Facebook's EU charm offensive may have actually offended

At least, so claim normally-pro-business CNBC:

Once the session had begun and much to everyone's bemusement, it quickly dawned on viewers that the format of the Q&A session was very unorthodox. Lawmakers went round in turns asking questions directed at Zuckerberg and it was only after a full 75 minutes of one-sided questioning that Zuckerberg had the opportunity to respond, leaving his total response time to fifteen minutes and where he clumped answers together, sticking to high level themes: what critics have called the perfect opportunity to "cherry-pick."

This riled lawmakers and the reaction from Europe has been unabashedly angry with one MEP (member of the European Parliament) complaining that he had asked Zuckerberg "six yes and no questions" and had not got one answer. The outspoken pro-European MEP Guy Verhofstadt (who was also in attendance) tweeted that the "format was inappropriate" and warned that if written answers from Facebook are not "accurately answered in detail, the EU competition authorities must be activated and legislation sharpened."

Among other things, EU lawmakers were concerned about whether Facebook would be fully GDPR-compliant (spoiler: they aren't),  about Facebook being basically a monopoly (Zuckerberg doesn't feel like it is, but can't name any actual competitors), and about Facebook's record of evading taxes and off-shoring profits. Mark Zuckerberg's combination of evasions and PR-boilerplate responses does not seem to have allayed any of these concerns. Says CNBC, "If the purpose of this tour was to stop Europe from being worried about Facebook, the exact opposite has occurred: Facebook should be worried about Europe."

It's amazing what a difference a few days make. Just a week ago, the media were hailing Zuckerberg's performance before the EU as a win, claiming that his ability to work the format, avoid tough questions, and stick to well-worn talking points were all good things for Facebook. A week later, though, it's becoming clear that EU lawmakers are going to be distracted as easily as their USA counterparts, and that Zuckerberg's alternately smirking and uncomfortable performance in front of the EU parliament may have really hurt Facebook's cause.

GDPR?

So, when I logged into Blogger today, I was greeted with this notice:

European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used and data collected on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent.

Out of courtesy, we have added a notice on your blog to explain Google's use of certain Blogger and Google cookies, including use of Google Analytics and AdSense cookies, and other data collected by Google.

You are responsible for confirming that this notice actually works for your blog, and that it displays. If you employ other cookies, for example by adding third-party features, this notice may not work for you. If you include functionality from other providers there may be extra information collected from your users.

Which is... fine, I guess? The weird part is that I have no idea what the notice says, because I'm in Canada, and the notice doesn't appear for Canadian users. Hopefully the thing is actually working, since I have no way to know; blogger's relevent help page says that it should be active automatically, with no action needed from me, which I find to be somewhat at odds with the notice itself, which says that I'm somehow supposed to be responsible for ensuring that it's working, even though I apparently can't do that from here.

If Blogger's default GDPR notice says anything you object to, please direct those objections to Google, who are entirely responsible for the no-doubt-legalese passages in question. If it's not there at all, please feel free to leave a comment on this blog post or something to let me know.

For the record, I have my browser options set to delete all cookies automatically when Firefox closes (and, yes, I use Firefox -  it's what I'm used to, and Quantum's performance is close enough to Chrome's to be acceptable), and to accept third-party cookies only from sites I've already visited. Since Firefox is also set to clear my history when it closes, and since I also run two ad-blockers (uBlock Origin and AdBlocker Ultimate), I feel pretty okay with the level of data that people can collect about me without my knowledge. I'm probably not doing much to slow the the likes of Facebook with their shadow profiles, but I shouldn't be broadcasting much of anything to the world that I'd rather keep quiet.

Remember... it's not paranoia if they are watching you. And they definitely are watching you. C'est la vie.

What could possibly go wrong?

Today in Facebook, courtesy of David Bloom at Forbes:

Facebook Wants Your Nude Photos; What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

In a bid to wrap up the race for the Tin Ear of the Year Award before June 1, Facebook has begun asking its 2.2 billion users to discreetly share their indiscreet nude photos with the company. The plan, they say, is to train Facebook to block the images you don't ever want on Facebook, in cases such as revenge porn.

The company is partnering with several third-party groups – such as the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and the National Network to End Domestic Violence – to distribute review forms to those who've had to deal with former sexual partners improperly posting their sensitive images.

Requesters are given a one-time upload link to send those images to Facebook, where they are reviewed by "a handful of specially trained members" of the company's burgeoning content-review team.

Those team members will create what's effectively a digital fingerprint of the images so that Facebook's systems can automatically recognize and block the images before they can be seen by anyone outside the company. The program is undergoing trials in the United States, United Kingdom and a couple of other territories.

This all sounds pretty good. Except, remember that this is the same company that has had such a bumpy time the past couple of years controlling what's happening to personal data on its site, and what's being shared with outside companies.

You may recall that little kerfuffle last year when it became clear that as many as 80 million people had their data improperly shared/exposed to third-party providers during the 2016 elections as part of relatively routine Facebook operations.

Does the expectation that people will send Facebook their nudes, specifically so that Facebook's crack team of privacy experts can examine them, strike anyone else as being even creepier that Facebook's usual level of creepy? I mean, really, just... ick.

There's also the problem that, even if it works, this will only help prevent revenge porn posts on Facebook and its subsidiaries. It won't help with revenge porn posts on, say, 4chan, or Reddit, "which previously had revenge porn subreddits and still has issues." Wouldn't it be better to get all of the major social media sites together to start an independent service that can create anonymized digital fingerprints of photos that any S.M. site can use to filter out likely revenge porn posts, and flag potential abusers?

So, yeah, it's nice that Facebook is finally trying to do something about revenge porn on its service, but timing is everything, especially for something this sensitive, and I'm finding it hard to imagine a worse time for Facebook to launch something like this. Talk about tone deaf.

People seeing what people want to see

So, apparently Mark Zuckerberg sailed through his appearance before the EU... unless he didn't, and it was actually spectacularly awkward.

First up, Fortune:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg managed to dodge tough questioning by European Union parliamentary members on Tuesday during a hearing about the company’s data collection practices.

The parliamentary members asked thorough, multi-part questions about Facebook’s policies and global operations. But because their questions were grouped together at the beginning of the roughly hour-and-a-half long session, Zuckerberg was able to mostly ignore them when it was finally his turn to speak.

Instead, he reiterated the company’s recent talking points around its efforts to clean up its service like hiring more monitors and combating fake news.

Sounds like he aced it. Right, Quartz?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with members of the European Parliament today (May 22) in what was billed as a “meeting” but ended up being more of an awkward hearing, in which the executive took a public lashing but was also let off the hook from many tough, detailed questions.

In one particularly uncomfortable moment for Zuckerberg, Nigel Farage, the well-known euro-skeptic and far-right leader, said that without social media, Trump and Brexit wouldn’t have happened, since these causes were able to circumvent traditional media to get their message to the public. “Perhaps you’re horrified by this creation of yours and what it’s led to,” he said to the 34-year-old, who looked a bit flabbergasted.

For the better part of the meeting, which was scheduled to last a little over an hour, the politicians lobbed their questions and reflections on technology at Zuckerberg, who, at the end, repeated talking points he’s given to US lawmakers, journalists, and investors over the past several months.

OK... maybe not?

Freedom from Facebook?

The #DeleteFacebook grassroots movement may seem to have stalled, but privacy and anti-monopoly advocacy groups aren't waiting for consumer pressure alone to goad Facebook into doing the right thing. Far from it, actually; they're hauling out the big guns.

From Gizmodo:

Privacy and anti-monopoly advocacy groups launched the Freedom from Facebook campaign on Monday, demanding that the Federal Trade Commission force the social media giant to break up into four separate companies. Sensing a moment of weakness, activists hope to establish stronger privacy protections and cross-platform communication.

After spending years ignoring privacy concerns and the potential for its platform to be used by bad actors, Facebook has made itself incredibly vulnerable to criticism. The Cambridge Analytica scandal demonstrated how it could lose control of millions of users’ data, and it has served as a tipping point for public outcry and political pressure. A coalition of groups that includes Demand Progress, Move On, Citizens Against Monopoly and the Open Markets Institute sees an opportunity.

On Monday, Freedom from Facebook launched a petition with three core demands:

1. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger should be separated into four companies that operate independently.
2. Require interoperability between competing social networks.
3. Create “strong privacy rules that empower and protect us.”

According to Axios, the petition will be accompanied a digital ad campaign that will target Facebook and Instagram users with simple messages like: “Facebook keeps violating your privacy. Break it up” and “Mark Zuckerberg has a scary amount of power. We need to take it back.” The ads will also run on platforms that aren’t run by Mark Zuckerberg, like Twitter.

I'd rather have seen U.S. lawmakers jump on this themselves, having recognized a winning issue when they saw it, but I'll take this as a consolation prize.

The challenge facing VR porn

A few weeks ago, when Digital Trends published list of "8 innovative ways VR is being used today," my reaction was... well... not kind. All of of Digital Trends' innovative non-gaming uses of VR either failed to be innovative, failed to be in use today, or failed to be something other than gaming (which their article's title promised specifically).

#8 on the list, though, was porn. And I understood, even at the time, why Digital Trends included it. As I wrote at the time, porn

helped drive widespread adoption of earlier technologies like VCRs, and helped decide the outcome of the VHS vs. Beta format war, so its ability to push a new technology into widespread use is well-established. Affordable home VCRs were both immediately useful and game-changing, though, two things that VR currently isn't. VCRs enabled a time-shifting activity which consumers of television media are still doing, and gave birth to an entirely new way to distribute and sell media to consumers; VR can qualitatively enhance your porn consumption, but you can still watch porn without a VR headset.

[Yes, I'm quoting my own blog post, don't @ me.]

It should surprise nobody, then, that I am utterly unsurprised by the fact that VR porn is failing to drive the adoption of VR technology. Sure, some are still bullish about VR porn's prospects, like BigThink.com:

Porn will be the third largest section of VR by 2025, says a report from the investment and management firm Piper Jaffray. Video games and NFL-content would be the only two industries ahead. Certainly, not many would be surprised if it turned out that porn was, in fact, the largest such VR section in the near future.

But others, like Mashable's Monica Chin, are starting to notice VR porn's failure to thrive:

Statistics show porn is a popular use of virtual reality, but it's still nowhere close to being the dominant form of porn. This is certainly due, at least in part, to the fact that very few people own VR headsets. Virtual reality itself has struggled to attract capital in the past year: Facebook-owned Oculus, perhaps the biggest name in the industry, shut down its content studio last year.

[...]

VR porn is an interesting idea, and I enjoyed the videos I watched. But at the end of the day, porn just isn't as compatible with the VR format as it is with the computer screen. Certainly, it doesn't enhance the porn experience enough (yet) to make buying a headset worth it. 

And that's the problem with VR in a nutshell. It's an interesting idea, but doesn't do enough yet to make buying a headset worth it.

OMFG, the hype...

OK, here's the pitch.

Do you remember about 12 years ago, when rhythm games like DDR™ were still really popular in spite of having been around for a decade already, so Activision™ published Red Octane/Harmonix's Guitar Hero™?

Guitar Hero™ turned out to be waaaaayyyyy popular, so EA™ naturally pushed out their own version a few years later (also by Harmonix, oddly enough, who were no longer working on Guitar Hero™ with Activision anymore), which they called Rock Band™. Which was basically multiplayer Guitar Hero™, except that you and three friends could role-play as an entire... rock band (I meant to do that), with one player on vocals, another player shredding on lead guitar (naturally), one more on bass guitar, and one drummer... without which no rock band (or Rock Band™) is ever complete.

Rock Band™ didn't do nearly as well as Guitar Hero™, of course, racking up only $600M in sales compared to GH's $2B-plus, in part because it was more expensive. Guitar Hero™ came with a cheap plastic guitar-shaped game controller, but Rock Band™ needed three: mic, guitar, bass, and "drums"... and also three other people to play with you, instead of GH's guitar-solo gameplay.

Still, it did well enough to have earned a remake... of sorts.

So, picture this: Instead of a cheap plastic game controller, the new version will require a few hundred dollars in expensive VR peripherals. And it will be made by an indie developer (no AAA fat cats here!), who will only have budget to convert about ¹⁄4 of Rock Band™'s game play into VR, so they're actually only going to remake the drumming part of Rock Band™. And forget licensing expensive actual pop and rock titles to drum along to, because, fuck, even Rockstar™ can't afford that shit anymore. So instead of popular hits with killer drum solos, you'll get a handful of cheaper, custom-crafted tunes that work well with VR's wonky motion controls.

How does that sound so far? What, VR isn't gimmick enough? OK, then... how about we make the game's weightless, wonky, non-drum motion controls into an asset by making them.... light sabers! Oh, fuck, I meant laser swords, not Light Sabers™. Seriously, Lucasfilm are litigious as fuck. Do not mess with them.

Better? See, I knew you'd like it. Still, it's a shame about the Light Saber™ business. Maybe it's still possible to work "saber" into the title? Drum Saber? No, there's no drums in this beat-keeping game. Maybe Beat Saber? Ah, that's clunky as fuck, too. Oh, well, trademark it anyway, and at least the game will have a name to fall back on... 

Beat Saber™. OK, yeah, that might grow on me.

How does it sound to you?

Oculus Go & Lenovo Mirage Solo, as reviewed by Tom's Hardware

I wonder if they like them?

From Mark Spoonauer at Tom's Hardware:

No more wires! You don't need a phone! I still don't care!

Oh. I guess not.

Overall, these new headsets feel like a necessary evolution of virtual reality, not the leap forward the category needs for them to become must-have devices. For one, you wouldn't want to be seen in public using either the Go or Solo. Cutting the cord from a geeky headset doesn't cut out the geek part.

Second, virtual reality is still waiting for killer apps, or at least titles and franchises that are household names. Where is the Call of Duty in VR? Or Fortnite? Or Star Wars (no, an add-on to Battlefront on the PSVR doesn't count). To me, it feels like publishers and developers like EA and Epic are forever dragging their feet, waiting for true mass adoption before they commit more resources.

These stand-alone headsets have another issue, and that's the fact that no one under 13 is supposed to use them. This is the same health-related warning that comes with other headsets, because childrens' eyes are still developing. It's hard to indoctrinate the next wave of VR heads when they can’t participate.

Spoonauer concludes by noting that he "extensively played with the Gear VR, only to place it in a drawer," so drawerware for the win? Although he did manage to point out something about VR that I had somehow not known already, namely that children under the age of 13 aren't supposed to use them, which nicely undercuts yet another argument that one hears from some VR proponents.
And make no mistake, Spoonauer is a VR proponent -- he's still actively pushing the killer app argument, even though VR is supposed to be its own killer app, and in spite of the fact that it's already got Doom VR, Skyrim VR, Superhot VR, and other high-profile VR titles and popular IPs like Star Trek, none of which have been enough to sell VR. Spoonauer is one of VR's early adopters. And even he doesn't see enough value in these new standalone devices for them to be worth their purchase prices.

VR... still not a thing.

NVidia GPP is dead

Weirdly for an admitted AMD man, NVIDIA's GeForce Partner Program's antitrust problems had largely flown beneath my notice until today... when NVIDIA killed it. Because of its antitrust problems. Yay?

From WCCFTech:

Almost a month after news first broke of NVIDIA’s GPP program and the anti-trust allegations surrounding it – the company has pulled the plug on what can be accurately called one of the most infamous marketing and branding experiments in graphics card history. [...]

This is something that can only be claimed as a victory for gamers because regardless of what the company terms this as, the fact remains that we saw major branding moves happen in this space including the launch of ASUS AREZ as well as MSI and Gigabyte removing the Gaming branding from Radeon flavored graphics cards. It is unclear at this point whether these decisions will be reversed or will continue in force. [...]

NVIDIA’s GPP program was surrounded by rumors about priority allocation and MDFs and the way AIBs almost universally decided to drop Radeon cards from their gaming branding indicated that there was more at play than simply a volunteer-based program. Whatever the case may be, it looks like NVIDIA has decided that GPP is not worth the hassle.

NVIDIA's blog post/announcement was an impressively meaningless word salad that tried to spin their looming antitrust problems as a positive, and even managed to shoehorn in their "the way it's meant to be played" tag line. You can click through to WCCFTech's article for the full text of that, and for the numerous other links to further reading that WCCFTech had embedded.

Tom's Hardware has coverage of AMD's response to NIVIDIA's non-apology:

In light of the Nvidia GPP controversy, AMD made an official announcement that it remains committed to fair competition and providing consumer choice. In AMD’s own words, the company’s products don’t come with “gamer taxes” and the company doesn’t force its partners into “anti-competitive conditions.” [...] AMD has now broken its silence on the matter and issued an official statement. Of course, AMD didn’t mention GPP or Nvidia by name, but it’s clear who this statement targets. Corporate VP of Radeon Gaming at AMD Scott Herkelman said the following with regards to the ongoing controversy.

Over the coming weeks, you can expect to see our add-in board partners launch new brands that carry an AMD Radeon product. AMD is pledging to reignite this freedom of choice when gamers choose an AMD Radeon RX graphics card. These brands will share the same values of openness, innovation, and inclusivity that most gamers take to heart. The freedom to tell others in the industry that they won’t be boxed in to choosing proprietary solutions that come bundled with “gamer taxes” just to enjoy great experiences they should rightfully have access to. The freedom to support a brand that actively works to advance the art and science of PC gaming while expanding its reach.

As someone who hates anti-competitive and anti-consumer bullshit of all kinds, just on principle, I have to say that it's good that GPP is dead, and I hope the penalties that NVIDIA pays for even attempting it are correspondingly severe.

Still melting down

Back when Meltdown and Spectre were first making headlines, the word was that Meltdown was more serious but also easier to fix, while Spectre would be haunting us for a long, long time (hence the name). But not only is Meltdown proving more pernicious than first thought, there are more Meltdown-like vulnerabilities in Intel's chips. Yikes.

First, from Bleeping Computer:

Microsoft's patches for the Meltdown vulnerability have had a fatal flaw all these past months, according to Alex Ionescu, a security researcher with cyber-security firm Crowdstrike.

Only patches for Windows 10 versions were affected, the researcher wrote today in a tweet. Microsoft quietly fixed the issue on Windows 10 Redstone 4 (v1803), also known as the April 2018 Update, released on Monday.

Welp, it turns out the #Meltdown patches for Windows 10 had a fatal flaw: calling NtCallEnclave returned back to user space with the full kernel page table directory, completely undermining the mitigation. This is now patched on RS4 but not earlier builds -- no backport?? pic.twitter.com/VIit6hmYK0

— Alex Ionescu (@aionescu) May 2, 2018

Back-ported patches are apparently in the works, but no ETA yet from Microsoft. So, that's the bad news. Ready for the worse news?

From Reuters:

Researchers have found eight new flaws in computer central processing units that resemble the Meltdown and Spectre bugs revealed in January, a German computing magazine reported on Thursday.

The magazine, called c’t, said it was aware of Intel Corp’s plans to patch the flaws, adding that some chips designed by ARM Holdings, a unit of Japan’s Softbank, might be affected, while work was continuing to establish whether Advanced Micro Devices chips were vulnerable.

[...]

C’t did not name its sources because researchers were working under so-called responsible disclosure, in which they inform companies and agree to delay publishing their findings until a patch can be found.

The magazine said Google Project Zero, one of the original collective that exposed Meltdown and Spectre in January, had found one of the flaws and that a 90-day embargo on going public with its findings would end on May 7.

Once again, it's looking like a pretty good day to be a W7-using AMD fan.

Stick a pin in this one...

Earlier this week, Facebook released the Oculus Go, a device that nobody was asking for, and which suffers from such a dearth of content that Facebook are also launching a service that will let you watch TV the Oculus Go, just so that you'll have something to do with the thing. VR's evangelists were quick to pronounce this to be the chosen one, the device that will finally win everyone over to VR, in spite of the fact that this new VR device is still just a useless as its more expensive siblings.

For a good spectrum of opinions, compare the Chicago Daily Herald ("the first VR gadget you might actually buy") to The Week Magazine who say straight out that the Oculus Go can't save VR:

The biggest knock against VR is that its ultimate goal is complete immersion, sucking you into whatever entertainment experience you happen to be experiencing. First, there are obvious practical troubles like being unaware of what is going on around you without the normal benefit of peripheral vision or hearing.

More importantly, however, is that a lot of the proposed software for VR is actually pointless. While immersion has always been the aim of video games — and thus offers VR's most compelling use case — most of the other things we want to do with tech aren't actually improved by putting a headset on. The idea of watching Netflix in a virtual room with friends are in a plain sense significantly worse than watching Netflix on a couch on a TV, and repeat failed experiments like Playstation Home. Yes, in theory, having a Skype chat with someone in VR may seem as if it would be more immediate, but it's likely just more cumbersome and difficult than doing it on a phone. Even VR games would require significantly more effort than playing Angry Birds on your phone, again constraining the usefulness of technology.

The point is that VR is at best a niche platform because unlike other forms of tech, it asks you to rebuild your behavior around it. Rather than being some next mainstream wave, its actual uses will likely be in more technical situations, such as skills training, education, or in situations like museums. What it will almost certainly not be is akin to the smartphone: a ubiquitous piece of technology that promises to become used by most of the world's population soon.

As a quick aside, it's nice to see someone else making the same comparison to smartphones that I've been making from the outset.

Cambridge Analytica finally killed by the scandal that they caused...

... and somehow, they didn't see it coming. From CBC News:

The British data analysis firm at the centre of Facebook's privacy scandal is declaring bankruptcy and shutting down.

London-based Cambridge Analytica blamed "unfairly negative media coverage" and said it has been "vilified" for actions it says are both legal and widely accepted as part of online advertising.

"The siege of media coverage has driven away virtually all of the company's customers and suppliers," the company said in a statement on Tuesday. "As a result, it has been determined that it is no longer viable to continue operating the business."

The company said it has filed papers to begin insolvency proceedings in the U.K. and will seek bankruptcy protection in a federal court in New York. Employees were told on Wednesday to turn in their computers, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Facebook said it will keep looking into data misuse by Cambridge Analytica even though the firm is closing down. And Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, a digital advocacy group in Washington, said criticisms of Facebook's privacy practices won't go away just because Cambridge Analytica has.

"Cambridge Analytica's practices, although it crossed ethical boundaries, is really emblematic of how data-driven digital marketing occurs worldwide," Chester said.

"Rather than rejoicing that a bad actor has met its just reward, we should recognize that many more Cambridge Analytica-like companies are operating in the conjoined commercial and political marketplace."

Just a little reminder, in case you still needed it, that there's more where Cambridge Analytica came from, and Facebook's fiasco is far from over. I have to disagree with Jeff Chester on one point, though: I think that most of us can still remember that, while also rejoicing in Cambridge Analytica's demise.

The other Facebook histoire du jour? The Facebook engineer, and professional stalker, that they had to fire for abusing FB's user information database, of course.

Facebook finally launches the Oculus Go. Will it matter?

VR evangelists have been praying for a low-cost, stand-alone VR headset, with no wires and no high-end smartphone, PS4, or PC required. The idea is that turning VR from an expensive peripheral into a more reasonably priced stand-alone device is just what VR needs to become a thing. Well, on the first day of F8, Facebook has answered their prayers by officially launching the Oculus Go.

As reported by TechCrunch:

Oculus Go, Facebook’s cheap and capable standalone VR headset, is now on sale. It costs $199 for the version with 32GB of onboard storage, and $249 for the 64GB variety.

Why: VR headsets where you have to stick your phone in are clumsy and prevent Facebook from controlling the whole experience. Instead of relying on the Samsung Gear headset shell and your iPhone or Android, Facebook gets to dictate everything about the perfect VR rig you can strap on first-timers.

[...]

Oculus wants you to watch TV inside its new Go headset. At first you’ll get Facebook Watch, but expect apps like Netflix and Hulu to arrive eventually.

Why: There just aren’t enough great VR experiences, but perhaps Facebook can get people spending more time in their headsets by creating a virtual big screen for 2D content.

Yeah.... good luck with that. I'm going to stand by my earlier prediction, though: with "just not enough great VR experiences" to drive adoption, it won't matter that FB's new headset is a cheaper stand-alone. It still offers no obvious value to the consumer, which means that its value per dollar of cost is still effectively zero. This is the problem that plagues VR, and the fact that Oculus want you to watch TV in VR, because there's nothing else to do with the Go, eloquently illustrates it.

If this thing sells even as well as Samsung's GearVR, I'll be astonished, given that the hype and excitement around VR has completely dissipated everywhere except in tech media. Look for the Go to sell about as well as the Rift, and for prices to be dropping by X-Mas.