Technology

The New York City Council has voted in favor of a new law requiring Airbnb and similar home-share companies to share data on their users. The company has fought the law tooth and nail, but city authorities say itbasically common sense for the local government to be informed of the number and nature of residents using the service.

The law was characterized by the council as one that would &provide the City with an additional tool to enforce the laws against illegal short term rentals.&

&This bill is about transparency and bringing accountability to billion-dollar companies who are not being good neighbors,& explained NYC Councilwoman Carlina Rivera.

You can read the text here; what it amounts to is that Airbnb is required to collect and present the following information monthly:

• Name, physical address, email, Airbnb profile URL, and phone number of hosts active that month
• Addresses and URLs of any properties a given host rents out, and whether it was a full-home or partial-home rental
• Total days the property was rented, rent/price paid, and any fees collected by Airbnb

Failure to do so will result in a substantial fine: $1,500 or more per item, depending on the listing. Some of this data has already been provided voluntarily by Airbnb for a year and a half in monthly reports for its New York operations; hereone it totally coincidentally issued today.

It is however one thing to give statistics like average amount earned per month in this or that borough, and quite another to say Jane Jamison of 224 East 85th St. earned $3,712 from 12 nights at this address and 8 at her second place over in Brooklyn.

The granularity of the data matters. In the first case, Airbnb is in a position of power, voluntarily granting data more or less of its own choosing, while also protecting the privacy of its users. But in the second case, hosts can be identified individually for all kinds of purposes: fines, taxes, licenses, inspections and so on.

Itnot ideal for Airbnb or hosts, both of which will have their liberty curtailed considerably by the mere fact of their commerce being open for inspection by the city and potentially released publicly as part of studies, lawsuits and so on.

But as with so many other new industries that have gotten ahead of regulation, this kind of clampdown was inevitable from the start; how long did Airbnb really think it could get away with its limited disclosure of data so obviously valuable to local government fighting skyrocketing rents, property scams, unscrupulous landlords and so on

Airbnb says that the whole thing is bought and paid for by the hotel industry, which of course does have an enormous interest in keeping its thumb pressed firmly down on this new challenger.

&We&re not surprised the City Council refused to meet with their own constituents who rely on home sharing to pay the bills and then voted to protect the profits of big hotels,& Airbnb thundered in one of its usual bombastic statements. &The fix was in from the start and now New Yorkers will be subject to unchecked, aggressive harassment and privacy violations, rubber stamped by the City Council.&

But while Airbnb may be a young company, it is fabulously rich and extremely politically active, so this argument comes off as a bit disingenuous. We&ve seen similar rants from other unregulated companies as they run headlong into the red tape and inertia inherent to the establishment.

What the harassment and violations comprise isn&t clear. Certainly there is one man suing the city, saying he was targeted with housing code violations after speaking out against the proposed law; Airbnb is paying his legal fees.

But the city says its targets are bad actors, people running what amount to off-the-books hotels, renting units with unsafe conditions, or keeping housing units off the market for long-term residents so they can make a greater profit off visitors.

Thereno doubt that, armed with this more complete information, city authorities will have the opportunity to do legal and financial harm to the people who are taking part in this technically unsanctioned but largely harmless (and in many ways beneficial) business.

If they&re going to require this information to be disclosed, users of Airbnb and other services deserve to know exactly what it is going to be used for. Itnot enough to say that bad actors are being targeted when a man who opposed the city has $30,000 in fines leveled at him the next week.

Regulation is necessary for healthy and safe industry, and data is necessary for regulation, so this bill seems reasonable to me and to the city council members who voted for it in overwhelming majority. But itonly part of the puzzle; citizens should feel that their elected officials are acting to protect them, not expose them.

Rolls-Royce showed off its new vision for the future of engine maintenance this week at theFarnborough Airshow, and it might make your skin crawl.

As part of its IntelligentEngine vision (which the company announced at the Singapore Airshow earlier this year), it demonstrated plans for both a robotic snake and swarm of cockroach-like miniature robots that, in theory, will work together to inspect the interior of aircraft engines without removing the entire engine.

Neither technology is mature enough to be put into practice yet, but herehow it should work:

In partnership with Harvard University and the University of Nottingham, Rolls-Royce is working to build 10mm miniature, collaborative robots — called SWARM — that will be able to provide to the human operator a live video feed of an engine interior via small cameras.



While scaling these bots down to size will be a challenge for the company and its collaborators, ita challenge that Harvard University researchers have been working at for eight years now, according to a statement given by Harvard researcher Sebastien de Rivas at the show.

For SWARM to access the engines, these small bots will catch a ride with FLARE — a pair of endoscopic,snake-like robots that can slither inside the nooks and crannies of a large piece of machinery and deposit SWARM at the inspection point. The company also has plans for FLARE to carry out internal patch repairs.

In addition to these ambitious plans, Rolls-Royce also displayed slightly more mature technologies, including a network of periscope-like INSPECT bots, which they plan to permanently install inside engines for constant spot maintenance, as well as remote boreblending robots that can be controlled by specialist engineers to assist with complicated maintenance tasks.

These kinds of advancements in engineering could help lead to more cost-efficient maintenance of large crafts, where previously maintenance was driven by internal sensor data and carried out manually — a process that can last up to five hours, James Kell, Rolls-Royce on-wing technology specialist,told The Engineer. With robots like SWARM, Kell told the publication, the process could take as little as five minutes.

While the efficiency of these robotic assistants cannot be denied, the accuracy and reliability has yet to be demonstrated, and the level of comfort passengers have knowing their aircraft was inspected by an intelligent swarm of robotic bugs is still up in the air.

Facebook wants to expand your Messenger contact list with a little help from Instagram. The company has launched a feature in Messenger that pulls in your contacts from Instagram, if you opt to connect your account. The option appears in Messenger&People& tab, alongside the existing option to sync your phonecontacts with Messenger.

The feature was first spotted by Jane Manchun Wong, who posted a screenshot to Twitter.

Others outside the U.S. noticed the option as well.

We also found the option enabled in our own Messenger app, and have now confirmed with Facebook ita full public launch.

When you tap on &Connect Instagram,& Messenger adds contacts from Instagram automatically. In addition, your Instagram username and account also then becomes visible to other people on Messenger.

The result is an expanded social graph of sorts — one that combines the friends and family you know from Facebook, with those you know from Instagram.

Not everyone is thrilled with the feature, however.

As one Twitter user pointed out, itnot clear that pushing &Connect Instagram& (the buttontitle that appeared to some), means Messenger will automatically add your Instagram contacts to Messenger. It seems that you should be given a choice here as to if you want to add them, but thatnot the case.

In December 2017, TechCrunch spotted avery similar option to sync Instagram contacts to Messenger in the same People section. However, the option never launched to the public and later disappeared. But the recent re-emergence of the feature is not a continued test — itnow rolled out, Facebook says.

This is not the first time Facebook has added integrations between its apps.

For example, in 2016 it gave businesses access to a unified inboxof conversations from across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Last year, it also tested a cross-app notification feature. Thereeven an option to launch Facebook right in Instagram itself, via an icon on your Instagram profile page.

The timing of the launch is notable, given that Instagramown Direct Messaging service has become a popular communications service of its own.

Instagram Direct as of April 2017 had 375 million users, and wasspun off into its own standalone app last year in select countries outside the U.S. With so many users now messaging through Facebook-owned Instagram, itclear that Facebook wants to capitalize on that activity to grow its own Messenger app, too.