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Shortly after a Smartlynx Estonian Airbus 320 took off on February 28, 2018, all four of the aircraft’s flight control computers stopped working. Each performed precisely as designed, taking themselves offline after (incorrectly) sensing a fault. The problem, later discovered, was an actuator that had been serviced with oil that was too viscous. A design created to prevent a problem created a problem. Only the skill of the instructor pilot on board prevented a fatal crash.
Now, as the Boeing 737 MAX returns to the skies worldwide following a 21-month grounding, flight training and design are in the crosshairs. Ensuring a safe future of aviation ultimately requires an entirely new approach to automation design using methods based on system theory, but planes with that technology are 10 to 15 years off. For now we need to train pilots how to better respond to automation’s many inevitable quirks.
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The Facebook Oversight Board is on the cusp of deciding whether Donald Trump should be allowed to return to a platform he used to incite racist violence.
While the board ostensibly has the authority to make this decision, Facebook itself will make the final call. From the boardâs inception in 2018, weâve noted that its power is illusory. It provides cover for Facebook, a veneer of accountability, even as the company enables and promotes hate and disinformation.
The board is dysfunctional by design, which is why it did nothing over the past year even as Facebook amplified Trumpâs lies about the Covid-19 pandemic. The boardâs toothlessness became even more apparent as Facebook allowed Trump to repeat claims of election fraud, which set the stage for the deadly white-supremacist insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6. It was only after the world witnessed Trumpâs incitement of this viole
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Earlier this week, the Food and Drug Administration called for a pause in the use of Johnson & Johnsonâs Covid-19 vaccine, to evaluate its association with extremely low risks of serious blood clots. On Wednesday, this pause was effectively extended for another seven to 10 days. Many are worried that the FDAâs decision to temporarily halt distribution in the first place has unnecessarily sidelined a key vaccine in the middle of a pandemic. It slows the pace of vaccination and potentially increases vaccine hesitancy, which makes it harder to reach the herd immunity threshold, even if Johnson & Johnson is subsequently cleared for use.
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You’ve probably never heard of Acxiom, but it likely knows you: The Arkansas firm claims to have data on 2.5 billion people around the world. And in the US, if someone’s interested in that information, there are virtually no restrictions on their ability to buy and then use it.
Enter the data brokerage industry, the multibillion dollar economy of selling consumers’ and citizens’ intimate details. Much of the privacy discourse has rightly pointed fingers at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok, which collect users’ information directly. But a far broader ecosystem of buying up, licensing, selling, and sharing data exists around those platforms. Data brokerage firms are middlemen of surveillance capitalism purchasing, aggregating, and repackaging data from a variety of other companies, all with the aim of selling or further distributing it.
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Five years ago today, WhatsApp completed our roll out of end-to-end encryption, which provides people all over the world with the ability to communicate privately and securely. This was a technical achievement decades in the making, a vision first imagined by Stanford mathematicians Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman, who in 1975 developed the underlying cryptography we rely on today.
In the past five years, WhatsApp has securely delivered over 100 trillion messages to over 2 billion users. During the height of the global pandemic lockdown, end-to-end encryption protected peopleâs most personal thoughts when it was impossible to come together in person.Â