Apple announced on Friday that it had been rebuilding Apple Maps since 2015, and that the next-generation maps will be released for beta testers in San Francisco later this summer.

The underlying map data itself, like the location of roads, businesses, and signs, will be all Apple's for the first time ever, the company revealed to TechCrunch. This means that Apple will reduce its reliance on data providers like TomTom and OpenStreetMap, which have historically provided most of the data for Apple Maps.

Apple has been collecting a lot of the data with its Apple Maps vans, which have been spotted on streets as far back as 2015. This is the first time that data will be used in the Maps app, according to Apple.

The iPhone company also plans to use anonymized data from people's phones to improve its maps.

The first public sighting of an Apple Maps van in 2015.ClaycordApple's own data also has more detail than what it was using before, according to the TechCrunch report. It will include landmarks like grass, pools, parking lots, fields and pedestrian parkways. The overall design will be the same, but the maps themselves will be more detailed and useful.

Apple Maps was released in 2012, and the software was quickly panned for being worse than Google Maps. Apple CEO Tim Cook was forced to publicly apologize for removing the Google-based Maps app that had been a default iPhone app.

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So Apple has been secretly working to improve its maps since 2014, according to TechCrunch. 9to5Mac previously reported in 2015 that the company had aimed to built its own mapping database by 2018.

"We haven't announced this. We haven't told anybody about this. It's one of those things that we've been able to keep pretty much a secret. Nobody really knows about it. We're excited to get it out there. Over the next year, we'll be rolling it out, section by section in the US," Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president for services, told TechCrunch.

Most rocket launches happen in early daylight, when the weather most often cooperates — and nervous engineers can keep a clear eye on their precious space vehicles.

But for those lucky enough to witness a dark, pre-dawn launch, an incredible sight sometimes awaits. Such was the case Friday morning, when SpaceX fired a Falcon 9 rocket from a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and toward the International Space Station.

The SpaceX mission, called CRS-15 — NASA's designation for Commercial Resupply Service — sent a Dragon spaceship with nearly 6,000 lbs of supplies (including a floating robotic head) to the space station's crew. The launch of SpaceX's 23-story rocket was stunning, but a phenomenon that the mission left in its wake was even more spectacular.

Taylor Harris, a YouTube artist invited by NASA to watch the launch from a few miles away, described the launch plume as a "Dragon Tail."

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"I'm glad I got the opportunity to see the Dragon's Tail in person," Harris tweeted about 45 minutes after the launch at 5:42 a.m. EDT.

Robert Richards, a space entrepreneur and Google Lunar XPRIZE competitor who saw the launch from a different location, aptly called it a beautiful "rocket rise" on Twitter.

A Falcon 9 rocket launches toward space.SpaceX/Flickr (public domain)

When rockets launch, they leave behind a trail of hot exhaust, also called a plume. The appearance of the plume depends on the fuel, in SpaceX's case it's RP-1 — a high-grade kerosene — burned by liquid oxygen.

Falcon 9 rockets can send payloads more than 250 miles above Earth, beyond the edge of space and where the space station orbits our planet.

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At first, a rocket leaves behind a relatively thin plume. But as it climbs higher and higher toward space, the air pressure gets lower and lower. About a dozen miles up, the air pressure is less than 1% of that at Earth's surface, causing hot launch plumes to dramatically expand.

If atmospheric conditions are right, these billowing plumes can make water condense out of the air, which then freezes into tiny ice crystals. And if the timing is right, these crystals can reflect the sun's light from far over the horizon like a mirror, beaming it down to a dark, pre-dawn location (at least until high-altitude winds blow around the plume and ice).

The phenomenon is known to scientists as noctilucent or "night-shining" clouds, which form naturally and most frequently over the Arctic and Antarctic.

Andreessen Horowitz this week launched a $300 million specialist crypto fund, five years after first investing in the space through Coinbase. The venture capital firms' long interest in crypto and sizeable new fund make it a trailblazer — most VCs have largely ignored cryptocurrencies and are now struggling to play catch-up.

"If you look back a year ago at where we were, it really wasn't on many [venture capitalists'] radars," Michael Jackson, a partner at venture capital firm Mangrove, told Business Insider.

"Ethereum hadn't come up, ICOs hadn't started, bitcoin had been Mt Gox'd. There wasn't any mainstream interest aside from bitcoin and I think most of the venture world was agreed that investing in a currency wasn't for venture capital companies."

Now the industry is reconsidering its position after an explosion of activity towards the end of 2017. Bitcoin rose over 1,000% against the dollar in 2017, with other cryptocurrencies recording similarly eye-catching returns. The entire market has more than halved since the start of 2018 but there is a sense that the technology is not going away.

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"[VCs] certainly want to talk more and more to us, in fact ever since 2017 they're much more interested in talking to us to invest in us," Jon, the COO of digital cryptocurrency exchange Shapeshift, told Business Insider. (Shapeshift doesn't give out the second names of its employees for fear of phishing attacks.)

Unfortunately for VCs, the particular nature of cryptocurrency presents plenty of potential hurdles.

'They're a little late to the boat'

2017 saw the emergence of ICOs — initial coin offerings — as a new fundraising method unique to the cryptocurrency space. ICOs allow startups to mint their own digital currencies or tokens and sell them in exchange for ether or bitcoin that can be sold for fiat as and when they need working capital.

Billions have been raised through this method, most coming from individual investors. It allows startups in the space to effectively circumvent the VC world if they want.

Even for crypto companies that don't do an ICO, the rising tide of cash in the industry means that many are bringing in huge revenues and profiting from money flowing into the sector.

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The CEO of crypto derivatives platform BitMEX told Business Insider in January: "The mining firms, the trading platforms — they don't need VC money. They're perfectly capable of funding capex and opex from retained earnings."

Jon at Shapeshift said his business turned into an accidental hedge fund in 2017 due to the inventory of cryptocurrencies it holds.

"Of course, now we don't need their money anymore," Shapeshift's Jon said. "They're a little late to the boat."

Venture funds could theoretically buy crypto tokens offered in ICO raises but that presents problems too. Laws in some jurisdictions prevent venture funds from straying beyond equity and convertible debt investments, and most funds are bound by the terms of sales documents produced when raising money for their funds.

"We've historically written pretty boilerplate stuff in that, which is equity, convertible debt, and some amount of cash into companies and that's it," Mangrove's Jackson said. "We have never included the term token, or cryptocurrencies or anything like that because they didn't exist when the PPMs [private placement memorandum] were written."

'What the hell do you do with them?'

Even if funds find ways around these problems and buy tokens, there still the problem of how to handle these investments.

Ledger, whose Nano S cryptocurrency hardware wallet is pictured, is working on institutional versions of its products.REUTERS/Mike Segar"If you get a load of crypto tokens, what the hell do you do with them?" Jackson said. "You get a USB key. Well, to be honest, we're not really geared up around USB keys and certainly having a USB key or a ledger in the office — it just goes against all the sort of governance and things that you've got used to.

"Everybody's struggling. When I talk to [other investors] they're looking at the token side of things and struggling with some of the practicalities and things around that."

Jackson, who authored a report last year on crypto's impact on venture capital, said he expects the problem to be a temporary one. Companies such as Bitcoin Suisse, Coinbase, and Ledger are all developing custodial solutions for crypto.

'Some of the biggest and best VCs saw ahead'

Still, given all these hurdles, why are VCs bothering with crypto at all? The answer is because the people who have invested in venture funds are asking for it.

"VCs wanted to invest in all those companies and were told by their LPs involved in their VC funds, 'oh no we're not interested in that,'" Shapeshift's Jon said.

"Now those same people who couldn't get those deals done are now the ones having people come to them and say: 'What's our crypto strategy?' Our crypto strategy was investing in all those companies a year and a half ago that I told you about and you all said no to — that was our strategy and now we've missed it."

Ari Paul, the CIO of Blocktower Capital, told a recent conference in London that traditional investors are increasingly moving from a fear of crypto towards "FOMO" — fear of missing out.

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One Silicon Valley VC told BI recently that they had begun investing in ICO tokens after consulting with their limited partners (LPs), who are the institutions that back the VC funds. The LPs told the fund to go for it because "everyone else is doing it."

Cryptocurrency hedge fund Polychain Capital was founded in late 2016 and this week it became the first crypto specific fund to hit $1 billion in assets under management, demonstrating rising investor interest.

Thomas Bertani, the director of cryptocurrency app Eidoo, which raised $27 million through an ICO last year, expects to see a "huge wave of capital hit the market" by the end of the year as VCs wrap their heads around investing in the space.

Shapeshift's Jon said: "VCs tend to like a herd. When the herd move in, then everybody wants to move in. There are a few that saw ahead of that."

Jon praised the early adopters like Andreessen Horowitz, who took a chance on the space when it was still largely associated with the dark web and cyberpunk anarchists.

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"Some of the biggest and best VCs I think saw ahead of those," he said. "Some of the VCs like Sequoia and Union Square and Andreessen Horowitz. They took the chance that no one was willing to take and now everyone else is jumping on board because it's much clearer now. It's kind of the way things go."

Diane Greene, CEO for Google's cloud businesses, spoke on a wide range of subjects regarding Google and the company's rivals Wednesday night. She covered nearly everything other than the one topic that's grabbed the most headlines of late.

At the annual "Most Powerful Women Evening" event hosted by Fortune magazine, Greene said that she "wouldn't have minded buying" Github. When asked about Google's competition with Amazon Web Services for cloud supremacy, she boasted that Google's cloud possessed "better technology."

On artificial intelligence, one of the hot areas of investment and innovation in the tech sector, Greene said it was "a real frontier and nobody knows how fast it's going to go or where it's going to go." According to Greene, AI is frightening to some because the technology has developed more human aspects and capabilities.

But as for Google's recently aborted ambitions to provide cloud and AI services for the US military, the event's hosts told the audience that they decided not to query their guest about the controversy.

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That's a curious choice by Fortune considering recent events. Last year, Google agreed to provide AI technology to help the Pentagon analyze huge amounts of drone surveillance footage. When word about the partnership spread inside the company, many employees were angered — more than 4,000 signed a petition that demanded Google management stop working with the military and promise never to develop AI for weapons. A dozen employees quit in protest.

Tech companies are now like governments

A few weeks ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai relented. He published a list of ethical principles to guide the company's AI development and promised not to use AI for weapons.

The decision to forgo military contracts potentially worth billions of dollars didn't exactly help Greene's efforts to continue growing Google's cloud. One of Greene's interviewers did attempt to draw her out about the debacle. The interviewer asked her whether it was true that all platforms can be used for "good or evil."

"I think that's true of almost every tech," Greene responded. "You can use a Google doc to send nasty grams."

Greene added something else that hinted at how Google's management views the recent employee revolt. She spoke about some of the challenges that tech leaders face now, in an age where employees feel empowered to refuse to work on projects they find morally objectionable.

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"AI researchers want to know how their tech is going to be used," Greene said. "Now, you have to [figure out] and discuss all about the worst possible uses for a technology ... I think tech companies are almost in a position of being like a government, as far as making decisions about what your values are."

Greene is a powerful figure at Google. Because she sits on the board of Alphabet Inc, Google's parent company, she is both Pichai's employee as well as one of his bosses. The cloud is also a pivotal area for Google, and Greene has led the division to rapid growth since taking over there in 2015.

Organizational engineer

On Amazon, the leading cloud service, she suggested that the company enjoys the top spot in the sector because it had a first-mover advantage. She added, however that Google is rapidly closing the gap between the companies.

"We have the better tech, the better cloud," Greene said. "What Amazon has is a lot of developer mind share because it was the only cloud in town, but that's changing very quickly. We're more secure ... we have better machine learning."

As for Microsoft, Greene's comments suggested that she was a little envious of that company's $7.5 billion acquisition earlier this month of Github, the top software development platform. She noted that Google is the" biggest contributor to GitHub" and cautioned Microsoft's leaders against fiddling too much with the platform.

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"I hope they can leave them completely neutral," she said. "I think that would be the thing to do after paying $7.5 billion."

Lastly, Greene was asked what she learned during her time at Google.

"It's been a unique challenge for me," Greene said. "It's a very large operation, and for me, it's like a large startup because of our unbelievable growth."

"[Google cloud] is also in enterprise and Google is mostly a consumer company," she added. "Building that within this larger company, and then partnering with the rest of the company around everything has required a lot of processes and ways to work together and juggling people and organization structures. So, I feel like I've become an organizational engineer."

Paris-based mobile games studio Oh BiBi has raised $21 million and now hopes to take on "Fortnite."

The series B investment was led by Atomico, which has previously backed games companies such as Supercell (the studio behind "Clash of Clans") and Rovio ("Angry Birds"), with participation from French VC fund Korelya Capital.

To date, Oh BiBi has specialised in racing games, but now wants to branch out into new genres more associated with PC and console gaming. A new shooter game called "FRAG" is the focus of its efforts.

"What always struck us as weird was why no shooter was super successful on mobile, because shooter is the biggest genre on console and PC, and so far the mobile market was eluding it," said Martial Valery, the 34-year-old cofounder and COO of Oh BiBi.

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Atomico partner Mattias Ljungman told Business Insider that Oh BiBi's idea to move into the shooter genre is what attracted Atomico to put up about two thirds of the funding for its series B. "That was sort of what got our interest because they said look, there are some really big genres that have yet to be tapped," he said.

Atomico was also impressed by Valery and Stanislas' track record at their former studio, Gameloft. "It was pretty obvious when we met them that they were pretty unique guys. Between them, they have 18 years experience, 150 titles under their belt," Ljungman added. These games include hits such as "Minion Rush" and "Ashphalt."

Taking on "Fortnite"

There is one game bucking the trend of low numbers of shooter games on mobile: The wildly popular battle-royale game "Fortnite," which was brought to iOS this spring, and will be coming to Android this summer.

"The key difference is that 'Fortnite' is a port from console and PC, while our game is designed exclusively for iOS and Android from the start," Valery said.

He said "FRAG" will be more accessible than "Fortnite," which currently requires 2 gigabytes of memory.

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"Our upcoming game is only 100 megabytes, so [it's] something very optimised for mobile that people will be able to access super quickly, and without their battery being killed by all the processing power," he said.

Whereas "Fortnite" has 100 players facing off, "FRAG" will be one-to-one, with each opponent controlling a team of five "heroes." Valery said that in creating these heroes, Oh BiBi drew a lot of inspiration from Pixar, describing them as "super-colourful and soft-edged."

"FRAG." Oh BiBi

Tackling new genres

According to Valery, Oh BiBi's ambition to adapt PC and console-centric genres to the mobile platform are not limited to "FRAG."

"We think in terms of sports games there is a huge opportunity that has not been completely fulfilled on mobile, there is not an actual football game that can rival 'FIFA'," he said. "The sandbox type of game, à la 'GTA' (Grand Theft Auto) is also something that has not been successfully brought to market."

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His believes developers haven't been able to adapt PC and console game genres for mobile because they stick too closely to the source material.

"I think what has been problematic for a lot of developers before is that they've tried to take these genres very literally and bring them to mobile without much adaptation in terms of session length, or controls, or accessibility," he said. "What we're trying to bring is really a secret sauce that can make these genres tick and work on these platforms as well."

A beta version of "FRAG" will be available on iOS and Android next month, and the game will launch fully by the beginning of next year.

Emmett Carson, the CEO of Silicon Valley Community Foundation, is out after an independent investigation found "credible" evidence that the organization had a "toxic" work environment, the organization announced on Wednesday — the same day it released the investigator's report.

Those allegations included "racial and sexual comments, and other inappropriate comments and workplace behavior (such as berating and bullying)," the report says.

The investigation was undertaken after The Chronicle of Philanthropy's Marc Gunther published a detailed report in April alleging that the foundation's top fundraiser, Mari Ellen Loijens, engaged in emotionally abusive and sexually inappropriate behavior. It also reported allegations that Carson turned a blind eye to Loijens' transgressions.

The day after the article published, Loijens resigned, and Carson was put on administrative leave while this investigation took place. Further news reports about the organization followed.

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SVCF bills itself as the world's largest community foundation and manages over $13.5 billion in donations, as of December 2017, it says.

SVCF is popular with the billionaires of Silicon Valley because SVCF isn't a traditional charity. Donors can use it to set up "donor-advised funds," which lets them dump big sums of money into the foundation, claim the tax write-off immediately, and then later dispense charitable grants when and as they wish. While that money is waiting to be donated, it can be invested, tax free, according to Fidelity.

Consequently, the SVCF has attracted a long list of big name donors including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix founder Reed Hastings, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, GoPro founders Nicholas and Jill Woodman and companies like Cisco.

Not every billionaire has loved SVCF. Back in 2014, when Zuckerberg first announced his $1 billion+ gift to charity, long-time philanthropist Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff criticized it. "Silicon Valley Community Foundation is a bunch of DAFs: donor-advised funds. You give your money to SVCF and you get your tax write-off for the year, but [the foundation] has no obligation to administer that money," Benioff said.

It's worth noting that the while the investigators did seem substantiate allegations concerning SVCF's culture, they found no evidence of "financial misconduct," the report said.

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SVCF appointed Greg Avis as its interim CEO when Carson went on leave in the spring. Avis is a founder of venture firm Summit Partners. Avis has already hired a workplace consultant to work on SVCF's culture, the foundation says.

We reached out to SVCF for comment and will update if we hear back.

Sandbox VR

Sandbox VR, a Hong Kong-based virtual reality startup that licenses its technology to IMAX movie theaters, is raising a significant new round of funding, Business Insider has learned.

Andreessen Horowitz is in talks to invest in the round, according to two sources familiar with the matter. One of the firm's general partners, Andrew Chen, may be spearheading the investment, according to one person familiar with the talks.

Andreessen Horowitz and Sandbox VR did not respond to requests for comment on the matter.

Sandbox VR, which was previously operating under the name Glo Games, has previously raised $3 million in seed funding from investors including ChinaRock Capital Management, Presence Capital Fund, Mindworks Ventures, and Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, according to Pitchbook data. 

The specific amount being raised in this most recent funding round and what it values the startup at could not be learned. But given that the company’s only known previous fundraising was a modest $3 million seed round, Sandbox VR is likely looking for a hefty cash infusion as it seeks to support its partnership with IMAX and to expand its business in a competitive sector. 

The Void, another VR entertainment company, debuted a Star Wars VR experience at Disneyland in March. 

Headquartered in Hong Kong and led by CEO Steven Zhao, Sandbox VR currently offers virtual reality experiences in San Francisco, San Mateo, Los Angeles, and New York, and outside the US in Singapore and Thailand.

The startup currently licenses its technology to IMAX, which offers Sandbox VR experiences in some of its theaters. A 30-minute session costs between $32 and $38, depending on the time of day.

The game experiences take place in specially designed rooms created by attaching four green screen walls to a green screen floor. Customers wear a virtual reality headset connected to a PC that is worn on the player's back along with sensors on the feet and arms, an elaborate system that allows multiple people to play through the experiences in the same physical and virtual space. Plastic guns with motion tracking sensors attached are used to shoot virtual waves of enemies. Some experiences even include wall-mounted fans that can simulate wind and motion.

Kif Leswing

The green screen walls and floor allow the startup to capture video of the players' experiences that can then be merged together so people can later see their physical bodies overlaid onto the virtual world they viewed through their VR headsets.

Last week, Sandbox VR's chief product officer, Siqi Chen, tweeted a photo of himself playing one of the company's virtual reality games with Andreessen Horowitz's Andrew Chen and MixPanel founder Suhail Doshi.

Sandbox VR has generated lots of interest in Silicon Valley in recent weeks. SVB vice president Dan Hardman, SVB managing director Josh Dorsey, Shasta Partner Jacob Mullins, and Coatue managing partner Matthew Mazzeo have all tweeted about their experiences visiting Sandbox VR this month.

Business Insider senior reporter Kif Leswing recently got to try out a Sandbox VR experience, which you can read about here.

Every day, over 5 million New Yorkers rely on the subway system to get to work, doctor appointments, daycare, college classes, dates, shops — you name it. With 665 miles of track, 472 stations, and 27 lines, NYC's subway system is one of the largest in the world.

At the same time, it has the worst on-time performance of any other major transit system globally. The system's operator, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), said that just 58.1% of all weekday trains arrived on time in January, The New York Times reported.

A new report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York explores how the severity of those delays may vary by income. The researchers considered data on subway delay times, track work, and alternative options for riders in various tax brackets across Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan.

The study found that New Yorkers living in high-income neighborhoods — the Upper West Side, SoHo, Tribeca — tend to experience fewer subway delays and lower commute times than those in lower-income neighborhoods. Neighborhoods with the worst delays include Coney Island, East New York, and Harlem.

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Nicole Gorton and Maxim Pinkovskiy, the study's authors, recognize a possible reason why: A short commute is often expensive, because people are willing to pay more to live closer to the subway.

Another reason is that further-out, less expensive neighborhoods tend to have longer commute times overall, which means there are more opportunities for delays. Low-income New Yorkers also have fewer transit alternatives — like bikeshares, buses, and ferries — when the subway breaks down.

Due to cost, taxis and rideshare services tend to be less accessible for low-income residents.

Gorton and Pinkovskiy said that their findings suggest more serious consequences than more time spent on the subway. Low-income New Yorkers are losing time on trains that they could spend on more important things.

"Aside from the obvious frustration of unanticipated delays, longer commutes mean people risk losing pay, or even their jobs, and may have less time to invest in their health, education, and children," Gorton and Pinkovskiy wrote. "That is bad news for all New Yorkers."

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There's no clear solution to the issue, especially as the MTA prepares to shut down a major train line connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan for 15 months.

Over the past year, Google has been embroiled in a boatload of scandals centered on the way its employees treat each other. The company has now taken its first steps to put the kibosh on one underlying cause of these scandals: the company's internal, employee community message boards.

On Wednesday, Google confirmed on Twitter that it released new "guidelines" this week for employees about what is and isn't considered okay behavior on these boards. Most of them seem like common sense, including rules about thinking before you post and treating others with respect.

But the rules also pack a punch. Employees are warned that if they behave badly, they could face discipline. Over-the-top behavior is defined generally as posting material or comments, or making such comments in person, that doesn't align with the company's values or that "are disruptive to a productive work environment."

Google is not shutting down its internal message boards, which are moderated by volunteers, the Wall Street Journal's Douglas Macmillan reports. The search giant is, however, making it clear that the boards are officially no longer a free-for-all. Employees who start a discussion group are empowered to delete or remove over-the-top posts.

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These new community standards have their roots in the 2017 scandal, when Google fired James Damore after one of his posts to the internal boards caused a national uproar. He argued that women are less suited to engineering than men, biologically speaking — an idea that's been fiercely refuted by experts — and that the true problem with Silicon Valley is how it treats conservatives, a minority political affiliation in the Bay Area.

Tensions flew after that, on the boards and elsewhere. Lawsuits filed in the wake of the incident included messages posted on internal message boards by employees where people threatened to blacklist other employees. Some employees were "doxed," their personal details, like a home address, leaked as a way to incite retaliatory behavior.

More recently, there was an employee uprising at Google, in which employees pressured the company not to work on projects for the military. Things got so heated that Google CEO Sundar Pichai bowed to the mob and promised, in its way, to never help the military build artificial intelligence-powered weapons.

However, one person close to the company said that the discussions on the boards regarding military contracts were actually largely civil and respectful, and would have been compliant with these new guidelines.

In any case, this latest uproar is still causing fallout. As Business Insider's Greg Sandoval reports, one of Google's star engineers is now on the hot seat: Dr. Fei-Fei Li who is leading its all-important artificial intelligence unit, is under scrutiny for her role in defending Project Maven, a project between Google and the Pentagon.

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Meanwhile, employees have been told they will be held accountable if their posts to the internal boards cause scandals, wind up as evidence in lawsuits, or otherwise impact other employees and the company.

To be sure, the last year of scandals aren't the first time Google employees have talked about the good, bad and ugly going on on these message boards. For instance, Google's Memegen is infamous. It's an internal site where employees create and share memes, many of them irreverent or political.

Way back in 2013, in fact, a Google employee involved in a discussion on Hacker News about the downsides of Google's culture, described it like this: "There's also the ones who think they're still in college and don't understand simple things such as being mature and respectful with your fellow Googlers. The latter you can see spending a lot of time posting passive aggressive memes on memegen."

Here are the part of the new guidelines that Google tweeted out.

Google community guidelines

When David tried to download apps on his iPhone and iPad recently, he found he wasn't able to because his account was linked to something called "Family Sharing."

That's a feature that Apple introduced in 2014 to make it easier to share apps, iCloud storage, and iTunes content like music and movies with up to five family members.

But this was news to David, who says he didn't remember turning on Family Sharing. After he dug into his account settings, he received a popup that to remove himself from the Family Sharing account he needed to contact a name that was in Chinese — and he had no way to get in touch.

David called Apple's support line, and they were able to fix the issue for him, but weren't able to tell him exactly why it happened nor anything he could do to keep his account safe in the future, he said. The problem was resolved, but the ordeal "struck me as odd," he told Business Insider in an email.

Not the only instance

ImgurIt is difficult to quantify how widespread the account hijacking involving Family Sharing is, but David is not the only person who has encountered it.

There are a handful of posts on Apple's support forums and Reddit that detail similar stories of accounts that couldn't buy apps or in-app purchases due to issues involving the feature.

One account, from April, is particularly detailed, and even suggests why the hackers might be trying this attack.

It starts when the author, Emmerage, receives an email from Apple saying that someone had purchased an app on his account.

Although he was "wary of phishing scams," he writes that after logging in to his account independently, he discovered someone had changed his name to Chinese characters, and a second account connected to the Apple ID had been buying a bunch of in-app purchases for the app Youku, a Chinese video app, using someone else's credit card and a fake Australian billing address.

From the April post on Apple's support forums:

"I find it difficult to believe that someone would go to that much trouble just to spend $100 on someone else's credit card to buy games and other crap on Youku. Also, I can't see how they would be able to reliably intercept confirmations and so on using a compromised email - there's nothing in trash, and I get my email notifications on my phone, surely I would have seen something? Surely they would have intercepted the purchase email I saw that made me change all the passwords? There has been no suspicious activity at all regarding my email, or the Apple ID until now, and no logins from new devices or anything else I would have expected to get a notification for if someone overseas was accessing any of my accounts."

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Other posts suggested the attackers were interested in buying iTunes gift cards with the account's balance or credit card.

"The most obvious way that could happen is if a hacker gained control of the victim's Apple ID," Thomas Reed, an Apple-focused researcher at security firm MalwareBytes, told Business Insider in an email. "This could provide a simple way to monetize a hacked Apple ID, and I did notice that one person reporting this kind of issue specifically mentioned he didn't have two-factor authentication turned on."

"So an unauthorized access to the victim's Apple ID account could explain it. In this case, enabling two-factor authentication should prevent that kind of unauthorized access," he continued.

Apple ID usernames and passwords can be an attractive target for scammers, who sometimes use Apple's security features to lock the data on an attacked device and ask for ransom.

Separately, in 2017, police in China reportedly arrested 22 people who resold information related to Apple ID accounts for between 10 and 180 yuan per account, or between $1.50 and $27.

What you can do

How permission through Family Sharing works.AppleThere are several potential reasons why this could be happening.

When setting up Family Sharing, the user being added receives an email or text with an option to join or decline, according to Apple. It's possible that many of these people who have reported the problem may have received the notification and mistakenly approved it, although most of the reports online say they believe that didn't happen.

There's another way to add an account to Family Sharing: if the administrator of the family has your password. This is useful for parents and other legitimate Family Sharing users.

But that also means that an attacker could obtain someone's password, perhaps through a fake phishing email or one of the leaked databases out there, and then use that password to take over the Apple ID account.

But if an attacker had your Apple ID and password, that means could gain access to your account directly if two-factor is not turned on. So it's still unclear why the Family Sharing feature is entering into this phenomenon — why would a scammer make purchases with a linked account instead of the original?

There is one solid way to make your Apple ID more secure: by turning on two-factor authentication. That means in order to log in, a password and user ID wouldn't be enough — they'd need a 6-digit code from your phone or another trusted device.

Regardless, it's a reminder that you should practice good account security, especially with important accounts. Don't reuse passwords, don't use bad passwords like "password," and turn on two-factor authentication wherever possible.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist born and raised in the Bronx, defeated longtime incumbent Joseph Crowley in a primary race for New York's 14th District on Tuesday.

As 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez begins her meteoric rise in politics — this November, she's highly likely to become the youngest woman ever elected to the US House of Representatives — observers have pointed out that she has an asteroid named after her, called 23238 Ocasio-Cortez.

The Democratic politician confirmed this fact in early June.

"It's true! Science was my first passion," she tweeted on June 12, adding that the asteroid was named in honor of longevity experiments she conducted out of Mt. Sinai Health System in New York.

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"My research won 2nd place globally in Microbiology at @intel ISEF," she said in the tweet, referring to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. "At [Boston University] I started as science major, changed to Econ “#nerdalert"

How Ocasio-Cortez got a space rock named after her

A campaign flyer for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 2018

The asteroid in question was discovered on November 20, 2000, by the Lincoln Observatory Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.

Not anyone can officially name an asteroid: That duty belongs International Astronomical Union, the world's official record-keeper of celestial objects. According to IAU rules, the person or people who discover an asteroid get 10 years to suggest a name.

Jenifer Evans, an electrical engineer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, was one of the lead scientists on LINEAR along with her boss Grant Stokes — so they had the naming rights to all the asteroids the program found. LINEAR, built in 1996, uses ground-based telescopes at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to scan for asteroids and comets — especially any that may pose a threat to our planet. It was one of the first high-power surveys of the night sky, so it discovered more than 140,000 asteroids.

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Evans and Stokes decided to keep things "honorable" by handing out asteroid names to the winners of top science and engineering fairs for students.

"We didn't want to make it willy-nilly. We wanted to keep it exclusive," Evans told Business Insider. She said first- and second-place winners of three major student competitions, plus some teachers and mentors, get naming rights.

"Usually science people aren't in the newspaper," Evans said. "This is a way to encourage an interest in science because local newspapers will write up, 'Tommy Smith had an asteroid after him.' It's almost as cool as, 'Tommy Smith made three touchdowns at the football game.'"

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez celebrates at a victory party in the Bronx on June 26, 2018. Scott Heins/Getty This is where Ocasio-Cortez comes in.

When she submitted her high-school microbiology project in 2007 and won second place at Intel's science and engineering fair, she automatically won the naming rights to an asteroid found by LINEAR.

From there, Evans worked with the IAU to propose the name "23238 Ocasio-Cortez" and ask its 13-member judging panel to approve the title. The name passed in August 2007, affixing Ocasio-Cortez's name to a space rock.

About 15,000 asteroids have been named after people, and Ocasio-Cortez was far from the first student — the naming program has been going since 2001.

Today, about 4,000 middle- and high-school students have had asteroids named after them, which represents nearly a fifth of all named space rocks.

What we know about asteroid 23238 Ocasio-Cortez

An illustration of an asteroid. Reuters/NASA

Not too much is known about asteroid 23238 Ocasio-Cortez, since no spacecraft has ever visited it for an up-close look.

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"We have no idea what any of these are. We only see it as a bright spot," Evans said, adding that it's only visible through a telescope and not with a naked eye. "And you can't tell the difference between a star and an asteroid at first. It looks like a star until it moves from one picture to the next."

However, observations by LINEAR and other telescopes have pinned down some basic pieces of knowledge about the rock, which NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has logged in an expansive database of asteroids.

Asteroid 23238 Ocasio-Cortez is about 1.44 miles wide and an average of 240 million miles from Earth. This puts it in the Asteroid Belt, which is an expansive zone between Mars and Jupiter.

Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute, says the rock appears to be what's called a "QV" type asteroid.

"These guys were blasted off the surface of Vesta, the second-largest asteroid in the solar system, from the impact of another asteroid at its south pole," Sykes, who works on the Dawn mission (which visited Vesta), told Business Insider. "So her asteroid could be a piece of Vesta."

Full view of Vesta.NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ UCLA/ MPS/ DLR/ IDAIt takes the space rock about 3 years, 10 months, 9 days, and 18 hours to make one trip around the sun. During that trip, which is slightly oval-shaped, 23238 Ocasio-Cortez travels slightly above the plane of the solar system for about half the time, and dips below it the other half. It's a very stable orbit, so the asteroid is unlikely to doom Earth.

"It'll never get close to the Earth, and it'll always be beyond Mars. Unless something weird happens," Sykes said.

Evans said naming "safe" asteroids after students was very deliberate.

"We want to assure all the students that their asteroid will never impact Earth," Evans said.

Although it's a pretty typical space rock, Evans said few people get anything named after them — let alone a 4.5-billion-year-old object that's likely to outlast the human race by billions if not trillions of years.

This story was updated with new information.

What would you be willing to give up in order to keep your smartphone privileges for a week?

A lot of consumers say they would be willing to temporarily stop using household items or give up their favorite pastimes; some are apparently willing to adopt questionable hygiene standards.

As it turns out, 41% of millennials ages 18 to 34 said they would be willing to quit shampooing for a week if it meant keeping their phone for that same period of time, according to a survey conducted by app-based phone service Visible. All 1,180 respondents owned a cell phone and were split almost evenly by gender using the census' breakdown.

Entertaining as it might be, this statistic brings to mind the conversation surrounding smartphone addiction that has been consuming various companies, adults, and teens. While some argue that it's on the product and platform creators to help control our dependence on mobile devices, others say it's our own responsibility — and a good first step is knowing where you stand.

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In the survey, a similar number of respondents (54%) said they would be willing to give up movies and TV for a month, while 28% said they would be willing to give up their pet for the week, 23% chose their phone over caffeine, and a small 17% took the 'take my toothbrush but not my cell phone' approach.

Given the capabilities of today's smartphones, it doesn't come as a huge surprise that consumers would be willing to prioritize them more than they did a decade ago. But these results — particularly the ones about habits we're taught are crucial from an early age — are an interesting look at just how a generation that has lived with smartphones for all or most of their adult life sees their mobile devices as necessity over luxury.

The scooter armageddon in San Francisco was over almost as quickly as it began.

After the city received complaints of scooters routinely blocking sidewalks and building entrances, causing people to trip, and making sidewalks less accessible for people with mobility issues, it slapped the three high-profile scooter companies with cease and desist orders. Those startups are now vying for a limited number of permits from the city.

Now, Mark Lawrence, the CEO of parking startup SpotHero, tells Business Insider that his company is very close to a solution for the complaint that largely led to the scooter crackdown in the first place: The fact that because there's no dedicated scooter parking, they tend to get dumped anywhere and everywhere on streets and sidewalks.

Several scooter companies are in talks with SpotHero, an app that makes it fast and convenient to book a parking spot across 49 cities, to dock scooters in parking garages or share data to ensure scooters are located where they will most likely be used.

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Lawrence said since the drama around scooter-sharing has unfolded, several companies — which he declined to name — approached SpotHero about working together to find a solution for scooter parking.

One of the most well-funded players in the scooter market, Lime, told Business Insider it's in conversation with several partners that will "allow us to extend access of our scooters to more riders."

"SpotHero is an example of an innovative compapany that would complement Lime's overall rider experience," a Lime spokesperson said.

Mark Lawrence is the cofounder and CEO of SpotHero. SpotHero

The other top two scooter companies, Bird and Spin, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bird, the most valuable of the three, is said to be valuing itself at $2 billion as it pursues new funding.

SpotHero works by linking drivers with over 5,000 parking lots, garages, and valets across the US and Canada. In the app, a driver can find, reserve, and pay for a spot with just a few clicks. SpotHero takes a commission on every reservation made.

Lawrence said some commuters want to drive into the city, park somewhere, and book a scooter the rest of the way to their destination. Someday, scooter companies might put scooters in SpotHero locations to make their lives easier and rake in their business.

Data could also help scooter companies be smarter. If SpotHero knows there's a big event coming up and lots of parking spots in a certain radius are booked in advance, the startup could tip off scooter companies to deploy their scooters there, Lawrence said.

"We know where millions of people are already going to pay to park and where they're going to be. A percentage of those are going to need a scooter, and so the question is, is that scooter going to be physically available where people need it?" Lawrence said.

The benefits are twofold: Scooter users can more easily find the vehicles, while more scooters will find homes in garages instead of taking up space on sidewalks.

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It would be a surprising twist in the scooter saga, because all of these scooter companies market their vehicles as "dockless." People reserve a local scooter on their phone, ride for a small fee, and at the end of the journey, leave the scooter wherever to be claimed by the next rider. Not having docking stations is part of what makes them convenient.

Lawrence said the talks with scooter companies are still early, but he's optimistic that his startup will partner with others to improve the scooter situation for everybody.

"The way we do it isn't so much important as the why, which is, so we can make mobility better, so we can reduce congestion, so we can get people to move in and out of cities," he said.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Google's chief scientist for artificial intelligence, has been a rising star at the company since arriving in the November of 2016.

Her future with the company, however, is unclear.

Li, an associate professor at Stanford University and chief of the school's AI lab, took a leave of absence to work at Google. According to material posted online, Li is due to return from leave sometime in the second half of this year, a period that begins now.

Leading up to last month, Li appeared to be someone Google might want to tempt into staying. Her personal history has turned her into something of a media star. She immigrated to the US from China when she was 16 without knowing a word of English and climbed her way to the top of Google's management ranks, earning a PhD along the way. In 2016 Li was named a Great Immigrant by the Carnegie Corporation.

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But then came the employee backlash to Google's agreement to supply the military AI tech that could help analyze drone-surveillance footage and Li found herself caught up in the months-long internal dispute.

With the drama from the controversy still playing out, Google's star acquisition in the ultra-competitive AI field appears to be preparing to move on. "Dr. Li's plans for Google and Stanford remain unchanged," a Google spokesperson told Business Insider, declining to elaborate further.

Leaked emails make for bad optics

It's not clear if Li was directly involved in winning the military contract, or whether she personally played any role in making it happen. But inside Google, which long prided itself on its "Don't be Evil" motto, she has taken a lot of the heat for the controversial deal.

After news of that contract circulated within Google, more than 4,000 employees signed a petition demanding that management reverse the decision. A dozen employees later quit in protest. Google eventually yielded to many of the demands and has since promised not to ever build AI for weapons.

Sources among current and former Googlers who spoke to Business Insider say Li has been criticized because of comments she made during a September email exchange with other Google managers. Those emails were leaked last month to The New York Times and The Intercept and have proven to be embarrassing for Google as well as Li.

The emails reveal a discussion between Li and other managers, who were fretting about how to release news to the public about Google's first big contract with the Pentagon.

"Avoid at ALL COSTS any mention or implication of AI," she wrote in an email, according to The New York Times. "Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI — if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google."

In another message, Li wrote: "I don't know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry," according to The Intercept. "Google Cloud has been building our theme on Democratizing AI in 2017, and Diane (Greene, Google cloud chief) and I have been talking about Humanistic AI for enterprise. I'd be super careful to protect these very positive images."

AI for good

Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks with reporters at the 2018 I/O developer conference Greg Sandoval/Business Insider To some Googlers, those comments made Li appear complicit in the AI deal with the Pentagon. Worse, the comments struck them as being at odds with Li's public image of being an advocate for the ethical use of AI.

Even before arriving at Google, Li was a well-known AI booster and ethicist.

She has written often about the importance of developing "AI for good," and "human-centered AI," and AI that benefits all humans and "not just the privileged few." She has cautioned that "enthusiasm for AI is preventing us from reckoning with its looming effects on society."

Li's critics say she didn't appear very concerned about "AI for good" or ethics when discussing a military contract that should at least have rang some alarm bells. As a result, they say, her credibility and effectiveness as an AI evangelist are compromised.

To be sure, Li was not the only Google executive who seemed more than willing to work with the Pentagon, and she certainly wasn't the final decision maker on the deal. At multiple all-hands meetings, Diane Greene, the person overseeing Google's contracts with the Pentagon, defended them arguing that Google's contributions were strictly for non-offensive purposes.

It's possible that Li could continue to work at Google, perhaps with an "advisor" title if she returns to Stanford. What Li has going for her is that Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said that AI is vital to the company's future, and she is considered one of the top AI experts in the world.

"AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on," Pichai said earlier this year. "It is more profound than, I don't know, electricity or fire."

With Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and other tech rivals bolstering their AI teams, Google would likely prefer not to lose Li to a competitor — optics issues aside. And now that Google has given up on working with the military on weapons, and the billions of dollars that those contracts might have generated, Google is going to need all the AI brainpower and ethical guidance it can get.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk send a companywide email on Wednesday refuting estimates by a Goldman Sachs analyst that the electric car company would miss second-quarter production targets of its Model 3 sedan.

David Tamberrino, a Goldman Sachs analyst who has had a sell rating on Tesla since last February, wrote that deliveries were not meeting expectations and that second-quarter production numbers were "elevated."

Musk did not agree with Goldman Sachs' assessment.

"They're in for a rude awakening :)" Musk wrote in an email obtained by Bloomberg.com. Musk then linked his comments to a CNBC story that showed Goldman expected Tesla to deliver 22,000 Model 3s at the close of the quarter.

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While Tamberrino wrote Tesla would hit 22,000 deliveries of its Model 3 electric-sedan, the number falls well short of the 28,000 number chosen as an industry-wide consensus. CNBC reports Tamberrino based his conclusion on data from InsideEVs.com, GreenCarReports.com, and registration bureaus in various European countries.

Tesla has stated it expects to make 5,000 cars per week by the end of this month, but Musk has repeatedly changed Model 3 production targets.

During a first-quarter earnings call in May 2016, Musk said Tesla aimed to make 100,000 to 200,000 Model 3s in the second half of 2017. He did not come close. This year, only 9,766 Model 3s rolled out in the first quarter - a weekly output rate of roughly 750.

Tesla recently revealed "a giant tent" assembly line to help increase its Model 3 delivery numbers, but it's unclear how much impact the makeshift production line has helped the company grow output.

At the time of this writing, Tesla shares were up 2.2 percent at $344.24. The last 12 months have been up and down year for Tesla, with shares down about 9 percent over the past year, but up nearly 10 percent since January. Last September the stock traded as high as $389.61, while hitting its lowest price of $244.59 in April.

Joe Skipper/Reuters

Elon Musk is reportedly not happy with Goldman Sachs latest pessimism on Tesla's stock price.

In an email to Tesla employees on Wednesday, the chief executive sent around a CNBC write up of a research note from the bank which said the company will likely miss Model 3 delivery estimates.

"They are in for a rude awakening :)," he said, per Bloomberg.

Tesla has been running like crazy to meet Musk’s stated goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 sedans per week. It even built a massive tent outside its Fremont, California factory to add an extra assembly line to its arsenal. But so far, those efforts haven't appeared to pay off. 

"Given cadence from production to delivery, we now forecast the company achieving approx. 22,000 Model 3 deliveries to customers in the quarter—up from our previous 19,000 but below consensus of 28,000," David Tamberrino, the bank’s autos analyst, told clients Tuesday in a note seen by Business Insider. That translates to about 1,700 vehicles per week.

Tamberrino has maintained a $195 price target for shares of Tesla since March — a full 40% below where the stock was trading Wednesday.

Musk has repeatedly lambasted analysts with less-than-favorable ratings for Tesla’s stock. In May, during an earnings conference call, he interrupted two analysts attempting to ask questions about Tesla’s financial situation. Musk later tweeted that he ignored their questions because they "represent a short-seller thesis." He has also warned short sellers, or investors with bets riding against Tesla’s stock price, twice in recent weeks that their position will soon "explode."

Regardless of short positions, most of Wall Street remains convinced Tesla will need to raise capital this year. That directly contradicts with the company’s forecast of profitability.

Tesla is likely to announce its second quarter delivery numbers for the Model 3 as well as its other vehicles shortly after the end of the reporting period, as it has in the past. All eyes will be on the production numbers.  Even if the company does reach its goal of 5,000 per week, Goldman Sachs says that may not be sustainable.

"We see the possibility for Tesla to meet the objective, given incremental assembly lines added to the Model 3 program (Grohmann engineering battery module line and an additional general assembly line for the Model 3 at Fremont), and we note that the company has previously reported extrapolated weekly production rates (e.g., derived from several days of production, rather than a full week)" Goldman said.

"However, the question that will remain is how sustainable that run-rate of production is for 3Q18 given the historical volatility of the Model 3 production rate, where Tesla has taken intermittent downtime."

Do you crack under pressure? Crumble when you're stressed? If so, you'd be better off pursuing a career in science or education than you would in healthcare or law enforcement.

Using data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), a US Department of Labor database full of detailed information on jobs, we found the 41 professions you should avoid if you really don't like stress.

O*NET rates the "stress tolerance" for each job on a scale from zero to 100, where a higher rating signals more stress. To rate each job, O*NET looks at how frequently workers must accept criticism and deal effectively with high stress at work.

The following are jobs that earned a stress tolerance rating of 93 or higher. We've also included how much they pay, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

If you're the type of person who thrives under pressure or can stay cool, calm, and collected in high-stress situations, these jobs may be perfect for you. If you're the crack-or-crumble type, you may want to avoid them:

Facebook is developing a feature titled "Your Time on Facebook," which could track how much time you spend on its app each day.

The unreleased feature was first spotted by engineer Jane Manchun Wong who found it buried in code on Facebook's Android app. Wong has a history of surfacing these nuggets.

"Your Time on Facebook" shows how much time you've spent on the app each day for the past seven days, plus the average daily amount of time spent. It also lets you set a daily time-limit and will notify you once you've hit it, and allows you to change your notification settings.

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Facebook confirmed the feature is in development to TechCrunch, and a spokesperson said: "We're always working on new ways to help make sure people's time on Facebook is time well spent." Facebook did not confirm, however, when the feature would be rolled out.

"Your Time on Facebook" is in keeping with a recent trend at big tech companies like Apple and Google, who offering features to help people manage the amount of time they spend on their devices.

In January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that changes to the platform, including shifting the emphasis away from news, had resulted in users spending 50 million fewer hours on Facebook. He also laid emphasis on making sure that people make "meaningful connections" on Facebook, rather than promoting addictive use of the platform.

Business Insider has reached out to Facebook for comment.