Some of the most popular smartphone apps are uploading to Facebook highly personal information about their users, including their blood pressure and weight, what house listings they were looking at, and whether they were menstruating or pregnant, without users' explicit knowledge or consent, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The Journal found that at least 11 apps were transferring such sensitive data to Facebook; they included Flo Health's Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, Move's Realtor.com, and Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor. All of the apps named by the Journal — and thousands of others besides — include code from Facebook that allow their developers to track how people are using them and use that information to target ads at them.

The apps are transferring data to Facebook regardless of whether the individual users log into the app via the social network or are even members of it, The Journal reported. None of them gave users an obvious way to block Facebook from getting their data, according to the story. Many of them didn't explicitly disclose to users what information they were sharing with Facebook, according to the report.

The practices may put the developers and Facebook in trouble with regulators in the United States and Europe. Following The Journal's report, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo reportedly ordered an investigation into apps sharing sensitive information with Facebook.

That may only be the start. The Federal Trade Commission has in the past cracked down on companies whose actual privacy practices differed significantly from what they disclosed to their users. Meanwhile, Europe's new General Data Protection Regulation typically requires companies to gain users' explicit consent before collecting or sharing their personal data.

The company is already under regulatory scrutiny after a series of mishaps that came to light last year, including the leak of records to Cambridge Analytica, the data firm linked to President Trump. The Journal's report comes as the company is reportedly negotiating with the FTC over the size of a fine related to that massive data leak.

Read this:Facebook is reportedly considering paying a record multibillion-dollar fine to settle the FTC's investigation into its privacy practices

Facebook's terms of service require developers that use its code to make clear what information they are sharing with the social network, company spokeswoman Nissa Anklesaria told Business Insider. They also bar app makers from sharing certain sensitive data with Facebook. Facebook looks for and deletes such data when the company finds it, she said.

But generally, the practice of apps sharing data with Facebook for the purpose of advertising to users is nothing unusual or untoward, Anklesaria said.

"Sharing information across apps on your iPhone or Android device is how mobile advertising works and is industry standard practice," she said.

Several of the developers mentioned in The Journal's report changed their privacy policies or data sharing practices after being contacted by the newspaper. For example, BetterMe, maker of BetterMe: Weight Loss Workouts, updated its privacy policy to make more explicit what information it shares with Facebook and why.

Although the market for tech IPO offerings is being called a "s---show" in 2019, it hasn't stopped some startups from taking steps toward going public anyway.

But thanks to market volatility at the end of 2018, as well as the government shutdown in January that put public filings on hold, 2019 as a "banner year" has started out slow. The down market has left many highly anticipated tech IPOs to be delayed, and bankers are now anticipating an inundation of IPOs in the second quarter of 2019, beginning in March.

Through the first two months of 2019, there have been only a handful of tech startups that have taken official steps toward going public. Some of the most highly anticipated startups have made their first moves already: Uber and Lyft are dueling it out to be the first of the two multibillion-dollar ride-hailing platforms to go public.

Here are the tech startups that have taken steps toward going public, and those that are rumored to make their first moves in 2019:

(Valuations and funding raised courtesy of PitchBook.)

Following is a transcript of the video. Narrator: An Israeli company called Space IL just became the first private company to launch a mission to the moon, hitching a ride on SpaceX's Falcon 9 Rocket, which took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Israel is now the fourth country, after the U.S., Russia, and China, to launch a robotic lander to the surface of the moon.

Dave Mosher: This isn't just any SpaceX launch. This one is different. And it represents a new phase in space flight.Narrator: The last crewed moon mission happened in 1972, just three years after Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. No human has been back since, only uncrewed payloads. But, why?Mosher: It fell out of favour because we were trying to get the Space Shuttle program off the ground. We were trying to build the Space Station. We were trying to do all these other things to survive long-term in space. And so now, we're starting to finally look back at the moon. Announcer: Today, the Google Lunar XPRIZE ignites our imagination.

Mosher: This whole mission owes its existence to the Google Lunar XPRIZE. This is a competition that started in September 2007. The prize: $20 million to the first private entity that could land a spacecraft on the moon and move 500 meters.Narrator: The deadline to win the $20 million passed in 2018… but the competition continues, only without a cash prize for the winner. Space IL built a 1,300-pound robotic spacecraft called "Beresheet," which is Hebrew for "in the beginning." The craft is equipped with cameras, magnetic sensors, and transmitters that, after landing on the lunar surface, will collect and send data back to Earth.Morris Kahn: The challenge was, could Israel innovate and actually achieve this objective with a smaller budget and being a smaller country and without a big space industry backing it?Mosher: Morris Khan is a South African entrepreneur, a billionaire who lives in Israel. He's helped fundraise for the mission to the point of $100 million. He sees that as a huge point of pride for Israel.Kahn: My personal stake is actually in excess of about 42, 43 million at this point in time, and counting. I would have liked to have got more support from the government, but we didn't. And actually what it did was, it left us the initiative to do what we thought was necessary. So, maybe the fact that they didn't put all that money in didn't give them control and actually gave us the ability to do what we thought was what was necessary. And we did the job.Narrator: The rocket launched from pad 40 at SpaceX's facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida — a place that's been making space history for over 50 years.Mosher: Cape Canaveral in Florida is this cradle of space flight history. You've got the birth of theMercury, the Gemini, the Apollo programs and missions that went to the moon, the Space Shuttle program. And SpaceX and others are now leasing and taking over and retrofitting these launchpads for the next wave of the space race.Scott Parazynski: This is really the nucleus of our nation's space program. And it's also a cauldron of international collaboration.Narrator: Scott Parazynski is a veteran of five Shuttle missions and a member of the Astronaut Hall of Fame.Parazynski: Israel is an incredible technological powerhouse, so I think it's extraordinary that now, non-spacefaring nations, in other words, those that don't have the capacity to necessarily launch their own astronauts, are now able to, launch major payloads like this. Perhaps not the too distant future, they will be able to also launch their own astronauts independently. Narrator: After being deployed from SpaceX's Falcon Nine rocket, It's going to take two and a half months for SpaceIL's lander to actually get to the moon. A successful landing could be our next small step towards a manned mission to Mars. Parazynski: I think it's imperative that we send crews to the moon and return them to stay, to actually set up a real habitat akin to the South Pole station in Antarctica. I think we should send international crews to work, to explore, to learn to live off of the land. And in so doing, we develop the technologies that would allow us to actually colonize Mars. Mosher: The Space IL mission is just the beginning. In the future, we might look back at this as an inflexion point as to where all of this started, all of this being the permanent settlement of the moon and perhaps even Mars.

Epic Games, the publisher behind the wildly popular battle-royale game "Fortnite," suspended its pre-roll advertising on YouTube after its ads were being featured on suggestive videos of young girls, Wired reports.

A video by YouTuber Matt Watson recently pointed out that YouTube's algorithm was prompting users down a "wormhole" of inappropriate content showing young girls.

He said the algorithm continually directs users towards similar videos, which had racked up hundreds of thousands of or even over a million views and seemingly amassed an audience of pedophiles.

Wired conducted its own investigation into the videos, which included girls doing gymnastics, playing Twister, and playing in pools. It found some of the videos had millions of views.

Comments underneath the videos seemed to show a ring of people congregating, often leaving timestamps marking moments in the videos where the childrens' exposed genitals or nipples can be seen.

Wired found that they sometimes exchanged WhatsApp or Kik details, promising to send each other more videos. It said it looked like a "network of pedophiles is hiding in plain sight."

Read more: YouTube failed to take down live videos of child exploitation after they were flagged to moderators

Watson originally pointed out that some of these videos were being monetized, and featured adverts from major brands including Disney. Wired found pre-roll adverts for Alfa Romeo, Fiat, "Fortnite," Grammarly, L'Oreal, Maybelline, Metro: Exodus, Peloton and SingleMuslims.com.

A spokesperson for Epic Games told Wired that it had suspended all pre-roll advertising on YouTube. "Through our advertising agency, we have reached out to YouTube to determine actions they'll take to eliminate this type of content from their service," they added.

When contacted by Business Insider, a YouTube spokesman said: "Any content — including comments — that endangers minors is abhorrent and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube.

"We took immediate action by deleting accounts and channels, reporting illegal activity to authorities and disabling violative comments. There's more to be done, and we continue to work to improve and catch abuse more quickly."

Epic Games was not immediately able to respond when contacted by Business Insider.

Here's YouTuber Matt Watson's video in full:

Redis Labs has been living under the specter of Amazon for some time.

Redis Labs is best known as the creator of the free, open-source Redis database, which has only grown more popular among developers since its introduction in 2011, thanks in large part to the speed with which it gives results.

That popularity has translated into fast growth. In 2018, Redis Labs saw 60% revenue growth from the year before, from sales of its paid enterprise edition with more features. In November, it hired its first CFO, Rafael Torres, ahead of an initial public offering it plans to hold in about two years, Redis Labs' CEO, Ofer Bengal, says.

But because Redis is open source — meaning others can use, download, or modify the software in any way they want, free — it also means Amazon Web Services was within its rights when it took Redis, packaged it up, and sold it as a service for a profit, as it did starting in 2013.

"We lived with the Amazon competition from day one," Bengal said. "All this time we learned to live with it, although it hurts because they make hundreds of millions of dollars each year on Redis alone. These are revenues that are taken from us. Redis is the fruit of our development efforts ... They didn't add any significant functionalities to it and basically just packaged the open source into a fully managed service which they offer over AWS."

Still, Bengal says the company's fast growth offset investor concerns about Amazon. And on Tuesday, Redis Labs announced it closed $60 million in series E financing led by Francisco Partners, with participation by the existing investors Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital Ventures, Viola Ventures, and Dell Technologies Capital.

"We are building our company to be a leading database company," Bengal said. "The landscape has changed a lot. Ten to 20 years ago, it was insane to build a new database company because of the dominant position of Oracle. Today, everyone understands that there's a market that's open, and there's room for several database companies."

Competition from Amazon

Just because Redis Labs has grown on its own merits, it doesn't mean the company is taking the competition from Amazon lying down.

Last year, Redis Labs made ripples in the open-source community when it announced it would adopt the Commons Clause— a controversial new provision in its software license that would prevent Amazon, or any other large cloud provider, from taking components of Redis' code and selling it for a profit.

Read more:2 software companies, fed up with Amazon, Alibaba, and other big cloud players, have a controversial new plan to fight back

When Redis Labs first added the Commons Clause, open-source developers were divided, fretting that putting provisions on how the software was used could undermine the meaning of open source. But Redis Labs was soon joined by companies like Confluent and MongoDB in taking similar stands.

"I think people understand we need to update the open-source concept," Bengal said. "I think today people are OK with it. In terms of the business itself, it has no impact on our business whatsoever. We didn't see any deduction."

In fact, Bengal says, it will help Redis Labs become more competitive with Amazon. While AWS is still free to use the older versions of Redis, which are still under the previous license, it means that it's blocked by the license from taking advantage of features in any future releases.

"Our newest innovation is not open to them anymore," Bengal said. "They can't adopt them anymore because of our new license. We base our potential future growth on those new innovations which we constantly bring to the market … And the competition from Amazon will become less and less."

Risks and rewards

This approach does have its risks, though, and the new licenses aren't a silver bullet. Though its new license prevented Amazon from selling MongoDB's own open-source database software, it didn't stop Amazon from creating its own version based on the same concepts.

"MongoDB just now feels the power of the Amazon competition," Bengal said.

Still, he says, the time is right for change in the way that open source and cloud computing work with each other.

"Everyone understands that what happens with cloud providers and open source today is unfair," Bengal said. "If it will continue without change, there is no reason for anyone to distribute open-source code without Amazon picking up the code at the expense of the creator. We were the first company to really do it."

Bengal says only time will tell whether the new license will actually help Redis Labs in terms of its business. But he says the logic of changing the license resonated well with investors.

"Most investors in open source, they have the same interest as the company, which is to protect the assets of the company, and this license is very much what it is," Bengal said. "It's very constructive in this approach."

Read more:Here's why investors are throwing money at startups that give away their software free

With the new funding, Redis Lab plans to invest in its global go-to-market strategy, the Redis community, and more high-performance features in the software. To date, Redis Labs has raised $146 million.

In early February, Google announced that its home security and alarm system Nest Secure would be getting an update — users could now enable its virtual assistant technology, Google Assistant.

The problem: Nest users didn't know a microphone even existed on their security device to begin with.

The existence of a microphone on the Nest Guard (which is the alarm, keypad, and motion sensor component in the Nest Secure offering) was never disclosed in any of the product material for the device.

Nest Gaurd Nest

On Tuesday, a Google spokesperson told Business Insider it had made an "error."

"The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs. That was an error on our part," the spokesperson said.

Google says that "the microphone has never been on and is only activated when users specifically enable the option."

It also said the microphone was originally included in the Nest Guard for the possibility of adding new security features down the line, like the ability to detect broken glass.

Still, even if Google included the microphone in its Nest Guard device for future updates — like its Assistant integration — the news comes as consumers have grown increasingly wary of major tech companies and their commitment to consumer privacy.

Google bought Nest — which was initially known for its smart thermostat device — back in 2014 for $3.2 billion. It became a standalone company in 2015 when Google reorganized as Alphabet, but in February 2018, it was brought back into Google under the leadership of head hardware exec Rick Osterloh.

Read more: Google is reabsorbing Nest, the smart home company it bought for $3.2 billion in 2014

Today, Nest offers a variety of IoT products including smoke detectors, video doorbells, and security cameras.

New rules proposed by federal regulators will let mega-startups like Uber and Airbnb seek early feedback about investor appetite for an initial public offering.

On Tuesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed a new "test the water" reform which would allow all pre-IPO companies to consult with qualified institutional buyers before filing paperwork to go public.

These meetings give startups the chance to see if investors are actually interested in buying their stock before going through the work of filing with the SEC. And it helps institutional investors like Fidelity and T. Rowe Price the chance to see what's coming up in the IPO pipeline while setting the tone on valuation and price.

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"It makes the process more informed," said Edwin O'Connor, a capital markets lawyer at Goodwin. "So when [companies] are ready to go to market, they have heard the investors' concerns and have the time to address it."

Currently, the privilege to chat with investors only extends to the smaller emerging growth companies, which excludes most companies with annual revenue over $1 billion. These so-called EGCs, which make up the vast majority of IPO registrants, have been able to get feedback on price and demand since 2012, when the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, known as the JOBS Act, was signed into law.

Larger private companies with revenue of more than $1 billion, however, must file an S-1 registration statement in order to be allowed to seek feedback from institutional investors. That would change, if the proposed rules become law.

"Everyone's been waiting for this," said Anna Pinedo, a securities lawyer at Mayer Brown. "It's been much anticipated, so it's great to see it out."

Such reform could have an outsized impact in tech, Pinedo said, where startups are waiting longer and growing larger before tapping the public markets.

Ride-hailing service Uber, which is expected to go public this year, brought in $11.4 billion in revenue in 2018. Airbnb, another 2019 IPO prospect, announced that it brought in more than $1 billion in revenue in one quarter alone in Q3 2018. Both have too much revenue to count as an EGC.

While Uber and Lyft would not directly benefit from the new rules, as each has already confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the SEC, the new rules could come in handy for other startups reportedly weighing an IPO, such as Airbnb and Palantir. Depending on how the 60-day public comment period goes, the new rules could take effect as soon the end of April.

This reform won't just impact pre-IPO unicorns, according to O'Connor. The proposal also gives public companies more flexibility when it comes to issuing new shares.

Currently, executives at public companies can chat with investors about raising more capital. But the banks underwriting these offerings can't. The reform would change that to allow authorized representatives to "engage in oral or written communications with potential investors."

"[The reform] probably won't move the needle much on IPOs because for private companies, most won't need this," O'Connor said. "But I think it will help companies raise money after they're public. It might incrementally increase capital raising activity in the public markets."

Though the SEC will take comments for 60 days before making the reform official, both Pinedo and O'Connor said they don't expect to see any opposition prevent this from happening.

"Lawyers' industries groups and trade associations have been talking about extending the 'test the waters' for a couple of years now," Pinedo said. "I doubt that there will be any opponents or natural critics for this."

If one were too oppose to reform, it would be on behalf of the investors themselves. And while many SEC regulations are designed to prevent investors from being mislead by the companies issuing securities, the new reform only impacts institutional investors.

"These are sophisticated investors," O'Connor said. "They can fend for themselves."

The Department of Defense has agreed to investigate some of the central complaints raised by Oracle in a lawsuit. The suit has been Oracle's method to wrestle a $10 billion cloud computing contract out of the waiting hands of Amazon, who has long been considered the front-runner for the winner-take-all deal.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon's lawyers asked for a stay — meaning a postponement — in Oracle's lawsuit, which no one, not even Oracle, opposed. The motion asking for the stay was sealed, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Read: Amazon's new Virginia data center is getting a bunch of tax breaks, and it gives insight into how the company reduces its tax liability

But, when granting the stay, the court indicated that the Pentagon was asking to investigate the claims raised in the suit, according to the court filing, as seen by Business Insider.

Specifically, Judge Bruggink wrote, with emphasis ours:

"For good cause shown, the court grants the government's unopposed motion to stay this case while the Department of Defense reconsiders whether possible personal conflicts of interest impacted the integrity of the JEDI Cloud procurement. The government is directed to file a status report within five days of a final decision by DoD."

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure program (JEDI) is a 10-year contract up to $10 billion that would have the Pentagon using a single cloud provider for much of its general computing needs. As Amazon blows its competition away in the cloud computing market — not just in market share, but in the number of features its cloud offers — it has for a long time been considered the frontrunner to win the contract.

But competitors including Google, Microsoft and Oracle have complained that the Pentagon was going to to use just one provider, likely Amazon, instead of dividing the bounty up among a number of companies. Google has since dropped out of the running for the contract, citing ethical concerns, and fears that it lacked certain capabilities to fulfill the contract.

Oracle has tried a number of methods to influence and stop this train, including reportedly having CEO Safra Catz raise the issue during a dinner with President Trump, as well as a failed formal protest with the General Service Administration (GSA), the organization that handles government contracts.

Ultimately, Oracle sued, alleging that two former DoD staff members involved with the deal had ties to Amazon, creating a conflict of interest that unfairly tipped the scales in favor of Amazon. The most serious allegation was against Deap Ubhi, who was an Amazon employee before he came to work for the government on the JEDI contract process, and then rejoined Amazon after.

Oracle also previously asked the court to allow it to look at loads of documents involving Amazon's bid for the contract. In a motion at the time arguing that Oracle should not be granted such documents, Amazon leapt to Ubhi's defense, saying that Oracle "wildly overstated" Ubhi's involvement in the JEDI process — which was limited to seven weeks of market research — until he recused himself from the process. He recused himself "upon AWS's expression of interest in a start-up that he owned," Amazon said at the time.

The person taking over the contract for the Pentagon looked into his potential conflict of interest and concluded it didn't impact the deal, and that Ubhi didn't get any farther than drafting a table of contents of potential items to include before bowing out. Ubhi could not be immediately reached for comment.

And so, it seems the Pentagon is opting to stop the lawsuit train and investigate.

Interestingly, this doesn't put Amazon out of the running by a long shot. The company's cloud services are so advanced that even former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's largest shareholder, chose AWS to host his basketball team's new technology. Ballmer told Bloomberg that even though he "bleeds" Microsoft, AWS had the better technology to run CourtVision, his new mobile video technology for fans of the Los Angeles Clippers.

And, even if Oracle's saber rattling does cause the Pentagon to split the contact between multiple cloud vendors, it's not foregone that Oracle would be one of them. The most likely next choice would be Microsoft, and some industry observers believe Microsoft has a growing shot to take the whole thing.

Read: 'Google, this is bogus as hell' — one of the fathers of the internet blasts Google for how Chromecast behaves on his home network

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he is "certain" that Tesla vehicles will be able to operate without any driver intervention by the end of this year, pending regulatory approval, during an interview with ARK Invest.

"I think we will be feature-complete full self-driving this year, meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention — this year. I would say that I am certain of that. That is not a question mark," Musk said.

Musk suggested the update would still require the driver to pay attention to the road, but estimated that Tesla vehicles will be capable of operating themselves without any attention from the driver by the end of next year. He added that both updates would depend on regulatory approval.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read more:Elon Musk's 'reckless' comment about the capabilities of Tesla's Autopilot could put drivers at risk, an analyst says

Musk's comments were similar to ones he made during Tesla's fourth-quarter earnings call in January, but his use of the word "certain" was striking. Musk is known for making bold predictions that the automaker sometimes misses, but he has qualified recent projections about vehicle demand and product timelines with more conservative language.

During the fourth-quarter earnings call, Musk referred to his predictions about demand for the Model 3 sedan, Tesla's timeline for introducing a long-awaited $35,000 base model, and the future average selling price for the vehicle as guesses, rather than assertions.

Developing the autonomous capabilities Musk mentioned by the end of this year would put Tesla at the forefront of the autonomous-driving industry. Waymo, which is seen by experts as the industry's current leader, is operating an autonomous ride-hailing service, Waymo One, in parts of Arizona where vehicles drive without human assistance, but have in-vehicle safety operators ready to intervene if the vehicle encounters a particularly challenging situation. (A Waymo One rider told Business Insider the safety operator rarely takes control of the vehicle.)

Waymo has not announced a timeline for expanding the service beyond Arizona, and other high-profile rivals, like Uber and the General Motors spin-off, Cruise, have not set public deadlines for autonomous-driving capabilities as aggressive as Musk's.

But Musk has missed projections about autonomous-driving technology on multiple occasions. In 2015, Musk said Tesla would have fully autonomous driving technology ready in about two years, and Tesla has passed multiple deadlines set by Musk to send a self-driving vehicle across the US.

Have a Tesla news tip? Contact this reporter at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

President Donald Trump has pushed the US one step closer to establishing the first new military branch in more than 70 years: a Space Force.

Trump can't create a Space Force on his own; that requires the approval of Congress. So on Tuesday, the President signed a document called Space Policy Directive-4, or SPD-4.

The new memorandum asks the Department of Defense (DOD) to draft legislation for Congress that would ultimately set up a Space Force. Should such legislation pass, the new division would exist alongside the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, and Navy.

"Space Force would be authorized to organize, train, and equip military space forces ... to ensure unfettered access to, and freedom to operate in, space, and provide vital capabilities to joint and coalition forces in peacetime and across the spectrum of conflict," according to the directive.

President Donald Trump displays the "Space Policy Directive 4" on February 19, 2019.Jim Young/ReutersThe directive says the legislation establishing a Space Force should not include NASA. But Jim Bridenstine, NASA's administrator and a former Republican congressman, weighed in on the document's signing via Twitter.

"Civilization is dependent on freedom of navigation in space. SPD-4 ensures our freedom continues. @NASA has billions of dollars of assets and a permanent human presence in space. NASA will not have a direct role, but I support @POTUS Trump's announcement," Bridenstine said on Tuesday, adding that he once voted for a similar proposal in Congress.

But not everybody is on board with a Space Force.

Retired NASA astronaut Mark Kelly has been vocal in his opposition to the idea. Kelly is a former Navy captain, pilot, combat veteran, four-time space flyer, and the identical twin brother of former astronaut Scott Kelly. He is also running for a US Senate seat in Arizona.

"This is a dumb idea. The Air Force does this already. That is their job," Kelly tweeted in June. "What's next, we move submarines to the 7th branch and call it the 'under-the-sea force?'"

Kelly reiterated and expanded upon his argument in August during an MSNBC interview.

"There is a threat out there, but it's being handled by the US Air Force today. [It] doesn't make sense to build a whole other level of bureaucracy in an incredibly bureaucratic DOD," he said, according to Reuters. "It is an area where we should continue focus ... but we can do this within the US Air Force."

Kelly and his campaign did not immediately respond to Business Insider's requests for comment on the signing of SPD-4.

However, some members Congress have also voiced their distaste for the idea of a Space Force, and other critics question its utility, expense, and potential role in weaponizing space, perhaps to disastrous effect.

Why the US already has a 'space force'

USAF

In his criticisms, Kelly was referring to the Air Force Space Command — though the group has had different names over the years.

Space Command is headquartered in Colorado, and its responsibilities include supporting military use of satellites, rocket launches, and cyberwarfare operations. The group also helps track the countless pieces of space junk and debris around Earth that pose a persistent threat to anything in orbit.

Space Command is managed by US Strategic Command, one of 10 groups that direct major pieces of the Defense Department. Its responsibilities include oversight of the country's nuclear-weapons capabilities, which involves space because long-range, nuclear-tipped missiles fly through space.

In July 2016, Space Command even announced the creation of a Space Mission Force, which military leadership said was akin to an expeditionary force.

Red dots are known pieces of China's destroyed FY-1C satellite. Green dots are low Earth orbit satellites. Celestrak/Analytical Graphics, Inc.

This force was created in part to quickly respond to outer-space attacks from adversaries. The main countries of concern are Russia, which continues to publicize new weaponry, and China, which destroyed one of its own satellites in a 2007 test with a "kill vehicle" (essentially a giant bullet launched by missile).

"Despite world interest in avoiding militarization of space, potential adversaries have identified the use of space as an advantage for US military forces, and are actively fielding systems to deny our use of space in a conflict," Gen. John E. Hyten, the commander of US Strategic Command, wrote in a white paper about the decision in 2016, when he led Space Command.

The Trump administration wants to peel these space-related capabilities from the Air Force, however, and form a new division entirely.

For and against a Space Force

Aaron Bernstein/Reuters

Some members of Congress, especially Republicans in the House of Representatives, have appeared warm to the idea.

"As we get all these briefings about what adversaries are doing, our dependence on space, it's clear that we have to do better," Rep. Mac Thornberry, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, told reporters in early June, according to Space News. "Organizational changes don't fix all the problems. But on the other hand, they can sometimes help make sure space gets the kind of priority it should have, like cyber, as a domain of warfare."

But others in Congress — and apparently some high-ranking military officials — have, like Kelly, questioned and pushed back on the idea of a Space Force.

"The president told a US general to create a new Space Force as 6th branch of military today, which generals tell me they don't want," former Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida tweeted in June. "Thankfully the president can't do it without Congress because now is NOT the time to rip the Air Force apart. Too many important missions at stake."

In September 2018, the Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said creating a Space Force may cost $13 billion, and she pushed back on aspects of its creation, according to Defense One. One independent security organization suggested that money would be better spent on establishing a Cyber Force to better prepare the US for cyberwarfare.

Stationing or testing any weapons of mass destruction in space, including nuclear weapons, is banned by the United Nations' Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Peaceful use and exploration are permitted, however, and smaller-scale weapons are not explicitly banned. Experts fear that militarizing space with such weapons could stoke a costly new arms race.

A war in space might also lead to something called a Kessler event. In this scenario, uncontrolled space debris could collide and create even more uncontrolled space debris, ultimately shutting off human access to space for decades, if not centuries.

Ben Brimelow contributed reporting.

New York City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, center, speaks during a conference in Gordon Triangle Park in the Queens borough of New York, following Amazon's announcement it would abandon its proposed headquarters for the area, Feb. 14, 2019. Bebeto Matthews/AP

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What a week it's been for Amazon. The company accustomed to being slobbered over by local municipalities got a cold welcome when it tried to expand to New York City, and ended up pulling out. It was another sign that the public's goodwill toward big tech is fading.

Amazon's business will be just fine without New York City. But more crucial to its business, and less publicly, it's trying to become the third player in digital advertising behind Google and Facebook. Advertisers have found it tough to parse all Amazon's ad formats, though.

Amazon's latest attempt to expand its ad business, with video search ads, is running into obstacles with advertisers. As Lauren Johnson reported last week, advertisers have issues with the price, creative demands, and data limitations. "It's not something that we have clients clamoring for," Nich Weinheimer, VP of e-commerce at Kenshoo, a company that helps marketers plan and buy digital ads.

That kind of challenge is giving rise to tech companies that are emerging to help marketers leverage Amazon, Tanya Dua reported.

Amazon needs to get formats like this one right if it's going to expand beyond performance ads.

-- Lucia

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Here's what else we've been up to this week.

Instagram is already running out of room for ads, and that's a threat to Facebook as it looks for new avenues to keep revenue growing Speaking of growing pains, Facebook is running up against a wall growing Instagram. The app was supposed to be the savior of Facebook's ad business, but it's already getting saturated with ads itself.

The New York Times has more subs than ever. That's not necessarily good news for the rest of the industry. I talked to Meredith Levien, COO of The New York Times Co., on the heels of a strong fourth quarter for subscription growth. But while the Times has many reasons to be optimistic about its ability to keep growing subscriptions, it's less clear that other subscription publishers can replicate that success.

Pay TV distributors are looking to new video packages after another disastrous quarter, and it might be their only option Cable companies are running out of ways to hold on to cord-cutting subscribers, which is why one trend on the horizon could be bundling themed content in niche entertainment interest areas like kids and Bollywood. That's according to Amdocs, which works with MVPDs like Comcast, AT&T's DirecTV, and Dish and is talking to clients about offering packages like this in the US in the months ahead.

Giant brands like Unilever and Marriott are taking more of their advertising in-house than ever before, and a whole new cottage industry of companies is trying to cash in on the opportunity Disruption creates all kinds of pains and opportunities. As more marketers try to bring their advertising in-house, some are getting help from new companies that have emerged to help them figure out how to cut out the agency middleman.

BuzzFeed cut 15% of its staff, and some critics are now taking shots at CEO Jonah Peretti's strategy BuzzFeed represented soaring hopes that online media operators could reinvent the news model for digital, but since it had to lay off staff to get profitable, some in and outside the company are questioning decisions made under CEO Jonah Peretti, from its ballooning staff to aggressive overseas expansion to rejecting a reported offer from Disney.

Feel free to send tips or thoughts to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Here are other good stories from tech, media, and entertainment:

60-hour weeks, ambulance callouts, and 'swag bucks': 30 employees describe the intense reality of working for Amazon during its busiest time of the year The CEO of sports media startup Overtime explains how he was able to quickly raise a $23 million round, even as gloom and doom grips the industry

Two words in Facebook's latest regulatory filing shows how worried the company is about what it's doing to people

Oscars ads will hit a record high this year despite the steady decline of ratings. Here's why ABC keeps making more and more money

How Dark Horse is building its own movie and TV empire out of comic books, from Netflix to a 'Hellboy' reboot

While Amazon has bailed on its plans for an HQ2 office in New York, things seem to be chugging along for Virginia, the other state where the online retailer has promised a massive expansion.

A new report from Bloomberg's David Kocieniewski detailed some of the hush-hush dealmaking between Amazon and state officials, particularly concerning tax breaks for its plans to build a new data center for its cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS representatives reportedly met with the governor and with the state's economic developer, Buddy Rizer, last year. Rizer is the official overseeing the state's runaway success in attracting data-center operators, including AWS.

Read more: I spent an uplifting day at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and discovered what it's really like to work there

Virginia is one of Amazon's most major and important locales, with one particular county, Loudoun, playing the starring role. Loudoun is said to be home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world, thanks to its proximity to a major internet interconnection hub and its low electricity rates.

Amazon keeps its data-center plans under wraps, but it has leased millions of square feet across dozens of sites in that county and nearby areas for Vadata Inc., the business unit that operates Amazon's data centers, Rich Miller at Data Center Frontier reported. Google, Facebook, and many others have data centers in Loudoun, too.

Among the topics discussed at some of those meetings were tax breaks for Amazon. One such meeting was reportedly between AWS CEO Andy Jassy, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, and the governor's aides. In that meeting, Jassy asked for assurances that Virginia's tax breaks for data centers would continue, Bloomberg reported.

Virginia exempts sales and use tax for the largest data-centers operators, and such breaks are scheduled to sunset in 2035. In the state's 2018 fiscal year, it forgave $79 million in data-center taxes, it said. But the breaks paid off as the state reaped $66.8 million over budget in tax revenues from data centers, too, Michael Neibauer of the Washington Business Journal reported.

But last year, Amazon reportedly also got another, more controversial tax break.

Although Loudoun is one of the richest counties in the nation, the state designated some of the land that Amazon was interested in there as an "opportunity zone." An "opportunity zone" is a Trump-era program that can give tax breaks to companies and developers who invest in economically distressed communities.

The state submitted this land for the program, the Treasury Department approved it, and AWS was under contract to build a data center there in the following month, Bloomberg reported.

Rizer's spokesperson insisted to Bloomberg that Amazon never asked for this particular tax incentive, and Amazon told Business Insider the same.

An Amazon spokesperson told us, "Any speculation that AWS officials worked with the Commonwealth of Virginia to designate an Opportunity Zone for tax purposes is misguided and incorrect. The conversations between AWS leadership and the Governor were about the continued AWS investments we are making in Virginia, including our renewable energy projects, AWS Educate program, and the benefits that cloud computing has on local businesses in the commercial, public sector, and education segments."

And the site it chose for its Virginia HQ2 offices was in Crystal City, Arlington County, which is not in an opportunity zone, Bloomberg reported.

Not that Virginia is unique in its use of the opportunity-zone program.

Read more: Amazon Web Services is bigger than its next 4 competitors combined as cloud became a $70 billion market last year

There are plenty of critics of the program who say the rules around the opportunity zones are too lax, that it helps the rich more than the poor, and that it hastens gentrification.

We don't know what other tax incentives Amazon was offered by various government entities when it asked them to compete for its HQ2 because Amazon required government entities to sign nondisclosure agreements.

However, Virginia's choices give a little insight into how Amazon reduces its tax bills. It may have paid no federal taxes on its $11.2 billion profit last year, according to the progressive think tank Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy.

On the heels of a warning from federal regulators, a controversial startup that had been charging $8,000 to fill your veins with young blood has allegedly stopped providing the procedure.

On Tuesday, regulators with the Food and Drug Administration warned people against getting transfusions of young blood that purport to provide anti-aging and other health benefits.

"There is no proven clinical benefit of infusion of plasma from young donors to cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent these conditions, and there are risks associated with the use of any plasma product," the FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, and the director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Peter Marks, said in a joint statement.

The statement didn't call out any companies by name.

One of the only companies known to offer the procedure, however, is called Ambrosia. Its founder, Jesse Karmazin, previously told Business Insider that he was charging $8,000 for 1 liter of young blood or $12,000 for 2 liters. He also said the transfusions were safe and reliable, despite little to no hard scientific evidence demonstrating either its safety or its benefits. Karmazin didn't immediately return a message seeking comment on the recent FDA statement.

But as of Tuesday afternoon, Ambrosia's website had been changed to read, "In compliance with the FDA announcement issued February 19, 2019, we have ceased patient treatments."

A single employee and a clinical trial with no published results

Roughly three years ago, Karmazin launched Ambrosia and claimed that infusing older patients with younger blood could help conquer aging by rejuvenating the body's organs.

Read more: A controversial startup that charges $8,000 to fill patients' veins with young blood is opening a clinic in NYC — but researchers whose work inspired it warn that it's dangerous

Karmazin told Business Insider last month that the startup was up and running in five US cities. Ambrosia recently revamped its website with a list of clinic locations and said it was accepting payments for the procedure via PayPal.

In the fall, Karmazin — who is not a licensed medical practitioner but graduated from Stanford Medical School — told Business Insider he planned to open the first Ambrosia clinic in New York City by the end of the year. That didn't happen. Instead, he later said, the sites where customers can get the procedure include Los Angeles; San Francisco; Tampa, Florida; Omaha, Nebraska; and Houston, Texas.

In 2017, Ambrosia enrolled people in a clinical trial designed to find out what happens when the veins of adults are filled with blood from younger people. While the results of that study have not been made public, Karmazin told Business Insider in September that they were "really positive."

There's no scientific evidence to suggest that the treatments could help anyone, however. Several experts who have spoken with Business Insider about the process have raised red flags.

But because the FDA has approved blood transfusions for emergencies like car crashes and other life-saving procedures, Ambrosia's approach was able to continue as an off-label treatment.

There appears to be significant interest in the idea of an anti-aging therapy based on blood.

A week after putting up its first website in September, the company received roughly 100 inquiries about how to get the treatment, David Cavalier, Ambrosia's chief operating officer at the time, told Business Insider in the fall. That led to the creation of a waiting list, Cavalier said.

In January, Cavalier told Business Insider he'd left Ambrosia, leaving Karmazin as the company's only public employee.

Before departing from Ambrosia, Cavalier worked with Karmazin to scout several potential clinic locations in New York and organize talks with potential investors, he said. As of September, the company had infused close to 150 people, ranging in age from 35 to 92, with the blood of younger donors, Cavalier said.

Of those 140 people, 81 were listed as participating in its clinical trial on the government website ClinicalTrials.gov.

The two-day experiment involved giving patients 1.5 liters of plasma from a donor between the ages of 16 and 25. It was conducted with David Wright, a physician who owns a private intravenous-therapy center in Monterey, California. Before and after the infusions, participants' blood was tested for a handful of biomarkers, or measurable biological substances and processes thought to provide a snapshot of health and disease.

Trial participants paid $8,000, the same price as one of the procedures listed on Ambrosia's website.

"The trial was an investigational study," Cavalier said in September. "We saw some interesting things, and we do plan to publish that data. And we want to begin to open clinics where the treatment will be made available."

Young blood and anti-aging: Are there any benefits?

The science on whether infusions of young blood plasma could help fight aging remains murky at best.EmiliaUngur/shutterstock

Karmazin is right about the capacity of blood transfusions to save lives. But the science on whether infusions of young blood plasma could help fight aging remains murky at best.

In early experiments in mice, Tony Wyss-Coray, a director of the Alzheimer's research center at Stanford University Medical School who founded a longevity startup focused on blood plasma called Alkahest, found that swapping old blood plasma for young blood plasma appeared to provide some limited cognitive benefits. The 150-year-old surgical technique he used, parabiosis — whose name comes from the Greek words "para," or "beside," and "bio," or "life" — involves exchanging the blood of two living organisms.

But Alkahest's work is very different from Ambrosia's. Their researchers aim to develop drugs for age-related diseases that are inspired by their work with plasma; they are not looking to open a clinic.

Read more: The CEO of a startup aimed at harnessing the benefits of young blood shares his real plan to beat aging

'The results looked really awesome'

Karmazin told Business Insider in 2017 that he got the idea for his company as a medical student at Stanford and an intern at the National Institute on Aging, where he watched dozens of traditional blood transfusions performed safely.

"Some patients got young blood, and others got older blood, and I was able to do some statistics on it, and the results looked really awesome," Karmazin told Business Insider in 2017. "And I thought this is the kind of therapy that I'd want to be available to me."

So far, no one knows whether young blood transfusions can be reliably linked to lasting benefits, however.

Karmazin said that "many" of the roughly 150 people who had received the treatment described benefits including renewed focus, better memory and sleep, and improved appearance and muscle tone.

Yet it's impossible to quantify these benefits as the study's findings have not been made public.

And on Tuesday, regulators urged caution.

"We strongly discourage consumers from pursing this therapy outside of clinical trials under appropriate institutional review board and regulatory oversight," Gottlieb and Marks wrote in their letter on Tuesday.

I talked to a slew of computer programmers who entered the job market within the past five years about the languages and platforms they're learning and using, and there was one that came up over and over again: JavaScript.

Christina Holland, a software engineer at Google who's been in the industry since 2015, calls it "probably one of the most approachable languages for beginners." Scott Woods, a staff engineer at JASK and 2016 college grad, says, "If you have any intent of being a UI developer, JavaScript is a must."

It powers the web, application front-ends, and, thanks to an increasing number of server-side frameworks, back-ends as well. It's topped the Stack Overflow developer survey for six years running.

So you might find it a little surprising that, of US News and World Report's top ten computer science undergraduate programs, exactly zero of them have JavaScript listed as part of their curriculum. Redditors bemoan that they never got a chance to take college JavaScript. As Justin Phan, a site reliability engineer at SAP and 2017 college graduate, put it: "JavaScript was as much expected of computer engineering students as was knowing Latin."

What's the source of the disconnect? And, if the kids today aren't picking up one of IT's most popular and important programming languages in school, where are they learning it?

What students are learning

JavaScript isn't exactly some brand-new upstart language. It was first developed in the mid-90s as a scripting language for the Netscape Navigator browser; originally called LiveScript, it got its name as a result of an anti-Microsoft alliance with Sun Microsystems. JavaScript was pitched as the "web companion" to Java, Sun's hot new programming language, but despite some similar syntax the two languages aren't otherwise related.

And it's Java, along with Python, that dominates university curricula. These aren't unpopular languages in the industry, although they certainly don't have the cachet and momentum that JavaScript does today. But they do have the pedagogical advantages of being easy to explain to newcomers, and illustrative of many of the core concepts of computer science in a way that JavaScript, often sneered at for a lack of elegance, doesn't.

"My absolute preference is to teach using Python primarily due to its simplicity and relative conciseness — there's no need for verbose begin/end statements or lots of curly braces," says Databricks CEO and adjunct UC Berkeley professor Ali Ghodsi. "It is not as concise as pure functional languages, but those are also harder to understand."

Databricks CEO Ali GhodsiYouTube/Apache Spark

"I do think that Java was a good starting point," says Carolyn Bump, a software developer at Kohactive who graduated from college in 2017. "I learned a lot of great computer science concepts that I use day-to-day, such as object-oriented programming, data structures, and algorithms. I learned a basic mindset a programmer should have: where to start when solving problems, how to solve problems effectively, and what you should keep in mind while building a solution." Today, she's solving those problems in Ruby and JavaScript.

But many of the recent grads I spoke to felt a keen disconnect between what they learned in college and the real world. Kevin Wakatama, who got his CS degree in 2014, noted that Java was taught more or less divorced from any relevance outside the classroom. "Our undergrad professors didn't really present Java as being either particularly useful, or exclusively as a teaching device," he says. "It was mentioned on occasion that it was one of the most popular, and why it became so, but not much more than that."

And Brandon Sheehy, a software developer in Dallas who recently graduated with a Business Computer Information Systems degree, complained that his professors "had no idea what languages would be profitable to pick up. They more or less just taught whatever technologies Microsoft released. I had an entire course around writing Windows 8 Metro apps. When was the last time you've seen someone use an application from the Windows App Store?"

Some are turning to coding bootcamps

If there's an institution that stands at the opposite philosophical pole from the computer science department at a four year college, it's the coding bootcamp. Offering intensive courses that last weeks, not years, bootcamps like Hack Reactor or General Assembly have rapidly become a huge business since the first one launched in 2011. And one thing they're relentlessly focused on is the practical. And for wannabe computer programmers, practical often means JavaScript.

David Jackson, CEO of custom app developer FullStack Labs, explains the incentives thusly:

"There's a lot of demand from employers for JavaScript devs, and JavaScript devs tend to make more than other types of devs, so that's probably why bootcamps are focusing mostly on JavaScript. The bootcamps measure themselves primarily on the number of graduates receiving jobs and their starting salaries, so it makes sense that they would focus on JavaScript to boost these metrics."

General Assembly offers several intensive coding bootcamps that turns participants into programmers. General Assembly

Google's Holland graduated from a bootcamp in 2015. She credits the fact that bootcamps are nimbler than CS academia for the solid grounding she received in web technologies, which are "where the majority of the explosion in job demand is." In fact, she points out that bootcamps have already gone through a shift: "For a while in the late '00s that meant Ruby, but now it's mostly JavaScript, especially since you can use it on the server side."

Of course, the differences in approach between academia and the bootcamp world means some people take extreme positions: Holland says that on one side, you have an attitude like "I would never hire a bootcamp grad unless I wanted my product ruined," and on the other: "CS grads are great if you want obscure math problems solved that don't apply to real life."

The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle. Holland found her bootcamp experience invaluable, and feels she got a decent grounding in CS fundamentals. But, she says, "a lot of bootcamps are driven by demand of students to 'just give me what I need to get a job,' so they're just jumping straight into how to build JavaScript web apps using certain frameworks. If you lean too much on this, you get people who know how to do a specific thing and don't know the concepts behind it, and aren't very flexible in adapting to slightly different circumstances."

Making it on your own

Google's Holland sees a counter-tendency to this pigeonholing: "A lot of people who go to bootcamps are very self-motivated and kind of take it on themselves to fill in the gaps." But the truth is that many young developers who came up through academia — and who are hungry to learn JavaScript and other platforms they aren't getting in their classes — do the same.

Wakatama, the recent grad, remembers hearing "whispers" of what was popular in the industry during his undergraduate years, which helped students guide their career planning. "There were also things that I wouldn't exactly call research," he said, "but something like community information — JetBrains's 'State of Developer Ecosystem,' for example — that might give us an idea of what the popular and 'up and coming' languages were."

Sheehy may have been learning Windows 8 development in his classes. But at an internship at a city government office, he snagged a JavaScript programming job.

"I was able to fumble my way around it until I actually knew what was going on and eventually fell in love with the language," he said. "I learned pretty much everything I know from internet tutorials, reading code, and a lot of trial and error. I was lucky to have an environment where I was free to grow and make mistakes."

Many turn to the community for guidance

Finding tutorials and boilerplate code online has a long and honorable history in computer programming. However, one interesting twist that many of the young developers I talked to brought up is that they prefer to find put a human face on that information nowadays, via various social media sites.

"If you want to get your foot in the door now," says Holland, "people seem to know that you should get on Twitter and follow famous devs — authors of popular open source libraries, people in developer relations at big tech companies, speakers, bloggers, 'thought leaders' with nebulous credentials, etc. You should have a web page to showcase your projects and make blog posts on." Sheehy has turned to Reddit not only for programming advice, but for career advice as well.

Mosh Hamedani's popular YouTube channel teaches viewers how to get started with programming languages like Angular.YouTube/Screenshot

Another perhaps-unexpected site that serves as a locus for young developer community is YouTube, says Parth Jhaveri, a front-end developer at the EGC Group.

"A junior developer can seek out mentorship and tutorials from popular developers like Fredrik Christenson, Telmo Sampaio, Programming with Mosh, and Code with Tim," he explains. "I view their content on a variety of topics, including react.js, Redux, coding best practices, and industry norms. Christenson, who is my personal favorite, answers subscriber-submitted questions pertaining to coding or on related topics like looking for your first programming job."

The long road ahead

So JavaScript and its various frameworks rule the roost — for now. But that could change. Holland notes that a source of great anxiety for many young web developers is how the state of the art is a moving target.

"React came into existence in 2015 and now it's the standard in front-end. Then there's bundlers that get replaced by the hot new thing every two years or so. This drives job hunters crazy because what if the thing you're learning goes obsolete once you've finished learning it? There's fights about frameworks and tools that get hot because people are scared that the thing they learned yesterday is going to die tomorrow, or the future thing they're learning now isn't actually going to be the future," says Holland.

But perhaps these new developers should have faith in themselves.

"Most employers don't expect students to know every language," says Heike Rees, Senior HR Business Partner at SAP, who has done a lot of hiring over the years. "It's impossible to know every language because they change so quickly. We look for people who have a basic understanding of how languages work the ability to quickly learn new ones. We want someone who can independently research how to learn a new language — someone who can ask good questions."

Many young developers, emerging from an educational system that doesn't spit them out ready-made for the job market, have already proven that they can meet this challenge.

Josh Fruhlinger is a writer and editor who lives in Los Angeles.

If you're looking to save money on a school textbook that you don't need to own, renting that book from Amazon could be the ideal route to go.

Though you'll need to return books on time to avoid fees and really capitalize on your savings, Amazon makes returning a book rental a relatively easy process.

The ecommerce giant automatically checks the shipping status of a rental item you have requested to return, and returning items to a local Amazon Pickup location will result in the item being marked as "returned" in your account a little faster than with other carriers.

Here's how you can return a book you've rented from Amazon.

How to return a rented book on Amazon

In the "Manage Your Rentals" section of your account, click the "Return rental" button on an item to proceed. Amazon; Michelle Greenlee/Business Insider

A few tips and tricks of the returning process

While it may seem like a lot to do at first, the rental return process for books is really quite simple once you know what to expect. And for items that you've bought or ordered as a gift for someone else, you can read our guide on how to return a gift or purchased item on Amazon.

We may soon see a collaboration between two of the biggest troll-loving personalities on the internet: Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the YouTuber PewDiePie.

Musk, whose previous tweets have landed him in major legal trouble and also at the top of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's favorite-tweeters list, said on Monday night that he had just recorded a segment for "Meme Review," a video series that PewDiePie hosts on YouTube.

This isn't the first time Musk and PewDiePie have interacted on Twitter. Musk first floated the idea of hosting PewDiePie's meme-focused show in a January tweet.

PewDiePie responded and invited Musk to host an episode of "Meme Review." At the time, however, it was tough to gauge whether Musk would actually make an appearance as guest host or whether it would turn out to be an elaborate troll, or something he'd like to do but his busy schedule wouldn't allow. A video from early February didn't seem to give fans much hope, as PewDiePie said they would have to wait until "the next millennia" for Musk to make an appearance.

In a series of back-and-forth messages, Musk offered up an excuse a few weeks later as to why he wasn't able to host (he was recently in Norway). PewDiePie seemed to understand, but it sounded like the saga might be over.

But Musk was back with an update a week later, saying in a tweet Monday that he recorded the show with the "Rick and Morty" cocreator Justin Roiland. Business Insider reached out to PewDiePie in an effort to confirm that Musk and Roiland will host an upcoming episode of "Meme Review," but hasn't heard back yet.

Between Musk's Twitter following and PewDiePie's YouTube subscribers, the two have 110 million fans combined. While both have grown their audiences and fan bases considerably through their use of social media, it's landed them both in serious trouble before, too.

Musk is known for his active presence on Twitter, where he's revealed breaking news about his companies, clashed with high-profile figures, and sent out "false and misleading statements" that landed him in major trouble with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Meanwhile, PewDiePie runs the most popular YouTube channel in the world, with more than 86 million subscribers. PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, has a history of making offensive remarks in his videos. His actions led to YouTube canceling a season of his original series set to air on YouTube Premium.

But PewDiePie has seen his subscriber base spike by 700% over the last few months. The massive influx in subscribers can be attributed to PewDiePie's bid to maintain his role as YouTube's most subscribed-to channel, a title he's been in jeopardy of losing to the Bollywood music channel T-Series.

Read more: Despite predictions and controversy, PewDiePie has yet to lose his spot as YouTube's 'biggest star'

Since the race between the two popular channels started, PewDiePie has found help from fans and fellow YouTubers that want the star to keep his crown. A hacker altered a page on The Wall Street Journal's website to say the paper was supporting PewDiePie and people should subscribe. Hundreds of thousands of printers across the globe printed messages in support of him. As many as 5,000 smart TVs and Chromecast devices were hacked and showed messages encouraging people to subscribe to PewDiePie.

A YouTuber with millions of subscribers himself has also been heavily promoting PewDiePie. Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, purchased radio ads and billboards promoting PewDiePie, and even appeared in a stunt supporting the YouTuber at this year's Super Bowl.

On Twitter, Donaldson has also interacted with Musk and tried to further the idea of having him on PewDiePie's channel. He said that in return for Musk appearing on PewDiePie's video, he would pay him $5 and also buy a Tesla.

As of Tuesday afternoon, PewDiePie held the lead above T-Series by about 15,000 subscribers, according to Social Blade.

With such a small gap, Musk may have filmed his episode of "Meme Review" just in time.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Tony: One of the most anticipated smartphones of, well, recent memory is Samsung's foldable phone. Some have their own ideas of what it should be called. We have - one idea was Samsung Winner which I'm personally all about. I like that a lot. I think it should be called the Winner. The other one is called the Galaxy F. And also the Galaxy X, which is the more, you know, widely accepted name for this foldable phone. Now, we know actually that Samsung is indeed working on a foldable phone that comes straight from DJ Koh. Still, we don't know when to expect it. Probably not by the end of 2018 is my guess. Wall Street Journal came out with a report. They said maybe 2019. That seems a little more likely.

One of the reasons why I don't think it's going to be coming out this year is because, honestly, there are not a lot of rumors about it. Nothing really concrete that we're seeing online, and that could mean that the phone isn't really in production yet. However, we can make some educated guesses. There's some speculation and we can just have a little fun with our imagination too. Samsung even had a video with a foldable phone in it just a few years ago. That gave a hint at the time that Samsung was indeed working on a foldable phone. That was a few years ago, and the company's just been sort of, I guess, working on it for this whole time.

Samsung Video: All in a day's work for Samsung.

Tony: One rumor that has made it so far on the internets. It could have a seven-inch display. And diagonally that is. That's a pretty big phone, right? Of course, it's foldable. So, it's not going to be this huge giant tablet that you're holding in your hands. You know, you could sort of use it for a while. Close it up like a wallet. And once you've folded it up, put it in your pocket, like a wallet. It sounds kind of fragile, right? Kind of breakable. But Samsung very conveniently, very good timing, announced an unbreakable sort of display for smartphones. That would be a good fit, I would imagine, with a foldable phone. Because, I mean, there is another foldable phone out there. It exists. Called the ZTE Axon M. And it's actually a really interesting phone. And basically, it's just two phones attached by a hinge in the middle. So, it's kind of like a book. So, there's already a foldable phone out there. We're hoping it's not it. And we don't expect that to be the design. Because it does make the phone really thick. I mean the Axon M is just really chunky. It doesn't inspire the future of smartphones.

We're banking and hoping on the more sort of wallet design. Something else we're expecting. A large battery. I'm imagining that it would need a pretty significantly large battery to power a seven-inch display. A larger battery means, you know, a thicker phone. A heavier phone too. We are expecting this phone to be expensive. I think it's gonna be closer to the $1,500 range. And we're also expecting Samsung to have a very limited release of this. There are a lot of issues that we have no idea about. We just do not know. This is kind of just what we're expecting and hoping to see. Maybe early 2019. Stay tuned. It'll be interesting to see if Samsung includes its signature Infinity edge. Maybe they might not include it on the Galaxy Winner. Right? Winner? Make it so, Samsung.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This video was originally published on September 4, 2018.

Roughly a year and a half since apps powered by Apple's ARKit augmented reality platform became available for the iPhone, Apple has designated a marketing head for its AR division. Frank Casanova, who has worked at Apple for about 30 years, was recently appointed as Senior Director of Worldwide Product Marketing for the company's augmented reality efforts according to his LinkedIn profile, which Bloomberg first reported.

That Apple would assign such a senior marketing executive with nearly three decades of experience at the company to oversee augmented reality provides further evidence that Apple views AR as being a vital part of its business. Apple CEO Tim Cook has long been vocal about the potential of augmented reality, saying he believes the technology will make the smartphone "even more essential than it currently is" when speaking with CNBC.

The company is reportedly working on an augmented reality headset to be released in 2020 that would support some iPhone features, like messaging, phone calls, and video, according to Bloomberg. But the company's current augmented reality offerings live on its iPhone and iPad devices through its ARKit platform, which provides developers with tools for creating AR-enabled apps for Apple's mobile devices. It's another sign that Apple is looking to software to fuel iPhone growth moving forward.

Modern slimline airplane seats are awful. They are lighter and thinner, which is good for airlines. For passengers flying in economy, it feels like you've sat on a thin yoga mat for three hours.

We've seen a bevy of airplane seat patents and concepts in recent years. They range from interesting to downright terrifying.

The Airbus Move seat concept is one of the interesting ones.

Read more: We flew on the new Delta Airbus jet, which Boeing tried to keep out of the US, to see if it lives up to the hype. Here's the verdict.

The Move seat concept was created for Airbus by London-based design firm Layer as an exploration into how smart textiles can improve passenger comfort in economy class while helping airlines save weight and fuel.

"At Layer, we believe good design should be accessible to all. All too often, new concepts for flying are focused on innovation in business class," Benjamin Hubert, Layer's founder, said in a statement. "We were excited to take on this project with Airbus to find ways to improve and add value to the economy class experience - for both the passenger and the airline."

The Move seat took 18 months to create and are a part of an ongoing partnership between Layer and Airbus.

For now, the seat remains a prototype.

Here's a closer look at the Move smart seats by Airbus and Layer.