Well beyond the realm of incompetence...

In case you were wondering... Facebook's day of bad news didn't only revolve around the consequences that they're now facing for their reckless disregard of their users' privacy. It also included new insight into that disregard for their users' privacy. As reported by The Guardian:

Facebook targets users with location-based adverts even if they block the company from accessing GPS on their phones, turn off location history in the app, hide their work location on their profile and never use the company’s “check in” feature, according to an investigation published this week.

There is no combination of settings that users can enable to prevent their location data from being used by advertisers to target them, according to the privacy researcher Aleksandra Korolova. “Taken together,” Korolova says, “Facebook creates an illusion of control rather than giving actual control over location-related ad targeting, which can lead to real harm.”

Facebook users can control to an extent how much information they give the company about their location. [...] But while users can decide to give more information to Facebook, Korolova revealed they cannot decide to stop the social network knowing where they are altogether nor can they stop it selling the ability to advertise based on that knowledge.

They say that you should hesitate to ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence, but there is no incompetence surrounding this latest revelation: Facebook themselves straight-up admit that they use "IP and other information such as check-ins and current city from your profile" to built these shadow profiles of users' location data, even after those users refused to grant Facebook permission to build a profile of their location data. This is clearly malicious. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Google does not do this. Microsoft does not do this; Apple and Amazon do not do this. There is no "all sides" argument to be made by WIRED magazine, or any of Facebook's other Definers Media-fueled defenders.

Only Facebook is this shady. Facebook is the problem, here.

To say that this most likely contravenes multiple provisions of the GDPR would be something of an understatement; whether U.S. laws currently prohibit this sort of "shadow profiling" is anyone's guess, although I'm sure the new U.S. Congress will be looking into that question, among others. If you're waiting for government regulators to get a handle on the full breadth and depth of Facebook's scumminess, though... you should probably stop waiting, and just delete Facebook, already.

Facebook's very bad year gets even worse

It turns out that Facebook couldn't even make it through one more day before getting hit with more bad news. This time, though, it's not news of their incompetence, or their outright malice, that's wrecking their week; rather, it's news of actual consequences for Facebook. Finally.

As reported by The Washington Post:

Nine months after a whistleblower revealed Facebook had allowed outsiders to improperly access personal information about millions of its users, the social media giant faced its first major rebuke from regulators in the United States -- a lawsuit filed by the attorney general of the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit from Karl Racine on Wednesday targeted Facebook mainly for its entanglement with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that harvested names, “likes” and other data from the social site without users’ permission. The incident, which affected more than 87 million users beginning in 2014, came to light this March, sparking investigations around the world.

The opening salvo from the D.C. attorney general ended a protracted silence on the part of many U.S. regulators, who have faced immense pressure -- from members of Congress and average web users -- to discipline Facebook for what many see as a reckless disregard for online privacy. Some of Silicon Valley’s toughest critics have urged the government to slap Facebook with severe fines and other penalties that might force it to rethink a business model that monetizes the most intimate details of consumers’ lives.

“It’s about time,” said Christopher Wylie, who exposed the Cambridge Analytica controversy through reports in several news organizations.

[...]

The D.C. case threatens to develop into an even worse headache for Facebook. Racine told reporters that his office has “had discussions with a number of other states that are similarly interested in protecting the data and personal information of their consumers,” though he cautioned there is no formal agreement for them to proceed jointly. And the attorney general’s aides said they could add additional charges to their lawsuit as other details about Facebook’s privacy lapses become public.

Hello, again, Christopher Wylie! I'd honestly forgotten that he even existed. But I digress...

Fucking Facebook's terrible year isn't over yet

With two more weeks to go, Facebook's horribad year is still getting worse, as reported by Gizmodo:

According to a bombshell report in the New York Times on Tuesday, Facebook’s behind-the-scenes efforts to give select corporate partners access to user data have been far more expansive than previously reported, including allowing certain third-party companies access to user contact lists and access to users’ private messages.

Yes, that’s right, Facebook gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read users’ messages, and other tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon, and Sony access to data on users’ friends, according to hundreds of internal documents obtained by the paper and interviews with dozens of “former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners.” 

Not only did Facebook allow 150 companies, including Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and Yahoo, access to users’ private messages, they also allowed them unprecedented access to users’ personal data. According to BuzzFeed News:

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s search engine Bing to see the names of nearly all users’ friends without their consent, and allowed Spotify, Netflix, and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write, and delete users’ private messages, and see participants on a thread.

Let that sink in for a second: these companies could not only see your messages, they could delete any of them which they didn't like, allowing them to censor Facebook users without their consent, and possibly even without them noticing. It's the nuclear option of damage-control PR. And that's not all they could do.

It also allowed Amazon to get users’ names and contact information through their friends, let Apple access users' Facebook contacts and calendars even if users had disabled data sharing, and let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts “as recently as this summer,” despite publicly claiming it had stopped sharing such information a year ago, the report said. Collectively, applications made by these technology companies sought the data of hundreds of millions of people a month.

So, yes, in case you were wondering, Facebook's regard for your personal privacy, safety, and fundamental right to self-expression really is utterly non-existent, and the situation is far worse than we knew... with, doubtless, even worse revelations to come. Because this is just what we're learning in spite of Facebook's best efforts to keep all of this under wraps; what we'll learn next year, when the Democratic Party takes control of the U.S. Congress and its various investigative and oversight committees, is anyone's guess, but there's almost certainly more to learn here.

Epic Games' big gamble

Having mentioned Epic Games' storefront in passing in my last post, I suppose it would behoove me to elaborate a bit on my thoughts on the issue. Because I'm firmly of the opinion that Epic Games will not become any more a competitor to Steam than any of the other already-existing online storefronts: Origin, Uplay, GOG, Itch.io, etc., for several reasons.

It just. Won't. Die!

Do you remember the Universal Windows Platform? The new paradigm for Windows software distribution, which Microsoft has been pushing since Windows 8, when it was called Metro, and which Windows users have been resoundingly rejecting ever since?

Metro, and Windows 8 with it, was so unpopular that Microsoft was forced to allow OEMs to install Windows 7 instead on machines whose purchasers were paying for Windows 8 licenses. Valve's Gabe Newell saw Microsoft's attempt to seize control over software distribution as so profoundly anti-competitive, and anti-consumer, that it birthed the Steam Machine initiative, whose SteamOS has since given rise to Steam Play/Proton, which is well on its way to making Windows irrelevant for gaming. And UWP-exclusive titles are virtually non-existent, since they can only be installed via Microsoft's storefront of desolation, while basically the entire PC gaming industry distributes their games through Steam.

That is the legacy of UWP for Microsoft: repeated failures, alienated consumers, and a well-deserved reputation for monopolistic bullshit. Well, apparently Microsoft still see UWP as their key to global domination, because it's baaaack!!!

Facebook's latest round of PR problems are a purely self-inflicted injury

Maclean's has an interesting piece about how RBC (the Royal Bank of Canada) "quietly stopped allowing online transactions through Facebook in 2015 after Facebook changed its network’s privacy settings." The most interesting tidbit, though, isn't RBC's part, but rather this:

Canadian MPs travelled to Britain last month to participate in a parliamentary inquiry into “disinformation and fake news,” helping grill Facebook representatives about the firm’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The committee seized the Facebook emails—part of a sealed record in an American legal dispute—after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declined to testify. The emails were disclosed as part of a lawsuit by American software developer Six4Three, which once ran a bikini photo application on Facebook.

The seized emails, of course, are the same ones that touched off the most recent PR firestorm, and it looks like Mark Zuckerberg could have avoided both the emails' seizure, and their subsequent public disclosure, by simply agreeing to the British Parliament's request that he show up in person to answer some questions.

Irony, truly, thy name is Zuckerberg.

How low is morale at Facebook?

According to NYMag's Intelligencer, it's pretty damn low:

“People now have burner phones to talk shit about the company — not even to reporters, just to other employees,” one former employee said. Another described the current scene as a “bunker mentality,” meaning that after nearly two years of continuous bad press some people are, to borrow a phrase, leaning in as hard as they can to cope. “It’s otherwise rational, sane people who’re in Mark’s orbit spouting full-blown anti-media rhetoric, saying that the press is ganging up on Facebook,” said the former employee.

Yeah.... When you're buying a burner phone just so you can vent to your fellow employees? That's a sign, people; that's when you start burnishing that resume, and planning your exit strategy. Just saying.

As to why folks at Facebook are "spouting full-anti-media rhetoric"... maybe it's because all the news about Facebook looks like this?

• New Documents Show That Facebook Has Never Deserved Your Trust
• A Few Things Facebook Forgot to Include in Its Year in Review
• Why is Facebook in the doghouse? Here are 5 reasons
• Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is more ruthless than clueless
• The biggest culprit in the Facebook debacle
• Facebook Never Really Cared About Connecting the World
• The Facebook papers are a timely reminder that Mark Zuckerberg is ruthless about making money
• Facebook Stock Could Take a Hit From Growing Distrust, Analyst Says
• 5 takeaways from the UK's Facebook document dump

Only WIRED is still playing from Facebook's false equivalence playbook, drawing attention to other, lesser examples of bad behaviour from Silicon Valley companies as if they were in any way comparable to what Facebook has just been caught doing; I guess that Definers Media money was well-spent, after all. Even WIRED couldn't maintain the facade all the way to the end of their piece, though:

Amid Facebook’s rapid expansion, [Zuckerberg’s mentor Peter Thiel] told [journalist David Kirkpatrick] he was confident that the company would avoid government intervention. “Facebook will have the maximum amount of legal and political leeway in a world where it’s seen as friendly and not threatening,” Thiel said. [...] Nearly a decade later, Facebook’s effect on humanity appears to be careening in a different direction—and Thiel’s views on globalization also have soured since. Still, Thiel’s line about fast-growing companies seeming friendly turned out to be right on the money.

Is this the appropriate point to mention that Facebook is now shedding users, and not growing? Or that Facebook's ravenous hunger for unconstrained growth is what had ultimately landed them in so much hot water now? I'm sensing a connection, there... it's almost as if Facebook's focus on growth at all costs was the root of the problem.

Microsoft makes it official

After word leaked yesterday that Microsoft was redesigning their Edge browser to use Google's Chromium engine "under the hood," Windows-watchers were left wondering just how long Microsoft would make everyone wait before actually acknowledging this shift publicly. The answer, apparently, was one day.

As reported by VentureBeat:

Microsoft today embraced Google’s Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop. The company also announced it is decoupling the browser updates from Windows 10 updates, and that Edge is coming to all supported versions of Windows and to macOS. [...] The first preview builds of the Chromium-powered Edge will arrive in early 2019, according to Microsoft.

[...]

Microsoft hopes moving to Chromium will “create better web compatibility for our customers” and “less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.” The former is certainly true, as the Edge web platform will thus become aligned with web standards and other Chromium-based browsers. The latter is not true in the short term (plenty of testing will be needed to accommodate the switch) but it is likely in the long term, as developers will have one fewer browser to explicitly test against.

Fucking Facebook...

As someone who's never installed a Facebook app, I'd totally missed this when it first surfaced back in March, and I don't recall seeing it make headlines either. It should have. As reported by The Verge:

In March, many Android users were shocked to discover that Facebook had been collecting a record of their call and SMS history, as revealed by the company’s data download tool. [...] According to [internal emails released by the UK Parliament], developers knew the data was sensitive, but they still pushed to collect it as a way of expanding Facebook’s reach. [...] Notably, the project manager recognized it as “a pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective,” but that risk seems to have been overwhelmed by the potential user growth.

[...]

Initially, the feature was intended to require users to opt in, typically through an in-app pop-up dialog box. But as developers looked for ways to get users signed up, it became clear that Android’s data permissions could be manipulated to automatically enroll users if the new feature was deployed in a certain way. [...] The group developing the feature seems to see the Android permissions screen as a point of unnecessary friction, to be avoided if possible. When testing revealed that call logs could be collected without a permissions dialog, that option seems to have been obviously preferable to developers.

Yes, that's Facebook, bypassing Android's privacy controls to access data that they knew damn well they had no right to, without bothering to ask permission from anybody at all... because GREED.

Microsoft may finally have stopped trying to make "fetch" happen

Following about a month after the news that Microsoft were finally planning to stop pushing Cortana on consumers who are plainly not interested, comes the news that they're also going to let go of another of their attempts to foist a doomed and unwelcome product on users who couldn't care less. That's right, Microsoft are apparently planning to finally listen to what consumers have been telling them since 2015 about Edge.

As reported by Windows Central:

Microsoft's Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure, but it launched with a plethora of issues that resulted in users rejecting it early on. Edge has since struggled to gain traction, thanks to its continued instability and lack of mindshare, from users and web developers.

Because of this, I'm told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, which uses a similar rendering engine first popularized by Google's Chrome browser known as Blink. Codenamed "Anaheim," this new browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform, according to my sources, who wish to remain anonymous. It's unknown at this time if Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand, or if the user interface (UI) between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is for sure, however; EdgeHTML in Windows 10's default browser is dead.

Assuming this is accurate, Microsoft finally cutting the bullshit and doing not only the right thing, but the obvious thing, is great news. The only downside is that Microsoft have taken three years to finally get here, after years of taskbar advertising, questionable battery use statistics, and refusals to allows Google's wildly popular Chrome browser onto the Microsoft store... because Google refused to adopt Microsoft's EdgeHTML rendering algorithm, while ditching the Chromium algorithm which has become the standard for all web browsers.

No official word has yet come from Microsoft, of course, so they might still find some way to screw this up, but considering how well-received this news has been today, it's hard to imagine that Microsoft won't go through with this. If once is an incidence, and twice a coincidence, we're just waiting for Microsoft to prove this to be a pattern by doing it just once more. We'll see if doing that now, after years of coercive bullshit, can win back enough good will among consumers to stop Windows' gradual-but-steady market share decline.

Denial of Virtual Reality

I spotted this accidental juxtaposition in a Google search for VR news, and it couldn't have been more perfect. First, from RoadToVR:

A Road to VR analysis of the latest data from Valve’s Steam Hardware & Software shows that VR users on Steam have not only been growing, but are at their highest point in history.

First generation VR hardware may not yet have had its mass adoption moment, but pundits claiming the end is near for VR are overlooking strong evidence against their claims. Not only has the tech fostered a strong enthusiast community, but that group continues to grow. In fact, in November there were more VR users on Steam than ever before.

And then, from The VR Soldier:

Although there are still four weeks in the year 2018, VR-related forecasts are not looking great. Research by CCS Insight confirms there will be a total of eight million headsets to be sold throughout 2018. This number combines both VR and AR units, which further confirms the VR industry itself may face a bigger uphill battle than originally assumed.

This total figure is down by 20% compared to 2017. While one would assume sales figures to rise as more content is produced, the opposite is coming true. Further growth will occur in 2019 and beyond, according to the research. CCS Insight confirms 52 million units will be sold in 2022. Whether that favors VR or AR, is difficult to predict at this time.

I couldn't have planned a more perfect rebuttal.

The percentage of VR headset owners increased by 0.05% of Steam's total user base, with only HTC Vive and Oculus Rift showing growth that registered as more than 0.00% on the Steam Hardware Survey. Multiplied by Steam's 125 million users, that's about 62,500 headsets sold... in November, which is one of the two busiest sales months of the year.

Even Black Friday couldn't shift VR's market momentum.

The 0.78% of Steam's total users who have VR or AR headsets, by the by, similarly approximate to 975K total headsets, worldwide, since VR's launch two years ago, and to get even that high, you have to include Oculus Rift's two developer kits, which are almost certainly not in the hands of average consumers. Which must mean that the "eight million headsets" cited by The VR Soldier includes non-SteamVR users, also, like PlayStationVR, GearVR, and, presumably, Google Cardboard.

That's not enough to support any platform, and VR is a platform; headset sales need to pick up sharply, and soon, if this round of either VR or AR hardware is going to be anything other than a footnote in tech history.

Needless to say, I think that's unlikely.

Rats and sinking ships, and "a marriage made in hell"

Today, in Facebook...

We'll start with this report from CNBC:

Some former Facebook employees say their phone is ringing a lot more in the last two months. On the other line: former Facebook colleagues asking about job openings or looking for a reference.

This type of behavior is normal at most companies. But according to a half dozen former employees, all of whom left in the last year or two, it's a major change in behavior at Facebook, which had long been known around Silicon Valley as the company that no one leaves.[...] The shift could be an early warning of recruiting and retention challenges for Facebook after a turbulent year. 

[...]

The stories from former employees are only anecdotal at this point, and there's no firm data showing a significant uptick in departures or employee dissatisfaction. On Glassdoor, a site where workers anonymously review their employers, Facebook is among the best-rated tech companies, with a satisfaction rating of 4.3 out of 5. However, that rating has fallen noticeably during the last year, with a particularly sharp drop in the last few months.

It looks like those earlier reports of morale problems at the scandal-plagued social media firm may have been on the money; we'll have to see if this story continues to grow, and if it receives corroboration from elsewhere. In the face of Facebook's obvious rampant amorality and occasional outright evil, though, I'm less inclined to be sympathetic to these would-be rats, apparently seeking to abandon their slowly sinking ship. They had no qualms at all about sticking around when it looked like they could do whatever the fuck they wanted to with impunity, after all. Considering how much damage they've had a hand in doing to the fabric of society and democracy worldwide, any tears that I'd be crying at the sight of their misfortunes would be of the crocodile variety.

Speaking of rats, though...

Windows is losing Steam

It looks like the downward trend in Windows' overall market share is also being mirrored in Steam's software survey numbers, as reported by Phoronix:

Valve has published their latest monthly Steam survey data, which shows an increase in the Linux gaming population.

For November 2018, Steam's Survey reports a 0.80% marketshare for Linux, which is a 0.08% increase over October, which was on an upward trend following the roll-out of Steam Play late this summer for allowing Windows-only games to run more easily on Linux with their Wine-based Proton software... Earlier this year it was around just 0.5% Linux marketshare and last year there were the lows of around 0.3%.

While 0.80% may not seem like much, it's significant when factoring in the size of Steam's customer base that is reportedly at 125+ million users. 

Not only is Linux up, MacOS is also up, and Windows is down, in a rare case of Steam users actually trending in the same direction as the market overall.

There's a lot of overlap between Steam's user base and the PC gaming community overlap, and their higher Windows 10 adoption rate, and higher PC purchasing rate, were helping to drive Windows 10's numbers upwards. Windows 10 is still pushing out Windows 7 among PC gamers, but with more PC gamers shifting from Windows to Mac OS X and Linux because of Steam Play, this shift among the most active PC purchasers could be a significant driver of the overall market shift away from Linux.

Importantly, MacOS X and Steam are both consumer-driven market segments, which could mean that Microsoft is losing consumers to both Apple and FOSS. Back in July, Microsoft had talked about their desire to win back consumers with Modern Life Services. We've heard nothing about that consumer-focused initiative since, and if this trend in Windows' market share is any indication, Microsoft's time could be starting to run out. Windows has a healthy lead in PC gaming, though, with a 96.00% market share, so there's still time for Microsoft to react... if they start now.

Tick, tock, Microsoft. Your move.

Windows' incredible shrinking usage share

Most of the attention on desktop OS usage share has been the horse race between Windows 7 and Windows 10. The question to which everybody wants to know the answer is always, "When will Windows 10 finally overtake Windows 7?"

The prediction, for several Novembers running now, has been next November, and November 1st has once more arrived with W7 still holding on to a slim lead over its newer "rival" OS, as reported by Wayne Williams at Betanews:

In October, Windows 10 had edged closer to Windows 7, and I predicted that NetMarketShare would finally see Windows 10 emerge victorious in November.

It didn’t.

Again, this has now happened for at least three consecutive Novembers, and is hardly news. Williams has actually buried the lede at bit, though, because the really interesting bit is what comes next:

In fact, in November Windows 10 actually lost some usage share, dropping 0.14 percentage points. That puts it on 38.1 4 percent, down from the 38.28 percent high in October.

The gap between the two operating systems still narrowed though, as Windows 7 also lost share, going from 39.35 percent to 38.89 percent, a fall of 0.46 percentage points.

Wait, what? Both Windows versions managed to lose market share last month? I mean, yes, Microsoft has had a couple of months of bad news with update 1809's issues, but even so, how the fuck does this happen?

Well, the short answer is that Windows lost overall market share last month, dropping from 87.27% to 87.03%. But even that's not the end of the story; looking back at overall market share numbers for the last six months, we see a pattern emerge:

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions."

For anyone who's been defending Facebook against the NY Times' Definers Media story by claiming that it was an isolated incident... it wasn't. Of course it wasn't. After everything we've learned about the depths of Facebook's rampant amorality over the course of this past year, why would you ever think it was?

As reported by TechCrunch:

Facebook is still reeling from the revelation that it hired an opposition research firm with close ties to the Republican party, but its relationship with Definers Public Affairs isn’t the company’s only recent contract work with deeply GOP-linked strategy firms.

[...]

According to sources familiar with the project, Facebook also contracted with Targeted Victory, described as “the GOP’s go-to technology consultant firm.” Targeted Victory worked with Facebook on the company’s Community Boost roadshow, a tour of U.S. cities meant to stimulate small business interest in Facebook as a business and ad platform. The ongoing Community Boost initiative, announced in late 2017, kicked off earlier this year with stops in cities like and Topeka, Kansas and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Facebook also worked with Targeted Victory on the company’s ad transparency efforts. Over the last year, Facebook has attempted to ward off regulation from Congress over ad disclosure, even putting forth some self-regulatory efforts to appease legislators. Specifically, it has dedicated considerable lobbying resources to slow any progress from the Honest Ads Act, a piece of legislature that would force the company to make retain copies of election ads, disclose spending and more. Targeted Victory, a digital strategy and marketing firm, is not a registered lobbyist for Facebook on any work relating to ad transparency.

Just as Cambridge Analytica were only the ones that got caught, rather than being the only ones mining Facebook's user data for fun, profit, and geopolitical sabotage, Facebook's ethically-challenged use of the anti-semitic Soros-bashing Definers Media was only one of several such efforts by the firm. And this time, Sheryl Sandberg can't plead ignorance; after all, she did that with Definers Media, only to later admit that the decision really had crossed her desk, after all. Fool you once, shame on you; fool me twice.. can't get fooled again, is what I'm saying.

There is no such thing as a cockroach, folks. If you see one, the simple truth, on which you can absolutely rely, is that there are more of them hiding just out of sight. When you see a cockroach, you don't tell yourself that it's okay because you've only seen one of the pests; you call an exterminator, pronto. And it's clearly long past time to call in the social media equivalent of the Orkin Man, to deal with Facebook's sketchy, dodgy, and downright evil ways.

#FacebookIsTheProblem
#deleteFacebook

A new week in Facebook begins

Did you have a good Thanksgiving weekend? Because Facebook didn't.

Shall we start with their Black Friday news dump? Normally, dumping bad news on Friday helps to bury those ledes, as days can pass before major news outlets are able to properly cover them. Unfortunately for Facebook, though, news media organizations have adapted to this technique, a special favourite of the Trump administration, so they were primed and ready to cover whatever happened on Black Friday, including this story, as reported here by Slate:

On the day before Thanksgiving, Facebook published a blog post in which COO Sheryl Sandberg and outgoing head of communications Elliot Schrage admitted to lapses in their work with a Republican opposition research firm called Definers. The New York Times had reported in a bombshell investigation the week before that the company hired Definers to create media narratives linking anti-Facebook protestors to liberal billionaire George Soros and criticizing competitors for unsavory business practices. Facebook severed its ties with Definers after the story, but the company pushed back on the investigation by arguing that it contained “a number of inaccuracies.”

The company is now confirming that much of what the Times reported is true, at least when it comes to Definers. In the post, Schrage disclosed that he had decided to hire Definers and was partially directing its efforts on behalf of the company. “Some of this work is being characterized as opposition research, but I believe it would be irresponsible and unprofessional for us not to understand the backgrounds and potential conflicts of interest of our critics,” Schrage wrote. “This work can be used internally to inform our messaging and where appropriate it can be shared with reporters.” In the immediate aftermath of the Times article, Sandberg and CEO Mark Zuckerberg both claimed that they didn’t know that Facebook had hired Definers. Zuckerberg further sought to distance Facebook from Definers by labeling it as a typical “D.C.-type firm” and implying that he did not approve of its tactics. However, Schrage asserted in his post, “Mark has asked us to reevaluate how we work with communications consultants. It’s not about Definers. It is about us, not them.”

Get hyped for this

With both artificial general intelligence and quantum computing looking like they're further away than ever, it's probably a good time to remember that technology isn't all AI and qubits. Other future technologies are almost here, including one that I associate with sci-fi almost as much as the flying car: vat-grown meat.

As reported by Newsweek:

Laboratory-grown meat could soon be available, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration announcing that they would oversee its production so it could be safely sold to consumers across the country. 

A joint statement released by the two agencies said they would be working together to “foster these innovative food products and maintain the highest standards of public health.” The FDA would be in charge of regulating the collection, banking and growing of the cells used to make artificial meat, while the USDA would work on the production and labeling of food products.

[...]

There are many benefits to lab-grown meat. It would eliminate the need for animals to be bred and slaughtered—in the U.S. alone, around 9 billion chickens and 32 million cattle are killed every year. It would also help limit climate change—agriculture, and meat production in particular, is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. There would also be major financial incentives if the technology could be successfully scaled.

It will be a while before lab-grown meat becomes generally available, or cheap enough to be generally affordable, but this technology has the potential to be truly game-changing if this catches on. The environmental benefits alone could have an enormous beneficial impact on our rapidly warming climate. Stand aside, VR; this is what a transformative technology looks like.

Is it time to cool our quantum jets?

I've previously described quantum computing as being in its "ENIAC" phase, an analogy that would put effective quantum computing several decades away, at best. After all, it took seven decades for binary computers to get from ENIAC to Android, and there was no reason to suspect that quantum computers would any easier to develop than their binary predecessors.

According to a long article on IEEE.org, penned by Mikhail Dyakonov, who does
research in theoretical physics professionally, that decades-away estimate might actually be too optimistic. Quantum computers, he argues, might be more than merely difficult to develop, but impossible.

While I believe that such experimental research is beneficial and may lead to a better understanding of complicated quantum systems, I’m skeptical that these efforts will ever result in a practical quantum computer. Such a computer would have to be able to manipulate—on a microscopic level and with enormous precision—a physical system characterized by an unimaginably huge set of parameters, each of which can take on a continuous range of values. Could we ever learn to control the more than 10³⁰⁰ continuously variable parameters defining the quantum state of such a system?

My answer is simple. No, never.

Get 'em while they last...

As one of the relatively few people who actually owns a Steam Link, it's with a certain sadness that I learned that the pseudo-console device has been discontinued by Valve. As reported by arstechnica:

Valve is quietly discontinuing Steam Link, the in-home streaming box it first launched in late 2015. A low-key announcement on Valve's Steam Link news page suggests that production of new units has ceased and that Valve is currently selling off the rest of its "almost sold out" inventory in the US, after selling out completely in Europe. Valve says it will continue to offer support for existing Steam Link hardware.

[...]

The discontinuation of Steam Link hardware wasn't a complete surprise, given that Valve was briefly selling the playing-card-deck-sized devices for a closeout price of $2.50 earlier this year. And though Valve insists it's "still working hard" on Linux gaming and bringing Windows game compatibility to SteamOS, Valve's much ballyhooed circa-2015 hardware initiative has not made a huge impact on the marketplace.

It remains to be seen whether Valve will continue to sell the Steam Controller, after both Steam Machines and Steam Link failed to make an impact on the market; the Controller is currently 30% off, which might just be a Black Friday special, or might be the start of a sell-off of that inventory, as well.

The fact that Valve is, in fact, still working hard on Linux gaming serves to ease some of the sting from this news, but even so... I can't help but wish that things had gone differently. Farewell, Steam Link. We hardly knew ye, and you're gone too soon.

Microsoft's ongoing struggles with QA and Edge

After a terrible month of QA issues with Windows 10's 1809 update, and following revelations that those issues aren't actually over yet, even after 1809's re-release, comes news that Microsoft's other flagship product has similar issues. As reported by betanews:

Microsoft's update procedure for Windows 10 has been a little, er, wobbly of late. The Windows 10 October 2018 Update proved so problematic that it had to pulled, and even the re-released version is far from perfect.

Now it seems the cancer is spreading to Office. Having released a series of updates for Office 2010, 2013 and 2016 as part of this month's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has now pulled two of them and advised sysadmins to uninstall the updates if they have already been installed.

In both instances -- KB4461522 and KB2863821 -- Microsoft says that the problematic updates can lead to application crashes. While this is not as serious a problem as, say, data loss, it does little to quieten the fears that have been voiced about the quality control Microsoft has over its updates.

So, the bad news is that Microsoft's attempts to reassure consumers and Enterprise customers that their quality assurance procedures really are up to the challenge of delivering software-as-a-service seem to be failing. What's the good news?

Apparently, the good news is that Edge has failed so hard that Microsoft is now collaborating with Google and Qualcomm to bring the Chrome browser to Windows 10's ARM version. Yes, really.

Are we done with the blockchain hype yet?

This week in blockchain...

First, from the BBC, comes the news that the price of BitCoin is still crashing:

The value of Bitcoin has fallen below $5,000 (£3,889) for the first time since October 2017.

The fall brought the total value of all Bitcoin in existence to below $87bn.

On Thursday, 15 November, Bitcoin Cash - an offshoot of Bitcoin - split into two different crypto-currencies, which are now in competition with each other.

And some observers have blamed this for creating turmoil in the crypto-currency markets, with many of the digital assets experiencing falls.

Hmmm.... sounds to me like folks got greedy and over-reached. Maybe that's why mentions of the word "blockchain" was down by eighty percent in corporate corporations' messaging to investors this year.

Roller-skates are not VR's missing element

I've seen a few articles making note of this latest patent filing from Google, reported here by AndroidPit:

While the audiovisual side of virtual reality is on track, the more innovative proposals in the technology are now tackling how to immerse our other senses, such as touch and motion. This includes complicated sensor arrangements set up around the room, motion trackers in your pockets and even strapping our VRnauts into special treadmills. 

A new patent from Google, however, points to a solution that seems elegant in its logic: walking naturally starts with the feet, so what about motorized VR footwear?

Google's patent outlines schemes for a kind of motorized VR roller skates that will let the user walk normally, while the motors and wheels work to stop you from actually going anywhere in the real world. This should keep you inside the VR safe zone and stop you from banging your knees against your living room furniture.

Sorry, but this still isn't the solution to VR's locomotion problems.

Windows 10's telemetry violates GDPR, according to Dutch regulators

OMG, has this news item ever been a long time coming. From The Reg:
Microsoft broke Euro privacy rules by carrying out the "large scale and covert" gathering of private data through its Office apps.

That's according to a report out this month that was commissioned by the Dutch government into how information handled by 300,000 of its workers was processed by Microsoft's Office ProPlus suite. This software is installed on PCs and connects to Office 365 servers.

The dossier's authors found that the Windows goliath was collecting telemetry and other content from its Office applications, including email titles and sentences where translation or spellchecker was used, and secretly storing the data on systems in the United States. That's a no-no.

Those actions break Europe's new GDPR privacy safeguards, it is claimed, and may put Microsoft on the hook for potentially tens of millions of dollars in fines. The Dutch authorities are working with the corporation to fix the situation, and are using the threat of a fine as a stick to make it happen.

The investigation was jumpstarted by the fact that Microsoft doesn't publicly reveal what information it gathers on users and doesn't provide an option for turning off diagnostic and telemetry data sent by its Office software to the company as a way of monitoring how well it is functioning and identifying any software issues.

I always thought that there ought to be a law against Microsoft's data collection practices, and had hoped that GDPR might be that law, but I'll admit that it feels really satisfying to see it actually happen. I only wish that it had been the data collection in Windows 10 itself that had triggered this.

Microsoft aren't the only company facing an uphill battle when it comes to transforming their anti-consumer practices into GDPR-compliant ones (The Reg dubbed this "GDPRmageddon," which is just fabulous). Considering just how stubborn Microsoft have been when it comes to addressing the inadequacies of their business practices, though, I have a feeling that they'll struggle with GDPR compliance more than most companies... except, of course, for Facebook.

Besos on scrutiny

Originally posted on my political blog.

I'd written before about how Facebook's lack of ethics, morals, truthfulness, and accountability simply had no parallel in other FAANG companies. Here's a quote from Amazon's Jeff Besos that throws that difference into sharp relief, from CNBC:

This isn't the first time that Bezos has addresssed the issue of his company's scale with employees. In an earlier all-hands meeting in March, Bezos was asked whether tech companies like Amazon need to be more closely regulated because of their sizable market power and influence.

"It's a fact that we're a large company," Bezos said, according to a recording. "It's reasonable for large institutions of any kind, whether it be companies or governments, to be scrutinized."

[...]

Bezos said at the March employee meeting that the best way to respond to increased scrutiny is to "conduct ourselves in such a way that when we are scrutinized we will pass with flying colors."

It's an old-fashioned notion, isn't it?

Windows 10's 1809 update is still broken

I feel a facepalm coming on. As reported by ZDNet:

Microsoft this week rereleased the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, version 1809, after fixing its data-deletion mess. But the new build still has an old mapped-drives bug that's causing headaches for admins.

Within days of Microsoft's first release of Windows 10 1809 at the beginning of October, IT pros noticed that Windows File Explorer indicated that mapped network drives appeared to be broken. [...] Microsoft says it is working on a resolution but warns admins not to expect a fix until "the 2019 timeframe".

It's important to note that this is not a new bug; apparently it was a known issue before 1809's original release, and just not patched by MS in the five weeks between pulling and rereleasing the update. There are also compatibility issues between the 1809 update and Trend Micro's business security software, and a third issue that affects machines with Radeon HD 2000 or HD 4000 video cards.

Microsoft has temporarily blocked the update for users with affected soft- and/or hardware (at Trend Micro's request, in the former case), but the careless damage has already been done. IT pro Susan Bradley summed up the situation pretty well, in this quote from the ZDNet piece:

"I cannot believe -- well, I guess in this era of Microsoft I can believe -- that Microsoft would release an update that would impact their customer base like this. Yes, it's documented, yes there are 'workarounds', but there are possibilities that line-of-business applications will not be happy with these solutions given," wrote Bradley.

Affected non-business consumers probably won't be happy, either, and headlines like, "FAIL!!! Windows 10 October Update (1809) Still Has Multiple Flaws," are probably not what Microsoft was hoping to see within days of claiming that their testing regimen and quality control were still top-notch. That claim, incidentally, is looking more ridiculous with each passing day. Apparently MS have decided that they'd like to take a few more lumps, please, before actually addressing their QA issues.

Fortunately for Microsoft, the rereleased 1809 update wasn't being rolled out as aggressively as 1803; most users won't be offered the update until 2019 anyway, and it will be months after that before the update is pronounce ready for business, so the PR damage from this latest snafu might not be too severe.

It will be interesting to see if this latest example of Microsoft's inability to reliably deliver a product that works to consumers will cause any further slowdown in Windows 10's adoption rate. Personally, I can't wait to see the OS usage share numbers at the end of November.

Hey, Microsoft... you do know that can stop hitting yourself any old time, now. Right?

Stop me if you've heard this one...

Under pressure over the NY Times' bombshell story detailing Facebook's own campaign of anti-Semitic disinformation which they pursued in order to deflect criticism over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mark Zuckerberg offered a truly defense in response. In essence, he claimed:

1. the everybody knew that Facebook had employed Definers Media (i.e. nothing to see here);
2. that he himself didn't know that Facebook was employing Definers (i.e. it wasn't me);
3. that an un-named comms staffer had actually decided key details of Facebook's damage-control/PR strategy, apparently without anyone signing off on it (this, after testifying before Congress about how he "took full responsibility for" exactly this sort of decision-making at Facebook); and
4. that Facebook had now cut ties with Definers, literally yesterday (i.e. now that we all know about their shady business, they'd like to be seen doing a right thing).

As reported by Gizmodo:

Today, Facebook set up a press conference addressing a bombshell report from The New York Times that alleged, among other things, that the company contracted a Republican opposition research firm called Definers to run interference on the company’s image, a job which reportedly included leaning on George Soros conspiracy theories.

On the call, Mark Zuckerberg claimed he only found out the group was working for Facebook yesterday—which would mean the CEO learned about his company’s dealings well after most reporters.

Facebook ended its relationship with Definers yesterday, following backlash from the public as well as from the president of the Open Societies Foundation: one of the groups run by Soros, who has been a frequent target of anti-semitic conspiracy theories. In the wake of that abrupt dismissal, Facebook published a rebuttal which included the following statement:

Our relationship with Definers was well known by the media – not least because they have on several occasions sent out invitations to hundreds of journalists about important press calls on our behalf.

“Me personally, I didn’t know we were working with them,” Zuckerberg said during today’s Q&A. [...] Who would have known or approved of such a relationship? Zuckerberg, who previously stated that personnel matters are outside the purview of public disclosure, pinned the blame on “someone on our comms team.”

At this point, I can't help but wonder if anyone in Facebook's senior leadership had any idea what ethics even are. They've certainly behaved with reckless disregard for the truth, and utter contempt for the consequences of their decisions, with such consistency and for so long that I can no longer believe anything that they say without supporting documentation. Zuckerberg, personally, has done almost nothing but hide the truth and deflect criticism, all while espousing his own commitment to transparency, love of facts, and personal qualities of responsible leadership. The extent of the cynical hypocrisy on display here is simply breathtaking.

And I'm far from being the only person who's not buying it anymore.

Irony, thy name is Zuckerberg

Clearly, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg did not know that the NY Times' blockbuster report detailing his own company's anti-Semitic fake news campaign was in the works when he made this decision. As reported by c|net:

Mark Zuckerberg is "not able" to attend a joint disinformation hearing in London, Facebook says, despite calls from politicians from five countries.

The Facebook CEO isn't giving in to pressure to provide testimony on Nov. 27, even after Argentina, Australia and Ireland added their voices to those of the UK and Canada last week.

In a letter to the UK's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the company declined to say why Zuckerberg couldn't attend, but said it remains "happy to cooperate" with the inquiry. The letter also laid out some of the efforts Facebook has made over the last year in areas like fighting fake news and striving for transparency in political ads.

Damian Collins, chair of the committee, is leading the charge and noted that the social network's response is "hugely disappointing."

"The fact that he has continually declined to give evidence, not just to my committee, but now to an unprecedented international grand committee, makes him look like he's got something to hide," he said in an emailed statement."

It turns out Facebook actually did have something to hide: the fact that they're paying for exactly the brand of fake news that Zuckerberg claims to be fighting. How much longer he'll be able to keep dodging questions about his company's activities, while proclaiming his happiness to cooperate, remains to be seen, but I have a feeling it won't be too much longer.

#FacebookIsTheProblem
#FuckFacebook
#deleteFacebook

This week in Facebook

It's shaping up to be another bad week for Mark Zuckerberg.

The NY Times have published a blockbuster piece, reporting that Facebook were not only fighting the spread of fake news on their service, but actually spreading some fake news of their own: in particular, to paint their wave of post-Cambridge Analytica negative PR as some sort of George Soros-funded anti-Facebook conspiracy.

[As] evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

This means that Facebook funded anti-Semitic propaganda for no other reason that petty material self-interest. Which means that Facebook now have real blood on their hands, after a wave of anti-Semitic social media content on their own site helped inspire one of the worst incidents of anti-Semitic mass murder in U.S. history. And Jews weren't the only targets of Facebook's fake news campaign.

1809 update finally released by Microsoft, along with empty promises of future change

We always knew it would come eventually; the only remaining question was the timing of the thing. Let's start with the details, as reported by ZDNet:

Microsoft has resumed the rollout of Windows 10 version 1809. The re-release of the so-called October 2018 Update comes more than five weeks after the company pulled the original installation files from its download servers and stopped its scheduled delivery through Windows Update just days after its initial debut on Oct. 2.

In a blog post, Microsoft's John Cable, the director of Program Management for Windows Servicing and Delivery, says the data-destroying bug that triggered that unprecedented decision, as well as other quality issues that emerged during the unscheduled hiatus, have been "thoroughly investigated and resolved."

Not exactly Half Life 3

Lest we forget, Valve Software isn't only working on separating their primary business, the Steam storefront, from Microsoft's Windows OS. They're also devoting significant resources to VR technology, an R&D spent which apparently includes Valve-branded VR hardware, likely iterating on HTC's Vive designs, and supporting software, including a sequel prequel to Half-Life 2.

As reported by UploadVR:

Images of a prototype VR headset with a Valve logo visible on the circuit board leaked on the image sharing website imgur. Our independent sources tell us these are in fact prototypes for an upcoming Valve HMD.

We’ve also heard the field of view will be 135° with “Vive Pro resolution.” It may also come bundled with ‘Knuckles’ controllers as well as a Half-Life based VR game that could be a prequel rather than the much-anticipated Half-Life 3.

Cue the Half-Life 3 jokes in 3... 2... 1...

And now, with that out of our collective systems, let's talk about the potential impact of this.

Microsoft tap Phil Spencer to fix the Windows Microsoft Store

The Windows Store has been a wasteland of shit ever since Microsoft first launched it alongside Windows 8. Married to a Universal Windows Platform that never did take off, it has long been a developer- and customer-forsaken place; intended as the channel through which all applications would flow, to both desktop and mobile devices, it's instead become something of an albatross: an awkward, burdensome reminder of Microsoft's monopolistic sins.

This is at least partly why Microsoft rebranded the Store last year; Windows Store had negative connotations for consumers from which they wanted to distance themselves, in much the same way that the Windows 10 name was intended to put more distance between the current Windows version and the wildly unpopular Windows 8. Microsoft only changed the name, though, apparently hoping that a re-brand would be change enough.

Consumers, however, weren't fooled; when they remember to use the new name, it's normally as an afterthought. And, critically, nothing else about the Store was changed; it's still a developer- and customer-forsaken place, where it's both easier and more desirable to search for TV shows than software. This is especially true of games; even when they're running Windows 10, PC gamers use Steam, not Microsoft's terrible storefront, unless they're given no other choice. And Valve is working hard to ensure that they have other choices in most, if not all, cases.

The situation was clearly untenable for Microsoft, and it seems they've finally decided to do something about it: they're tapping the one person in their senior leadership team who seems to understand what consumers want, and to understand that it's important for a business to provide what consumers are asking for, to finally fix the thing. As reported by WCCFTech:

Phil Spencer, previously Head of Xbox at Microsoft, was promoted last year into the Senior Leadership Team where he now reports directly to CEO Satya Nadella as the Executive Vice President of Gaming. Spencer has since suggested that gaming isn’t the proverbial red-headed stepchild at Microsoft anymore, thanks to the importance placed by Nadella himself in this growing market.

We haven’t heard much from him after E3 2018. However, he briefly appeared on yesterday’s Inside Xbox: X018 Special live from Mexico City to make a few statements, the most interesting of which directly addressed the state of Windows 10 gaming on PC.
When asked about what will come next, he expressed the intent to focus on improving the Windows Store (now formally now as Microsoft Store) so that it can be properly tailored towards gamers.

Has Microsoft finally stopped trying to make "fetch" happen with Cortana?

I've been posting about Cortana, and why it should be optional in Windows 10, for a while now. By turning Cortana on by default, frustrating attempts to turn it off, and forcing all searches through Cortana, including local file searches, Microsoft basically forced users to sacrifice privacy in exchange for the use of a feature that most of them didn't care about at all.

But with Javier Soltero, Microsoft's head of Cortana, departing the company, and Alexa, the rival digital assistant from Amazon, now available on the Microsoft store, it was looking more and more inevitable that Microsoft would start backing Windows 10 away from this sort of forced Cortana integration. With the market having spoken, and saying clearly that Cortana was not a selling point of Windows 10, how long would Microsoft keep forcing its use as WX's default for all search?

The answer to that question, apparently, is "until the 19H1 update," as reported by WindowsLatest:

Microsoft is making some changes to how Windows Search works in Windows 10. With Windows 10 19H1 update, Microsoft is reportedly planning to remove Windows Search from Cortana. It’s a smart move as this could eventually allow you to use the search feature flawlessly even if you don’t like Cortana.

Windows 10 19H1 will separate Cortana and Windows Search, and two different icons will be displayed on the taskbar. It’s a pretty neat change as this would allow Cortana to act more like a personal digital assistant and you can use Windows Search if you’re looking for files, pictures, music and other stuff stored in your local drive.

Screenshots show menus which seem to allow users to hide the new Cortana button -- not quite as good as allowing users to simply disable Cortana, but when combined with the separation of Cortana from search, it amounts to functionally the same thing.

This is a good move. Microsoft's insistence that users must use features and products that they had repeatedly indicated they had no interest in using was one of the most annoying things about Windows 10. Nobody cares about Cortana, or Edge, or Bing, and yet Microsoft was dead set on making them unavoidable, in a display of either monopolistic arrogance, desperation, or simple tone-deafness, which had long since convinced a large number of Windows 7 users to put off the switch indefinitely, if possible.

If nothing else, this latest move explains by Javier Soltero is leaving the company. As someone who'd internally championed Cortana, the prospect of having Cortana de-emphasized in Windows 10, and his own role and career prospects with them, probably made leaving look like a really attractive option. But if Microsoft really are finally learning to let go, to stop trying to force with issue, then maybe that's about to change.

It's not enough to convince someone like me to switch to Windows 10, #Never10, #LinuxShift, but it is, finally, a start. Whether this first baby step has happened in time, is of course, a whole 'nother discussion.

Coming along nicely

As a PC gamer, with Windows 10 looking like more of a dumpster fire with each passing month, and Linux looking more and more like the OS that I'll end up using in 2020, I've obviously been keeping an eye on the progress of Valve Software's Steam Play/Proton initiative. I'd even tried switching to Linux a few months ago, literally formatting my hard drive and installing Ubuntu... only to discover that Ubuntu came with some frustrating limitations, and that Proton itself wasn't quite ready for prime time.

Proton was very promising, but it was clearly not a polished enough consumer experience yet that the average consumer should be thinking of making the switch. That was back in August, though, and this is November. With three more months to work on their tech, how much progress have Valve made?

There was only one way to know. Armed with my list of shame (i.e. every game on my Steam account that I have yet to play), I looked them up on ProtonDB to find out how they were rated for Steam Play performance. To say that the results surprised me, would be something of an understatement.

Here's how my Steam library breaks down, using the rating definitions from ProtonDB:

Native	Platinum	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Borked	No Rating
42.5%	13.7%	11.8%	13.7%	5.2%	7.2%	5.9%

OK, this is just embarrassing

Offered without any ado... this report, from Softpedia:

Microsoft has just released a free AV1 video codec for Windows 10 devices, and users can download it right now from the Microsoft Store.

Available as part of an early beta program, the codec is available for PCs, Surface Hub, and HoloLens, as Microsoft itself explained in the Store.

Oddly enough, the codec can only be installed on devices running Windows 10 October 2018 Update, which is no longer up for grabs after Microsoft pulled it last month. The October update came with several major bugs, including an issue that could have caused the removal of user files stored in libraries.

So.... any idea when your October 2018 update will actually be available, there, Microsoft? You know, just in case people want to actually use this new AV1 codec that you've just released for that same update, knowing that it's not actually available to Windows 10 users?

GG, Microsoft. GG.