Month: June 2023

Enlarge / A Trump campaign event in Waco, Texas, on Saturday, March 25, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

YouTube on Friday announced a major change in its approach to US election misinformation, saying it will no longer remove videos that make false claims about the 2020 election or previous presidential elections. Starting today, "we will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections," YouTube's announcement said.

This is a reversal from YouTube's announcement in December 2020 that it would ban videos falsely claiming that Donald Trump beat Joe Biden. YouTube said at the time that it "will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 US Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical US Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors."

The Google subsidiary YouTube made its December 2020 announcement while Trump was spreading a baseless conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from him. Trump's false claims helped fuel the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Enlarge / Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' studio at the Central Park Arsenal in New York City, with models of extinct animals. (credit: Public domain)

The original plans for New York City's Central Park included a Paleozoic Museum at 63rd Street and Central Park West, which would have displayed life-size concrete models of dinosaurs placed in carefully designed dioramas. Those plans were dashed in 1871 when vandals broke into the workshop of the museum's designer, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, and smashed the models with sledgehammers, burying the rubble in the southwestern corner of the park.

The traditional take in paleontology circles is that the man behind the destruction was William "Boss" Tweed, who pretty much ruled the city's Democratic Party political machine at the time with his cronies at Tammany Hall. But a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the Geologists' Association identifies a different culprit: a lawyer and businessman named Henry Hilton, a member of the Tammany Hall contingent who championed plans for what would become the American Museum of Natural History.

Co-authors Victoria Coules and Michael Benton of the University of Bristol in England also found no evidence of a religious motivation for the destruction, i.e., opposition to the then-nascent field of paleontology and its associated implications for evolutionary theory, which were deemed "blasphemous" by some religious leaders. Rather, it seems to have been one of many "crazy actions" by Hilton. "We find that Hilton exhibited an eccentric and destructive approach to cultural artifacts, and a remarkable ability to destroy everything he touched, including the huge fortune of the department store tycoon Alexander Stewart," Coules and Benton wrote. "Hilton was not only bad but also mad."

Enlarge / Can Boeing unlock a bright future for the Starliner spacecraft? (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

In September 2009, Boeing announced that it would participate in NASA's new "commercial crew" program. The aerospace industry leader vowed to bring its long experience in supporting the space agency and leverage its human spaceflight experience to make the program successful.

"Boeing has a lot to offer NASA in this new field of commercial crew transportation services," Keith Reiley, then the Boeing program manager for the project, said at the time. "To show our commitment, we are willing to make a substantial investment in research and development."

This was a consequential moment for the new program, which lacked widespread support from Congress. The commercial initiative had only been created because the Obama administration tucked $50 million into its American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 for a new program start.

Enlarge (credit: Audi)

In August of last year, we were somewhat shocked when Audi confirmed that it would enter Formula 1 in 2026. Rumors had swirled for many years that Volkswagen Group was considering entering the sport with one or more of its brands, even as Audi and then Porsche racked up win after win in other categories. But those rumors never seemed to go anywhere, earning a kind of vaporware status similar to the infamous Duke Nukem Forever.

That game did eventually see the light of day, though, and so too will Audi's F1 ambitions when it takes over the Sauber team as F1 ushers in a new set of technical regulations. We recently spoke with Oliver Hoffmann, Audi's board member for technical development, who told us more about the company's F1 plans and how entering that sport should help some of its road cars.

Audi will be new to F1 when it joins the sport in three years, but it's certainly not new to motorsport. In the 1980s, it made a name for itself—and its "quattro" all-wheel drive technology—in the World Rally Championship. More recently, it dominated endurance racing for almost two decades, winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans 13 times between 2000 and 2016, plus two World Endurance Championships and nine American Le Mans Series championships. While doing so, it proved the value of new technology that transferred to its road cars—direct injection gasoline engines, direct injection turbo diesel engines, hybrid powertrains, and laser beam headlights, to name just a few.

Enlarge / A Maryland digital ID. (credit: Google)

Google Wallet on Android is finally getting ready for your digital driver's license and other US state IDs. Google says the feature is rolling out this month, and it will slowly start bringing states online this year. Of course, your state has to be one of the few that actually supports digital IDs. Google says Maryland residents can use the feature right now and that "in the coming months, residents of Arizona, Colorado and Georgia will join them."

The road to digital driver's license support has been a long one, with the "Identity Credential API" landing in Android 11 in 2020. Since then, it has technically been possible for states to make their own ID app. Now Google Wallet, Google's re-re-reboot of its payment app, is providing a first-party way to store an ID on your phone. Some parts of the Identity Credential API landed in Google Play Services (Google's version-agnostic brick of APIs), so Wallet supports digital IDs going back to Android 8.0, which covers about 90 percent of Android devices.

Maryland has supported Digital IDs on iOS for a while, which gives us an idea of how this will work. An NFC transfer is enough to beam your credentials to someone, where you can just tap against a special NFC ID terminal and confirm the transfer with your fingerprint. Wallet has an NFC option, along with a "Show code" option that will show the traditional driver's license barcode.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Twitter VP of Product Trust and Safety Ella Irwin resigned from the company yesterday, she confirmed to Reuters and other news outlets. Irwin's departure came on the same day that Twitter owner Elon Musk criticized his staff for restricting What Is a Woman?, a Daily Wire documentary on transgender issues.

Irwin took over as head of Twitter's trust and safety team after the November 2022 resignation of Yoel Roth. Twitter has massively reduced its staff under Musk's leadership and is facing scrutiny from regulators, particularly in the European Union, over its content moderation practices. Twitter executive A.J. Brown, the head of brand safety and ad quality, also left this week.

Twitter recently pulled out of the EU's voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation but must comply with the mandatory Digital Services Act rules taking effect on August 25. As European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton tweeted, "obligations remain. You can run but you can't hide. Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be [a] legal obligation under DSA as of August 25. Our teams will be ready for enforcement."