Facebook parent Meta has raised the price of its Quest 2 virtual reality headset by $100, as the company reckons with inflationary pressures. From a report: Starting Aug. 1, the 128 GB version of the Quest 2 will cost $399, while the 256 GB model will cost $499, Meta said. The company said it hiked the price of the VR headset "in order to continue investing in moving the VR industry forward for the long term." Meta added in a corporate blog post that "the costs to make and ship our products have been on the rise. By adjusting the price of Quest 2, we can continue to grow our investment in groundbreaking research and new product development that pushes the VR industry to new heights."

Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon launched a public effort Monday to scrap the leap second, an occasional extra tick that keeps clocks in sync with the Earth's actual rotation. US and French timekeeping authorities concur. From a report: Since 1972, the world's timekeeping authorities have added a leap second 27 times to the global clock known as the International Atomic Time (TAI). Instead of 23:59:59 changing to 0:0:0 at midnight, an extra 23:59:60 is tucked in. That causes a lot of indigestion for computers, which rely on a network of precise timekeeping servers to schedule events and to record the exact sequence of activities like adding data to a database.

The temporal tweak causes more problems -- like internet outages -- than benefits, they say. And dealing with leap seconds ultimately is futile, the group argues, since the Earth's rotational speed hasn't actually changed much historically. "We are predicting that if we just stick to the TAI without leap second observation, we should be good for at least 2,000 years," research scientist Ahmad Byagowi of Facebook parent company Meta said via email. "Perhaps at that point we might need to consider a correction."

Tuned, Meta's social app for couples, is winding down a little over two years after it launched. TechCrunch: Users, including this reporter, began receiving a notification about the impending shutdown last week, advising them to download their data before September 19 when the app will cease to work. Tuned was a project under Meta's New Product Experimentation (NPE) Team, which was originally formed to build consumer-facing apps that would allow Meta to test out new features and gauge people's reactions. Launched in the early months of the pandemic, Tuned was positioned as a way for couples to stay in touch and engaged, with messaging features and quizzes designed to let them share how they're feeling, what they're up to and milestones they're anticipating. Tuned allowed users to exchange notes, photos and videos, challenges, voice messages, notes and lists, and music via a Spotify integration. They could set their respective moods, and -- for more intimate content -- choose a password or a blur filter. A "check-in" feature nudged couples to suss out their feelings about the relationship in any given moment, with prompts to add context.

A worldwide shortage of fibre optic cable has driven up prices and lengthened lead times, endangering companies' ambitious plans to roll out state of the art telecommunications infrastructure. From a report: Europe, India and China are among the regions most affected by the crunch, with prices for fibre rising by up to 70 per cent from record lows in March 2021, from $3.70 to $6.30 per fibre km, according to Cru Group, a market intelligence firm. Although the pandemic prompted some of the biggest tech and telecoms groups to slash their capex, there has been a surge in demand for internet and data services, leading to a shortfall in availability of the crucial but often overlooked material.

Companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook owner Meta are expanding their data centre empires to meet soaring demand, including laying vast international fibre networks under the ocean. Meanwhile, governments have set ambitious targets for the rollout of superfast broadband and 5G, both of which require vast quantities of fibre optic cable to be laid under the ground. Total cable consumption increased by 8.1 per cent in the first half of the year compared with the same time last year, according to Cru estimates. China accounted for 46 per cent of the total, with North America representing the fastest growing region, at 15 per cent year on year.

Tech companies should move ahead with controversial technology that scans for child abuse imagery on users' phones, the technical heads of GCHQ and the UK's National Cybersecurity Centre have said. From a report: So-called "client-side scanning" would involve service providers such as Facebook or Apple building software that monitors communications for suspicious activity without needing to share the contents of messages with a centralised server. Ian Levy, the NCSC's technical director, and Crispin Robinson, the technical director of cryptanalysis -- codebreaking -- at GCHQ, said the technology could protect children and privacy at the same time.

"We've found no reason why client-side scanning techniques cannot be implemented safely in many of the situations one will encounter," they wrote in a discussion paper published on Thursday, which the pair said was "not government policy." They argued that opposition to proposals for client-side scanning -- most famously a plan from Apple, now paused indefinitely, to scan photos before they are uploaded to the company's image-sharing service -- rested on specific flaws, which were fixable in practice. They suggested, for instance, requiring the involvement of multiple child protection NGOs, to guard against any individual government using the scanning apparatus to spy on civilians; and using encryption to ensure that the platform never sees any images that are passed to humans for moderation, instead involving only those same NGOs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A video started circulating on Twitter Thursday of a Boston Dynamics-style robot dog firing a submachine gun into targets amid a snowy backdrop. This type of robot dog (it doesn't seem like the robot in the video is a Boston Dynamics Spot, just looks a lot like it) is famous for dancing, but now appears to have fulfilled every warning given by journalists and analysts. It's got a gun and it's ready to kill. A lot of questions remain. First, the robot dog doesn't seem to be able to handle the recoil of the gun well. As it fires its rounds, the barrel trails up and the dog has to take a minute to get its balance back. We also don't know if the dog is firing on its own or if, and this is more likely, someone is off-camera pulling the trigger remotely.

The robot's feet, various ports, and its front are completely different from Boston Dynamics' Spot. There's dozens of knockoffs of the Boston Dynamics dog selling on the international market. The one in the video appears to be a UnitreeYusu "technology dog" selling on AliExpress for about $3,000. The feet, port placement, and joint coverings are all the same. The robot also has strips of Velcro on either of its flanks. The left flank bears a Russian flag and the other appears with a wolf's head. In another video on the channel, a man wears a similar patch on his arm. It appears to be a wolf's head insignia commonly associated with Russian Special Operations Forces or Spetsnaz. That doesn't mean that Spetsnaz is using armed robot dogs, as pretty much anyone can buy a similar patch online in various places.

The gun is also Russian. It appears to be a PP-19 Vityaz, a submachine gun based on the AK-74 design. As the dog wanders around and fires, it sometimes moves in front of an armored personnel carrier with a unique triangular door. That's a BDRM-2, a Russian armored car that's been spotted recently in Ukraine. Finally, there's the account the video originally appeared on. Before making its way to Twitter, the video of the dog was posted to the YouTube account of Alexander Atamov on March 22, 2022. Atamov is listed on his LinkedIn profile as the founder of "HOVERSURF" and his Facebook page lists him as living in Moscow. He posted a picture of the robot dog on March 21. According to Facebook's translation of his post, he called the dog "Skynet."

Facebook parent Meta Platforms is changing the way it shows users posts and videos on its flagship social network, part of an effort to get people to watch content from accounts they don't already follow and better compete with the video app TikTok. From a report: The main feed on Facebook will now be called "Home," and will be a place for people to "discover new content" that Facebook thinks that they'll like, according to a company blog post. That includes photos and videos selected by software algorithms, which will surface content based on users' interests, from both accounts they follow and those they don't.

The changes will start Thursday, but the majority of the content will still come from accounts users follow, a Meta spokeswoman said. The company plans to increase the new content it shows over time as it improves the recommendation algorithm. A new tab, called "Feeds," will exclusively show posts from friends, family, pages and groups that a person has chosen to follow, with the most recent content at the top. "Your Home tab is uniquely personalized to you," the company explained in its blog. "This system takes into account thousands of signals to help cut through the clutter and rank content in the order we think you will find most valuable."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg will have to provide testimony to a federal court to discuss their alleged involvement in the company's notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, over half a decade since it first captured the world's attention. [...] Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm that used Facebook user data to target and lobby potential voters ahead of the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump. The ensuing scandal helped trigger an investigation from the Federal Trade Commission that resulted in Facebook agreeing to a record-setting $5 billion settlement over its privacy practices.

A new filing (PDF) in the Northern District of California Tuesday shows Zuckerberg and Sandberg agreed to be deposed for six and five hours respectively in September of this year. This comes as part of a class action lawsuit filed against Meta, claiming the company violated consumer privacy laws when it shared user data with Cambridge Analytica back in 2015. [...] In addition to Zuckerberg and Sandberg, the court's also seeking to depose Meta's newly named CTO Javier Olivan -- who previously served as the company's Chief Growth Officer -- as well as a handful of other "key witnesses." Olivan's deposition is expected to last three hours. According to Tuesday's filing Meta will also hand over 1,200 documents "previously withheld as privileged." Plaintiffs in the case previously accused Meta and the law firm representing it of "stonewalling," during the court's discovery phase.

An installation-art company called META (or Meta.is) announced Tuesday that it will be suing Meta (or Facebook) for trademark violation, alleging that Zuckerberg's name change violated the smaller company's established brand. The Verge reports: "On October 28, 2021, Facebook seized our META mark and name, which we put our blood, sweat, and tears into building for over twelve years," reads a post on the smaller company's site. "Today, after eight months of trying to negotiate with Facebook in good faith to no avail, we were left with no choice but to file a lawsuit against them."

Much of the case hinges on Facebook's many privacy scandals, which Meta.is argues has made it impossible to share the name. "Meta can no longer provide goods and services under the META mark," the complaint argues, "because consumers are likely to mistakenly believe that Meta's goods and services emanate from Facebook and that Meta is associated with the toxicity that is inextricably linked with Facebook."

Meta.is holds a valid trademark for the name but may still be facing an uphill battle in court, given the broad range of trademark applications Facebook has made since the name change became official -- including separate marks for messaging, social networks, and financial services. There are also a number of trademarks claiming the Meta name for non-tech products, including a hard seltzer and manufacturer of prosthetic limbs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon filed a lawsuit Monday against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups that coordinate cash or goods for buyers willing to post bogus product reviews. The global groups served to recruit would-be fake reviewers and operated in Amazon's online storefronts in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Japan and Italy. If 10,000 Facebook groups sounds like a lot, it's apparently the sum total of groups Amazon has reported to Facebook since 2020. The company notes that past legal action it's taken has been effective and "shut down multiple major review brokers," and yet here we are. They've been suing people for this stuff since all the way back in 2015.

The company named one group, "Amazon Product Review," which boasted more than 40,000 members until Facebook removed it earlier in 2022. That one evaded detection through the time-honored, AI-eluding strategy of swapping a few letters around in phrases that would get it busted. Amazon says that it will leverage the discovery process to "identify bad actors and remove fake reviews commissioned by these fraudsters that haven't already been detected by Amazon's advanced technology, expert investigators and continuous monitoring." The monitoring might be continuous but it's clear that thousands and thousands of illegitimate reviews push products across the online retailer's massive digital storefront every day, all around the world. And regulators are taking notice -- something that's bound to light a little fire under everyone's favorite online shopping monolith.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Exactly 10 years ago today, Microsoft completed its $1.2 billion purchase of Yammer, an enterprise-focused social networking platform. Despite a big Yammer overhaul in 2019, Microsoft has been increasingly focused on Teams and its new Viva platform as the hubs of communication in workplaces. Microsoft is now launching Viva Engage today, a new Facebook-like app inside Teams that encourages social networking at work.

Viva Engage builds on some of the strengths of Yammer, promoting digital communities, conversations, and self-expression in the workplace. While Yammer often feels like an extension of SharePoint and Office, Viva Engage looks like a Facebook replica. It includes a storylines section, which is effectively your Facebook news feed, featuring conversational posts, videos, images, and more. It looks and feels just like Facebook, and it's clearly designed to feel similar so employees will use it to share news or even personal interests.

Alphabet's Google and Meta Platforms's Facebook have submitted to Indonesian regulations that grant Jakarta sweeping powers to shut down content it deems undesirable and tax digital sales. From a report: The US giants were among the last of several internet media platforms that submitted official business registrations in Indonesia, effectively endorsing the new rules. Netflix, Spotify Technology, Meta Platforms' Instagram and ByteDance-owned TikTok have also registered, according to Indonesia's information ministry. Social media operators are facing increasing scrutiny from governments around the world as their market dominance grows. The Indonesia regulations allow the government to block services that fail to remove within 24 hours content that could potentially "incite unrest" or "disturb public order," such as those that promote child pornography or support terrorism. They also allow the government to levy a value-added tax on the sale of digital goods, from content to virtual items.

"Facebook has started to use a different URL scheme for site links," writes the technology blog Ghacks, "to combat URL stripping technologies that browsers such as Firefox or Brave use to improve privacy and prevent user tracking." Some sites, including Facebook, add parameters to the web address for tracking purposes. These parameters have no functionality that is relevant to the user, but sites rely on them to track users across pages and properties. Mozilla introduced support for URL stripping in Firefox 102, which it launched in June 2022. Firefox removes tracking parameters from web addresses automatically, but only in private browsing mode or when the browser's Tracking Protection feature is set to strict. Firefox users may enable URL stripping in all Firefox modes, but this requires manual configuration. Brave Browser strips known tracking parameters from web addresses as well....

It is no longer possible to remove the tracking part of the URL, as Facebook merged it with part of the required web address.

Reuters reports: Amazon.com Inc is pausing the construction of six new office buildings in Bellevue and Nashville to reevaluate the designs to suit hybrid work, the tech giant said on Friday... "The pandemic has significantly changed the way people work ... Our offices are long-term investments and we want to make sure that we design them in a way that meets our employees' needs in the future," said John Schoettler, vice president of Global Real Estate and Facilities at Amazon.

Separately, Bloomberg News reported on Friday that Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Amazon have pulled back on their office expansion plans in New York City.... "The past few years have brought new possibilities around the ways we connect and work," a Meta spokesperson told Reuters without confirming or denying the report.
Various news sites seems to have different pieces of the story. On Hawaii's most populous island Oahu, the office vacancy rate is now 14% — the highest level ever recorded.

And this week a tech founder admitted in Fast Company that after converting to a hybrid company, "we're just as productive as we were before the pandemic (if not more so). Our engineering team's engagement has remained strong, and we've actually seen a boost in retention since the transition to hybrid work....

"Our transition from in-person, to remote, and now to hybrid work has reinforced the value of staying open-minded to innovation not just in our products, but also in how we work."

The Washington Post reports: In the frantic first weeks of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. tech companies that control the world's largest information hubs sprang into action. Responding to pressure from Western governments, social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube banned or throttled Russian state media accounts, beefed up their fact-checking operations, curtailed ad sales in Russia and opened direct lines to Ukrainian officials, inviting them to flag Russian disinformation and propaganda to be taken down.

As the war grinds toward its sixth month, however, Russian propaganda techniques have evolved — and the tech firms haven't kept up.

Ukrainian officials who have flagged thousands of tweets, YouTube videos and other social media posts as Russian propaganda or anti-Ukrainian hate speech say the companies have grown less responsive to their requests to remove such content. New research shared with The Washington Post by a Europe-based nonprofit initiative confirms that many of those requests seem to be going unheeded, with accounts parroting Kremlin talking points, spewing anti-Ukrainian slurs or even impersonating Ukrainian officials remaining active on major social networks. As a result, researchers say, Kremlin-backed narratives are once again propagating across Europe, threatening to undermine popular support for Ukraine in countries that it views as critical to its defense....

With big state media accounts suspended or muffled, researchers say Russian leaders and influencers have shifted to the semiprivate messaging app Telegram to direct information campaigns via swarms of smaller accounts.
The Post reports that Google-owned YouTube hasn't returned emails for almost two months, according to the deputy head of the Ukrainian government's Strategic Communications and Information Security center. And the Post notes that researchers found LinkedIn "removed fewer than half of the posts that Ukrainian officials flagged as examples of Russian propaganda justifying the war....

"On the positive side, the researchers found that Facebook had removed all 98 of the posts the Ukrainian government and its partners flagged as containing anti-Ukrainian hate speech, though many of the accounts responsible remained active."

"A growing number of cities and towns all over the U.S. are handing out cash grants and other perks aimed at drawing skilled employees of faraway companies to live there and work remotely," reports the Wall Street Journal: A handful of such programs have existed for years, but they have started gaining traction during the pandemic — and have really taken off in just the past year or so. Back in October there were at least 24 such programs in the U.S. Today there are 71, according to the Indianapolis-based company MakeMyMove, which is contracted by cities and towns to set up such programs.

Because these programs specifically target remote workers who have high wages, a disproportionate share of those who are taking advantage of them work in tech — and especially for big tech companies. Companies whose employees have participated in one remote worker incentive program in Tulsa, Oklahoma, include Adobe, Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, Dell, Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Lyft, Netflix, Oracle and Siemens, according to a spokeswoman for the organization.

Local governments are offering people willing to move up to $12,000 in cash, along with subsidized gym memberships, free babysitting and office space....

A skeptic might ask why local economic development programs are spending funds to subsidize the lives of people who work for some of the most valuable companies in the world. On the other hand, because these remote workers aren't coming to town seeking local jobs, an argument can be made that they constitute a novel kind of stimulus program for parts of the country that have been left out of the tech boom — courtesy of big tech companies... Every remote worker these places successfully attract and retain is like gaining a fraction of a new factory or corporate office, with much less expenditure and risk, argues Mark Muro, who studies cities and labor at the Brookings Institution.
The reporter interviewed an Amazon engineer who moved to Greensburg, Indiana (population: 12,193), and Meta worker David Gora, who moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma and praises its relocation program's sense of mission, possibility, and community. "Even with the pay cuts that Meta has imposed on workers who relocate to areas with a lower cost of living, Mr. Gora is saving a lot more money and has a much higher quality of life than before, he adds."

Tulsa's program is unique in that it's funded by a philanthropic organization rather than a local economic-development budget, the article points out. But it adds that "a study conducted by the Economic Innovation Group and commissioned by Tulsa Remote concluded that for every two people the program brings to the city, one new job is created." By contrast, when an office moves to a town, every new high-wage tech job creates an estimated five more jobs in sectors including healthcare, education and service, according to research by economist Enrico Moretti. That's because those deals involve not only people but the money that goes into building and maintaining facilities, paying commercial property taxes and more.

Still, for towns that don't have the budget to attract a whole office or factory, the modest impact of bringing in a handful of remote tech workers can be balanced by the much smaller investment required to attract them.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: [R]esearchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology are warning this week about a novel technique attackers could use to de-anonymize website visitors and potentially connect the dots on many components of targets' digital lives. The findings (PDF), which NJIT researchers will present at the Usenix Security Symposium in Boston next month, show how an attacker who tricks someone into loading a malicious website can determine whether that visitor controls a particular public identifier, like an email address or social media account, thus linking the visitor to a piece of potentially personal data.

When you visit a website, the page can capture your IP address, but this doesn't necessarily give the site owner enough information to individually identify you. Instead, the hack analyzes subtle features of a potential target's browser activity to determine whether they are logged into an account for an array of services, from YouTube and Dropbox to Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and more. Plus the attacks work against every major browser, including the anonymity-focused Tor Browser. "If you're an average internet user, you may not think too much about your privacy when you visit a random website," says Reza Curtmola, one of the study authors and a computer science professor at NJIT. "But there are certain categories of internet users who may be more significantly impacted by this, like people who organize and participate in political protest, journalists, and people who network with fellow members of their minority group. And what makes these types of attacks dangerous is they're very stealthy. You just visit the website and you have no idea that you've been exposed."

How this de-anonymization attack works is difficult to explain but relatively easy to grasp once you have the gist. Someone carrying out the attack needs a few things to get started: a website they control, a list of accounts tied to people they want to identify as having visited that site, and content posted to the platforms of the accounts on their target list that either allows the targeted accounts to view that content or blocks them from viewing it -- the attack works both ways. Next, the attacker embeds the aforementioned content on the malicious website. Then they wait to see who clicks. If anyone on the targeted list visits the site, the attackers will know who they are by analyzing which users can (or cannot) view the embedded content. [...] Complicated as it may sound, the researchers warn that it would be simple to carry out once attackers have done the prep work. It would only take a couple of seconds to potentially unmask each visitor to the malicious site -- and it would be virtually impossible for an unsuspecting user to detect the hack. The researchers developed a browser extension that can thwart such attacks, and it is available for Chrome and Firefox. But they note that it may impact performance and isn't available for all browsers.

Europeans risk seeing social media services Facebook and Instagram shut down this summer, as Ireland's privacy regulator doubled down on its order to stop the firm's data flows to the United States. From a report: The Irish Data Protection Commission on Thursday informed its counterparts in Europe that it will block Facebook-owner Meta from sending user data from Europe to the U.S. The Irish regulator's draft decision cracks down on Meta's last legal resort to transfer large chunks of data to the U.S., after years of fierce court battles between the U.S. tech giant and European privacy activists.

The European Court of Justice in 2020 annulled an EU-U.S. data flows pact called Privacy Shield because of fears over U.S. surveillance practices. In its ruling, it also made it harder to use another legal tool that Meta and many other U.S. firms use to transfer personal data to the U.S., called standard contractual clauses (SCCs). This week's decision out of Ireland means Facebook is forced to stop relying on SCCs too. Meta has repeatedly warned that such a decision would shutter many of its services in Europe, including Facebook and Instagram.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Despite the name change and metaverse hyperbole, Facebook has always been at the center of the Meta suite of software for users engaging with its wider ecosystem. While that may continue to be the case indefinitely, it's clear the company is taking steps to ensure that its next swath of users aren't tied to a network that may still pay the bills but isn't where the company sees its reinvention. Next month, the company will be introducing a new type of login called a Meta account that will allow users to engage with products that previously might have required a Facebook account to use.

At launch, users will be able to use their Meta account to sign up for and log in to the company's Quest hardware, functionality that will come to other Meta devices in the future, the company says. Users can choose to link their Meta account to their Facebook and Instagram accounts as well, or not. Unlike Facebook accounts, users are free to have multiple Meta accounts, the company says. This change addresses the concerns of some VR users who complained about various quirks of relying on a private social media profile login to play video games. While plenty of users were concerned by privacy implications, others were frustrated by more organizational issues related to combining the two accounts with separate friends lists, settings and rules. By the beginning of next year, Meta accounts will be the standard login for VR users.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A recent media release from market research firm IDC predicts that Meta (the parent company of Facebook) may not be able to compete in the mixed-reality business in the long run if its strategy remains unchanged. The media release offers a bird's-eye view of the virtual reality hardware marketplace. In the release, IDC research manager Jitesh Ubrani said that, while "Meta continues to pour dollars into developing the metaverse, [the company's] strategy of promoting low-cost hardware at the expense of profitability isn't sustainable in the long run."

A similar concern was raised by tech industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo late last month. Kuo predicted that Meta would make moves to scale down investment in virtual reality, creating an opening for Apple and other competitors. He also wrote that Meta's practice of selling VR headsets at a loss is unsustainable. Currently, Meta owns 90 percent of the VR headset market, according to the IDC release. In distant second is ByteDance's Pico, at just 4.5 percent. Overall, VR headset shipments jumped 241.6 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2022. But the industry faced significant supply issues in Q1 2021, contributing to "a favorable comparison" for this year's Q1.

Like Kuo a couple of weeks ago, IDC research director Ramon Llamas said that "all eyes will be on Apple as it launches its first headset next year." Apple's headset is expected to be much more expensive than Meta's offerings, driving up the average unit price for the product category across the board, and Llamas believes Apple's offering "will appeal primarily to a small audience of early adopters and Apple fans." In other words, don't expect the first Apple headset to ship vastly more units than Meta's Oculus Quest 2 right out of the gate. It's just a first step in a long-term plan to own the mixed-reality market.