Technology

At times, it can be hard to tell exactly who &Locke - Key& was made for.

Adapted from a comic book series written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, the show tells the story of the Locke family after they move into the mysterious Keyhouse, where they soon discover hidden keys that can be used for a variety of magical purposes.

With its emphasis on adolescent romance and magical powers, &Locke - Key& often feels like a young adult adaptation, but it also strays into darker territory, with plenty of horror, as well as a persuasive focus on the familyongoing trauma following the violent death of husband/father Rendell Locke.

Despite some quibbles, your Original Content podcast hosts agree that the show manages to balance these different elements effectively, with surprising plot twists, creepy visuals and a particularly compelling sibling relationship between the two teenaged Lockes, Tyler (played by Connor Jessup) and Kinsey (Emilia Jones).

In addition to reviewing the show, we also discuss the announcement that Netflix has acquired Adam McKaynext film, &Don&t Look Up,& which will star Jennifer Lawrence. We had less to say about the movie itself and more about our respective attitudes towards a potential asteroid apocalypse.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcastsor find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you want to skip ahead, herehow the episode breaks down:

0:00 Intro 0:35 &Don&t Look Up& discussion 14:19 &Locke and Key& spoiler-free review 29:48 &Locke and Key& spoiler discussion

SpaceX is looking to raise around $250 million in new funding according to a new report from CNBCMichael Sheetz. The additional cash would bring SpaceXtotal valuation to around $36 billion, according to CNBCsources — an increase of more than $2.5 billion versus its most recently reported valuation.

The rocket launch company founded and run by Elon Musk is no stranger to raising large sums of money — it added $1.33 billion during 2019 (from three separate rounds). In total, the company has raised more than $3 billion in funding to date — but the scale of its ambitions provides a clear explanation of why the company has sought so much capital.

SpaceX is also generating a significant amount of revenue: Its contract to develop the Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of the NASA commercial crew program came with $3.1 billion in contract award money from the agency, for example, and it charges its customers roughly $60 million per launch of one of its Falcon 9 rockets. Last year alone, SpaceX had 13 launches.

But SpaceX is also not a company to rest on its laurels, or its pre-existing technology investments. The company is in the process of developing its next spacecraft, dubbed &Starship.& Starship will potentially be able to eventually replace both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and will be fully reusable, instead of partially reusable like those systems. Once itoperational, it will be able to provide significant cost savings and advantages to SpaceXbottom line, if the companyprojections are correct, but getting there requires a massive expenditure of capital in development of the technology required to make Starship fly, and fly reliably.

Musk recently went into detail about the companyplans to essentially build new versions of Starship as fast as itable, incorporating significant changes and updates to each new successive version as it goes. Given the scale of Starship and the relatively expensive process of building each as an essentially bespoke new model, it makes perfect sense why SpaceX would seek to bolster its existing capital with additional funds.

CNBC reports that the funding could close sometime in the middle of next month. We reached out to SpaceX for comment, but did not receive a reply as of publication.

As Samsung (re)unveiled its clamshell folding phone last week, I kept seeing the same question pop up amongst my social circles: why?

I was wondering the same thing myself, to be honest. I&m not sure even Samsung knows; they&d win me over by the end, but only somewhat. The halfway-folded, laptop-style &Flex Mode& allows you to place the phone on a table for hands-free video calling. Thatpretty neat, I guess. But… is that it?

The best answer to &why?& I&ve come up with so far isn&t a very satisfying one: Because they can (maybe). And because they sort of need to do something.

Lettime-travel back to the early 2000s. Phones were weird, varied and no manufacturers really knew what was going to work. We had basic flip phones and Nokia indestructible bricks, but we also had phones that swiveled, slid and included chunky physical keyboards that seemed absolutely crucial. The Sidekick! LG Chocolate! BlackBerry Pearl! Most were pretty bad by todaystandards, but it was at least easy to tell one model from the next.

(Photo by Kim Kulish/Corbis via Getty Images)

Then came the iPhone in 2007; a rectangular glass slab defined less by physical buttons and switches and more by the software that powered it. The device itself, a silhouette. There was hesitation to this formula, initially; the first Android phones shipped with swiveling keyboards, trackballs and various sliding pads. As iPhone sales grew, everyone elsebuttons, sliders and keyboards were boiled away as designers emulated the iPhoneform factor. The best answer, it seemed, was a simple one.

Twelve years later, everything has become the same. Phones have become… boring. When everyone is trying to build a better rectangle, the battle becomes one of hardware specs. Which one has the fastest CPU? The best camera?

According to a report from Bloomberg, the Trump campaign called dibs on some of the most prized ad space online in the days leading up to the 2020 U.S. election.

Starting in early November and continuing onto Election Day itself, the campaign will reportedly command YouTube masthead, the space at the very top of the video sharing sitehomepage. YouTube is now the second most popular website globally after the online video platform overtook Facebook in web traffic back in 2018. Bloomberg didn&t report the details of the purchase, but the YouTube masthead space is reported to cost as much as a million dollars a day.

The Trump campaignad buy is likely to rub the presidentmany critics the wrong way, but it isn&t unprecedented. In 2012, the Obama campaign bought the same space before Mitt Romney landed the Republican nomination. Italso not a first for the Trump campaign, which bought banner ads at the top of YouTube last June to send its own message during the first Democratic debate.

Screenshot of the Trump campaignJune 2019 YouTube ads via NPR/YouTube

In spite of the precedent, 2020 is a very different year for political money flowing to tech companies — one with a great degree of newfound scrutiny. The big tech platforms are still honing their respective rules for political advertising as November inches closer, but the kinks are far from ironed out and the awkward dance between politics and tech continues.

The fluidity of the situation is a boon to campaigns eager to plow massive amounts of cash into tech platforms. Facebook remains under scrutiny for its willingness to accept money for political ads containing misleading claims, even as the company is showered in cash by 2020 campaigns. Most notable among them is the controversial candidacy of multi-billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who spent a whopping $33 million on Facebook alone in the last 30 days. In spite of its contentious political ad policies, much-maligned Facebook offers a surprising degree of transparency around what runs on its platform through its robust political ad library, a tool that arose out of the controversy surrounding the 2016 U.S. election.

On the other end of the spectrum, Twitter opted to ban political ads altogether, andis currently working on a way to label &synthetic or manipulated media& intended to mislead users — an effort that could flag non-paid content by candidates, including a recent debate video doctored by the Bloomberg campaign. Twitter is working through its own policy issues in a relatively public way, embracing trial-and-error rather than carving its rules in stone.

Unlike Twitter, YouTube will continue to run political ads, but did mysteriously remove a batch of 300 Trump campaign ads last year without disclosing what policy the ads had violated. Google also announced that it would limit election ad targeting to a few high-level categories (age, gender and ZIP code), a decision the Trump campaign called the &muzzling of political speech.& In spite of its strong stance on microtargeting, Googlepolicies around allowing lies in political ads fall closer to Facebookanything-goes approach. Google makes a few exceptions, disallowing &misleading claims about the census process& and &false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process,& the latter of which leaves an amphitheater-sized amount of room for interpretation.

In recent years, much of the criticism around political advertising has centered around the practice of microtargeting ads to hyper-specific sets of users, a potent technique made possible by the amount of personal data collected by modern social platforms and a strategy very much back in action in 2020. While Trumpcampaign leveraged that phenomenon to great success in 2016, Trumpbig YouTube ad buy is just one part of an effort to see what sticks, advertising to anybody and everybody in the splashiest spot online in the process.

YouTube declined to confirm to TechCrunch the Trump campaignreported ad buy, but noted that the practice of buying the YouTube masthead is &common& during elections.

&In the past, campaigns, PACs, and other political groups have run various types of ads leading up to election day,& the spokesperson said. &All advertisers follow the same process and are welcome to purchase the masthead space as long as their ads comply with our policies.&

The New York Times published anin-depth report on Oyo, a tech-enabled budget hotel chain and rising star in the Indian tech community. The NYT wrote that Oyo offers unlicensed rooms and has bribed police officials to deter trouble, among other toxic practices.

Whether Oyo, backed by billions from theSoftBankVision Fund, will become IndiaWeWork is the real cause for concern. Indiastartup ecosystem is likely to face a number of barriers as itgrowsto compete with the likes of Silicon Valley.

Today we bring you another edition of &Dear Sophie,& an advice column that answers readers& questions about immigration for tech.

&Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,& says Sophie Alcorn, Silicon Valley immigration attorney. &Whether you&re in people ops, a founder, or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.&

Dear Readers,

Today I&m sharing answers to the most frequently asked questions following up to the last H-1B Dear Sophie. Fortunately, the government has provided a lot more details over the last few weeks. Additional info about the electronic registration process is available on my H-1B podcast. Enjoy!

Am I limited to sponsoring somebody in the lottery to a maximum of three times?

No, there is no limit to how many times a company can sponsor an individual. A lot of companies tend to do it three times because candidates can often work for you for three years with OPT and STEM OPT, but the law doesn&t set out an upper limit. Also, you can sponsor current F-1 students as well as people who have accepted your offers who are currently outside the United States.

I&m in HR. When can I create my profile for H-1B electronic registration?

You can access my.uscis.gov starting February 24, 2020 at 10 a.m. (EST) to create your profile for the electronic registration process. However, employers will not be able to create registrations for your employees and candidates until March 1st at noon.

I&m working with a lawyer; which category should I select for my my.uscis.gov profile?

This is counterintuitive. If you&re working with an attorney, on the Account Type screen, don&t select the box for &I am an applicant, petitioner, or requestor.& Instead, select the &I am an H-1B registrant& box.

When can I actually register my employees and people who accepted our job offers?

The initial registration period starts March 1, 2020 and is supposed to run through March 20, 2020. USCIS will announce the actual end date of the initial registration period on its website. If not enough people register (unlikely), USCIS can decide to re-open registrations.

How do I add my lawyer to the my.uscis.gov account?

Your attorney will provide a &representative passcode& that you need to enter. This will take you to the G-28 page where you can accept your representative. Talk to your attorney about whether they prefer that you have USCIS send notices to you or their firm.

How many people can I register?

You can enter up to 250 people in one batch and you can review them before you submit.

What if I make a mistake when registering somebody?

You should be able to delete entries even after having submitted them. The website will warn you if there is missing information, but cannot warn you about inaccurate information.

Can I register the same person more than once?

No, don&t do it. Itagainst the rules and you will forfeit this personopportunity to get an H-1B.

When are we supposed to file full I-129 petitions with all the supporting documents?

For each of your selected candidates, you will receive a selection notice listing the 90-day filing window deadline and the physical mailing address to send the petition package. Therefore, most petitions will be submitted April through June.

What if we electronically register somebody in good faith but we can&t go through with the petition?

USCIS is trusting your company to act in good faith. Make sure that for any candidate you electronically register, they have accepted a position with your company and you actually intend to follow through with hiring them. However, there is currently no requirement to notify USCIS if you won&t be following through with filing the full petition for a selected registration.

Can a current student be included in the &Mastercap?&

The advanced degree exemption to the H-1B lottery is for candidates who have received masterdegrees and PhDs from U.S. universities. They have a higher chance of lottery selection. Under the new electronic registration system, you have to prove eligibility at the time of filing the physical petition, not at the time of electronic registration. So if somebody is graduating in May or June, you check the Mastercap box for them in March. However, itsafest to wait to get their proof of graduation before submitting the full I-129 package.

What are the chances?

Last year, there were more than 200,000 petitions. There are 65,000 available H-1Bs plus 20,000 for the Mastercap. Just how many petitions will be filed with the new electronic registration system remains to be seen.

Will premium processing continue to be available?

I don&t know, my crystal ball isn&t giving me information on this one right now. ;)

Have a question? Ask it here; we reserve the right to edit your submission for clarity and or space. The information provided in &Dear Sophie& is general information and not legal advice. For more information on the limitations of &Dear Sophie,& please view our full disclaimer here.

Have a story to share about how you navigated immigration to build your dreams? Apply to guest on Sophiepodcast about immigration law for tech startups.

Future &Dear Sophie& columns will be accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one or two-year subscription for 50% off.