Apple's new iPhones pack all sorts of nifty new features. But there's one important item you won't get with the new iPhone: a headphone dongle.

Apple will no longer include include a free 3.5mm jack conversion dongle with newly-purchased iPhones.

The clunky, white doodad doesn't get much love from consumers. It's dorky-looking and easily lost. But it's an essential item for a lot of people.

That's because Apple removed the traditional 3.5mm analog headphone jack from its iPhones in 2016, and replaced it with the proprietary "lightning" jack. Listening to music, or taking hands-free calls on an iPhone, now requires newer lightning compatible headphones, or wireless headphones — or, the converter dongle that lets your old headphones connect with the lightning jack.

Until now, Apple has included the dongle as a complimentary item with new iPhones. After all, it was Apple's decision to make the change, so it makes sense that the company would provide the necessary equipment so that customers could continue to use their old headphones.

But apparently Apple believes that two years is enough time for the world to have adapted to the new reality.

The company did not formally announce that it is no longer offering the free dongle with iPhones, but a look at the Apple site that details everything that's included with the latest iPhones reveals the dongle's conspicuous absence.

For those who are still attached to their old headphones though, there's still a way to connect them to the iPhone — but it will cost $9. The dongles can be purchased on Apple's website, on physically in-store.

Amazon is being criticized for appearing to inflate prices as residents of North and South Carolina prepare for Hurricane Florence to make landfall.

Many local grocery and warehouse stores have sold out of basics like cases of water, so some locals have turned online to buy goods to prepare for the storm. What they've found is water cases that cost over $20 for a few dozen bottles — far more than their usual cost.

Some on social media have balked at the prices that Amazon is charging for these items.

As Amazon's own stock and third-party sellers' lower-priced stock has sold out, the price of the water has appeared to creep up. When Business Insider checked the prices for a 40-pack of Deer Park water on Wednesday morning, it was listed for as much as $29.99 by a third-party seller.

Amazon

An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that it has taken action against some of the sellers listing unusually expensive water.

After Business Insider reached out to the company for comment, the same case of water was in stock with Amazon again and was listed for $10, though the spokesperson declined to comment on the pricing of this specific item.

Amazon

"We do not engage in surge pricing, and product prices do not fluctuate by region or delivery location," an Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider.

Unless a product is being sold by Amazon, the company does not set the prices itself. Still, many customers don't make the distinction between Amazon and its third-party sellers.

Prices might already appear high due to the expense of shipping a heavy case of water through the mail, which is baked into the price by sellers.

Some third-party sellers have added an increase to the shipping charges instead of to the product itself. One seller of a pack of 40 bottles of water from Dasani included a shipping charge of nearly $80.

Amazon

Earlier this year, some customers overpaid for paper products by thousands of dollars because of this same selling method. Amazon refunded them. Its policy explicitly states that "sellers cannot set excessive order fulfillment or shipping costs."

"We have selling policies that all sellers agree to before selling on Amazon, and we're actively monitoring our store and removing offers of products that violate our policies and harm our customer experience," an Amazon spokesperson said.

"If customers think an offer has substantially increased in price or shipping cost, we encourage them to contact Amazon customer service directly and work with us so we can investigate and take the appropriate action."

Most bottled water at Walmart and Target is being sold directly by the retailer and does not cost more than $10, according to a scan of those retailers' websites.

Some people quake at the idea of artificial intelligence. It's safe to say that sci-fi films featuring malevolent machines have helped poison much of the public's perception of AI.

But three experts in the field say there's good reason to feel uneasy. While killer robots are still many years away, AI in some cases could pose an enormous threat to humans, according to Andrew Moore, the dean of the Computer School at Carnegie Mellon University who will soon take over as head of Google Cloud AI.

In November, Moore gave the keynote address for the Artificial Intelligence and Global Security Initiative, and said: "If an AI disaster happens, and that would for instance be an autonomous car killing people due to serious bugs, and frankly I believe that's already happened, then at some point AI systems are going to be locked down for development, at least in the US."

"There are some even more horrible scenarios — which I don't want to talk about on the stage, which we're really worried about — that will cause the complete lockdown of robotics research," Moore continued.

Moore's statements come during a time when billions of dollars are being invested in AI.

Google, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Amazon, Facebook, and others are pushing hard to develop the technology. Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, once called AI more fundamental to human development than electricity or fire.

Andrew Moore, head of AI for Google CloudThe Charlie Rose show

Nonetheless, a handful of researchers are urging caution and warning that AI misuse could bring serious consequences.

Last week, Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China, predicted that AI will revolutionize many industries and generate a lot of wealth, but most of it will land in the pockets of a relatively small number of people. He warned that with the help of AI, business owners will automate more and more tasks that were once performed by humans.

"So it's actually having a doubling effect...creating new AI tycoons at the same time taking away from the poorest of society," Lee said at the Artificial Intelligence 2018 Conference in San Francisco.

At the same conference, Meredith Whittaker, cofounder of the institute AI Now at New York University and a leading Google researcher, outlined how technologists, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, are searching for a means to enable humans to control devices via their thoughts. She predicted that in the not-so distant future, the technology will exist that can interpret and store our thoughts.

Whittaker then posed a question to the audience: What would happen if the authorities went to a company who had warehoused its customers' thoughts and subpoenaed a person's thought records? She called this possibility "creepy."

Along the same "creepy" vein is the increasing ability of AI systems to read human emotions. This is something that Moore said is on the way.

"Up until three or four years ago, the advances in computer vision and speech processing were around recognizing people, recognizing objects, and transforming spoken words into underlying written sentences," Moore told Forbes magazine last year. "Now we realize we can go farther than that. For example, the cameras in modern cell phones have such high resolution that they can see little imperfections in the face and use them to track all the parts of skin as they move around the face.

"From tracking all the bits of the skin, you can work out what the muscles are doing under the face," Moore continued. "From what the muscles are doing, using previous knowledge from psychology, you can detect facial action units and micro expressions to get information that we as humans are not even consciously aware of.

"This means that when in dialogue with a person, we can capture when they are excited, when they are happy, when there are fearful, or when there is a showing of contempt."

Brad Parscale, Donald Trump's campaign manager for the 2020 election, wants Congress to investigate Google following the leak of a video that showed the internet company's top managers lamenting Trump's election victory in 2016.

The video was recorded during one of Google's weekly all hands meetings, known as TGIF meetings, and was leaked to the right-wing Breitbart news site on Wednesday.

"Let's face it, most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad because of the election...myself, as a immigrant and refugee I certainly find this election deeply offensive and I know many of you do too," Google cofounder Sergey Brin is seen saying in the video.

The comments do not appear very different from other critical comments Brin made following the election, particularly with regards to Trump's views on immigration. But the leaked video was quickly seized upon by associates of Trump, who have been leading a drumbeat of accusations about anti-conservative bias within the tech industry.

"Google needs to explain why this isn't a threat to the republic," tweeted Brad Parscale, the manager of Trump's 2020 election campaign.

Parscale's tweet comes amid a full-scale attack by Trump and his allies on Google. The President also took to Twitter two weeks ago and accused Google of rigging search results as part of an effort to silence the voices of people with politically conservative views and to make him look bad.

Trump also alleged that Google had not promoted his state of the union addresses on its famous front door the same way the company had done for former US President Barack Obama. Google refuted the claim and provided evidence that it promoted Trump's speeches before Congress in the same way as Obama's.

Business Insider is going through the video and will update this story soon.

Apple's got two new main versions of the iPhone this year: the iPhone XS (ten-ess) and XS Max.

In the past, Apple has released its new iPhone alongside a "Plus" model — since the Max is "bigger than Plus size," Apple's calling it something different.

With a 6.5-inch "Super Retina" OLED display, the iPhone XS Max is a giant. It's got a giant-sized price tag to match: The iPhone XS Max starts at $1,099, with 64 GB of storage, and goes all the way up to $1,499 with 512 GB of storage.

The iPhone XS directly replaces last year's iPhone X at the now standard iPhone price of $999 to start. The screen size stays at 5.8 inches, and the phone in general looks very similar to last year's model.

Here's a comparison, with the iPhone X on the left, the iPhone XS in the middle, and the XS Max on the right:

Indeed.

In the camera department, both the XS and XS Max have two 12-megapixel lenses on the back. Apple is touting a new feature called "Smart HDR," which seamlessly blends several different image frames into a single image. In short, the function is intended to make photos look sharper and have more natural light.

Another new camera trick is adjustable bokeh — you can snap a photo, and then adjust how blurry or sharp the background of your subject is.

But the biggest upgrade to this year's iPhone model is something you can't see: A new chip. The "A12 Bionic" chip is said to make the iPhone more powerful than ever.

Both the iPhone XS and XS Max are offered in three colors: gold, silver, and space gray. Additionally, there are three storage options for each: 64 GB, 256 GB, and — for the first time in an iPhone — 512 GB. Another notable addition: Both the XS and XS Max support a dual-SIM card system, enabling multiple phone numbers and easier international travel.

Pre-orders for both phones are planned to start this week, on Friday, September 14; the phones are otherwise scheduled to be available in stores starting on the following Friday, September 21.

Some Tesla customers will have to wait longer to get a response from customer service due to a significant increase in vehicle deliveries, CEO Elon Musk said via Twitter on Wednesday.

"Due to a large increase in vehicle delivery volume in North America, Tesla customers may experience longer response times. Resolving this is our top priority," he said.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how long the extended response times will last or what percentage of customers may be affected. Some Tesla customers have told Business Insider that the company's service centers are slow to respond to inquiries, while others have said they are easy to contact.

Musk's tweet came one minute after he replied to a Twitter user who said that Tesla's customer-service center was not responding to his emails as he prepared for delivery of a Model 3.

"My apologies, am working on this exact issue right now," Musk said in response.

As the end of the third quarter nears, Tesla faces an important test. The company has said that it expects to become consistently profitable beginning in the third quarter and, on Friday, CEO Elon Musk said in an email to employees that was posted on Tesla's website that the third quarter will be the "most amazing quarter in our history." He said in the email that Tesla will build and deliver more than double the amount of cars it did in the second quarter, when it built 53,339 and delivered 40,740.

A profitable quarter and large increase in production could refocus the Tesla narrative around the company's rapid production growth and improving financial prospects. But failing to meet those goals may only increase doubts about the company's long-term potential.

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

After four long, hard years, it's finally happening: Apple is making phones that look good again.

On Wednesday, the Silicon Valley tech giant held its annual iPhone event, announcing its latest slew of premium handsets and devices. But while in previous years, the lineup has been a predictable procession of muted metal slabs, Apple finally announced something different this year — the iPhone XR.

The iPhone XR is positioned as a lower-cost alternative to the new high-end iPhone XS and XS Max — "lower-cost" being relative of course, with Apple still charging customers an eye-watering $749 for the device (the XS and XS Max start at $999 and 1,099, respectively).

The XR follows a similar design to the other models in the X family, with a nearly edge-to-edge screen featuring a notch at the top, a glass backing, and metallic sides. It differs, however, in a striking way: Color. The device comes in 6 different bold shades — black, white, blue, yellow, coral, and red.

Objectively, this looks good. Apple

The XS, meanwhile, only comes in the standard silver, "space gray," and gold. They're the latest in a long line of lackluster devices, that offer nothing for people who were after some actual personality from their devices. Sure the build quality is high and the software is competent, but there's little in the way of flair or fun.

The XR finally acknowledges that not everyone wants to keep a shard of an office block in their pocket, and that there's room for an Apple smartphone that doesn't prioritize "cool" at the expense of individuality.

Apple has experimented with more colorful devices before, namely the iPhone 5c— a "beautifully, unapologetically plastic" device introduced in 2014 that looked unlike anything else Apple offered, while still remaining quintessentially Apple. Coming in five glossy colors — white, pink, yellow, blue, and green — the 5C was a lower-cost edition to the iPhone line, alongside the iPhone 5S. Its bold finish was reminiscent of the old iMac G3 — back before Apple began to fetishize chrome and glass at the expense of approachability.

Alas, Apple didn't refresh the device the following year, ultimately replacing it with the meh-looking iPhone SE.

With the iPhone XR, Apple appears to be waking up to the possibilities of colour again — and it couldn't come soon enough.

AP

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

1. A lengthy New Yorker profile of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg details how deeply he is thinking about issues such as monopoly and competition, privacy, and combating misinformation. Zuckerberg has become extremely careful about what he says publicly and, according to the profile, is trying to wrap his head around some of humanity's deepest and most contentious issues.

2. Snap's chief strategy officer, Imran Khan, is to leave the company. Insiders noted that Khan didn't have much background in media or advertising, though he was integral to taking it public.

3. Apple may name its new iPhones 'Xs,' 'Xs Max,' and 'Xr', according to Bloomberg. The iPhone Xs Max is expected to have a jumbo 6.5-inch screen, and Apple is expected to launch the new phones on Wednesday.

4. Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed on Friday that the company is about to have an "amazing" quarter, but frontline employees seem to be divided on whether that's true. One employee dismissed Musk's prediction that production had doubled as "laughable", but another said he and his colleagues were generally optimistic.

5. Apple's stock price took a hit on Monday after President Trump threatened new tariffs against China. Apple warned that the proposed tariffs could result in a price raise for Apple Watch and AirPods.

6. India's "Aadhar" digital identity system is facing major security issues once more, after a Huffington Post investigation found a software patch that could generate random Aadhar numbers. According to the report, the patch is in widespread use.

7. The founder of Twitch, Justin Kan, has raised $65 million for his legal startup Atrium. Twitch sold to Amazon for $1 billion, and Kan is hoping to repeat his success with Atrium, which builds software tools for law firms.

8. British flying car startup Vertical Aerospace conducted a test flight of its electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle this summer, and plans to launch an intercity flying taxi service by 2022. The 28-person startup is competing with the likes of Kitty Hawk, Uber, and Rolls-Royce in building flying taxis.

9. A new Pixelbook laptop from Google may have leaked in an online ad, which shows a flexible 2-in-1 laptop that looks similar to last year's Pixelbook, but with slimmer edges. Google is expected to announce the Pixelbook 2, along with other new hardware products like the Pixel 3, at an event on October 9.

10. Google Cloud chief Diane Greene announced in a blog post that Dr. Fei-Fei Li will return to her professorship at Stanford and Google Cloud AI's new leader will be Dr. Andrew Moore, of Carnegie Mellon University. Greene said in her blog post that Li will become an AI and machine learning advisor to Google.

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

Amazon said on Tuesday that its specialist business supplies sales portal has now hit $10 billion in annual sales.

Founded in 2015, Amazon Business functions just like regular Amazon but is specialised to suit the needs of businesses, offering things like separate VAT pricing and receipts.

It's the first time Amazon has published global numbers for Amazon Business. The company said it now has millions of customers for the service and hundreds of thousands of vendors on the marketplace.

Bill Burkland, UK head of Amazon Business, told Business Insider: "To have launched a business in April 2015 in the US and just over three years later to announce $10 billion in annualized sales is certainly a reflection that this is a big and fast-growing business."

Bill Burkland, UK Head of Amazon Business. Amazon Amazon Business currently operates eight marketplaces in countries such as the USA, Japan, Germany, and the UK. These marketplaces ship products to businesses in over 70 countries.

The service launched in France, Italy, and Spain this year and Burkland said international expansion was helping to fuel Amazon Business's growth, which is accelerating.

"We've also launched some interesting features that we can see businesses are finding of value," Burkland said. "One of those is catalogue curation, which allows a customer to take the 250 million products that are in the Amazon business catalogue and it allows them to create preferred sellers, for example, they can restrict products, they can set policies that allow them to ensure that they'll get a downloadable VAT invoice."

Burkland said the most popular products on Amazon Business are "things like PC and computer peripherals, office products, janitorial products, things of that nature that really are used across all businesses."

He added: "One of the reasons that businesses are finding Amazon Business valuable is that breadth of selection. Just about anything that may come up as a need for a business and that's whether you're a construction company or a manufacturer or a legal firm or high tech — we have the breadth."

50% of sales on Amazon Business come from third parties selling on the platform and Burkland said it allows smaller suppliers access to big businesses they otherwise wouldn't be able to transact with. Amazon said on Tuesday that 50% of FTSE 100 companies are now using its platform, for example.

"The business community can reach a set of customers that would be very difficult to reach outside of a marketplace like Amazon Business," Burkland said.

"Just to bring that home, if you think about the type of businesses that Amazon Business sells to — the FTSE 100 companies — those are often very difficult for a smaller seller to be able to sell to. Amazon Business is a channel that allows them to reach those types of customers."

Burkland declined to talk about Amazon's specific future plans for Amazon Business but said: "What you can count on are the major themes that we have focused on for the first three years, we'll continue to focus on for the immediate and distant futures.

"Those fall around continuing to drive innovation and roll out new features, it involves building our selection, continuing focus on bringing in new products and adding depth to the categories that we sell in."

Apple has a new lower cost laptop in the works that will have a fingerprint sensor but not the company's widely panned touch-sensitive Touch Bar, according to a new research note from a widely respected and usually reliable financial analyst.

The new model would seem to fill a longstanding demand by Apple fans for a relatively inexpensive Mac laptop, but one that comes without the Touch Bar. The new laptop model will replace Apple's 12-inch MacBook model, which does not have a fingerprint scanner and starts at $1300, TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in a note distributed Monday.

Apple may or may not reveal the new laptop Wednesday, when it is holding a press event on its campus in Cupertino, California. But Kuo expects the company to launch it before the end of the year.

According to Bloomberg, which has previously reported on the laptop, it will have a much higher resolution 13-inch display than that found in the current MacBook Air models and will be targeted at consumers and schools.

It's not clear whether the new laptop will have a redesigned keyboard. The "butterfly" keyboard Apple has used in its recent notebook computers has suffered from reliability complaints.

Apple introduced the Touch Bar in 2016, debuting it on its high-end MacBook Pro laptops. The feature replaced the standard function and other keys in the top row on those computers with a narrow, touch-sensitive screen as well as a fingerprint reader. Developers can program the Touch Bar to display custom keys for particular programs.

This feature proved controversial, though. Many Mac loyalists lamented the loss of the escape and other physical keys. Others complained that the Touch Bar simply wasn't that useful.

These are some of the products Kuo expects Apple to announce before the end of this year. TF International Securities

While it's unclear whether Apple will announce the new laptop Wednesday, it is widely expected to unveil new iPhones and Apple Watch models at its event this week.

One new feature the Apple Watch models will include is support for electrocardiography (ECG), Kuo said in his note. Current Apple Watches have a heart-rate sensor, which can take occasional readings. But ECG, which is required for many medical uses, requires continuous heart monitoring.

Additionally, the underside of the new watches will be made of a ceramic material, according to the report. The current models use a composite material on their backs.

Apple also has in the works a new iPad Pro model that will include the company's Face ID facial recognition feature, Kuo said. Additionally, the new iPad Pro will have an USB-C port, which will allow it to be charged more quickly than current models and will be used to connect accessories, he said. As with the laptop, Apple may hold off until later this year to unveil the new iPod Pro model, rather than launching it on Wednesday.

Kuo's research focuses on Asian technology companies that sell parts and manufacturing services to Apple and other big American tech companies. Among the companies he offered bullish assessments on in his note were Luxshare ICT, Catcher, and Everwin Precision.

Transportation and logistics industries have operated largely the same way for decades. But the surge in e-commerce in the last several years, combined with consumers' appetite for same-day delivery, has brought us to a tipping point.

Business Insider Intelligence

Delivery companies are doing all they can to get orders to customers' doors as quickly as possible, which has facilitated wholesale changes in how they operate.

Cutting-edge digital solutions (including digital freight services, warehouse robotics, AI for supply chain management, delivery robotics, and autonomous driving software) are forcing traditional delivery companies to either evolve or see their core businesses erode.

Transportation & Logistics Startups to Watch, a new report from Business Insider Intelligence, monitors the biggest change agents in the industry to offer unique insight into the development of the transportation and logistics space at large, and shows how traditional companies are adapting to their new environment.

Want to Learn More?

Business Insider Intelligence's Startups to Watch reports give a high-level overview of the funding trends for startups in a particular coverage area, as well as a list of key startups (by function, what they do, key news, and statistics). Businesses need to understand new competitive threats, technologies, and acquisition opportunities in order to thrive. These reports provide that contextual information in an easy-to-digest manner.

In full, the Transportation & Logistics Startups to Watch report dives into the top 25 companies - five startups across five key disruption areas - that are easing shipping burdens, improving order fulfillment efficiency, optimizing delivery, and automating processes.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li will be replaced at the end of the year as head of Google Cloud AI by Dr. Andrew Moore, dean of the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, Google announced on Monday.

Diane Greene, the CEO of Google Cloud, made the announcement in a blog post. Li, a well-known expert in artificial intelligence, was on leave from Stanford for nearly two years. She had always planned to return, according to a Google spokesman.

Diane Greene, Google Cloud CEO Greg Sandoval/Business Insider

In June, Business Insider reported that Google planned to keep Li on in some capacity. On Monday, Green said in her blog post that even after Li returns to Stanford, she will remain an AI and machine learning advisor to Google cloud. Geekwire was first to report on Greene's blog post Monday.

You can read more about Li and her time at Google here.

Greene, reflecting on the AI researcher's time at Google, wrote that Li "has built a tremendous team and together they have innovated and done a remarkable job of accelerating the adoption of AI and (machine learning) by developers and Google Cloud customers."

Though Li's departure was scheduled, it doesn't change the fact that there's been a lot of turnover at Google's cloud division in recent months. In August, Bogomil Balkansky, Google's VP of cloud recruiting solutions and someone who had worked with Greene for years, left the company. But the most notable and head-scratching change of course was the departure of Diane Bryant.

Bryant, the longtime Intel exec, lasted at Google barely seven months before she resigned. Nonetheless, Google cloud appears to be growing and Greene is fresh off the successful launch of several important products and services.

Snap's chief strategy chief Imran Khan is leaving, the company said Monday, becoming the latest executive to depart its top ranks.

And even though he leaves a big hole for founder and CEO Evan Spiegel to fill —advertising executives aren't particularly sorry to see Khan go.

Khan was necessary for Snap's IPO — but invisible after

Khan, 41, joined Snap in early 2015, with a mandate to expand its business and revenue and steer it toward an initial public offering.

He was the perfect person for the latter job, having been hired from Credit Suisse where he was head of global internet investment banking — and was best known for his leading role on the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group's IPO in 2014.

"When you look at what he's been able to accomplish while there, it's pretty incredible," said Ethan Agarwal, founder and CEO of Aaptiv, a small business that has worked with Snap. "The guy brought Snap from pre-revenue to over a billion-dollar run rate, helped grow it from 100 to 3,000 employees, and essentially brought a company running on Quickbooks to IPO."

But while he succeeded in charting the company's path to an IPO, insiders and outsiders apparently never saw him as an advertising guy.

"Internally and externally, folks never thought Imran was a good fit in that strategy role — he had no ad or media background," an advertising executive who wished to remain anonymous told Business Insider. "It made a lot of sense for him to help get Snap to IPO, and considerably less sense after that."

"He was needed because Evan wasn't a business person, and Wall Street needed an experienced adult to take them public," said another executive. "He was more a factor when he first joined. Once the company went public he was invisible."

Ad executives say that Khan wasn't as hands-on as they'd have liked

That's not to say he didn't try. Khan helped Snap build a strong base for its ad business, tried to forge deeper relationships with Madison Avenue and helped the company transition to selling ads programatically

But some executives said that Khan wasn't as hands-on as they'd have liked him to be.

"He was never about ads and we hardly saw him," said an executive. "He never really came to our agency, or attended meetings around Snap and our usage of it."

Others, however say that although he never claimed to be an ad guy, he was accommodating.

"Any time I texted him saying that I wanted to catch up, he'd say I'll see you tomorrow," said a third ad executive. "I have a lot of respect for him."

Snapchat has come under fire internally for what has been described as a "toxic" culture.Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Snap's disastrous redesign was a strategic misstep

Snap rolled out the biggest ever redesign in its history last December — a move that was wildly unpopular among users and set its stock plunging. While it was eventually reversed, the damage was permanent.

According to Aaron Perez, director of digital and social strategy at ad agency Glow, Khan shares a part for the blame for allowing the redesign to go through. He called it "a strategic misstep."

"That move demonstrated that he was out of touch with culture and how users want to engage with the platform," he said. "When the redesign happened, it shook several core users off the app and made advertisers even more wary of investing in the platform."

There is no denying that the company has struggled — both commercially and in terms of users and usage — relative to earlier optimistic expectations that were widely held, said Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser.

"While user and usage trends are Evan Spiegel's responsibility, commercial matters are Khan's," he said. "Of course, if usage trends were meaningfully better it's possible the business would have been better."

Khan's departure makes Snap more vulnerable than ever — but all may not be lost

Khan's final day on the job has not been set, and he will help in the transition of his duties and responsibilities, Snap said, clarifying that his departure did not stem from any disagreement relating to accounting, strategy, management, operations, policies, or practices.

"Imran has been a great partner building our business," Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in an SEC filing. "We appreciate all of his hard work and wish him the best."

Still, Khan's exit does not come at a good time for Snap, with the company reeling from its first-ever quarterly decline in daily users as a public company last quarter, and its shares dropping more than 30% since the beginning of the year.

"As the stock has fallen, stock-based compensation is less valuable to employees who might have been counting on a higher stock price to justify why they were staying with the company," said Pivotal's Wieser. "[This is a] particularly big risk for Snap given how much they were using stock for compensation and may contribute to more departure risks."

But others said that Snap's voluntary exit may set the stage for someone with a more traditional ad background to take the reins and help turn the company around. In fact, Snap just hired WarnerMedia's former chief marketing officer to run its sales.

"I would actually say this is a sign of righting the ship," said an executive. "Not it sinking."

Hurricane Florence is headed for the East Coast of the US as a Category 4 storm.

Hurricanes are storms that are so large they can easily be seen by astronauts in space, yet they are tricky-to-categorize weather events.

Over the decades, one classification system has risen above the rest: The Saffir-Simpson scale.

The Saffir-Simpson scale tries to assess a hurricane's intensity and is used to estimate potential property damage and coastal flooding caused by storm surge — an abnormal rise of water above the normal tide, generated by a storm pushing water ashore.

Winds are a big driver of storm surge, however, so the scale is determined by wind speed.

Flooding from storm surge depends on many factors, such as the storm's track, intensity, diameter, forward speed of the storm, and the characteristics of the coastline where it comes ashore or passes nearby.

Category 1

Winds of 74-95 mph (120-150 kph). Storm surge of 4 to 5 feet (1 to 1.5 meters) above normal. Damage primarily to un-anchored mobile homes, shrubbery and trees. Some damage to poorly constructed signs and piers. Extensive damage to power lines and poles likely will result in power outages that could last a few to several days.

Category 2

Winds of 96-110 mph (155-175 kph). Storm surge 6 to 8 feet (1.8-2.4 meters) above normal. Some roof, door and window damage to buildings. Considerable damage to mobile homes, small watercraft, trees, poorly constructed signs and piers. Flooding of coastal and low-lying areas. Many shallowly rooted trees will be snapped or uprooted and block numerous roads. Near-total power loss is expected with outages that could last from several days to weeks.

Category 3

Winds of 111-129 mph (180-210 kph). Storm surge 9 to 12 feet (3 to 4 meters) above normal. Some structural damage to small homes. Mobile homes destroyed and large trees blown down. Coastal flooding destroys smaller structures and floating debris damages larger structures. Terrain lower than 5 feet (1.5 meters) above sea level may flood as far as 8 miles (13 kilometers) inland. Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, was a Category 3 storm at landfall in 2005 after being a Category 5 in the Gulf of Mexico. At least 1,800 people died.

Category 4

Winds of 130-156 mph (210-250 kph). Storm surge 13 to 18 feet (4-5 meters) above normal. Wall failures and roof collapses on small homes, and extensive damage to doors and windows. Complete destruction of some homes, especially mobile homes. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Major coastal flooding damage. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months. Two 2004 storms were Category 4: Hurricane Ivan, which made landfall near Gulf Shores, Alabama, and Hurricane Charley, which hit the Florida Gulf Coast near Fort Myers. Charley killed at least 21 people and left thousands homeless. The total U.S. damage was estimated to be near $15 billion.

Category 5

Winds greater than 157 mph (250 kph). Storm surge greater than 18 feet (5 meters) above normal. Complete roof failure on many homes and industrial buildings. Smaller buildings and mobile homes blown over or completely blown away. Major damage to lower floors of all structures located less than 15 feet (4.5 meters) above sea level and within 500 yards (460 meters) of the shoreline. Massive evacuation of residential areas on low ground within 5 to 10 miles (8 to 16 kilometers) inland may be required. The last Category 5 storm to hit the United States was Hurricane Andrew in 1992. An estimated 250,000 were left homeless and the storm caused more than $20 billion in damage in the Bahamas, Florida and Louisiana. Fifty-five people were killed.

Below is a graphic that shows all five categories and what they mean.

Ana Pelisson/Business Insider

This story has been updated. It was originally published on September 5, 2017.

Justin Kan was unable to sell Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most powerful venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, on investing millions into his nutty startup Justin.tv more than a decade ago.

"We couldn't get them to invest in Twitch," Kan said, referring to the live-streaming platform's spinoff that's focused on video gaming. "Actually, I don't think I ever got a meeting."

But now, years later, the firm is leading a new $65 million round of financing for Kan's new startup, Atrium. The legal technology startup builds software tools for an in-house law firm whose attorneys specialize in helping startups do the things all successful startups do: raise funding, issue stock options, and create commercial contracts.

Someday, the startup could bundle these software tools, which use machine learning to understand legal documents and then automate certain processes, and license them out to law firms.

Marc Andreessen, one of the most influential investors in the Valley, and the firm's Andrew Chen will join Atrium's board of directors.

Ashton Kutcher's firm Sound Ventures, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator, whose CEO and partner Michael Seibel will also join the board of Atrium, signed on as co-investors in the round.

Chen met Kan about 10 years ago, when the young entrepreneur hatched an idea for a live-video platform that streamed his life 24/7. He strapped a camera to his baseball cap and wore a backpack filled with cellular data cards that carried whatever he saw to the web.

"The idea was creative, but so off the wall," Chen told Business Insider. (Even Kan would later call the startup a "terrible idea.")

Justin.tv pivoted and pivoted again, transforming into the world's largest live video platform. Twitch sold to Amazon for $970 million in an all cash deal in 2014.

Chen credited Kan with "inventing modern live-streaming." His boldness is part of the reason Chen believes in Kan as a founder.

In 2017, Chen joined nearly 100 institutional and angel investors in providing $10.5 million in Series A funding to Atrium. He must have been impressed, because he convinced Andreessen Horowitz to put in more than half of the $65 million round total for the Series B.

In the last year alone, Atrium has offered its legal services to over 250 startups, who have raised a total of $500 million in funding. Its client roster includes digital pharmacy startup Alto, scooter-sharing firm Bird, and fraud detection software-maker Sift Science.

CEOs from a handful of startups working to create meat from animal cells have decided there's one thing they don't want their product to be called: clean.

Some startups had been using the term "clean meat" as a moniker for real meat grown in a lab from animal cells. But following a spirited discussion behind closed doors on Friday, the leaders of at least five startups decided that the name comes with too much negative baggage.

"[Clean] implies superiority, or that one method is better than another," Uma Valeti, the founder and CEO of a startup called Memphis Meats, which aims to make duck, chicken, and beef without slaughter, told Business Insider.

His comments came at the end of a panel on the future of meat at a conference organized by the non-profit Good Food Institute but before the closed-door meeting, which was held later that day.

Instead of calling their products "clean," a term the startups had used to distinguish themselves from factory-farmed meat and plant-based meat alternatives like the Impossible Burger, the companies plan to use the phrase "cell-based," Brian Spears, the founder of New Age Meat, another startup aiming to make meat from animal cells, told Business Insider.

It's a big move for the industry, which has grown from a few small ventures to a significant and organized group of nearly a dozen startups and established companies.

At their meeting, the representatives of these cultured-meat startups also agreed to form an industry trade organization to represent themselves. They hope the move will allow for better collaboration with traditional meat companies, but have not released any further details on that work.

Deciding what to call meat that doesn't come from a farm has become tricky business in recent months.

In the past, cultured-meat companies floated the idea of labels emphasizing that their products come from labs instead of slaughterhouses. That's where the word "clean" originated.

Other startups have said their products should simply be called "meat," because at their core, they are the same as traditional meat.

But traditional meat producers are not fans of those options.

The US Cattlemen's Association recently filed a petition to the US Department of Agriculture that would limit using the terms "beef" and "meat" to products "born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner." In Missouri, that language just became law, meaning that any product made without slaughter couldn't be called meat.

That underscores the need for a separate label for animal products coming out of startups that don't rely on farms.

Still, alternatives like "farm-free" don't work either, some of the CEOs said. That's because not all traditional meat is produced in factory farms, and because it emphasizes what the startups are seeking to avoid, rather than what they aim to represent.

"We'd rather define ourselves by what we are, as opposed to what we are not," Niya Gupta, the co-founder and CEO of Fork & Goode, a startup aiming to make pork from animal cells, told Business Insider before the closed-door meeting on Friday.

Spears said the term "cell based" also will make it easier for companies like his to collaborate with traditional meat companies, who may have felt antagonized by the term "clean."

"Cell-based meat is a better label to bring them on board," Spears said. "We want to make winners instead of losers. Losers will fight you, winners will fight with you."

A savvy car thief could drive off with a Tesla Model S by using just a few, relatively inexpensive pieces of computing hardware and some radios — at least, the thief could have until recently, when Tesla fixed an overlooked vulnerability in its cars' security systems.

A group of researchers from KU Leuven university in Belgium demonstrated that Tesla Model S key fobs can be cloned, and the cloned signal can then be used to unlock the vehicle and start the engine — all without the owner realizing, WIRED reports.

The researchers brought their findings to Tesla last summer, and the company rewarded them with $10,000 for exposing the security flaw. In response, Tesla released a software update in August that enabled two-factor authentication with a PIN code from within the vehicle. It also developed and released updated, encrypted key fobs with additional security. If customers updated their software and received a new key fob, they should be safe from these types of attacks, but customers who didn't install the update or who don't own the new fobs are still theoretically vulnerable.

The amount of work that goes into the hack is surprisingly minimal, and not much equipment is needed. All of the necessary hardware costs less than $600, and the Model S can be hacked within seconds without the owner realizing it. The researchers built their device with a Raspberry Pi computer, a Yard Stick One radio, a Proxima radio, an external hard drive, and batteries.

A clever, and worrisome, hack

The researchers began by building a database of all the possible digital entry keys that could be used to open a Model S. The result was six terrabytes worth of potential keys — which are stored on the device's hard drive.

After that, it's simply a matter of following these 4 steps:

1. The hacker needs to copy the locking system signal that is constantly emitting from the Model S itself.

2. Next, the hacker has to take the radio within about three feet of the victim's key fob, and using the signal that was copied from the car's locking system, they trick the fob to emit two response codes that would normally be sent to the vehicle.

3. The hacker then need only run the signals through the database of possible keys stored on the hard drive, and the car's digital key will be located within seconds.

4. Then the hacker can return to the car, open the door, and drive away without the owner having any idea. Once the digital key is discovered, the hackers could clone the key fob and make one of their own — meaning they could enter and start the vehicle whenever they please.

Here's a video of the hack being demonstrated:

In a statement to WIRED, Tesla said that it had needed time to verify the authenticity of the flaw, identify a solution, and then roll it out via a software update and through the production line of new cars. Tesla's solution should technically stop this type of attack — the two-factor authentication and encrypted key fobs that aren't vulnerable to hacking are most likely efficient countermeasures. In addition, Tesla added the ability to disable the "passive entry" feature, requiring the driver to physically press a button on the key fob to unlock the car.

Although the problem appears to be fixed, and there aren't any reports of this method being used to steal a Model S, it's an interesting development in cybersecurity. As cars become more high-tech, new threats arise as well that need to be addressed.

Microaggressions are unconscious expressions of racism or sexism. They come out in seemingly innocuous comments by people who might be well-intentioned.

From telling a new female worker that she "looks like a student" to asking a black colleague about her natural hair, microaggressions often exist in the workplace, too. And they can make a workplace feel unsafe and toxic.

"Because microaggressions are often communicated through language, it is very important to pay attention to how we talk, especially in the workplace and other social institutions like classrooms, courtrooms, and so on," Christine Mallinson, professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, told Business Insider.

Because microaggressions are so subtle, it's often hard to know if you're committing one or if you're on the receiving end.

"One thing is that they are in a sense ambiguous, so that the recipient is apt to feel vaguely insulted, but since the words look and sound complimentary, on the surface (they're most often positive), she can't rightly feel insulted and doesn't know how to respond," Robin Lakoff, Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, told Business Insider.

Here are some of the most common microaggressions: