribute their bogus material.

“It’s an ingenious scheme: a political marketing campaign for getting the ideas you want out there at exactly the right time,” he adds. “You don’t need to go digging in Reddit, or 4 or 8 Chan, or crypochat for these things anymore. You’ll see them everywhere in political Facebook Groups.”

The third piece of analysis based on the research — looking at Facebook’s challenges in enforcing its rules and terms of service — is slated to follow shortly.

Meanwhile this is the year Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, made it his personal challenge to ‘fix the platform’.

Yet at this point, bogged down by a string of data scandals, security breaches and content crises, the company’s business essentially needs to code its own apology algorithm — given the volume of ‘sorries’ it’s now having to routinely dispense.

Late last week the Intercept reported that Facebook had allowed advertisers to target conspiracy theorists  interested in “white genocide”, for example — triggering yet another Facebook apology.

Facebook also deleted the offending category. Yet it did much the same a year ago when a ProPublica investigation showed Facebook’s ad tools could be used to target people interested in “How to burn Jews”.

Plus ça change then. Even though the company said it would hire actual humans to moderate its AI-generated ad targeting categories. So it must have been an actual human who approved the ‘white genocide’ bullseye. Clearly, overworked, undertrained human moderators aren’t going to stop Facebook making more horribly damaging mistakes.

Not while its platform continues to offer essentially infinite ad-targeting possibilities — via the use of proxies and/or custom lookalike audiences — which the company makes available to almost anyone with a few dollars to put towards whipping up hate and social division, around their neo-fascist cause of choice, making Facebook’s business richer in the process.

The social network itself — its staggering size and reach — increasingly looks like the problem.

And fixing that will require a lot more than self-regulation.

It's impossible to fix Facebook's toxic data business. For every category they remove you can use others as proxies. 'Advertisers' can use seemingly unrelated categories to target vulnerable people or amplify outrage. Or custom audiences & lookalikes which is more powerful anyway

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) November 2, 2018

Not that Facebook is the only social network being hijacked for malicious political purposes, of course. Twitter has a long running problem with nazis appropriating its tools to spread hateful content.

And only last month, in a lengthy Twitter thread, Albright raised concerns over anti-semitic content appearing on (Facebook-owned) Instagram…

This @David_Ingram story went up this morning <half an hour before the Pittsburgh tragedy https://t.co/a6gMt7X7qG

— J0nathan A1bright (@d1gi) October 27, 2018

But Facebook remains the dominant social platform with the largest reach. And now its platform seems appears to be offering election fiddlers the perfect blend of mainstream reach plus unmoderated opportunity to skew political outcomes.

“It’s like the worst-case scenario from a hybrid of 2016-era Facebook and an unmoderated Reddit,” as Albright puts it.

The fact that other mainstream social media platforms are also embroiled in the disinformation mess doesn’t let Facebook off the hook. It just adds further fuel to calls for proper sector-wide regulation.

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Pinterest taps former Athleta exec as first CMO

Andréa Mallard, the former chief marketing officer of the Gap-owned line of athleisure clothing Athleta, has joined Pinterest as its first-ever CMO.

Overseeing Pinterest’s global marketing and creative teams, Mallard will report to the visual search company’s chief operating officer Francoise Brougher, who joined in February from payments company Square. Mallard previously spent four years as CMO of digital health company Omada Health and eight years with IDEO, where she led the company’s global brand strategy practice.

Pinterest has finally finished staffing its c-suite as it gears up for a potential 2019 initial public offering. In late 2016, the company hired former Twitter executive Todd Morgenfeld as its first chief financial officer. Earlier this year, the former Google computer vision research lead Chuck Rosenberg joined Pinterest as its head of computer vision.

Founded in 2010, San Francisco-based Pinterest is led by co-founder and chief executive officer Ben Silbermann. The company has secured more than $1 billion in venture capital funding, most recently raising $150 million at a $12.3 billion valuation.

Two hundred and fifty million people are using the platform every month, up from 200 million last September, according to numbers the company shared in September.

Pinterest is turning more of its window shoppers into buyers with newest features

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Election Night

Election Night

Yub nub! Students dress a bipedal robot up like an AT-ST

Students at Oregon State University dressed up their bipedal robot, Cassie, in a delightful AT-ST costume. This robot, which everyone said looked like one of the Empire’s two-legged walkers, anyway, can now zap both Rebels and Ewoks in a deadly battle to take control of the forest city of Corvallis.

The robot, as you can see, can change its center of gravity for better stability and, because it doesn’t have a torso or arms, can balance in multiple difficult environments. It can also now fire lasers at primitive man-bears stuck in the Stone Age.

The Dynamic Robotics Lab at Oregon State University built the original robot and now Agility Robotics is mass-producing the bipedal machines, presumably for for Grand Moff Tarkin. You can see Cassie without her costume here, but I think the Star Wars version is far superior.

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Review: The iPad Pro and the power of the Pen(cil)

Laptop users have been focused for a very long time on whether the iPad Pro is going to be forced upon them as a replacement device.

Depending on who you believe, Apple included, it has at one point been considered that, or a pure tablet with functions to be decided completely by the app development community, or something all its own.

But with the iPad Pro, the Smart Keyboard and the new version of Apple’s Pencil, some things are finally starting to become clear.

The new hardware, coupled with the ability and willingness of companies like Adobe to finally ship completely full-featured versions of Photoshop that handle enormous files and all of the tools and brushes of the desktop version, are opening a new door on what could be possible with iPad Pro — if Apple are ready to embrace it.

Pencil

Does the double tap gesture feel natural? Yep. I’ve been using electronic drawing surfaces since the first generation Wacom that had a serial port connector. Many of them over the years have had some sort of ‘action button’ that allowed you to toggle or click to change drawing modes, invoke erasers or pallets and generally save you from having to move away from your drawing surface as much as possible.

That’s the stated and obvious goal of the Apple Pencil’s new double-tap as well. Many of the internal components are very similar to the first generation Pencil, but one of the new ones is a capacitive band that covers the bottom third of the pencil from the tip upwards. This band is what enables the double tap and it is nicely sensitive. It feels organic and smooth to invoke it, and you can adjust the cadence of tap in the Pencil’s control panel.

The panel also allows you to swap from eraser to palate as your alternate, and to turn off the ‘tap to notes’ feature which lets you tap the pencil to you screen to instantly launch the Notes app. When you do this it’s isolated to the current note only, just like photos. One day I’d love to see alternate functions for Pencil tap-to-wake but it makes sense that this is the one they’d start with.

I never once double tapped it accidentally and it felt great to swap to an eraser without lifting out of work mode — the default behavior.

But Apple has also given developers a lot of latitude to offer different behaviors for that double tap. Procreate, one of my favorite drawing apps, offers a bunch of options including radial menus that reflect the current tool or mode and switching between one tool and another directly. Apple’s guidelines instruct developers to be cautions in implementing double tap — but they also encourage them to think about what logical implementations of the tool look like for users.

The new Pencil does not offer any upgrades in tracking accuracy, speed or detection. It works off of essentially the same tracking system as was available to the first Pencil on previous iPad Pros. But, unfortunately, the Pencil models are not cross compatible. The new Pencil will not work on old iPad Pros and the old pencil does not work on the new model. This is due to the pairing and charging process being completely different.

Unlike the first one, though, the new Pencil both pairs and charges wirelessly — a huge improvement. There is no little cap to lose, you don’t have to plug it into the base of the iPad like a rectal thermometer to charge and the pairing happens simultaneously as you charge.

The ‘top’ (for lack of a better term) edge of the iPad Pro in horizontal mode now features a small opaque window. Behind that window are the charging coils for the Pencil. Inside the Pencil itself is a complimentary coil, flanked by two arrays of ferrite magnets. These mate with magnetic Halbach arrays inside the chassis of the iPad. Through the use of shaped magnetic fields, Apple pulls a bit of alignment trickery here, forcing the pencil to snap precisely to the point where the charging coils are aligned perfectly. This enables you to slap the pencil on top quickly, not even thinking about alignment.

The magnetic connection is tough — almost, but not quite, enough to hold the larger iPad Pro in the air by the pencil — and it should hold on well, but it’s fairly easy to knock off if you come at it from the side, as you would when pulling it off from the front.

There’s also a pleasant on screen indicator now that shows charge level.

When the Pencil launched, I brought it to my Dad, a fine artist who sketches more than anyone I know as a part of his creative process. He liked the tracking and the access to digital tools, but specifically called out the glossy finish as being inferior to matte and the fact that there was no flat edge to rest against your finger.

The new Pencil has both a matte finish and a new flat edge. Yes, the edge is there to stop the pencil from rolling and also to allow it to snap to the edge of the iPad for charging, but the ability to register one edge of your drawing instrument against the inside of your control finger is highly under-valued by anyone who isn’t an artist. It’s hugely important in control for sketching. Plenty of pencils are indeed round, but a lot of those are meant to be held in an overhand grip – like a pointing device that you use to shade, for the most part. The standard tripod grip is much better suited to having at least one flat edge.

Your range of motion is limited in tripod but it can provide for more precision, where the overhand grip is more capable and versatile, it’s also harder to use precisely. The new Pencil is now better to use in both of these widely used grips, which should make artists happy.

These fiddly notions of grip may seem minor, but I (and my drawing callous) can tell you that it is much more than it seems. Grip is everything in sketching.

The Pencil is one of the most impressive version 2 devices that Apple has released ever. It scratches off every major issue that users had with the V1. A very impressive bit of execution here that really enhances the iPad Pro’s usability, both for drawing and quick notes and sketches. The only downside is that you have to buy it separately.

Drawing and sketching with the new Pencil is lovely, and remains a completely stand-out experience that blows away even dedicated devices like the Wacom Cintiq and remains a far cut above the stylus experience in the Surface Pro devices.

Beyond that there are some interesting things already happening with the Pencil’s double tap. In Procreate, for instance, you can choose a different double tap action for many different tools and needs. It’s malleable, depending on the situation. It’s linked to the context of what you’re working on, or it’s not, depending on your (and the developer’s) choices.

One minute you’re popping a radial menu that lets you manipulate whole layers, another you’re drawing and swapping to an eraser, and it still feels pretty easy to follow because it’s grounded in the kind of tool that you’re using at the moment.

Especially in vertical mode, it’s easy to see why touch with fingers is not great for laptops or hybrids. The Pencil provides a much needed precision and delicacy of touch that feels a heck of a lot different than pawing at the screen with your snausages trying to tap a small button. Reach, too, can be a problem here and the Pencil solves a lot of the problems in hitting targets that are 10” away from the keyboard or more.

The Pencil is really moving upwards in the hierarchy from a drawing accessory to a really mandatory pointing and manipulation tool for iPad users. It’s not quiiiite there yet, but there’s big potential, as the super flexible options in Procreate display.

There’s an enormous amount of high level execution going on with Pencil, and by extension, iPad. Both the Pencil and the AirPods fly directly in the face of arguments that Apple can’t deliver magical experiences to users built on the backs of its will and ability to own and take responsibility of more of its hardware and software stack than any other manufacturer.

Speakers and microphones

There are now 5 microphones, though the iPad Pro still only records in stereo. They record in pairs, with the mics being dynamically used to noise cancel as needed.

Th speakers are solid, producing some pretty great stereo sound for such a thin device. The speakers are also used more intelligently now, with all 4 active for FaceTime calls, something that wasn’t possible previously without the 5-mic array due to feedback.

Let’s talk about ports, baby/Let’s talk about USB-C

I’m not exactly an enormous fan of USB-C as a format, but it does have some nice structural advantages over earlier USB formats and, yes, even over Lightning. It’s not the ideal, but it’s not bad. So it’s a pleasant surprise to see Apple conceding that people wanting to use an external monitor at high res, charge iPhones and transfer photos at high speed is more important than sticking to Lightning.

The internal and external rhetoric about Lightning has always been that it was compact, useful and perfect for iOS devices. That rhetoric now has an iPad Pro sized hole in it and I’m fine with that. A pro platform that isn’t easily extensible isn’t really a pro platform.

It’s not a coincidence that Apple’s laptops and its iPad Pro devices all now run on USB-C. This trickle down may continue, but for now it stems directly from what Apple believes people will want from these devices. An external monitor was at the top of the list in all of Apple’s messaging on stage and in my discussions afterwards. They believe that there is a certain segment of Pro users that will benefit greatly from running an extended (not just mirrored) display up to 5K resolution.

In addition, there are a bunch of musical instruments and artist’s peripherals that will connect directly now. There’s even a chance (but not an official one) that the port could provide some externally powered accessories with enough juice to function.

The port now serves a full 7.5W to devices plugged in to charge, and you can plug in microphones and other accessories via the USB-C port, though there is no guarantee any of them will get enough power from the port if they previously required external power.

Pretty much all MacBook dongles will work on the iPad Pro by the way. So whatever combos of stuff you’ve come up with will have additional uses here.

The port is USB 3.1 gen 2 capable, making for transfers up to 10GBPS. Practically, what this means for most people is faster transfer from cameras or SD Card readers for photos. Though the iPad Pro does not support mass storage or external hard drive support directly to the Files app, apps that have their own built in browsing can continue to read directly from hard drives and now the transfer speeds will be faster.

There is a USB-C to headphone adapter, for sale separately. It also works with Macs, if that’s something that excites you. The basic answer I got on no headphone jacks, by the way, is that one won’t even fit in the distance from the edge of the screen to the bezel, and that they needed the room for other components anyway.

The new iPad Pro also ships with a new charger brick. It’s a USB-C power adapter that’s brand new to iPad Pro.

A12X and performance

The 1TB model of larger iPad Pro and, I believe, the 1TB version of the smaller iPad Pro, have 6GB of RAM. I believe, according to what I’ve been able to discern, that the models that come with less than 1TB of storage have less than that – around 4GB total. I don’t know how that will affect their performance, because I was not supplied with those models.

The overall performance of the A12X on this iPad Pro though, is top notch. Running many apps at once in split-screen spaces or in slideover mode is no problem, and transitions between apps are incredibly smooth. Drawing and sketching in enormous files in ProCreate was super easy, and I encountered zero chugging across AR applications (buttery smooth), common iPad apps and heavy creative tools. This is going to be very satisfying for people that edit large photos in Lightroom or big video files in iMovie.

The GeekBench benchmarks for this iPad are, predictably, insane. Check out these single-core/multi-core results:

iPad Pro 12.9” 5027 / 18361

MacBook Pro 13” 2018 5137 / 17607

MacBook Pro 15” 2018 6-core  5344 / 22561

iMac 27” 2017 5675 / 19325

As you can see, the era of waiting for desktop class ARM processors to come to the iPad Pro is over. They’re here, and they’re integrated tightly with other Apple designed silicon across the system to achieve Apple’s ends.

There has basically been two prevailing camps on the ARM switch. One side is sure Apple will start slowly, launching one model of MacBook (maybe the literal MacBook) on ARM and dribbling it out to other models. I was solidly in that camp for a long time. After working on the iPad Pro and seeing the performance, both burst and sustained, across many pro applications, I’ve developed doubts.

The results here, and the performance of the iPad Pro really crystalize the fact that Apple can and will ship ARM processors across its whole line as soon as it feels like it wants to.

There are too many times where we have ended up waiting on new Apple hardware due to some vagary of Intel’s supply chain or silicon focus. Apple is sick of it, I’ve heard grumbling for years about this from inside the company, but they’re stuck with Intel as a partner until they make the leap.

At this point, it’s a matter of time, and time is short.

Camera and Face ID

The camera in the iPad Pro is a completely new thing. It uses a new sensor and a new 5 element lens. This new camera had to be built from the ground up because the iPad Pro is too thin to have used the camera from the iPhone XR or XS or even the previous iPads.

This new camera is just fine image quality wise. It offers Smart HDR, which requires support both from the speedy sensor and the Neural Engine in the A12X. It’s interesting that Apple’s camera team decided to do the extra work to provide a decent camera experience, rather than just making the sensor smaller or falling back to an older design that would work with the thickness, or lack thereof.

Interestingly, this new camera system does not deliver portrait mode from the rear camera, like the iPhone XR. It only gives you portrait from the True Depth camera on front.

iPad photography has always gotten a bad rap. It’s been relegated to jokes about dads holding up tablets at soccer games and theme parks. But the fact remains that the iPad Pro’s screen is probably the best viewfinder ever made.

I do hope that some day it gets real feature-for-feature parity with the iPhone, so I have an excuse to go full dad.

Of similar note, both hardware and software updates have been made to the True Depth array on the front of the iPad Pro in order to make it work in the thinner casing. Those changes, along with additional work in neural net training and tweaking, also support Face ID working in all “four” orientations of the iPad Pro. No matter what way is up, it will unlock, and it does so speedily — just as fast as the iPhone XS generation Face ID system, no question.

I also believe that it works at slightly wider angles now, though it may be my imagination. By nature, you’re often further away from the screen on the iPad Pro than you are on your phone, but still, I feel like I can be much more ‘off axis’ to the camera and it still unlocks. This is good news on iPad because you can be in just about any working posture and you’re fine.

Keyboard

Like the Pencil, the Smart Keyboard Folio is an optional accessory. And, like the Pencil, I don’t think you’re really getting the full utility of the iPad Pro without it. There have been times where I’ve written more than 11,000 words at a stretch on iPad for very focused projects, and its ability to be a distraction free word production machine are actually wildly under sung, I feel. There are not many electronic devices better for just crashing out words without much else to get in the way than iPad with a good text editor.

Editing, however, has always been more of a mixed bag. I’m not sure we’re quite there yet with the latest iPad Pro, but it’s a far better scenario for mixed-activity sessions. With the help of the Pencil and the physical keyboard, it is becoming a very livable situation for someone whose work demands rapid context switching and a variety of different activities that require call-and-response feedback.

The keyboard itself is fine. It feels nearly identical to the previous keyboard Apple offered for iPads, and isn’t ideal in terms of key press and pushback, but makes for an ok option that you can get used to.

The design of the folio is something else. It’s very cool, super stable and shows off Apple’s willingness to get good stupid with clever implementation.

A collection of 120 magnets inside the case are arranged in the same Halbach arrays that hold the pencil on. Basically, sets of magnets arranged to point their force outwards. These arrays allow the case to pop on to the iPad Pro with a minimum of fuss and automatically handle the micr-alignment necessary to make sure the the contacts of the smart connector make a good connection to power and communicate with the keyboard.

The grooves that allow for two different positions of upright use are also magnetized, and couple with magnets inside the body of the iPad Pro.

The general effect here is that the Smart Keyboard is much much more stable than previous generations and, I’m happy to report, is approved for lap use. It’s still not going to be quite as stable as a laptop, but you can absolutely slap this on your knees on a train or plane and get work done. That was pretty much impossible with its floppier predecessor.

One big wish for the folio is that it offered an incline that was more friendly to drawing. I know that’s not the purpose of this device specifically, but I found it working so well with Pencil that there was a big hole left by not having an arrangement that would hold the iPad at around the 15-20 degree mark for better leverage and utility while sketching and drawing. I think the addition of another groove and magnet set somewhere on the lower third of the back of the folio would allow for this. I hope to see it appear in the future, though third parties will doubtlessly offer many such cases soon enough for dedicated artists and illustrators.

Design

Though much has been made about the curved corners of the iPad Pro’s casing and the matching curved corners of its screen, the fact is that the device feels much more aggressive in terms of its shape. The edges all fall straight down, instead of back and away, and they’re mated with tight bullnose corners.

The camera bump on the back does not cause the iPad to wobble if you lay it flat on a counter and draw. There’s a basic tripod effect that makes it just fine to scribble on, for those who were worried about that.

The overall aesthetic is much more businesslike and less ‘friendly’ in that very curvy sort of Apple way. I like it, a lot. The flat edges are pretty clearly done that way to let Apple use more of the interior space without having to cede a few millimeters all the way around the edge to unusable space. In every curved iPad, there’s a bit of space all the way around that is pretty much air. Cutting off the chin and forehead of the iPad Pro did a lot to balance the design out and make it more holdable.

There will likely be, and I think justifiably, some comparisons to the design of Microsoft’s Surface Pro and the new blockier design. But the iPads still manage to come in feeling more polished than most of its tablet rivals with details like the matching corner radii, top of the line aluminum finish and super clever use of magnets to keep the exterior free of hooks or latches to attach accessories like the Smart Keyboard.

If you’re debating between the larger and smaller iPad Pro models I can only give you one side of advice here because I was only able to test the new 12.9” model. It absolutely feels better balanced than the previous larger iPad and certainly is smaller than ever for the screen size. It makes the decision about whether to mov e up in size a much closer one than it ever has been before. Handling the smaller Pro in person at the event last week was nice, but I can’t make a call on how it is to live with. This one feels pretty great though, and certainly portable in a way that the last large iPad Pro never did – that thing was a bit of a whale, and made it hard to justify bringing along. This one is smaller than my 13” MacBook Pro and much thinner.

Screen

The iPhone XR’s pixel masking technique is also at work on the iPad Pro’s screen, giving it rounded corners. The LCD screen has also gained tap-to-wake functionality, which is used to great effect by the Pencil, but can also be used with a finger to bring the screen to life. Promotion, Apple’s 120hz refresh technology, is aces here, and works well with the faster processor to keep the touch experience as close to 1:1 as possible.

The color rendition and sharpness of this LCD are beyond great, and its black levels only show poorly against an OLED because of the laws of physics. It also exhibits the issue I first noticed in the iPhone XR, where it darkens ever so slightly at the edges due to the localized dimming effect of the pixel gating Apple is using to get an edge-to-edge LCD. Otherwise this is one of the better LCD screens ever made in my opinion, and now it has less bezel and fun rounded corners — plus no notch. What’s not to like?

Conclusion

In my opinion, if you want an iPad to do light work as a pure touch device, get yourself a regular iPad. The iPad Pro is an excellent tablet, but really shines when it’s paired with a Pencil and/or keyboard. Having the ability to bash out a long passage of text or scribble on the screen is a really nice addition to the iPad’s capabilities.

But the power and utility of the iPad Pro comes into highest relief when you pair it with a Pencil.

There has been endless debate about the role of tablets with keyboards in the pantheon of computing devices. Are they laptop replacements? Are they tablets with dreams of grandiosity? Will anyone ever stop using the phrase 2-in-1 to refer to these things?

And the iPad hasn’t exactly done a lot to dispel the confusion. During different periods of its life cycle it has taken on many of these roles, both through the features it has shipped with and through the messaging of Apple’s marketing arm and well-rehearsed on-stage presentations.

One basic summary of the arena is that Microsoft has been working at making laptops into tablets, Apple has been working on making tablets into laptops and everyone else has been doing weird ass shit.

Microsoft still hasn’t been able (come at me) to ever get it through their heads that they needed to start by cutting the head off of their OS and building tablet first, then walking backwards. I think now Microsoft is probably much more capable than then Microsoft, but that’s probably another whole discussion.

Apple went and cut the head off of OS X at the very beginning, and has been very slowly walking in the other direction ever since. But the fact remains that no Surface Pro has ever offered a tablet experience anywhere near as satisfying as an iPad’s.

Yes, it may offer more flexibility, but it comes at the cost of unity and reliably functionality. Just refrigerator toasters all the way down.

THAT SAID. I still don’t think Apple is doing enough in software to support the speed and versatility that is provided by the hardware in the iPad Pro. While split screening apps and creating ‘spaces’ that remain in place to bounce between has been a nice evolution of the iPad OS, it’s really only a fraction of what is possible.

And I think even more than hardware, Apple’s iPad users are being underestimated here. We’re on 8 years of iPad and 10 years of iPhone. An entire generation of people already uses these devices as their only computers. My wife hasn’t owned a computer outside an iPad and phone for 15 years and she’s not even among the most aggressive adopters of mobile first.

Apple needs to unleash itself from the shackles of a unified iOS. They don’t have to feel exactly the same now, because the user base is not an infantile one. They’ve been weaned on it — now give them solid food.

The Pencil, to me, stands out as the bright spot in all of this. Yes, Apple is starting predictably slow with its options for the double tap gesture. But third party apps like Procreate show that there will be incredible opportunities long term to make the Pencil the mouse for the tablet generation.

I think the stylus was never the right choice for the first near decade of iPad, and it still isn’t mandatory for many of its uses. But the additional power of a context-driven radial menu or right option at the right time means that the Pencil could absolutely be the key to unlocking an interface that somehow blends the specificity of mouse-driven computing with the gestural and fluidity of touch-driven interfaces.

I’m sure there are Surface Pro users out there rolling their eyes while holding their Surface Pens – but, adequate though they are, they are not Pencils. And more importantly, they are not supported by the insane work Apple has done on the iPad to make the Pencil feel more than first party.

And, because of the (sometimes circuitous and languorous) route that Apple took to get here, you can actually still detach the keyboard and set down the Pencil and get an incredible tablet-based experience with the iPad Pro.

If Apple is able to let go a bit and execute better on making sure the software feels as flexible and ‘advanced’ as the hardware, the iPad  Pro has legs. If it isn’t able to do that, then the iPad will remain a dead end. But I have hope. In the shape of an expensive ass pencil.

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The 10 Best YouTube Channels for Wacky Science Experiments

We’re sure most people have put a packet of Mentos in Diet Coke and enjoyed the ensuing carnage by this point. But in terms of science experiments you can do at home, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

If you like watching weird and wacky science experiments, YouTube is a treasure trove of content. With that in mind, here are the best YouTube channels full of people doing madcap science experiments.

1. Doctor Mad Science

Have you ever wondered what happens if you put a grape in the microwave? Or what happens if you combine milk and soap? Doctor Mad Science has the answers.

A 15-year-old autistic boy called Jordan hosts the channel. Impressively, in addition to hosting, Jordan also records and edits all of the content.

His channel is filled with science experiments that use household products, meaning anyone can try them in their own home. Just make sure you take appropriate safety measures before starting!

2. Brusspup

The Brusspup channel goes in a different direction. It explores the boundaries between science and amazing optical illusions.

If you subscribe, you can look forward to finding out what happens when UV light hits sand or how to control magnets using static electricity.

One of the channel’s most popular videos (with almost 30 million views) is “10 Amazing Paper Tricks”. It’s impressive stuff, so make sure you check it out.

3. Whizz Kid Science

Whizz Kid Science is another channel that’s hosted by a child. The presenter is 13, but he often ropes in his younger brother and sister in be part of whatever experiment he is conducting.

Some of the channel’s most-watched videos include “Five Amazing Egg Experiments” and “Top Seven Colorful Experiments”.

The Whizz Kid Science channel also features a handful of how-to videos that straddle the divide between science and children’s activities. Examples include “How to Make Chocolate Slime” and “Glow Stick Hacks for Kids”.

Note: The same child is also responsible for the excellent Whizz Kid Math and Whizz Kid Play channels.

4. Incredible Science

Kids love a fad. It doesn’t matter how old you are; you’ll definitely be able to recall something from your childhood that everyone badly wanted then quickly got bored with (Tamagotchi, anyone?).

The Incredible Science channel aims to put those fad products to good use by extrapolating science lessons from them. We had no idea that a fidget spinner could be such a great learning tool.

There are also plenty of other experiments that don’t use toys. The most viewed video investigates the weird science behind polymer balls. At the time of writing it has been viewed more than 70 million times.

5. MC Experiments

If you have kids, the kitchen is a fantastic place to do science. There are so many things that you can combine to learn more about the world.

The MC Experiments channel takes the kitchen idea and runs with it. All the experiments on the channel are kid-friendly and can be performed using items that most families will have lying around.

Bouncing eggs, lava in a cup, and fun with food coloring—the channel has it all.

6. The Quirkles

The Quirkles is a 26-book science series for kids. Each book featured a different imaginary scientist who takes the reader on a journey through the subject matter. The YouTube channel is a spinoff from the book series.

It differs from the other channels on this list thanks to its focus on seasonal science. You’ll see experiments geared towards the time of year, but also towards events such as Halloween and Valentine’s Day.

7. Sick Science

Sick Science is the brainchild of Steve Spangler. Steve is an American TV personality, science teacher, toy designer, and author, meaning he’s well-placed to perform some entertaining weird and wacky science experiments.

Some of his most fun videos include “Liquid Light”, “Exploding Egg”, and “Make Your Own Lightsaber”.

Unfortunately, Spangler is slow to release new videos, so you can expect just a couple per year. Nonetheless, the back catalog is impressive enough.

8. The Spangler Effect

The clue is in the name. The Spangler Effect is Steve Spangler’s second YouTube channel. Thankfully, this one receives new content far more frequently—you’ll get at least eight new videos every month.

The content is broadly similar to Sick Science. If you want to see fire tornadoes, fizzy reaction contests, colorful convection currents, and magnetic slime, this is the channel for you.

The most viewed video on the channel is an experiment that shows you how it’s possible to unlock a car using nothing more than water. It has racked up 4.2 million views and counting.

9. The Backyard Scientist

It’s fair to say that The Backyard Scientist channel should come with a giant “Do Not Try This at Home” warning.

But, while the channel’s videos might be somewhat dangerous, they’re also packed with incredible science and wild experiments.

Honestly, we’d never given a thought to what happens when you pour molten aluminum into a watermelon before, but now we’re glad we know.

Other examples of what to expect include putting molten salt into water, what happens if you microwave a microwave, and whether someone can escape a human-sized glue trap.

10. Applied Science

Our final recommendation is Applied Science. It’s slightly less wacky than some of the other channels on this list, but the experiments are still fun and will teach you a lot.

If you subscribe, you’ll be able to learn what happens if you blow mold over plastic bottles or dissolve lithium in anhydrous ammonia. The channel’s most popular video looks at how to make a refrigerator work using rubber bands.

There are even some videos for foodies (which you can watch when you run out of Netflix documentaries for foodies). You can find out how a potato chip reacts if you fry it in Fluorinert FC-40 or how to make chocolate whip using high-pressure nitrous oxide.

Improve Your Scientific Knowledge Further

These channels will hopefully inspire you to get more involved with science. And they’re a reminder that science doesn’t have to be dry and boring.

If you’d like to further your scientific knowledge, the internet is a fantastic resource. To learn more, check out our articles listing apps that explain complex science topics and sites to keep abreast of the latest science news.

Read the full article: The 10 Best YouTube Channels for Wacky Science Experiments

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What Does Apple Know About You? Request Your Personal Data Now

Apple now makes it easy to download a copy of the data associated with your Apple ID. Once you’ve lodged your request, the company will prepare your archives of personal data and notify you when they’re ready.

The service helps you understand what data Apple is storing against your Apple ID. You can also use it to grab a copy of your iCloud data, including mail, photos, and documents.

So here’s how you request your own download, and everything you get.

What Data Can You Download From Apple?

You can choose which data associated with your account that you want to download. Apple lets you choose from the following categories:

• App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store and Apple Music activity
• Apple ID account and device information
• Game Center activity
• Maps issues you’ve reported
• Marketing communications, downloads, and other activity
• Apple Pay activity
• Apple Online Store and Retail Store activity
• AppleCare support history, repair requests and more
• Other data

You can also choose the following iCloud data to be included:

• iCloud Bookmarks and Reading List
• iCloud Calendars and Reminders
• iCloud Notes
• iCloud Contacts
• iCloud Drive files and documents
• iCloud Mail
• iCloud Photos

Some of this information stored by Apple for Apple’s benefit, while other categories are your own data, contacts, photos and so on.

How to Request Your Apple Data Download

Requesting your Apple data download is easy. First head to privacy.apple.com and log in with your Apple ID username (email address) and password.

Once you’ve logged in you’ll see the “Manage your data” screen, and at the top of the list will be an option to Obtain a copy of your data. Click Get started to begin.

Now you’re able to specify exactly what you want to download. You can click Select all to grab a copy of everything, or just pick from the categories that interest you. Note the separate section at the bottom of the page with the warning about potentially large file sizes.

Click Continue when you’re ready.

On the next screen you’ll be able to specify how large you want your files to be. Apple will split your data download into files of this size, so you can download them in smaller chunks (handy for slower, patchier connections). Click Complete request to finalize your selection and sit back.

Apple will then email you at the address associated with your Apple ID. You should also receive an email notifying you that your request is pending. Apple sent an email to both my Apple ID associated email address, and my iCloud email address.

How Long Does the Download Take to Prepare?

I requested my download for all items except big iCloud libraries on the 18th, and received an email on the 22nd stating that the download was ready.

Selecting more or fewer items may impact the time it takes Apple to process your request, but expect to wait a few days at least.

What You Get in the Apple Data Download

Once Apple notifies you that your download is ready, login to privacy.apple.com (or follow the link in your email). You should now see a new green notification to the right of the “Manage your data” screen. Click Get your data to see a list of items for download.

You can download each data category independently. Since the download will only be available for around two weeks, make sure you download what you want before it’s deleted and you have to make another request.

Most of the data is stored in CSV spreadsheet files (that formatted perfectly using Preview on my Mac). The contents are detailed, but unsurprising. I found a list of every song I’ve ever listened to on Apple music, my musical likes and dislikes, and both free and paid App Store purchase history.

There’s information about all your linked Apple devices, including names, time zones, and the last registered IP address associated with that device. I also found a folder with Apple retail store receipts, which included an invoice for a repair covered by AppleCare, but no invoice for the original MacBook Pro transaction in 2012.

I excluded mail, photos, and iCloud Drive files from my download, but included everything else. The total download size was under 100MB, with the largest download being Apple Notes on account of included attachments.

The vaguely-titled “Other Data” download included a list of “favorite” places in Apple Maps (it was thin, and I don’t remember using the feature), my Safari browsing history, call history, a list of known Wi-Fi networks associated with my account, and a long list of iCloud usage events (adding contacts, uploading photos) and the device associated with each one.

Ultimately none of this should surprise you, since it’s all disclosed in the terms of service you agreed to when you started using your Apple ID (and the many amendments since). You did read that big long terms of service document, right? You can read about how Apple uses this data on their privacy information page.

How to Deactivate or Delete Your Apple ID

Apple’s privacy minisite also allows you to deactivate and delete your Apple ID should you no longer need it. Deactivation is a temporary measure, and will mean that you cannot use any Apple services associated with that account.

Deleting your account is permanent, but it’s also the only way to delete your data from Apple’s servers. You’ll have to register for a new account if you want to start afresh.

Stay in Control of Your Personal Data

Downloading your data will help you understand what data is held against your account. Never give someone else your Apple ID login information, since they could potentially get hold of everything in this download.

Apple isn’t the only company that makes it easy to get a copy of your data. Social media giant Facebook allows you to download your profile data too, and it generally doesn’t take as long as Apple’s download to prepare.

Read the full article: What Does Apple Know About You? Request Your Personal Data Now

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