If at first you don't succeed, try, try, and try again. That appears to be VanEck's strategy when it comes to bitcoin-linked investments.

The asset manager has, for the third time, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, the company announced earlier this week. It is partnering with blockchain firm SolidX on the fund.

But one market structure expert is calling the fund's filing "laughable."

Joe Saluzzi, the cofounder of Themis Trading, said he's skeptical of bitcoin ETFs generally, but thought the one filed by VanEck was especially striking considering its risk disclosure section is 19 pages.

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"Listen, I got a problem in general with the ETFs in bitcoin," Saluzzi said in a phone interview. "They have market structure problems they haven't begun to address, but this one is a stand out."

"It's laughable," he said.

Market observers told Business Insider that the number of pages of risk disclosures for VanEck's newest product are about double the length of typical ETFs. To be sure, many riskier investment products, such as those tied to oil and the volatility index VIX, have long disclosures, said Eric Ervin, the CEO of fund manager Reality Shares.

Still, none are as long. VXX, one of the original exchange traded notes tied to VIX, has about 9 pages of disclosures. VanEck's filing for an actively managed ETF linked to bitcoin derivatives has about 13 pages of risk disclosures.

A bitcoin ETF has been viewed as a natural next step in bitcoin's maturation as an asset and could precipitate the entrance of more retail investors into the crypto market. But the concept has received pushback from regulators who want to closely monitor the potential risks they could present to investors.

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Opponents of bitcoin ETFs take issue with the lack of liquidity in the market and the lack of market surveillance to stomp out manipulation.

The filing notes manipulation as a risk factor. From the filing:

"The price of bitcoin may be influenced by fraud and manipulation for a number of reasons, including the following: most bitcoin spot markets are not regulated or supervised by a government agency; platforms may lack critical system safeguards, including customer protections; volatile market price swings or flash crashes; cyber risks, such as hacking customer wallets; and/or platforms selling from their own accounts and putting customers at an unfair disadvantage."

Daniel Gallancy, the chief executive of SolidX, said in an interview that there's nothing wrong with over-disclosing.

"Why would you not want potential investors to know about every single thing," Gallancy said. "Even the most obscure things, and most of the things in there are obscure, should be identified."

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"Length of a disclosure section does not correlate with risk," Gallancy said. "Let the market decide if this is not a good product, but it is important that investors have the option to get exposure to bitcoin without operational risk."

Tim Ellis has an audacious vision for the future of his company, Relativity Space: He's making a 3D printer that he hopes will someday be used to manufacture rockets on Mars.

While Ellis' vision might seem like the stuff of science fiction, he says that he's never once doubted his plan for his company and that this confidence has led to several successful funding rounds.

Since founding Relativity Space in 2013, Ellis and his cofounder, Jordan Noone, have received a total of $45.1 million from investors including Social Capital, Y Combinator, and the legendary "Shark Tank" investor Mark Cuban.

Cuban has a long history with Relativity Space. Ellis says Cuban first agreed over an email exchange to invest in the ambitious 3D-printing company.

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"The week when we decided to start building our own company, we realized that we didn't have any connections in the investing world," Ellis told Business Insider.

Ellis and Noone, who have worked as engineers at Blue Origins and SpaceX, respectively, took an unorthodox approach to securing funding. After they heard that Cuban responded to cold emails, they decided to pitch their idea for Relativity Space to his inbox.

"We didn't have his email address, so we guessed a bunch of different combinations and tried them out," Ellis said. "It turns out that his email address is pretty easy to guess."

Once the two landed their pitch in the appropriate inbox, it took a few short moments for Cuban to respond. He was in.

Though Ellis and Noone originally asked for $100,000, Cuban volunteered to fund their entire seed round at five times the amount, Ellis said, adding that the entire exchange took about five minutes.

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"I was impressed at his email game to get back to us that fast," Ellis said.

When asked what it was about his pitch that made it so compelling, Ellis said he believes the concept for Relativity Space is innately attractive.

"Space is sexy," Ellis said. "I think the idea of 3D printing an entire rocket really appeals to people."

Ellis said that reaching out to Cuban taught him an important lesson about asking for help in building his company.

"If you have a vision that people want to see happen, and you explain it clearly, people are usually very receptive to helping or putting you in touch with someone who can help," Ellis said. "There's a lot of people who want to back great ideas and great companies."

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Asking for help has landed Ellis other beneficial connections for his company as well, among them a seat on the National Space Council's Users Advisory Group, which advises on government decisions about outer space. Ellis said he was the board's youngest member and the only one coming from a venture-backed startup.

While many startups won't speak with the government early on, Ellis said, he testified before senators to give perspective on what it's like to come from a venture-backed company. The move paid off in big ways — Ellis said his government connections landed him a 20-year agreement to use one of NASA's facilities at cost, saving him what he estimates to be hundreds of millions of dollars in overhead.

Ellis rarely hesitates to reach out when it comes to furthering the interests of his company, he said.

"You might as well reach out," he said. "Basically the moment you decide not to try, you're already sealing your fate."

Tired businessman sleeping while working with laptop and writing book at work in modern office, people dozing on workplace. Sutterstock / Freedomz

Employee burnout and stress is a big problem in the average American workplace, but it's especially true among some of the country's biggest tech companies, many of which have famously rigorous workplace cultures that often encourage long hours, favor young people, and sometimes require unreasonably high levels of productivity.

Blind, a message board app created for employees to talk about work anonymously, surveyed more than 11,000 employees at 30 of the biggest tech companies to find out just how many of them feel burnt out by their work.

Users were asked the simple question, "Are you currently suffering from job burnout?" and could only answer with either "Yes" or "No," according to a Blind spokesperson.

Blind's findings show that overall, more than half (57.16%, to be exact) of tech employees surveyed said they were feeling burnt out by their jobs.

Each participant's employment status is self-reported, and while the results do not include the opinions of every employee at each of the companies listed, they give us an inside look at the workplace cultures experienced by those who did respond to the survey.

Here's how each of the biggest tech companies stack up, based on their respective levels of employee burnout:

When iOS 12 comes to iPhones everywhere later this year, Apple's very popular $159 AirPods will get Live Listen, a nifty feature that makes it easier to hear conversations in noisy places.

The addition of Live Listen to the AirPods was first reported by TechCrunch earlier on Tuesday. Live Listen has been around since 2014, but only on select Apple-certified hearing aids.

Essentially, Live Listen turns your iPhone into a microphone: If you're in a crowded bar, point your iPhone's microphones at the person across the table from you, or even slide it over, and you'll hear what they have to say in your hearing aid — or, soon, your Apple AirPods.

The AirPods, which have been hailed as one of Apple's greatest inventions in recent memory, will expand the reach of Live Listen, and let far more people take advantage of a potentially very handy feature. That said, people with hearing loss should still get an actual medical device, and not rely on a pair of consumer earbuds like the AirPods.

The really exciting part is when you look at what this could mean for the future of the AirPods, and for Apple itself.

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When Apple first launched the AirPods back in 2016, Slate's Will Oremus referred to them as "Apple's first ear computer."

Apple's Live Listen feature, as it exists today. Apple Indeed, the sky seemed to be the limit. Because AirPods give users one-touch access to the Siri virtual assistant, and because they linked up with the iPhone's tremendous galaxy of apps, pundits were hopeful that the AirPods could enable all kinds of superpowers beyond what any other headphones could do. Almost two years later, though, those superpowers have yet to manifest, and the AirPods are still best suited for music and maybe phone calls.

Still, we've gotten a glimpse of what the future could look like, thanks to some of Apple's competitors. Doppler Labs, a startup, released the Here One, a pair of earbuds that could increase the bass at a concert to quiet the sounds of a crying baby. Google, for its part, recently launched the Pixel Buds, which feature real-time language translation.

Those products may have been too far ahead of the curve: Doppler Labs went out of business in 2017, after its cool technologies couldn't overcome the inherent challenges of the hardware market. And the Google Pixel Buds received lukewarm reviews, and they haven't become nearly as ubiquitous among gadgetheads as the Apple AirPods.

So it's no wonder that Apple, which famously prefers being right to being first, has been slow to push nontraditional uses of the AirPods. With the addition of Live Listen, though, it means that Apple is still right on track to bring so-called audible computing to the masses, even if it's happening slower than some would like.

Once it gets going, though, things are going to get wild. It's not hard to imagine how Apple's App Store would get apps specifically for the AirPods — language translation is an obvious one, but what about putting Apple's Shazam acquisition to work by automatically cataloging every song you hear in a day? Or prank apps that make it sound like your boss has inhaled helium during your big weekly meeting?

So yes, Live Listen is one little feature, but it's one that points to a bold new future for Apple, where your headphones actually help you do things you couldn't before. You may just have to wait a little while for it to fully come to pass.

A new policy at Uber enacted by CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has some employees at the $62 billion ride-hailing startup bewildered by what they're hearing in meetings.

In a May 15 memo obtained by Business Insider, Khosrowshahi described a new company policy designed to eliminate "bureaucracy creep" at the growing company.

"While our scale and scope are unrivaled, they come at a potential cost: increased bureaucracy, slower decision making, less accountability, and too many people in too many meetings where it's unclear who the decision makers are," Khosrowshahi wrote in the memo.

For that reason, Khosrowshahi tells employees how they should assert control in meetings.

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"You may hear me say in meetings '[insert name] has the D here.' This is about being clear on who is the decision maker; I'd encourage you to do the same," Khosrowshahi wrote.

'The D' doesn't only mean what he thinks it does

The idea behind this new policy to is to be clear about whose opinions matter most in meetings where there are a lot of different teams and leaders participating in a conversation. To Khosrowshahi, "D" most likely stands for "decision-making authority."

But to younger employees and those familiar with slang, the phrase sounds like "getting the D," which means having sex.

A comprehensive history of this phrase can be found on Know Your Meme. The site traces it back to the 2004 single "So Sexy" by Twista and a viral meme known as "Give Her the Dick," which started with an awkwardly phrased comment on PornHub.

To be fair, wielding one's "D" in meetings is not a Khosrowshahi invention. A 2006 article in the Harvard Business Review titled "Who Has the D?: How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance" explains the merits of the managerial strategy.

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That article was written by Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko, partners at Bain & Company, a consulting firm that Uber recently hired to work with it on its organizational management, the memo says.

But language and slang are ever evolving, and in the 12 years since the article appeared, the phrase has taken on a new meaning. The lewd usage gained steam online in 2012, according to Know Your Meme.

Khosrowshahi, 49, was unfamiliar with just how sexual this phrase sounds to an entire generation of employees, according to Uber.

"As you may have read, Uber is now run by your dad— so, no, that interpretation was lost on him, but he appreciates Business Insider pointing it out," a spokesman for Uber said.

It's an example of a generational disconnect, but Uber has a history of frat-like memos

"The D" may be little more than an example of a disconnect between different generations in the workplace, but the optics aren't ideal, given Uber's history of inappropriate behavior from the top.

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Khosrowshahi joined Uber in August as part of the board's efforts to clean up a frat-like culture that was said to have emanated from its founding CEO, Travis Kalanick.

Last summer, amid an epic battle between Kalanick and his opponents on the board, Recode obtained an internal email from 2013 in which Kalanick warned employees not to barf or throw any kegs off buildings during a company party in Miami.

"Do not have sex with another employee UNLESS a) you have asked that person for that privilege and they have responded with an emphatic 'YES! I will have sex with you' AND b) the two (or more) of you do not work in the same chain of command. Yes, that means that Travis will be celibate on this trip. #CEOLife #FML," Kalanick's email said.

Khosrowshahi, who joined Uber from a successful tenure as CEO at Expedia, has spent the past 10 months righting the course at the dysfunctional unicorn. He spent the first few months traveling the world to meet with regulators, business partners, and employees in an effort to restore the company's image.

Khosrowshahi's mission has also been cutting costs at the company to get its finances in order for an initial public offering next year. So far it's working, since, at the end of the day, it's Khosrowshahi who has "the D."

Cryptocurrencies are viewed by many of their evangelists as one of the most groundbreaking financial innovations of the modern age. But the way crypto trades looks like something out of an old-school Wall Street flick.

For the most part, trading firms are making multimillion-dollar crypto trades over the phone, not electronically. DRW's crypto arm, Cumberland, uses Skype calls to conduct its bitcoin dealmaking, Reuters reported.

But Jump Trading, the Chicago-based firm, has built a platform that will allow it to take the other side of large crypto trades electronically with its counterparties, according to people familiar with the matter. The so-called graphical user interface allows those counterparties to interact with Jump on a desktop. It does not allow users to connect to external trading exchanges.

Jump is known for its ultra-high-speed trading strategies, but it has also been developing what it calls a "lower frequency trading strategy." It's also known for its discretion, with little information on the firm available on its website.

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The new platform shows that Jump is taking the new market for cryptocurrencies seriously, according to a person familiar with the firm's thinking. Also, the firm believes that voice and chatroom environments don't leave a clear audit trail, the person said.

Jump Capital, the venture-capital firm affiliated with Jump Trading, has made crypto a focus for 2018, as previously reported by Business Insider.

"GUIs are not unique," Michael Dunworth, the CEO of Wyre, a blockchain tech company, told Business Insider. "But it is impressive that Jump built it."

The move shows the cryptocurrency market is maturing in a similar way to the now multitrillion-dollar foreign-exchange market, which in its earliest days saw trades conducted mostly over the phone, says John Spallanzani, a former FX trader at Sumitomo Mitsui who is now a portfolio manager at Miller Value Partners.

"We used to call 20 banks at once for spot FX prices," Spallanzani said of forex trading in the 1990s.

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"It's without a doubt maturing just by the fact that there's so many OTC desks out in the mix," Dunworth added.

The crypto exchange Kraken set up an OTC desk in New York, Business Insider first reported. There's also Genesis Global Trading and itBit, the OTC run by Paxos.

At the same time, crypto-focused investment funds are opening up at a record pace, according to new research by Crypto Fund Research. Sixty-one new funds have launched in 2018, according to the firm's research, bringing the total number above 366 globally. Such funds together manage only a paltry $5 billion, however, a fraction of the $3.2 trillion managed by the hedge fund industry.

Apple is expected to come out with new iPhones this September, but a notorious leaker says he has spoiled some of the surprise by publishing digital drawings of the rumored low-priced iPhone.

A well-known leaker, known as OnLeaks, along with MySmartPrice, have published computer-generated renders of what he says is one of the new models: a lower-cost iPhone X-style device with a screen that covers the entire device except for a notch at the top

Former KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has written about this device. He predicted it could cost as little as $550, which could entice buyers who found the $999 iPhone X to be too expensive.

OnLeaks/YouTubeIt's a critical device for Apple — Kuo predicted it could account for as many of 75% of the iPhones sold after September, given its low price. Apple could save money by using an LCD screen instead of the nicer OLED screen on the iPhone X.

In the renders shared by OnLeaks, the device has a notch — presumably for facial recognition — along with a 6.1-inch display, a glass back, and a single camera lens, as opposed to the two-lens camera on the iPhone X.

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Apple is also expected to release a phone with the iPhone X design but faster components, as well as a super-sized iPhone X.

OnLeaks is a well-known leaker who often publishes CAD schematics from Asian factories. His track record is excellent, but considering that these renders are describing an unreleased Apple product, it's probably smart to take them with a grain of salt.

"As I often say, the leaking game isn't an exact science. There is no flawless leaker and even the best fail sometimes," OnLeaks told Business Insider in 2016.

More information about the leak is available at MySmartPrice.

SAN JOSE, California — Apple built its reputation on two pieces of software: the iPhone's iOS operating system and the MacOS operating system used by Apple's laptops and desktops.

But on Monday during a presentation at its developers conference, Apple had to address persisting questions about whether it planned to combine the two.

"Are you merging iOS and MacOS?" a slide asked. "No," came the emphatic answer in the next slide.

Apple's top software boss, Craig Federighi, then spent the next portion of the keynote talking about how Apple planned to combine iOS and MacOS.

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The way Apple has decided to link its two big platforms is by bringing some of the best parts of the bigger, more vibrant platform — the iPhone — to its older, stodgier sibling, the Mac.

"There are millions of iOS apps out there," Federighi said. "We think some of them would look great on the Mac."

Details are light, but starting next year it will apparently be possible for iOS developers to port their apps to Macs without rewriting them. Basically, Apple is looking to make it easy to change the user interface from touch, like the iPhone, to a keyboard-and-trackpad approach.

Kif Leswing Apple even revealed four new desktop apps that were ported from iPhones and iPads: Apple News, Apple Home, Voice Memos, and Stocks.

Unfortunately for Apple, this is not going to stem the worry of many Mac devotees that the company has put its oldest product line on the back burner.

It's basic math: During the quarter that ended in March, the most recent quarter for which statistics are available, Apple sold over 12 times as many iPhones as it did Mac computers. Apple sold over 52 million iPhones, compared with 4.2 million Mac laptops and desktops.

Especially considering the total number of Mac users is a fraction of the number of iPhone and iPad users, companies aren't likely to spend a lot of time dialing in their iPhone apps for a smaller audience.

From Apple's perspective, the move can help revive a moribund Mac App Store by injecting some of the life from the bustling iPhone App Store, with 20 million registered developers and billions of dollars flowing through it each year. That's also why Apple gave its Mac App Store a facelift on Monday, with additional curation and a new design.

But it's also hard to imagine the kind of iPhone apps that would work well on a laptop. Many apps, like WhatsApp or Pocket, already have web-based versions. Some apps, like Lyft or Uber, may represent a poor experience without the GPS built into smartphones. One developer who maintains four commercial iPhone apps such as TapeACall told me on Tuesday he couldn't imagine any of his apps being ported to Mac, because they do such limited and specific tasks.

In fact, the announcement may have some unexpected effects going forward. "Why would any Mac developer start a new app before next year?" a Mac developer remarked while leaving Monday's presentation.

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Basically, rather than revitalizing the Mac software world, Apple's announcement on Monday permanently confirms that it's a second-class citizen with iPhone and iPad apps. It sends a huge signal to the software-development world that the best software is being developed for iPhones and that Macs are an afterthought.

At the beginning of Apple's presentation on Monday, CEO Tim Cook said the company had paid $100 billion to developers since the start of the iPhone App Store in 2008. That's where the money is, and that's where Apple will push its army of software makers.

"This implies that developers will earn about $32B this year, a number that we believe is big enough to continue to entice world-class developers to continue to code on iOS and macOS," the Loup Ventures analyst Gene Munster wrote in a note on Monday.

Notice which platform he mentioned first.

EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager.Vimeo/Markus Böhnisch

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Friday.

1. A Facebook bug accidentally set users' posts to be public by default, even if they were intended to be private. As many as 14 million users were affected by the bug and had their posts made public incorrectly.

2. Google has unveiled a set of ethical principles governing how it will use artificial intelligence (AI). The seven principles include making sure that AI is applied to applications that are socially beneficial, safe and won't create unfair bias.

3. Google's partnership with Chinese phone maker Huawei is under congressional scrutiny, according to The Washington Post. That comes after members criticised Facebook for its data-sharing agreements with Huawei and Chinese peer ZTE.

4. Google may face another billion-euro fine from the EU next month over an antitrust case involving Android. A fine would reflect growing political antipathy towards the big tech firms and could help trigger further regulatory action.

5. Facebook is looking to hire a pair of contractors as "news credibility specialists" to create a list of credible news organizations. That list could be used for various features on the site, from the newsfeed to its advertising system.

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6. Google's pledge to quit doing military work involving its AI technology does not include its current job helping the Pentagon with drone surveillance. Diane Greene, the head of Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post on Thursday that Google will continue to honour the controversial Project Maven contract that it entered into last year.

7. Amazon became first tech company to win rights to show Premier League games in the UK. The US firm has acquired the rights to livestream 20 matches a season for three years, starting in August 2019.

8. Supposed images of the Google Pixel 3XL were leaked on Thursday. They support the rumors that the Pixel 3XL will have a notch, much like the iPhone X.

9. The world's largest producer of bitcoin mining chips, Bitmain Technologies, might be considering going public. Bitmain's founder, the cryptocurrency billionaire Jihan Wu, told Bloomberg that Bitmain was considering an initial public offering as it expands into producing hardware for artificial-intelligence computing.

10. Delivery robot startup Starship Technologies has raised $25 million and hired a new CEO, a former Airbnb executive. Lex Bayer headed up Airbnb for business but will take over the top job from Starship Technologies' cofounder and CTO Ahti Heinla.

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Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.

Pharmaceutical companies are slowly but surely turning their eyes toward Silicon Valley.

At a time when companies like Amazon and Apple are getting serious about entering the healthcare market, pharmaceutical firms in turn are considering ways they can learn from their tech counterparts.

But it has taken a long time to get there, Jay Bradner, the president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, told Business Insider in an interview at a healthcare conference in Boston this past week.

"Healthcare is so technology forward, and biomedical discovery is so technology forward," he said. "Yet our field has been a late adopter to innovations that the computer-science world is sick of talking about." For example, he said, concepts like machine learning and artificial intelligence are standard for the tech world but new to biomedicine.

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Novartis is taking a lot of that computing technology inherent to Silicon Valley and applying it to drug discovery.

"We like to think of ourselves as the lead turtle in the race of the turtles," Bradner said. About 4% of the 6,000 scientists working at Novartis' research engine are data scientists, and the company's biologists also have an understanding of computer science and coding.

"To interact with data today, the fundamental biologist needs to be comfortable 'in silico,'" i.e., through computers, he said. "It's too late for me to go back and learn Python, but every new graduate student from my lab will leave learning how to interact primarily with their data."

Ideally, the thinking goes, pharmaceutical researchers can use these skills and tools like machine learning to speed up drug development.

Virtual trials

One way Novartis put technology to use recently was in determining which trial the company wanted to pursue on an experimental drug.

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Novartis was able to take data it had recorded from other clinical trials it had run and use that information to set up virtual trials. These trials looked at how experimental drugs might work. In the end, one of the trials seemed to show that its drug worked, while the other two didn't.

Running the trial virtually allowed Novartis to prioritize how to spend its time and resources.

"In the one case, we're more efficient because we didn't launch and resource two clinical trials, and in the other we can revisit that idea with a definitive trial," Bradner said.

Leaving Silicon Valley culture to the Valley

When it comes to Silicon Valley's culture, with its traditionally hyped-up ideas and "move fast and break things" pace, that's less likely to rub off on pharma.

"Silicon Valley seems to tolerate more hype than the biomedical research environments where I've worked," Bradner said. Still, it doesn't mean researchers within pharma don't have big visions. "It doesn't make this community that we're in any less ambitious or starry-eyed or dreamy," he said.

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And while an idea for a new app in Silicon Valley can get off the ground and onto the market in months, the timeline to get a drug from discovery to approval can take upward of a decade and involves a lot of regulation.

As interest from technology companies to get into healthcare and biotech grows, pharmaceutical companies and tech giants are starting to become rivals. But Bradner said the two industries would ultimately be better off teaming up than finding themselves in competition.

"These are two communities that I find really fascinating," he said, "that stand to benefit more from working together than by pretending to have solved each other's problems."

Facebook is getting back into the business of having employees make decisions about news organizations and stories — including about their credibility — something company leaders including Mark Zuckerberg have previously renounced.

The company has open job listings for two "news credibility specialists," one of which would be required to be able to speak, read, and write fluently in Spanish. The jobs, which Facebook listed within the last few weeks, would be contract positions, rather than full-time, but would be based in Menlo Park, California, site of Facebook's headquarters.

"We're seeking individuals with a passion for journalism, who believe in Facebook's mission of making the world more connected," one of the two listings reads. It continues: "As a member of the team, you'll be tasked with developing a deep expertise in Facebook's News Credibility Program. You'll be conducting investigations against predefined policies."

Facebook would ask the specialists to help create a list of credible news organizations. That list could be used for various features on the site, from the newsfeed to its advertising system.

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The move comes as Facebook tries to battle the spread of fake news and propaganda on its social network, and to shore up its damaged reputation. But in taking a bigger role appraising news organizations, Facebook risks opening itself up to charges of bias and censorship as it tries to make sense of an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

One example of how the credibility specialists might come into play involves Facebook's plans to ensure transparency with political ads. Facebook has said it will require political ads to disclose who paid for them, restricting ads that don't comply.

Since news organzations often pay to promote political articles on Facebook, the credibility specialist would be able to help Facebook identify those articles from standard political ads, to ensure that the news articles don't get caught in the net.

"We're working to effectively identify and differentiate news and news sources across our platform," company spokesman Adam Isserlis said.

Facebook had said it didn't want to judge news trustworthiness

At least on its face, the fact that the social networking giant is hiring "news credibility specialists" appears to contradict a policy it announced earlier this year. Facebook officials said they didn't want to be in the business of determining the credibility of news reports and outlets. Instead, the company said it would survey its users to figure out which sites and sources were trustworthy. It's also said that it would rely on third-party fact-checking organizations, including the Associated Press, to judge the credibility of articles.

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"The hard question we've struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted in a world with so much division," company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on his personal Facebook page in January. "We could try to make that decision ourselves, but that's not something we're comfortable with."

He continued: "We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective."

The new news credibility specialists won't replace the third-party fact checkers or Facebook's surveys of users to determine the trustworthiness of sites, but will be an addition to them. But the lines between what they will do and what will be left to the survey of users could get blurry.

It makes sense for Facebook to have its own employees making decisions about the credibility of news organizations, said Daniel Kreiss, a professor of of political communications at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The fact is that Facebook makes editorial decisions all the time about what it will and won't allow on its site, and in keeping with the company's mission, it needs to have a role in determining what content on its site is legitimate, he said.

But there are plenty of questions to be raised about this effort, Kreiss said. It's unclear, for example, what kinds of qualifications Facebook will be looking for when trying to fill these roles; a journalist with 30 years of experience may have different ideas about what is a credible news organization than someone just out of college, he said.

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It's also unclear what kind of criteria Facebook will use to determine what entities are news organizations and which are credible, he said. It's anyone guess whether Breitbart would qualify or whether a news organization run as a wing of a political organization would qualify.

"They're always playing this editorial role," Kreiss said. "My concern throughout has been that they haven't acknowledged they're playing this role, they aren't transparent about how they're making those decisions, and because of that, they aren't accountable for the decisions they do make."

Given Facebook's importance when it comes to distributing news and its role in the democratic process, it's going to be crucial when the company decides that entities are not a credible news organization that the social networking giant is transparent about its rationale and that it allows those entities to appeal the decisions, Kreiss said.

"There should be a way to ... hold Facebook accountable for the decisions they make," he said.

we might want to truncate and move up Weiland's comment. Maybe cut it down to just "They're giving us a lot of mixed signals" and put it right after tha part about the lines getting blurry

The company is sending "mixed signals"

Facebook has a responsibility to be transparent about how it plans to evaluate news organizations, said Morgan Weiland, an attorney and PhD candidate at Stanford whose research focuses on how the big tech platform companies are handling their role in distributing news.

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"If they're going to build out a team like this, they need to be more explicit about how they understand their role or what kind of company they see themselves as," Weiland said.

She continued: "They're giving us a lot of mixed signals."

The process of determining the credibility and newsworthiness of articles and publications has long been a fraught issue for Facebook.

Two years ago, the company drew criticism after its employees reportedly downplayed stories about right-wing politicians and conservative topics in its trending news section. In response, the company fired its human editors, relying instead on algorithms to determine trending topics. But the automated editing system ended up promoting fake and offensive stories. Earlier this month, Facebook announced it would discontinue the trending news feature.

But the company's problems in figuring out the credibility of news go well beyond its trending news controversy.

Facebook has been trying to battle fake news

During the presidential election in 2016, Facebook's systems were hijacked by Russian-linked groups to spread false stories and other propaganda in an alleged attempt to influence the vote, a development the company was slow to acknowledge. Facebook has also been used by ultra nationalist groups in Myanmar to spread propaganda and hate speech that has helped incite violence against the country's Rohingya minority, according to the United Nations.

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In an attempt to curtail the spread of fake news, Facebook early this year said it would de-emphasize posts from news outlets and other organizations in its news feed. Then, it said it would poll users to figure out which sites to trust. The algorithms underlying its news feed would use those determinations about trustworthiness when deciding which articles to highlight or to suppress.

The Netflix of China is continuing to rise in popularity among millennial investors.

Data from the stock trading app Robinhood — whose usership skews markedly younger than traditional brokerages — show iQiyi is now the 42nd most popular stock. It's gained 32 spots in the app's popularity ranking since last week, surpassing Dropbox, GM, and other more well-known companies.

The surge, which was first reported by Business Insider last week, mirrors a similar rise in share prices of the company, up 81% in the past month.

Ten-year-old iQiyi went public in March after being spun off by the Chinese search giant Baidu in an initial public offering that raised $2.25 billion for the video service. It currently boasts 20 million subscribers. For comparison, Netflix has more than 100 million worldwide, but Chinese regulations have hindered its expansion in the country.

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IQiyi's post-IPO surge — a 90% gain in the roughly three months since — has led to several bullish analyst notes in recent weeks. Both Citic Securities, the investment-banking arm of the Chinese bank Citic Group, and First Shanghai upgraded shares to a "buy" rating. First Shanghai also raised its price target to $35 a share.

The FBI has warned that terrorists are working to acquire the cyber skills to carry out catastrophic attacks that could involve taking down America's 911 emergency response system.

Aristedes Mahairas, a special agent in charge of the New York FBI's Special Operations/Cyber Division, said terror groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda are plotting attacks that could wipe out online networks to maximise casualties.

"The concern is that the cyber terrorists will one day be able to simultaneously execute an attack in the virtual world and in the physical world," Mahairas told Business Insider.

By way of an example, the FBI agent speculated on two horror scenarios:

"In such an environment, it would cause havoc," said the agent, who used to lead the New York FBI's counter-terror operations. "The truth is that such a scenario is only limited by your imagination."

Mahairas said terror groups may not currently have the capability to launch this kind of dual-pronged attack, but the FBI is working on the assumption that they one day could.

He continued: "It's really important to recognise that the terror groups are starting to leverage the technologies in such a way that it stands to reason that they are going to be able to recruit someone who is technically capable of spending time, effort, and energy to achieve that objective of eliminating the 911 emergency system...

"My working proposition is that they will eventually have the capability because they will be able to successfully recruit somebody."

Terrorists are also engaging hackers to help raise the money that actually carries out attacks, Mahairas said. "They need money, they need funds to pay their people, to feed them, to house them. If there's a lack of funding coming in then they may resolve to cybercriminal schemes," he added.