Facebook announces steps to stop illegal gun sales

A man shows the smartphone photo sharing application Instagram on an iPhone on April 10, 2012 in Paris

Facebook is taking aim at people who are using the social network or Instagram photo-sharing platform to sell guns.

Under pressure from gun safety advocates, the social network will block members under 18 years of age from viewing pages or timeline posts reported to involve private sales of firearms and will set up online "checkpoints" warning people that such deals may be illegal.

And people offering guns for sale on Facebook will not be allowed to indicate that background checks are not required or that sales will be done across state lines without involving licensed firearms dealers, it said.

"We will not permit people to post offers to sell regulated items that indicate a willingness to evade or help others evade the law," Facebook head of global policy management Monika Bickert said in a blog post.

The California-based company said that it worked with New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman and advocacy groups to modify policies to fight illegal gun sales.

"Responsible social media sites know that it is in no one's interest for their sites to become a 21st century black market in dangerous and illegal goods that place our families and communities at risk," Schneiderman said in a statement praising Facebook's move.

Facebook and Instagram will remove content that represents a "direct, credible risk" to users and notify police when appropriate, according to Bickert.

Facebook's new rules also require people using social network pages to sell guns or other regulated items to display messages instructing buyers to obey applicable laws.

"By taking these unprecedented educational and enforcement steps, we've been able to strike an important balance in helping people express themselves, while promoting a safe and responsible community," she added.

The leading social network's hardened policy will also apply to its smartphone photo sharing service Instagram, where gun sellers had taken to showing pictures of wares tagged with terms such as #gunsforsale.

Legal rules regarding gun sales vary from state to state, while federal laws apply to cross-border transactions.

While Facebook and Instagram are not commerce websites, users are free to connect and buy or sell items to one another.

Facebook said it will work with advocacy groups to create a targeted ad campaign to teach social network members about gun laws.

Advocacy group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America founder Shannon Watts said 230,000 people signed a petition as part of a campaign calling for Facebook and Instagram to crack down on gun sales at the social networks.

"American moms are gratified that Facebook and Instagram have agreed to take meaningful steps to prevent illegal gun sales to children and dangerous people on its platforms," Watts said in a release.

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NEW RECORD IN DATA TRANSFER

New record set for data-transfer speeds

In the foreground are 2 Chalmers VCSELs. The one on the left has a 6 μm aperture and could operate error free up to 62 Gb/s while the one on the right has a 5 μm aperture and set the equipment limited record of 64 Gb/s. Behind the two VCSELs is IBM's BiCMOS8HP VCSEL driver IC. On either side of the IC are the decoupling capacitors and connecting wirebonds. Image: IBMResearchers at IBM have set a new record for data transmission over a multimode optical fiber, a type of cable that is typically used to connect nearby computers within a single building or on a campus. The achievement demonstrated that the standard, existing technology for sending data over short distances should be able to meet the growing needs of servers, data centers and supercomputers through the end of this decade, the researchers said.

Sending data at a rate of 64 gigabits per second (Gb/s) over a cable 57-m long using a type of laser called a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL), the researchers achieved a rate that was about 14% faster than the previous record and about 2.5 times faster than the capabilities of today's typical commercial technology.

To send the data, the researchers used standard non-return-to-zero (NRZ) modulation. “Others have thought that this modulation wouldn't allow for transfer rates much faster than 32 Gb/s,” said researcher Dan Kuchta of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Many researchers thought that achieving higher transmission rates would require turning to more complex types of modulation, such as pulse-amplitude modulation-4 (PAM-4).

"What we're showing is that that's not the case at all," Kuchta said. Because he and his colleagues achieved fast speeds even with NRZ modulation, he added, "this technology has at least one or two more generations of product life in it."

Kuchta will describe these results at the 2014 OFC Conference and Exposition, being held March 9-13 in San Francisco.

To achieve such high speeds, the researchers used the VCSEL lasers developed at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and custom silicon-germanium chips developed at IBM Research. “The receiver chip is a unique design that simultaneously achieves speeds and sensitivities well beyond today’s commercial offerings,” Kuchta explained. “The driver chip incorporates transmit equalization, which widens the bandwidth of the optical link. While this method has been widely used in electrical communication, it hasn't yet caught on in optical communication,” he said.

“Researchers typically rely on a rule of thumb that says the usable data-transfer rate is about 1.7 times the bandwidth,” Kuchta explained. “That means that with the VCSEL laser, which has a bandwidth of about 26 GHz, the rate would be only about 44 Gb/s.”

"What we're doing with equalization is we're breaking the historical rule of thumb," Kuchta said.

The fast speeds only worked for a distance of 57 m, so this technology isn't designed for sending data across continents. Instead, it's most suitable for transmitting data within a building, he said. About 80 percent of the cables at data centers and most, if not all, of the cables used for typical supercomputers are less than 50 meters long.

This new technology, Kuchta added, is ready for commercialization right now.

Presentation Th3C.2, titled “64Gb/s Transmission over 57m MMF using an NRZ Modulated 850nm VCSEL,” will take place Thursday, March 14 at 1:30 p.m. in room 121 of the Moscone Center.

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