Technology

I have to hand it to 8BitDo. At first I thought they were just opportunistically hawking cheap hunks of plastic in an era of unparalleled nostalgia for retro games, but… well, who am I kidding Thatexactly what they&re doing. But they&re doing it well. And these new DIY kits are the latest sign that they actually understand their most obsessive customers.

While you can of course purchase fully formed controllers and adapters from the company that let your retro consoles ride the wireless wave of the future, not everyone is ready to part with their original hardware.

I, for example, have had my Super Nintendo for 25 years or so — its yellowing, cracked bulk and controllers, all-over stains and teeth marks compelling all my guests to make an early exit. I consider it part of my placeunique charm, but more importantly I&m used to the way these controllers feel and look — they&re mine.

8BitDo understands me, along with the rest of the wretches out there who can&t part with the originals out of some twisted concept of loyalty or authenticity. So they&re giving us the option to replace the controllers& aging guts with a fresh new board equipped with wireless connectivity, making it a healthy hybrid of the past and present.

If you&re the type (as I am) that worries that a modern controller will break in ways that an SNES controller would find laughable, if it could laugh, then this will likely strike your fancy. All you do is take apart your gamepad (if you can stand to do so), pull out the original PCB (and save it, of course), and pop in the new one.

You&ll be using more or less all the same parts as these famously durable controllers came with (check out this teardown). The way the buttons feel shouldn&t change at all, since the mechanical parts aren&t being replaced, just the electronics that they activate. It runs on a rechargeable battery inside that you recharge with an unfortunately proprietary cable that comes with the kit.

If you&re worried about latency… don&t be. On these old consoles, control latency is already like an order of magnitude higher than a complete wireless packet round trip, so you shouldn&t notice any lag.

You will, however, need to pick up a Bluetooth adapter if you want to use this on your original console — but if you want to use the controller with a wireless-equipped setup like your computer, it should work flawlessly.

If you buy it and don&t like it, you can just slot the original PCB back into its spot and no harm is done!

There are conversion kits for the NES and SNES, the new Classic Editions of both, and the Sega Mega Drive. At $20 each ithardly a big investment, and the reversible nature of the mod makes it low risk. And hey, you might learn something about that controller of yours. Or find a desiccated spider inside.

In a rare moment of agreement, members of the House Judiciary Committee from both major political parties agreed that Facebook needed to take down Pages that bullied shooting survivors or called for more violence. The hearing regarding social media filtering practices saw policy staffers from Facebook, Google and Twitter answering questions, though Facebook absorbed the brunt of the ire. The hearing included Republican Representative Steve King ask &What about converting the large behemoth organizations that we&re talking about here into public utilities&

The meatiest part of the hearing centered on whether social media platforms should delete accounts of conspiracy theorists and those inciting violence, rather than just removing the offending posts.

The issue has been a huge pain point for Facebook this week after giving vague answers for why it hasn&t deleted known faker Alex Jones& Infowars Page, and tweeting that &We see Pages on both the left and the right pumping out what they consider opinion or analysis & but others call fake news.& FacebookHead of Global Policy Management Monica Bickert today reiterated that &sharing information that is false does not violate our policies.&

As I detailed in this opinion piece, I think the right solution is to quarantine the Pages of Infowars and similar fake news, preventing their posts or shares of links to their web domain from getting any visibility in the News Feed. But deleting the Page without instances of it directly inciting violence would make Jones a martyr and strengthen his counterfactual movement. Deletion should be reserved for those that blatantly encourage acts of violence.

Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Florida) asked about how Infowars& claims in YouTube videos that Parkland shootingsurvivors were crisis actors squared with the companypolicy. Google Global Head of Public Policy and Government Relations for YouTube Juniper Downs explained that &We have a specific policy that says that if you say a well-documented violent attack didn&t happen and you use the name or image of the survivors or victims of that attack, that is a malicious attack and it violates our policy.& She noted that YouTube has a &three strikes& policy, it is &demoting low-quality content and promoting more authoritative content,& and itnow showing boxes atop result pages for problematic searches, like &is the earth flat& with facts to dispel conspiracies.

Facebookanswer was much less clear. Bickert told Deutch that&We do use a strikes model. What that means is that if a Page, or profile, or group is posting content and some of that violates our polices, we always remove the violating posts at a certain point& (emphasis mine). Thatwhere Facebook became suddenly less transparent.

&It depends on the nature of the content that is violating our policies. At a certain point we would also remove the Page, or the profile, or the group at issue,& Bickert continued. Deutch then asked how many strikes conspiracy theorists get. Bickert noted that &crisis actors& claims violate its policy and its removes that content. &And we would continue to remove any violations from the Infowars Page.& But regarding Page-level removals, she got wishy-washy, saying, &If they posted sufficient content that it would violate our threshold, then the page would come down. The threshold varies depending on the different types of violations.&

&The threshold varies&

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) gave the conservatives& side of the same argument, citing two posts by the Facebook Page &Milkshakes Against The Republican Party& that called for violence, including one that saying &Remember the shooting at the Republican baseball game One of those should happen every week.&

While these posts have been removed, Gaetz asked why the Page hadn&t. Bickert noted that &Thereno place for any calls for violence on Facebook.& Regarding the threshold, she did reveal that &When someone posts an image of child sexual abuse imagery their account will come down right away. There are different thresholds for different violations.& But she repeatedly refused to make a judgement call about whether the Page should be removed until she could review it with her team.

Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Showing surprising alignment in such a fractured political era, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Florida said &I&m agreeing with the chairman about this and I think we arrived at the same exact same place when we were taking about at what threshold does Infowars have their Page taken down after they repeatedly denied the historical reality of massacres of children in public school.&

Facebook can&t rely on a shadowy &the threshold varies& explanation any more. It must outline exactly what types of violations incur not only post removal but strikes against their authors. Perhaps thatsomething like &one strike for posts of child sexual abuse, three posts for inciting violence, five posts for bullying victims or denying documented tragedies occurred, and unlimited posts of less urgently dangerous false information.&

Whatever the specifics, Facebook needs to provide specifics. Until then, both liberals and conservatives will rightly claim that enforcement is haphazard and opaque.

For more from todayhearing: