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Video edited by Jenifer Hahn. (video link)

OCOTILLO WELLS, Calif.—The area of the Southern California desert we were standing in made for a decent visual fill-in for the Red Planet—simply change the tint of the landscape and get rid of the sparse scrub on the nearby hillsides. At this site in a large, open-air mine near the Salton Sea, a few people in hard hats were gathered around a tall stand with a tether in the middle that dropped into a small hole in the ground.

The area was silent except for a hum of a large compressor. "That's for cooling," explained Kris Zacny, an engineer for Honeybee Robotics. "We won't need cooling on Mars."

Photos used in Dvach's doxing campaign. (credit: Tjournal.ru)

This story originally appeared on Global Voices Advocacy

The developers behind “FindFace,” which uses facial recognition software to match random photographs to people’s social media pages on Vkontakte, say the service is designed to facilitate making new friends. Released in February this year, FindFace started gaining popularity in March, after a software engineer named Andrei Mima wrote about using the service to track down two women he photographed six years earlier on a street in St. Petersburg. (They’d asked him to take a picture of them, but he never got their contact information, so he wasn’t able to share it with them, at the time.)

From the start, FindFace has raised privacy concerns. (Even in his glowing recommendation, Mima addressed fears that the service further erodes people’s freedoms in the age of the Internet.) In early April, a young artist named Egor Tsvetkov highlighted how invasive the technology can be, photographing random passengers on the St. Petersburg subway and matching the pictures to the individuals’ Vkontakte pages, using FindFace. “In theory,” Tsvetkov told RuNet Echo, this service could be used by a serial killer or a collector trying to hunt down a debtor.”

"All your friends are out of the game, Wolf! Don't make me shoot you down!" Thus begins A Fox In Space, the best fan-made Nintendo cartoon I've probably ever seen. (credit: Matthew Gafford / A Fox In Space)

After watching the first 12-minute episode of A Fox In Space, you'd be forgiven for thinking this was somehow an official Nintendo project. Maybe some hip promotions person at the big N thought an Adult Swim-caliber, '70s animation throwback series starring characters from the Star Fox games would make for some good PR—especially with a new Star Fox Wii U game hitting store shelves.

As it turns out, the above video wasn't made by Nintendo, or Adult Swim, or any established animation house, really. A Fox In Space is largely credited to a self-taught artist named Matthew Gafford, and in addition to serving as the cartoon's sole animator, he was also its scriptwriter, editor, director, soundtrack co-writer, and lead voice actor for most of the characters.

The result is a high-quality tale whose dark-comedy atmosphere and animation styles recall the best of Heavy Metal and Don Bluth. Episode one finds the series' rival faction, Star Wolf, exploiting a rare moment of Fox McCloud emotional weakness, and its opening Arwing battle montage gives way to a lower-key kidnapping plot. The voice acting is shockingly on-target for the aesthetic—and I'm particularly stunned by the animator pulling off such quality, different-sounding voices for Fox and Wolf—while the slow-but-simmering pacing still leaves room for a lot of impressive animation and beautiful scenery design. (Plus, I'm partial to the cartoon's gags about silly series elements like Fox's legs.)