Technology

Disney fired director James Gunn from the set of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the company confirmed at Comic-Con this week. The move came after highly offensive joke tweets dating from between 2008 and 2011 resurfaced. The tweets, which have since been deleted, make light of topics ranging from molestation and rape to pedophilia.

&The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James& Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studiovalues, and we have severed our business relationship with him,& Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

Gunn, for his part, acknowledged the distasteful statements. The director, who helmed the first two installments of the Marvel franchise, tweeted a multi-part apology/explanation for the old tweets, in which he refers to himself as a &provocateur& during his early career.

&I used to make a lot of offensive jokes,& Gunn wrote. &I don&t anymore. I don&t blame my past self for this, but I like myself more and feel like a more full human being and creator today.Love you to you all.&

Prior to helming blockbuster superhero films, Gunn made a name directing films for Troma, the comedically offensive, aggressively B-movie studio behind films like The Toxic Avenger. The tweets resurfaced after being promoted by right-wing personalities like Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich.

Gunn has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration andtook to Twitter to weigh in on actor/director Mark Duplass& recent tweets about conservative pundit Ben Shapiro.

Update: Gunn has issued a statement that reflects and expands on his earlier Twitter apology,

My words of nearly a decade ago were, at the time, totally failed and unfortunate efforts to be provocative. I have regretted them for many years since — not just because they were stupid, not at all funny, wildly insensitive, and certainly not provocative like I had hoped, but also because they don&t reflect the person I am today or have been for some time.&

&Regardless of how much time has passed, I understand and accept the business decisions taken today. Even these many years later, I take full responsibility for the way I conducted myself then. All I can do now, beyond offering my sincere and heartfelt regret, is to be the best human being I can be: accepting, understanding, committed to equality, and far more thoughtful about my public statements and my obligations to our public discourse. To everyone inside my industry and beyond, I again offer my deepest apologies. Love to all.

As part of its ongoing mission to close the barn doors after the cows have got out, Facebook has suspended the accounts of British data analytics firm Crimson Hexagon over concerns that it may be improperly handling user data.

The ominously named company has for years used official APIs to siphon public posts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other sources online, collating and analyzing for various purposes, such as to gauge public opinion on a political candidate or issue. It has clients around the world, serving Russia and Turkey as well as the U.S. and United Kingdom.

Facebook, it seems, was not fully aware of the extent of Crimson Hexagonuse of user data, however, including in several government contracts which it didn&t have the opportunity to evaluate before they took effect. The possibility that the company is not complying with its data use rules, specifically that they may have been helping build surveillance tools, was apparently real enough for Facebook to take action. Perhaps the bar for suspension has been lowered somewhat over the last year, and with good reason.

&We are investigating the claims about Crimson Hexagon to see if they violated any of our policies,& said Facebook VP Product Partnerships Ime Archibong in a statement.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the suspension, noted that Crimson Hexagon currently has a contract with FEMA to monitor online discussion for various disaster-related purposes, but a deal with ICE fell through because Twitter resisted this application of their &firehose& data.

However, beyond the suggestion that the company has undertaken work that skirts the edge of what the social media companies consider appropriate use of public data, Crimson Hexagon doesn&t seem to have done anything as egregious as the wholesale network collection done by others. It restricts itself to publicly available data that it pays to access, and applies its own methods to produce its own brand of insight and intelligence.

The company also isn&t (at least, not obviously) a quasi-independent arm of a big, shady network of companies working actively to obscure their connections and deals, as Cambridge Analytica was. Crimson Hexagon is more above the board, with ordinary venture investment and partnerships. Its work is in a way similar to CA, in that it is gleaning insights of a perhaps troublingly specific nature from billions of public posts, but itat least doing it in full view.

As before, the onus of responsibility is equally on Facebook to enforce as it is on partners to engage in scrupulous handling of user data. Ithardly good data custodianship for Facebook to let companies take what they need under a handshake agreement that they&ll do no evil, and then take them to task years later when the damage has already been done. But that seems to be the companymain priority now: To reiterate the folksy metaphor from above, it is frantically counting the cows that have bolted while apologizing for having left the door open for the last decade or so.

Incidentally, Crimson Hexagon was co-founded by the same person who was put in charge of Facebooknew social science initiative: HarvardGary King. In a statement, he denied any involvement in the formereveryday work, although he is chairman. No doubt this connection will receive a bit of scrutiny on Facebookside as well.

Getting banned for cheating is nothing new in Pokémon GO. There&ve been big ol& ban waves every few weeks for ages now.

The policies have never been totally set in stone, however — at least not publicly. Like many of the gamemechanics, the player base has had to share info amongst themselves to figure out the offenses and their relative punishments, from slaps on the wrist to lifetime bans.

At long last, Niantic has published a proper &Three-Strike Discipline Policy.&

As the name implies, most infractions will be handled on a three-strike system. Niantic notes, however, that &some misbehaviors& (they leave that one pretty open-ended) will work out to an instant perma ban.

So whatworthy of a strike Spoofing (making the game think you&re somewhere you&re not), using modified Pokémon GO clients or bots or doing something that accesses Pokémon GObackend in an unauthorized way.

On the first strike, you&ll get a warning message. You&ll still be able to play, technically, but you won&t see anything even remotely rare for seven days.

On the second strike, they&ll close your account for a month.

On the third strike, the account is banned for good.

And if you think you got stuck in the crosshairs by accident Niantic has an appeal process for that.

Itworth noting that these punishments aren&t really new; bans of all variety have been happening since shortly after the gamerelease. This is just the first time Niantic has really put the hows-and-whys in stone.

Niantic could probably go a few steps further in their clarifications here, though, as plenty of players are still confused as to whether or not they&re breaking the rules.

Will they get in trouble for using third-party software (like an automated IV calculator) that doesn&t modify the client or access Nianticbackend but does provide the player with more info What about players using third-party versions of the Go Plus hardware, like the Go-tcha That thing pretty much automates catching/spinning as you walk around… but italso been sold in retail stores for years now, likely to many players who&ve never considered that this thing they bought in their local GameStop might not be allowed.