In an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg published Monday, a group of academics called for Meta to be more transparent about its research into how Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp affect the mental health of children and adolescents. The Verge reports: The letter calls for the company to allow independent reviews of its internal work, contribute data to external research projects, and set up an independent scientific oversight group. "You and your organizations have an ethical and moral obligation to align your internal research on children and adolescents with established standards for evidence in mental health science," the letter, signed by researchers from universities around the world, reads.

The open letter comes after leaks from Facebook revealed some data from the company's internal research, which found that Instagram was linked with anxiety and body image issues for some teenage girls. The research released, though, is limited and relied on subjective information collected through interviews. While this strategy can produce useful insights, it can't prove that social media caused any of the mental health outcomes. The information available so far appears to show that the studies Facebook researchers conducted don't meet the standards academic researchers use to conduct trials, the new open letter said. The information available also isn't complete, the authors noted -- Meta hasn't made its research methods or data public, so it can't be scrutinized by independent experts. The authors called for the company to allow independent review of past and future research, which would include releasing research materials and data.

The letter also asked Meta to contribute its data to ongoing independent research efforts on the mental health of adolescents. It's a longstanding frustration that big tech companies don't release data, which makes it challenging for external researchers to scrutinize and understand their products. "It will be impossible to identify and promote mental health in the 21st century if we cannot study how young people are interacting online," the authors said. [...] The open letter also called on Meta to establish an independent scientific trust to evaluate any risks to mental health from the use of platforms like Facebook and Instagram and to help implement "truly evidence-based solutions for online risks on a world-wide scale." The trust could be similar to the existing Facebook Oversight Board, which helps the company with content moderation decisions.

Meta is backing away from its longstanding (if not absolute) ban on cryptocurrency ads. Engadget reports: As CNBC reports, Meta has greatly loosened its ban by expanding the number of regulatory licenses it accepts from three to 27. The crypto landscape has "matured and stabilized" enough to justify the change of heart, the company said, including an increased amount of government regulation that sets "clearer responsibilities and expectations."

Advertisers still need written permission to run ads for cryptocurrency exchanges, lending and borrowing, crypto mining tools and wallets that let you buy, sell, stake or swap tokens. This does, however, open the door to cryptocurrency businesses that previously couldn't run any ads, not to mention would-be investors who might not be familiar with the market. The report goes on to note that "the shift comes just a day after Meta's crypto overseer, David Marcus, said he was leaving the company."

The UK competition regulator is expected to block Meta's $315m acquisition of online gif platform Giphy in the coming days in an escalation of the watchdog's assault on Big Tech. Financial Times: The Competition and Markets Authority is set to reverse the deal according to individuals close to the matter, in what would be the first time the CMA has unwound a Big Tech deal. The watchdog began investigating Meta's acquisition of New-York based Giphy -- the biggest provider of animated images known as gifs to social networks -- in June last year. A decision to block the deal would set an eye-catching precedent from the UK regulator, which has never sought to reverse a completed tech deal. In August the CMA provisionally ruled Meta, formerly known as Facebook, should be forced to sell Giphy due to competition concerns. It has until December 1 to make a final call. At that time the CMA argued Meta could cut off its rivals' access to gifs, and demand platforms like TikTok or Snapchat hand over more of their data in order to access gifs, consolidating power in Meta's hands. The watchdog also said the deal could remove a competitor to Meta in the display advertising market in the UK, despite Giphy's lack of presence in that sector.

An anonymous reader shares the results of a new poll (PDF) from CNN, adding: "Facebook should be treated like cigarettes." From the report: Roughly three-quarters of adults believe Facebook is making American society worse, a new CNN poll (PDF) conducted by SSRS finds [...]. Americans say, 76% to 11%, that Facebook makes society worse, not better, according to the survey. Another 13% say it has no effect either way. That broadly negative appraisal holds across gender, age and racial lines. Even frequent Facebook users -- those who report using the site at least several times a week -- say 70% to 14% that the social network harms, rather than helps, US society. Although majorities across parties say Facebook is doing more harm than good, that feeling spikes among Republicans (82%).

Among the majority overall who think Facebook is worsening society, however, there's less of an overwhelming consensus on whether or not the platform itself is primarily to blame: 55% say that the way some people use Facebook is more at fault, with 45% saying it's more due to the way Facebook itself is run. Overall, about one-third of the public -- including 44% of Republicans and 27% of Democrats -- say both that Facebook is making American society worse and that Facebook itself is more at fault than its users.

Advanced Micro Devices said Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, is becoming a user of its server processors, further eroding Intel's hold on that lucrative market. From a report: Meta will use AMD Epyc processors in its data center computers, the two companies said Monday at an event. AMD also unveiled a new version of that chip with extra memory, which Microsoft Corp. will use in an offering from its Azure cloud computing service. The chipmaker also showed off a new graphics chip for artificial intelligence workloads and gave hints about its next generation of processors coming in 2022. The addition of Meta, the world's largest social media company, to AMD's customer list means it now supplies all the top operators of the giant computing networks that run the internet. Winning those major spenders was part of Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su's plan to resurrect AMD and have it reach market share levels it had only briefly flirted with amid years of struggling to keep up with Intel.

A week on from its Connect conference, Meta is moving ahead with rebranding the Oculus Quest 2 as the Meta Quest 2. UploadVR reports: In last week's keynote, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Meta is the new corporate company name for Facebook. Almost all individual services under the company's umbrella, including Whatapp, Instagram and the actual Facebook social platform itself will keep their names. But, just after the keynote, Meta's Andrew Bosworth revealed that the Oculus brand covering VR products and services would start to be switched out with Meta branding. Bosworth explained that "you'll start to see the shift from Oculus Quest from Facebook to Meta Quest and Oculus App to Meta Quest App over time." Turns out "over time" was just over a week -- the Meta Quest 2 branding is already featured prominently in a new blog post on the official Oculus webpage. Confused yet?

The post outlines a new installation at Downtown Disney District at the Disneyland Resort showcasing Star Wars: Tales From The Galaxy's Edge on the "Meta Quest 2." Promotional art for the installation seen above also carries the Meta Quest 2 logo despite the fact that the Oculus icon is front and center of the art. Unfortunately, we can't make out if the logo on the Quest headset itself is for Oculus or Meta. But if you try and buy a Quest 2 at the top of the same page, it's still branded as the Oculus Quest 2 for now.

Thelasko shares a report from Business Insider: Facebook announced last week that it's changing its name to Meta. But the transition might not be without obstacles. A company is already after the "Meta" trademark -- and was well before Facebook rolled out its new moniker. Arizona-based startup Meta PC founder Zach Shutt told Insider the company filed for the "Meta" trademark in August. The Patent and Trademark Office website confirms the filing, which states that Meta PC first began using the brand for its range of products in November 2020. [Founders Zach Shutt and Joe Darger] said they're willing to stand down if CEO Mark Zuckerberg pays them $20 million, TMZ reported. However, Shutt declined to confirm the amount, or that it made such a proposal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: Facebook says it will stop using facial recognition for photo-tagging. In a Monday blog post, Meta, the social network's new parent company, announced that the platform will delete the facial templates of more than a billion people and shut off its facial recognition software, which uses an algorithm to identify people in photos they upload to Facebook. This decision represents a major step for the movement against facial recognition, which experts and activists have warned is plagued with bias and privacy problems. But Meta's announcement comes with a couple of big caveats. While Meta says that facial recognition isn't a feature on Instagram and its Portal devices, the company's new commitment doesn't apply to its metaverse products, Meta spokesperson Jason Grosse told Recode. In fact, Meta is already exploring ways to incorporate biometrics into its emerging metaverse business, which aims to build a virtual, internet-based simulation where people can interact as avatars. Meta is also keeping DeepFace, the sophisticated algorithm that powers its photo-tagging facial recognition feature.

"We believe this technology has the potential to enable positive use cases in the future that maintain privacy, control, and transparency, and it's an approach we'll continue to explore as we consider how our future computing platforms and devices can best serve people's needs," Grosse told Recode. "For any potential future applications of technologies like this, we'll continue to be public about intended use, how people can have control over these systems and their personal data, and how we're living up to our responsible innovation framework."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard, written by Janus Rose: During a tech demo in 2016, CEO Mark Zuckerberg described VR as "the next major computing platform" -- a space where all our social interactions will play out with new levels of physical presence thanks to headsets and motion-controllers. As I wrote at the time, this could only mean one thing: Zuckerberg wants to build virtual environments where all human behavior can be recorded, predicted, and monetized. At the time, the company told me it had "no current plans" to use physical motion data like head and eye movements as a means of predicting behavior and serving ads. Since then, it has made logging into Facebook a mandatory requirement for users of its Oculus headset -- a requirement it was recently pressured to remove. And earlier this year, the company announced its inevitable entry into VR-based advertising, inspiring enough backlash to cause one Oculus developer to abandon its plans for VR ads altogether.

While the bait-and-switch is a familiar and unsurprising move for The Company Formerly Known As Facebook, the announcement of Meta proves that there is no stopping Zuckerberg's plans to mine every human interaction in the world for data that can then be monetized. The brand shift notably comes at a time when the company is under intense scrutiny for its role in spreading disinformation and violence around the world, reinvigorated by revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugin. With Meta, it's safe to assume the predictive algorithms at work will be functionally the same as its predecessor. Data is collected about human behavior, which is then used to build profiles on users and automatically prioritize content they are more likely to interact with. Facebook itself proved the effectiveness of this manipulation with an "emotional contagion" experiment it secretly conducted on users in 2012, which showed that changing a user's feed to show positive or negative content altered the types of content they were likely to post.

This type of algorithmic manipulation forms the core business model of Facebook and countless other apps and social platforms. [...] Researchers have found that this algorithmic "nudging" is possible in embodied virtual spaces too, where the collection of intimate data about physical body movements provides new ways to influence human behavior on a large scale. Companies like RealEyes and Affectiva have marketed AI that they say can predict human emotions by analyzing body language and facial expressions -- a claim that is fiercely contested by AI experts but being widely deployed anyway. In one notable study, researchers determined that AI-controlled digital avatars can be used in virtual spaces to push people into accepting certain political views. In other words, Meta represents a massive investment into the very kind of algorithmic manipulation for which Facebook has been repeatedly maligned.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack has been bullish on the idea of "the metaverse" for a long time, as he'll be among the first to point out. But the id Software co-founder spent a good chunk of his wide-ranging Connect keynote Thursday sounding pretty skeptical of plans by the newly rebranded Meta (formerly Facebook) to actually build that metaverse. "I really do care about [the metaverse], and I buy into the vision," Carmack said, before quickly adding, "I have been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times." The reason for that seeming contradiction is a somewhat ironic one, as Carmack puts it: "I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse."

Today, Carmack said, "The most obvious path to the metaverse is that you have one single universal app, something like Roblox." That said, Carmack added, "I doubt a single application will get to that level of taking over everything." That's because a single bad decision by the creators of that walled-garden metaverse can cut off too many possibilities for users and makers. "I just don't believe that one player -- one company -- winds up making all the right decisions for this," he said. The idea of the metaverse, Carmack says, can be "a honeypot trap for 'architecture astronauts.'" Those are the programmers and designers who "want to only look at things from the very highest levels," he said, while skipping the "nuts and bolts details" of how these things actually work.

These so-called architecture astronauts, Carmack said, "want to talk in high abstract terms about how we'll have generic objects that can contain other objects that can have references to these and entitlements to that, and we can pass control from one to the other." That kind of high-level hand-waving makes Carmack "just want to tear [his] hair out... because that's just so not the things that are actually important when you're building something." "But here we are," Carmack continued. "Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build the metaverse, so enormous wheels are turning and resources are flowing and the effort is definitely going to be made."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is developing a smartwatch with a front-facing camera and rounded screen, according to an image of the device found inside one of the tech giant's iPhone apps. The photo shows a watch with a screen and casing that's slightly curved at the edges. The front-facing camera -- similar to what you'd see on a smartphone -- appears at the bottom of the display, and there's a control button for the watch on the right side. The image was found inside of the company's app for controlling its new smart glasses launched in partnership with Ray-Ban. The picture was located by app developer Steve Moser and shared with Bloomberg News.

The watch has a detachable wrist strap and what appears to be a button at the top of the watch case. Its large display mimics the style of Apple's watch -- rather than the more basic fitness trackers sold by Google's Fitbit and Garmin. The camera suggests the product will likely be used for videoconferencing, a feature that would make Meta's device stand out. Apple's smartwatch doesn't have a camera, nor do rival products from companies such as Samsung. Facebook has been planning to launch its first watch as early as 2022, but a final decision on timing hasn't been made yet and the debut could be later, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company is working on three generations of the product aimed at different release time frames, the person said. The device in the image could ultimately represent a version that is never released, but it's the first evidence of the company's work on the project. Not only does the code inside the software of the watch indicate it'll work with iOS and Android devices, but it may also be used as an input device or accessory for the company's VR and AR headsets.

Earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg announced it's changing Facebook's name to Meta. While he said Facebook's existing brands wouldn't be changing, we have learned that's not entirely true. "In a lengthy Facebook post, CTO-in-waiting Andrew Bosworth detailed about 15 minutes later following the completion of the keynote that as part of the new rebrand, they will be killing off the Oculus brand," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Oculus phrasing was conspicuously absent from the presentations today and features like the Oculus Store were consistently referred to as the Quest Store. In his post, Bosworth details that starting early next year the process to rename the Oculus app to the Meta app and the Oculus Quest to the Meta Quest will begin. "We all have a strong attachment to the Oculus brand, and this was a very difficult decision to make. While we're retiring the name, I can assure you that the original Oculus vision remains deeply embedded in how Meta will continue to drive mass adoption for VR today," Bosworth wrote. Facebook bought Oculus VR back in 2014 for $2 billion.

At the time, Zuckerberg said the Oculus Rift VR headset was the beginning of something big: "This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures."

Facebook said Thursday it's changing its name to Meta. "From now on, we''ll be metaverse first, not Facebook first," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company's Oculus Connect event. "Over time you won't need to use Facebook to use our other services."

71-year-old Hugh Pickens (Slashdot reader #49,171) is a physicist who explored for oil in the Amazon jungle, commissioned microwave communications systems in Saudi Arabia, and built satellite control stations for Goddard Space Flight Center around the world including Australia, Antarctica, and Guam.

After retiring in 1999, he wrote over 1,400 Slashdot posts, and in the site's 23-year history still remains one of its two all-time most active submitters (behind only long-time Slashdot reader theodp). Today theodp shares an article by Hugh Pickens: I am a Covid Survivor," writes former Slashdot contributor extraordinaire Hugh Pickens (aka pickens, aka Hugh Pickens writes, aka Hugh Pickens DOT Com, aka HughPickens.com, aka pcol, aka ...). "I got the Covid six weeks ago and yesterday I was declared virus free. I had what was called a moderate case of Covid. I was never hospitalized. I was never in any real danger of death. But I was in bed for three weeks.

"It knocked me on my ass. I have been talking about my Covid when I go out and a lot of people are interested in what it really means to have a moderate case of Covid. I don't claim to speak for every Covid patient. I certainly can't speak for the ones who went into the hospital and are on ventilators. But I think the majority of people have a moderate case of Covid so I thought I would write this up for people that were interested."
During those three consecutive weeks in bed, "I guess I ate Jell-O for about two weeks..." Pickens writes. "I was laying in bed all day long. I was sleeping 12 to 14 hours a day..." He lost 25 pounds — and vividly describes having nightmares "every night like clockwork." But the essay ends with him committed to making the most of his second chance. "I'm only going to do what's important from now on...

"I'm 71 years old and I may have five more years or ten but I am going to live every day like it's my last."

Obviously Slashdot has had some issues the past couple days. For those wondering, we inherited an aging hardware setup in the acquisition that was located physically far away from us. We made a big investment in a new hardware set up, and ran into sizable issues including a massive DDOS during the migration process. Going forward we expect much better uptime. If we inconvenienced anyone, we're sorry. If it's any consolation, it wasn't fun for us either, and our team worked non-stop for days to get Slashdot back online. With our new infrastructure in place, we will be dedicating a lot of time and resources this year to improving Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Happy New Year, Slashdot! To say goodbye to 2017, I've created a web page that displays random Slashdot stories from the year gone by.

It chooses a page from over 6,600 different URLs -- every story that Slashdot ran in 2017. And every time you reload this page, it pulls up a different story from 2017.

Slashdot's most-visited story of 2017 was Google Has Demonstrated a Successful Practical Attack Against SHA-1, which was visited more than 212,000 times since it was published in Feburary.

And our second- and third-most popular stories also came in February -- both just one week before.

FCC Chairman Wants It To Be Easier To Listen To Free FM Radio On Your Smartphone and IT Decisions Makers and Executives Don't Agree On Cyber Security Responsibility.

Keep reading for a complete list of Slashdot's 10 most-visited stories of 2017.

An anonymous reader writes: Happy aniversary, Slashdot! To commemorate your 20th year, here's a special web project I created. Every time you reload the page, it pulls up another one of the 162,000 stories Slashdot has posted over the last 20 years -- each time choosing a different story at random.
The original submission has one caveat. If you keep reloading the page long enough, you'll eventually get a story by Jon Katz.

For Slashdot's 20th anniversary, "What could be geekier than celebrating with the help of an open-source neural network?" Neural network hobbyist Janelle Shane has already used machine learning to generate names for paint colors, guinea pigs, heavy metal bands, and even craft beers, she explains on her blog. "Slashdot sent me a list of all the headlines they've ever run, over 162,000 in all, and asked me to train a neural network to try to generate more." Could she distill 20 years of news -- all of humanity's greatest technological advancements -- down to a few quintessential words?

She trained it separately on the first decade of Slashdot headlines -- 1997 through 2007 -- as well as the second decade from 2008 to the present, and then re-ran the entire experiment using the whole collection of every headline from the last 20 years. Among the remarkable machine-generated headlines?

• Microsoft To Develop Programming Law
• More Pong Users for Kernel Project
• New Company Revises Super-Things For Problems
• Steve Jobs To Be Good

But that was just the beginning...

Slashdot turned 20 this month, which is ancient in internet years. How far have we come?

Also, we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups around the world to celebrate. Read on for the full 20-year history of Slashdot.