Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

what is the Metaverse

What Is the Metaverse? Is It Just Virtual Reality, or Something More?

https://www-howtogeek-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.howtogeek.com/745807/what-is-the-metaverse-is-it-just-virtual-reality-or-something-more/amp/

Tech CEOs keep talking about “the metaverse.” Mark Zuckerberg insists that Facebook will be seen as a “metaverse company” instead of a social media company. Satya Nadella proclaims Microsoft is creating a “metaverse stack” for the enterprise.

Author Neil Stephenson coined the term “metaverse” in Snow Crash, a dystopian cyberpunk novel published in 1992.

In the novel, the metaverse is a sort of 3D virtual world. It’s not simply a virtual reality game but is a persistent, shared virtual world. Or rather, the metaverse is a whole universe of shared virtual spaces seemingly linked together—you could, essentially, teleport between them.

If you think this all sounds a bit like Ready Player One or a higher-tech version of Second Life, you’re right.

virtual reality (VR) and not augmented reality (AR) was necessary for that kind of vision

To Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs, the concept of “the metaverse” seems to have more in common with “Web 2.0.” It’s a bunch of new technologies: VR headsets! Presence! Persistent digital worlds

Microsoft’s vision of the metaverse seems to take the form of rambling, buzzword-heavy talk about “digital twins” and “converging the physical with the digital” with “mixed reality.” Microsoft’s Azure cloud can do it!

Of course, as we learned with Windows 10’s “Mixed Reality” headsets, that term often just means Virtual Reality to Microsoft. However, it can also mean augmented reality: And, little surprise, Microsoft also has a headset to sell you: The HoloLens.

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more on Metaverse in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=metaverse

more on immersive in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=immersive

WhatsApp CEO and German Law

https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/whatsapp-ceo-on-the-controversy-surrounding-proposed-german-communications-laws-a-2e6f4c52-4a39-4117-8199-1606e1f3ac87

Cathcart: Let me be very clear: We cannot read your messages, we cannot listen to your calls. When you send your location over WhatsApp, we do not know where you are.

DER SPIEGEL: But you do save data about your users like the device ID, the phone model, the WhatsApp user name, the phone book and thereby also the numbers of all their contacts, right?

DER SPIEGEL: Apple has recently introduced privacy labels that resemble nutritional labels about what kind of data an app collects and what it doesn’t. Why don’t you do something similar?

DER SPIEGEL: A new German law, if passed, would mean that WhatsApp would have to hand over account data to law enforcement. Do you hand over data about your customers to government agencies?

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more on WhatsApp in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=whatsapp

big tech break up

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/12/amazon-facebook-google-maryland-tax/

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more on social media break up in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media+break+up

fluctuations in social media

WhatsApp loses millions of users after terms update from r/worldnews

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/24/whatsapp-loses-millions-of-users-after-terms-update

A poorly explained update to its terms of service has pushed WhatsApp users to adopt alternative services such as Signal and Telegram in their millions.

Apps like Signal, Telegram, Wickr, and WhatsApp offer privacy features ranging from end-to-end encrypted data transfer to ‘self-destructing messages’.”

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Fast-Growing Alternative To Facebook And Twitter Finds Post-Trump Surge ‘Messy’

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/22/958877682/fast-growing-alternative-to-facebook-twitter-finds-right-wing-surge-messy

MeWe markets itself as privacy forward. It doesn’t harness users’ data to sell ads or decide what content to show them. My note: but has to charge somehow, so, differently from FB Messenger, one needs to pay, in order to do audio call in MeWe.

MeWe’s Weinstein resists the comparison to Parler or Gab, which tout themselves as free-speech sites. For one thing, he says, MeWe is serious about putting limits on what people can say.

The tech website OneZero uncovered right-wing militia groups on MeWe as well as a “Stop the Steal” group that discussed shooting people. The company removed the groups after OneZero flagged them.

“I think we all still treat social media companies like they’re these inexpensive startups, but maybe they need to be treated more like starting an airplane company or a company that makes cars,” said Megan Squire, a professor at Elon University who studies online extremists. “You’ve got to think about seat belts.”

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more on social media in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media

Facebook antitrust lawsuit

The Smoking Gun in the Facebook Antitrust Case

The government wants to break up the world’s biggest social network. Internal company emails show why.
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-ftc-antitrust-case-smoking-gun/

At first blush, privacy and antitrust might seem like separate issues—two different chapters in a textbook about big tech. But the decline in Facebook’s privacy protections plays a central role in the states’ case. Antitrust is a complicated field built on a simple premise: When a company doesn’t face real competition, it will be free to do bad things.

a conceptual breakthrough on that front. In a paper titled “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook,” the legal scholar Dina Srinivasan argued that Facebook’s takeover of the social networking market has inflicted a very specific harm on consumers: It has forced them to accept ever worse privacy settings. Facebook, Srinivasan pointed out, began its existence in 2004 by differentiating itself on privacy. Unlike then-dominant MySpace, for example, where profiles were visible to anyone by default, Facebook profiles could be seen only by your friends or people at the same school

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Facebook hit with antitrust probe for tying Oculus use to Facebook accounts

https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/10/facebook-hit-with-antitrust-probe-for-tying-oculus-use-to-facebook-accounts

In recent years Facebook has been pushing to add a ‘social layer’ to the VR platform — but the heavy-handed requirement for Oculus users to have a Facebook account has not proved popular with gamers.
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more on Facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook

Chris Hughes
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/05/09/break-up-facebook/

S Korea Facebook privacy

S. Korea fines Facebook 6.7 bln won for sharing users’ info without consent from r/technology

https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20201125006500320

South Korea’s information watchdog on Wednesday fined Facebook Inc. 6.7 billion won (US$6 million) for passing information of at least 3.3 million South Koreans to other companies in its first crackdown on the U.S. tech giant.

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more on Facebook privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook+privacy

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