Sunday reads: Deadly recklessness, lies, and dangerous foods.

DVR and technofossils. [Gizmodo]( December 16, 2018 [The deadly recklessness of the self-driving car industry]( [Autonomous vehicles were supposed to make driving safer, and they may yet—some of the more optimistic research indicates self-driving cars could save tens of thousands of lives a year in the U.S. alone. But so far, a recklessness has defined the culture of the largest companies pursuing the technology—Uber, Google, and arguably even Tesla—and has led directly to unnecessary crashes, injury, even death. Let’s be clear about this, because it seems to me that these companies have gotten a bit of a pass for undertaking a difficult, potentially ‘revolutionary’ technology, and because blame can appear nebulous in car crashes, or in these cases can be directed toward the humans who were supposed to be watching the road. These companies’ actions (or sometimes, lack of action) have led to loss of life and limb. In the process, they have darkened the outlook for the field in general, sapping public trust in self-driving cars and delaying the rollout of what many hope will be a life-saving technology. The litany of failures of the most visible companies pursuing self-driving technologies underlines the fact that the safety of autonomous systems are only as good as the people and organizations building them.]( [EARTH SCIENCE]( [The fossils of the 21st century]( [For thousands of years, humans have been leaving technological artifacts behind. But since the mid-2oth century, advances in industrial manufacturing, economic globalization, and explosive population growth have conspired to exponentially increase the amount of techno-junk strewn across the Earth’s surface. As our waste piles up in landfills, sink to lake bottoms and settles onto the seafloor, some bits will broken down, either by physical and chemical processes or biology. But a portion of our trash won’t be recycled: Instead, it’ll get buried in sediment, which over time will become squished and chemically altered to make new rocks. Like shark teeth or dinosaur bones from eras past, our refuse won’t just be entombed in rock, it’ll become part of that rock.]( [GIZ ASKS]( [What's the most dangerous food of all time?]( [For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of food historians and anthropologists to nominate their candidates for the all-time most dangerous food. There was one sticky pattern, but mostly, their takes varied wildly; collectively they cover pretty much all of the non-fruit/vegetable parts of the food pyramid. If you like eating, and also enjoy being alive, you might want to take their opinions to heart. "Sugar’s dangers greatly exceed its malign effects on the bodies of those who eat it. The history of how we make sugar is one of the darkest chapters in human history. Production of the vast quantities of sugar that we now take for granted is entwined in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, and the deaths of millions of people. The majority of West Africans forcibly transported to the Americas in the centuries after Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean were brought to labour on the new world sugar plantations."]( [FACEBOOK]( [How Facebook schemed against its users]( [Last year, I was trying to solve a mystery. Facebook’s “People You May Know” tool was outing sex workers’ real identities to their clients, and vice versa, and I was trying to figure out how. A sex worker using the pseudonym Leila told me she had gone to great lengths to hide her identity from clients by using an alternate name, alternate email address, and burner phone number—contact information she didn’t provide to Facebook—yet Facebook was still inextricably linking her with her clients, suggesting them to her real-name account as people she might want to friend. Facebook expressed concern about this happening, but its spokespeople purported to be as mystified as I was as to how it happened. “We take privacy seriously and of course want to make sure people have a safe and positive experience on Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson told me at the time. “We test a variety of signals for People You May Know and suggestions are always based on multiple signals.”]( [ARCHAEOLOGY]( [Scientists virtually reconstruct magnificent pre-Incan temple]( [The 1,500-year-old Pumapunku temple in western Bolivia is considered a crowning achievement of Andean architecture, yet no one knows what the original structure actually looked like. Until now. Using historical data, 3D-printed pieces, and architectural software, archaeologist Alexei Vranich from UC Berkeley has created a virtual reconstruction of Pumapunku—an ancient Tiwanaku temple now in ruins. Archaeologists have studied the site for over 150 years, but it wasn’t immediately obvious how all the broken and scattered pieces belonged together. The surprisingly simple approach devised by Vranich is finally providing a glimpse into the structure’s original appearance. Excitingly, the same method could be used to virtually reconstruct similar ruins. The details of this achievement were published today in Heritage Science.]( [PRIVACY AND SECURITY]( [FBI secretly collected data on Aaron Swartz earlier than we thought—in a case involving Al Qaeda]( [Nearly two years before the U.S. government’s first known inquiry into the activities of Reddit co-founder and famed digital activist Aaron Swartz, the FBI swept up his email data in a counterterrorism investigation that also ensnared students at an American university, according to a once-secret document first published by Gizmodo. The email data belonging to Swartz, who was likely not the target of the counterterrorism investigation, was cataloged by the FBI and accessed more than a year later as it weighed potential charges against him for something wholly unrelated. The legal practice of storing data on Americans who are not suspected of crimes, so that it may be used against them later on, has long been denounced by civil liberties experts, who’ve called on courts and lawmakers to curtail the FBI’s “radically” expansive search procedures.]( [TELEVISION]( [io9 roundtable: Blog worlds collide as we break down the Elseworlds finale]( [Last night, the final part of the CW’s big DC crossover for the year, Elseworlds, aired its conclusion. It had everything it could possibly jam into 40 minutes of superhero TV, and then some—and ramifications for the entire Arrowverse so huge, we had to do a little bit of crossing over ourself to discuss it. Yes, joining your intrepid io9ers James Whitbrook and Alex Cranz this time is a special guest from Earth-Kotaku (a parallel reality eerily similar to our own, but with more snack reviews) is Mike Fahey, as we discuss the highs and lows of Supergirl’s addition to the Elseworlds party, what it all means for our heroes going forward, and that big teaser for what’s to come.]( [REVIEW]( [Amazon's DVR for over-the-air TV is surprisingly great]( [The Amazon Fire TV Recast is a wacky gadget. It’s not wacky in that it looks weird. (It’s just a simple black box.) It’s also not wacky because it does wacky stuff. (It’s a DVR for over-the-air TV.) The Recast is wacky because it does this one hyper-specific thing really well. I’m not sure why Amazon even wanted to make it, but serious cord cutters will be glad the company did. I should emphasize how incredibly focused this thing is. No Netflix or Hulu. No cable. The Recast plugs directly into a TV antenna and can record broadcast TV. There’s a 500-gigabyte model ($230) that has two tuners and can record two programs at a time. There’s also a 1-terabyte model ($280) with four tuners that does four programs at once. For now, you cannot record cable TV content. But if you’re a serious cord cutter, why would you want to?]( You made it to the end. Thanks for reading our newsletter! [Visit Gizmodo]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( [YouTube]( [Terms of Use]( | [Privacy Policy]( | [Unsubscribe]( © 2018 Gizmodo Media 114 5th Avenue, Floor 2 New York, NY, 10011