Facebook’s disappearing message saga is the act of a company in turmoil
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Facebook’s disappearing message saga is the act of a company in turmoil
First it came to light that Facebook had been deleting Mark Zuckerberg’s messages from inside Messenger chats, then the firm said it would turn the trick into a feature for everyone. Given its current predicament, no wonder it decided to.
Mark’s amazing messages: TechCrunch yesterday reported that some Facebook users ad found that conversations that they had held with Mark Zuckerberg on Messenger had been edited, so that the CEO’s messages were no longer visible. Facebook said it was done to protect Zuck’s communications, and in “full compliance” with its legal obligations.
Deletion for all: There was, rightly, outcry at the news—that Zuck and his fellow execs should get such privileges when using the same system as others, and at the fact that it meant Facebook was directly tampering with inboxes. Now, Facebook has told TechCrunch that, actually, it will roll out a feature so that everyone can unsend messages in the next few months. (And Zuck won’t be able to delete any until then.)
Why it matters: Facebook is in major damage-limitation mode in the wake of its huge data scandal, with Zuck blitzing the press this past week with new announcements. Why? To have a raft of new privacy measures in place that he can point to when he testifies to Congress on April 11. The disappearing message saga is another example of how the firm is doing all it can to calm any controversy, as lawmakers decide whether to regulate his social network.
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Watch Virgin Galactic’s new SpaceshipTwo take flight
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As Virgin Galactic continues its quest to "open" space flight, it completed its first powered test flight since the 2014 crash that killed one of its pilots. Now we have video of the new SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, separating from its carry vehicle and using its rocket to reach supersonic speeds. It hit Mach 1.87 during its 30-second rocket burn and then coasted until reaching an altitude of 84,271 ft before preparing for its return.
Hot-air dryers suck in bacteria and hardy bacterial spores loitering in the bathroom—perhaps launched into the air by whooshing toilet flushes—and fire them directly at your freshly cleaned hands, according to a study published in the April issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The authors of the study, led by researchers at the University of Connecticut, found that adding HEPA filters to the dryers can reduce germ-spewing four-fold. However, the data hints that places like infectious disease research facilities and healthcare settings may just want to ditch the dryers and turn to trusty towels.
Indeed, in the wake of the blustery study—which took place in research facility bathrooms around UConn—”paper towel dispensers have recently been added to all 36 bathrooms in basic science research areas in the UConn School of Medicine surveyed in the current study,” the authors note.
The research findings largely square with other data showing that hot-air dryers and jet dryers can launch and disperse germs from hands into the air and onto surfaces—essentially setting off a very dirty bathroom bomb. But the new study clearly demonstrates that the less powerful hot-air dryers can also bathe hands with germs already swirling in the wash room.
The researchers speculated that “one reason hand dryers may disperse so many bacteria is the large amount of air that passes through hand dryers, 19,000 linear feet/min at the nozzle. The convection generated by high airflow below the hand dryer nozzles could also draw in room air.”
Commode commotion
The researchers landed on that speculation by first placing plates of gelled bacteria food (agar media plates) in some of UConn’s bathrooms—either for two minutes without hot-air dryers blowing or blasting them with dryer air for 30 seconds while they were 12 inches from the nozzle. If bacteria landed on the plates, they’d begin to grow tiny, domed colonies, which researchers can then count.
In the still bathrooms, the researchers caught an average of zero to one bacterial landings per plate. When they left the plates open for 18 hours, that average leapt to 6 colonies per plate. But in the line of fire from the blowers for 30 seconds, the plates collected averages from 18 to 60, with a range as high as 254 depending on the bathroom.
The researchers concluded that those launched germs were originating from around the bathroom—not the air dryer nozzles themselves. They deduced this because the bacterial splatter could be replicated by placing tiny, sterile fans around the bathrooms (after accounting for rates of air flow and exposure times). Retrofitting the dryers with HEPA filters reduced the germ count about four-fold.
A unique ripple in the study was that the bathrooms were in the vicinity of a lab studying the harmless spore-forming bacterium Bacillus subtilis strain PS533. Though B. subtilis is a common environmental bug, this lab strain has a distinctive resistance to the antibiotic kanamycin. The researchers could easily pick it out of their bathroom samples by simply growing collected toilet germs in the presence of kanamycin—the survivors were likely PS533 and confirmed by further testing. The researchers ended up finding PS533 milling about in all the bathrooms tested—even the ones in different buildings from the lab.
Brutal blowout
Perhaps most concerning, the researchers found that the air dryers were spreading the spores of PS533. They tested this by exposing their potty germ collections to heat—which will kill growing bacteria and germinated spores but not the spores themselves—then seeing if any spores grew. They did. The researchers then found that the hand dryers were spewing spores onto the surfaces of the bathroom.
PS533 “was almost certainly dispersed throughout bathrooms in the research areas as spores, which would easily survive desiccation in room air, as well as the elevated temperatures in hand dryer air; however, growing or stationary-phase bacteria would not be nearly so hardy as spores,” the authors note. “However, the facile dispersion of one bacterial strain throughout a research facility should probably be a concern to risk assessors and risk managers when dispersion of potentially pathogenic bacteria is considered.”
In a final test, the researchers did a cursory look at some of the other bacteria the dryers were blowing around. They found that with or without a HEPA filter, the blowers stirred up potential pathogens, including Staphylococcus aureus.
The findings should be a wake-up call to managers of research and clinical settings. The authors note that Clostridium difficile—a devastating and intractable diarrheal plague—also forms spores, and researchers have found that a flushing toilet can easily launch it into the air.
“This suggests another means of C. difficile transmission and one that may not be interrupted by either hand washing or traditional surface decontamination methods,” the authors conclude. “The role of this potential mode of C. difficile transmission is worthy of future study.”
Facebook admits Zuckerberg wiped his old messages—which you can’t do
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Facebook has been quietly deleting old messages from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg out of their recipients’ Facebook Messenger inboxes, the company has acknowledged. This isn’t an option available to ordinary users. Users can delete their own copy of a Messenger conversation, but if they do the other party will retain his or her own copy.
“Three sources confirm to TechCrunch that old Facebook messages they received from Zuckerberg have disappeared from their Facebook inboxes, while their own replies to him conspicuously remain,” Techcrunch’s Josh Constine wrote.
Facebook argues that it has done nothing wrong.
“After Sony Pictures’ emails were hacked in 2014, we made a number of changes to protect our executives’ communications,” the company told Techcrunch. “These included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages in Messenger. We did so in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages.”
While deleting the messages may not have been illegal, it is going to raise some eyebrows. For weeks, Facebook has faced criticism for appearing to put its own financial interests ahead of the privacy interests of users in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Now we’re learning that Facebook has essentially created a two-tier system of privacy for Messenger users: Zuckerberg and a handful of other Facebook executives enjoy a limited “retention period” of their messages, whereas the embarrassing messages of ordinary users live on as long as their recipients want to keep them.
Zuckerberg has a history of having old, embarrassing instant messaging conversations come back to haunt him.
“Yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard just ask,” Zuckerberg wrote shortly after the site’s 2004 launch as a social network for Harvard students. “I have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns.”
“How’d you manage that one?” the friend asks.
“People just submitted it,” Zuckerberg replied. “I don’t know why. They ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks.”
Presumably Zuckerberg has become more circumspect in recent years, so the deleted Messenger messages probably don’t contain anything quite that embarrassing. But with ever-increasing scrutiny into Facebook’s business practices, it’s not hard to see why Zuckerberg would want to minimize his paper trail.