Your AirPods Aren’t Waterproof, But Here’s What You Can Do

Your AirPods are not waterproof. You should avoid wearing them in the shower, in the swimming pool, or even in the rain. If you have AirPods Pro, they might be water resistant, but they don’t stay that way forever so you’re always better off safe than sorry.

Still, no matter how hard we try, sometimes it’s impossible to avoid getting your AirPods wet. If that happens, you need to know how to dry them off safely and you probably want to know how to protect them from water in the future. Keep reading to find out.

Waterproof vs. Water Resistant

When a device is waterproof, it’s impossible for water to get inside and cause damage. This is the case no matter how long that device is underwater or how deep it goes. None of Apple’s AirPods are waterproof.

In contrast, a water-resistant device only stops water from getting inside for a limited time or at limited depths. We measure water resistance using the IP rating system.

Standard AirPods are not water resistant at all, but AirPods Pro have a water-resistance rating of IPX4. This is quite a low rating; it means Apple only designed the AirPods Pro to withstand small splashes of water, such as rain or sweat.

Unfortunately, water-resistant seals degrade over time, which means the AirPods Pro become less water resistant as they age. There’s no way to find out if a water-resistant seal still works or not and there’s no way to re-seal it either. So the older your water-resistant devices get, the more careful you should be with them.

Are My AirPods Water Resistant?

There are no waterproof AirPods, and only the AirPods Pro are water resistant. You should still avoid getting AirPods Pro wet on purpose, but they should survive the odd splash.

The original AirPods or AirPods (2nd generation) aren’t waterproof or water resistant at all, so don’t ever let them get wet.

The same is true of any AirPods charging case. Even the AirPods Pro charging case isn’t water resistant due to the metal connectors inside. You might want to use a Catalyst waterproof AirPod case to keep your charging case and the AirPods inside it dry at all times.

What Can I Do With My Water-Resistant AirPods Pro?

Although your AirPods Pro are water resistant, you still shouldn’t let them get wet on purpose. The water-resistant seals will deteriorate eventually, which means even a splash of water could damage your AirPods Pro in the future.

Since a lot of people ask these questions, here are some common activities you can not do with your AirPods or AirPods Pro, even though they are water resistant:

• Do not:
  • swim with them
  • shower with them
  • wear them in heavy rain
  • use them while doing water sports
  • let them go in the washing machine
  • take them into a sauna or steam room

Your AirPods Pro should be okay in light rain or if you sweat on them at the gym. But you still need to make sure you dry them properly before returning them to the case.

What to Do If Your AirPods Get Wet

Whether you have standard AirPods or water-resistant AirPods Pro, you need to carefully dry them whenever they get wet. Make sure you dry your AirPods before returning them to the charging case, so you don’t damage the case.

If your AirPods are wet, wipe off any excess water using a dry, lint-free cloth. We suggest a microfiber cloth for this, although you could use a cotton swab to dry the small ports.

Then leave your AirPods out in the open for at least two hours to let them air dry. Don’t use them during this time and if possible, leave your AirPods to dry overnight. The best spots to leave your AirPods are those cool, dry places with a gentle airflow.

Regardless of what other people say, you shouldn’t put your AirPods in a bag of rice to dry them. This isn’t any more effective than the open air and can lead to bits of rice getting stuck in the various ports and holes.

You should also avoid extremely hot or cold temperatures. Don’t put your AirPods on a radiator and don’t use a blow dryer to try and speed up the process. Doing so could easily cause your AirPods to overheat and damage the circuitry inside.

If you get your AirPods charging case wet, remove the AirPods and stand the case upside down with the lid open to let it dry. Again, you should allow at least a couple of hours for it to dry, preferably more.

If You Get Anything Other Than Water on Your AirPods

Different liquids can damage your AirPods in different ways. Solvents or lotions can eat away at the water-resistant seals, soda forms a sticky residue that blocks the speaker, coffee can stain the white plastic, and seawater might leave a salt residue when it dries.

If you get anything other than clean water on your AirPods, wipe them down with a damp cloth to remove it before letting your AirPods dry. When using a damp cloth, be careful not to get more liquid inside your AirPods.

If you still can’t remove the dirty liquid, try other ways to clean your AirPods instead.

How to Avoid Water Damage to Your AirPods

If your AirPods get wet, there’s no guarantee they’ll keep working even when you follow the instructions above to dry them. Sometimes, water affects your AirPods instantly, other times it slowly rusts the circuits over weeks or months.

Whatever happens, you’ll need to pay out of pocket to replace your AirPods if they stop working. Apple doesn’t cover water damage under the warranty, not even for water-resistant AirPods Pro.

Follow these extra tips to keep your AirPods as safe as possible:

• Don’t leave your AirPods on wet surfaces
• Put your AirPods away when it starts to rain
• Keep your AirPods away from people’s drinks
• Check your pockets before putting clothes in the wash
• Keep your AirPods in the case when you aren’t using them
• Avoid dropping or crushing your AirPods to keep the water-resistant seals intact
• Immediately remove makeup, perfume, sun lotion, or other substances that get on your AirPods

Accessorize Your AirPods to Keep Them Protected

If you’re worried because your AirPods aren’t waterproof, look into buying a waterproof charging case or AirPod ear hooks to keep them protected. The waterproof charging case keeps your AirPods dry when you aren’t using them, while the ear hooks stop them falling out of your ears and into a puddle.

But why stop there?

There are loads of great AirPods accessories you can use to improve your AirPods in other ways. You might enjoy a charging dock, a wireless transmitter, or a strap to keep your AirPods together. Whatever your fancy, you can find it online.

Read the full article: Your AirPods Aren’t Waterproof, But Here’s What You Can Do

Read Full Article

FTC votes to review influencer marketing rules & penalties

Undisclosed influencer marketing posts on social media should trigger financial penalties, according to a statement released today by the Federal Trade Commission’s Rohit Chopra. The FTC has just voted 5-0 to approve a Federal Register notice calling for public comments on questions related to whether The Endorsement Guides for advertising need to be updated.

“When companies launder advertising by paying an influencer to pretend that their endorsement or review is untainted by a financial relationship, this is illegal payola” Chopra writes. “The FTC will need to determine whether to create new requirements for social media platforms and advertisers and whether to activate civil penalty liability.”

Currently the non-binding Endorsement Guides stipulate that “when there is a connection between an endorser and a seller of an advertised product that could affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement, the connection must be clearly and conspicuously disclosed.” In the case of social media, that means creators need to note their post is part of an “ad”, “sponsored” content, or “paid partnership”.

But Chopra wants the FTC to consider making those rules official by “Codifying elements of the existing endorsement guides into formal rules so that violators can be liable for civil penalties under Section 5(m)(1)(A) and liable for damages under Section 19”. He cites weak enforcement to date, noting that in the case of department store Lord & Taylor not insisting 50 paid influencers specify their posts were sponsored, “the Commission settled the matter for no customer refunds, no forfeiture of ill-gotten gains, no notice to consumers, no deletion of wrongfully obtained personal data, and no findings or admission of liability.”

Strangely, Chopra fixates on Instagram’s Branded Content Ads that let marketers pay to turn by posts by influencers tagging brands into ads. However, these ads include a clear “Sponsored. Paid partnership with [brand]” and seem to meet all necessary disclosure requirements. He also mentions concerns about sponcon on YouTube and TikTok.

Additional targets of the FTC’s review will be use of fake or incentivized reviews. It’s seeking public comment on whether free or discounted products influence reviews and should require disclosure, how to handle affiliate links, and whether warnings should be posted by advertisers or review sites about incentivized reviews. It also wants to know about how influencer marketing affects and is understood by children.

Chopra wisely suggests the FTC focus on the platforms and advertisers who are earning tons of money from potentially undisclosed influencer marketing, rather than the smaller influencers themselves who might not be as well versed in the law and are just trying to hustle. “When individual influencers are able to post about their interests to earn extra money on the side, this is not a cause for major concern” he writes, but “when we do not hold lawbreaking companies accountable, this harms every honest business looking to compete fairly.”

While many of the social media platforms have moved to self-police with rules about revealing paid partnerships, there remain gray areas around incentives like free clothes or discount rates. Codifying what constitutes incentivized endorsement, formally demanding social media platforms to implement policies and features for disclosure, and making influencer marketing contracts state that participation must be disclosed would all be sensible updates.

Society has enough trouble with misinformation on the Internet from trolls to election meddlers. They should at least be able to trust that if someone says they love their new jacket, they didn’t secretly get paid for it.

Read Full Article

FTC votes to review influencer marketing rules & penalties

Undisclosed influencer marketing posts on social media should trigger financial penalties, according to a statement released today by the Federal Trade Commission’s Rohit Chopra. The FTC has just voted 5-0 to approve a Federal Register notice calling for public comments on questions related to whether The Endorsement Guides for advertising need to be updated.

“When companies launder advertising by paying an influencer to pretend that their endorsement or review is untainted by a financial relationship, this is illegal payola” Chopra writes. “The FTC will need to determine whether to create new requirements for social media platforms and advertisers and whether to activate civil penalty liability.”

Currently the non-binding Endorsement Guides stipulate that “when there is a connection between an endorser and a seller of an advertised product that could affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement, the connection must be clearly and conspicuously disclosed.” In the case of social media, that means creators need to note their post is part of an “ad”, “sponsored” content, or “paid partnership”.

But Chopra wants the FTC to consider making those rules official by “Codifying elements of the existing endorsement guides into formal rules so that violators can be liable for civil penalties under Section 5(m)(1)(A) and liable for damages under Section 19”. He cites weak enforcement to date, noting that in the case of department store Lord & Taylor not insisting 50 paid influencers specify their posts were sponsored, “the Commission settled the matter for no customer refunds, no forfeiture of ill-gotten gains, no notice to consumers, no deletion of wrongfully obtained personal data, and no findings or admission of liability.”

Strangely, Chopra fixates on Instagram’s Branded Content Ads that let marketers pay to turn by posts by influencers tagging brands into ads. However, these ads include a clear “Sponsored. Paid partnership with [brand]” and seem to meet all necessary disclosure requirements. He also mentions concerns about sponcon on YouTube and TikTok.

Additional targets of the FTC’s review will be use of fake or incentivized reviews. It’s seeking public comment on whether free or discounted products influence reviews and should require disclosure, how to handle affiliate links, and whether warnings should be posted by advertisers or review sites about incentivized reviews. It also wants to know about how influencer marketing affects and is understood by children.

Chopra wisely suggests the FTC focus on the platforms and advertisers who are earning tons of money from potentially undisclosed influencer marketing, rather than the smaller influencers themselves who might not be as well versed in the law and are just trying to hustle. “When individual influencers are able to post about their interests to earn extra money on the side, this is not a cause for major concern” he writes, but “when we do not hold lawbreaking companies accountable, this harms every honest business looking to compete fairly.”

While many of the social media platforms have moved to self-police with rules about revealing paid partnerships, there remain gray areas around incentives like free clothes or discount rates. Codifying what constitutes incentivized endorsement, formally demanding social media platforms to implement policies and features for disclosure, and making influencer marketing contracts state that participation must be disclosed would all be sensible updates.

Society has enough trouble with misinformation on the Internet from trolls to election meddlers. They should at least be able to trust that if someone says they love their new jacket, they didn’t secretly get paid for it.

Read Full Article

GMSA cancels Mobile World Congress due to coronavirus concerns

The GSMA, the organization behind MWC, the world’s largest mobile trade show, has announced that it is officially canceling the show. MWC usually attracts over 100,000 attendees from 200 countries to Barcelona. This year’s show was supposed to take place on February 24-27.

Several publications received a statement about the cancellation. “The GSMA has cancelled MWC Barcelona 2020 because the global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel concern and other circumstances, make it impossible for the GSMA to hold the event,” GSMA CEO John Hoffman told Bloomberg and the Financial Times. El Diario, El País and La Vanguardia also report that the show has been canceled.

The GSMA has now published a statement confirming its decision to cancel — writing:

Since the first edition of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2006, the GSMA has convened the industry, governments, ministers, policymakers, operators and industry leaders across the broader ecosystem.

With due regard to the safe and healthy environment in Barcelona and the host country today, the GSMA has cancelled MWC Barcelona 2020 because the global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel concern and other circumstances, make it impossible for the GSMA to hold the event.

The Host City Parties respect and understand this decision.

The GSMA and the Host City Parties will continue to be working in unison and supporting each other for MWC Barcelona 2021 and future editions.

Our sympathies at this time are with those affected in China, and all around the world.

Further updates from the GSMA, are on our website and can be found on www.mwcbarcelona.com.

Over the past few days, dozens of big names announced that they would skip this year’s show. LG first announced that it wouldn’t attend the trade show, citing safety concerns related to the coronavirus outbreak. Nvidia and Ericsson followed suit.

On Sunday, the GSMA sent a long coronavirus-related email to registered attendees. The association wanted to reassure attendees by demonstrating that it would implement tough restrictions.

Here’s what GSMA CEO John Hoffman wrote:

• All travellers from the Hubai province will not be permitted access to the event
• MWC Barcelona, Four Years From Now (4YFN), xside and YoMo
• All travellers who have been in China will need to demonstrate proof they have been outside of China 14 days prior to the event (passport stamp, health certificate)
• Temperature screening will be implemented
• Attendees will need to self-certify they have not been in contact with anyone infected.

But that email made things even worse.

Dozens of companies pulled out of the trade show. In other words, some of the top consumer electronics and telecom companies got scared. And those who thought that GSMA had things under control started to cancel their attendance as well — it wasn’t worth going to Barcelona if many important partners had already canceled.

Some of the companies that announced they wouldn’t be attending include Amazon, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Facebook, HMD, Intel, LG, Nokia, NTT Docomo, Sony and Sprint.

GSMA’s lawyers wanted to make sure that the association wouldn’t be held accountable if there was a single case of coronavirus at the show. But they started another virus — companies pulling out one by one.

A list of MWC coronavirus cancellations so far: Nokia, Facebook, AT&T, Sprint, Intel now also staying away

As companies usually spend millions of dollars to secure exhibit space and send large teams, canceling MWC altogether is going to be an unexpected financial blow for the GSMA.

According to a report from El País, the GSMA originally planned to meet on Friday and consider the next steps. The association held an emergency meeting earlier today in order to take a decision more quickly.

MWC originally started as a trade show for carriers. Big telecom companies would meet up with hardware vendors and discuss the evolution of telecommunications networks. More recently, phone manufacturers started attending the show to talk with telecom companies and unveil their latest products. Big tech companies, such as Facebook and Amazon, have also had a formal presence in recent years as they have developed important ties with the mobile industry.

According to the World Health Organization, there are over 43,000 cases of coronavirus around the world. Over 1,000 people have died.

Read Full Article

Andy Rubin’s Essential shuts down

Essential was supposed to disrupt the smartphone industry. And when it was done with that, it was coming for the smart home. The company came out of stealth with a $330 million funding round and grandiose plans for a new brand of handset, led by none other than Android head, Andy Rubin.

But bad timing, broader industry issues and a founder embroiled in some pretty troubling allegations of sexual misconduct contributed to a company that has struggled to make it far beyond the launch of its first handset. In a blog post today, Essential announced that it would be ceasing operations and shutting down.

The post is a strange mix of existential dread and hopefulness, unveiling a final device it was never able to launch in the process. “Our vision was to invent a mobile computing paradigm that more seamlessly integrated with people’s lifestyle needs,” the ‘Essential team’ writes. “Despite our best efforts, we’ve now taken Gem as far as we can and regrettably have no clear path to deliver it to customers. Given this, we have made the difficult decision to cease operations and shutdown Essential.”

That’s all a nod to Project Gem, a new mobile form factor Essential first showcased through renders on social media back in October. The post features the first product videos for Gem, set to a kind of moody acid jazz soundtrack showcasing the skinny candy bar form factor that plays out as a sort of alternative history insight into what might have been, had things gone better for a company once valued at $1 billion.

The news follows years of speculation about the health of the company. In May 2018, reports surfaced that Essential was up for sale following disappointing sales of its first handset. Spokespeople for Essential have long insisted, however, that the company was carrying on in spite of reports. The Project Gem reveal, it seems, was a Hail Mary that turned into a parting shot. What “taken Gem as far as we can” means with regard to a product that didn’t make it beyond the promotional video stage remains to be seen.

TechCrunch reached out to Essential for further comment, but we were ultimately directed to the initial blog post. The same month Gem was revealed, news surfaced that Rubin had been bought out of his Playground incubator, which shared closed ties — and an office — with Essential.

The executive had become a liability following explosive allegations of sexual misconduct during his time at Google. 

Read Full Article

Learning to See Transparent Objects

Posted by Shreeyak Sajjan, Research Engineer, Synthesis AI and Andy Zeng, Research Scientist, Robotics at Google

Optical 3D range sensors, like RGB-D cameras and LIDAR, have found widespread use in robotics to generate rich and accurate 3D maps of the environment, from self-driving cars to autonomous manipulators. However, despite the ubiquity of these complex robotic systems, transparent objects (like a glass container) can confound even a suite of expensive sensors that are commonly used. This is because optical 3D sensors are driven by algorithms that assume all surfaces are Lambertian, i.e., they reflect light evenly in all directions, resulting in a uniform surface brightness from all viewing angles. However, transparent objects violate this assumption, since their surfaces both refract and reflect light. Hence, most of the depth data from transparent objects are invalid or contain unpredictable noise.

Transparent objects often fail to be detected by optical 3D sensors. Top, Right: For instance, glass bottles do not show up in the 3D depth imagery captured from an Intel® RealSense™ D415 RGB-D camera. Bottom: A 3D visualization via point clouds constructed from the depth image.

Enabling machines to better sense transparent surfaces would not only improve safety, but could also open up a range of new interactions in unstructured applications — from robots handling kitchenware or sorting plastics for recycling, to navigating indoor environments or generating AR visualizations on glass tabletops.

To address this problem, we teamed up with researchers from Synthesis AI and Columbia University to develop ClearGrasp, a machine learning algorithm that is capable of estimating accurate 3D data of transparent objects from RGB-D images. This is made possible by a large-scale synthetic dataset that we are also releasing publicly today. ClearGrasp can work with inputs from any standard RGB-D camera, using deep learning to accurately reconstruct the depth of transparent objects and generalize to completely new objects unseen during training. This in contrast to previous methods, which required prior knowledge of the transparent objects (e.g., their 3D models), often combined with maps of background lighting and camera positions. In this work, we also demonstrate that ClearGrasp can benefit robotic manipulation by incorporating it into our pick and place robot’s control system, where we observe significant improvements in the grasping success rate of transparent plastic objects.

ClearGrasp uses deep learning to recover accurate 3D depth data of transparent surfaces.

A Visual Dataset of Transparent Objects
Massive quantities of data are required to train any effective deep learning model (e.g., ImageNet for vision or Wikipedia for BERT), and ClearGrasp is no exception. Unfortunately, no datasets are available with 3D data of transparent objects. Existing 3D datasets like Matterport3D or ScanNet overlook transparent surfaces, because they require expensive and time-consuming labeling processes.

To overcome this issue, we created our own large-scale dataset of transparent objects that contains more than 50,000 photorealistic renders with corresponding surface normals (representing the surface curvature), segmentation masks, edges, and depth, useful for training a variety of 2D and 3D detection tasks. Each image contains up to five transparent objects, either on a flat ground plane or inside a tote, with various backgrounds and lighting.

Some example data of transparent objects from the ClearGrasp synthetic dataset.

We also include a test set of 286 real-world images with corresponding ground truth depth. The real-world images were taken by a painstaking process of replacing each transparent object in the scene with a painted one in the same pose. The images are captured under a number of different indoor lighting conditions, using various cloth and veneer backgrounds and containing random opaque objects scattered around the scene. They contain both known objects, present in the synthetic training set, and novel objects.

Left: The real-world image capturing setup, Middle: Custom user interface enables precisely replacing each transparent object with a spray-painted duplicate, Right: Example of captured data.

The Challenge
While the distorted view of the background seen through transparent objects confounds typical depth estimation approaches, there are clues that hint at the objects’ shape. Transparent surfaces exhibit specular reflections, which are mirror-like reflections that show up as bright spots in a well-lit environment. Since these visual cues are prominent in RGB images and are influenced primarily by the shape of the objects, convolutional neural networks can use these reflections to infer accurate surface normals, which then can be used for depth estimation.

Specular reflections on transparent objects create distinct features that vary based on the object shape and provide strong visual cues for estimating surface normals.

Most machine learning algorithms try to directly estimate depth from a monocular RGB image. However, monocular depth estimation is an ill-posed task, even for humans. We observed large errors in estimating the depth of flat background surfaces, which compounds the error in depth estimates for the transparent objects resting atop them. Therefore, rather than directly estimating the depth of all geometry, we conjectured that correcting the initial depth estimates from an RGB-D 3D camera is more practical — it would enable us to use the depth from the non-transparent surfaces to inform the depth of transparent surfaces.

The ClearGrasp Algorithm
ClearGrasp uses 3 neural networks: a network to estimate surface normals, one for occlusion boundaries (depth discontinuities), and one that masks transparent objects. The mask is used to remove all pixels belonging to transparent objects, so that the correct depths can be filled in. We then use a global optimization module that starts extending the depth from known surfaces, using the predicted surface normals to guide the shape of the reconstruction, and the predicted occlusion boundaries to maintain the separation between distinct objects.

Overview of our method. The point cloud was generated using the output depth and is colored with its surface normals.

Each of the neural networks was trained on our synthetic dataset and they performed well on real-world transparent objects. However, the surface normal estimations for other surfaces, like walls or fruits, were poor. This is because of the limitations of our synthetic dataset, which contains only transparent objects on a ground plane. To alleviate this issue, we included some real indoor scenes from the Matterport3D and ScanNet datasets in the surface normals training loop. By training on both the in-domain synthetic dataset and out-of-domain real word dataset, the model performed well on all surfaces in our test set.

Surface Normal estimation on real images when trained on a) Matterport3D and ScanNet only (MP+SN), b) our synthetic dataset only, and c) MP+SN as well as our synthetic dataset. Note how the model trained on MP+SN fails to detect the transparent objects. The model trained on only synthetic data picks up the real plastic bottles remarkably well, but fails for other objects and surfaces. When trained on both, our model gets the best of both worlds.

Results
Overall, our quantitative experiments show that ClearGrasp is able to reconstruct depth for transparent objects with much higher fidelity than alternative methods. Despite being trained on only synthetic transparent objects, we find our models are able to adapt well to the real-world domain — achieving very similar quantitative reconstruction performance on known objects across domains. Our models also generalize well to novel objects with complex shapes never seen before.

To check the qualitative performance of ClearGrasp, we construct 3D point clouds from the input and output depth images, as shown below (additional examples available on the project webpage). The resulting estimated 3D surfaces have clean and coherent reconstructed shapes — important for applications, such as 3D mapping and 3D object detection — without the jagged noise seen in monocular depth estimation methods. Our models are robust and perform well in challenging conditions, such as identifying transparent objects situated in a patterned background or differentiating between transparent objects partially occluding one another.

Qualitative results on real images. Top two rows: results on known objects. Bottom two rows: results on novel objects. The point clouds, colored with their surface normals, are generated from the corresponding depth images.

Most importantly, the output depth from ClearGrasp can be directly used as input to state-of-the-art manipulation algorithms that use RGB-D images. By using ClearGrasp’s output depth estimates instead of the raw sensor data, our grasping algorithm on a UR5 robot arm saw significant improvements in the grasping success rates of transparent objects. When using the parallel-jaw gripper, the success rate improved from a baseline of 12% to 74%, and from 64% to 86% with suction.

Manipulation of novel transparent objects using ClearGrasp. Note the challenging conditions: textureless background, complex object shapes and the directional light causing confusing shadows and caustics (the patterns of light that occur when light rays are reflected or refracted from a surface).

Limitations & Future Work
A limitation of our synthetic dataset is that it does not represent accurate caustics, due to the limitations of rendering with traditional path-tracing algorithms. As a result, our models confuse bright caustics coupled with shadows to be independent transparent objects. Despite these drawbacks, our work with ClearGrasp shows that synthetic data remains a viable approach to achieve competent results for learning-based depth reconstruction methods. A promising direction for future work is improving the domain transfer to real-world images by generating renders with physically-correct caustics and surface imperfections such as fingerprints.

With ClearGrasp, we demonstrate that high-quality renders can be used to successfully train models that perform well in the real world. We hope that our dataset will drive further research on data-driven perception algorithms for transparent objects. Download links and more example images can be found on our project website and our GitHub repository.

Acknowledgements
This research was done by Shreeyak Sajjan (Synthesis.ai), Matthew Moore (Synthesis.ai), Mike Pan (Synthesis.ai), Ganesh Nagaraja (Synthesis.ai), Johnny Lee, Andy Zeng, and Shuran Song (Columbia University). We would like to thank Ryan Hickman for managerial support, Ivan Krasin and Stefan Welker for fruitful technical discussions, Cameron (@camfoxmusic) for sharing 3D models of his potion bottles and Sharat Sajjan for helping with web design.

Daily Crunch: Samsung unveils another foldable phone

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Samsung Galaxy Z Flip hands-on: This is more like it

When the Galaxy Fold was finally released to the public after numerous delays, the device came swaddled in warnings. It was a long list, and not exactly a vote of confidence for those who just dropped $2,000 on an unproven device.

Announced almost exactly a year after the Fold, the Galaxy Z Flip presents a refined look at the concept. Having only spent a little time with the product after the unveiling, Brian Heater says he isn’t quite ready to declare that this is the phone the Fold should have been, but it certainly feels like a key step in the right direction.

2. WhatsApp hits 2 billion users, up from 1.5 billion 2 years ago

WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app, revealed today just how big it has become. The Facebook-owned app said it has amassed two billion users, up from the 1.5 billion it revealed two years ago.

3. Extra Crunch Anniversary: 9 lessons from building a media subscription product

Since launching Extra Crunch, we’ve published more than 1,000 articles, onboarded new hires, overhauled our technical infrastructure, expanded into five new European countries, made a handful of visual design changes, launched an Extra Crunch stage at Disrupt, performed a lot of price testing, adjusted our editorial strategy based on what the Extra Crunch audience wants annnnnd announced nearly a dozen annual community perks. (You’re going to need an Extra Crunch membership to read the lessons learned, natch.)

4. MWC hangs by a thread after Nokia, DT and other big names back out

Nokia, one of the omnipresent firms at major tech trade conferences, said today that it won’t be attending this year’s Mobile World Congress, citing health and safety concerns over the coronavirus outbreak. Electronics giant HMD, which sells smartphones under the Nokia brand, cited similar reasoning for its withdrawal, too.

5. Battery Ventures just closed on a whopping $2 billion across two funds, two years after its last fundraise

This sounds typical of the broader trend in recent years of firms that rush back to market every two years and lock down ever-greater capital commitments as they go. But Battery General Partner Chelsea Stoner insists the firm’s newest funds reflect the firm’s determination to slow down its pace of fundraising.

6. UK names its pick for social media ‘harms’ watchdog

The U.K. government has named the existing communications watchdog, Ofcom, as its preferred pick for enforcing rules around “harmful speech” on platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok.
7. Battery Ventures just closed on a whopping $2 billion across two funds, two years after its last fundraise.

7. Facebook will pay Reuters to fact-check deepfakes and more

A four-person team from Reuters will review user-generated video and photos, as well as news headlines and other content in English and Spanish, submitted by Facebook or flagged by the wider Reuters editorial team.

Read Full Article

What a nun can teach a scientist about ecology | Victoria Gill

What a nun can teach a scientist about ecology | Victoria Gill

To save the achoque -- an exotic (and adorable) salamander found in a lake in northern Mexico -- scientists teamed up with an unexpected research partner: a group of nuns called the Sisters of the Immaculate Health. In this delightful talk, science journalist Victoria Gill shares the story of how this unusual collaboration saved the achoque from extinction -- and demonstrates how local and indigenous people could hold the secret to saving our planet's weird, wonderful and most threatened species.

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

WhatsApp hits 2 billion users, up from 1.5 billion 2 years ago

WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app, revealed today just how big it has become. The Facebook-owned app said it has amassed two billion users, up from 1.5 billion it revealed two years ago. It also remains free of ads and does not charge its users any fee.

The announcement today makes WhatsApp the only second app from Facebook to join the two-billion-users club. (Facebook’s marquee app has 2.5 billion users.) In an earnings call late January, Facebook also noted that that there were 2.26 billion users that opened either Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp each day, up from 2.2 billion last quarter. The family of apps sees 2.89 billion total monthly users, up 9% year-over-year.

WhatsApp, founded 11 years ago and sold to Facebook for $19 billion six years ago, took the opportunity today to reiterate that it is committed to providing end-to-end encryption to its customers all over the globe — a crucial feature lauded by security experts everywhere but something that many governments are increasingly trying to contest.

“Strong encryption acts like an unbreakable digital lock that keeps the information you send over WhatsApp secure, helping protect you from hackers and criminals. Messages are only kept on your phone, and no one in between can read your messages or listen to your calls, not even us. Your private conversations stay between you,” WhatsApp wrote in a blog post.

Among the governments that are attempting to force WhatsApp into dropping encryption is India, which happens to be WhatsApp’s largest market with 400 million users, Australia, and the U.S.

Will Cathcart, the chief executive of WhatsApp, has said in the past that the messaging platform will fight for the privacy of its users. This was on display late October, when WhatsApp filed a suit in federal court accusing Israeli mobile surveillance maker NSO Group of creating an exploit that was used hundreds of times to hack into targets’ phone.

“Strong encryption is a necessity in modern life. We will not compromise on security because that would make people less safe. For even more protection, we work with top security experts, employ industry leading technology to stop misuse as well as provide controls and ways to report issues — without sacrificing privacy,” the company said today.

The two-billion milestone is a big feat for WhatsApp, which gained immense popularity without any marketing in developing markets such as India where calls and texts were fairly expensive for most people. There is no app in India today that has a greater penetration than WhatsApp, for instance.

But even as WhatsApp has amassed all the users in the world, it is still struggling to make any substantial contribution to Facebook’s bottom line. In recent years, WhatsApp has introduced tools for businesses to connect with their customers. But something even more interesting has happened in the meantime.

Scores of startups in developing markets today are building businesses around WhatsApp. Vahan, a Y Combinator-backed startup, uses WhatsApp to help delivery startups find blue-collar workers. Digi-Prex, a Hyderabad-based startup, runs an eponymous online subscription pharmacy to serve patients with chronic diseases. Patients share their prescription with Digi-Prex through WhatsApp and the startup’s workers then deliver the medication to them on a recurring cycle.

I think the next justdial will be built on top of @whatsapp … especially for India (or other markets where WhatsApp is big)

anyone working on this?

— miten sampat (@miten) February 11, 2020

But this immense popularity has also created other challenges for WhatsApp. The platform has been used to spread false information that has resulted in gruesome fatalities in real world. WhatsApp has rushed to make product changes and run campaigns to educate users, but it’s a long battle.

Read Full Article

Ever Loved’s funeral marketplace undercuts undertakers

Fifty percent of families are scared they can’t cover the cost of a funeral. They end up overpaying because no one wants to comparison shop amidst a tragedy. That’s why ex-Googler Alison Johnston’s startup Ever Loved built a free funeral crowdfunding tool. Now it’s addressing one of the most expensive parts of saying goodbye: burial. Today Ever Loved launches its online marketplace for caskets, urns, headstones and memorial jewelry.

By sidestepping the overhead of a physical funeral home, Ever Loved can offer better prices while still earning a 10% margin. Its caskets cost 50% less than the average sold at a mortuary, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.

When I called a local San Francisco funeral home, the high markups came into focus. They quoted me $2,795 for a casket sold for $1,200 on Ever Loved.

“Most people don’t think to — or don’t want to — plan funerals in advance, which means that when someone passes away, the family is often scrambling,” Johnston tells me. “When this rush to make decisions is paired with extreme grief, many people don’t do anywhere close to the same amount of research as they would with another several-thousand-dollar purchase. When combined with the fact that most funeral homes don’t publish their prices online, it’s easy for families to spend much more than they need to.”

Johnston co-founded Ever Loved in late 2017 after a family member was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She discovered how few resources there were available for helping people plan and pay for funerals. She’d previously worked at Q&A app Aardvark through its acquisition by Google, then started online tutoring startup InstaEDU that eventually sold to Chegg. The consumer website building and e-commerce tools she’d grown used to weren’t available in the funeral industry, so she set out to build them. Ever Loved has raised seed funding from Social Capital and gone through Y Combinator.

Ever Loved co-founder and CEO Alison Johnston

“Tech too often merely makes life and work easier for those who already have it good,” she told me last year. “Tech that tempers tragedy is a welcome evolution for Silicon Valley.”

Ever Loved’s first focus was its funeral crowdfunding tool that let families ask the decedent’s loved ones to help contribute to offset the costs. Donors could leave a tip for Ever Loved, but otherwise it charged nothing beyond credit card processing fees. The tool was paired with a memorial website builder that families could use for distributing invites and collecting memories. Now Ever Loved is helping people plan thousands of funerals per month with revenue up nearly 20X year-over-year.

Now that it’s helping families raise money for remembrance services, Ever Loved wants to make sure they don’t get ripped off. The fact that there’s such low pricing transparency at funeral homes should clue you in that they try to pass off steep markups since customers might not have the energy to keep looking. “The average funeral home only helps with a funeral once every three days, meaning that many funeral homes need to charge high prices in order to cover their own fixed costs,” Johnston explains.

Remove the overhead costs and assist customers across geographies and there’s room for a strong business with more affordable prices. For example, a Stanford Blue Casket costs $990 on Ever Loved while one LA funeral home charges $1,600. The Last Supper Pieta Casket is $1,500 on Ever Loved but $6,580 from the funeral home. That funeral home had both of these listed under different names, further hindering the ability of customers to find a fair price.

Ever Loved can also more quickly adapt to the diversification of burial options. Between concerns about costs, land use, environmental impact and connection to family and nature, many are looking beyond caskets. Cremation became more popular than burial in the U.S. in 2017. Liquid cremation is now legal in 18 states, and Washington just began allowing body composting.

“We’re seeing a lot of independent providers popping up to do everything from turning your loved one’s ashes into a diamond ring to shooting their ashes into space to planting them under a tree in the forest,” says Johnston. Any single funeral home is unlikely to offer the breadth customers are looking for. “Our goal is to make all of your options available to you in an easily digestible format.”

Ever Loved’s business is protected by the FTC’s Funeral Rule that bars mortuaries from refusing or charging extra to handle a casket or urn purchased elsewhere. That means Ever Loved customers can combine shopping online with in-person memorial services from a local funeral home. Still, it’s a tough business. Startups like HaloLife, Clarity and After I Go have all shut down. Most others merely offer memorial sites, or funeral home search engines.

That means Ever Loved’s biggest competitors, beyond the standard just accepting the local mortuary’s prices, are Google and Amazon. Often they surface the same prices as Ever Loved with comparable shipping, though Google could sometimes find a slight discount by buying straight from the manufacturer, while Amazon was missing some top brands. Costco and Walmart sell funeral products too. But Johnston says “many people don’t feel like generic, mass-market stores are the appropriate place to purchase funeral products.” I agree it might feel disrespectful buying an urn from the same place you get toilet paper.

“We also put a huge focus on customer service, which you don’t get at Walmart, Costco or Amazon,” Johnston tells me. “When you’re grieving and spending thousands of dollars, we’ve found that this is very important.”

As the demographic planning funerals gets more tech-savvy over time and want personalized farewells rather than cookie-cutter conclusions, there’s a chance to change the status quo. Discussing death is becoming less taboo. Being smart about paying for it should too.

Read Full Article

Google’s Gboard introduces Emoji Kitchen, a tool to mash up emojis to use as stickers

If you’re ever felt like there just weren’t enough emoji options to express how you’re feeling, a new addition to Google’s Gboard keyboard, launching today, aims to help. Gboard for Android is introducing a feature called “Emoji Kitchen” which allows users to mash up different emoji then use them as stickers when messaging.

The stickers will work across apps, including Gmail, Messages by Google, Messenger, Snapchat, Telegram, WhatsApp, and others.

For example, you could add glasses to the various smiley emoji, add a cowboy hat to a ghost, have a robot cry tears, put a monkey face on a cactus (idk either), make the happy poop emoji express love with a heart, and so on.

[gallery ids="1945466,1945465,1945464,1945463,1945462,1945461,1945460,1945458"]

 

 

 

To be clear, you can’t just mash up any of the thousands of emoji with any other one — it only works with those Google supports, which are mainly variations on the smileys. That’s because the emoji aren’t being mashed up in real-time through some sort of A.I. system. Instead, Google designers have created this set of mashups for Gboard, specifically.

To use the option, you first tap on any smiley emoji and Emoji Kitchen will show which mashups are available to you.

Google’s Gboard has long been an experimental app for trying out new ideas in self-expression, including with launches like its own set of personalized emoji, called Emoji Minis, as well as with features like doodling, Morse code input, emoji suggestions and GIFs, and others in years past.

The app has been well-received by Android users, as a result — despite being years old, it’s still in a top 50 app in the Tools category and has over a billion downloads worldwide to date. It’s also now the default keyboard on some Android devices, like Google’s Pixel smartphones.

However, Google’s larger goal with Gboard is to make it compelling enough for users to keep it installed, giving the company a way to bring Google’s properties, like Search, directly to the end-user. That’s more important than ever at a time when mobile search has become bigger than desktop. Unfortunately for Google, mobile search has been much more expensive,  as the company now relies on deals with mobile device makers, like Apple, to make its search engine the default.

Gboard gives Google another way to hedge its bets — by skipping the need to use a browser app to get to Google. Users can just use their keyboard instead.

Google says Emoji Kitchen rolls out today to Android users.

Read Full Article

UK names its pick for social media ‘harms’ watchdog

The UK government has taken the next step in its grand policymaking challenge to tame the worst excesses of social media by regulating a broad range of online harms — naming the existing communications watchdog, Ofcom, as its preferred pick for enforcing rules around ‘harmful speech’ on platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok in future.

Last April the previous Conservative-led government laid out populist but controversial proposals to legislate to lay a duty of care on Internet platforms — responding to growing public concern about the types of content kids are being exposed to online.

Its white paper covers a broad range of online content — from terrorism, violence and hate speech, to child exploitation, self-harm/suicide, cyber bullying, disinformation and age-inappropriate material — with the government setting out a plan to require platforms to take “reasonable” steps to protect their users from a range of harms.

However digital and civil rights campaigners warn the plan will have a huge impact on online speech and privacy, arguing it will put a legal requirement on platforms to closely monitor all users and apply speech-chilling filtering technologies on uploads in order to comply with very broadly defined concepts of harm — dubbing it state censorship. Legal experts are also critical.

Further, it requires social media companies to *prevent* ‘harmful’ (undefined) speech going online in the first place; & prevent ‘inappropriate’ (undefined) content recommendations.

So expect state-sponsored upload filters, recommendation systems & mass surveillance.

— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) February 12, 2020

The (now) Conservative majority government has nonetheless said it remains committed to the legislation.

Today it responded to some of the concerns being raised about the plan’s impact on freedom of expression, publishing a partial response to the public consultation on the Online Harms White Paper, although a draft bill remains pending, with no timeline confirmed.

“Safeguards for freedom of expression have been built in throughout the framework,” the government writes in an executive summary. “Rather than requiring the removal of specific pieces of legal content, regulation will focus on the wider systems and processes that platforms have in place to deal with online harms, while maintaining a proportionate and risk-based approach.”

It says it’s planning to set a different bar for content deemed illegal vs content that has “potential to cause harm”, with the heaviest content removal requirements being planned for terrorist and child sexual exploitation content. Whereas companies will not be forced to remove “specific pieces of legal content”, as the government puts it.

Ofcom, as the online harms regulator, will also not be investigating or adjudicating on “individual complaints”.

“The new regulatory framework will instead require companies, where relevant, to explicitly state what content and behaviour they deem to be acceptable on their sites and enforce this consistently and transparently. All companies in scope will need to ensure a higher level of protection for children, and take reasonable steps to protect them from inappropriate or harmful content,” it writes.

“Companies will be able to decide what type of legal content or behaviour is acceptable on their services, but must take reasonable steps to protect children from harm. They will need to set this out in clear and accessible terms and conditions and enforce these effectively, consistently and transparently. The proposed approach will improve transparency for users about which content is and is not acceptable on different platforms, and will enhance users’ ability to challenge removal of content where this occurs.”

Another requirement will be that companies have “effective and proportionate user redress mechanisms” — enabling users to report harmful content and challenge content takedown “where necessary”.

“This will give users clearer, more effective and more accessible avenues to question content takedown, which is an important safeguard for the right to freedom of expression,” the government suggests, adding that: “These processes will need to be transparent, in line with terms and conditions, and consistently applied.”

Ministers say they have not yet made a decision on what kind of liability senior management of covered businesses may face under the planned law, nor on additional business disruption measures — with the government saying it will set out its final policy position in the Spring.

“We recognise the importance of the regulator having a range of enforcement powers that it uses in a fair, proportionate and transparent way. It is equally essential that company executives are sufficiently incentivised to take online safety seriously and that the regulator can take action when they fail to do so,” it writes.

It’s also not clear how businesses will be assessed as being in (or out of) scope of the regulation.

“Just because a business has a social media page that does not bring it in scope of regulation,” the government response notes. “To be in scope, a business would have to operate its own website with the functionality to enable sharing of user-generated content, or user interactions. We will introduce this legislation proportionately, minimising the regulatory burden on small businesses. Most small businesses where there is a lower risk of harm occurring will not have to make disproportionately burdensome changes to their service to be compliant with the proposed regulation.”

The government is clear in the response that Online harms remains “a key legislative priority”.

“We have a comprehensive programme of work planned to ensure that we keep momentum until legislation is introduced as soon as parliamentary time allows,” it writes, describing today’s response report “an iterative step as we consider how best to approach this complex and important issue” — and adding: “We will continue to engage closely with industry and civil society as we finalise the remaining policy.”

Incoming in the meanwhile the government says it’s working on a package of measures “to ensure progress now on online safety” — including interim codes of practice, including guidance for companies on tackling terrorist and child sexual abuse and exploitation content online; an annual government transparency report, which it says it will publish “in the next few months”; and a media literacy strategy, to support public awareness of online security and privacy.

It adds that it expects social media platforms to “take action now to tackle harmful content or activity on their services” — ahead of the more formal requirements coming in.

Facebook-owned Instagram has come in for high level pressure from ministers over how it handles content promoting self-harm and suicide after the media picked up on a campaign by the family of a schoolgirl who killed herself after been exposed to Instagram content encouraging self-harm.

Instagram subsequently announced changes to its policies for handling content that encourages or depicts self harm/suicide — saying it would limit how it could be accessed. This later morphed into a ban on some of this content.

The government said today that companies offering online services that involve user generated content or user interactions are expected to make use of what it dubs “a proportionate range of tools” — including age assurance, and age verification technologies — to prevent kids from accessing age-inappropriate content and “protect them from other harms”.

This is also the piece of the planned legislation intended to pick up the baton of the Digital Economy Act’s porn block proposals — which the government dropped last year, saying it would bake equivalent measures into the forthcoming Online Harms legislation.

The Home Office has been consulting with social media companies on devising robust age verification technologies for many months.

In its own response statement today, Ofcom — which would be responsible for policy detail under the current proposals — said it will work with the government to ensure “any regulation provides effective protection for people online”, and, pending appointment, “consider what we can do before legislation is passed”.

Ofcom responds to the Government’s announcement on online harms regulation: https://t.co/DTfMJkgIVU pic.twitter.com/Qgop0xcIcw

— Ofcom (@Ofcom) February 12, 2020

The Online Harms plan is not the online Internet-related work ongoing in Whitehall, with ministers noting that: “Work on electoral integrity and related online transparency issues is being taken forward as part of the Defending Democracy programme together with the Cabinet Office.”

Back in 2018 a UK parliamentary committee called for a levy on social media platforms to fund digital literacy programs to combat online disinformation and defend democratic processes, during an enquiry into the use of social media for digital campaigning. However the UK government has been slower to act on this front.

The former chair of the DCMS committee, Damian Collins, called today for any future social media regulator to have “real powers in law” — including the ability to “investigate and apply sanctions to companies which fail to meet their obligations”.

In the DCMS committee’s final report parliamentarians called for Facebook’s business to be investigated, raising competition and privacy concerns.

Read Full Article

Facebook will pay Reuters to fact-check Deepfakes and more

Eye-witness photos and videos distributed by news wire Reuters already go through an exhaustive media verification process. Now the publisher will bring that expertise to the fight against misinformation on Facebook. Today it launches the new Reuters Fact Check business unit and blog, announcing that it will become one of the third-party partners tasked with debunking lies spread on the social network.

The four-person team from Reuters will review user generated video and photos as well as news headlines and other content in English and Spanish submitted by Facebook or flagged by the wider Reuters editorial team. They’ll then publish their findings on the new Reuters Fact Check blog, listing the core claim and why it’s false, partially false, or true. Facebook will then use those conclusions to label misinformation posts as false and downrank them in the News Feed algorithm to limit their spread.

“I can’t disclose any more about the terms of the financial agreement but I can confirm that they do pay for this service” Reuter’s Director of Global Partnerships Jessica April tells me of the deal with Facebook. Reuters joins the list of US fact-checking partners that include The Associated Press, PolitiFact, Factcheck.org, and four others. Facebook offers fact-checking in over 60 countries, though often with just one partner like Agence France-Presse’s local branches.

Reuters will have two fact-checking staffers in Washington D.C. and two in Mexico City. For reference, Reuters has over 25,000 employees. Reuters’ Global Head of UGC Newsgathering Hazel Baker said the fact-checking team could grow over time, as it plans to partner with Facebook through the 2020 election and beyond. The fact checkers will operate separately from, though with learnings gleaned from, the 12-person media verification team.

Reuters Fact Check will review content across the spectrum of misinformation formats. “We have a scale. On one end is content that is not manipulated but has lost context — old and recycled videos” Baker tells me, referencing lessons from the course she co-authored on spotting misinfo. Next up the scale are simplistically edited photos and videos that might be slowed down, sped up, spliced, or filtered. Then there’s staged media that’s been acted out or forged, like an audio clip recorded and maliciously attributed to a politician. Next is computer-generated imagery that can concoct content or ad fake things to a real video. “And finally there is synthetic or Deepfake video” which Baker said takes the most work to produce.

Baker acknowledged criticism of how slow Facebook is to direct hoaxes and misinformation to fact-checkers. While Facebook claims it can reduce the further spread of this content by 80% using downranking once content is deemed false, that doesn’t account for all the views it gets before its submitted and fact-checkers reach it amongst deep queues of suspicious posts for them to moderate. “One thing we have as an advantage of Reuters is an understanding of the importance of speed” Baker insists. That’s partly why the team will review content Reuters chooses, not just what Facebook has submitted.

Unfortunately, one thing they won’t be addressing is the widespread criticism over Facebook’s policy of refusing to fact-check political ads, even if they combine sensational and defamatory misinformation paired with calls to donate to a campaign. “We wouldn’t comment on that Facebook policy. That’s ultimately up to them” Baker tells TechCrunch. We’ve called on Facebook to ban political ads, fact-check them or at least those from presidential candidates, limit microtargeting, and/or only allow campaign ads using standardized formats without room for making potentially misleading claims.

Facebook staff demand Zuckerberg limit lies in political ads

The problem of misinformation looms large as we enter the primaries ahead of the 2020 election. Rather than just being financially motivated, anyone from individual trolls to shady campaigns to foreign intelligence operatives can find political incentives for mucking with democracy. Ideally, an organization with the experience and legitimacy of Reuters would have the funding to put more than four staffers to work protecting hundreds of millions of Facebook users.

Unfortunately, Facebook is straining its bottom line to make up for years of neglect around safety. Big expenditures on content moderators, security engineers, and policy improvements depressed its net income growth from 61% year-over-year at the end of 2018 to just 7% as of last quarter. That’s a quantified commitment to improvement. Yet clearly the troubles remain.

Facebook spent years crushing its earnings reports with rapid gains in user count, revenue, and profits. But it turns out that what looked like incredible software-powered margins were propped up by an absence on spending on safeguards. The sudden awakening to the price of protecting users has hit other tech companies like Airbnb, which the Wall Street Journal reports fells from from a $200 million in yearly profit in late 2018 to a loss of $332 million a year later as it combats theft, vandalism, and discrimination.

Paying Reuters to help is another step in the right direction for Facebook that’s now two years into its fact-checking foray. It’s just too bad it started so far behind.

Read Full Article