Minutes after a woman opened fire on YouTube’s San Bruno, California campus, employees returned to the building they’d just fled to help police officers access the office.

In a new statement Wednesday, the company praised employees and first responders for their “acts of heroism” following the shooting.

“Yesterday’s horrific act of violence was deeply shocking and disturbing to our YouTube Family. Still, we are uplifted by the heroic acts we witnessed from both employees and the San Bruno community, especially the first responders,” the company wrote. Read more…

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Boeing successfully refueled a KC-46 Pegasus tanker from a fellow tanker — mid-air.

Boeing transferred 146,000 pounds of fuel from one plane to another after taking off from Boeing Field, near Seattle.

Here’s a video of the mid-air fuel transfer. The fuel was off-loaded at a rate of 1,200 gallons per minute.

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Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook from his Harvard dorm room (of course, with a little bit of help). Now, 14 years and several scandals later, the 33-year-old billionaire is unabashedly saying that he’s still the best person to run Facebook. 

On a rare call with journalists Wednesday, Financial Times reporter Hannah Kuchler asked, “Has the board discussed if you should step down from chairman?”

Zuckerberg — a man who once gave out business cards that said, “I’m CEO, bitch” — replied with a cocky tone quite unlike his often robotic-cheery responses: “Not that I’m aware of.” Read more…

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We finally have some answers regarding what was arguably the biggest feud of 2016, outside of the election. 

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson gets remarkably candid about his beef with Fate of the Furious co-star Vin Diesel in an extensive interview with Rolling Stone. Their rivalry, initially made public by Johnson, spurred headlines throughout production for the film (how could it not? Johnson called Diesel a “candy-ass” on Instagram), and later reiterated that it all boils down to their different mentalities. 

Johnson confirms that if you saw the film and suspected that he and Diesel did not film scenes together, you are indeed correct.  Read more…

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Our Facebook privacy nightmare somehow keeps getting worse.

The vast majority of Facebook users have likely had their public profile data scraped by third-parties, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed Wednesday.

The seemingly massive privacy loophole was the result of a feature that allowed people to search for friends using their phone number. The setting, which has now been removed, was enabled by default in order to make it easier for users’ to find friends.

But on Wednesday, Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer revealed that bad actors have been abusing the feature for years in order to gain access to public profile data. “Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way,” he wrote. Read more…

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Once a daily vlogger, beloved YouTuber Casey Neistat has been less present on the platform in recent months. But in support of the victims, their families, and employees at YouTube, Neistat shared a touching video to his channel on Wednesday.

Neistat says he planned to share with his over 9 million subscribers his new plans for his channel (since parting ways with CNN) on Wednesday, but news of the shooting broke while he was finalizing his plans. 

“I love YouTube,” Neistat said. “I have a deep, profound respect, admiration, and love for YouTube. I credit most of my career and the success that I’ve found in life to YouTube and what it’s provided me with.” Neistat clarified that when he is speaking of “YouTube” in the clip, he means the people that run the company every day, and make this platform possible. Read more…

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The autonomous car industry has a perception problem — and now a group of related companies has banded together to try to solve it.

Uber’s fatal crash last month was the first self-driving car accident to kill a pedestrian. Then a Tesla Model X in autopilot mode left the driver dead after a fiery crash into a California highway barrier. Following its deadly accident in Tempe, Arizona, Uber halted all its self-driving testing, as did companies such as Nvidia and Toyota. 

A group of tech and transportation companies involved in building and testing self-driving vehicles announced the Autonomous Vehicle Coalition on Tuesday. The group aims to tout the enhanced safety of computer-run vehicles, along with economic and job opportunities and overall quality of life for people to get around.  Read more…

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Apple just took a very important step toward improving its AI capabilities.

The company hired Google’s top AI exec, John Giannandrea, to lead Apple’s artificial intelligence strategy, The New York Times reports.

It’s not clear what specific projects the longtime Google veteran will be focused on, but it’s safe to say Siri will play a central role in the company’s future AI strategy. 

Critics have long held that Apple has lagged behind competitors when it comes to its AI capabilities, and nowhere is this more evident than in Siri. Though Apple’s assistant has gradually improved over the years, it’s still noticeably less advanced than Google and Amazon’s digital assistants.  Read more…

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Snapchat’s redesign has been critiqued for being difficult to find celebrities, such as Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian. But while that may upset a subset of the world’s Kardashian fans, another mistake is the app now seemingly burying breaking news. 

On Tuesday, a shooting at YouTube HQ left four people injured (three were shot, one hurt their ankle feeling) and the shooter dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The news was trending on Twitter and was being shared to Facebook, and while false information was spreading on those social apps, Snapchat provided a verified and close-up look at what was happening in San Bruno, California. But it wasn’t easy to find.  Read more…

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Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has sent a note to all staff in the company following a shooting at YouTube’s headquarters.

Three people were shot and one person is dead following an active shooter at the company’s offices in San Bruno, California. There was a fourth victim with non-shooting injury.

In his note, which was tweeted by Google’s communications team, Pichai assured employees that the situation was now under control, and thanked first responders to the incident, as well as for the outpouring of support. Read more…

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