The Hero We Need

As you may be aware, Glassholes are back, but this time, it's the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ that is selling spy spectacles masquerading as a VR headset.

Some influencer wannabee was making funny noises on the New York City Subway and filming reactions for a TikTok, and a woman snatched the Ray-Bans off of his face and broke them in two.

Good on her, and bad on the skeevy cretin who was filming people without their knowledge:

A New York subway rider is going viral after a TikToker accused her of breaking his Meta AI glasses, a moment that instantly made her a folk hero among privacy-conscious internet users.

The eyewear, which can discreetly record video, has been criticized as a creeping surveillance threat. Many online viewers argued that the woman simply did what others have only joked about doing.

While the TikToker insists the incident was unprovoked and filed a police report, the internet has already taken her side, celebrating her as the anti-AI vigilante of their dreams.

………

In the description on another video, he claims he did nothing to provoke this woman.

“She was like 12 feet away from me and I wasn’t addressing her, I was just making sounds that I and others thought was hilarious for a video to post,” he wrote. “There were so many different routes one could take instead of breaking someone else’s $300 glasses such as asking nicely to not post it or blur my face.”

Ummm....No.

It's your job to get affirmative permission before filming people in an attempt to create a funny video.

Alan Funt you ain't.  (Also, he got waivers signed for anything that he showed) 

Adventures in Skeuomorphic Design

My car is in the shop, and I am renting a car, a Nissan Sentra, because the smaller Toyota Corolla was not available.

I prefer the Toyota to the Nissan, but I got an impressive example of well executed skeuomorphic user interface design as a result.

For the uninitiated, skeuomorphism is the use of real world analogues in an interface, so in a drawing program, you have pens that look like a pencil, or a pen, or a spray can, or an eraser.

I had a pleasant surprise with the Sentra and its lane departure warning (LDW) system.

My car, the one in the shop, is a 2004 Toyota Prius with over 270,000 miles (435,000 km) on it, which is best described as a mid-life crisis car for the most boring mother-f%$#er on the planet, lacks such a system.  (I'm keeping it until it reaches 300,000 miles, because 300,000 miles, thank you very much).

On the Sentra, if you drift too close to a lane marker, it: (Quoting the manual)

The LDWsystem provides a lane departure warning function when the vehicle is driven at speeds of approximately 37 mph (60 km/h) and above and the lane markings are clear. When the vehicle approaches either the left or the right side of the traveling lane, THE STEERING WHEEL WILL VIBRATE and the LDW indicator on the instrument panel will blink to alert the driver.

(emphasis mine)

The indicator on the instrument panel is old school, and that, along with a chime, I have encountered in other rentals that I have used in the past few years.

The wheel vibration though, provides both a tactile and aural indication that is almost identical to the rumble strips that you find on the side of the road.

This is f%$#ing brilliant.  It is a near perfect simulation of an existing sensory input, and I reacted in exactly the same way that I would if I encountered a rumble strip on the road.

Note that I have received no consideration for this opinion, but if either Nissan Corp. or Enterprise Car Rental wishes to pay me,  I am more than willing to take their filthy capitalist lucre.

Least Surprising News of the Day

It appears that employees at the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ are refusing to use platform's virtual reality platform because it sucks like 1000 hoovers all turned on at once.

This is more than just embarrassing, it means that they are not getting bug reports on the alpha.

Their solution is typical Facebook, to coerce employees into using the platform:

Meta’s VR social network Horizon Worlds — the company’s flagship “metaverse” app — is suffering from too many quality issues and even the team building it isn’t using it very much, according to internal memos obtained by The Verge.

In one of the memos to employees dated September 15th, Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, said the team would remain in a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year to “ensure that we fix our quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users.”

Horizon Worlds lets people build and interact in virtual worlds as legless avatars, sort of like Roblox meets Minecraft. It’s a key initiative following CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranding of Facebook to Meta; the company is spending billions per year to build his vision of the metaverse. The multiplayer platform was released on Meta’s Quest headset in December of last year. It hit 300,000 users earlier this year and is supposed to be coming to mobile and desktop via a web version sometime soon, though Vishal’s memos imply a web launch could be pushed back.

………

A key issue with Horizon’s development to date, according to Shah’s internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much. “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” he wrote to employees on September 15th. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

In a follow-up memo dated September 30th, Shah said that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

So the package is so bad that the team developing it refuses to use it.

There is, of course, a typically the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ solution to all of this:  They will spend their monopoly rents on people who are actually competent at all of this, and then rebrand this as Meta.

Is Anyone Surprised By This?

Virtual reality, at least as envisioned by the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™, is a will be a complete privacy clusterf%$#.

I am not sure why anyone would be surprised by this.  Facebook's entire business model since its inception has to be a complete privacy clusterf%$#:

More thought – or at least some thought – needs to be given to privacy protection in the promised metaverse of connected 3D virtual-reality worlds, experts have concluded.

In a paper distributed via ArXiv, titled "Exploring the Unprecedented Privacy Risks of the Metaverse," boffins at UC Berkeley in the US and the Technical University of Munich in Germany play-tested an "escape room" virtual reality (VR) game to better understand just how much data a potential attacker could access.

………

The wealth of information available through augmented reality (AR) and VR hardware and software has been known for years. For example, a 2012 article in New Scientist described Ingress, an AR game from Google spin-off Niantic Labs, as "a data gold mine." That's why data-monetization firms like Meta are willing to invest billions to make the market for head-hugging hardware and AR/VR apps more than just a sadness of tech enthusiasts with no use for torsos.

Similarly, the trust and safety issues of online social interaction have vexed online services since the days of dial-up modems and bulletin boards, before web browsers were even a thing. And now that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and other players see a chance to remake Second Life under their own gatekeeping, corporate consultancies are again reminding clients that privacy will be a problem. ………

Not only is privacy an unsolved metaverse issue, but hardware security also leaves something to be desired. A related recent study of AR/VR hardware, "Security and Privacy Evaluation of Popular Augmented and Virtual Reality Technologies," found vendor websites full of potential security vulnerabilities, their hardware and software lacking in multifactor authentication, and their privacy policies obtuse. 

Gee, if Zuckerberg had been interested in having a name that accurately describes the company's new direction, instead of, "Meta," he should have chosen, "Full of potential and their privacy policies obtuse."

It does sum up both Zuckerberg and his criminal enterprise.

………

The potential data points identified by the researchers include: Geospatial Telemetry (Height, Arm Length, Interpupillary Distance, and Room Dimensions); Device Specifications (Refresh Rate, Tracking Rate, Resolution, Device Field-of-View, GPU, and CPU); Network (Bandwidth, Proximity); Behavioral Observations (Languages, Handedness, Voice, Reaction Time, Close Vision, Distance Vision, Color Vision, Cognitive Acuity, and Fitness).

From these metrics, various inferences can be made about a VR participant's gender, wealth, ethnicity, age, and disabilities.

………

"All our research shows is that if a company wanted to do data harvesting, it could get vastly more information about users in VR than it could from mobile apps for example, and that pivoting towards VR would make perfect sense in that context."

As I observed earlier, if it wasn't a privacy stripping horror show, Zuck would not be interested in it.