GoodTime nabs $2M to match job applicants with interviewers to save time and build rapport

Tim Cook has stressed that Apple does not bend the way it does business in China — and it could be seen as a subtle swipe at Google.

Cook did not mention Google in an interview with Vice on Tuesday, but said Apple protects user data in China in exactly the same as anywhere else in the world.

The Apple CEO said his view of privacy as a human right applied to how the company does business in China. "Encryption for us is the same in every country in the world," he said.

"We don't design encryption for the US and do it differently everywhere else, it's the same. And so to send a message in China, it's encrypted. I can't produce the content, I can't produce it in the United States either. If you lock your phone in China I can't open it," added Cook.

Cook said that while Apple complied with laws that mean the data of Chinese citizens have to be stored in China, that data is under lock and key. "We worked with a Chinese company to provide iCloud, but the keys [...] are ours," he said.

Cook added that the fact data is stored in China doesn't make it easier for the Chinese government to access it. "I wouldn't get caught up in 'where's the location of it,' I mean we have servers located in many different countries in the world. They're not easier to get data from being in one country versus the next."

"The key question is how does the encryption process work, and who owns the keys — if anyone. In most cases for us, you and the receiver [of a message] own the keys."

The comments are in contrast to Google, which is reportedly preparing to launch a search engine in China that could be used as "spying tools" by Chinese officials.

In September, The Intercept obtained an internal memo that said Google's custom-built Chinese search engine would require users to log in, and would harvest data about their location and search history with a Chinese partner that would have "unilateral access" to the data.

While Cook did not mention Google or Dragonfly in his interview, setting a marker for user privacy in China sent a message, especially given the harsh words he had for data collectors earlier in the interview.

"The narrative that some companies will try to get you to believe is 'I've got to take all of your data to make my service better.' Well, don't believe that. Whoever's telling you that - it's a bunch of bonk," said Cook, although he did not elaborate on who these companies might be.

Apple's decision to ban the conservative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones had everything to do with its longstanding belief that it should offer users curated services and nothing to do with either politics or acting in coordination with other tech companies, CEO Tim Cook said on Tuesday.

In an interview with Vice News Tonight, Cook declined to get into the specific reason why Apple decided in August to remove Jones' podcasts from its Podcast app and, a month later, his Infowars app from its app store. But he said the decision came out of the company's practice of reviewing, selecting, and editing the kinds of apps and other material available through its stores and apps.

"What users want from us and what we've always provided them is a curated platform," Cook said.

Apple CEO Tim Cook denied the decision to remove Jones had anything to do with politics. Richard Drew/AP He denied that the decision had anything to do with Apple's political biases.

Because Apple and other tech giants are based in left-leaning Silicon Valley, conservatives have charged that the companies are prejudiced against them.

In the wake of Jones' ouster, President Donald Trump and other conservative politicians have called for government regulators to scrutinize tech companies for not acting as neutral services.

Despite Apple's ban of Jones, its users can still find material and apps found on its services that come from all over the political spectrum, Cook said.

"We don't take a political stand," he said. "We're not leaning one way or the other."

Cook also refuted the notion that Apple was working in coordination with other tech companies when it decided to ban Jones.

Right after the iPhone maker removed most of Jones' podcasts from its app, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube also removed his material from their services. But neither he nor, as far as he knows, has anyone else at Apple talked with any of those other companies about Jones, he said.

"​We make our decisions independently and I think that's important," Cook said.

In addition to a blizzard of new Surface hardware, Microsoft also announced at an event on Tuesday that it has started to roll out the next big update to Windows 10.

The October 2018 update, as it's called, has one big, headlining feature: A new app, called Your Phone, that lets you read your Android phone's text messages and view your Android phone's photos from your Windows 10 PC. And it works over WiFi, so you don't need to have your phone plugged into your computer to make it happen. The big caveat: Your phone needs to be running Android 7.0 or up.

If you have an iPhone, you lose some of the benefits of the Your Phone app. For iPhone users, the only supported feature at the moment is the ability to send a webpage link from your PC to your phone. Still handy, but less so.

But wait, there's more: Microsoft also used its event to tease another forthcoming new feature. At some point, you'll be able to mirror your Android phone to your PC's desktop, so you can use any app without leaving your keyboard.

Microsoft Windows Timeline can tell you what you were working on, when. Now, it's coming to Android phones. Microsoft

And finally, Android users are getting one more superpower with the new Windows update, beyond the Your Phone app.

Earlier this year, Microsoft unveiled Timeline, a Windows 10 feature that kept track of which files and webpages you were accessing, and when, so you could figuratively trace your digital steps and find what you were looking for. Now, Android users can install the Microsoft Launcher app, and access that same Timeline, so you can find the website or Office 365 file you wanted. Microsoft says that it's coming to iPhone at some point soon, as well.

Oh, one more thing. This isn't strictly related to the phone stuff, but the new update also adds a so-called Cloud Clipboard that lets you copy text or images from one PC, and paste it on another. Plus, it keeps a history across devices of everything you've copied. It's a little thing, but probably useful to many.

Microsoft is playing nice with Android and iPhone

The texting features are very similar to one of the best parts of the Apple ecosystem: If you own a Mac and an iPhone, your texts flow freely between them — you can start a conversation on your laptop and finish it on your phone, or vice versa. A feature called AirDrop, too, makes it easy to share photos and other files between all Apple devices.

Google has tried to close that particular gap with the recent introduction of an Android messages app for the web browser. However, what Microsoft is offering Android users is something built right into the operating system, so you can click and drag photos straight from your phone into an editing or social media app.

All in all, it's a reflection of Microsoft's recognition that, without a viable phone platform of its own, it needs to integrate tightly with the iPhones and Androids of today to stay relevant. While it's clear that there's a lot of work left to do, this is a promising first step.

How to get the new Windows 10 update

Generally speaking, if you have automatic updates installed, the Windows 10 October 2018 update will start going out in waves on October 9th. If you're dying to have it now, though, you can go into your PC's settings and have it check for updates, per the instructions from Microsoft here.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is reiterating his call for new government regulations to protect consumer privacy from tech companies.

The amount of information about individual users stored online and on their phones is enormous, Cook said in an interview with Vice News Tonight on Tuesday. The tech industry hasn't done a good job of respecting and protecting that data, he said.

"I'm not a pro-regulation kind of person, I believe in the free market deeply," Cook said. But, he added, "when the free market doesn't produce a result that's great for society, you have to ask yourself: what do we need to do? And I think some level of government regulation is important to come out of that."

Despite advocating for new regulations, Cook, who has repeatedly advocated new privacy rules this year, expressed doubt whether Congress is as up to speed on technology as it would need to be to craft beneficial legislation in the area. The technology "literacy" of legislators and their staffs is "a challenge," he said.

"There is a need to work with Congress and the staff to make sure that we do our jobs of helping them kind of come up to speed on ... on what's possible," he said.

Consumer advocates, policy makers, and tech industry figures have been increasingly discussing the need for new privacy regulations, particularly in the wake of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal this spring. In that incident, some 87 million customer records were leaked to a data analysis firm linked to President Donald Trump. More recently, Facebook acknowledged that at least 50 million accounts were compromised thanks to a security hole.

Apple and Cook have repeatedly tried to distinguish the company from its Big Tech peers such as Facebook and Google. Unlike those companies, Apple's business isn't built around advertising revenue or collecting scads of data on its users to target them with ads. Apple actually tries to limit the amount of information it collects on users, Cook said.

"The way we go into product design, we challenge ourselves to collect as little as possible," he said. He continued: "You are not our product."

Some in the industry have asserted that Apple's restraint in data collection will ultimately hurt the company's ability to compete with its rivals, particularly in areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Those technologies tend to improve as they get access to more data. An intelligent assistant, for example, could potentially offer more useful suggestions about what restaurant a user might like if it had more information about what restaurants they've liked in the past.

But Cook disputed the notion that Apple itself needs to collect more data on users to improve it services, suggesting instead that users' devices could collect it instead — without sharing it with the company.

"The narrative that some companies will try to get you to believe is 'I've got to take all of your data to make my service better.' Well, don't believe that," he said. "Whoever's telling you that - it's a bunch of bonk. We try to keep as much of your information on that device as possible because we want that device to know, because you count on the device to be smart for you."

Some consumer advocates have raised the concern that while Apple may respect user privacy now, things could change under Cook's successors. Users' iPhones collect plenty of data and the company at some point in the future could choose to start collecting it for itself.

But Cook disputed that notion too, saying it would go against Apple's culture.

"I think the next person [who runs Apple], I don't want to commit them, but I can't imagine it. It's not in my imagination that somebody would just say 'oh, time to change,'" he said. I don't see it."

The Surface Pro 6 was the headliner.

This is the latest iteration of Microsoft's flagship line of laptop/tablet hybrids.

In terms of design, it's not much different from the current-generation Surface Pro, currently on store shelves. The Surface Pro 6 does, however, sport a modern quad-core Intel processor, which Microsoft says makes it 1.5 times faster than its predecessor.

In terms of aesthetics, you can get the Surface Pro 6 in a new, sleek matte black finish — though that option only comes with certain higher-end models, which will run you more than the $899 starting price.

In our hands-on time with the Surface Pro 6, we found that Microsoft didn't mess much with its own winning formula. However, it's worth noting the somewhat puzzling absence of a USB-C port, which the tech-savvy might find disappointing.

Oh, and the matte black finish looks extremely good in real life.

Facebook says it can't find any evidence that the hackers who compromised 50 million users' accounts on the social network also used stolen "keys" to break into victims' accounts on other apps and services.

Last week, the Silicon Valley tech firm revealed it had been targeted in a massive hack that saw an as-yet-unidentified attacker, or attackers, gain access to tens of millions of users' accounts by exploiting vulnerabilities in its software.

It subsequently acknowledged that this attack also meant that, in theory, the hacker could have stolen "access tokens" to get into users' accounts on other apps that use the Facebook Login service, including Tinder, Airbnb, Spotify, and more.

In a statement published on Tuesday, Facebook exec Guy Rosen said the company hasn't found any evidence this has actually happened. It will be a partial relief to the victims of the attack, as well as the companies that rely on Facebook Login and faced having to conduct their own investigations.

But Facebook's update provides no more information on who is behind their attack, what their motivation was, and what user data they took. "We're sorry that this attack happened — and we'll continue to update people as we find out more," Rosen wrote.

The news of the hack comes as Facebook attempts to recover from a string of bruising scandals, from Cambridge Analytica to the spread of Russian misinformation and propaganda on its platform. Facebook now faces multiple investigations over the breach, including from multiple US Congressional committees and the Irish privacy watchdog.

A year ago, Amazon debuted a new way to pick up items within minutes of ordering them, calling it Instant Pickup.

Customers could order items like snacks, drinks, and basic essentials from the Amazon app and use a barcode to access their purchase at designated Pickup locations. An Amazon employee would fill an Instant Pickup locker within minutes of the order being placed.

However, Amazon has pulled the plug on the service, a company spokesperson has confirmed to Business Insider. The company did not specify when the service ended.

The service was designed for impulse, need-it-now purchases. It used Amazon Pickup locations that were already in operation for traditional pickups. When the service was announced in August 2017, it was available at five Pickup locations, including college campuses, and announced plans to expand to more.

Instant Pickup made the Pickup locations more like a store than just a receiving center. It was like a large vending machine with a staff of one.

The cancellation of the rollout is a rare step back for the retailer, which has been going full-steam ahead on opening physical locations. It continues to open Amazon Books stores and pop-up locations, and it recently opened a new store concept called Amazon 4-star. It's possible that Instant Pickup was just an experiment that did not turn out the way Amazon hoped it would.

Instead of Instant Pickup, Amazon is focusing on its Pickup locations, which allow customers to pick up and drop off items to be returned. The centers also offer free, same-day pickup on some locations for Prime members, but that's the fastest Amazon is offering now that Instant Pickup has been rolled back.

When Business Insider tested the Pickup location, we found it easy and simple to use, but limited in functionality.

In just a few weeks, 70 new emoji will arrive on your iPhone.

The new emoji include everything from redheads — like those pictured above — to a bagel, a lacrosse stick, a lobster, and more.

This is a good thing, right?

Wrong.

Hey, I'll be honest: I'm a huge fan of emoji, and I probably overuse them when texting with friends and family. Plus, as someone who is occasionally called a redhead, I'm thrilled that I and my ginger ilk will be better represented in emoji form. I'm even optimistic that having a bagel emoji will probably change my life.

But the fact of the matter is, we just can't handle this annual influx of new emojis anymore — at some point, enough is enough. It's become far too difficult to ever find the emoji you're looking for at the exact moment you need it. If Apple insists on including dozens of new emoji each year with its latest software update, it needs to add an emoji search function to the iPhone, or just stop adding new emoji altogether.

Don't believe me? OK, fine: say it's your friend's birthday, and you're hoping to send her a festive text message to help celebrate her special day. You'd like to include a balloon emoji. The only problem is, where the heck is the balloon emoji, anyway? Is it under the smiley faces? Hidden away in the tab with the little car and the little building? Suddenly, you're left scrolling through every single character before giving up in frustration.

It's just too much.

(By the way, the balloon emoji is underneath the present emoji inside the tab that looks like a light bulb — obviously!)

2,823 emoji

For the past several years, we've gotten dozens upon dozens of new emoji annually. The Unicode Consortium — the governing body responsible for approving new emoji designs — typically approves the new characters for all platforms sometime around February, then they roll out on various devices and services over the course of the next several months.

Apple usually adds new emoji to iPhones via a software update sometime in October. This year, they will arrive as part of iOS 12.1, which will land sometime in the next few weeks.

A sampling of the new emoji coming to phones this fall. Emojipedia

This year's update will include 70 new emoji, and 157 new characters total, which includes gender and skin tone variations. Last year, we got 56 unique characters, and a whopping 239 total emoji.

All of that would be well and good, except our phones are now absolutely clogged with tiny characters and symbols, half of which are obscure and rarely, if ever, used. Seriously — have you ever used the paperclip emoji?

On top of that, each symbol that represents a person — or fictional creature, like a mermaid — has variations for gender and skin tone. This is a great thing! The more often people can feel represented, in ways big and small, the better.

Sometimes, though, the emoji powers-that-be take it a little too far:

The current total number of emoji, including skin tone and gender variations, is 2,823 — that's way too many if you ask me.

Just make a search button (please!)

If we're going to keep getting new emoji each year — and all signs point to yes — I have one request: please, please make it easier to find them on your iPhone.

Yes, this is an iPhone-specific problem — Twitter has a search function for emoji; Google has an emoji search function across its phones and keyboards. Even Apple's iMessage on your Mac lets you search for a specific character.

Here's how predictive emoji works on iPhones right now. Apple

And Slack, the popular work chat app, does you one better: typing in ":" followed by what you're looking for will bring up a bevy of emoji to choose from. Type ":car," and it'll bring up a selection of car emoji to choose from, for instance.

Apple has tried to add a way to make finding the right emoji easier in the past, but it's not fool-proof and, to be honest, I rarely find myself using it. It's called predictive emoji: if you type in a word in iMessage — say, for instance, "train" — then tap on the keyboard button, the word will highlight orange. Tapping on that word will bring up emoji suggestions where applicable.

While it works, that isn't the most seamless way to do it — a good old search button would work just fine.

So while I may be a self-professed emoji fiend, I don't want any new symbols making it harder to find my favorite characters, like the hug emoji, the slice of pizza, or the dark red heart. Give me a search button, or give me no new emoji at all. …

AP/Scott Sady

When announcing plans to raise minimum wage to $15 an hour for all of Amazon's employees in the US, chief executive Jeff Bezos portrayed the move as a sort of moral reckoning.

"We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead," he said Tuesday, referring to months of backlash over how Amazon treats its workers. "We’re excited about this change and encourage our competitors and other large employers to join us."

But political pressure aside, economists say Amazon was probably going to have to raise its wages anyway. In order to stay competitive in a tight labor market, they say, companies across the US will have to make similar moves.

"It is a big deal in that it says a lot about the current political climate and where the labor market is headed," said Josh Wright, chief economist at iCIMS Inc., a recruiting software company. "But it is more symbolic than it is significant." 

With historically low unemployment levels and a humming economy, labor shortages in the US look poised to extend past the holiday shopping season. Put simply, companies need to offer more to attract workers when labor conditions are tight.

Martha Gimbel, director of economic research for the job site Indeed, said the move is just an example of what is expected in the current labor market, and expects other companies would have made similar moves on their own.

"This is not just an Amazon phenomenon," Gimbel said. "When something is harder to find, you're going to have to pay for it."

The policy likely won't show up in national wage data anytime soon. It would increase average hourly earnings in the US by 1.2 cents, Moody's economist Adam Ozimek estimates, as affected workers make up less than a quarter percentage point of total payroll employment. For comparison, that figure tends to rise about 10 cents on average each month. 

"This reflects an underlying trend in wage growth anyway so some of the wage hikes were going to happen even without this policy," Ozimek said. "I think it's more reflective of a tight labor market than it is likely to generate a tight labor market."

Still, others see the action as more than a symptom. Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at the career site Glassdoor, predicts the company will put "immediate" pressure on wage growth. In the retail and e-commerce sectors, pillars of Amazon's workforce, he expects payrolls to rise faster than the national average. 

"The writing is on the wall," he said. "If the largest retailer in the US is taking a stand like this, it puts other companies at a competitive disadvantage." 

And with labor shortages across the economy, changes in retail and e-commerce could spread to the rest of the economy as it pulls workers from other sectors. 

"Policies and public stances like this do matter," Chamberlain said. "Amazon is such a big fish in the pool that it can have far-reaching consequences."

Apple has its AirPods, Google built the Pixel Buds, and now Microsoft has its Surface Headphones.

The $350 over-the-ear Surface Headphones, available later this holiday season, were announced at a Microsoft event in New York City on Tuesday. They'll feature active and passive noise cancelation, bluetooth and wired connections, fast charging, and Cortana support.

Users can ask Microsoft's Cortana voice assistant to pause, play, or change songs, as well as utilize Cortana's non-audio functionalities like reminders and Bing searches. The headphones will also notice when they're taken off someone's head, and will pause songs or mute calls accordingly while the headset is removed.

The idea, it seems, is to offer a pair of high-end headphones that complement Microsoft's high-end Surface hardware. Indeed, on Tuesday, Microsoft announced a trio of new Surface computers: the Surface Pro 6, the Surface Laptop 2, and the Surface Studio 2.

Here are the key specs for the Surface Headphones:

The spate of bad news continues for Facebook.

After Russian meddling in the 2016 elections and the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, a cyber attack impacted nearly 50 million Facebook user accounts, the company said on Friday.

But marketers aren't freaking out, and instead they're being empathetic, says Carolyn Everson, Facebook's vice president of global marketing solutions.

Speaking at Advertising Week New York, Everson said that she and her team spent Friday and the weekend contacting the company's advertisers, helping them understand the ramifications of the cyber attack. And while they had questions, most were understanding.

"There's empathy around the fact that we're all dealing with this incredible threat, and that at any given moment there can be a cyber attack on anyone," she said. "And certainly, we're not the only company to have had a situation like this."

On Tuesday, Facebook discovered that an unknown attacker, or attackers, had taken advantage of a security flaw to take over users' accounts. The flaw was related to the "View As" feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like through the eyes of another user, Facebook explained.

Everson called the attack "extremely intricate," likening it to an "odorless, weightless intruder" that walks into a house. She said that the attack was so sophisticated that it was very complicated for Facebook's security team to be able to detect it.

Facebook's business team put together a guide over the weekend listing certain steps clients could take to secure their accounts.

And Facebook's team encouraged advertisers to take a stock of admins on their accounts, as large brands tend to have several people that are admins across not just the company, but also at their agencies. Those brands looking to take extra precautions could log out and log back in, said Everson. Lastly, Facebook assured brands that their credit card information could not have been taken by the hackers.

"We do not store the full digits of the credit card number anywhere, and so that was of comfort as well," she said. "Mostly, they're just looking forward to us providing them updates."

This reaction is very different from when the Cambridge Analytica crisis hit, said Everson. And that's because that was something that could have been prevented.

"With Cambridge Analytica, the reaction was slightly different in that that was something that we felt we definitely should have prevented," she said. "We should have gone back and really checked that audit. The firm said that they deleted the data and they didn't and we didn't go back and check on that."

It also helps that Facebook has taken full responsibility for the previous goof-ups and has been proactive in communicating with advertisers, she said. And that's because it recognizes that the foundation of its business is trust from both consumers and marketers.

"At the end of the day we have a responsibility to people and to the marketers that utilize our platform — trust is one of those things that is earned every day by individual actions," she said. "There is no amount of time, energy, or effort that won't be expended in protecting people."

In fact, there is a massive cultural shift taking place within Facebook as far as the role it plays and its responsibility in regard to election integrity, the fight against fake news and data security is concerned, said Everson. She said it was a bigger shift than when the company embraced mobile.

"This is the most important cultural shift — recognizing our responsibility, taking very specific actions and doing everything we can. We have zero tolerance for all of this behavior, but there won't be zero occurrence," she said. "This is the most important thing that we're doing. Nothing else matters if we don't get this right."