Month: August 2018

Nathan Mattise

AUSTIN, Texas—I'll admit it: I'd never heard of Rooster Teeth before moving to Austin. But the Texas-based animation/podcasting/game streaming media company has been around for 15 years now, and it boasts some of the longest-running Web series around (including the Halo-inspired machinima series Red v. Blue).

I'm an odd case if judging by the crowds at the 2018 RTX Austin festival last weekend. The event started in 2011, and by year two, the festival had 4,000 attendees enjoying perks like the exclusive hands-on premiere of Halo 4. In contrast, 62,000 descended upon the Austin Convention Center in 2017, and the costumed crowds certainly felt as big this go-round. Accordingly, animation studios from Titmouse (Venture Bros. and Big Mouth, among others) to Netflix (here premiering Brickleberry) hung out, one of the 12 inaugural Overwatch League squads took over the exhibition hall (by inviting folks to volunteer and get pwned), and non-stop panels helped interested con-goers find advice on writing for animation or learn what's happening behind the scenes on their favorite Web series (perhaps like popular Rooster Teeth anime, RWBY). 

Enlarge / Conspiracy theorist and talk show host Alex Jones.

After over a week of controversy and pressure, Facebook removed four pages run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from its platform. According to a blog post published Monday morning, Facebook removed the Alex Jones Channel, Alex Jones, InfoWars, and Infowars Nightly News pages for "repeatedly posting content over the past several days" that violates the company's Community Standards.

"Since then, more content from the same Pages has been reported to us," the blog post states. "Upon review, we have taken it down for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies."

The four pages in question haven't been totally axed from Facebook; they've just been unpublished so that no one can view them. Jones has the opportunity to file an appeal to get his pages restored, but if he loses the appeal (or doesn't appeal at all), Facebook will permanently remove the pages from its platform.

Enlarge / A Block 5 variant of the Falcon 9 rocket launches in July. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

On May 11, SpaceX launched the new, optimized-for-reuse Block 5 variant of its Falcon 9 rocket for the first time. Just before the flight, Ars asked company founder Elon Musk how long it would be before we saw the first reflight of a Block 5 booster.

"We are going to be very rigorous in taking this rocket apart and confirming our design assumptions to be confident that it is indeed able to be reused without taking it apart,” Musk said at the time. “Ironically, we need to take it apart to confirm it does not need to be taken apart.”

Apparently it did not take that long to tear the first stage of this rocket apart, because less than three months later, this booster is back on the launch pad for a geostationary mission set to launch late Monday night. SpaceX is targeting launch of the Merah Putih satellite to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit during a two-hour launch window that opens at 1:18am ET Tuesday (5:18 UTC). The launch will occur from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The first stage will attempt to make a landing on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship after completing its primary mission. Weather conditions appear favorable.

Enlarge / Alex Jones (credit: Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Update: This article originally stated that Facebook had not banned most Alex Jones content from the site, which was true when we scheduled the post on Friday afternoon. But on Monday morning, shortly before this article published, Facebook removed four key Alex Jones pages, effectively banning him from the platform. I've updated the story to reflect this change.

Facebook and YouTube both have strict rules against posting content that is hateful, pornographic, or violates someone's privacy. But what if someone posts content that is just egregiously false? Right now, neither Facebook nor YouTube has rules banning this kind of content. And critics say that's a problem.

In recent weeks, the issue has come to a head over online provocateur, pundit, and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Jones gleefully flouts the rules of journalistic ethics, regularly making outrageous claims without a shred of evidence.