Indeed, the nanobots in this MIT research are primitive, but the present and future prospects look to be amazing. «The first [component of the aerosol] is a colloid, an extremely tiny insoluble particle or molecule…. The second part of the sensor is a complex circuit containing a chemical detector built from a two-dimensional material, such as graphene. When this detector encounters a certain chemical in its environment, its ability to conduct electricity improves. The circuit also contains a photodiode, a device that can convert ambient light into electric current. This provides all the electricity needed to power the circuit’s data collection and memory.» This is fascinating research, well explained in the link. It will open new doors.

It involves scraper bots and the ways in which retailers use them against rivals.

For retailers, scraping can be a two-way street, and that’s where things get interesting. Retailers want to see what their rivals are doing, but they want to prevent rivals from snooping on them; retailers also want to protect intellectual property like product photos and descriptions, which can be scraped and reused without permission by others. So many deploy defenses to subvert scraping. One technique: showing different prices to real people than to bots. A site may show the price as astronomically high or zero to throw off bots collecting data.

Machines making machines and fighting other machines. How perverse.

You can use Apple Pay for eBay purchases starting this fall. That’s great news for Apple and its contactless payment platform, but not so much for PayPal. From the Bloomberg piece:

EBay gives Apple Pay a credibility jolt in the digital wallet space that online shoppers have been slow to embrace since using credit cards online and in stores isn’t that difficult. EBay could shore up some sales for loyal iPhone users who occasionally back out of purchases when Apple Pay isn’t accepted. Apple gets a small fee from transactions made on the platform.

Of course, PayPal most likely saw this coming since eBay has been openly moving away from the online payment processing company since the two split in 2015.

Twitter is home to alt-right trolls, neo-Nazis, and then there’s Alex Jones. Will Oremus writes about Twitter’s free speech problem (problem is my opinion).

The Twitter executive leading these moderation efforts is Vijaya Gadde, the company’s legal, public policy, and trust and safety lead. I recently interviewed Gadde on Slate’s technology podcast, If Then, where we discussed Twitter’s current approach to harassment, hate speech, and misinformation; whether the social network’s very structure encourages these problems; and why conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones are still allowed to have Twitter accounts.

If you want to see a good example of platform moderation, look to r/AskHistorians on Reddit. Twitter and Facebook need to pay attention.