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.