Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: Why study alone, when you can study with a bunch of strangers from all over the world?

This is gongbang, which translates to "study broadcast" in Korean. In Japan, it's known as benkyou douga, and in the US and other parts of the world, it's simply called "study with me." It's a type of video in which people prepare for an exam on camera, while other people watch and study as well.

This might not sound like riveting entertainment, but these videos are racking up millions of views on YouTube. So why are they so popular? And is this just the latest example of lazy content creation, or is there something more going on here?

The Man Sitting Next to Me: When you're studying by yourself, you can feel alone. But they can reduce their loneliness by getting the sensation of studying with other people.

Narrator: This YouTuber goes by the name "The Man Sitting Next to Me." He prefers to remain anonymous. He lives in Korea and is studying to be a tax accountant. He livestreams himself studying for hours at a time and has over 20 thousand subscribers on his channel.

The Man Sitting Next to Me: It depends on my exam schedule, but, in general, I broadcast from 9 a.m to 12 a.m.

Narrator: His videos show him simply sitting at a desk taking notes or looking at a book.

Jamie Lee: You're studying for a long time whether it's for high school, college, or a professional degree. It can be really lonely, and it's always helpful to have sort of a study buddy.

Narrator: This is Jamie. She lives in New York and runs a YouTube channel called "The Strive to Fit." She started her channel when she was in medical school and continues to film herself studying while in residency. Unlike The Man Sitting Next to Me, Jamie's "study with me" videos are prerecorded. Her videos range from around 20 minutes to two-and-a-half hours in length, and some have over two million views.

She offers videos with music and some with the natural sounds of the pencil on paper as a sort of ASMR.

Jamie: I try to cater to different types of audiences. It'll just be kind of the natural sound of like, pen and paper or book sounds and things like that.

Narrator: With a quick YouTube search, you can find all sorts of different people and types of study videos to choose from. This study video trend is a lot like mukbang, which has become more popular in recent years. It involves people eating food, often a whole lot of it, on camera.

Looking at what's on YouTube these days, like ASMR, mukbang, and reaction videos, it would seem like you don't need a whole lot of special skills to be a success. But gongbang serves a real purpose, helping people focus. Or at least that's what the content creator and the fans are saying.

While it may seem distracting to watch YouTube while doing your work, they say it actually is a helpful way to avoid distractions.

The Man Sitting Next to Me: The first benefit my viewers can get is motivation. By watching other people studying, they can also get motivated to study hard. And for myself, by studying with all of you, I can prevent myself from getting lazy and continue to focus with my study.

Narrator: And based on some of the comments, this method seems to be working.

"I'm an engineering student, a week ago I wasn't motivated at all, then I found your channel. Thank you for saving me."

"I feel more concentrated on my exam preparation. Thank you Jamie for your video. It's actually very nice and helpful."

Jamie: It really helps them focus, because every time they're tempted to do something on their phone or go somewhere on their website, they kinda look up and see that I'm still studying on the screen, so it kind of motivates them to keep studying and stay focused on what they're supposed to be doing.

Narrator: And while they do make money off the videos with YouTube ads, they say viral fame and fortune isn't why they're doing it. Keep in mind, these YouTubers are studying for careers outside of YouTube, like tax accountants and doctors. They say they're only using YouTube as a means to an end, that isn't becoming the next Logan Paul or Jenna Marbles.

The Man Sitting Next to Me says he even uses the money that he earns to give back to his community, charities, and nursing homes. You can find him on his channel interacting with his viewers, giving out gift cards for things like coffee and books to help study.

The Man Sitting Next to Me: There's a system in my channel where you can mark your attendance. Among those people, I randomly choose around 20 people a month, and I also host public events to give out gifts to people who study.

Narrator: His followers will often stick with him until they complete their exam and share his channel with friends.

The Man Sitting Next to Me: People revisit as long as they're studying for their exam. And once they pass, they let other people know, so they can also get motivated.

Narrator: But what happens when the tests are over for these YouTubers? What can their followers expect? Both Jamie and The Man Sitting Next to Me say they plan to keep filming themselves but perhaps with different content related to their careers.

The Man Sitting Next to Me: I promised the people in my community to continue gongbang for the rest of my life. So I'm gonna continue. But I will add more content like tax advice.

Narrator: No matter why you watch or when you watch, it all comes down to one thing: making sure you do the work and pass that test.

Big brands are getting smarter about how they advertise online— and they're starting to see better results.

Dick's Sporting Goods relied on automated merchandising on Facebook during the holiday season in 2018, leading to 100,000 incremental purchases and $10 million in incremental sales.

Facebook shared the results of Dick's campaign with Business Insider ahead of publishing a blog post to coincide with the retail conference Shoptalk about how retailers can create frictionless experiences for consumers.

The retailer used dynamic ads and store sales optimization, a product that Facebook describes as using machine learning to show ads to people who are most likely to buy in-store.

With the dynamic ads, Dick's showed specific products to people who were most likely to be interested in them. For example, mothers were shown ads with gifts for children.

"We grew up as a traditional retailer sending circulars out in direct mail pieces and doing television and radio," said James Keaney, director of digital marketing at Dick's Sporting Goods. "But Facebook is somewhere we can speak to consumers on all levels of the customer journey."

Dick's Sporting Goods initially started using Facebook to grow awareness, targeting a wide audience with a range of Facebook's ad products and ad creative that was brand-focused.

One of the dynamic ads that Dick's ran Dick's Sporting Goods As the retailer tried to get customers further down the path to purchase, the ads became more product-focused. It used units such as Carousel ads to show a range of products and Local Dynamic Product ads that showed where the nearest Dick's store was, for instance.

In the final stage, the brand used dynamic ads, which essentially retargeted people with ads for products they had already seen.

One of the biggest benefits Dick's got from Facebook was using its third-party data to broaden its reach, said Keaney.

"We're seeing a lot of success in using Facebook as a prospecting channel," he said. "We can cast a wide net and reach a lot of people that haven't shopped with us in a long time or a lapsed customer or someone that's never shopped with us before."

The retailer used Facebook conversion lift studies to gauge the ads' impact on people's propensity to shop at Dick's after seeing the ads.

During the holiday campaign, Dick's shifted its budget to focus on reaching people who had visited its site and retargeted them with ads designed to get them to purchase.

Such ad tracking that measures incremental returns on a given advertising campaign, using test and control groups, is growing more common among marketers. Airbnb and eBay have also run incrementality studies.

Read More: Big marketers like Airbnb and eBay are using Facebook to see which ads are a waste of money

For Facebook, these studies are a way to show its vast data can drive tangible business outcomes for advertisers, like sales. Brands, on the other hand, can use ad tracking to calculate lifts in ad performance and justify marketing spend on a given campaign or channel.

"Through testing, we found that customers who were previously exposed to our TV ad had comparable ROAS (return on ad spend) to the lookalike audience we had been using," said Keaney. "This supported us using Facebook as a full-funnel platform."

Juniper Networks on Monday announced that it plans to buy Mist Systems for $405 million.

Mist makes what it calls the first artificial intelligence-driven WiFi. Its flagship product delivers WiFi using high performance WiFi hardware, along with a cloud service.

The access points include some patented tech that helps the wireless network perform reliably. But it's the cloud service that makes Mist different. This service can analyze the network and do things like troubleshoot any problems with the help of an AI assistant named Maven.

It can also deliver location-aware apps, such that a business can grant access to apps or websites when the user is in the right place at the right time. For instance, when a traveler walks through the doors and arrives at the hotel's reception area, the WiFi can automatically pop up everything they need to check in.

Mist was founded in 2014, and launched its first product in the summer of 2016.

Its claim to fame was that its founders, Sujai Hajela and Bob Friday, were some of the people that helped Juniper's oldest rival Cisco become a Wi-Fi networking powerhouse.

Read: Microsoft and VMware are working on a partnership that won't make Amazon happy

Mist co-founders Sujai Hajela and Bob Friday Mist They led groups that built Cisco's internal WiFi products — were also responsible for one of Cisco's bigger acquisitions, buying business WiFi company Meraki for $1.2 billion in 2012.

Meraki's subscription-based service has since become t he model upon which Cisco is remaking itself, with a new focus on subscription-based cloud services.

At Cisco, the two execs knew they wanted to go out on their own and build a new kind of wireless network designed from the ground up with mobile devices in mind. But the key inspiration for the company came from Hajela's daughter, the founders told Business Insider back in 2016.

In 2014, before they tried to drum up a Series A venture capital investment, Hajela told his daughter about his newfangled Wi-Fi product idea, he said at the time. She told him, "Dad, that's too technical." She told him she just wanted a network that put whatever information she needed about wherever she was at her fingertips.

That idea, coupled with their backgrounds, helped them raised about $14 million in a Series A from Norwest and Lightspeed, on top of about a $500,000 seed round raised from Lightspeed. By the time they launched their product, they had 20 potential customers trying out their new take on WiFi.

Between 2016 and today they gained more customers including big names like Ikea, Okta, Raleys, PetSmart, Stanford and Juniper Networks. Their customers include two among the Fortune 10, seven of the top 40 retailers, a major facility at a large US healthcare system, a mobile carrier, and an airline.

Mist also raised $88 million, according to PitchBook, and was valued at at $246 million valuation as of their last raise in 2018. Investors included Mist's alma mater, Cisco Systems — meaning Cisco had to be aware and keeping an eye on Mist.

That also means that Juniper is paying a premium for Mist Systems of nearly $160 million more than its year-ago valuation. No doubt Juniper is hoping that Mist will be for it what Meraki was for Cisco: a way to sell more cloud services, with a business model built around recurring cloud subscription revenue.

This past Valentine's Day, Amazon stunned New York City by announcing it was withdrawing its plan to build its new Queens headquarters. The company's 14-month long search for a new home, which spanned all of North America and attracted wall-to-wall media coverage, ended unceremoniously that morning when it announced it would take its 40,000 jobs elsewhere.

This loss for New Yorkers is disappointing. This was the single biggest job creation opportunity in New York State history, projected to deliver close to $30 billion in tax revenue over the next quarter century, fortify the city's economy, and given tens of thousands of people new pathways to the middle class. New Yorkers were excited about these career ladders; a Siena poll published two days before the company backed out showed that 58 percent of New York voters approved of Amazon's headquarters, with the margin even wider in communities of color.

With the dust settling from Amazon's abrupt change of plans, New York is now taking stock of the current economic state of play. We are reorienting ourselves and asking hard questions. Are we going to be a city where tech companies can successfully grow? Where innovations are born? Where prosperity can be shared across all economic strata and backgrounds?

The answers to all these questions have to be "yes."

New York has no choice but to keep working to become the country's most dynamic innovation hub. The way we will do this is by embracing growth, debunking rumors that thwart progress, and seizing the power of our diverse population to build a model inclusive economy.

Read more: Amazon is opening a new grocery chain

New York's successful Amazon bid proves the city's tech star is rising. Our unparalleled talent pool boasts of 2.3 million residents with a bachelor's degree or higher. We are a proud bastion of diversity and are home to 3.3 million immigrants, a population larger than Chicago's. And, after decades of fits and starts, we are ranked the number one tech city in the world. Moreover, the bid showed the city is committed to building a new commercial hub in Long Island City and that our leadership can execute bold ideas on seemingly impossible timelines.

But all this won't matter if innovation companies feel as though their growth will be stifled here. We as a city need to continue to support expansions that generate good-paying jobs, whether it's Google spending more than $1 billion to build a new campus on the Far West Side or Zola's headcount tripling since 2017.

This also means the majority of New Yorkers who support such expansions must stand up and speak out when there is a lack of honest dialogue about the facts, as was the case during the Amazon process. We continue to see the effects of the misinformation campaign today as people share ideas on how to spend the $3 billion in subsidies Amazon was slated to receive. This was the estimated discount on the $30 billion of new tax revenue the city and state stood to collect. The next time an unprecedented economic opportunity arises, we will work even harder to ensure every New Yorker understands the nuances of the opportunity.

Perhaps most importantly, New York needs to continue differentiating itself from Silicon Valley by leaning into our greatest asset: our diversity.

While the tech industry has been excoriated for its homogeneity, New York's ecosystem is doing far better than its peer cities. Nearly 50 percent of tech workers are foreign born and roughly 40 percent of industry jobs are held by women.

Read more: From new iPhones to foldable phones, these are the top smartphones we can't wait to see in 2019

But we need to continue raising the bar. At a time when 44 percent of these roles don't require a college degree, there is no good reason why tech jobs shouldn't be widely accessible. Now more than ever, we must connect New Yorkers with the skills they need to participate in the 21st century economy.

Back in 2017, no one thought New York had a shot of landing the new Amazon headquarters. Not only did we prove them wrong, but we finally proved New York is a formidable player in the tech space. And I believe history will show that the city emerged from this moment with even more tech companies, more innovations, and more prosperity for all New Yorkers.

James Patchett is the President and CEO of the New York City Economic Development Corporation.

The meal-kit maker Blue Apron tumbled 12.06% to $0.95 a share Monday, nearly a week after an investor dumped the stock at a discount.*

On Wednesday, Bessemer Venture Partners sold a block of 15 million shares at a $1.15 apiece, representing an 11% discount to the prior day's closing price, Bloomberg reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. Shares have since tanked 26%. 

Blue Apron has had a rough time as a publicly traded company since its June 2017 initial public offering. First, Amazon announced plans to buy Whole Foods, causing Blue Apron to slash its IPO range to between $10 and $11 a share, down from $15 to $17, as investors worried about the competition such a deal would bring. Then, less than a month later, Amazon rolled out its own meal-kit business. 

And in August of last year, Blue Apron announced it was having trouble keeping customers. The meal-kit maker said its total number of customers plunged by 24% in the second quarter versus the prior year and that revenue per customer dipped by $1 to $250.

After bottoming at $0.65 apiece in December, shares started to recover — up as much as 145% — following a December 20 announcement that Blue Apron was partnering with Weight Watchers to provide healthier home cooking, as well as a forecast of achieving profitability since 2019 sent out during its quarterly earnings release on January 31. 

Blue Apron was down 8% so far this year.

*This story has been updated to reflect that Bessemer Venture Partners — and not Blue Apron — sold the shares.

Now read:

MI

The National Enquirer published its story about Jeff Bezos' affair as a favor to investors from Saudi Arabia, Bezos' investigator is planning to claim in an upcoming report, Vanity Fair said Monday.

Bezos asked Gavin de Becker, his longtime security chief, to look into the leak of his text messages with Lauren Sanchez and and information about his affair with the former television anchor. In a post on Medium last month, Bezos hinted that there was a link between Saudi Arabia and the Enquirer's coverage of him.

American Media, the Enquirer's parent company, has a "crushing" amount of debt and the Enquirer's circulation has been plummeting, Vanity Fair said. The company raised $460 million to refinance its debt in January. De Becker's apparent theory is that the Enquirer ran the story on Bezos to return a favor to its Saudi backer, according to Vanity Fair.

In his Medium post, Bezos implicitly alleged that Saudi Arabia hates him because he owns the Washington Post, which has published stories critical of the country following the murder of Post journalist and Saudi citizen Jamal Khashoggi.

Representatives for Bezos and for American Media didn't immediately respond emailed requests for comment about the Vanity Fair report.

Read the full report in Vanity Fair.

Viruses and other kinds of malicious software - collectively known as malware - hang like a dark cloud over the world of technology.

Security experts warn about the risk of malware on PCs and Macs, and most people run some kind of antivirus software on their desktop or laptop for protection.

But what about iPhones? Are they also at risk? Here's what you need to know.

In general, there's little to no risk

In short, no. For the vast majority of everyday users, there's virtually no risk of viruses on the iPhone. "In the consumer space, there is so little risk as to be none," said Marc Rogers, executive director of cybersecurity at Okta. Rogers was the white hat hacker who was one of the first to hack Apple's Touch ID, and he is one of the technical advisors for the TV show, "Mr. Robot."

Amit Serper, the head of security research at Cybereason, agrees. He said the low risk is a consequence of the fact that "Apple has a very closed security model for their iOS that takes a walled garden approach."

The so-called walled garden, another term for Apple's approach to requiring third-party apps and services to be specifically approved and vetted through the App Store, effectively prevents malware from taking control of the entire phone. Another factor working to the iPhone's advantage: "Apple has avoided OS fragmentation which is the curse of Android," Rogers said.

Android is a much more fertile environment for malware because there are so many versions of the OS in the wild, and it's the carriers - not Google - that get to decide when or even if the operating system is patched with security updates on specific model phones. In contrast, Apple device owners update their operating system software far more frequently, and Apple doesn't have to deal with the same amount of OS fragmentation found within the Android ecosystem.

No device is invulnerable

That said, a more thorough answer to the question of whether iPhones can get viruses is that "it depends," though the number of potential viruses that could affect an iOS-based device is minuscule compared to the tens if not hundreds of thousands of known viruses for PCs.

Still, there are active threats in the wild today. As Rogers explained, the economic value of these exploits is so great that they are generally only leveraged by nation states against very high-value targets.

"It's no surprise that nation states have been looking for ways to crack mobile devices for years," Rogers said. "You'll remember that after the San Bernardino shooting, Apple refused to open devices. It was a testament to Apple's security, but it also meant that governments had to come up with their own way in."

You should take sensible precautions

Though the risk to everyday users is quite low, you should still take sensible precautions - and thankfully, it requires almost no effort.

It should go without saying, but do not "jailbreak" your phone. Jailbreaking is an unauthorized change to iOS that allows you to install apps that aren't found in the official Apple App Store.

But moreover, the best defense against malware is to "keep your iPhone updated to the latest version," Serper said. To make sure you have the most current OS update installed, do this:

Rogers had some other tips for avoiding malware: "Set strong passwords on your phone and online services. Only install apps you trust, and don't click on unknown links in email."

The future of iPhone malware

It's reasonable to assume that Apple will continue to update iOS as hackers play cat and mouse with newly discovered vulnerabilities. Steve Grobman, chief technical officer at antivirus company McAfee, said you should also be aware of other risks, like social exploits - in which criminals pose as a business to get you to reveal passwords and other personal information. This could be done over the phone or via email, which commonly referred to as a "phishing."

"Malware is just one of many security concerns for mobile devices," Grobman said. "iOS had a significant Bluetooth vulnerability in 2018, and we recently saw security problem with FaceTime. Cybercriminals have even set up rogue Wi-fi networks in public places. Viruses are just one way in." (Apple has since fixed the vulnerability found in group FaceTime calls.)

If you take simple precautions and stay vigilant, you should be safe. But as Serper said, "I'm not a fan of the popular narrative that iPhone are impervious to malware. Anything with a CPU is vulnerable."

If you've ever hopped on Amazon and found yourself filling your cart with stuff you don't really need but can't pass up at such a good price, you're not alone.

Buyer's remorse is something we've all experienced at one point or another, but what happens when you realize you don't really need any of this stuff after all?

Thankfully, if your order hasn't yet shipped and you placed the order pretty recently — think within the past couple of hours to up to 24 here, depending on your chosen shipping speed — you may be able to cancel your order before it leaves one of the company's giant warehouses.

Here's how to do it.

1. Log into your Amazon account and then navigate to the top right corner of the screen, hovering your mouse over the "Your Account" menu. Scroll down and click on the "Your Orders" option.

Click "Your Orders" from your account menu. Amazon; Jennifer Still/Business Insider

2. Once on your order summary page, locate the order you want to cancel. You'll see an option to the right of the item that says "Cancel items." Perhaps unsurprisingly, that's the one you'll want to click on.

Click "Cancel items." Amazon; Jennifer Still/Business Insider

3. On the next page, you may be told that your cancellation isn't guaranteed, but there's still no harm in trying. Scroll down and, if you feel like it, selection your cancellation reason from the dropdown menu before clicking the "Cancel selected items" button at the bottom right of the screen.

Select a reason for your cancellation and then "Cancel selected items." Amazon; Jennifer Still/Business Insider 4. From there, you'll be sent to a confirmation screen and an email will be sent to you detailing your cancellation request. You'll receive a further email when it's determined whether or not your order could be successfully cancelled.

You should receive an email which details your cancellation request within a few minutes of placing it, as well as another letting you know whether or not this request was successful (if you weren't already informed on the website when placing the request).

This generally happens within an hour or so, though the time varies depending on whether you've purchased items sold by Amazon themselves or via a third-party seller, who you would likely need to contact to see where your order is terms of processing.

Of course, it's not the worst thing in the world if your cancellation wasn't successful. Amazon has a pretty relaxed return policy, so you can always begin that process if your unwanted order does indeed get delivered to your door.

Then again, you might decide you want them items after all and be glad to have them. Either way, you won't be out money you didn't mean to spend for very long, so that's good news.

When scrolling through the Galaxy S10's wallpapers, I noticed how they all have a darker area towards the top right.

I could be crazy, but it seems like Samsung intentionally darkened the top right of its Galaxy S10 wallpapers to hide the hole-punch selfie camera ports on its Infinity O displays.

It immediately reminds me of Apple's iPhone XS wallpapers that are seemingly designed to hide the rather large and wide notch on its display. Apple was even sued by a woman who claimed its marketing images with the notch-hiding wallpapers misled her, as she didn't know the iPhone XS had a notch.

In Samsung's case, the company doesn't seem to be ashamed of the hole-punch cutout, as it actively called its hole-punch display "Infinity O," where the "O" denotes the fact that Samsung's Galaxy S10 phones have an "O" shaped hole for the selfie camera. (On the S10 Plus, it's more of an oval rather than a circle.)

Still, the wallpapers that come with the Galaxy S10 do seem like they're trying to obscure the selfie camera cutouts.

Check it out:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida. — Under the cover of night and the glow of nine car-size rocket engines, a new era for US spaceflight has lifted off from Kennedy Space Center.

At 2:49 a.m. ET on Saturday, SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, rocketed its Crew Dragon spaceship into orbit for the first time.

The maiden flight of Crew Dragon marks the first time ever that a commercial spaceship designed for humans has left Earth. More importantly, it's the first time in eight years that any American spaceship made for people has been launched into orbit.

The seven-person space capsule is intended for NASA astronauts, but no people are flying on board right now. Instead, the roughly six-day-long demonstration mission, called Demo-1, is bringing 400 lbs of cargo and a female crash-test dummy named "Ripley" to the International Space Station (ISS).

However, the stakes couldn't be higher: Ever since NASA retired its fleet of space shuttles in July 2011, the US has relied on Russian rockets and ships to taxi astronauts to and from the ISS.

William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, has called Demo-1 "an absolutely critical first step" toward "eventually returning crewed launch capability back here to the US."

Read more: NASA named these 9 astronauts to fly SpaceX and Boeing's spaceships for the first time

Crew Dragon rode into space atop a roughly 23-story-tall Falcon 9 rocket. The vehicle launched Launch Complex 39A — a historic site from which Apollo astronauts launched to the moon and space shuttles sent up major sections of the ISS.

Next, Crew Dragon must successfully dock with the football-field-size orbiting laboratory, drop off its cargo, then return its artificial passenger back to Earth over the next week. If that all goes well, SpaceX could launch its first flesh-and-blood crew members — NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley — as soon as July.

Why NASA needs SpaceX's spaceship to work

In preparation for the inaugural launch of its Crew Dragon spaceship, SpaceX put a crash-test dummy in one of the vehicle's seats. The mannequin is named "Ripley," named after the lead character in the sci-fi movies "Alien."Elon Musk/SpaceX via Twitter

Demo-1 is part of a larger, roughly $8 billion effort called the Commercial Crew Program Program that aims to spur two companies — SpaceX and Boeing — to build commercial vehicles that can fly astronauts. NASA has given SpaceX and Boeing cash, expertise in human spaceflight, and the honor of restoring American pride.

Both companies have faced years of delays in building and testing the spacecraft due to funding, engineering challenges, and safety concerns. But SpaceX was the first to receive a "go" from NASA, following almost a decade of work with the agency.

"Demo-1 is a flight test, it absolutely is, although we view it also as a real mission, a very critical mission," Kirk Shireman, who manages the space station program at NASA's Johnson Space Center, said during a briefing before the launch. "The ISS still has three people on board, and so this vehicle coming up to the ISS for the first time — it has to work."

SpaceX is no stranger to space-station deliveries, however. The rocket company got its start with NASA in 2010 by developing an uncrewed Dragon cargo spaceship, which has now successfully flown to the ISS 16 times. Dragon's success was part of the reason NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.6 billion contract in 2014 to develop and certify its Crew Dragon capsule.

Once it's astronaut-ready, the plan is for SpaceX to launch six operational missions to the space station.

"This is a critically important event in American history," Jim Bridenstine, NASA's administrator, told reporters on Friday. He was standing before Behnken, Hurley, and other astronauts slated to fly on Crew Dragon. "We're on the precipice of launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil again for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011."

Demo-1 has just begun

An illustration of SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle, a spaceship designed to fly NASA astronauts, docking with the International Space Station.SpaceX

The Crew Dragon spaceship that launched today is now making its way to the space station.

Kathryn Lueders, the manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said the flight is "an invaluable exercise to learn, in the space environment, how these systems will be working" before any attempts to launch people.

Read more: Here's what Crew Dragon must do to prove it's safe to fly astronauts

Crew Dragon's avionics systems and on-board thrusters will attempt to navigate the spaceship to the ISS by around 3:30 a.m. ET Sunday. Once it arrives, a few hours of flying around the space station and docking with it will start. By 8:30 a.m. ET, the astronauts who are currently on board the space station hope to open Crew Dragon's hatch.

The astronauts will unload the 400 lbs of cargo and say goodbye to Ripley the mannequin, then close the hatch on Thursday. Crew Dragon will then undock itself from the space station starting around 2 a.m. ET on Friday and begins its journey home.

The biggest moment in the mission will arrive around 7:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, when Crew Dragon will fire its engines to slow down enough to fall back to Earth, then try to land in the Atlantic Ocean.

Throughout all these steps, SpaceX and NASA will be listening and logging critical information about the flight.

"We've done tons of water-landing testing, parachute testing — all of these individual pieces. But actually having a reentry with Ripley in the seat, in the position is critical," Lueders said. "We've instrumented the crap out of this vehicle."

That data collection will help engineers model the spacecraft's real-world behavior in detail, revealing any potential issues that need to be fixed.

"I guarantee everything will not work exactly right, and that's cool, that's exactly what we want to do," Gerstenmaier said before the launch. "We want to maximize our learning so we can get this stuff ready, so when we put crew on, we're ready to go do a real crew mission."

If the mission somehow fails, it's unlikely to mean the end of SpaceX's work in the Commercial Crew program.

"It's a first flight of a system that is designed for one of the most complex things we do, which is carrying humans safely into space," John Logsdon, a spaceflight historian at George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, told Business Insider. "The chances of everything going perfectly the first try are not anywhere near 100%."

US lobbying against Chinese firm Huawei, one of the biggest phone makers and telecommunications kit providers in the world, hit a new level this week during the phone industry's big annual conference.

Around 100,000 technology vendors, carriers, and device makers head to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona every year both to strike deals and to showcase emerging technologies. This year, the conversation was dominated almost exclusively by 5G, as carriers look to introduce next-generation, superfast mobile networks.

The conference was heavily sponsored by Huawei, as the firm made its big pitch about its 5G capabilities.

But looming in the background were the months of negative press about whether Huawei's equipment might a backdoor that would allow the Chinese government to spy on people.

The firm's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, is awaiting Canada's decision on whether to extradite her to the US, after alleged sanctions violations. And the company was also indicted by the US for alleged theft of trade secrets.

Rotating chairman Guo Ping took to the stage on Tuesday morning to talk up Huawei's 5G business to a cavernous auditorium filled with telecoms executives and journalists.

His speech took an unexpected turn about halfway through, when he fired a shot at the US government, turning claims that Huawei spies on behalf of China back on America.

Huawei's rotating chairman, Guo Ping, told an audience at MWC 2019 that the company didn't spy on its customers. Shona Ghosh/Business Insider

"PRISM, PRISM on the wall, who is the most trustworthy of them all?" Guo said onstage, in reference to the PRISM surveillance system used by America's intelligence agency. "Huawei has a strong track record in security in three decades. Three billion people around the world. The US security accusations of our 5G has no evidence, nothing."

Behind him, a slide appeared in his presentation with the statement: "Huawei has not and will never plant backdoors." There was even some muted laughter from the audience.

Elsewhere around the conference centre, Huawei's logo adorned lanyards of thousands of attendees, while ads for its Mate X foldable phone greeted visitors as they entered the building.

Visitors walk next to Huawei's booth at the Mobile World Congress 2019 in Barcelona. RAFAEL MARCHANTE/Reuters

Just five hours after Guo's swipe, US government officials held a small press conference to make their position on Huawei clear. Up until that point, there had been no visible sign of the US government delegation, which had quietly turned up to Mobile World Congress to lobby its European allies not to use Huawei's equipment in their networks.

Reading from a printed statement, with no microphone or slides, top US cyber official Robert Strayer said: "The United States is asking other governments and the private sector to consider the threat posed by Huawei and other Chinese information technology companies."

Read more: Huawei said it built a folding phone similar to Samsung's Galaxy Fold — but killed it because it was so bad

When pressed by reporters, Strayer refused to say whether the US had proof that Huawei might have built backdoors into its telecommunications equipment.

And asked if the US might simply be worried about leaning too heavily on a foreign tech company, Strayer said: "Really I think the question is this: Do you want to have a system that is potentially compromised by the Chinese government or would you rather go with a more secure alternative?"

The US will be hoping that Strayer's comments, and its behind-the-scenes lobbying, will land more effectively with its allies than Huawei's attack on the big stage at MWC.

Former FBI official: The US is worried about China's rising military and economic power

Chinese President Xi Jinping. Reuters

Security experts with ties to the US government said America's lobbying efforts are about more than just protecting the West's nascent 5G networks from potential Chinese spies.

Joseph Campbell, a director in the global investigations and compliance practice at Navigant Consulting and formerly assistant director of criminal investigations at the FBI, says the Huawei fight is a proxy for bigger US fears about China's ambition.

"We don't know as private citizens all the intelligence information the US and its allies have gathered relative to China and Huawei," Campbell told Business Insider during a phone interview. "But... there's no doubt China is a significant threat for the United States, they are committed to becoming a lead economic and military power in the world."

"Data is power," he added. "Eventually Huawei could be in the position where it could interfere with data traffic, sharing usage, or even engaging in proactive activity to extract that information and use it for their own benefit."

Ang Cui, CEO of security firm Red Balloon, added that whoever dominated 5G would potentially have access to billions of additional connected devices expected to be enabled by the faster network. According to Ericsson, there will be a total of 29 billion connected devices by 2022.

"Whoever gets to dominate 5G infrastructure will become the owner of the next generation of the world's telecoms infrastructure," he said. "If you look back 30 years, [the US Defense Department] funded... what became the internet. US companies provided a lot of the technology and infrastructure."

Cui added: "The internet turned out not to be perfect, but the world doesn't suspect that the US runs a pervasive surveillance mechanism."

Still, Huawei did play on fears that the US does carry out wide-ranging surveillance with its reference to the PRISM system, and the newly introduced Cloud Act, which would force Amazon, Microsoft, and other tech providers to hand over data.

Campbell, the former FBI staffer, said it came down to differences in the legal approach by the two countries.

Actually obtaining data under a law like the Cloud Act, he said, involves many layers of authorisation and back-and-forth between the FBI, the Attorney General, and a further judicial process.

And such laws in the US are intended to help criminal investigations and national security investigations, Campbell said. He added that China's approach to data-gathering was more self-serving.

"Their usage of laws is much more towards benefiting the state in general and the ability to drive its own economic and military capabilities," he said.

Huawei's business is much bigger in Europe, the Middle East, and African than it is in the US

It would be a major victory if the US does manage to persuade more European governments to ban Huawei, simply because its business in EMEA is so much bigger than in the US.

The Americas account for only a small portion of Huawei's business, according to its most recently available financial report from 2017. Just 6.5% of its $90 billion in revenue came from the Americas that year, while Europe accounted for more than a quarter. Its strongest-performing division was its carrier business — the arm that would be providing 5G equipment to telecommunications providers.

Here's how much revenue Huawei makes across its different businesses, and what percentage comes from different regions. The figures are in Chinese yuan:

Huawei makes most of its money from its carrier business, and it doesn't hugely rely on the US market.Huawei

One problem for US lobbying efforts is that Huawei is already deeply embedded in European telecoms networks, and is already helping to test 5G networks in the UK.

"They are a trusted vendor, a trusted provider," one senior UK telecoms executive involved in 5G testing told Business Insider at Mobile World Congress. The person added that operators would come to their own decisions about Huawei, but would listen to advice issued by UK intelligence.

Detecting whether there are vulnerabilities in a piece of equipment or the software that runs on it is difficult, Cui said. "If someone puts in a backdoor, they're going to hide it. So this is not going to be on a spec sheet, it's not going to be an obvious thing they give access to."

He likened a backdoor to the hidden blocks in a Super Mario game which remain invisible to the player.

"You jump, you don't see anything, but something happens," Cui said. "It's a cheat in the system that no one knows about, and that changes the entire security system. It could be in the hardware or the firmware, and perhaps not even a full bug, but a small vulnerability somewhere in the code that only you know about."

UK intelligence is due to publish a report on Huawei in the coming weeks, and early indications suggest that the authorities will conclude they can mitigate the risk from using the Chinese firm's kit.

For the US though, the risk is just too high.

"Certainly Germany, the UK, have independent abilities to assess the threat posed by Huawei, and determine if they can put in the right mitigations," said former FBI exec Campbell. "Obviously the US doesn't feel mitigation techniques would be effective... they would prefer to eliminate that threat."

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — After years of delays, SpaceX and NASA are closing in on the first experimental launch of a commercial spaceship designed to fly astronauts into orbit.

The demonstration mission, called Demo-1, is scheduled to launch aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday at 2:49 a.m. ET from Kennedy Space Center here in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

You can watch the rocket lift off live via NASA TV using the player embedded at the end of this post.

The goal of the launch is to show that Crew Dragon, or Dragon V2— a new spaceship that Elon Musk's spaceflight company designed for NASA — is safe to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS).

The experimental spaceship will go to the ISS, but it won't have any people on board this time. Instead, it will ferry a female crash-test dummy named "Ripley" in a spacesuit, along with some cargo, to the the $150 billion orbiting laboratory. If this test proves successful, SpaceX may launch its first astronauts as soon as July.

"Demo-1 is a flight test, it absolutely is, although we view it also as a real mission, a very critical mission," Kirk Shireman, who manages the space station program at NASA's Johnson Space Center, said during a press briefing. "The ISS still has three people on board, and so this vehicle coming up to the ISS for the first time has to work. It has to work."

Read more: SpaceX plans to rocket a sleek new spaceship for NASA astronauts into orbit. Here's what Crew Dragon must do to prove it's safe to fly people.

Demo-1 is part of a roughly $8 billion effort by NASA called the Commercial Crew Program, which aims to restore NASA's ability to launch astronauts on its own ships. The agency has not had a way to do that since it retired the last space shuttle in July 2011. (US astronauts currently fly to and from the ISS on Russian Soyuz spacecraft.)

Saturday's event would mark the first launch of an American-made spaceship for astronauts since then, among other milestones.

"This is a critically important event in American history," Jim Bridenstine, NASA's administrator, told reporters on Friday while standing before four astronauts slated to fly on Crew Dragon. "We're on the precipice of launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil again for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011."

An illustration of SpaceX's Crew Dragon space capsule for NASA astronauts launching toward space on a Falcon 9 rocket.SpaceX

NASA TV plans to broadcast live video and commentary of the Falcon 9 rocket launch starting at 2 a.m. ET tomorrow (March 2). You can watch it using the embedded player below.

Although SpaceX typically hosts its own launch webcasts, this time the livestream will be a joint production with NASA, featuring remarkable views from inside the Crew Dragon.

"There will be video cameras and there will be nice views, and it will give you a perspective that you would have if you were inside," Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX's vice president for build and flight reliability, said on Thursday.

On Friday morning, the US Air Force released a forecast predicting a 20% chance of delay due to weather. Cloud cover that's too thick to launch a rocket within NASA's margins of safety could lead the agency to scrub the morning launch. However, the weather here at the Cape is currently calm, with cloudless skies and a crystal-clear view of the stars.

Should weather or some other issue delay launch, the backup launch date is Tuesday, March 2. The forecast for Tuesday is markedly worse, with the USAF weather report says there could be a 40% chance of delay then, due to thick clouds and a chance of rain.

You can watch live launch coverage here. We've also posted a second-by-second list of stages for the launch below this player so you can follow along.

Here's a list of all of the stages of the launch that you can expect to see, according to NASA, with all times being approximate and relative to 2:49 a.m. ET:

COUNTDOWN Min/Sec — Events

LAUNCH, LANDING AND DRAGON DEPLOYMENT Min/Sec — Events

This story has been updated with new information.

YouTube TV now has more than 1 million subscribers, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The streaming media giant has never officially reported its subscriber numbers. The new figure from Bloomberg is the first update on the service's subscribers since last July, when The Information reported YouTube TV had nearly 800,000 paying users.

News of the service reaching the 1-million-subscriber milepost comes just a few weeks after the Super Bowl, which likely boosted its numbers. Popular sporting events such as the Super Bowl and the World Series tend to lure in new users, many of whom take advantage of YouTube TV's 30-day free trial, Christian Oestlien, who helped launched the live TV streaming service in 2017, told Business Insider last month. Many decide to stick around after that, though, he said.

"Sports helps bring people in and then programming [such as 'The Big Bang Theory,' 'The Voice,' and other shows] is stuff that people still care about and love to watch every day," said Oestlien, a director of product management at YouTube.

Following an expansion into new markets in January, YouTube TV is now available to 98% of people living in the US. The cable alternative costs $40 per month and comes with access to broadcast networks ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC and to popular cable networks, including TNT, TBS, CNN, and ESPN.

YouTube TV isn't the only online pay TV alternative to have topped 1 milion subscribers. Hulu's live streaming service, which also launched in 2017, has attracted more than 2 million paying users, Bloomberg reported.

Read more: Hulu and YouTube are on track to win the battle for streaming live TV, and it's terrible news for AT&T

Even if YouTube TV trails Hulu, it stands out from YouTube's other paid offerings for doing as well as it has. The Google-owned company, which has long dominated the ad-supported streaming video market, has repeatedly flailed at trying to create successful paid services.

In November, the company appeared to sign the death warrant for YouTube Premium, its short-lived attempt to create a kind of subscription-based competitor to Netflix and Amazon Prime. YouTube announced then that starting next year, consumers would be able to watch the original shows it developed for the service for free with advertisements instead of having to pay a subscription to view them.

YouTube Premium is a rebranded version of YouTube Red, an earlier subscription offering from the company, but with a confusing grab bag of services. The offering, which costs $11.99 per month, includes everything from the company's Spotify-like streaming music service to an ad-free video service for kids.

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Microsoft stopped making the Microsoft Band fitness tracker back in 2016, but it still worked for anybody who bought one — like a Fitbit or Apple Watch, the Microsoft Band used an app to help users track their health.

On May 22, though, that all changes because Microsoft will turn off the Microsoft Band's online services, as well as the Microsoft Health Dashboard, and remove the apps for download across iPhone, Android, and Windows.

To make it up to users, Microsoft is offering a partial refund for anybody who bought the original Microsoft Band, released in 2014, or the Band 2 from 2015.

For owners of the original device, Microsoft will pay out $80, and Band 2 owners will get $175. The only stipulation is that you have to have synced a Band to the app between December 1st, 2018, and March 1st, 2019, meaning it'll be limited to only active users. If your device is under warranty, however, you'll get the refund no matter what.

There's a full FAQ page for Microsoft Band owners here, including details on how to export your health data to other services. The news was first reported by The Verge.

It appears that the Microsoft Band will still have some use, even without those backend services: You can use one to track your heartbeat, count steps, set an alarm, or do anything else that doesn't need an internet connection. However, Microsoft said, if you reset a Band, it will be impossible to set it up again.

The Microsoft Band was a little ahead of its time: While it was primarily a fitness-focused device, it came with some smartwatch-style features, including the Cortana voice assistant and the ability to pay for Starbucks with a displayed barcode. However, it got extremely lukewarm reviews, with users complaining that it was clunky and inaccurate.

The Microsoft Band 2 added more apps and brought a revamped design — but it was released after the Apple Watch, which stole much of its thunder. Plans for a third-generation device were scrapped, and the entire Microsoft Band line was discontinued in 2016.

Still, this misfire aside, the Microsoft Band was part of Microsoft's renewed assault on the hardware market, presaged by the surprising success of 2014's Surface Pro 3. The overall quality of the Surface line shows that Microsoft's hardware lineup still has a lot of promise — just, perhaps, not on the wrist.

Boutique fitness brand Orangetheory Fitness has amassed a cult following on the back of its high-intensity, boot-camp-style workouts. This year, it is set to partner with another cult brand.

Kevin Keith, Orangetheory's chief brand officer, teased an upcoming partnership with Apple at the Association of National Advertisers' Brand Masters conference on Friday.

"We are actually rolling out, later this year, some new partnerships that rhyme with 'Snapple,' I can tell you this," he said.

For those unfamiliar with Orangetheory, the key part is to get your heart rate past its maximum threshold (an effort of 85 or above on a scale of 1 to 100) for 12 to 20 minutes during the 60-minute class, which the brand calls the "orange zone."

Read more: I'm addicted to a boot camp-style workout that's taking over America — here's what it's like

The tech-savvy brand has already rolled out a slew of tech integrations that let its customers track their progress, such as a heart monitor that tracks what they do outside of the studio. An integration with Apple would only take its tech efforts to the next level.

When asked to elaborate on the partnership by Business Insider, Keith declined to say more. But he hinted that the partnership was most likely an app for the Apple Watch.

"It's kind of a secret, but the worst kept secret," he said. "A third of our members have Apple watches. Now, we're going to go legit, and we're also really elevate the experience."

All day long, we're inundated by interruptions and alerts from our devices. Smartphones buzz to wake us up, emails stream into our inboxes, notifications from coworkers and far away friends bubble up on our screens, and "assistants" chime in with their own soulless voices.

Such interruptions seem logical to our minds: we want technology to help with our busy lives, ensuring we don't miss important appointments and communications.

But our bodies have a different view: These constant alerts jolt our stress hormones into action, igniting our fight or flight response; our heartbeats quicken, our breathing tightens, our sweat glands burst open, and our muscles contract. That response is intended to help us outrun danger, not answer a call or text from a colleague.

We are simply not built to live like this.

Our apps are taking advantage of our hard-wired needs for security and social interaction and researchers are starting to see how terrible this is for us. A full 89% of college students now report feeling "phantom" phone vibrations, imagining their phone is summoning them to attention when it hasn't actually buzzed.

Another 86% of Americans say they check their email and social media accounts "constantly," and that it's really stressing them out.

Garry Knight/Flickr (CC)

Endocrinologist Robert Lustig tells Business Insider that notifications from our phones are training our brains to be in a near constant state of stress and fear by establishing a stress-fear memory pathway. And such a state means that the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brains that normally deals with some of our highest-order cognitive functioning, goes completely haywire, and basically shuts down.

"You end up doing stupid things," Lustig says. "And those stupid things tend to get you in trouble."

Your brain can only do one thing at a time

Scientists have known for years what people often won't admit to themselves: humans can't really multi-task. This is true for almost all of us: about 97.5% of the population. The other 2.5% have freakish abilities; scientists call them "super taskers," because they can actually successfully do more than one thing at once. They can drive while talking on the phone, without compromising their ability to gab or shift gears.

AP/Rafiq Maqboo

But since only about 1 in 50 people are super taskers, the rest of us mere mortals are really only focusing on just one thing at a time. That means every time we pause to answer a new notification or get an alert from a different app on our phone, we're being interrupted, and with that interruption we pay a price: something called a "switch cost."

Sometimes the switch from one task to another costs us only a few tenths of a second, but in a day of flip-flopping between ideas, conversations, and transactions on a phone or computer, our switch costs can really add up, and make us more error-prone, too. Psychologist David Meyer who's studied this effect estimates that shifting between tasks can use up as much as 40% of our otherwise productive brain time.

Every time we switch tasks, we're also shooting ourselves up with a dose of the stress hormone cortisol, Lustig says. The switching puts our thoughtful, reasoning prefrontal cortex to sleep, and kicks up dopamine, a brain chemical that plays a key role in pursuing reward and motivation.

In other words, the stress that we build up by trying to do many things at once when we really can't is making us sick, and causing us to crave even more interruptions, spiking dopamine, which perpetuates the cycle.

More phone time, lazier brain

Our brains can only process so much information at a time, about 60 bits per second.

The more tasks we have to do, the more we have to choose how we want to use our precious brain power. So its understandable that we might want to pass some of our extra workload to our phones or digital assistants.

But there is some evidence that delegating thinking tasks to our devices could not only be making our brains sicker, but lazier too.

Researchers have found smarter, more analytical thinkers are less active on their smartphone search engines than other people. That doesn't mean that using your phone for searching causes you to be "dumber," it could just be that these smarties are searching less because they know more. But the link between less analytical thinking and more smartphone scrolling is there.

We also know that reading up on new information on your phone can be a terrible way to learn. Researchers have shown that people who take in complex information from a book, instead of on a screen, develop deeper comprehension, and engage in more conceptual thinking, too.

Recent research on dozens of smartphone users in Switzerland also suggests that staring at our screens could be making both our brains and our fingers more jittery.

Last year, psychologists and computer scientists found an unusual and potentially troubling connection: the more tapping, clicking and social media posting and scrolling people do, the "noisier" their brain signals become. That finding took the researchers by surprise. Usually, when we do something more often, we get better, faster and more efficient at the task.

But the researchers think there's something different going on when we engage in social media: the combination of socializing and using our smartphones could be putting a huge tax on our brains.

Social behavior, "may require more resources at the same time," study author Arko Ghosh said, from our brains to our fingers. And that's scary stuff.

Flickr/André-Pierre du Plessis

Should being on your phone in public be taboo?

Despite these troubling findings, scientists aren't saying that enjoying your favorite apps is automatically destructive. But we do know that certain types of usage seem especially damaging.

Checking Facebook has been proven to make young adults depressed. Researchers who've studied college students' emotional well-being find a direct link: the more often people check Facebook, the more miserable they are. But the incessant, misery-inducing phone checking doesn't just stop there. Games like Fortnite or apps like Twitter can be addictive, in the sense that they will leave your brain craving another hit.

Getty Images/Spencer Platt Addictive apps are built to give your brain rewards, a spike of pleasure when someone likes your photo or comments on your post. Like gambling, they do it on an unpredictable schedule. That's called a "variable ratio schedule" and its something the human brain goes crazy for.

This technique isn't just used by social media, it's all over the internet. Airline fares that drop at the click of a mouse. Overstocked sofas that are there one minute and gone the next. Facebook notifications that change based on where our friends are and what they're talking about. We've gotta have it all, we've gotta have more, and we've gotta have it now. We're scratching addictive itches all over our screens.

Lustig says that even these kinds of apps aren't inherently evil. They only become a problem when they are given free rein to interrupt us, tugging at our brains' desire for tempting treats, tricking our brains into always wanting more.

"I'm not anti technology per se," he counters. "I'm anti variable-reward technology. Because that's designed very specifically to make you keep looking."

Lustig says he wants to change this by drawing boundaries around socially acceptable smartphone use. If we can make a smartphone "addiction" taboo (like smoking inside buildings, for example), people will at least have to sanction their phone time off to delegated places and times, giving their brains a break.

"My hope is that we will come to a point where you can't pull your cell phone out in public," Lustig says.

This story was originally published on March 10, 2018 as part of Business Insider's "Your Brain on Apps" series.

Two top AT&T executives are leaving the company, and insiders say it's a harbinger of cultural changes and widespread layoffs at the company now that it has a court go-ahead to move forward with its $85 billion purchase of Time Warner.

HBO CEO Richard Pepler and Turner president David Levy are leaving in what are among the biggest changes at AT&T since the phone giant moved to acquire the media giant. With nearly 60 years combined experience at their respective companies, Pepler and Levy were closely associated with making, respectively, HBO a premier entertainment business and Turner an innovative cable company.

Their departures followed a Wall Street Journal report earlier in the week that AT&T was in talks to hire former NBC exec Bob Greenblatt to oversee a combined HBO and Turner.

That news, coupled with the departures of Pepler and Levy, has heightened staff concerns about how the Dallas-based phone company would put its stamp on its newly acquired New York-centric media and entertainment properties, now WarnerMedia, according to insiders.

There also was frustration about hearing the news through the press and not AT&T itself. One person described the atmosphere at Turner as being "like a funeral."

"The first thing they did was fire the two heads of the business that we most worried about," another insider said. "That doesn't bode well on Pepler's side for the creative culture and on Levy's side for the ad culture."

Read more: David Levy steps down as president of Turner amid broader shakeup at AT&T's WarnerMedia

The potential combination of HBO and Turner speaks to how John Stankey, an AT&T long-timer who was put in charge of WarnerMedia last June, plans to run the company, another insider said.

Historically, Time Warner operated its units like AOL and Time Inc. separately from each other, which made it easier to spin them off if and when the time came.

But in this case, combining HBO and Turner would enable AT&T to unify the way it sells video to consumers. WarnerMedia is working on a direct-to-consumer streaming service that will have HBO at its core combined with other WarnerMedia content.

'We're going to see really big reductions'

The idea of a mashup of both companies also has some buzzing that layoffs are ahead.

"I've heard they are talking 30% cuts," said a person with close ties to the company. "We're going to see really big reductions — I'm hearing it will be across the board. The places it will probably hit hardest is where the return will be the biggest. The number of people making over $750,000 [at Turner] — in a phone company, there aren't."

WarnerMedia hasn't responded to a request for comment.

Beyond cuts, there are questions about how the HBO and Turner cultures themselves will mesh.

"HBO is slow-growth, versus Turner, where you've got to sell ads every day," that person said. "Some people describe HBO as a mushroom farm. You go around Turner, and you've got people bouncing off the walls."

"Turner has been known as being incredibly innovative, willing to take risks," a media buyer said. "Is there going to be any more of a conservative approach, given AT&T heads are coming in and will Turner continue to embrace a trailblazing spirit?"

One area of the company that seems to be safe is CNN, where Jeff Zucker remains as head and AT&T executives have made indirect comments that it's status quo. "We've been reassured over and over that WarnerMedia doesn't have any desire or intention to shake things up at CNN," an insider at the news network said.

A combined HBO and Turner could be a way to pool information about how people consume all their content and combined with AT&T's distribution pipes, there could be big benefits to marketers, said Amanda Richman, US CEO of the agency Wavemaker.

Agencies have questions

The shakeup has agencies wondering what the strategy is, especially with TV about to enter its crucial TV selling season in a couple of months.

"We're about to enter the upfront, and David was key to setting that strategy," said Lyle Schwartz, head of investment for GroupM. "Do they have a plan for someone stepping up. Is it going to be status quo or signal a change in their approach to the marketplace. It might have a significant impact on what I recommend to clients. I hope to see some clarity of vision.

"Turmoil always happens with things are left open too long. We're in the beginning of March and in 60 days is the upfront. That's a period of time you don't want this change."

Following is a transcript of the video.

We've sent a lot of unusual things to space, guitars, AI robots, even a golden record, but none of that compares to what Elon Musk sent up at the start of 2018. His very own $100,000 cherry red, convertible Tesla Roadster. With the top down and a dummy at the wheel listening to David Bowie, strapped to the most powerful, operational rocket in the world, no less, The Falcon Heavy.

Since its launch a year ago, it's probably safe to say the Roadster has traveled farther than any other car in history. In fact, it's estimated to be about equal to driving every single road in the world 22 times. So the question is, where exactly is it?

Right now, the Roadster is traveling through space at thousands of kilometers per hour, faster than most fighter jets, but unlike a jet, the Roadster isn't burning any fuel because it doesn't have to. When SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket launched on February 6, 2018, it gave the sports car an initial boost in speed, sort of like a slingshot that's been powering it through space ever since. And by November, that boost got it all the way to Mars. But Mars is just the first stop of many.

The Roadster is currently on an elliptical path around the sun, taking it past Venus and Mercury too. It completes one full orbit about every 557 days, and is scheduled to finish its first orbit before the end of 2019. Now if nothing unexpected happens, like a miniature asteroid strike that could pummel the car to pieces, researchers predict that the Roadster will orbit the sun for the next few million years.

Sadly, it's too small and too far away to see in the night sky, even with the aid of a telescope. But eventually, it will make its way back to earth. A team at the University of Toronto projected the Roadster's orbit decades into the future. They discovered that in the year 2091, it will likely pass close enough to earth that we'll be able to see it through a powerful telescope like the Panstar's telescope in Hawaii. But if you don't want to wait that long, you can easily track the Roadster online.

Fans like Ben Pearson use NASA data to project the car's location through space. For now, the convertible will continue its long drive around our inner solar system. And perhaps if humans make it to Mars like Musk hopes, we might even see the Roadster on our way there.

Since 2017, Tesla has officially been selling two sedans, the Model S and the Model 3. Both are fully electric, but with the arrival of the base, $35,000 Model 3, there's now a wide price difference between the cheapest Tesla four-door and the most expensive Model S, which can cost over $100,000, depending on the configuration.

What, you might wonder, do you get for your money with each car?

Glad you asked. I've provided a simple breakdown. The bottom line is that you currently have more options with the Model 3, but the Model S is more premium and serves up better performance — if you pay extra for it. Otherwise, although the cars are in different segments, they have a lot in common.

Read on to learn more:

CUPERTINO, California — Apple welcomes employees with "all" political viewpoints, CEO Tim Cook said Friday, adding that employees that felt ostracized because of their political views should talk to him.

Cook's comments came in response to a question at the company's annual shareholder meeting at its headquarters here. The questioner said she had a friend who worked at the company who doesn't "share the left-wing view" and suggested that the friend felt uncomfortable or even hated because of her views. She asked Cook how he would advise her friend.

One of Apple's most deeply held values is its openness to people of all different sorts, Cook said. It's open to people of different ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, and political beliefs, he said.

"I would encourage them to come talk to me if they have an issue," Cook told the questioner. Adding that the person could also speak with Deirdre O'Brien, Apple's human resources head, he continued, "I would really encourage them to say something."

Silicon Valley companies have drawn increasing fire recently for their progressive political stances, the liberal affiliations of many of their workers, and for allegedly discriminating against conservative employees and points of view. The criticism has particularly hit Facebook and Google, but Apple hasn't been immune to it.

Prior to the question about the conservative worker, Apple shareholders voted on a proposal that would have urged the company to disclose to shareholders the "ideology" of each of its director nominees. In his statement advocating the proposal, Justin Danhof, an attorney at the National Center for Public Policy Research, which submitted it, made clear that it was an effort to ensure that conservative political viewpoints were represented on Apple's board.

"When the company takes overtly political, legal, and policy positions, it would benefit to have voices from both sides of the aisle in the room," Danhof said. "At this company, the consideration of conservative viewpoints appears to be discouraged if not altogether forbidden."

The proposal sparked a lengthy debate among investors about the wisdom of the proposal, the company's frequently progressive policy stances, and its openness to conservative people and points of view. Although supporters of the proposal were well represented in the audience, investors as a whole overwhelmingly voted against it. According to a preliminary tally released by Apple, the measure secured just 1.7% of shareholder votes.

In his comments later, Cook argued against the notion that Apple should query potential employees or anyone affiliated with the company about their political beliefs. As a gay man from the South, he learned not to ask people their thoughts on homosexuality, because if he had done that, "you don't have a lot of friends," he said.

"I don't check people at the door as to who they are and what they believe," he said. "I care about skills and capabilities and contributions."

Apple focuses on promoting certain policies, not on partisan politics, Cook said. It supports pro-environment and pro-immigration policies. It back diversity and privacy. But it also believes in capitalism, he said.

Like most of the top Silicon Valley tech companies however, Apple has a lot of room for improvement when it comes to workforce diversity. Cook said that more than half of the company's new hires last year were women or underrepresented minorities, but he did not say what portion of those were hired to work in Apple's retail stores, which is where a disproportionate number of its women and minority employees work.

To promote its favored policies, Apple works with people from both political parties in the US. Sometimes the policies it favors are supported by one party, sometimes its the other. Sometimes it find common ground for its preferred policies on both sides of the aisle; sometimes both sides are opposed, he said.

"We don't really look at the politics of it," he said. "We think about the policy of it."

What's more, he said, Apple doesn't have a corporate political action committee and doesn't donate to political campaigns.