A man who was piloting a drone that collided with a firefighting aircraft working on the Palisades fire has agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, pay a fine and complete community service, federal prosecutors said Friday. Peter Tripp Akemann, 56, of Culver City was charged with unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft. He could still face up to a year in federal prison, prosecutors said. The drone, which authorities say was flying in restricted airspace on Jan. 9, put a fist-sized hole in the left wing of a Super Scooper -- a massive fixed-wing plane that can drop large amounts of water onto a fire. The collision knocked the plane out of commission for about five days and destroyed the drone.

Tülay McNally, director of inclusive design at Electronic Arts, chooses her words carefully as we chat about creating diverse characters for video games. Raised in Germany, McNally is no stranger to the international video game industry. She worked at Square Enix, Sega, and Bioware before joining EA. McNally's team at EA assists with the development of characters from underrepresented groups and with public communication. Her caution is warranted--Activision Blizzard was ripped to shreds a month before our interview for its reductive approach to video game diversity, one which assigned numerical scores to marginalization, turning identity into a kind of scorecard that developers could use to determine who they should include (or exclude) from character rosters.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday that Apple CEO Tim Cook refused to meet with him about a possible acquisition of his electric vehicle company when it was in dire straits. His claim came after the publication of a Reuters report that Apple is developing electric vehicle technology that could result in the production of a car for consumers or self-driving vehicle systems for automakers. If any of that comes to fruition, Apple would be competing directly with Tesla. "During the darkest days of the Model 3 program, I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla (for 1/10 of our current value)," Musk said on Twitter. "He refused to take the meeting."

Surveying the reactions to the latest revelation that Facebook played fast and loose with user data, it was hard not to harken back to what Scott McNally, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, told a group of reporters, including one from WIRED, in 1999: "You have zero privacy anyway. McNealy was widely excoriated for candor, but nearly twenty years later, we appear to be not only fighting the same fight but continually shocked that McNally's words, so jarring then, remain so true now. Zachary Karabell is a WIRED contributor and president of River Twice Research. This past spring, when it was revealed Facebook allowed campaign data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica to target users, it was grandly described as "Facebook's Privacy Crisis." When Facebook disclosed in September that hackers accessed the data of 30 million Facebook users, the massive breach that threw the public into a panic, prompting Facebook to assure the masses with messages that "Your privacy and security are important to us." And then, a few weeks later, when reports found that Facebook allowed select companies to access user posts and contact information without clear consent, commentary after commentary described this as "Yet Another Massive Privacy Scandal."