Tesla Unveils The Model 3, Its First Mass-Market Electric Car

The Model 3 costs $35,000, has an all-glass roof and reaches 60 mph in six seconds. It ships in late 2017.

Tesla

Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk debuted the $35,000 car amid much fanfare, describing the latest vehicle venture as something paid for by Tesla's luxury cars, the Models S and X.

Elon Musk in Paris on Dec. 2, 2015.

Eric Piermont / AFP / Getty Images

The Model 3 will go from 0 mph to 60 mph in less than six seconds, will have autopilot hardware, and will seat five people comfortably. It will also come with supercharging standard.

"It gives you freedom of travel," Musk said.

The Model 3, which comes in black, silver and red, also has an all-glass roof.

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Top Conservative Writer Is A Group Effort, Sources Say

Sources claim interns produce much of Breitbart.com tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos's work. Yiannopoulos says his practices are "completely standard."

A leading voice of the new "alt-right," Breitbart.com tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos, does not write many of the articles that appear under his byline on the conservative news site, two sources who have worked directly with him told BuzzFeed News.

These sources — a former intern and someone who has worked with Yiannopoulos for years both in and outside of the Breitbart News Network — as well as a video taken from a private chat offer a glimpse behind the curtain of one of a new movement's leading provocateurs. The sources also suggest that much of the commentator's work is written by a bevy of mostly unpaid personal interns.

Yiannopoulos confirmed in an interview with BuzzFeed News that he has "about 44" interns — "a mix of paid and unpaid" — writing and conducting research for him. But he denied that other people write stories for him start to finish.

"Two people write Breitbart stuff for me," he told BuzzFeed News, but "ghostwriting is too great a word." He said that the majority of his interns are researchers and that some write speeches for him. "I have two books coming out this year," he said. "It's completely standard for someone with a career like mine to have researchers and assistants and ghostwriters."

Yet the sources who came forward to BuzzFeed News tell a different story. "Milo Yiannopoulos is not one person," said the Breitbart employee. "That person does not exist. It is a collective consciousness of various different people who come and go."

The former intern said Yiannopoulos delegated frequently. "I wrote articles for him," he told BuzzFeed News. "His articles on Breitbart. He writes some of them, but most no. He has other people writing his shit."

Yiannopoulos directs these personal interns — who are not associated with Breitbart — through a private group on the chat service Slack. BuzzFeed News obtained a minute-and-a-half-long video that appears to depict activity in the group, which is called PROJECT MILO.

In the clip, the user "milo" warns the group not to use racial epithets because of the way it would look if the group chat became public: "Can't believe I have to say this but no n-words in shitposting or anywhere else, thank you. Please THINK about how this could appear if leaked to the wrong person."

#shitposting is another channel in the PROJECT MILO Slack.

Immediately after the warning from "milo," a user named "marc" adds "that also includes anyone saying 'sieg heil' to me in shitposting, you know who you are."

According to the former worker, "marc" is Marc Geppert, who is listed as Yiannopoulos's executive assistant on his personal website. (Geppert did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.)

Yiannopoulos told BuzzFeed News that all uses of the n-word in PROJECT MILO were ironic. "A lot of these guys are young 4chan guys," he said, referring to his interns. "They use it in the sense that message boards use it ... It was the n-word with an -a, not with an -er — they were quoting hip-hop lyrics."

"I know they don't mean it in a racist way," he continued. "It wasn't like I had to police racism out of my Slack."

Elsewhere in the video clip, "milo" writes, "does anyone need anything else from Daddy tonight?"; instructs the group to tweet a link to a Breitbart story about Twitter censorship of conservatives from their accounts; and tells workers to tune in to an appearance on Fox News. He also asks several workers to write a speech about feminism: "include (1) feminism attention seeking for ugly people (2) wage gap (3) campus rape culture... a load of mean jokes."

Yiannopoulos insisted that this kind of delegation was normal for public figures, adding that "I take a much more hands-on approach than most people." Indeed, Yiannopoulos has tweeted about the headaches of having the amount of assistance he enjoys:

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Experts Question The FBI’s Thinking In Keeping iPhone Hack A Secret

Dado Ruvic / Reuters

Nearly four months after the FBI confiscated a locked iPhone used by the man behind the San Bernardino terrorist attack, investigators have found a way to access the data inside of it.

The Justice Department has refused repeatedly to share details of how it got in, so the method they used remains a mystery, along with the identity of the outside party who showed the FBI how to penetrate the device. But even as the Justice Department has decided to keep these things a secret, at least for now, the White House has recognized that disclosing such vulnerabilities can serve the public interest. Under the government's own review process, the FBI may be obligated to share the details of the method with Apple.

Michael Daniel, a special assistant to the president and cybersecurity coordinator, laid out the benefits and drawbacks of disclosing vulnerabilities in a 2014 White House blog post. "Too little transparency and citizens can lose faith in their government and institutions," he wrote, "while exposing too much can make it impossible to collect the intelligence we need to protect the nation."

Daniel said the government "established a disciplined, rigorous, and high-level decision-making process for vulnerability disclosure." Among the questions Daniel would ask an agency who wishes to keep a vulnerability secret:

"Does the vulnerability, if left unpatched, impose significant risk?"

"How badly do we need the intelligence we think we can get from exploiting the vulnerability?"

"How likely is it that someone else will discover the vulnerability?"

Daniel's post gave the public a glimpse into the government's internal review process for disclosure, a process that privacy experts say lacks transparency and public accountability.

Known as an equities review, the process was designed to balance the competing interests of government agencies after a new vulnerability has been discovered. In some cases, withholding a vulnerability allows the government to conduct counterintelligence or prevent criminal activity, Daniel wrote. But keeping exploits a secret can also leave the American public at risk, with consumer products and computer networks vulnerable to intruders or manipulation.

"This administration takes seriously its commitment to an open and interoperable, secure, and reliable Internet," Daniel wrote, "and in the majority of cases, responsibly disclosing a newly discovered vulnerability is clearly in the national interest."

In a call with reporters Monday, a law enforcement official declined to comment on the risk that the San Bernardino method may pose to other iPhone owners. He also declined to say if the vulnerability would be subject to the equities review process. But experts outside the government agree that it should, and that the iPhone security breach ought to trigger disclosure, so that the millions of American iPhone owners won't be exposed to the same vulnerability.

"By keeping this a secret, the FBI is essentially gambling that no one else will independently discover it," Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist at the ACLU, told BuzzFeed news. "It's unlikely that they will remain the only entity that knows about this flaw forever."

Soghoian also expressed concern about the equities review process itself. The interagency review group, overseen by the president's National Security Council, he said, is stacked with people who are inclined to keep vulnerabilities secret, in order to use exploits to conduct surveillance, hacking, counterintelligence, and law enforcement. "You have a bunch of foxes deciding how the hen house should be built," he said.

"There's not a lot we know about that equities process," Alan Butler, the senior counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told BuzzFeed News. The 2014 White House blog post is one of the few public documents about the review process. Another, from January of this year, was made public by the government only after the Electronic Frontier Foundation pursued a public records lawsuit compelling its release.

EPIC's Butler believes the government is obligated to disclose the San Bernardino iPhone method, especially considering the abundance of data that iPhones contain, in addition to personal information. "In many situations, these phones are used as keys and authenticators for other sensitive material, including critical infrastructure," Butler said.

Riana Pfefferkorn, the cryptography fellow at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, told BuzzFeed News that responsible disclosures can enable companies like Apple to "to alert their users, come up with a fix, and push it out to their users through software updates." But from the Justice Department's perspective, a successful security patch can also represent the loss of a law enforcement tool. "The key thing is that Apple can't fix what they don't know about, so the DOJ wouldn't lose this method if they keep it secret," Pfefferkorn said

But Pfefferkorn believes the tradeoff works in favor of disclosure. Keeping the method secret would mean leaving everyone's devices less secure, she said, "so that law enforcement potentially can get access in some instances to some mobile devices used by the tiny percentage of the population who are criminals."

The law enforcement official on the press call declined to say whether the Justice Department would share details of the secret method with Apple, or whether the method would be used on additional iPhones in different investigations.

In an active New York drug case, for instance, a federal judge rejected the government's application for a court order that would force Apple to extract information from a confiscated iPhone; the Justice Department has appealed. Court documents from the New York case also revealed that 12 additional cases are pending throughout the U.S., all of which feature the government requesting that Apple pull information from encrypted devices.

Because little is known about the method outside the government, it's difficult for outside experts to gauge the risk that it may pose to the public, Jay Kaplan, a former NSA analyst and CEO of Synack, a cybersecurity firm, told BuzzFeed News. "There might not be anything for Apple to fix," he said.

"There's a lot between the conclusion that this particular phone could be accessed by a particular contractor and everyone's phone being vulnerable," said Joseph DeMarco, a former federal prosecutor who also represented law enforcement groups in support of the Justice Department in the San Bernardino case. "I think there's a lot of assumptions and steps in between that."

It's also not clear whether a nondisclosure agreement between the FBI and the unidentified third party would trump the government's obligation to disclose the vulnerability.

Ordinarily, DeMarco told BuzzFeed News, the contract between the government and the third party would govern whether the method could be shared with other parties, including additional law enforcement agencies and Apple.

Following the Snowden revelations, the Obama administration convened a special review group to assess the government's intelligence agencies. In addition to the review group recommending that the government "not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial encryption," the group also advised the government to generally disclose vulnerabilities.

"In almost all instances, for widely used code, it is in the national interest to eliminate software vulnerabilities rather than to use them for US intelligence collection," states the 2013 review group report. And that principle holds true in the 2014 White House blog post: "Disclosing vulnerabilities usually makes sense."

Andrew Crocker, a staff attorney for the EFF, told BuzzFeed News that the requirements to trigger the review process — a newly discovered vulnerability that is not publically known — are clearly present in the San Bernardino case.

What's unclear, he said, is whether the government will actually follow through with the process, or weigh the public interest case for disclosure fairly. "You can imagine all kinds of workarounds. And we've found that the government plays all kinds of word games related to the intelligence context," he said.

"It's just a policy adopted by the government; there's not a lot of transparency or rules around this."

In the same way that the Apple vs. FBI dispute has made concrete what was once a more abstract disagreement over encryption, Crocker believes this case has also drawn attention to how the government cloaks what ought to be in public view.

"Everyone who is innocent and is walking around with a phone is at the same risk as a target of surveillance or hacking or whatever the government might want to engage in."

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Startup Workers Say No To Free Food, Hell Yeah To Intermittent Fasting

Illustration by BuzzFeed News / SuperStock / Alamy

Every Wednesday at 8 a.m., members of a group called WeFa.st gather at a casual order-at-the-counter kind of San Francisco cafe for what they call a biohacker breakfast. The restaurant varies, but the meal is always awash with the relief of finally being able to eat.

WeFa.st is an online community made up mostly of tech workers, all of whom share a fascination with intermittent fasting, which dictates a strict schedule for fasting and eating in exchange for a host of health benefits. These mostly young, mostly male, hype men for biohacking have built an ethos around the diet, which promises peak productivity and readiness for a future where technology is king and the smartest man wins. If tech is becoming a lifestyle brand, then intermittent fasting is its Master Cleanse, and these are its Gwyneths. Each regimen has its own name, like the Warrior Diet, wherein the faster abstains for 20 hours and eats one big meal at night, or the Monk Fast, which entails fasting continuously for 36 hours. For the X Games of caloric consumption, there is the Himalayan Fast, where you fast continuously for 60 hours. "This is difficult to sustain," the website warns.

Fasters at a breakfast at Elmira Rosticceria on March 30.

Nitasha Tiku

The WeFa.st breakfast club's members are on different regimens, but aim to end their fast in time for the group meal. Among intermittent fasters, the block of hours where you're allowed to eat is called "a feeding window." The term is better suited to farm animals or lab rats, but the vibe they're going for is less mammal and more machine.

One of the biohackers at breakfast last week was Clinton Mielke, a data scientist working with MRI results from Alzheimer's patients at UCSF. Mielke also runs a startup called Infinome dedicated to increasing life expectancy. He predicts that the tech industry will shift away from software and toward personalized medicine, pointing to Google's investments in life sciences startups like Calico and Verily, as well as its hiring of futurist Ray Kurzweil. According to Mielke, both he and the Google co-founders have had an epiphany: "The computer revolution was really exciting, but ultimately it's the human source code that matters and that's the human genome, the code that powers all of us."

It's a dizzying existential leap from skipping dinner to cheating death, but it also explains why some of the newer acolytes to a practice that dates back to ayurvedic medicine are approaching intermittent fasting with such zeal. Scientific research, mostly in mice, has shown that intermittent fasting can boost metabolism and fight diabetes and obesity; adherents are fond of mentioning studies about enhancing longevity.

It's also, according to Paul Benigeri, an engineer for the nootropics company Nootrobox, supposed to be a contrast to the status quo. "We're always splurging," said Benigeri. "We eat a lot, we play a lot of games, we download a lot of apps." Fasting offers a more austere alternative, he said. "You kind of feel like a monk." (The Warrior Diet has been around for a couple years, but Benigeri said that he and his co-workers came up with "Himalayan" because it invoked a "super extreme" way of life.)

Indeed, perhaps there's a reason that all three dietary archetypes seem to hark back to a time before standing desks, and why fasters tend to invoke evolutionary biology when explaining their choices. For years, a certain stratum of the tech industry has enjoyed unlimited access to venture-backed abundance. But if Salesforce managers are taking Benedictine vows and even Google is tidying its estate, we may be approaching an ascetic bent in the economic cycle.

Aside from the meetups, WeFa.st is basically just a group chat on Slack, the popular software for organizing teams and offices. Nootrobox, which sells mind-enhancing supplements, set it up after the company's six-person, all-male staff challenged themselves to try it. WeFa.st isn't the first online hangout for fasting obsessives, but it represents a new spin on the concept. You're more likely to find hardcore disciples on bodybuilding sites like Leangains, but there, commenters are seeking "a shredded eight-pack," explained Justin Schafer, a regular breakfast club member and former marketing analyst for Solar City, Elon Musk's energy startup. The WeFa.st guys, said Schafer, are obsessed with "an optimally functioning human brain."

Illustration by BuzzFeed News

Last week's breakfast was held at the Yerba Buena location of The Grove, a popular chain of homey cafes in San Francisco. The space earnestly adheres to the woodsy theme with actual floor-to-ceiling tree trunks amid the dining tables. At 8 a.m., the line to order already stretched from the counter to the door.

Because everyone is quasi-starving, biohacker etiquette permits digging in as soon as one's food arrives. While some of us waited, Schafer passed around a box of Tulsi tea made with "holy basil" from India that supposedly makes the drinker impervious to stress, as well as a pop-top plastic bottle of L-theanine, a beginner-level nootropic that's said to kill the jittery side effect of coffee.

I put the tea in my pocket and swallowed the pill with my coffee. If I had work to do after breakfast, Schafer assured me that I would now be good to go. All I had to do is put in some earbuds, go to Brain.fm (a site that uses artificial intelligence to recommend songs) and listen to some binaural beats, where different tones are played in each ear in order to enhance concentration. Geoff Woo, the Nootrobox CEO, nudged me. With a "belly full of food" I'd be ready for action, he said. (One big selling point for intermittent fasting is avoiding the food coma that plagues carb enthusiasts like myself.) Schafer, who was sitting across from me, made a tick-tock gesture with his index fingers to mimic the beats switching from ear to ear.

They grinned like they were going to induct me into a bungee-jumping club or hand me a micro-dose of LSD, not send me back to my office to sit on a chair and look at a screen. Once I returned to my desk, however, the combo did seem to do the trick. Schafer is a good salesman. A few days later I found myself in line at Whole Foods with two boxes of Tulsi tea and a strong suspicion that with a few tweaks, I might be able to master my own destiny.

During the three breakfasts I dropped in on, people were friendly and encouraging — intermittently cognizant of how they sound to the wider world, but also relishing in the subversiveness. ("I'm not a psychopath," Schafer replied when I asked him if The Warrior Diet meant always saying no to after-work drinks or dinner with friends.) There's a lot of talk about 23:1s or 16:8s, shorthand for the ratio of fasting hours to feeding hours. I watched a few try to out-reference each other with research papers like they were baseball stats. One biohacker, who identified himself only as Carl, told me that he'd "been reading shitloads of research" and described a week of plowing through 40 research papers on fasting — while simultaneously fasting. Carl said he got into discussions with academics about cell replication and cancer. "I not-so-gracefully shut them down," he bragged. When I asked whether he was a programmer or a researcher, Carl didn't specify, but he did volunteer that he was probably better read on the subject "than most people that are raised in academics."

Illustration by BuzzFeed News

I decided to try a short fast after the first biohacker breakfast.

Practitioners recommend no more than 500 calories a day on fasting days. I didn't intend to eat 94% of these allotted calories before 9 a.m., but it just sort of happened. I ate lentil soup (300 calories) and that made me want a slice of bread (140 calories) — and what kind of monster eats dry bread (70 calories of olive oil). By 3 p.m. on Tuesday I was scrolling through The Grove's menu looking for the fattiest thing I could order. By 6 p.m. I was eating a soft-boiled egg (70 calories) to make it through the night. When I woke up the next morning, though, I felt excellent and ordered something (semi) healthy instead.

It supposedly gets easier. Benigeri told me that while abstaining, he and Gavin Banks, Nootrobox's business development guy, have fantasized about In-N-Out and sent each other pictures of steak. But he also told me that talking about being hungry in the Slack group is rare because it implies weakness. The gnashing of teeth, he said, tends to happen one on one.

Banks was on the Himalayan Fast, so he wasn't eating the morning of my second breakfast. Intermittent fasting, he said, helps him work better and faster. "I feel crispier and sharper throughout the day." Crispier? "Crispier," he said with a nod, making a gesture as if nerve endings were firing.

According to him, that's the "motivating factor" that distinguishes fasting from diets. "The goal is to live forever, right?" Benigeri said to Banks, rapping his knuckle on the wooden table.

But it's also apparently about the challenge. At the breakfast, the group joked about selling fasting kits containing air and water. Banks, who started fasting to lose his love handles, suggested "a mirror to look at yourself and not quit."

"It's another little mental victory over being lazy," said Banks. (Not to mention one over temptation from the tech company cafeteria: "I'd get bored, have a snack," Benigeri said. "I'd get angry, have a snack.")

"Physical performance isn't necessarily representative of your salary," Banks continued. Rather, salaries are "measured by how much you are output-ing at work." (The number of nouns that these biohackers verb-ized during the course of one meal was arresting.) Fasting improves mental clarity so that he can do more work and generate more revenue. So instead of competing on a physical plane, "I am competing with the rest of the world."

Schafer, who is 28 years old, said he quit his job recently to help out the family business and start up something of his own. In the meantime he's driving a Lyft. I spoke to him just after he had dropped off a passenger. "People treat you differently when you're in the service sector. It's a little bit like a second-class citizen — and that's totally fine. My identity is not tied to my current means of generating income. It's more of a social experiment."

I asked him if he's concerned that the world will soon be divided into two categories: Uber drivers and Uber passengers. He said a dividing line was forming, but it would be between "the people who can wield technology and those who are the servants of technology. People who can master technology will be creating the systems," like Uber, "and the others will be on the receiving end of it, I guess," he said, referring to Uber's plans to turn turn to driverless cars.

In Schafer's mind, his lifestyle choices and the arc of technological development are aligned: "There are only going to be more distractions, more stimulations, and more opportunities to not focus on what matters." So it will be increasingly important "to know how to focus and know how to prioritize in order to adapt to the present and the future." He sounded like the mirror-image of a doomsday prepper: The apocalypse as told from the perspective of someone who expects to thrive in this harsh new reality.

Illustration by BuzzFeed News

There were two to five women at the three breakfasts I went to, better than the low bar set by your average tech conference, considering the size of the group. At the first meal, I met Mielke's girlfriend, Jun Axup, who is also a startup founder and Ph.D. researcher. She's been fasting for the past 12 years, but in a more organic manner. Axup doesn't care for breakfast foods, so she fasts from 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. until noon the next day. It wasn't until Mielke introduced her to intermittent fasting that she realized there was a name for it.

She described the gender imbalance in intermittent fasting as unfortunate, but expected — the same skewed ratio she's had to face at work and school. (The research on how intermittent fasting effects women is not definitive. Some female fasters claim that it causes anxiety and irregular periods. A female founder at the breakfast club reported bloodshot eyes.) But Axup pointed out that it doesn't reflect a lack of interest. "The fasting thing might be more male-dominated right now," she said, but just look at all the YouTube videos about anti-ageing face creams or other makeup tutorials. "This whole search for a fountain of youth? Women have been doing this for a long time, too."

Danielle Morrill is the CEO of Mattermark, a startup that collects and crunches data on private companies, which just raised more than $7 million in funding. Morrill began fasting inadvertently a couple months ago when she started getting up 5 a.m. and found the prospect of a sunrise meal unappealing. An investor in Bulletproof Coffee clued her in to the surrounding fervor. (Bulletproof's founder, Dave Asprey, is partly responsible for the intermittent fasting fad.) Morrill hesitates to tweet or talk much about her diet, to avoid scrutiny and unnecessary competition. "I just want to figure out what is the ideal way to live day-to-day and I don't think anyone really teaches you that."

Illustration by BuzzFeed News

George Burke, another WeFa.st member, used to run a bitcoin startup and now organizes the San Francisco Peak Performance Meetup. Nearly 600 people are signed up for the meetups online, which is roughly 200 more members than WeFa.st. About 50 to 75 people have been showing up at events.

Burke had a unique perspective. He said he approached intermittent fasting not because he was a Type A guy who was always on his grind, but because he felt self-conscious about not being that guy. "I never really felt all that productive. My whole life I always felt like I was one step behind everyone else, so I was always looking for an edge." Burke said that's why he organizes the meetup, to share whatever he's learned, but also to surround himself with experts. (It's not too shabby for his personal brand in the fitness-tech space either.) "There are a lot of people who are underperformers and underachievers who simply accept their place in life, and I don't," he told BuzzFeed News. And now? A wrist full of self-tracking devices later? "People perceive me as being equal, so I'll take it," he said.

Schafer also traced his faith in fasting back to a sense of insecurity. In high school, he followed the whey protein and weightlifting wisdom popular in the '90s. It didn't work. He would fall asleep during AP calculus every day because it came after lunch, and he lost the sense of himself as a curious, hyper-literate kid. That doesn't seem to be an issue now. During the course of our 45-minute conversation, he mentioned Seth Godin, The Paleovedic Diet, Dave Asprey, Derek Sivers (who pioneered the decision tree: "Hell yeah!" or "No"), and Nassim Taleb's Antifragile — a veritable office lounge shelf of counterintuitive thinking.

Burke's approach to productivity makes him an ideal hypebeast for biohacking. His daily routine sounds like a word cloud for the quantified self. For example, Burke has also dabbled in micro-dosing LSD, another trendy productivity hack that posits that micrograms of hallucinogens can be office appropriate. During his bitcoin days, he said he wasn't scared to lead a meeting while microdosing because "they are mostly libertarians and many of them enjoy their vices. I've never been to wilder parties, outside of the bitcoin space."

As with all health fads, there's still a lot of conflicting advice about fasting and micro-dosing, but that uncertainty doesn't faze Burke. "I'll experiment with almost anybody's advice. That's kind of what biohackers do," he explained.

Burke's quest to reach the apex of performance has some hardware components as well. He wears an Apple Watch to measure his heart rate and an Atlas wristband to measure reps at the gym. He also uses a Pavlok, a device that zaps users with a bit of electricity, as a means of curing bad habits.

So far, he's found it useful for both fasting and quitting vaping. He recommended a new Chrome plugin that punishes you for opening too many windows. "Set it at 10 or more browser tabs, it's going to zap you." Burke said the sensation was kind of like touching a doorknob charged with static electricity. "It's uncomfortable but it's not painful. They even make sex toys with little type of zap, so you're not going to die," he assured me.

Burke had to miss the biohacker breakfast, but when he broke his fast later that day it was with food from Two Forks, a meal delivery service. His options that day included grass-fed beef with roasted plantains and green beans and shallot salad, as well as free-range chicken with roasted eggplant and kale salad. Even though it's made for Paleo, Burke still has to tweak it to his standards. "I have to modify [the deliveries] because there are still starches in these meals that I'm not going to eat."

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This Smart Bracelet Buzzes When Your Phone Needs You

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The beauty of wearable tech is being able to stay off your phone until it *really* needs you, thanks to notification-induced vibrations.

End screen addiction NOW.

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Today, Ringly is offering more choice when it comes to wrist-bound gadgets with a new smart bracelet called Aries.

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Aries works just like Ringly's phone-enabled smart rings (which I reviewed earlier this year).

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Microsoft’s HoloLens Begins Shipping To Developers Today

At Microsoft's Build conference, we got a look at what the augmented-reality headset is going to be used for.

Today, Microsoft begins shipping the HoloLens to developers.

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The augmented-reality headset was announced early last year, but this is the first time people outside Microsoft-controlled demos will get their hands on it.

Right now, it's only available to developers and enterprise users — essentially, only people who work for an organization executing a very specific mission, like a hospital or NASA, or are engineers building new tools and experiences for HoloLens and are in need of a headset to do it.

Even though the HoloLens is a ways away from making it onto the heads of average consumers, Microsoft is beginning to show off exactly what it's going to be used for when it does.

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Case Western Reserve University will be using it for medical education and research.

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NASA is using it to take a closer look at Mars and to stay connected with astronauts on the International Space Station.

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And, in one of the few looks at what normal consumers can expect, this is what Skype will look like on HoloLens.

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Twitter Pulls Down "Moment" Following Questionable Editorial Decision

Twitter pulled down a Moment yesterday after acknowledging that it has misstepped in its decision to post it in the first place.

The Moment curated a Trump supporter's Twitter rant against @Estblishmnt, an account belonging to a woman's magazine, not the actual Republican establishment. Though funny, the Moment both highlighted abuse on Twitter — and sparked even more of it, this time directed toward the Trump supporter. After being called out on these two fronts, Twitter took the Moment down.

When Twitter introduced Moments last October, it effectively entered the editorial business. And though the company doesn't write the tweets placed within Moments, it still writes the headlines, and decides which stories are Moment-worthy. These editorial decisions are difficult, the type even the most seasoned news organizations struggle with, and the very act of making them turned Twitter from an agnostic platform into one with a point of view. The shift was bound to get Twitter into trouble at some point, and yesterday it did.

In recent weeks, Moments' editorial tone has been noticeably bold, so the episode isn't entirely surprising.

Twitter declined to comment beyond Twitter Moments lead Andrew Fitzgerald's apology in a tweet.

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Apple Hits Milestone On Conflict Minerals Efforts

Jared Harrell / BuzzFeed News

Apple has announced a milestone in its five-year-long effort to ensure that the minerals used in its products are sourced responsibly and "do not finance armed
conflict." These "conflict minerals" are so called because the proceeds from their mining have at times been used to fund armed groups associated with murder, rape, and other human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries where they are mined.

As of today, all of the smelters and refiners that supply the tech company with conflict minerals are enrolled in a third-party auditing program, a process Apple COO Jeff Williams calls "a journey." The announcement comes at a time when the Silicon Valley behemoth is increasingly angling to be seen as an international do-gooder.

Apple currently works with 242 suppliers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and adjoining nations, where violent conflict plays a role in how those substances are extracted and sold. Conflict minerals such as gold, tin, tungsten, and tantalum are used to make circuit boards, as well as the parts of iPhones that allow them to vibrate or hold a charge. When Apple published its conflict mineral report last year, 199 of 225 smelters and refiners were enrolled in the audit program.

"Unfortunately," Williams told BuzzFeed News, "we had to kick out 35 along the way that we were unable to convince to do things in the way we think are appropriate." In some instances, he said, Apple resorted to "publicizing smelters in order to shame the ones we couldn't convince otherwise to join the program."

Apple

After President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act — which included anti–conflict mineral regulations — in 2010, companies like Apple have been under pressure to ensure that the products they sell don't come from suppliers that are contributing to or exacerbating violent conflict or human rights violations.

It can be difficult, however, to track the origin points of many of these substances, as they tend to change hands many times after extraction. The easiest path forward, Apple says, would be to work with a small number of approved smelters and refiners.

"You can do that, and you can declare yourself conflict free," Williams explained, "but that would have very little impact on the ground." Instead, Williams said, Apple made the decision to instead maximize its potential impact on baseline practices in the region by working with as many suppliers as possible.

Apple's primary conflict mineral auditor is the Conflict-Free Sourcing Initiative (CFSI), whose stated goal is to make sure that the smelters and refiners tech companies source from aren't using minerals that come from mines controlled by armed forces. To accomplish this, auditors including the CFSI use methods like the "bag and tag" system, in which minerals that are certified conflict free are given a barcode so that they can be tracked from mine to export.

But even these procedures are corruptible, which is why Apple isn't labeling itself "conflict free" just yet.

"By current definitions and standards, we could declare ourselves conflict free," Williams said. "We've chosen not to do that, because we think the third-party audit programs, while a good first step, [can be improved]. There are too many holes in the system, too many chances for robberies along the way. We aren't ready to declare ourselves done."

Human rights groups agree that third-party auditing, while helpful, is just a start when it comes to transparency in the supply chain. Seema Joshi is head of business and human rights for Amnesty International, which published a none-too-rosy analysis of companies, including Apple, last year. She says she hopes to see more concrete evidence of what these businesses are doing to eliminate harmful practices.

"Companies are still not providing enough information as to what their due diligence practices are," Joshi, who had not yet seen Apple's report today, told BuzzFeed News. "We're not yet seeing the transparency that we hope to be seeing."

Now that Apple's goal of 100% enrollment in the third-party auditing program has been met, the company plans to further strengthen its system. It is investigating reports of incidents in which "individuals associated or potentially associated with armed groups, in particular the police in the DRC and the DRC national army, were alleged to be involved in incidents linked to smelters in Apple's supply chain." Apple says it has reviewed over 700 such reports from on-the-ground organizations so far, three of which they are continuing to investigate.

"This is not about marketing 'conflict free.' It's not about guilt-free purchases for consumers," Williams said. "It's about reducing armed conflict."

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