In Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man comic, most of the world’s population of mammals with a Y chromosome—save for one man and his pet capuchin monkey—suddenly perish in a mysterious plague whose origins are never fully explained. Though the comic spends a fair amount of time ruminating on how people’s…
Two spacecraft zipped past Venus at nearly time this week, and we’re steadily getting more data from this rare double flyby. The research teams have even translated some of this data into sounds, which you can hear below.
“What if we just cut off the unemployment?” the Fox News host asked before noting, “Hunger is a pretty powerful thing.”
The former W.H. intern gave hilarious answers on her favorite historical figure, favorite name and the love of her life.
Back in 2019, Konami released a mobile game called Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls. Unfortunately, it was released on a very limited scale, as it was only available on Android and iOS in Canada. It was available for a very short period of time, too, because less than a year after release, Konami shut the game down and pulled it from … Continue reading
AlgorithmWatch, a group of researchers who had been studying how Instagram’s opaque algorithms function, say they were recently forced to halt their work over concerns Facebook planned to take legal action against them. In a post spotted by The Verge, AlgorithmWatch claims the company accused it of breaching Instagram’s terms of service and said it would move to take “more formal engagement” if the project did not “resolve” the issue.
AlgorithmWatch’s research centered around a browser plugin more than 1,500 individuals downloaded. The tool helped the team to collect information it says allowed it to make some inferences about how Instagram prioritizes specific photos and videos over others.
Most notably, the team found the platform encourages people to show skin. Before publishing its findings, AlgorithmWatch said it had reached out to Facebook for comment, only for the company not to respond initially. However, in May 2020, Facebook told the researchers their work was “flawed in a number of ways” after it said earlier in the year it found a list of issues with the methodology AlgorithmWatch had employed.
When Facebook accused AlgorithmWatch of breaching its terms of service, the company pointed to a section of its rules that prohibits automated data collection. It also said the system violated GDPR, the European Union’s data privacy law. “We only collected data related to content that Facebook displayed to the volunteers who installed the add-on,” AlgorithmWatch said. “In other words, users of the plugin [were] only accessing their own feed, and sharing it with us for research purposes.” As for Facebook’s allegations related to GDPR, the group said, “a cursory look at the source code, which we open-sourced, shows that such data was deleted immediately when arriving at our server.”
Despite the belief they had done nothing wrong, the researchers eventually decided to shutter the project. “Ultimately, an organization the size of AlgorithmWatch cannot risk going to court against a company valued at one trillion dollars,” they said.
When Engadget reached out to Facebook for comment on the situation, the company denied it had threatened to sue the researchers. Here’s the full text of what it had to say:
We believe in independent research into our platform and have worked hard to allow many groups to do it, including AlgorithmWatch — but just not at the expense of anyone’s privacy. We had concerns with their practices, which is why we contacted them multiple times so they could come into compliance with our terms and continue their research, as we routinely do with other research groups when we identify similar concerns. We did not threaten to sue them. The signatories of this letter believe in transparency — and so do we. We collaborate with hundreds of research groups to enable the study of important topics, including by providing data sets and access to APIs, and recently published information explaining how our systems work and why you see what you see on our platform. We intend to keep working with independent researchers, but in ways that don’t put people’s data or privacy at risk.
This episode with AlgorithmWatch has worrisome parallels with actions Facebook took earlier in the month against a project called NYU Ad Observatory, which had been studying how political advertisers target their ads. Facebook has some tools in place to assist researchers in their work, but for the most part, its platforms have been a black box since the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That’s a significant problem, as AlgorithmWatch points out.
“Large platforms play an oversized, and largely unknown, role in society, from identity-building to voting choices,” it said. “Only if we understand how our public sphere is influenced by their algorithmic choices, can we take measures towards ensuring they do not undermine individuals’ autonomy, freedom, and the collective good.”
It could be months before Boeing takes another stab at a Starliner test flight. The company is detaching the capsule from an Atlas V rocket and taking it back to the factory to fix an issue with four propulsion system valves. The problem led to Boeing scrapping the planned second test flight on August 3rd.
Boeing will conduct “deeper-level troubleshooting” of the valves at its Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center. Engineers attempted to fix the problem while the Starliner was still on top of the rocket — they managed to repair the nine other valves. Boeing, NASA and Atlas V maker United Launch Alliance will need to find a new launch date when Starliner is ready.
However, as SpaceNews notes, the next opportunity for a test flight could be months away. Boeing may have to wait until after the October launches of NASA’s Lucy asteroid mission and SpaceX’s Crew-3 mission, as well as the return of the Crew-2 spacecraft. So, even if Boeing can fix the valves quickly, it could be November before Starliner can get back on the docking port.
Flash floods have killed at least 27 people in northern Turkey after intense rains hit areas around the Black Sea Wednesday and caused streams and rivers to burst their banks. The floods come as the country struggles in the aftermath of hundreds of fires in the country’s southern region that killed at least eight…
We just got DC doing its own continuation of the classic 1989 Batman movie in comic form, and now the company’s going a step beyond to cater to fans of the Burton era of the Dark Knight: one of his greatest on-screen nemeses is teaming up with the publisher for a new anthology special.
After the Walt Disney Company slipped on a banana peel and released Black Widow on streaming on the same day of its theatrical release, severely cutting into the film’s box office earnings and prompting a lawsuit from its star, Scarlett Johansson, the company’s CEO doubled down on its ability to “fairly compensate”…
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