Last week was not a great one for big tech: It started when a serious flaw in Apple’s Group Facetime feature got serious media attention. The bug itself is seriously bad, but even worse was the fact that the bug’s discoverer, a 14-year old teen, and his mom tried for a week to get Apple’s attention about the bug, even tweeting to Tim Cook, to no avail.

Look, software bugs are a fact of software life, and to Apple’s credit, once they got moving, they did the right things fairly quickly: Deactivate the Group Facetime functionality server-side (so no one could exploit the bug any more), and announcing an update that would fix the bug on iOS¹. But everything before that shows Apple just isn’t able to deal with reporting security issues properly. By all accounts, the teen’s mom did not only do everything right, but went above and beyond trying to report the bug to Apple, and in return, she got nowhere. Only when the media coverage started did Apple do something. That’s a black stain on Apple as a whole, and it’s a problem that has been around for a very, very long time, both for regular and security bugs (ask any iOS or macOS developer about filing RADAR’s², and, well, just watch their response).

But then Facebook got afraid Apple might break their “Fuck-Up of the Week” streak, and so it came to light that Facebook paid people (including teenagers) the lump sum of $20 per month to essentially allow Facebook to spy on them. Considering Facebook’s excellent stewardship of personal data and general conduct in the past, US lawmakers questioned the data collection, since it involved teenagers. Worse: the app in question was based on Facebook’s Onavo VPN app. It had promised to make browsing more secure, but also allowing Facebook to see what websites and apps people used. Apple forced Facebook to pull Onavo from the App Store in August for violating Apple’s policies on data collection — only for Facebook to turn around and use Apple’s Enterprise Distribution program, intended for large companies to provide internal iOS apps to their employees (and only employees!), to distribute the app instead. As a consequence, Apple simply revoked Facebook’s Enterprise Distribution certificate³ — stopping all of Facebook’s internal iOS apps from launching.

Google, as it turned out, had been doing the same thing, and immediately issued a press statement it would stop distributing its own “research” app this way, but Apple shut their enterprise certificate down as well (Both companies have since had their enterprise certificate restored, but it’s unclear under what terms, if any).

None of the three companies will come out of this week looking good — Facebook and Google again demonstrated they don’t really care about privacy, while Apple’s culture of secrecy has once more inflicted some very public damage on the company. Considering Apple’s privacy stance, it probably lost the most this week. Facebook, meanwhile, is doing better than ever, despite the scandals and outrage.

Only Amazon somehow managed to stay out of it — this week.

Lifeblood

Blood transfusions are an important tool for doctors and medics to save people’s lives. That blood, however, has to be donated from other humans, and it can’t be stored very long (no more than 35 days in Europe, less for other blood products like platelets or plasma). In other words, blood needs to get from the donor to the recipient as quickly as possible. Developed countries have both the infrastructure and the supply chains in place that ensure donations are processed and distributed to hospitals, so they always have enough blood in stock even if demand surges. This also means a lot of blood expires before it’s actually used.

Less developed countries, however, rarely have the infrastructure or supply chains to supply enough blood outside a small area, and they cannot afford to have their blood stocks expire. So especially hospitals in rural areas don’t have enough blood on-hand to deal with regular demand.

Rwanda is one of those countries, but it has found an innovative way to ensure blood supply even for hospitals in rural areas: On-demand delivery by autonomous drones. Hospitals can place orders, and receive blood within an hour. YouTube’s Wendover explores how Rwanda has managed this feat (as well as provide universal healthcare), and Real Engineering explores the technical challenges of running (and landing) a fleet of autonomous delivery drones.

Universal Speed

We humans aren’t very good at visualizing things that are outside our normal range of experience. Going at 300 km/h is something you can imagine, while going 300.000 km/s is something you can’t really. So planetary scientist James O’Donoghue has made some videos demonstrating how fast (and slow) light is.

I’ll Be There For You

When Netflix paid $100 million dollars to NBC to keep Friends on the streaming service for 2019, it probably raised some eyebrows — is a 20-year-old sitcom really worth all that much? The answer might be yes — Friends has not only endured, but even won new fans in the current generation of 20-somethings.

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Russian Progress MS-10 cargo spacecraft launch timelapse seen from space, as captured by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst aboard the ISS.