After a plateau in the US, subscriptions to streaming services are growing again thanks to a boom in Netflix and Hulu subscribers this year, a report from Ampere Analysis found.

The report found that subscriptions to SVOD — streaming video on demand — services had steadily increased from the third quarter of 2015 until the first quarter of 2017, when numbers began to stagnate. But subscriptions have been rising consistently since the beginning of this year, according to Ampere.

Ampere Analysis

Toby Holleran, an Ampere senior analyst, told Business Insider that an older generation rooted in pay TV was catching on to the benefits of SVOD services.

"Traditional users were more ingrained in the pay-TV space, and there was slightly less awareness of SVOD during that period" of plateauing, he said, "whereas now, especially with older demographics, we're starting to see more and more growth in those."

"I feel the plateauing was taking place among younger demographics because they formed such a large proportion of the overall SVOD base, whereas now with older demographics slowly familiarizing themselves with SVOD that's actually starting to grow again," he added.

That could be bad news for pay-TV companies, which could see an acceleration in cord-cutting if older generations find a viable alternative in streaming.

Read more: Data suggests that Hasan Minhaj's 'Patriot Act' could succeed where other Netflix talk shows have failed

Exclusive content is also key for streaming services, Holleran said, as Netflix has been heavily investing in its catalog of original content in an effort to have 1,000 original TV shows and movies by year's end. Hulu also has acclaimed shows like "The Handmaid's Tale," which won the Emmy for best drama last year.

As the SVOD landscape rapidly evolves, more players are entering the game. Disney is set to launch a competitor late next year and is already developing Marvel and "Star Wars" TV series for it. Meanwhile, AT&T recently announced it would roll out a service next year that would include HBO.

That could lead to a new form of SVOD bundle — but Holleran urged caution, saying that the best course of action for streamers is to give users as many options as possible for the best price.

"I think forcing bundles upon people might not be the best move," Holleran said. "It depends on the price point. Additional costs may turn away consumers who may only want to take one service."

The same day that thousands of employees walked out of Google headquarters in protest of sexual misconduct allegations against company executives, Google CEO Sundar Pichai gave an expansive interview at New York Times Dealbook conference in New York.

"How do you feel…right this second, when you see these headlines, what are you thinking?" asked New York Times editor at large Andrew Ross Sorkin on stage at the conference.

"This anger and frustration within the company — we all feel it," said Pichai. "I feel it too. At Google we set a high bar and we clearly didn't live up to our expectations. The first thing is to acknowledge and apologize for past actions. Words alone aren't enough, you have to follow up with actions."

Read more: PHOTOS: Google employees all over the world left their desk and walked out in protest over sexual misconduct

"We didn't always get it right," Pichai continued. Previously, he a pologized to employees in a company-wide e-mail.

Thursday's walkouts were the result of a New York Times report published last week that revealed multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against former Google executive Andy Rubin, known as the "father of Android." The Times report also said that Rubin was given a $90 million severance package when he left Google, following an internal investigation into his behavior.

While Pichai admitted that the company is still grappling with questions raised by the report including whether or not employees should be expected to sign confidentiality agreements in cases of sexual harassment, he said that Google hopes to evolve as a company.

"Moments like this show that we didn't always get it right," Pichai said, referring to the New York Times report.

Pichai emphasized that Google still hopes to champion one of the company's cardinal tenets: a culture of openness and transparency. Pichai also said that he applauded the women who had come forward with allegations of sexual harassment.

"I want to acknowledge the women who step up to do this," he said. "It takes extraordinary courage and we want to support them better."

Beyond discussing Google's culture, Pichai's remarks touched on China, matters of regulation, and the continuing importance of artificial intelligence.

There are plenty of mysteries in Netflix's hit new horror series, "The Haunting of Hill House," but the biggest was hidden in plain sight the entire time.

That means that director Mike Flanagan had to go to great lengths to keep the secret of the "Red Room" hidden from the audience. Throughout the first season, the characters are unable to open a red door when living in the haunted Hill house as children. When they return to the house as adults, they finally discover that they had each actually been in the room countless times, and it acted as their own personal spaces that nobody else could unlock.

Flanagan told The Wrap that to conceal what the Red Room was from viewers, the set was "constantly refined."

"But we needed one element to be constant so that once the reveal occurred, a second viewing would feel like it was always obvious," Flanagan said. "We chose that distinct vertical window. We also made sure to shoot the room from the same angle in all of the episodes leading up to it, so that even the camera framing was familiar. We really just hoped that Hill House was so sprawling, people would assume there were just a lot of rooms they hadn't seen. What's odd if they look a little similar?"

READ MORE: Netflix's 'The Haunting of Hill House' cast revealed what disturbed them most about the show

Flanagan also explained why the room never opened for Hugh Crain, the father of the series, played by Henry Thomas in the past and Timothy Hutton in the present.

"Hugh is a man who fixes things," Flanagan said. "He exerts control over the house, on a physical level. He is in charge of the physical work being done to it, and that gives him a sense of security, comfort, and order. To put him in a position where he is incapable of something as simple as opening a door strikes to the very heart of his confidence as a character. Between that and the mold, I think it erodes his sense of competence, and everything else tumbles for him as a result."

But that doesn't mean that Flanagan didn't envision what the room would be like for Hugh, saying that it would have been "full of tools and other things from his work."

When traveling during the holiday season, there's always a risk for weather disruptions and flight cancellations. Knowing which airports would be the best and the worst to be stranded in for an extended period of time seems like helpful information.

Luckily, one travel aggregator decided to study this scenario and make a definitive ranking.

Orbitz.com, a top travel website featuring searches and booking data for hotels, flights, car rentals, cruises, and vacation packages, recently completed a study where they published findings on the best and worst airports to be stranded in during the holiday season.

Using only the 15 busiest airports in the U.S. included in a 2017 Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Airport Traffic Report, Orbitz then studied certain aspects about each travel hub to determine how attractive each one is to be stuck in.

Orbitz's methodology included nine specific metrics: number of shopping outlets, number of dining outlets, WiFi speed, number of members-only lounges, the price of members-only lounges, the number of public lounges, the price of public lounges, the percentage on flights leaving on time, and the percentage of flights canceled.

They applied points to each metric on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the highest, and then divided the difference of the highest and lowest number within each metric in order to grant points where other airports sat relatively on the scale.

Read more:These are the 15 coolest things at airports around the world

The study used over 18 separate websites and included information from the Bureau of Transportation.

"We know most travelers can't realistically pick and choose which airports to avoid this holiday season," said Carey Malloy, brand director at Orbitz brand in a public statement. "But even if you're traveling to an airport near the bottom of the list, this information can help you plan a more rewarding trip. Whether that's peace of mind knowing you can quickly download a last-minute movie for the kids at Sea-Tac or as extravagant as ice skating at the Denver airport before takeoff, this list is here to help."

Take a look below at how each of the 15 busiest airports in the country scored, ranked from lowest to highest.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Matthew Walker: My name is Matthew Walker, I am a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and I am the author of the book "Why We Sleep."

We certainly know that a lack of sleep will actually prevent your brain from being able to initially make new memories, so it's almost as though without sleep the memory inbox of the brain shuts down and you can't commit new experiences to memory. So those new incoming informational emails are just bounced, and you end up feeling as though you're amnesiac. You can't essentially make and create those new memories.

We also know that a lack of sleep will lead to an increased development of a toxic protein in the brain that is called beta-amyloid and that is associated with Alzheimer's disease because it is during deep sleep at night when a sewage system within the brain actually kicks in to high gear and it starts to wash away this toxic protein, beta-amyloid.

So if you're not getting enough sleep each and every night, more of that Alzheimer's-related protein will build up. The more protein that builds up, the greater your risk of going on to develop dementia in later life.

What are the effects of sleep deprivation on the body? Well, there are many different effects. Firstly, we know that sleep deprivation affects the reproductive system. We know that men who are sleeping just five to six hours a night have a level of testosterone which is that of someone ten years their senior. So a lack of sleep will age you by almost a decade in terms of that aspect of virility and wellness.

We also know that a lack of sleep impacts your immune system. So after just one night of four to five hours of sleep, there is a 70% reduction in critical anticancer-fighting immune cells called natural killer cells. And that's the reason that we know that short sleep duration predicts your risk for developing numerous forms of cancer. And that list currently includes cancer of the bowel, cancer of the prostate, as well as cancer of the breast.

In fact, the link between a lack of sleep and cancer is now so strong that recently the World Health Organization decided to classify any form of nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen. So in other words, jobs that may induce cancer because of a disruption of your sleep rate rhythms.

We also know that a lack of sleep impacts your cardiovascular system because it is during deep sleep at night that you receive this most wonderful form of effectively blood pressure medication. Your heart rate drops, your blood pressure goes down.

If you're not getting sufficient sleep, you're not getting that reboot of the cardiovascular system, so your blood pressure rises. You have, if you're getting six hours of sleep or less, a 200% increased risk of having a fatal heart attack or stroke in your lifetime.

There is a global experiment that is performed on 1.6 billion people twice a year and it's called daylight savings time. And we know that in the spring, when we lose one hour of sleep, we see a subsequent 24% increase in heart attacks the following day.

Another question, perhaps, is what is the recycle rate of a human being? How long can we actually last without sleep before we start to see declines in your brain function or even impairments within your body? And the answer seems to be about 16 hours of wakefulness.

Once you get past 16 hours of being awake, that's when we start to see mental deterioration and physiological deterioration in the body. We know that after you've been awake for 19 or 20 hours, your mental capacity is so impaired that you would be as deficient as someone who was legally drunk behind the wheel of a car. So if you were to ask me what is the recycle rate of a human being, it does seem to be about 16 hours and we need about eight hours of sleep to repair the damage of wakefulness. Wakefulness essentially is low-level brain damage.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This video was originally published on December 26, 2017. Lamar Salter contributed reporting on a previous version of this article.

The Obamas have acquired the rights to Michael Lewis' new book, "The Fifth Risk," as part of their production deal with Netflix to make original TV shows and movies. Lewis confirmed the deal on a Katie Couric podcast, The New York Times reported.

"The Fifth Risk" is critical of Trump and his administration at its very core. Its publisher's description starts with the question, "What are the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works?," and describes the US government as "under attack by its own leaders."

This choice of a first (publicly confirmed) project will no doubt stoke the ire of conservatives, many of whom have been furious at Netflix for both the Obama deal and the presence of Susan Rice on its board of directors.

A spokeswoman for the Obamas' company told The New York Times that the project would not be used to take shots at Trump. It would instead be a "humorous series demystifying the little-known ways in which federal agencies improve our lives and serve our nation, from the food we eat to the planes we travel on."

Regardless of how political it turns out, it is unlikely that it will hurt Netflix's bottom line.

Despite online threats to boycott Netflix for a perceived anti-conservative bias, in an August survey conducted by AlphaHQ for Business Insider, of those surveyed who had once subscribed to Netflix, but then canceled, only 5% said it was for political reasons.

Netflix declined to comment and an Obama spokeswoman told Business Insider that "we are exploring projects but nothing has been green-lit at this stage."

Apple provided soft guidance for its all-important holiday quarter which fell on the low end of analyst expectations, and iPhone sales were essentially flat from last year and below analyst expectations.

The stock fell over 7% in after-hours trading.

Apple projects that it will generate between $89 billion and $93 billion in the holiday quarter, versus Wall Street consensus expectation of $92.74 billion.

On the bright side for Apple investors, the average price of an iPhone was up 28% from last year, driving huge gains in profit per share, which was up 40% year-over-year. Revenue was also up 20% from last year.

Apple also highlighted its services revenue, which reached $10 billion. That segment is comprised of fees from companies like Google, revenue from the App Store, and services like iCloud and Apple Music. Apple also noted that it shipped its 2 billionth device running iOS in the past quarter.

"We are heading in to the holiday quarter with our strongest product lineup ever, and we could not be more bullish on Apple's future," Apple CEO Tim Cook said on a conference call with analysts.

According to Apple's CFO Luca Maestri, the company spent over $23 billion on dividends and share repurchases in the quarter, bringing Apple's total capital return for its fiscal 2018 to "almost $90 billion."

Another factor in Apple's slide was that the company announced that it would no longer reveal unit sales for its hardware, which are metrics that investors use to see if Apple's business is growing.

While Apple will still report revenue by product line, investors and analysts will now need to estimate total unit sales and average selling price.

"As we have stated many times, our objective is to make great products and services that enrich people's lives, and to provide an unparalleled customer experience, so that our users are highly satisfied, loyal, and engaged," Maestri said.

"As we accomplish these objectives, strong financial results follow. As demonstrated by our financial performance in recent years, the number of units sold in any 90-day period is not necessarily representative of the underlying strength of our business," he continued.

"Our installed base is growing at double digits, that's probably a much more significant metric for us from an ecosystem point of view and customer loyalty, et cetera," Cook explained.

At first, investors appeared to be unenthusiastic about yet another quarter where Apple seemed to be wringing more money out of flat sales, with Apple's share price down about 4% after earnings were released.

But investors seem to have strongly disliked that Apple will limit its unit sales disclosure, and the stock tumbled farther, trading down 7% in after-hours trading.

Notes from Apple's conference call with investors:

6:01: Thanks for tuning in, we're done here!

5:58: Apple won't announce unit sales going forward, bringing the possibility that unit sales are going to go negative. Maestri is taking all unit-oriented questions. "One of the things we are doing and it's in addition to the information we're going to provide to investor, is starting with December quarter, we're going to be providing information for revenue and cost of sales for both products and services. First time gross margin for services ... We can assure you it's our objective to grow unit sales for every product category we have ... Unit sales for iPhone at top end of line have been very strong for September quarter, we're attracting customers to most recent ... you don't see that in the number that's reported ... we'll provide qualitative commentary when it's relevant ... we make decisions to optimize revenue and gross margin dollars."

Tim Cook added: Our installed base is growing at double digits, that's probably a much more significant metric for us from an ecosystem point of view and customer loyalty, etc. This is a little bit like if you go to the market and you push your cart up to cashier, she says, how many units do you have in there. It doesn't matter a lot in terms of the overall value of what's in the cart.

5:56: Question about India. Tim Cook expects to be able to open stores eventually on the sub-continent. "Discussions are going quite well ... I am a big believer in India."

5:53: "These trade relationships are large and complex," Cook says.

5:52: Question about trade and Chinese supply chain. Tim Cook says, "they're kind of manufactured everywhere." Says R&D is done in United States, and parts come from everywhere.

5:51: Tim Cook on AR: A year ago, we came out with ARKit 1 ... we recently came out with ARKit 2, the number of things you can do are growing significantly, the number of developers that have done something or working on something is growing tremendously, categories from gaming to shopping ... in China, saw it in an art exhibit, I was in Berlin and saw it being used in a historical educational kind of sense, I'm seeing it everywhere I go now. We are in early days, and it will keep on getting better and better, but happy with where things are at the moment.

5:49: We want to double services from 2016 by 2020, and Apple is still on pace to achieve that, Maestri said.

5:48: We have a very large and growing install base, Luca Maestri says, all product categories is at all-time high. We've added new services to our portfolio, we've added advertising business on App Store, and would want to continue to offer new services over time.

5:46: "Our intention is to continue to give revenue guidance at the company level, and gross margin in the other categories, our guidance isn't changing, it's our report that's changing," Cook said.

5:43: Here's the full reasoning why Apple is not providing hardware unit sales going forward:

5:41: Maestri gave an answer about headwinds, providing no insight into why guidance for the next quarter is soft.

5:39: Apple on health. "Non-monetized services so far, don't want to talk about the future, but this an area of major interest to us."

5:38: Tim Cook: Subscription business itself is nearly as broad as the App Store itself is. And that's the value proposition, the vast majority of people are very happy with it, including the most important people, which are the user.

5:36: Tim Cook:"Slowdown or moratorium on new game approvals...new regulatory setup in China, things are not moving the way they were moving previously, we did see a few games approved recently, but it's very far below the historic case."

5:31: Questions have started. BAML asking about deceleration in App Store in emerging markets. Certain markets "are not growing the way we'd like to see," Cook said.

5:29: Other products, which includes products like HomePod and Apple Watch, will be renamed to "Wearables, Home, and Accessories."

5:29: No more unit sales data for iPhone, iPad and Mac starting next quarter. This takes away one of the biggest signals investors look for. Maestri said that sales don't properly reflect the breadth of Apple's value proposition.

5:27: Apple will start reporting revenue as well as cost of sales for total products and total services starting next quarter, Maestri says.

5:25: Apple's net cash position is $122.6 billion, once you subtract debt from its cash pile, Maestri says. Also spending a lot of time talking about how much Apple's spend on share buybacks and dividends.

5:23: Deployment of iOS is growing with retailers, Maestri says, highlighting Apple's enterprise business. Lots of little enterprise nuggets in his prepared remarks.

5:20: Apple is on pace for its 2020 goal for services revenue, Maestri says. There are 30,000 subscription apps on the App Store, largest accounts for 0.03% of services revenue, Maestri said.

5:18: CFO Luca Maestri going through regions and satisfaction surveys. The action on these calls happens during the question and answer period, anyway.

5:14: Tim Cook highlights two items that doesn't show up in financial statements. First, education: More than 5000 schools are now using "Everyone Can Code," a free coding curriculum from Apple. Next, environment: Milestone year for Apple's commitment to the planet. In April it announced that 100% of global operations are powered by renewable energy and now it's working on the supply chain. Says that aluminum for MacBook Pro will be 100% recycled, a new alloy "developed by Apple."

5:13: 74,000 kids attended "Apple Camp," a session at Apple stores, Tim Cook says.

5:12: Apple Watch will be able to identify irregular heartbeats soon. We look forward to making more contributions to the health space, Tim Cook says.

5:10: Tim Cook calls the new Mac Mini "small but muscular." Wearables, which includes headphones and Apple Watch, was up 50%.

5:09: Tim Cook keeps talking about record revenue without mentioning flat unit sales.

5:08: Tim Cook says that services growth was 27% and that App Store, iCloud, AppleCare and Apple Pay all hit records. Spends some time talking about Apple Pay stats: transaction volume tripled, and compares it favorably to PayPal.

5:03: Tim Cook says it's the best September quarter ever. "Our revenue grew by a Fortune 100 company this past year."

5:01: We're getting started. Tim Cook is speaking. The Brooklyn event is an "exclamation point" on 2018 and he says this year had the strongest fiscal results in Apple's history.

4:54: We're waiting to get started. You can listen in here, from any browser, including Google Chrome.

Here is what Apple reported:

Here are the key tables, directly from Apple:

Apple

Apple

Charts:

BI Intelligence BI Intelligence BI Intelligence BI Intelligence BI Intelligence

For consumers seeking alternatives to linear TV, the options seem boundless.

Walmart, WarnerMedia, and Disney have all announced options coming to market — not to mention digital upstarts like Netflix, Hulu, or YouTube.

But armed with an arsenal of NBCUniversal content and the largest cable TV subscriber base in the US, Comcast isn't looking to join the list of companies offering overt-the-top (OTT) services, or television delivered over the internet.

"When you look at over-the-top services, it's very difficult for us to identify a business model that makes sense, especially when you see some players selling video at a negative gross margin," Matt Strauss, the executive vice president of Xfinity Services, told Business Insider. "Out of footprint OTT doesn't look nearly as attractive to us as the opportunity to continue to grow our broadband share in footprint and to deliver other products and services as part of that broadband."

Comcast seems so averse to the thought of streaming that Strauss mentioned the ability to bundle other products and services, like Xfinity home security, as a more attractive upside opportunity for the company than a streaming service.

Perhaps prior attempts at streaming contribute to Comcast's reticence to jump into the field. NBC shuttered its comedy streaming service Seeso last year, and couldn't get the app Watchable off the ground.

The timing of Comcast's aversion to streaming is interesting. A highlight of the third quarter earnings call was a separate presentation on Sky, which Comcast recently acquired. Sky already has an OTT service called Now TV, and with 23 million satellite subscribers in Europe, Comcast now has a large customer base to convert over to OTT subscribers.

That option is so attractive that some analysts predicted Comcast might focus on a global Netflix challenger, building out Now TV, which already has a strong content portfolio with exclusive rights to run HBO shows like "Game of Thrones" and "Westworld" across Europe, as well as the majority of Premier League TV rights and exclusive rights to the German Bundesliga. Comcast also has a 30% stake in Hulu, with majority ownership from Disney, which would directly compete with Comcast's newly-acquired Now TV, Sky's OTT platform. That has led some analysts to predict Comcast will sell its Hulu stake.

"Comcast may divest its stake in Hulu given it will now have its own Now TV platform and would likely have no interest in feeding its content to a direct competitor to both sides of its business," according to a research note by Cowen analysts.

In the US, Comcast's recent attention has been on the OTT integrations on its X1 set-top box.

X1 is the number one platform for Netflix in its footprint, according to Strauss, and Comcast has integrated YouTube service into its platform, with Amazon Prime Video coming soon. Comcast's goal is to offer to customers a seamless way to access all of its content in one place.

"We really see X1 as the premium destination for allowing customers to get access to all of their TV choices in one place," Strauss said. "Some say the future of TV is apps, we really believe it is more and more around aggregation."

If you searched for the word, "Jew" on Instagram on Monday, just two days after a gunman fatally shot 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, you would find nearly 12,000 posts with the hashtag "#jewsdid911," along with several others containing anti-Semitic rhetoric, according to The New York Times.

While such malicious, targeted comments populate social media sites, they do not accurately reflect the thoughts of all Americans, but it does mean that people quickly become aware that hate speech is part of the conversation, University of Southern California professor Karen North, an expert on social media trends, told Business Insider in a phone interview on Tuesday.

North said this was because most social media sites operate on a mathematical algorithm that calculates when a user searches for a word like "Jew," a number of recommendations are offered based on what is trending.

While the majority of recommendations that surface when a user searches for a topic generally reflect common civil discourse about that topic, an in-depth search often leads to darker, malicious conversations, North said.

"On most of the social media platforms when you search a topic it will find you what other people are looking for and unfortunately the dark side of the search is that while most of the information that you find will be the conversations and the information and the news, the other part of it will be the negative and hateful content that people are sharing with each other," North said.

Social media sites like Facebook have created "war rooms" in an effort to combat the level of hate speech on their platforms, North said. Similar to the way politicians hunker down and seek outside counsel during pivotal moments, social media sites are bringing together several off-site decision-makers to explore what is happening on their sites in real-time.

For example, Facebook is using this approach to address election-meddling.

When responding to the online reactions to the tragic shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last Saturday, executives from social media sites will likely have their analytics teams scan their respective platforms to identify comments containing hate speech that might become a problem. They will then consult with their legal teams on what actions should be taken.

Read more: The suspected Pittsburgh shooter allegedly had a following on a social network that many call the far-right's alternative to Twitter — here's everything we know about Gab

Once the company executives determine an appropriate course of action, they will have their technical teams execute it.

That course of action predominately involves social media sites recoding their algorithms so that comments containing hate speech do not come up when users search for a topic. This practice will likely be effective in limiting the spread of hate speech through social media in the future, North said.

"We see hashtags or we see recommendations when they have already become popular enough to be recommended or to be ranked on the algorithm," North said. "But the company can see the activity and the growth of the activity before they ever recommend it to us so, ideally, they will be able to identify a conversation, evaluate it, make a decision about whether or not it is actually promoting anti-social behavior and then intervene before we are ever aware of it."

While the argument has been made that the First Amendment of the US Constitution establishes that social media companies should not limit free speech, North asserts that the right to free speech does not extend to businesses like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Consequently, social media companies can legally dictate what shows up on their sites, which is apparent in the user-agreement contracts that users agree to when creating their personal profiles.

Social media companies like Twitter employ these user-agreements in part to help curb hate speech on the website in real-time.

"They will create rules that stop cyber bullying or hate speech or pornography or other malicious behavior itself in order to retain the people that are active and engaged members of their communities, and push away those who are causing trouble and discontent on their sites," North said.

When mainstream social media platforms take action to stop hate speech, it creates a market opportunity for smaller social media sites like Gab, the site popular with the far-right, to develop and target people engaging in that type of hurtful rhetoric, North said

"They find their own communities where they can have their own conversations" in what is for them a "socially appropriate venue," North said. "Those are sites that most of us are unaware of."

Gab was forced to shut down after its web host and several other sites blocked it from accessing their services, but Gab declared on Tuesday that it plans to keep operating.

The package bombing suspect accused of sending over a dozen improvised explosive devices to Democratic leaders and critics of President Donald Trump published over 240 tweets threatening at least 50 public officials, according to a CNN report Tuesday.

Fifty-six-year-old Cesar Sayoc from Florida, who was arrested and charged for mailing the devices to Trump's political opponents, made numerous threats on social media, including statements like "Your Time is coming" and "Hug your loved ones real close every time you leave you [sic] home."

Sayoc, an apparent Trump supporter, would also repeat his threats against political and media personalities around a dozen times in a row, according to CNN. Sayoc's apparent Twitter account is now suspended.

Sayoc's targets included Michael Avenatti, the attorney for Stormy Daniels; David Hogg, a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting; and comedian Kathy Griffin.

Democratic lawmakers were also reportedly targeted by Sayoc, who publicized their home address and implied he would make a visit.

"See you soon," Sayoc wrote to Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, one of Trump's most vocal political opponents. Sayoc included a photo of Waters' home, CNN said in the report.

Sayoc also tweeted at Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren in September and said, "A Promise we will see you real soon," according to CNN.

While the FBI has made an effort to inform Sayoc's targets of the threats, social media giants like Twitter and Facebook have been criticized for being slow to take proactive measures in regulating its platforms. Critics have alleged that the companies have been giving fringe political groups and users a wide berth, at the cost of promoting fake news, hate speech, or other harmful content.

In one case, former congressional press secretary Rochelle Ritchie reported one of Sayoc's tweets that targeted her. Twitter's support staff replied and said that after "carefully" reviewing her case, "found that there was no violation of the Twitter Rules against abusive behavior," according to a screenshot uploaded by Ritchie.

Twitter later apologized for the incident and said it was investigating.

"We made a mistake when Rochelle Ritchie first alerted us to the threat made against her," the company said in a statement. "The Tweet clearly violated our rules and should have been removed. We are deeply sorry for that error."

"We want Twitter to be a place where people feel safe, and we know we have lot of work to do," the company added.

Despite public pressure to more broadly moderate content, CEOs, like Twitter's Jack Dorsey, have suggested they would stand firm and continue to enforce their interpretation of "straightforward principles."

Richard DeVaul, a director at Alphabet's X — the research lab formerly known as Google X — has left the company following a report of sexual misconduct.

DeVaul left the company on Tuesday, according to Axios, which first reported the news. Alphabet did not pay him a severance package.

His departure comes less than a week after he was mentioned in a New York Times report about how Alphabet has handled charges of sexual misconduct that were made against prominent employees and executives.

While interviewing a female applicant for an engineering job in 2013, when X was still a part of Google, DeVaul essentially told her that he had an open marriage and invited her to accompany him to the Burning Man festival, according to the report. When she met up with him at the festival, thinking she could talk with him about the job, he asked her to remove her shirt so he could give her a back rub, The Times reported. After he insisted, she allowed him to rub her neck, according to the report.

She found out only later that she didn't get the job at Google. DeVaul told The Times that when he saw her at Burning Man, he didn't know she hadn't already been informed that she hadn't gotten the job. He apologized for the incident in a statement to the paper, calling it an "error in judgement."

The female engineer reported the incident to Google two years after it happened. She told The Times that company representatives asked her to stay quiet about it. DeVaul remained at the company afterward.

DeVaul is the cofounder of Alphabet's Project Loon, an effort to deliver internet access to people in developing countries via high-flying balloons. He had been with the X labs since 2011, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was part of its rapid evaluation team, which is designed to reach to quick judgments about the viability of prospective projects.

His resignation comes as Google employees are planning a walkout to protest the company's handling of the allegations against DeVaul and other executives.

Facebook is banning accounts and pages associated with the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group whose members assaulted protesters in New York City earlier in October.

On Tuesday, Twitter users began reporting that Facebook was taking down groups and accounts (both public-facing and personal) linked to members of the organisation, which has been involved in instances of political violence in the US.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that the company is banning The Proud Boys and founder Gavin McInnes from both Facebook and Instagram, pointing to Facebook's rules against hate groups.

The takedowns come after members of the Proud Boys allegedly attacked protesters following an event in New York on October 12. Members of the group reportedly shouted homophobic slurs as they beat and kicked protesters, and at least five Proud Boys have since been arrested.

The move by Facebook will deprive the extremist organisation of its primary channel for recruitment and publicity — but it only comes months after other tech firms took action against the group.

Proud Boys was founded by Gavin McInnes, also known as a cofounder of the media organization Vice, and describes its members as "Western Chauvinists." The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an extremism watchdog organisation, designates it as a hate group. One of the Proud Boys' initiation rites involves physical violence against left-wing antifascists.

Jason Kessler, one of the organizers of the 2017 "Unite the Right" white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville that resulted in the death of a protester, was reportedly a member of the Proud Boys.

In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: "Our team continues to study trends in organized hate and hate speech and works with partners to better understand hate organizations as they evolve. We ban these organizations and individuals from our platforms and also remove all praise and support when we become aware of it.

"We will continue to review content, Pages, and people that violate our policies, take action against hate speech and hate organizations to help keep our community safe."

The SPLC has previously revealed how the organisation used Facebook as a recruitment tool, setting up private groups for "vetting" prospective members. "While Twitter has received significant criticism for verifying Proud Boys accounts, it's Facebook that appears to provide the recruitment machinery for the group," it wrote.

As of writing, some major Proud Boys groups, including one with 20,000 members, are offline, with Facebook showing users a "This page isn't available message" — while others, including the page of McInnes, are still available.

Facebook lagged behind its peers in removing The Proud Boys; Twitter banned the organisation and its founder back in August, BuzzFeed News reported at the time.

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Electronic Arts has announced a new cloud gaming platform, Project Atlas, that will be capable of streaming the company's latest video games to almost any mobile device or computer with a sufficient internet connection.

Chief Technology Officer Ken Moss detailed Project Atlas in a blog post published to Medium on October 29th, just weeks after both Microsoft and Google revealed their own cloud gaming platforms.

Cloud gaming uses remote servers to stream video games directly to the player. In the simplest terms, the server runs the game and sends the player a video feed from the cloud, while the player's controller inputs are sent back to the server. This allows the user to play the game remotely on their choice of computer or mobile device. With the server doing the heavily lifting, players will no longer need expensive video game consoles to run the latest games. Of course, cloud-based services still require a strong, stable internet connection to stream games properly.

Google launched a private beta test of its cloud gaming service, ProjectStream, at the start of October, giving players access to the recently released "Assassin's Creed Odyssey." The only requirements for ProjectStream are a computer Google's Chrome internet browser, and an internet connection with 25 mbps or higher download speed. While Google isn't known for video games, the ProjectStream experience was comparable to playing the game on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, both of which start at $300. However, the ProjectStream beta doesn't work with mobile devices as of yet.

Microsoft followed Google with the announcement of Project xCloud, a gaming streaming service that will utilize the company's Azure Cloud computing service. Project xCloud will not enter beta tests until 2019, but Microsoft has already confirmed several popular Xbox games for the platform, including including "Halo," "Gears of War," "Forza" and "Minecraft." According to Microsoft, thousands of developers will be able to release their new games simultaneously for Xbox and Project xCloud without additional steps. Rumors suggest that the next generation of Xbox devices will likely utilize some form of cloud gaming as well.

Now EA is the latest company to join the cloud gaming race. In describing Project Atlas, Moss explained that the service will streamline game development by providing a unified platform for developers. Currently, development teams need to spend additional time making sure their games play nice with whatever platform they're working with. This means ensuring that social features work on both PlayStation and Xbox, that stats are properly recorded and maintained on different networks, and that updates are consistent across separate platforms. With a cloud-based gaming service, developers would maintain full control of the game, effectively cutting out the middleman.

"With the unified platform of Project Atlas, game makers will have the ability to seamlessly deploy security measures including SSL certificates, configuration, appropriate encryption of data, and zero-downtime patches for every feature from a single secure source," Moss wrote in the post. "This means that they can focus on what game makers are best at — creating the best games."

As the largest video game developer in the world, EA's decision to pursue its own cloud gaming platform speaks to rapid change in the industry. Up until now, major game developers needed to choose which platforms their games could support, often leading to their audiences being fractured between different consoles.

By streaming games directly to players on a device of their choosing, EA can effectively cut out the middleman when it comes to content control and sales. With Project Atlas set to compete directly with Microsoft's Project xCloud and Google's ProjectStream, it will also be interesting to see if Electronic Arts is willing to share its new games on other streaming platforms.

All three cloud gaming services are still very much in their testing phase, so it'll be some time before they're available to the public, and likely longer than that before they become mainstream. It remains to be seen what will come of traditional video game consoles if more developers start to prioritize streaming games from the cloud.

Over three-fourths of Americans own smartphones, which means that it's incredibly important for tech companies to nail their mobile apps. But testing those apps to make sure they're working correctly can be a hassle.

HeadSpin, a Silicon Valley startup, allows developers to easily test, debug and monitor mobile apps and sites in real-time on actual devices. Oftentimes, developers use a simulator on their computers to test these apps, but even then, there might be unexpected bugs on the actual mobile app when used by real customers on a real phone.

And investors see potential for this idea: On Tuesday, HeadSpin announced $20 million in Series B financing. With this funding, HeadSpin's valuation is now north of $500 million, just three years in.

As an engineer, HeadSpin co-founder and CEO Manish Lachwani has worked on a wide variety of projects, from online games at Zynga to YouTube and Chrome at Google. But one problem stood out to him: testing apps. And it was "nearly impossible" to pinpoint why mobile apps sometimes failed.

"There was no way of understanding whether something would work or not," Lachwani told Business Insider. "That's where a number of these games failed. We had a very hard time."

HeadSpin can solve these problems within five minutes, Lachwani says, and being able to test apps can save developers both time and money.

With the funding, HeadSpin plans to incorporate more automation into the app to identify high-priority issues for apps.

"All this learning helped us create a platform that helps you understand what to fix prior to launch," Lachwani said. "Developers can see, this is where the problem is."

On Tuesday, Apple unveiled a revamped iPad Pro and a brand-new Apple Pencil. In the process, it fixed one of the few bad things about the generation of products that these new ones will replace.

The new iPad Pro has an entirely new design, including squared-off edges and a nearly edge-to-edge "liquid retina" display. But perhaps one of the niftiest changes comes in how it charges the Apple Pencil.

Now, your Pencil can snap on magnetically to the top of your iPad and charge up wirelessly, like so:

This is a total change from how the Pencil used to charge. The first-generation Pencil could only charge up one way: by removing the cap on the top and plugging it directly into the Lightning port on your iPad, where it would stick out awkwardly.

It looked like this:

The first-generation Apple Pencil charging on an iPad. Matt Weinberger/Business Insider

While that charging method was a good idea in theory — you didn't need a separate charger for your Pencil! — it clearly had some limitations.

If you brushed past the device too quickly while it was charging, the Pencil could potentially snap off, breaking the Lightning charger. Or worse, if left on the edge of a table, a little one walking by could have been poked with the pointy end of the Pencil.

At the very least, it was incredibly unwieldy, and looked a little silly to boot — not unlike Apple's Magic Mouse 2, which faces a similar issue.

Now read:Here's everything Apple announced at its big iPad and Mac event

The new second-generation Pencil fixes one more issue: you have to worry less about losing the Pencil anymore. Before, there was no easy way to keep track of the Pencil unless you had a special iPad case, and its totally smooth, cylindrical shape meant it was often at risk for rolling right off your desk. Now that it has one flat edge and it's magnetized, you can snap it onto your iPad and put the whole thing in your bag.

A pricier Pencil

The only downside: the new Pencil is more expensive, and it only works with a few iPads. The Pencil costs $129, $30 more than the previous model, and it only works with the new 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

What's different about the new version — beyond a tweak to the design and the wireless charging — is the ability to double tap on the device to change tools or brush sizes in whatever program you're using, and tap to wake it up. Plus, you can now get your Pencil engraved.

While Apple now offers a new version of the Pencil, it does still sell the first-generation model — it costs $99, and it's compatible with the following iPads:

Read more of our coverage from Apple's October event:

The US Department of Justice has indicted 10 Chinese intelligence officers and those working at their direction for stealing sensitive information from United States aviation companies, according to a federal court filing.

The DOJ says over a dozen US and European aviation companies were hacked over a period of more than five years beginning no later than January 2010 in an effort to obtain intellectual property and other confidential information. The alleged hacks ended no earlier than May 2015, the DOJ says.

According to the DOJ, the defendants sought information about a turbofan engine used in commercial aircraft that was being developed by a French manufacturer and a US firm. The engine was similar to one being developed by a Chinese state-owned aviation company, the DOJ says.

"For the third time since only September, the National Security Division, with its US Attorney partners, has brought charges against Chinese intelligence officers from the JSSD and those working at their direction and control for stealing American intellectual property," John C. Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, said in a DOJ press release. "This is just the beginning. Together with our federal partners, we will redouble our efforts to safeguard America's ingenuity and investment."

The defendants opened email addresses under false identities and used multiple servers in different countries to evade detection, the DOJ says, and employed a number of techniques to gain access to confidential information. Those techniques allegedly included sending emails containing malware, installing malware on the web pages of targeted companies, and working with employees of targeted companies.

Two of the defendants worked for a branch of China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) — which specializes in domestic and non-military foreign intelligence, as well as some areas of domestic and political security — located in Nanjing. Six of the defendants worked underneath the intelligence officers and were described by the DOJ as hackers. The other two defendants are Chinese nationals who were employees of a French aviation company that was targeted in the alleged hacks.

"This action is yet another example of criminal efforts by the MSS to facilitate the theft of private data for China's commercial gain," the US Attorney Adam Braverman said. "The concerted effort to steal, rather than simply purchase, commercially available products should offend every company that invests talent, energy, and shareholder money into the development of products."

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.