Microsoft proves they've learned nothing, start testing full-page ads for Microsoft Edge to roll out in Windows 10

I am surprised only that people are surprised.

As reported by Windows Latest:

In production builds, Microsoft is A/B testing a new ‘feature’ that is designed to nag users with fullscreen window-less Microsoft Edge recommendations in the OOBE screen.

The nag will appear when users set up their PC, sign in to their system after applying updates, or when they click on a new ad banner within the Settings.

[...]

In the Settings app, there’s a new banner that appears to be rolling out to non-Insiders [...] the advert appears across the top of the Settings app window, just above the settings options. The banner states that you can “get even more out of Windows” and it surprisingly launches the OOBE (out of the box experience) screen [where] there’s a new page titled “Use recommended browser settings” that advises users to restore the Microsoft Edge and pin the browser to the desktop and taskbar.

[...] If you try to skip the setup, the pop-up will appear again in future.

Unfortunately, you cannot permanently disable these recommendations in Windows 10.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Windows is malware, and Microsoft should absolutely be facing antitrust action of their own for this shit. Microsoft controls over 80%, and nearly 90%, of the desktop/laptop OS market at a time when COVID-19 has pushed demand for desktop/laptop PCs to heights they haven't enjoyed for nearly ten years, and they've clearly decided to abuse that gatekeeper position to push their own products in the most anti-competitive, anti-consumer manner possible. 

I'm looking for the EU, at least, to bring action against Microsoft for this latest over-reach, but the US Department of Justice should also be scrutinizing the Redmond firm for this sort of behaviour, which was rampant during the Windows 10 rollout, and clearly isn't going to stop anytime soon.

For more details, along with screen shots, click through to Windows Latest's article.

Big Tech anti-trust actions finally aim at correct target

Given the actively evil toxicity of Facebook, and the overtly anti-competitive tactics which Amazon was using to wreak havoc on the entire retail sector of the developed world, it seemed odd to me that so much focus was on "don't be evil" Google. 

It's not that Google weren't also abusing their monopoly position to do anticompetitive things, because it certainly looks like they were and still are, it's just that of all the problematic, amoral Big Tech firms, Google just wouldn't have been high on my priority list, if I were calling the antitrust shots. Even Apple, whose stance against right-to-repair and obsession with trapping consumers on their "ecosystem" for all time are more problematic to my mind than Google giving Android licenses away for free, would have been pretty far down on my antitrust hit list.

Well, apparently someone in the EU has woken up to reality, because they're finally starting to move against the real Big Tech problem children. From HuffPost:

LONDON (AP) — European Union regulators have filed antitrust charges against Amazon, accusing the e-commerce giant of using data to gain an unfair advantage over merchants using its platform.

The EU’s executive commission, the bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, said Tuesday that the charges have been sent to the company.

The commission said it takes issue with Amazon’s systematic use of non-public business data to avoid “the normal risks of competition and to leverage its dominance” for e-commerce services in France and Germany, the company’s two biggest markets in the EU.

[...]

Amazon faces a possible fine of up to 10% of its annual worldwide revenue, which could amount to billions of dollars. The company rejected the accusations.

Better late than never, I guess.

The EU, for their part, claim to have been working on this antritrust case since 2018, in which case I just have to say, OMFG, get a handle on that bureaucracy, folks! And Amazon, naturally, "disagree with the preliminary assertions of the European Commission," which it pretty standard boilerplate for this sort of thing, and should surprise almost nobody. Odds are not in Amazon's favour, though; the EU typically don't bring antitrust actions unless they can prevail, which is the typical outcome, so look for Amazon to face big fines and strong restrictions in the not-too-distant future.

Whether this is a sign of emboldened officials around the world finally find the stones to reign in all of the Big Tech firms remains to be seen of course. If the EU takes on Facebook, in addition to Amazon, Apple, and Google, we'll have our answer. Don't expect that to happen until early next year, though, at the earliest, because... I mean... 2018? Damn.

Someone finally noticed...

 ...and it only took them four days. From Janet Swift, at I Programmer:

NetMarketShare Bows Out

This news item was supposed to be about the latest desktop browser statistics and the fact that during October Edge had experienced an increase in its share. However, more newsworthy is the fact the October is the final month for which NetApplications.com will collect these statistics.

Reporting the way in which Chrome has come to be the dominant the desktop browser, documenting Firefox's decline and, until recently, the failure of Edge to gain a foothold, has been a part of I Programmer's routine fare. So it came as a shock to discover that this months figures are the last, at least for the foreseeable future.

Well done, Janet Swift! As far as I can tell, you and I are the only two people to actually notice that huge banner announcement at the top of their stats page... and their home page... It makes me wonder what all the other chuckleheads are doing. 

Journalism!

NetMarketShare's closure announcement has received zero attention; their last set of released statistics, though, are a different matter

Days after posting their farewell until next time message, NetMarketShare's announcement they're shutting down after 14 years of service still hasn't generated a single tech media article or blog post (except, apparently, mine).

The evidence of NMS's influence, however, continues to trickle in,with the latest Chromium Edge browser numbers being the big story yesterday, and Wimdows 7's enduring popularity being the story today.

As reported by bleeping computer:

Windows 7 won't die, still second most popular operating system

According to NetMarketShare, Windows 7 saw a drop from 22.77% to 20.41% last month. The report shows that 20.41% of desktops still use Windows 7. Even worse, some are still using Windows XP, according to the report.

I can't help but wonder how bleeping computer will react next month, when they finally realize that frantically refreshing NetMarketShare.com isn't going to make the end-of-November numbers magically appear... because NMS aren't publishing any.

Also... in other news, Windows 7 is still the world's second-most-popular PC operating system, in spite of the fact that you can still get Windows 10 from Microsoft, for free (bleeping computer's article "helpfully" provides the steps). If you were wondering just how badly Microsoft pissed off their customers with the GWS fiasco... wonder no longer.

The other other Big Tech antitrust problem

With Amazon, Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech firms, how long do you think it will take for America's broadband ISPs to get the same attention? Because they probably should.

So says an excellent piece by arstechnica's Tom Simonite:

The new fervor for tech antitrust has so far overlooked an equally obvious target: US broadband providers. “If you want to talk about a history of using gatekeeper power to harm competitors, there are few better examples,” says Gigi Sohn, a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy.

Sohn and other critics of the four companies that dominate US broadband—Verizon, Comcast, Charter Communications, and AT&T—argue that antitrust intervention has been needed for years to lower prices and widen Internet access. [As many as] 162.8 million Americans do not use the Internet at broadband speeds [and] New America’s Open Technology Institute recently found that US consumers pay, on average, more than those in Europe, Asia, or elsewhere in North America.

[...] Children without reliable Internet have been forced to scavenge bandwidth outside libraries and Taco Bells to complete virtual school assignments. In April, a Pew Research Center survey found that one in five parents with children whose schools had been closed by coronavirus believed it likely they would not be able to complete schoolwork at home because of an inadequate Internet connection.

Such problems are arguably more material than some of the antitrust issues that have recently won attention in Washington. The Department of Justice complaint against Google argues that the company’s payments to Apple to set its search engine as the default on the iPhone make it too onerous for consumers to choose a competing search provider. For tens of millions of Americans, changing broadband providers is even more difficult—it requires moving.

I live in Canada, where broadband access is more affordable, so this issue wasn't top of mind for me, but Simonite's piece raises some excellent points; the telecom oligopoly that has been allowed to develop south of the border is just insane, and absolutely needs to be reigned in, or broken up, or at least broken open. Here's hoping that Democrats get a chance to do so; with everything they'll have to deal with (assuming they get control House, Senate, and White House, of course), their dance card is going to be pretty damn full for the next couple of years.

Simonite's piece is excellent, and well worth a read - there's a lot more over at arstechnica than what I've extracted above - so go give them some clicks.

End of an era: Intel might move to outsourcing for chip manufacture

For years now, one of the things that has most clearly separated AMD and Intel was simply where their chips were physically made.

AMD, lagging behind Intel in almost every measurable way, sold off their chip foundries years ago to cut costs and raise capital, in a move which was largely considered indicative of their weak position at the time. Intel, by comparison, continued to own their own chip foundries, preserving a degree of vertical integration which was generally seen as a competitive strength.

But Intel has struggled to update their chip manufacture processes; their recent announcement that next year's Rocket Lake processor will, once again, be a 14nm chip, at a time when rival AMD is rumoured to be planning a move from 7nm to 5nm, speaks clearly to Intel's struggles in moving beyond 14nm chips to reach even 10nm, which would still be well behind the curve in terms of processor manufacturing.

If that last para made very little sense to you, here are the Coles notes: smaller is better when it comes to microprocessors, with smaller chip elements allowing chips to be smaller while having more capabilities, drawing less power, generating less heat, and running faster. This is the heart of Moore's Law, with the increasing areal density of transistors resulting in an exponential increase in computing power.

AMD's 7nm processors aren't just smaller; they're also better-designed, which is why their Zen 3 generation of Ryzen chips now outperforms Intel's products in every measurable way. But AMD didn't have to figure out the manufacturing process for Ryzen; TSMC had done that already, so AMD could just focus on design. Suddenly, what had seemed like a competitive disadvantage (i.e. AMD being forced to rely on a third party to bring the products to market) works to AMD's advantage.

So it probably shouldn't be a surprise that Intel, after spending the last several years being clobbered by AMD+TSMC, are finally flirting with outsourcing chip production themselves. As reported by The Oregonian:

Intel is laying the groundwork to toss the old model out the window. It is openly flirting with the notion of moving leading-edge production from Oregon to Asia and hiring one of its top rivals to make Intel’s most advanced chips.

The company says a decision is likely in January.

It’s a momentous choice that follows a string of manufacturing setbacks at the Ronler Acres campus near Hillsboro Stadium, failures that have cost Intel its cherished leadership in semiconductor technology – perhaps forever.

There's no guarantee that Intel will do this, of course; even if they do move forward, there's no guarantee that this change will save them (AMD's processors aren't just smaller, remember - they're also better-designed). But the simple fact that Intel are considering this move speaks to the weakness of their position; much like the AMD of years ago, Intel might just have no choice but to outsource, if they want to stay in business. Rocket Lake was their last, desperate attempt to steal some of AMD's Zen 3 thunder, and it totally failed; most tech media outlets didn't even notice the Rocket Lake announcement, or care, which is pretty much the prevailing sentiment where Intel are concerned, generally.

Intel are in serious trouble; they might not be on the verge of insolvency, but they are on the verge of irrelevancy, if they aren't already completely irrelevant to a PC industry that they were totally lording it over just two years ago. After years spent charging premium prices for tiny performance increases, moving to outsourcing now may just be too little, too late. 

Whatever the outcome, though, there's no doubt that a solid decade of Intel dominion over the PC is well and truly over. That era is at an end.

End of an era: NetMarketShare throw in the towel

Confirming something that I'd suspected for some time now, OS and browser tracking site NetMarketShare confirmed the obvious today:

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
After 14 years of service and being used as a primary source in tens of thousands of articles and publications, we are retiring NetMarketShare in its current form. October, 2020 is the last month of data. All billing for existing accounts has been stopped. All outstanding balances are being refunded.

Why? An upcoming change in browsers (https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints) will break our device detection technology and will cause inaccuracies for a long period of time.

In addition, we have focused on bot detection and removal as a key part of the quality control process. It is the most complex part of our codebase. As time has gone on, it has become increasingly difficult to manage this process. So, instead of accepting increasing levels of inaccuracy, we thought it would be a good time to call it a day.

Well... That escalated quickly.

This week in Facebook: Hypocrisy, incompetence, and partisan political bias, and that's just one of their policies

As reported by HuffPost:

Under mounting pressure to quell the flood of partisan misinformation coursing through its platform, Facebook announced a new policy in September: It would stop accepting all new political ads during the week preceding the presidential election.

[...]

In theory, as Zuckerberg touted, the policy would prevent political advertisers from spreading new messages to targeted audiences before fact-checkers and journalists had time to scrutinize them — reducing the risk of false and misleading claims going viral in the run-up to the vote.

In practice, it has been a disaster. [...] Chaos ensued almost immediately: Thousands of previously approved ads from Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign and multiple progressive groups were wrongly blocked due to a “technical flaw,” potentially costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.President Donald Trump’s campaign managed to launch new ads post-ban. And in violation of its own rules, Facebook approved ads from the president’s campaign prematurely declaring victory, as well as hundreds of ads bearing the misleading text “ELECTION DAY IS TODAY” or “Vote Today.”

Days later, Facebook is still putting out fires amid searing accusations of partisan bias and negligence. The company’s stunning failure to properly enforce its own high-profile policy at such a critical time has raised alarm about its preparedness for the fallout of the election — the results of which could be inconclusive for days or even weeks.

“[Facebook’s] implementation certainly has only inspired more fears over how they’re going to be able to handle these last-minute election-specific rollouts,” [Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of the nonprofit Accountable Tech] said. “It constantly feels like they’re dealing with optics — they’re thinking of everything as optical problems and never as structural problems.”

And that, friends, is Facebook in a nutshell, and why I think that the U.S. DOJ's antitrust action again Google was aimed at entirely the wrong target. Google might be problematic and monopolistic, but Facebook is actively evil. Google and Amazon are cuddly kittens by comparison; sure, they might be problematic in terms of business competition, but they have nothing on the corrosive toxicity and greed of Zuckerberg & Co.

Of all the Big Tech firms, Facebook is the most responsible for the deepening divisions in our discourse and society, structurally dedicated to encouraging the worst impulses of humanity for no other reason than their own material gain. Facebook is actively undermining civility, privacy, and democracy itself, and worst of all is that they aren't even doing it for ideological reasons; no, Facebook's undermining of civilization is being done, almost entirely, for the money.

Facebook is fairly begging to be broken up, but Trump's DOJ won't touch them; after all, their "mistakes" and "accidents" seem to trend entirely in one direction, and that direction mostly favours Trump and his supporters. Hopefully the DOJ of a President Biden, or a new Congress in which Democrats control both House and Senate, will take action against the most urgent Big Tech threat.

In the meantime, it falls to the rest of us to keep on doing what we've already been doing: deleting Facebook from our lives. Facebook is the problem; it's time for more people to stop being part of that problem.

VR won't be a "meaningful" part of interactive entertainment for YEARS, according to SONY

Among all the languishing and failed VR products, Sony's PlayStation VR stands out as the closest thing VR has to a success story. Sure, Google's Cardboard VR or Samsung's Gear VR may have moved more units, but PSVR has handily outsold all integrated-display VR headsets, combined. The problem is that even those industry-leading sales numbers are far below VR's early projections; worse yet, they were entirely front-loaded, with basically nobody buying in after that first wave of early adopters.

PSVR fans kept showing up for E3, year after year, hoping for a big VR announcement from Sony, only to leave disappointed. The next-gen PS5, which will land in stores only days from today equipped with more than enough grunt for VR, does have a camera module available for sale, but it isn't PSVR-compatible; if you want to use your last-gen PSVR with the next-gen PS5, you'll need an adapter. The only thing that could speak more loudly to VR being low on the priority list for Sony would be some sort of official statement to that effect, from Sony themselves.

And now, as reported by The Washington Post, we have exactly that:

Though immersion appears to be the focal point of Sony’s PS5 push, Ryan says there won’t be any immediate leaps forward from Sony in the most immersive gaming experience, virtual reality (VR). PlayStation was at the forefront of the virtual reality market for consoles, having launched a PSVR headset in 2016. While 5 million headsets were sold by January this year, sales were slowing in 2020. There are currently no public plans for a PS5-specific headset. Instead, Sony is offering adapters to use the PS4′s PSVR headset with the new console.

“I think we’re more than a few minutes from the future of VR,” Ryan said. “PlayStation believes in VR. Sony believes in VR, and we definitely believe at some point in the future, VR will represent a meaningful component of interactive entertainment. Will it be this year? No. Will it be next year? No. But will it come at some stage? We believe that. And we’re very pleased with all the experience that we’ve gained with PlayStation VR, and we look forwarding to seeing where that takes us in the future.”

And that, as they say, is that. The most successful player in the VR game has no plans for a next play, anytime in the near-to-foreseeable future. Stick a fork in VR, folks; it's done.

VR apologists will likely look to Ryan's "at some stage"/"in the future" remarks as signs of life, but don't be fooled; that's just the corpse, twitching. Sony has to say something to assure buzzword-sensitive investors that they haven't given up on one of tech's juicier buzzwords, because admitting that VR's years-long campaign is ending in defeat could cause the share price of whoever admits it first to drop sharply, something which Sony would rather avoid. 

But their reluctance to flee the VR field first should not be mistaken for a desire to keep fighting the VR fight; Sony is done with VR, unless and until somebody else succeeds in convincing consumers to adopt the technology en masse. With the second-biggest player being Facebook VR née Oculus, who have nailed their VR fortunes to the larger platform's declining user count, that's looking less and less likely to happen.

Of all the companies doing VR business, the only one that might have been making money from VR was Sony. What we've now learned is that even Sony are not making enough money from VR for the tech to be worth any more investment. 

Oh, sure, Facebook and Valve have deep enough pockets that they can probably continue to lose money on VR for a while yet, but don't expect that to propel VR into the forefront of the public consciousness; it won't, and neither will the upcoming Ready Player Two (the sequel to VR-advert/movie Ready Player One, which also didn't more the needle on VR).

It's all over save the shouting; how long the likes of Facebook and Valve will keep shouting into the VR void remains to be seen.

A busy week for corporate bullshit

After months of keeping low profiles while COVID-19 dominated the headlines, the tech industry has apparently decided to make up for lost time with a one-week barrage of bullshit to close out October. Because who doesn't want to slide into the busiest sales season of the year on a slick of one's own mess, and associated consumer ill will? What do you mean, "Nobody with any sense?"

Anyway, here's a roundup of my favourites from yesterday, complete with pithy snarky commentary.

Is this the beginning of the end of Big Tech?

After months of hinting, and alluding, and leaking, the US Department of Justice has finally decided to actually piss, rather than just sitting on the pot.

As reported by Reuters, via Huffpost.com:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department and 11 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc’s Google on Tuesday for allegedly breaking the law in using its market power to fend off rivals.

[...]

Coming just days before the U.S. presidential election, the filing’s timing could be seen as a political gesture since it fulfills a promise made by President Donald Trump to his supporters to hold certain companies to account for allegedly stifling conservative voices.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley, a vociferous Google critic, accused the company of keeping power through “illegal means” and called the lawsuit “the most important antitrust case in a generation.”

The federal lawsuit marks a rare moment of agreement between the Trump administration and progressive Democrats. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted on Sept. 10, using the hash tag #BreakUpBigTech, that she wanted “swift, aggressive action.”

The 11 states which joined the lawsuit all have Republican attorneys general.

Google, who have only just seen the lawsuit themselves, did not respond to Reuters, and will probably let their lawyers do the talking now that the matter is before the courts. I expect that the very pro-Microsoft/ant-Google crew at Thurrott will be gloating about this in a matter of minutes, although I seem to have spotted this one before they did, this time around.

So, the question of which Big Tech firm would be the first to face the US DOJ's antitrust ire has been answered, In spite of the destructive impact and overt evil of Facebook; the profoundly more anti-competitive activities of Amazon; the fact that Epic has been trying to preempt the DOJ and force an antitrust finding against Apple; and the fact that Microsoft are still abusing their position as Windows' gatekeepers to continue loading unwanted Microsoft-branded content, and ads for the same, onto the devices of Windows 10 users, it will be Google who will face official government antitrust action first.

The partisan nature of this action, coming just weeks before an election which Republicans look likely to lose badly, and backed by Republican senators and Republican governors, will likely form the backbone of Google's defense here; the fact that Elizabeth Warren has called for breaking up Big Tech firms like Google will likely not be as much of a factor. I think that's a solid defense; the prosecution case will rely mostly on the fact that Google actually is guilty of doing exactly what they've been accused of, and the matter won't be resolved for years, so for the time being it's business as usual.

Nonetheless, this is something of a watershed moment. The Big Tech firms (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google) have mostly behaved as if laws do not apply to them for years; what the DOJ has announced today is an intention to apply the laws to them, and I don't expect that Google will be the only one to face a DOJ antitrust lawsuit in the coming months; Apple and Google are already facing multiple antitrust actions in the EU. 

The appearance of impropriety here, with the pre-election timing and largely partisan backing, are unlikely to alter the fact that these companies are behaving like the abusive monopolies that they mostly are, or to change the fact that they are now all faced with a new reality: that their ethos of disruptive innovation has run as far as society is willing to let it. They will now be required to stop disrupting society, and start helping to stabilize it, or at least pay for cleaning up the mess they've made.

Again, it will be years before this finishes playing out, and while Alphabet Inc. might end up looking rather different, I don't expect that Google itself will change very much. But with the conversation now officially underway, there is finally hope that these corporations (and, by extension, all similarly-sized corporations) might finally have reached the end of the era of limitless permissiveness for their largely lawless, corrupting, tax-evading ways. And that can only be a good thing.

This week in Facebook: Zuckerberg throws contractors under the bus for Facebook's Kenosha fail, while deflecting responsibility...

... and if that isn't peak Facebook in a nutshell, I don't know what is.

As reported by TIME:

In a video posted to Facebook on Friday, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said that the social media giant made a mistake by not removing a page and event that urged people in Kenosha, Wis., to carry weapons amid protests. On Tuesday night, a 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly fatally shot two people and injured a third.

Zuckerberg admitted that “a bunch of people” had reported the page and said the decision to not remove it was “largely an operational mistake.”

“The contractors, the reviewers who the initial complaints were funneled to, didn’t, basically, didn’t pick this up,” Zuckerberg said in the Friday video, which was taken from a larger company-wide meeting. “And on second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that’s responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down.”

He went on to deny that the shooter had followed this particular Facebook group, as if that was required for him to have decided to show up for an event which was organized on Facebook by the group; went on to announce that the shooter's Facebook and Instagram pages had been "suspended," and that the "Kenosha Guard" page had also been taken down... just hours after the public outcry started about white supremacist militia groups organizing events on Facebook that led to the shootings.

On the plus side, though, Zuckerberg did describe the shootings, accurately, as a "mass murder," so at least he's finally stopped pandering to these asshats.

At this point, it's pretty clear that Facebook is not a positive force in society; their corporate culture is, and always has been, morally bankrupt, suffering from a total lack of anything resembling actual principles. And the problem is pervasive, the result of a corporate leadership which views rules as being for other people, and morals as the small-minded thinking of the unintelligent; Facebook is a fish that's rotted from the head down, and which is thoroughly rotten.

As long as Facebook is allowed to continuing policing itself, subject only to "internal investigations" of its own failures, no matter how many lives are lost as a result of those failures, its problems will not be solved. Facebook does not have problems; Facebook is the problem. And the only solution to that problem is for Facebook is to stop being Facebook, most likely due to antitrust action breaking them up into chunks of manageable size. No other remedy can possibly begin to bring the problem of Facebook to heel.

This week in Facebook: Zuck wants in on Epic's action, picks PR fight with Apple (sorta)

Sometimes I fucking love The Reg:

Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people’s privacy in an upcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system – and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms.

The antisocial network that makes almost all of its revenue from building a vast, constantly updated database of netizens that it then sells access to, is upset that iOS 14, due out next month, will require apps to ask users for permission before Facebook grabs data from their phones.

“This is not a change we want to make, but unfortunately Apple’s updates to iOS14 have forced this decision,” the behemoth bemoans before thinking the unthinkable: that it may have to end its most intrusive analytics engine for iPhone and iPad users.

“We know this may severely impact publishers’ ability to monetize through Audience Network on iOS 14, and, despite our best efforts, may render Audience Network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14 in the future.”

Amazingly, despite Facebook pointing out to Apple that it is tearing away people’s right to have their privacy invaded in order to receive ads for products they might want, Cupertino continues to push ahead anyway.

The result is potentially horrifying. “While it’s difficult to quantify the impact to publishers and developers at this point with so many unknowns, in testing we’ve seen more than a 50 per cent drop in Audience Network publisher revenue when personalization was removed from mobile app ad install campaigns,” Facebook warns.

Kieran McCarthy, you San Francisco savage. I love you.

Seriously, though, the fact that Apple is trying to mobilize public sentiment against Apple for blocking their own attempts to violate users' privacy is about as fucking rich as it gets. Epic, at least, have adoring Fortnite fans to mobilize; nobody is going to ghost Apple for protecting them from Facebook's intrusive data collection. 

And it's not like Facebook can leverage antitrust sentiment against Apple, either, since Facebook are also in Congress' crosshairs. Especially not in a week when Facebook just announced that Oculus users will need to login with Facebook accounts or lose their access to the games they'd bought for the platform, specifically on the strength of Facebook's promise to not do that. I mean... for fuck's sake, Zuck, what are you thinking?

I don't really have anything else to add, here; this whole post was basically written because McCarthy's piece was too juicy not to share. The whole piece goes on in this same sarcastic vein another couple of hundred words, and is totally worth reading, so go give them the click.

And fuck Facebook.

Epic v. Apple, round one: A split decision, sort of

I guess that it's time to talk about Epic's war-of-choice against Apple.

For those who haven't been paying attention, here's the Coles Notes version. Epic Games, developers of Fortnite, deliberately breached the terms of the agreements with Apple and Google which allowed them to have Fortnite on both the iOS App Store and Google Play. Apple and Google both acted in accordance with the rules of said agreements, and removed Fortnite from both the App Store and Google Play.

This is when Epic, who very clearly wanted exactly this outcome, launched a well-prepared PR campaign against, primarily, Apple. They clearly intended to mobilize Apple-using Fortnite fans against the Cupertino company, intending to litigate their dissatisfaction with Apple's Apple Store payment terms in the court of public opinion, even as they also filed a lawsuit against Apple seeking an injunction to force their own desired payment terms on them "temporarily," clearly hoping that having those payment terms in place for the years it would take to resolve the lawsuit would essentially make it impossible for Apple to ever go back, whether Epic actually prevailed in court or not.

Apple, naturally, are having none of this. They make billions of US dollars every single year from their 30% cut of App Store transactions, and every incentive to "go to the mattresses" in defense of one of their main sources of revenue. And, as it turned out, banning Fortnite from the App Store was only one way they could express their displeasure with Epic's antics: they revoked Epic's developer license, effectively banning their Unreal Engine, and all games based on that engine, from the App Store as well.

Epic, clearly panicked by this drastic and rapid escalation of a fight that they'd clearly thought would be waged entirely on Epic's terms, filed for another injunction, asking the court to block Apple from killing the Unreal Engine dead. And at the end of yesterday, a federal court judge ruled on both injunctions. The result? Basically, it's a draw. The reasoning behind that draw, however, is quite interesting.

In case you needed one, here's another reason not to buy an Oculus VR headset

 

As reported by The Verge:

Oculus will soon require all of its virtual reality headset users to sign up with a Facebook account. [...]

Starting later this year, you’ll only be able to sign up for an Oculus account through Facebook. If you already have an account, you’ll be prompted to permanently merge your account. If you don’t, you’ll be able to use the headset normally until 2023, at which point official support will end. [...]

Facebook also says that all future unreleased Oculus devices will require a Facebook login, even if you’ve got a separate account already.

Yay?

If you're wondering why Facebook would possibly want to add even more barriers to entry in the way of VR adoption, in spite of the fact that almost nobody has a VR headset or cares about VR, the answer appears to be

a) consolidating Facebook’s management of its platforms, and

b) slightly simplifying the launch of Horizon, the social VR world that Facebook announced last year.

Of course, Facebook's disastrous record on privacy and data security makes 'a' problematic right out of the gate, and 'b' is only helpful is people care about Horizon... which is so thoroughly not a thing that even I hadn't heard about it, and I've been following this shit.

GG, Facebook! Well played. With most of your customers having bought those headsets only because they could also use them with Steam, you've now spiked your own sales, and probably the overall sales of VR headsets, for no other reason than sheer, monopolistic territoriality.

Unpopular opinion: XBox Game Pass is not a good value for the average consumer

Have I mentioned lately just how crazy it makes me, every single I hear someone describe Microsoft's "Netflix for gaming" Game Pass subscription service as the "best deal in gaming?" Because it really, really does, and it keeps happening.

Just fucking Christ... People, it's real talk time. 

For most gamers, Game Pass is not a good value. 

That's not just my opinion; quite simply, it's the math. So, let's look at that math. Specifically, let's look at the average attach rate of a videogame console.

Two weeks later: Pop!_OS is still fine

It's been a couple of weeks now since I switched from Windows 7 to Linux. If you're thinking of making the switch yourself, and wondering what that's like, I feel like I've now got enough experience to tell you what you can expect.

Microsoft strikes again, flags anti-telemetry HOST file changes as malware

Microsoft does not have a great record when it comes to data collection. Starting with the release of Windows 10, when they insisted that they needed to collect essentially every possible kind of metadata from users in the name of maintaining the platform, only to later admit that at least half of that data collection wasn't necessary after all, Microsoft's built-in telemetry has been a pain point for privacy-conscious users for years.

Windows 10's telemetry system was a major contributor to the slow uptake of Windows 10, and Microsoft's later decision to add the same telemetry, retroactively, to Windows 8 and 7 as well was even harder to defend; neither older OS, after all, needed to be maintained in perpetuity the way Windows 10 did, and both were mature OSes and much more stable to begin with, so why did they need to harvest users' metadata? I'd still like to know; Microsoft never explained.

Naturally, Windows users generally, and Windows 7 users in particular, started looking for workarounds for Redmond's telemetry bullshit. Third party applications like Spybot's Anti-Beacon, or O&O ShutUp10, began to proliferate, turning off telemetry for users that cared enough to take steps to do so; meanwhile, Microsoft continued to ignore calls by data privacy advocates and activists to turn off the telemetry, or at least to allow all of their users to opt out.

Late last week, Microsoft finally responded. As reported by bleeping computer:

Since the end of July, Windows 10 users began reporting that Windows Defender had started detecting modified HOSTS files as a 'SettingsModifier:Win32/HostsFileHijack' threat.

When detected, if a user clicks on the 'See details' option, they will simply be shown that they are affected by a 'Settings Modifier' threat and has 'potentially unwanted behavior,' [...] it seems that Microsoft had recently updated their Microsoft Defender definitions to detect when their servers were added to the HOSTS file.

Users who utilize HOSTS files to block Windows 10 telemetry suddenly caused them to see the HOSTS file hijack detection.

I can attest to this not being restricted to Windows 10, or to Windows Defender; Microsft Security Essentials running on Windows 7 started exhibiting this same behaviour on my own system last Wednesday. Apparently, having already paid for the privilege of using Windows 7 or 8 is not enough; we're now expected to pay again, by allowing Microsoft to harvest our metadata, even though the operating systems themselves are either out-of-service, or approaching end-of-service.

So, what's a Windows 7 or 8 user to do? Well... personally, I switched to Linux.

Specifically, I switched to Pop!_OS, which seemed well-aligned with my game-centric use case. And while it's been a bit of a learning curve, I have to say that the experience of switching to Pop!_OS in 2020 was far less painful than my attempt to switch to Ubuntu in 2019. I won't say that it's been flawless, but it's been nearly flawless, and I won't be switching back.

Good job, Microsoft! You've finally manage to make using your products so unattractive that even a procrastinator like me has finally pulled the rip cord, and bailed on you. Sayonara, and good riddance!

If you're still on an older version of Windows, and wondering what to do next, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you make the shift to Linux. Don't accept an OS that acts like malware, or a giant corporate overlord who never listens to your concerns, and who does not care if you stay or go. Installing your new OS takes only minutes -- a far cry from my last Windows 7 install, which took hours, and even then needed me to install ethernet and graphics card drivers separately, along with hours' worth of updates, and OMG why didn't I do this years ago?

Time saved during OS installation leaves lots of time to acclimatize yourself to the new OS environment... which will still leave you lots of time to actually get back to using your PC. Seriously, I don't have a single regret, and I don't think you will, either. Give it a shot; you've got nothing to lose, except Microsoft's baggage.

Twitter pulls a Facebook, faces FTC investigation over selling phone numbers collected for 2FA

In case you were wondering... yes, Twitter is also shit.

As reported by arstechnica:

Twitter is facing a Federal Trade Commission probe and believes it will likely owe a fine of up to $250 million after being caught using phone numbers intended for two-factor authentication for advertising purposes.

The company received a draft complaint from the FTC on July 28, it disclosed in its regular quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange commission [which] alleges that Twitter is in violation of its 2011 settlement with the FTC over the company's "failure to safeguard personal information."

That agreement included a provision banning Twitter from "misleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy, and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information, including the measures it takes to prevent unauthorized access to nonpublic information and honor the privacy choices made by consumers." In October 2019, however, Twitter admitted that phone numbers and email addresses users provided it with for the purpose of securing their accounts were also used "inadvertently" for advertising purposes between 2013 and 2019.

Harvesting phone numbers from users under the auspices of implementing two-factor authentication, and then selling those numbers to advertisers, is not the sort of thing one can do "inadvertently." This is not a mere "oops." What Twitter have done here is to violate the privacy of users, all while promising to protect their privacy; to describe this as a fundamental violation of trust is not even slightly exaggerated.

Of course, that's not all that Twitter have done here. With this one greedy, short-sighted move, Twitter have also thrown suspicion on the entire idea of two-factor authentication. Security experts will tell you that enabling two-factor authentication, or 2FA, on all of your online accounts is the best way to secure them, but that rather relies on the companies that hold our account data to act honestly when we do so.

Consumers were already inclined to suspicion towards these giant corporations, which is why so many of them don't already have 2FA enabled; this boneheaded move by Twitter will not help that situation at all. Somehow, given all this damage they've potentially caused, a mere $250 million on fines doesn't feel like nearly enough of a penalty.

This week in Facebook: Yes, it gets worse edition

Seeing this headline on the same day that I posted about how Facebook isn't serious about reforming itself feels a bit like kismet... but, for the record, I'd rather have been wrong.

As reported by VICE:

Facebook Just Failed Its First Ever Civil Rights Audit

The auditors warned that Facebook's failures to address misinformation will have "direct and consequential implications" for the 2020 election.

Facebook’s repeated failures to address the rampant hate speech and misinformation on its platform have left the 2020 presidential election wide open to interference by President Donald Trump, according to a scathing new report.

A 100-page civil rights audit published Wednesday morning lays bare Facebook’s failings, and the auditors conclude that Facebook’s failure “to grasp the urgency” of the situation will have “direct and consequential implications“ on the U.S. presidential elections in November.

Yes, dear reader, there are indeed times that I hate being right all the damn time. And yes, this is one of them.

The whole piece gives a lot more detail, and is definitely worth a read, so go read it over there, and give these actual journalists some clicks. And then delete Facebook.

This week in Facebook: I don't know what they were expecting edition

We've been seeing reports for most of a week now that Mark Zuckerberg was not planning to make meaningful changes at Facebook in response to the current advertising boycott of the platform, so I really don't know what the leaders of the "Stop Hate For Profit" movement were hoping would come of meeting with the man. Whatever they were hoping for, though, they clearly didn't get it.

As reported by HuffPostUS:

Civil rights organizers calling for an advertising boycott of Facebook said their meeting on Tuesday with company CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg was ultimately a “disappointment.”

In a scathing statement on the Stop Hate for Profit website, which urges brands to pull Facebook advertising for the month of July, organizers said it “was abundantly clear in our meeting today that Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team is not yet ready to address the vitriolic hate on their platform.”

“Zuckerberg offered the same old defense of white supremacist, antisemitic, Islamophobic and other hateful groups on Facebook that the Stop Hate for Profit Coalitions, advertisers and society at large have heard too many times before,” the statement reads.

The group continued: “Zuckerberg offered no automatic recourse for advertisers whose content runs alongside hateful posts. He had no answer for why Facebook recommends hateful groups to users. He refused to agree to provide an option for victims of hate and harassment to connect with a live Facebook representative ... And he did not offer any tangible plans on how Facebook will address the rampant disinformation and violent conspiracies on its platform.”

[...]

“None of this is hard,” the statement said of the demands, “especially for one of the world’s most innovative companies whose founder coined the term move fast and break things. Mark Zuckerberg, you aren’t breaking things, you are breaking people.”

Keep this in mind, the next time Facebook announce some essentially meaningless, superficial "change" on this issue; if they're not meaningfully addressing the specific issues raised by Stop Hate For Profit, they're not taking it seriously.

Microsoft is at it again (or, another reason why I'll never switch to Windows 10)

Let's just cut right to it, shall we? Here's a new report of Microsoft's intrusive, user-hostile, monopolistic practices, as reported by Sean Hollister of The Verge:

If I told you that my entire computer screen just got taken over by a new app that I’d never installed or asked for — it just magically appeared on my desktop, my taskbar, and preempted my next website launch — you’d probably tell me to run a virus scanner and stay away from shady websites, no?

But the insanely intrusive app I’m talking about isn’t a piece of ransomware. It’s Microsoft’s new Chromium Edge browser, which the company is now force-feeding users via an automatic update to Windows.

Seriously, when I restarted my Windows 10 desktop this week, an app I’d never asked for:

1. Immediately launched itself
2. Tried to convince me to migrate away from Chrome, giving me no discernible way to click away or say no
3. Pinned itself to my desktop and taskbar
4. Ignored my previous browser preference by asking me — the next time I launched a website — whether I was sure I wanted to use Chrome instead of Microsoft’s oh-so-humble recommendation

[...] Did I mention that, as of this update, you can’t uninstall Edge anymore?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Microsoft has turned Windows into malware. But don't worry! It gets worse. Because apparently Windows 7 and 8 are also receiving the unwanted gift of a new web browser that they didn't ask for and can't uninstall, in spite of the fact that Windows 7, in particular, is supposed to be out of service and not receiving updates anymore.

Needless to say, questions abound, and Hollister wasn't shy about asking them.

Some more overt examples of "working the ref": Unconscious bias revisited

It was just days ago that I posted this, opining on The Last of Us Part II's review drama, and on the conspiracy theories that had sprung up surrounding it. TL;DR: While I didn't believe that videogame reviewers were being consciously or overtly threatened with lack of access unless they posted positive reviews, I did believe that they were being wooed with expensive gifts and other perks to influence their reviews in advance of the games' release dates. In short, the problem wasn't the conscious bias of the conspiracy theories, but rather the unconscious bias that was clearly at work, and which was giving rise to the conspiracy theories in the first place.

Well, it turns out I was wrong. It turns out that media outlets are being very deliberately threatened with the withholding of access if their reviews are less than glowing, and that the problem may be more commonplace than anyone had been willing to talk about before.

As reported by Polygon:

On June 12, Vice published its review of The Last of Us Part 2, in which critic Rob Zacny said that while the game had “memorable moments” that made for great “spectacle,” he was less taken with the story and characters. “Nobody ever reconsiders their quest for vengeance,” Zacny wrote. “Everyone acts under a kind of vindictive compulsion that goes little remarked and unexamined.” Zacny went on to describe the game’s message as complacent, full of “oppressive bleakness and violence.”

While the vast majority of reviews have lavished The Last of Us Part 2 with all sorts of praise, a handful of outlets — Polygon included — have been slightly more critical of the blockbuster game. According to Zacny, Vice’s review prompted a Sony representative to reach out on behalf of Naughty Dog.

“They felt some of the conclusions I reached in my review were unfair and dismissed some meaningful changes or improvements,” Zacny told Polygon over Twitter messages.

Zacny clarified that the exchange wasn’t “confrontational,” but that it was nonetheless “unusual,” as the site doesn’t typically have big publishers asking in an official capacity why a review reads the way it does. Such things can happen, of course, though often with smaller developers, or from publishers who have spotted a factual error in a piece that they want corrected.

If you're thinking that this looks a lot like Sony and Naughty Dog trying to literally "work the ref" on this one, then you're not alone. And neither, as it turns out, was Zacny.

Facial recognition technology has a 96% failure rate

96% failure.

Let that sink in for a minute.

As reported by VICE:

Detroit police have used highly unreliable facial recognition technology almost exclusively against Black people so far in 2020, according to the Detroit Police Department’s own statistics. The department’s use of the technology gained national attention last week after the American Civil Liberties Union and New York Times brought to light the case of Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, a man who was wrongfully arrested because of the technology.

In a public meeting Monday, Detroit Police Chief James Craig admitted that the technology, developed by a company called DataWorks Plus, almost never brings back a direct match and almost always misidentifies people.

“If we would use the software only [to identify subjects], we would not solve the case 95-97 percent of the time,” Craig said. “That’s if we relied totally on the software, which would be against our current policy … If we were just to use the technology by itself, to identify someone, I would say 96 percent of the time it would misidentify."

Holy. Shit.

This week in Facebook: Facebook's Achilles' Heel

Back when the Cambridge Analytica scandal was still in high gear, and the #deletefacebook movement along with it, Facebook's shareholders did something they hadn't really done for years: they sold their stock. They sold enough stock to actually drop Facebook's share price a bit, for a couple of weeks... until Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was finished with his command performance testimony before Congress, and it was rapidly becoming clear that Congress had no intention of doing anything much to reign Facebook in.

None of Facebook's other scandals since then have had a much impact. FB shareholders, having learned that FB's actions had virtually no potential of negative consequences for the firm, have steadfastly driven FC's share price upwards ever since. The only other downwards blip on this general upwards trend was March of this year, when everyones' share prices were crashing.

That ended at the end of last week, when EU-UK giant Unilever announced that they were joining an advertising boycott of Facebook over their policies (or, more accurately, their lack of same) regarding hate-filled political advertising. Unilever's announcement that they were joining this boycott was probably the first time that most people had even heard that the boycott was happening, but once the world's attention was drawn to the boycott, and people had educated themselves on exactly who Unilever even were, the effect on FB's share price was immediate and dramatic: it dropped.

Unconscious bias: The Last of Us, Part 2, as a case study in how big game companies create it, and exploit it

A little while back, Naughty Dog Games released the sequel to their GOTY 2013 critical and commercial triumph, The Last of Us. And, to basically nobody's surprise, The Last of Us Part II has met with similar commercial and critical success. Unlike TLOU1, however, TLOU2's audience reception has been... decidedly more mixed, shall we say.

TLOU2 is hardly the first pop culture release of recent years to show this sort of dramatic disparity between critical opinion and audience opinion. The disparity can just as easily break the other way, too, as in the case of Netflix's Bright. And, just as with Bright, the immediate, knee-jerk response from those who disagreed with the critical take on things was to cry foul.

Specifically, and in basically a mirror image of the Bright situation, TLOU2's detractors were quick to claim that Naughty Dog had paid off enough video game critics to give glowing reviews that it resulted in a metascore that was simply not representative of the released product (with Bright, it was allegedly major movie studios paying for bad reviews, to tank the first major movie release from a competing business model which threatened their own).

Microsoft and Amazon follow IBM's lead... sort of

After IBM exited the facial recognition business earlier in the week, while also calling on Congress, "to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies," Amazon and Microsoft have both announced moratoria on the use of their facial recognition systems by law enforcement agencies.

Amazon was second out of the gate after IBM, followed by Microsoft, according to Reuters:

Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it would await federal regulation before selling facial recognition technology to police, making it the latest big firm to back away from the business following protests against law enforcement brutality and bias.

The announcement came shortly after rival Amazon.com Inc declared it was pausing police use of its "Rekognition" service for a year and International Business Machines Corp said it no longer offers the software generally.

In a statement, Microsoft said it has worked on enacting principles and legislation for the software's use.

"We do not sell our facial recognition technology to U.S. police departments today, and until there is a strong national law grounded in human rights, we will not sell this technology to police," the company said. The Washington Post first reported the news.

Obviously IBM's statement was much stronger, but IBM also wasn't a major player in facial recognition before killing it, so their decision to exit the space actually doubles as a cost-cutting move. Amazon and Microsoft, on the other hand, actually do have facial recognition businesses, so it probably shouldn't be a big surprise that they both announced one-year suspensions of their facial recognition development, rather than complete cancellation.

A small green shoot of hope: IBM abandons its own facial recognition technology, calls for change

"Daddy changed the world!"

- Gianna Floyd

He sure did, Gianna. And the changes are just getting started.

As reported by CNBC:

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna called on Congress Monday to enact reforms to advance racial justice and combat systemic racism while announcing the company was getting out of the facial recognition business.

The decision for IBM to get out of the facial recognition business comes amid criticism of the technology, employed by multiple companies, for exhibiting racial and gender bias. Amazon’s own use of facial recognition was put to a shareholder vote last year, with 2.4% of shareholders voting in favor of banning the sale of the technology to government agencies amid privacy and civil rights concerns.

“IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency,” Krishna wrote in the letter delivered to members of Congress late Monday.

“We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies.”

Facial recognition is a big and growing business, with law enforcement being its single biggest target market, but criticisms of the technology have been part of the conversation almost from the beginning. Implicit bias, largely the result of mostly white, mostly male engineers training facial recognition systems on their own faces, have long been known to cause inaccurate results when those same systems are pointed at any non-white, non-male subject, resulting in innocent people routinely being misidentified as matches to criminal suspects.

More evidence in favour of a Linux Shift

Just days after posting about Linux's user market share increasing 233% in two months, I came across these two ZDnet stories, linked in a single post on Slashdot. In chronological order by publication:

1. Why Munich is shifting back from Microsoft to open source – again:

In a notable U-turn for the city, newly elected politicians in Munich have decided that its administration needs to use open-source software, instead of proprietary products like Microsoft Office.

"Where it is technologically and financially possible, the city will put emphasis on open standards and free open-source licensed software," a new coalition agreement negotiated between the recently elected Green party and the Social Democrats says.

The agreement was finalized Sunday and the parties will be in power until 2026. "We will adhere to the principle of 'public money, public code'. That means that as long as there is no confidential or personal data involved, the source code of the city's software will also be made public," the agreement states.

That story was quickly followed by:

2. Why Hamburg is now following Munich's lead:

The trend towards open-source software on government computers is gathering pace in Germany.

In the latest development, during coalition negotiations in the city-state of Hamburg, politicians have declared they are ready to start moving its civil service software away from Microsoft and towards open-source alternatives.

The declaration comes as part of a 200-page coalition agreement between the Social Democratic and Green parties, which will define how Hamburg is run for the next five years.

[...]

"With this decision, Hamburg joins a growing number of German states and municipalities that have already embarked on this path," said Peter Ganten, chairman of the Open Source Business Alliance, or OSBA, based in Stuttgart.

He's referring to similar decisions made in Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, Bremen, Dortmund, and Munich. But, he adds: "The Hamburg decision is nevertheless remarkable because the city has always been more aggressively oriented towards Microsoft."

Munich's decision to abandon open-sourced software solutions that they'd spent €100M in public funds to develop, was touted at the time by the anti-Linux crowd as evidence of Windows 10's clear dominance and superiority in the space. It defied all available evidence, as well as what was (at the time, anyway) a growing wave of Linux adoption by state organizations the world over, and may have derailed that adoption for years.

This week in Facebook: Victory! Kinda...

After finding himself and his company on the wrong side of history for most of a week which had fairly reeked of historical import, Mark Zuckerberg has finally had a moment of clarity. As reported by HuffPost:

It turns out protests work.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that the company will conduct a review of the policy he cited when allowing President Donald Trump’s violence-inciting post to remain up on the site.

“We’re going to review our policies allowing discussion and threats of state use of force to see if there are any amendments we should adopt,” Zuckerberg wrote in a lengthy statement days after his employees staged a virtual walkout in protest of his response to Trump’s post.

Huzzah! It only took his own employees walking out on him, and a flurry of high-profile resignations at Facebook, for Zuckerberg to see the light see the need to adopt a more conciliatory tone.

Linux Watch: June 2020 Edition

It's been a while since I last blogged about OS user market share numbers.

In large part, the absence was due to boredom. Very little was changing month to month; with Windows 10 having finally passed Windows 7 in user share, no other tech blogs were writing about the subject, either. MacOS and Linux were stealing users from Windows for a while, but that trend slowed, then stopped, and then reversed itself. Increasingly, it looked like the personal computing paradigm that we'd lived with for twenty years was about to cement itself in place for the next twenty.

But an odd thing has been happening over the last couple of months. Linux, which had retreated allthe was to 1.36% user share just a few months ago, has been gaining ground rapidly, erasing all of its user share losses of the past year and then some.

This week in Facebook: It seems that "Criticism" was putting it mildly

It seems like just yesterday that I was blogging about Facebook's nascent culture, doesn't it? Probably because it was yesterday: specifically, yesterday morning.

By yesterday afternoon, the story had already evolved, as reported by The Huffington Post:

Facebook employees staged a “virtual walkout” Monday in protest of the social media company’s failure to address President Donald Trump’s use of its platform to spread incendiary content.

It’s unclear how many of the company’s 48,000 global employees are participating in the walkout by taking the day off. Many of Facebook’s employees were already working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A number of the virtual protesters said they planned to use their time to attend the physical demonstrations against police brutality around the country.

Wow. Just... wow.

Again, I have to emphasize just how much of a culture shift this represents. A year and half ago, Facebook's rank and file were talkingshop using burner phones to avoid having managers overhear, and complaining about the unfairness of Facebook's media coverage. Yesterday, they staged a walkout to protest Facebook itself.

This week in Facebook: Employees, including at least 3 senior managers, go public with criticism of Zuckerberg

This probably makes for some awkward water cooler conversations.

As reported by Reuters, via CBC News:

Facebook employees critical of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decision not to act on U.S. President Donald Trump's inflammatory comments about protests across the United States went public on Twitter, praising the rival social media firm for acting and rebuking their own employer.

Many tech workers at companies including Facebook, Google and Amazon have actively pursued issues of social justice in recent years, urging their employers to take action and change policies.

Even so, the weekend criticism marked a rare case of high-level employees publicly taking their chief executive to task, with at least three of the seven critical posts seen by Reuters coming from people who identified themselves as senior managers.

"Mark is wrong, and I will endeavour in the loudest possible way to change his mind," wrote Ryan Freitas, whose Twitter account identifies him as director of product design for Facebook's News Feed. He added he had mobilized, "50+ likeminded folks" to lobby for internal change.

This marks a shift in corporate culture for Facebook. When last we'd heard, Facebook employees were using burner phones to talk about the company because they feared what fallout might come if they spoke out openly... while simultaneously complaining about the unfairness of the media coverage of the company.

That was December of 2018; now, just a year and a half later, their senior managers are openly talking about Mark Zuckerberg being "wrong" about Facebook's ethical obligations, and Facebookers themselves are speaking out on Twitter. That's a significant culture shift of the kind that often never happens at any company of any size, absent some sort of company-wide restructuring.

Does this signify a shift in the company more broadly? Google's rank-and-file have successfully forced senior management to change course on ethically dubious initiatives; if Facebook' rank and file are going to embrace that sort of "ethical tech" mindset, then it could well lead to Facebook becoming a force for much less evil in the world.

If that happens, then I'll take it. Baby steps, people, baby steps.