They already ship a mobile phone. https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
Voice recognition is an extremely solved problem. A lot of the hard part of the AI---the stuff that appeared impossible in the '80s---works consistently on Google, Alexa, and Siri. It just needs to know enough about you to make intelligent guesses at your intent.
... which means it needs access to all that big data the big company collected on you and users like you.
There are technologies that are owned by big companies that will leverage them for ecosystem lock-in. Want a neat personal assistant? Sure; just use your Google account. Want some untethered VR? No problem; just login via Facebook. And that's generally how things will be; you don't have to use it, but you'll be off the cutting edge if you don't.
Because ecosystems are where the money is, and cutting-edge tech costs money. That's the iron law of capitalism and technological progress.
(I'm still waiting for my Linux phone. Thought it might be shipped to me in 2020, but with COVID slowing down production, 2021 looks more likely. But at least I'll feel some moral superiority once I have the thing in my hands that other people already have if they just give up and buy into a big-data vendor's ecosystem. ;) )
What this really means is that there is no untethered VR device for privacy-minded folks which make up a tiny portion of the overall VR users.
Tethered to Zuckerberg.
> foc-u-lus
And there are plenty of people who aren't techies who still don't want all their info going to facebook.
he's just a consultant now but you can bet he's been disillusioned by all of this.
Link: https://uploadvr.com/john-carmack-i-intend-to-stay-at-facebo...
I mean, what if a furniture company just decided to break into your house, reupholster your couch and remove some of the pillows? (Or I suppose, install a recording device on the bottom?)
Corporations are not your friends. Unless it is set in legal writing you can't take their promises at heart value. Even if they set it in legal writing it might mean nothing since they always find a way to worm around it. Their ultimate goal is to fuck you over. Their pricing and profit margin are "take as much as possible without them complaining". Games will get more expensive and it has nothing to do with development costs, it has everything to do "because they can so why wouldn't they".
Corporations are not idiots and they know how to do something subversively and over a long period of time so people don't notice the changes. Look at how microtransactions in games became almost a norm nowadays and future generations won't even see anything wrong with it. Look at how using FOMO and other psychological tricks are actually a "good retention method" now instead of being unethical, people don't even complain against it any more, they complain if it is badly implemented and they don't get enough of it. Companies selling your data are getting less and less backlash over it with people using arguments as "oh well they know everything already, I don't care".
I really hate all of this.
There should be a sister site that records all the post-acquisition promises that get nuked
What are the alternatives for a self-contained VR system? I don't want to have to plug into a PC.
* http://www.openhmd.net/index.php/devices/
* https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/ligh...
I'm super done with this company.
The headset itself is expensive but it's the best consumer headset in existence right now. I can play for hours (depending on the game) without feeling like I need to stop. There's no single thing that's dramatically better than other headsets, but just about everything about it is at least somewhat better. Comfort, tracking, visuals, adjustability, and so on.
Anyway, Valve is just night-and-day different from Facebook. In fact they're the ones maintaining support for the Rift on Steam, not the other way around. Valve wants VR to be an open platform, and Facebook wants it to be a part of Facebook, entirely owned and controlled by them.
PS, oculus has been the only piece of hardware I've purchased in the past few years where the drivers caused a blue screen. Thats ignoring all the other bullshit problems with the driver stack they have that can't even consistently enable a pile of USB devices.
Facebook to Oculus Users: Go f* yourself.
It's understandable to need an account for these things, but of course this being an FB account is creepy.
I guess it might be time to look at FOSS alternatives for these devices, just to keep basic functionality. I wonder if the bootloaders are locked.
One of the things that pleased me about it is that it hasn't already been rendered obsolete. Well I guess FB has set a date on that now for no good reason on the user end.
I'm curious to see what might be coming around hardware-wise in that time.
-- from someone waiting for VR to become a commodity hardware, like a monitor.
Phew
They are setting that time limit so existing users can't call to return Oculus saying "I don't agree to these terms" because _they aren't terms yet_ for that user. But by the time they finally require you to log in with the account, it will be impossible to refund because you are outside the legal warranty period for both US and EU.
It's planned exactly to trap people who already bought so that some percentage will "give in" and just log into Facebook so that they don't suddenly have a VR device (and VR library) that's not worth anything to them anymore.
There are far more people who will do this than those that won't, and that's a portion that COULD have returned it if Facebook was allowing them to.
So it might be interesting to see how this plays out here, although I'm not holding out a lot of hope for a positive result.
If I ever move my racing sim rig to VR, it's definitely not going to be an Oculus.
All were predicted given their past record.
Don't buy from bad companies and this isn't an issue.
It just doesn't even make sense.
FB is too entrenched in our lives. And for what?
Personally it doesn't bother me immensely... however it's annoying that I'd have to review, check and double check all the privacy settings before using the device as I don't expect any of the defaults to keep my activity private.
I'll probably opt for using my Oculus account another 2 years, at which point I'll likely have bought another headset.
The only way around it was to send the verification code via tex. I'm so concerned now that Google will only send verification codes to Android device in the future.
If it's connected to your desktop, it can also use all the dark patterns Facebook knows to tie it to your other activities ...
May well be insightful. Friends who have your email and phone number in a contact entry who also have FB and synced contacts - etc etc etc. May well have more information than just an email address and way to look at it is - would you bet a large sum of money that is all they have? Always a good way of putting perspective upon things I find.
Who uses this data? For what purpose? How can this data give an edge to make money elsewhere?
Is there a real relationship between data collection and ability to sell more things and increase profits? I'm not seeing it.
I didn't even wanted a FB account in the first place, but now I wonder why I can't do that
Not worth vilifying. Not worth accolades for basic rational thought.
Palmer is meh. As other comments have pointed out, don't waste energy on the scapegoat.
Complain about the people in control - Facebook.
The tech industry has gotten rather silly.
It seems that the app platform may be used for managing logins on third party sites. Are they likely to require it for Oculus devices?
Next VR headset will not be Oculus.
A game's age rating only covers the suitability of the content in the game in terms of things like violence, strong language etc. It does not imply that the game is aimed at or would be enjoyed by a particular age range. There is no special consideration for VR in terms of age ratings.
That's never going to happen now.
They have their faults, but acting like a modern big tech company isn't one of them.
"Want to print a page on your locally, USB-Connected printer? Log in at hp.com".
‘the occulus is for jumping in a facebook world to visit your family’
I can buy that, if they refund current owners who don’t want that...
At least this gives me enough time to sell my Oculus and buy from another company.
Well, that's a things from the past with hardware it seems. Effective obsolescence through corporate policy.
I deleted FB for a reason and it will stay that way.
A shame that their shitty growth hacking position will contribute more e-waste to the environment unless the headset can be fully jailbroken.
Realistically I’ll probably sell the quest, stick to buying steam games from now on, and buy a headset from a different company as soon as they get a wireless headset.
Or do they verify accounts in some way now?
Complain as much as you want about Steam, at least they are a games store and store only.
I don't know why anyone would buy games from the Oculus store.
I don't want to create a fake Facebook account. I want my own back.
I'm sorry for the following statement. Deal with it. You want shiny new products and technology. You develop new magical technology. You write insightful and groundbreaking scientific papers. Why are you dependent on investors, publishers and giant tech-firms? They exist because of you, because you need them. And they know that. So, please, rid yourself of the illusion that your product/paper can only survive if you give it away to someone with power and influence. You give away power, for money, that's why Facebook, Apple, Google got so powerful in the first place. It's your fault. Deal with it, you can do better than that.
It's bad enough having a Google account and all that encompasses.
It is astonishing that another company would require an account on some other system. Now I don't have a problem with allowing using your Google, Facebook, etc. account as a convenience to authenticate your account on some other service.
There is a qualitative difference between HN and Facebook or Twitter. One of these doesn't try to pry its tentacles into every aspect of your life while trying to capture every possible scrap of information about you known and unknown.
Also, forcing people for no real reason to create (or use) an account on a platform they hate is revolting. No everybody wants to use a social network to share with "friends" their gaming habits, or to play local games.
That Oculus had better have some pretty special pixels, if they need a network connection to even be visible.
I'm assume their tethered display devices will still work without an account, assuming you don't want to use their store/apps.
I also now many other people who think the same.
Goodby, I'm happy I hadn't yet time to but an Oculus product.
Quest is a great device, but I don't think my next VR headset will be an Oculus.
I might consider creating a brand new, singleton account to use it, but to be honest my gut reaction is that if they do not have a non-Facebook login, I will just _not_ use it.
Facebook TOS prohibits making multiple personal accounts. So one might assume company one works for then provides a company account as using the civilian account is not really a good thing.
If they mandate using the real civilian one then it’s maybe a good reason to finally ”close” it by removing all friends and photos. It’s just a dev account for oculus then.
The fact that Facebook had not made this move actually had a significant impact on me in assessing their overall "evil" factor for other services. Now that they have, I'm left owning a Quest and looking for another platform to move to over the next few years. I hope the competition steps up because the Quest has really nailed everything important about VR.
If you pick a mail service that lets you bring your own domain, they almost all have step-by-step guides to configure it. It's a half-dozen settings to copy/paste.
Using your own domain certainly isn't a requirement, but it lets you easily get out of this situation without any trouble if your next provider decides to do something you don't like.
The computer part needs an account. Virtually all software for it is paid, and it is genuinely helpful for non-technical users to have a "cloud" account that ensures they won't lose their games even if they sell or break the device.
Anybody with more than 2 brain cells should demand open standard hardware to be used with software of choice.
Game developers should invest in an open standard and take away the leverage from air merchants.
An account with no connections is HELLA suspicious.
I am already getting heat from users and media outlets who say this policy change proves I was lying when I consistently said this wouldn't happen, or at least that it was a guarantee I wasn't in a position to make. I want to make clear that those promises were approved by Facebook in that moment and on an ongoing basis, and I really believed it would continue to be the case for a variety of reasons. In hindsight, the downvotes from people with more real-world experience than me were definitely justified.
A few examples below so people won't make up their own version of what I actually said:
- I guarantee that you won't need to log into your Facebook account every time you wanna use the Oculus Rift.
- You will not need a Facebook account to use or develop for the Rift
- Nope. That would be lame.
- I promise.
If the new captain doesn't make the promise, you can't give it much weight, and if it is Facebook, probably no weight even if they did :(
The only privacy claims one may wish to take seriously are those that occur simultaneously with promises never to sell the company.
I used to use a location tracking app called Moves, which was a neat 24/7 location tracking lifelogging tool. Facebook, the very last people I would like to have that data, bought them, and presumably integrated it into my shadow profile.
Special thanks go to to the founders of Moves: Zsolt Szász, Jukka Partanen, Juho Pennanen, Aapo Kyrölä, and Aleksi Aaltonen. Hope you got paid selling private data that belongs to the users that entrusted it to you.
a) If acquirer does X, the seller, Y, has the option to repurchase the company for $1. b) Any future acquirer must agree to the same contract. If it does not, Y must be extended the option to repurchase the company for $1 before the sale.
I don't think anything less could constitute a true promise that the acquirer would avoid X.
Then open firmware.
Then support Linux.
Then ...
You are in a position to promise something where you have contractually retained control, or at least contractually secured an enforceable promise from the purchaser.
Otherwise, you are in the same position as Joe on the street.
Getting "company assurance at the highest level" is just as good as is the word of the person at the highest level. There are people for whom their word is their bond, but it's not very common.
I'd like to believe him, but it is pretty hard to do so given the historic record of acquisitions to date.
For me the heuristic is simple: I won't believe a word a CEO that is selling his company says about what will happen post deal. They are no longer in control and should know better.
We're also in a world where all the founders of Oculus have quit and no longer have a say in decisions like this. Facebook foundational employees and recent hires are running the show and the end game for Oculus is to give Facebook a platform that they control that is as pervasive as iOS or Android (or at least Xbox or PlayStation).
As a former Oculus and Facebook employee I'm torn by this. I always understood how a none trivial portion of the Oculus user base is extremely anti-Facebook, or even how people with Facebook accounts didn't want their Facebook account tied to Oculus. At the same time it would seriously reduce technical friction around using Facebook backend features in Oculus products. I know some folks would see this as a complete negative and I understand where you are coming from, but there are some interesting positive use cases as well.
Which is why smart founders can still get away with making these statements during the acquisitions so they can continue to grow their company post close (which means their post close bonus also stays in tact) and then leave after their golden handcuffs are done (usually 2-5 years).
> For me the heuristic is simple: I won't believe a word a CEO that is selling his company says about what will happen post deal. They are no longer in control and should know better.
For me, its on the other side of the coin. If I'm a founder and someone gives me billions of dollars for both acquiring my company and an additional bonus to pump the company I'm 100% incentivized to do everything possible to ensure that...even making forward statements that I don't genuinely believe are going to happen.
For everyone else - don't trust anyting an acquirer says - follow what they do.
(I think he really did believe at the time that Facebook wouldn't Facebook it up.)
Agreed, but that's no different that ANY corporate statement on anything. Things change. A policy or statement may be true this year, but may not be true next year.
GitHub made many nice statements post-Microsoft acquisition, and you know what, Microsoft execs may even believe all of them today. In 5 years though - who knows.
>Of course he and FB had a pretty strong incentive to ensure that there wouldn't be an immediate break-off risk to the acquisition, and of course there was plenty of evidence from other acquisitions that this is how the world works.
That could be part of it. It could also be the case that FB just didn't make any decisions pertaining to this aspect of Oculus at that point in time. It could also be the case that FB had many different factions within its org that pushed for different things - one faction wanted to use FB login, another did not and the former faction won after a while.
This is less nefarious than people are making it out to be.
Look at his exit from FB and his funding of Trump groups in 2016.
His life, in its successes and failures, has often been the result of what appears to be optimistic naivety.
He believed BigCo FB would keep their word to him on FB login not being required. He believed FB wouldn’t essentially fire him for his political opinions as well.
I was far from the only one who was saying this at the time. I don't believe Facebook had a significantly different reputation in 2014.
I also have a follow-up draft from 2016 that talks about how the things predicted in the blog post have already begun.
This development was trivially predictable right when Facebook acquired Oculus. Which is why I bought Vive instead.
You don't need to be a genius to see stuff like this ahead of time. All you have to do is refuse to be gaslit and be honest about the high-level drivers of corporate decision-making.
From the 2014 HN thread[0]
>Please login using your Facebook account to continue.
That's not really true. Hipster antitrust wasn't a thing yet, so people weren't talking about it at your neighborhood Starbucks. But serious people were talking about it. Look at the conflicts of interest disclosures for prominent antitrust scholars... they were busy during that period.
Also, the infamous "Zuckerberg destroy mode" email is from 2012.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/30/17304792/whatsapp-jan-kou...
>Founder at Framework, formerly part of the Oculus founding team
I don't recall it being much different, but I _do_ recall the outcry from Oculus followers and fans when the buyout occurred. This is exactly what we predicted and the fact that PL was assuring us it wouldn't happen would seem to disagree with what you're saying. It seems you may have just been ignoring it at the time for what may be a very obvious reason.
You can only make promises about what you control.
I had huge concerns regarding FB's purchase of Oculus at the time and I wasn't the only one. It was the single reason I did not buy an Oculus. It wasn't that I thought they would be brazen either, I just assumed they would be hoovering data up behind the scenes, and trading data between Oculus and FB.
If this announcement had occurred in 2014, it would not have been surprising, I think the concerns were clear from the outset to most of the community. The only people who were starry eyed were those who just wanted Oculus funded well and were happy to take the word of the founder.
I don't want to assume bad intent, but I find it hard to believe that someone could be so naive about the project and the organization controlling it.
Carmack also wanted to sell because he had built businesses before and wanted to focus on the technology without having to deal with survival.
It wouldn't surprise me if Luckey believed that would be the outcome. I think Zuck's strategy as CEO was also less clear then. Today it would be obvious, back then though, I'm not so sure.
Step 1: They get an credible offer for a ton of money.
Step 2: Their brain starts to spiral out of control and can't stop imagining all of the things they can do for themselves, their family, their friends, the world, etc
Step 3: They've just created millions of incentives for themselves.
It takes a very strong person to drive out the biases that money creates in our brains. Monetary incentives are the strongest bias creators, beaten (probably) only by sex and blood (i.e. family relations). Breaking them is the work of an iron will. You had better assume you'd do no better.
Let's not assume bad intent and recognize the reality that things change. That any corporate statement or policy is not true in perpetuity. It's very possible that at the time FB really did believe it. It has been 6 years since the acquisition after all.
That's kind of the whole point. Unless there is some sort of legally binding contract that says things won't change, and that contract can't be changed without consent of all parties, whatever BS comes out of some exec's mouth should just be completely ignored. All you should look at are the underlying incentives, and it was always clear that Oculus would be fully assimilated into FB.
If someone advertised a device as capable of doing X without it in fact being able to do X, they'd be liable for false advertising.
If someone sold you a device, then took it back or destroyed it, they'd be liable for theft or destruction of property.
Nevertheless, if someone sells you a connected device and then completely alters the rules by which the device operates at an arbitrary point in time after the sell, that's perfectly fine.
Have we really given up basic consumer rights that easily?
- (2014) Facebook acquires Oculus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469237
- (2016) Oculus's privacy policy sparks concern: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410809
Oculus responds to privacy concerns about user tracking (https://uploadvr.com/facebook-oculus-privacy/) saying
> Facebook owns Oculus and helps run some Oculus services, such as elements of our infrastructure, but we’re not sharing information with Facebook at this time. We don’t have advertising yet and Facebook is not using Oculus data for advertising – though these are things we may consider in the future.
- (2019) If logged into Facebook, Oculus data may be used for ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21770752
From their official statement:
> If you choose not to log into Facebook on Oculus, we won’t share data with Facebook to allow third parties to target advertisements to you based on your use of the Oculus Platform.
- (2020): Facebook accounts are now required.
None of this is particularly surprising, lots of people (even in the press) were calling out how this was going to evolve. But it's still interesting to look back 6 years and see what the initial reactions were and what people were most concerned about.
The takeaways:
- data silos are always temporary
- companies think on a larger timeline than just 2 years in advance
- this kind of thing nearly always gets executed as a slow boil. Facebook didn't buy Oculus and immediately require an account and start advertising to users. But I don't believe for one second that Mark wasn't thinking it at the time.
I came to Oculus with eyes wide open knowing it was a Facebook company, but this news still sucks.
Then your purchases and stuff are lost too, I guess as WebXR matures though maybe there will be some great apps you can just pay directly for on the web, but I feel like if rumors of Apple making a headset they'll just skip WebXR and force the app store... I know other headsets including the Oculus supports WebXR but sorta feels like it's a conflict of interest to their own stores to me so wonder how much more advanced it'll get.
Don't support Facebook ever, they don't deserve it.
Incidentally here is a comment I made recently about the bullshit they pulled on my wife and I relating to creating a business listing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959088
It makes me more likely to try a game on a whim knowing and if it's not for me I can refund it without hassle. Great way to handle it, I currently own close to 100 VR titles and have refunded at least 20+ that just weren't for me.
But Vive don't have anything on the quest to the best of my knowledge. We ship a lot of stuff on Quests and dev on them is really quite nice (with Unity).
The worst part was having to make a workspace Facebook account or whatever that thing was called, right as the Quest was just coming out. All the docs were hosted behind a login. Nightmare.
I don't know if Oculus could have done it without Facebook money though. It seems to me the world at large wasn't giving VR enough attention. We're finally seeing proper B2B adoption now and shit like this with Facebook accounts is going to make things a lot harder. It's kinda tricky sometimes getting hardware into banks or the NHS or any place that has funky or strict hardware procurement. This is just another barrier for all that.
I've not read the dev emails that have come from Oculus yet. But Oculus are meant to be rolling out their new 'Business' backend for remote deployments soon. Hopefully this isn't B2B side too.
Ugh. I guess Facebook is making a play to become the Steam/XBox Live of VR. Why can't we just have gaming peripherals anymore without some kind of platform tie-in?
I take it you don't have any Razer devices.
And it's incredibly creepy. Movement just feels like an extremely intimate piece of data.
Luckily my favorite purchases are on steam and 2 years gives me plenty of time to move on from my rift. I'm not going to be forced to use facebook.
Last thing I need is a remote exploit on my tracking cameras and facebook telling them exactly who and where I am.
Unsurprisingly, this ends up hurting all sorts of people who do not use their legal names online: people who have just chosen other names, people who want to avoid being targeted or stalked, trans people, etc. They've updated this policy to allow for some of these situations (https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/facebook-real-names-1.336...) but folks still get banned for failing to comply.
Just don't get why they're doing this at this point, I'd understand if they had iPhone level sales but although the Quest is selling great it's not there yet and it seems a misstep to push everyone into FB from it so soon lots of people will be turned off by the idea. Forcing the tens of thousand Oculus holdouts and saving a handful of engineering salaries surely can 't be worth the bad press and harm to the growing platform
Hope the 4 people who bought Quests after playing mine don’t whinge to me about this.
I take this as a negative indicator of how things are going for Facebook. I don’t see any synergy with oculus other than that both products have users. Maybe that is enough from a business standpoint, but I feel forcing login to Facebook is going to kill oculus adoption, it isn’t like 6 years ago, there are viable alternatives if you want a VR rig. It just looks and feels desperate to me.
I'm hoping you are right, but I feel like the average consumer is not so privacy aware and wouldn't mind using Facebook as their login. It's probably even more convenient since they already have a Facebook account and don't need to create an additional account for Oculus.
A (very patient) student of mine tried to install the oculsu software on a current thinkpad for 4 days in a row. It always failed for various reasons. She used a current Windows 10 and her computer definitly has the specs. She even reinstalled windows. In the end there was an electron error, which we sent to the support - we never got a reply.
If you can avoid Oculus, do so at all cost.
"The HP Reverb G2 does not require a Facebook account today or in 2023."
https://www.reddit.com/r/HPReverb/comments/ic93cn/for_anyone...
I guess we will wait to see what Apple and Microsoft now do in the space since Facebook and Google both seem to have (inexplicably) bowed out of the race.
> Using a VR profile that is backed by a Facebook account and authentic identity helps us protect our community and makes it possible to offer additional integrity tools. For example, instead of having a separate Oculus Code of Conduct, we will adopt Facebook’s Community Standards as well as a new additional VR-focused policy. This will allow us to continue to take the unique considerations of VR into account while offering a more consistent way to report bad behavior, hold people accountable, and help create a more welcoming environment across our platforms. And as Facebook adds new privacy and safety tools, Oculus can adopt and benefit from them too.
Isn't oculus just some kind of display device? Last time I've checked LG and Samsung doesn't really policy what kind of content I'm using their monitors for.
http://assayviaessay.blogspot.com/2014/03/virtual-spaces-rea...
This action feels really connected to the coming Horizon virtual world thing -- which coincidentally is also predicted in the blog post linked above.
A week ago, I tried to sign up for Facebook in order to buy some ads[1]. With nothing remarkable about the account or metadata[2], the first page I saw after the signup form was
> Your Account Has Been Disabled. You can't use Facebook because your account, or activity on it, didn't follow our Community Standards.
That page was shown immediately after the signup form. I jumped through their hoops of providing an SMS-able phone number, then a photo, and a few days later got this final result:
> Your Account Has Been Disabled. You can't use Facebook because your account, or activity on it, didn't follow our Community Standards. We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed."
Again, there's no activity on the account because I never saw any FB pages, let alone used it. I'm not concerned - I cancelled my personal account back in 2013 and never looked back, and other than wanting to buy some public-service ads, I still have no interest in it. I sure would care if I had an Oculus, though.
[1]: Because Twitter prohibits or applies extra terms to many types of issue/advocacy ads, and while I applaud their approach, those of us running public-service campaigns get stuck in unpredictable policy enforcement.
[2]: Signing up from a residential Comcast US IP that I'm the only user/client on, using an email address at a domain I own, am the only user on, has been registered for 10+ years, etc.
Isn't this just a phishing scam? This should be illegal.
I purchased these devices with the promise that I would not need a Facebook account, and I do not have one..
Off topic, but my favorites are the Star Wars Vader Immortal Trilogy, Racket Ball, and Ping Pong.
If Oculus didn't want UserVoice, they wouldn't have signed up for it.
If anything, Facebook's VR effort is just there in case someone else comes up with a VR or AR threat to Facebook.
It's gotta be hard to be a founder in a situation like this.
> I'm mostly surprised that they haven't done this with Whatsapp or Instagram thus far, but they are doing it for Oculus accounts.
> > As of a few days ago, they're starting the process of moving Instagram DMs to Messenger, requiring a FB account. So, they are.
> > > The people I know in product at Facebook are certain it is an inevitability for their entire portfolio. That's second-party hearsay, so take it as you will, but it's my operating understanding that is their long term (multi-year) goal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/ic4ye1/new_oculus_u...
They aren't done with a wink and a nudge, but everyone knows that they're bullshit, it lets the entrepreneur maintain his public image while letting the carnivore devour its meal in due course.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his [possible billions] depends upon his not understanding it.
I absolutely believe his post here. He was young and naive and believed the lies from the Facebook executives. Completely understandable and I hope this doesn't make people think he's a liar.
If anyone purchased the device relying upon Palmer Luckey's promises, that could be promissory estoppel.
(Not a lawyer, etc etc.)
All that went out the window once the company was bought for 19B, sure both founders left a few years later, but their statements were false after the sale.
If it is not it's only because the current government judicial system is so full of spam-cases and it is so inefficient that it doesn't have room for these things.
The problem is that if Facebook had to pay out $20 million to make this go away they'd consider that to be entirely a cost worth paying.
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucksWell, yes. I don't know if you've noticed, but short-term convenience trumps all other concerns. The market can't really deal with these issues, because they are too subtle and expensive for individuals to work out for themselves. We really do need collective action, by way of regulation, similar to how we recognized as a society that workplace safety laws were not something private businesses were ever going to compete on, and we just needed to force them to comply. And no doubt the same howls of protest let loose then, too, about how "the extra costs will put me out of business", etc. It was then, as it is now, hogwash.
And in fact I would argue this kind of regulation not only important for consumers, but for national security. As more and more individuals lives become dependent on centralized information infrastructure, the more damage espionage (foreign or domestic) can do, not to mention the effect of wide-scale DoS attacks. Imagine a world where all smart devices are bricked...so much of the old infrastructure is gone - phones, phone books, maps, manuals. In some cases you might not even be able to vacuum your house (Roomba owners), or make a POTS phone call.
So yeah, its bad on multiple fronts, and I fear that the correcting event will be catastrophic (like, supply chain catastrophic, leading to starvation).
Well, yes, but that's exactly what SV activists and social activists are claiming has to stop. It's absurd that these same people are willing to defend the iPhone/iOS/Apple Services pipeline of proprietary anticompetitive dependencies.
I hope Epic wins this case against Apple. It's a precedent that needs to be set for limiting anticompetitive business and manufactured monopolies. Nothing Apple has in its portfolio is absent a perfect substitute in the very same market Apple is selling their products. But Apple has used proprietary inputs as a gatekeeper for their revenue. No one should have to buy a $49 dongle to plug an HDMI cable into their iPhone when every Android/Windows/Linux-based device has built-in support within the device. And if someone tries to push a "Lightning" to HDMI cable, Apple detects and deliberately locks off device content.
Too many big, beloved logos are built on anti-free market tactics, both by lobbying policy and private act. The sheer volume of this that Steve Jobs did in his lifetime made it hard for me to feel anything when he died. I genuinely felt relieved that this tyrant in technology, a man whose every product idea was just enough of a change of someone else's existing work product, slapped with intentional proprietary inputs to limit competition within the Apple eco-system, was finally gone. And then Tim Cook sashay'd on in.
The change needed is a law that prevents waiving the right to class action. Such a law would be considered highly unfavorable to business and would not pass under a Republican majority/presidency. Consider who you vote for accordingly.
Democratic-ish societies get laws AFTER society is mostly in agreement on something. We got workplace safety laws because most workplaces had already started to care and the point of the laws were to force low margin industries and other hold-outs to get on board.
I mostly agree with the rest of your comment but your order of operations is simply backwards.
If you don't believe me, look up the price of a "commercial display" comparable to your tv. And before anyone asks, the majority of customers would rather have a cheaper tv with ads in the menus than a more expensive one without.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Monitor-Bdm4350uc-42-5in-3840...
This has worked for;
- Consumer devices (cloud support dropped within the lifetime of the device, features dropped likely as a cost saving measure to the manufacturer)
- Software (features removed or culled after buying)
- Smart TVs (claiming support for different platforms)
- Gaming consoles (OtherOS on PS3)
This usually hurts the retailer - they don't want to risk going after the manufacturer because they want to sell their products. I've been banned from buying from one store after returning a product and then posting about it publicly, many others returned as well when they realised it was possible - I can assume some took advantage of this fact as a "I paid full price for this 1.5 years ago, it's now worth 50% less, I can return it and buy a better model from somewhere else" endeavour.
Is there anything I can do as a mere consumer to lobby for my rights?
Sonos was a hair short of bricking their old devices a few months ago, then backtracked after getting a lot of fire from their customers.
I'm wondering if this would be true for larger companies / acquisitions though. Would they have done the same if purchased by Google or Facebook?
I bought a bunch of switches because the offered local control and no account needed, now an account is required to set up anything new and local control is apparently going away. I’m now wary of anything that needs a proprietary app at all which would give them the ability to do this in the first place.
It risks becoming a regulatory hell too for small developers to navigate. If regulation is weak, it risks becoming some pointless step in the way (a minor point in an EULA, or cookies-like popup) that people would ignore anyways. One way or the other, it's easy to spin as a feature: "Our VR set has a social focus (eg. we post your daily usage). For this, login in to you account is necessity". There. Now not only you need to log in, you are also publicly shamed for your usage just for them to save face.
Sadly, it boils down to human decency to make a human product.
You usually agree to a EULA that allows them to do that. If you cannot agree to the EULA then you return the product.
Now, I will give full credit that no one reads those, but Legality doesn't care if you fail to do due diligence.
sometimes things get bricked, other times they get new features for free
teslas couldn't self-drive and then, one OTA update later, they could
companies release security updates
society doesn't know how to regulate OTA; change is sometimes bad for users but not always.
Not really. If they're downloaded, why would you need to look up remotely what you have locally.
Not in the least
But at the same time, for any new users who value their own privacy the device is now pretty useless, and for any existing users who value their privacy but also want to be up-to-date and get new features, they're also probably going to be locked out in future updates.
So you kind of have to excuse them for focusing on the negatives, because they don't get to enjoy the positives. It's kind of a moot point for them what Facebook brought to the table.
This is always the concern with these kinds of purchases, and I think this was a big part of the concern back in 2014. I was never worried that Facebook wouldn't invest in Oculus, as a consumer I was worried that it would ruin the Oculus ecosystem and shove dystopian adware onto the devices.
Can't help but think of this comic: https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
Why does this have to be true at all? Let bad things be bad, and deal with them. Don't try to rationalize away problems.
One notable thing is that Oculus hired Michael Abrash just following the announcement of the acquisition. With John Carmack, who was already there, they are among the most (if not the most) prominent developers in the field. Even though Carmack stepped down as a CTO, both are still there. I have stopped following VR news but Oculus had pretty nice prototypes a few years ago which combined eye tracking, foveated rendering and varifocal lenses, all addressing fundamental problems with the current generation of headsets.
Also, even though I am not sure about Facebook involvement, they financed some of the best VR games at the time. Lone Echo is one of them. Ready At Dawn, the developer is now part of Oculus Studio, a branch of Oculus focused on making VR content. Note that having good VR content is extremely important, even more so than the devices themselves. I mean, you are not going to spend hundreds of dollars just to slash cubes, or maybe you do, can't blame you ;)
The use case drove the tech, not the company, and so far the tech is being used for exactly what it was used for before FB bought it (just better as computers, motion sensors, and cameras got better). There was nothing transformative there.
I don't think FB deserves any credit other than being in the right place at the right time. Now they're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Props for wireless 6DOF before anyone else, and I love my Quest, but now that the trail is blazed and they aren't being maintaining their (yes, their--Palmer worked for them too) promises to the community, they can sit down.
It can be true that Facebook heavily invested into the Quest and it can be true that their user-hostile moves over the past 6 years were all utterly predictable, even though company heads ran around telling their critics that they were being unreasonable and paranoid.
This is true for many tech products and industries.
Apple and Google have both invested huge amounts of money and resources into building voice assistants into general consumer services. They deserve credit for that. They also deserve criticism for stifling the markets around voice assistants, building walled gardens that hamper innovation in the space, and for general privacy violations along the way. And it is, once again, completely predictable what the end goals are for companies like Google in regards to voice assistants and augmented reality -- regardless of what their company spokespeople might be saying today.
It can be true that Chrome unambiguously moved the web forward as a platform, and that without Google's involvement the modern web would not have the potential that it has today. And it can simultaneously be true that Google's long-term corporate vision for the web is toxic, and that there are serious concerns to be had about Chrome continuing to maintain a dominant browser position.
The point is, I don't think acknowledging Facebook's investment in the Oculus means that it's good to ignore the obvious downsides of their involvement. I think it's good to look at what people were worried would happen, and to see that it did happen. That doesn't mean you need to disregard Facebook's investment, and it doesn't mean that Oculus shouldn't exist -- it's just giving you a broader perspective that sometimes these positive investments also come with serious tradeoffs that aren't always acknowledged up-front.
Or is it just that the end goal is to advertise in VR, and the acquisition was a grasp at a dystopian daydream?
It's a peripheral, not a platform.
EDIT: I didn't know that Facebook bought Oculus some time ago, back in 2014--for some reason I thought it happened far more recently. I would make the case above for someone who had bought an Oculus device before Facebook's acquisition and now would be forced to use its platform, then. I don't have anything to do with Facebook, personally. I don't even use WhatsApp, so there's that for my moral integrity.
If you sign in to one of their accounts, you are functionally signing into the facebook website.
However - supposedly your oculus account will be valid until the end of 2022 [0]. At that point you could change to a newer hardware platform from another manufacturer.
[0] https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-facebook-account-required-ne...
Their position is clear. They’re fucking creeps masquerading any user experience they create as anti-spam.
Is it possible to do that with a Facebook account?
I've also spent a bit of money on Rift games. This is angering.
I'll buy one of them from you for $300 or the pair for $500. That seems like the going price? Contact is in my profile, let me know.
EDIT: Oh, it's $399 retail in the US. Damn Europe.
Not that he knows. https://theconversation.com/shadow-profiles-facebook-knows-a...
The parent's downvotes makes it seem like HN expects the purchaser to know about the FB affiliation
FB can not be trusted. I'd argue they should be dismantled.
Time after time they have not only expressed views that are downright alarming but they have been actively repeatedly caught out deliberately flaunting the law and fucking their customers. (not to mention their Russian connections and their part in the election tampering in the US).
Google are a naught boy compared to the actively evil FB org.
If you don't want to send them a government issued photo ID, you can make a new account that lasts 10 minutes and then is locked on you and holds any accounts linked to it hostage as you can't sign in.
Never really worked with Unreal but wonder if this will affect other games using their engine, not sure if there's like signed dylibs and stuff.
All this security stuff is cool but in a way more control. It's like you paid all this money for something but in a way you don't really own it. Like some graphic card company sells graphic cards including server graphic cards, but their driver's EULA doesn't allow you to use your desktop cards for server use. I guess the hardware being used 24/7 wasn't designed for that, but sounds like they should deny your warranty then instead of turning it into a copyright issue. Some game streaming company ran into this problem.
If Apple's device can't run them will that be significant in their adoption?
On topic, it's a reason not to own an FB VR device as I really don't want FB knowing which apps I run (nor do I want Apple knowing which apps I run for that matter)
Your social credit goes down, of course
As someone who prefers to play games alone, it's frustrating. The first five minutes after installing Steam is a constantly stream of "stfu and stop shoving game release/update/sale announcements in my face", "gtfo with the popup messages that a friend is playing a game", "wtf? why are you auto-logging me into the messenger", "no, I don't consent to you building a hardware inventory of my machine and using it for internal stats", and "jfc, please just leave me alone and let me play some games".
It's almost enough to make me buy a shack in Montana and support the post office.
The rest of your post stands, just thought you might be interested
Just imagine eye tracking tech in VR headsets. What a trove of data for advertisers! Did the user see may ad? For how long? Etc.
I hadn't imagined that before writing this, but they could do the exact same thing in the real world with AR. Did you spend some time looking at that car? You are interested in cars. Spending some time in the garden? Watching birds? Running? Etc. What's better than an always-on, always-ouside device which you use as a proxy to see things, and request information? MITM TLS (which Google technically does with Chrome) becomes useless if you just have access to the eyes.
Google does not (need to) do this. Download a program like Fiddler and check for yourself.
Do you have a source?
In a world where everyone has a service subscription or a data hose to subsidize their hardware (see: most phones, game consoles, kitchen appliances, "smart assistants"), it's very difficult to be competitive just making hardware.
Given that the Oculus Quest is effectively a flagship phone with a strap attached to it at ~1/10 the sales volume of a flagship phone (rough figures: [0] [1]), it would be very difficult to even pay engineering expenses without a secondary income stream enabled by a) real-identity advertisement targeting/data sucking and b) ecosystem lock-in.
[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Galaxy-S20-series-sales-number... [1] https://arinsider.co/2020/05/25/data-dive-has-oculus-sold-80...
Steam is already the Steam of VR, btw. They have the flagship title (Alyx) and Oculus exclusives aren't necessarily compelling enough to make it a deal breaker.
It's just like "Download our app" to get a service the company can easily provide through a Web page, but refuse to. It's not there to benefit you. It's there to benefit the company.
This was the whole oculus spirit since the beginning.
This doesn't feel like an act of Facebook as a whole. They should be thinking long term, big picture. Zuckerberg seems to have an image of Neuromancer's Matrix in his head, and we ain't there yet. He'd definitely take this step but I wouldn't think he'd do it until he more solidly owns VR.
What I see here is a senior manager type, maybe a VP or a bit below it, who needs numbers that go dramatically up and to the right in the short term and is thinking about their own personal success. They'd be the ones to say "how do we turn this acquisition into Facebook-measurable success metrics so we can prove that we're worth all this spending? Ah, yes, mandate Facebook logins, great idea, do it."
Hardly a surprise.
I mean, there are plenty of other ways to demonstrate value without forcing people to login with a Facebook account to use their Oculus devices. In-fact, I'm not sure what added value this requirement demonstrates in the first place?
People already pay for the hardware, servicing, apps/games, and upgrades.
Valve and HTC VR are far superior. Quest is selling great because it's a standalone, but the resolution is poor and it's pretty buggy. Mine crashes at some point in about 33% of sessions. Oculus store has a very limited selection of games, and their recommendation engine is laughably bad ("Did you like Beatsaber? maybe you'll like a roller coaster simulator"). Casting from the Quest barely functions and disconnects frequently. Thank god for Sidequest, or I'd already have upgraded to Valve Index.
In what way do you think Oculus is superior?
As someone who had to make this exact decision. Yes. So there definitely are "someone"s who'd do exactly this.
But if you are asking if the average consumer would do so? Unfortunately the answer is they probably don't mind using Facebook.
In my case, because of that, getting a Facebook account is hard, if not impossible, because those "real identity" checks are obscure: I attempted twice to sign up for work-related reasons, and I failed both times despite providing IDs and pestering support. I have literally NO idea why I cannot have a FB account.
However, even if I could, I hate Facebook so goddamn much that if this was my only option I would rather not use VR altogether. And I love my Oculus Rift, especially for game development.
I am royally pissed off, and I will gladly go forward with a class action lawsuit.
I am not sure whether you are trying to justify this move, or whether you are questioning that it will have an economic impact or really what the point is.
It took 2.5 years for IBM to begin the process of gutting the consultancy they bought, for RedHat I think it'll probably take twice as long.
"should have known" is what most of these comments are talking about. As a thought experiment assume he was lied to, most of these comments are talking about the ignorance and whether it was sincere. Was he this naive or is it easy to be this naive (i.e. self imposed ignorance) when there's a deal to be made.
Now that it has proven out as people expected, they're calling him out on it again. Perhaps other people will learn a lesson from it? I can hope.
Compared to 2D games, it can be the case of "I can't play the game" rather than "I don't want to / don't like the game". So the refund system is especially great for VR.
> [Re: 20203] If you choose not to merge your accounts at that time, you can continue using your device, but full functionality will require a Facebook account.
Which I read as "you won't be able to use the store anymore or receive driver/software updates for Oculus". I'm ok with that. By 2025 I'll either not be doing any VR or will want a new rig anyway.
I think Facebooks business strategy how to make money was pretty clear at that time as well. Just remember the [Facebook Home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home) Android launcher that allowed the company unprecedented access to the data on the device. https://gigaom.com/2013/04/04/why-facebook-home-bothers-me-i...
The one whose business idea it is to lock up all the world's information?
The one that, together with Quora and Instagram, shove a login screen in your face when you haplessly click the wrong link? When all you really wanted some some local business opening hours or contact information?
The one that already owns your contact information, and aren't afraid to tell you so, because they tricked any one of your friends into letting their app suck their contact book dry?
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4gfpjk/palmer_lucke...
Let's be real, the reason he was wilfully naive is because they send him a big fat check, just like they did to the Whatsapp founders, in the same year I think.
I just wish they would at least be honest and say it instead of this whole "I thought our dreams would come true" talk.
Eh. The money drove the tech - Facebook can afford to dump money into Oculus despite there being very little use cases or consumer appetite for it.
interestingly you can say that about pretty much anything, but at some point someone need to work on it for "it" to happen.
Bad egg from the start from how they acquired tech and employees, to their exclusive policy on launch and their artificial compatibility issues with other headsets today, getting worse when selling out to Facebook is no surprise.
In the end it is nitpicking; the effect is much the same.
Without Facebook's funding, none of the recent advancements are likely to exist in the first place. Valve hasn't done it, HTC hasn't done it, Sony hasn't done it. Because it is hard, expensive, and a money losing endeavor (for the forseeable future).
To be clear, I am strongly against the requirement, but am glad the product exists.
I'm also not too cynical about the market, because thankfully there are multiple companies in this space who are making progress. So Facebook will trash Oculus and things will stink for a while.
Eventually somebody else will come along and offer the same functionality without feeling the need to create a user-hostile platform out of a peripheral. Eventually the Linux support will improve. Eventually some community group will take over WebVR and we'll get a general platform instead of a bunch of separate stores designed to increase user lock-in. Eventually the games will be disassociated from the peripherals. Eventually, we'll get what we want and the space will improve. And Facebook's early efforts to improve the raw tech will be a part of that story.
But in the meantime, for the people who were predicting what Facebook was going to do from the moment Oculus was acquired -- I think it's reasonable to step back and let them say, "we told you so."
Reminds me of Ready Player One, where the big bad gloated over the possibility of filling up to 70% of the visual field with ads, before the user collapses in epilepsy.
come on
I wondered if there was some correlation between Google pushing for HTTPS and their introduction of chrome, but I guess that's unrelated, as they didn't have this capability before (except for users of their toolbar).
You should disconnect your TV from the internet and not let it connect. Run a barebones version of Firestick (ideally with piHole) as it is constantly phoning home to Amazon. Roku is a popular alternative, but it too is constantly phoning home.
Two random articles, which includes coverage on the Samsung & Smart TV problem
https://www.cnet.com/news/samsungs-warning-our-smart-tvs-rec...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/18/you-wat...
This relates to Vizio[1] but it seems most manufactures are snooping on their customers.
1. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/02/vizio...
You should still stop smoking (for your own good) but that alone won't change the world.
Taking climate change as an example: 100 b-corps going carbon-neutral aren't going to offset the damage Exxon causes to the environment.
You can say we just need to wait until consumers change their behavior and let the market sort it out, but isn’t that exactly what we’ve been trying and failing to do? At this rate it’s all but certain that climate change won’t be solved via market solutions.
What’s better is forcing the bad actors to stop doing bad. Fighting to pass a carbon tax regulation or a green new deal is what we need, and bandaids like b-corps are often a distraction that tricks people into thinking we can consume our way out of the problem.
Charters can easily change, anything can be reincorporated at whim anywhere.
Also its typically just Shariah-Compliant investing rebranded for an Islamaphobic audience. S&P has a shariah index right across the border in Toronto Stock Exchanfe since forever while similar enterprisers push B-Corps and Public Benefit Corporations domestically as if they’ve “figured out” the code to sustainable for profit ventures through charter. Shariah in this context is very compatible with what these kind of investors and consumers are looking for, but they don't know it as they probably conflate it with human rights abuses.
People are just gullible, hope I unpacked that enough.
It's amazing how everyone who brings that up avoids this question:
Does Epic allow anyone to create and and sell content for Fortnite, without giving Epic any money?
Do Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo allow other stores on their consoles?
Good idea, let's make that a requirement too. The law could be something like "if you sell a general purpose computing device, you're not allowed to mandate software vendor lockin". That would open up so many possibilities, it would be great for the people who own consoles.
Why should we give a smartphone manufacturer(who ever it may be) such overwhelming ownership over their hardware when the computer manufacturers don't get it?
How can the consumer know, if it is not disclosed?
And when every TV manufacturer is doing "ads in your smart TV", there is no incentive to not sell it at full price AND show you ads.
When many commercial displays are hundreds of dollars more, it's pretty absurd to suggest ads are a large factor.
They probably don't have the infra set up (yet) to detect they are such SIM cards.
I'd also strongly object to moving the needle even the tiniest amount on Facebook's metrics. They wouldn't force users to do this unless it benefitted them; that's plenty enough reason for a lot of people.
Using some combination of behaviour analysis, flagging new and/or cookie-less browsers, and (I suspect) human review FB have gone to great lengths to try and assure their customers that all humans have one and only one account under their true legal name and biographical details.
(Anybody reading this - there are publicly available NFO files and posts from Fitgirl that indicate what is included in a release/repack. I would never advocate violating copyright, and I certainly do not do so in a personal capacity.)
Fortunately, I haven't.
In any case, I personally have never owned an Oculus or anything related to Facebook.
I'm not sure if you realize that there's only a handful of confirmed cases of voter fraud in the US in decades. The current system, based upon an address registration and someone confirming their information at the polling place, has achieved this result.
You could always so no and just continue running your company?
Even if you really do want to get out, you can probably get in some conditions if you are willing to reduce the price.
That's what I would assume at least
Consider the board on which you have posted - Often, the purchaser is acting over a greater time frame, and the seller has an immediate need. Competitors are at your heels, and you can't realistically enforce patents against the purchaser or competitors, while retaining the market agility that is required.
They're not very good at that. A pretty big chunk of people I have as friends have fake names, some of them even after me reporting their names for being fake.
> me reporting their names for being fake
So how does it feel to be in a punitive squad? Do they at least pay you well for all the atrocities?
In any case, Luckey was a 20-year old kid who got some lenses to point in the right direction to give a decent FOV. He had a good Kickstarter, hired a CEO, and two years later he sold to Facebook for billions. Should he have made those promises? Probably not. Should any of us have taken his predictions seriously about what Facebook would do in 6 years, which is 50% longer than Luckey's adult life at that point? Also probably not.
I don't use Facebook, but I totally recognize how valuable it is for my grandpa. Sadly, Facebook does not allow any mistakes to be made on its site, which is what older people tend to do when faced with new tech.
I used a realistic sounding name, I tried several email addresses that were rejected as blocked, eventually I landed on an email that worked and my account got immediately disabled.
I'm sure I could eventually succeed, but I don't believe that it's fair to brush this off as something that anybody could do easily.
I imagine that you could use a plausible but fake name and a plausible but fake "random person" image, but I'm not interested in actually interacting with that website enough to try.
You might try a clean OS & browser install, to avoid trackers, and maybe if you've been banned a bunch already, use a VPN (or stop using a VPN) or use Starbucks wifi or something.
January 2023
Sure you win on principle, but that's just the same as losing.
Sure you're sort of an idiot to make those assumptions, but I'm sure you already came to this realization about yourself years ago.
And Synapse did require a login for several years. Looks like it doesn't anymore, thankfully: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/razer-synapse-3-removes-lo...
Personal mouse experience, I had two Razers that died right outside warranty, while my Logitech is at >6 years. Those were before their driver shenanigans, but the drivers aren't even the main reason I wouldn't switch back.
I mainly use one profile for games and set any keybinds I need in each one, but I've used automatic game detection for other software like repurposing the DPI adjustment buttons for quick shortcuts to blender's popup radial menus.
I plugged my G700s into a Windows machine with the Logitech bloatware suite installed, programmed it, and I've been using it on a Mac for years since then without any trouble
I would never buy another Razer product, specifically because of this.
I got rid of my Razer mouse as my custom key settings wouldn't kick in for about 5 minutes after each reboot
It was: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/razer-synapse-3-removes-lo...
I will never buy a Razer product again.
Must be why I'm using a Steelseries now.
Edit: Apparently they gave up on that idiotic requirement. Sorry Razer, too late. Not touching your products ever again.
Edit 2: And since we're actually talking about Oculus, for me it died when they sold to Facebook. You needed to be pretty naive to think it won't come down to this in the long run.
Not just data, either. A year ago or so, Razer was pushing a cryptocurrency miner along with their driver package:
Uh, yeah, updating drivers for mice. Just WTF? I get that it makes sense to have a capability of correcting bugs, but that should not require an app.
Probably not a great thing to confess to but I doubt I’d find myself caring what my acquirer was doing with their new real estate.
Obviously Facebook can do what they want within the terms.
Why shouldn't we expect more from companies? Promises should mean something. But really this is just another example of facebook undermining the basic fabric of society for its own gain.
No? Than it doesn't matter. The whole idea that because something is written into a contract that that automatically means that that his how things will be in the indefinite future is an illusion, and I've seen plenty of people burned that way. A contract only matters if (1) you are prepared to sue over it and (2) you will know what kind of remedy you want if you win the suit.
In this case the state of (1) is 'no' and the state of (2) doesn't matter because of (1).
Still possible but most people will not that far to hide information from facebook.
Did you just predict it happening "eventually"?
If you predicted it would happen before your headset was obsolete, I'd say you were wrong. And that's usually the important part for making a purchase. Six to seven years is enough lifetime for an early VR kit.
It's a huge problem and even if you don't realize it now, it is going to be a huge political issue in the future.
In contrast, if you don’t want to use or get banned from facebook, you can still communicate via SMS/MMS, google chat, email, GnuSocial/ActivityPub, twitter, and dozens of other options.
Actually, banning companies from moderating is probably a first amendment problem in the opposite direction - you’re forcing them to associate with you.
For example, even in the US, courts have established that Twitter is a public forum with respect to what politicians (such as Trump) say. But do other people get such protections?
In my country, Romania, the supreme court declared that Facebook is a public space, so if you say something like "the police can blow me" you'll get a letter from the police telling you so show up at the station so that they can fine you (swearing is illegal in Romania).
But Facebook can take down something I can say in public, meaning I'm not allowed free speech. It's not fair that I suffer all the consequences of a "public space", but none of the rights.
IANAL but the court said Trump couldn't block you from his twitter account because his use of his feed made it a public forum. This was about Trump, not twitter. Twitter, AFAIK, wasn't forced to unblock the accounts trump had blocked.
Am I now legally liable for my TV stealing the neighbour's internet?
That said, influencing the votes of other people can make a huge difference.
This is one of the reasons why you have to lower the cost of voting as much as possible - in terms of time, money, and hassle - if you want broader participation.
You are talking as if this is an either/or proposition. No, B-Corps won't solve our problems but if it moves the needle even a little, that's still a good thing, right?
To your other point about private solutions being good because they move the needle a little:
In my personal life I shop sustainably (but I’m not perfect or obsessive about it). I do think it’s a little better as a consumer to make ethical choices than not to.
But: the rhetoric around climate change as something individual choices will fix is extremely dangerous. If you ask your average person about what we can do to fix climate change, I’d guess most would go straight to market solutions. Why is that? Could it be because that’s what the entire marketing and media establishment wants us to focus on, because a collective solution will cost them a shit-ton of money?
Yes in a different world it’s not either or and we’d have individual and collective solutions working together to save the planet. In this world, however, the powerful have a vested interest in market-based solutions being the only options on the table.
Basically, yes I agree that ethical companies are better than unethical companies. But on a macro level, propaganda around ethical consumption is so dangerous imo that I’m not interested in contributing to it just to move the needle an imperceptible amount.
It’s definitely not a guarantee, but mass movements can force change. Look at Bernie, he came pretty damn close to the nomination even with the entire upper class and media throwing their weight behind his opponents.
Only if you use or log into your bogus FB account.
- create burner gmail
- create burner oculus name/account
- create burner Facebook account
- always use a VPN
It seems like you could completely remain anonymous and provide Facebook with data they could never correlate to a real person.
That seems like it could go poorly, like if one person in a household had been buying a secret birthday present or an engagement ring or researching divorce lawyers and then the targeted ads were associated to everyone in the house.
1. If Apple didn't allow the sale of third party content, they would be in the same position as Epic and therefore there would be no problem?
2. If Epic allowed the sale of third party content, they should not be allowed to control what type of content is sold, nor should they be allowed to collect a percentage of each sale?
I don't think anyone has a problem with platforms charging _a_ percentage of each sale, just that Apple's is too high (and in the case of their dispute with Spotify, that it allows them to unfairly compete in their own marketplace)
There was an experimental add on for 6DOF controllers https://developers.google.com/vr/experimental/6dof-controlle...
It really wasn't a fundamental technical leap to go from the Mirage to a Quest. The Quest feels like a (well thought out) iteration instead of a revolution compared to the Mirage Solo.
Facebook might have helped but from a purely technical perspective, Facebook wasn't the only path.
No wonder they keep making empty promises.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_...
It would be great if they used the additional on board macro profiles as an 'out of the box' way of adjusting the mouse without software. You nerd the software to change mouse button 4/5 to native actions, otherwise it's just dpi control.
Nothing, though, compares to the irredeemable idiocy of forcing the user to have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard facing their play area in order to set up the guardian system, which you have to do essentially every time you use it because it will go out of alignment at a gnat's fart despite being screwed to the desk.
How much do Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo/Steam charge?
But if one person in an average household quits that is a 25% reduction.
In the end that person and those around benefit.
You should still stop smoking (for your own good)
You should still stop smoking (for your own good)
I was not making any claims about the likelihood of an account being banned.
I've got 100+ VR games and never bought anything on the Oculus store. Steam games work just as well, and will be easier to use if you ever switch to another VR headset.
Given the Oculus/FB fallout here I want to buy somewhere else.
And trusting Garmin seems a bit unlikely, sigh.
https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...
"Third, corporate directors are not required to maximize shareholder value. As the U.S. Supreme Court recently stated, "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so." ( BURWELL v. HOBBY LOBBY STORES, INC. ) In nearly all legal jurisdictions, disinterested and informed directors have the discretion to act in what they believe to be the interest of the business corporate entity, even if this differs from maximizing profits for present shareholders. Usually maximizing shareholder value is not a legal obligation, but the product of the pressure that activist shareholders, stock-based compensation schemes and financial markets impose on corporate directors. The Shareholder Value Myth , Eur. Fin. Rev. Lynn Stout (April 30, 2013) The Ideology of Shareholder Value Maxim (Watch), Evonomics"
A company's management has to act in the interest of shareholders, but that can be very loosely defined. A company that says "When making business decisions, we prefer protecting the environment over short-term profits, because our shareholders are humans living on Earth and without a good environment, our business would fail in the long-term" is not doing anything illegal. But if other companies don't follow suit, the eco-conscious company is in danger of being outcompeted.
Yes! That's why you should be very very careful who you give your data because you are exactly one acquisition away from the same effect as a breach. Fortunately the GDPR affords some protection here, if the data was collected for one purpose it can not suddenly be used for another.
As for never selling the company: there is one other option: you could give users the option to destroy their data just prior to the transfer. Of course no acquirer would be interested but that is another way of dealing with it.
Such a clause might work as long as it's part of the sale contract to adjust the sale price if any customers take that option.
Facebook has already been fined under the GDPR so it looks like that enforcement is working.
Nitpick: Rather, it's a condemnation of any data privacy claims; a data privacy practice is a technical measure that (by design if not in reality) makes it literally impossible for the attacker to collect private information in the first place. Nothing else actually provides security in practice.
The only winning move is not to play
So maybe not playing doesn’t really work.
I was thinking, in regards to some grandparent way up there, the same statement “don’t play” might have been true for Oculus in general.
What I mean to say is, don’t sell the company, ever. Then you can “control the outcome”.
Ah, but there lies another fallacy. You really can’t control the outcome even if you try to. Even if you don’t play, likely someone who wants to do the same thing as you, and exploit it, will find a way. Or maybe on their own, Oculus would have never found the right supporter who would honor privacy. Even if they had.. the below could happen.
For example, if Facebook hadn’t bought Oculus, maybe they would have bought the Vive product line from HTC (a bit far fetched) and compete against Oculus.. and then done the same privacy intruding measures.
So even if Oculus had held out and didn’t “play”, they might have been crushed anyway or the privacy problem could have just happened somewhere else.
I’m not saying we should give up trying to protect privacy and “play” the game... but that somehow in the competitive environment we are in, those playing the game are winning more over those who wish not to.
That said, maybe you should google the phrase "The only winning move is not to play". It's a movie quote ;-)
unless they have clear penalties for themselves in their EULA, and no clause that says they can change anything they want at any time. So yeah I guess you're right.
Same. Nothing since has managed the same usefulness (although I suspect this is because iOS has somewhat neutered tracking apps - e.g. both OwnTracks and Gyroscope have significant issues tracking my phone.)
[edit, 23 minutes later]: Initial impressions were good but it's "detected" 4 segments of car movement when my phone hasn't moved a single inch. Same kind of issues that Gyroscope has, alas.
https://theconversation.com/shadow-profiles-facebook-knows-a...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/anger-mounts-after-facebooks-s...
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-...
https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-infor...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/11/facebook-shadow-profiles-h...
The House Committee interview in the last link (TechCrunch) shows that Zuckerberg does not like to use the "shadow profiles" term, but it's what others use to refer to Facebook's tracking of non-users.
You can download an executable installer from their website that is DRM free, can be installed offline, and you can keep a copy of forever.
The quotes have a real Tim Sweeney vibe to them.
Plug in a cartridge and go from power on to playing the game in a matter of seconds, with no privacy invasion.
The Switch is the first console I've used in years where it seems like the maker of the console actually wants me to play games.
One major, technical differences from PCs, is the uniformity of the hardware. This is becoming less true, but consoles traditionally have fixed hardware. No "works on my machine" problems on consoles. This also guarantees stable performance characteristics, that developers can optimise for. (This is less true now that consoles are resembling PCs more and more internally).
This is even more visible on older consoles: take an N64 (PS2), plug in a cartridge (insert a CD), and voilà you have your game, completely separated from any other program. Perhaps one of those programs could be GNU/Linux, but the default would still to be running on the bare metal, without interference from other programs. Quite unlike the PC there.
Incidentally, I could see a new game console solve the Thirty Million Lines Problem. https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0031 Fixed, powerful hardware with a well defined interface could possibly trigger the OS competition that is so sorely lacking rights now: Windows, Linux, MacOS, IOS, Android, and if you pick a particular niche (Server, Mobile, Desktop), you'd rarely see more than 2 significant contenders.
A contract needs to be legal, and legal means what the law allows in the context. Does the law allow putting such provisions? I've been burnt by this in a rental agreement. Think about it this way: if we have a contract between both of us, where you agree that I'm going to kill you, I'm still going to jail. Having a contract doesn't make killing legal. This also applies to the rest of contracts. The provisions need to respect the law.
But the guy didn't have a contract, sold a patent-heavy company for $3bn (probably an army of lawyers involved) that netted him around $700mn. I'd just call this saving face.
Even if it were just the Quest: How is it reasonable to require an account to use a "stand alone computing device"? I have many stand alone computing devices in my home without the need for an account with their manufacturers.
I was already skeptical of my Oculus Rift when after buying it I learned I needed to create an account just to download drivers (WTF!) No other device on my computer requires an account to obtain drivers. I would love to hear the justification.
"We require you create an account so that we can protect your personal data."
The thing is: to sell me stuff, you don't need to know my name. You don't need to keep tabs on me. You may offer it, but I may decline. Plenty of mortar-and-bricks-stores work this way: there are loyalty cards for tracking, but customers who forego them do not have to register to make a purchase.
Point in fact: there are also internet shops that allow such options. Sure, they need a bit of data to send the parcel and the confirmation/invoice/etc. But that doesn't require everyone to create a username/password combination - and some internet shops blissfully do not require that. They get paid and ship the purchase to the address specified, and that's it.
In this case, it seems purchases could be tied to the Oculus device specified during the purchase. While I can certainly imagine benefits to tying purchases to a user account (e.g., ability to use on multiple Oculus devices), I don't see a reason to require logging in. Am I overlooking something?
If (when) the device fails, you would lose all of its associated software licenses and have to buy them again
I mean, my Nvidia card has had one for years because I didn’t realise I could’ve installed the drivers without creating one. What did a graphics card ever need with that? My mouse required one.
I'm not sure if this still works or if there are other things beside the driver that one would like to have installed nowadays.
https://insider.razer.com/index.php?threads/i-need-an-accoun...
I don't usually do this, but I don't think it is against the TOS, so here is my HB referral link [4] Here's also a 20% discount on the humble store for 30 days for one lucky person who isn't a subscriber [5]
[1] https://github.com/MayeulC/hb-downloader/tree/next-next
[2] https://github.com/talonius/hb-downloader
[3] https://gitlab.com/silver_rust/trove_downloader/
[4] https://www.humblebundle.com/subscription?refc=Y9dywp
[5] https://www.humblebundle.com/subscription/activate-discount?...
The good thing about Steam, which makes it good software in my opinion, is that you can easily customize it and turn features off, and nothing really gets forced down your throat. It's almost like Valve feels they actually have to make an effort to keep you as a customer. Compare that to anything from the tech giants.
If there's a way to turn off most of the recent UI updates I'd love to know how.
For example, is my microwave a general purpose computing device just because I can upgrade the firmware, even if the firmware has to be signed by the manufacturer?
For instance: the iPhone. It would definitely be general purpose if you didn't have to go through the App Store™.
Your microwave oven is different: minimum input, minimum display, one main purpose (heat food). Properly constructed ones can easily be bug-free on the first try, no need for patches. The firmware may even be fused into a strictly read-only chip. Clearly single purpose.
Personally, I'd tentatively set the limit at programmability: if there's any way to reprogram a machine, the user should be able to do it without authorization from the vendor. (We could make exceptions, for instance break control software in cars: such software should probably be tested to death and vetted by regulation. Preventing users from rolling their own may be justified to avoid untimely deaths on the road. Though "preventing" here could mean "legally disallow" rather than "use DRM". Not sure which is best.)
They run authorized programs, not arbitrary programs.
What is the downside?
There is no having a tiny bit of Facebook. If you give them a finger ...
After initial login I was asked to verify myself by either providing ID (sic!) or a phone number.
Well, seems that after 2023 I'll just trash my Quest.
I’ve supported Oculus since DK1 through every single iteration of hardware. This change by Facebook has just killed the brand entirely for me. I simply won’t sign up / back into Facebook (killed my account around 2011 as I found it overwhelmingly toxic and have never looked back) to use a piece of hardware I already purchased.
Shall we play a game?
Currently the Quest is the only Android based (and thus fully stand alone) headset that's wasn't Daydream branded and wasn't killed when Google mothballed their VR support. There's less now then there were, or would have been if Google stuck with it.
Don't create a burner account. Facebook's TOS is to lock burners and require an ID to unlock, so you'd be locking all your games out of access.
That's why I was wondering if it's officially confirmed somewhere.
Job done. raise the noise floor.
I ended up using my personal email address because that's how they want it.
My mum has a shadow facebook account for a number of reasons. She only has one friend, its on a shadow email. It's still active after a good 6 months.
it didn't require a phone number either. I mean it asked, but I didn't give it one.
So long as the emails dont bounce, you're good.
Simply not true. I suggest you try yourself and see how long the account stays unlocked.
I mean I don't know how I can make it any clearer....
Take oculus Rift as an example. You own a game (on a different platform) which supports VR (including your device). You plug your Rift in, calibrate the sensors/room and start playing the game. You shouldn't even need internet connection.
For support requests, use the serial number, like everywhere else.
Consoles work offline just fine.
To keep Steam from starting when you log in, select "Steam" from the menu bar and then choose "Settings". Under "Interface", untick "Run Steam when my computer starts". While you're in here, uncheck "Notify me about additions or changes to my games, new releases, and upcoming releases" if you want Steam to not tell you about those. You can use "Set Taskbar Preferences" to select what options appear in the right click menu from the taskbar icon.
I run Steam in Small Mode, which makes it look like the old, old version of Steam before they introduced the full screen library. To do this, go to "Steam"->"Settings" and bring up the "Interface" group. Set "Select which Steam window appears when the program starts, and when you double click the Notification Tray icon" to "Library". Click okay and then select "View"->"Small Mode" to show the classic small Steam interface. To the right of the search box at the top of the screen is a selector where you can toggle what is shown - I set this to "Installed" so only installed games are shown. See here[0] for an example. This UI will revert if you uninstall a game - just go to "View"->"Small Mode" to set it again. If you set it before closing Steam then the next time you open Steam it will start in this mode.
To avoid being logged into the Friends system by default, open the "Friends" menu from the menu bar and choose "View Friends". Then click the cog in the upper right hand corner of the window that appears - this brings up the settings window. Set "Sign in to friends when Steam Client starts" to off. There are a bunch of notification settings in here - set them as you will.
To make the Steam store not suck (bandwidth), go to the "Library" tab in "Steam"->"Settings" and set "Low Bandwidth Mode", "Low Performance Mode", and "Disable Community Content".
To turn off Broadcasting, "Steam"->"Settings", "Broadcasting" group and set "Privacy setting" to "Broadcasting Disabled".
You can tell Steam to create desktop shortcuts or Start menu shortcuts if you want to not have to open Steam manually to play a game. When installing a game, tick the "Create desktop shortcut" or "Create start menu shortcut" when installing and then you can start the game (and Steam with it) by double clicking that icon. There is no option to automatically quit Steam after a game exits (because of course there isn't - "wHy WoUlD aNyBoDy WaNt To ClOsE sTeAm" the fanboys go). For installed games, you can right click and choose "Create Desktop Shortcut" to get a desktop shortcut for your game. You can use the "steam://" URL generated anywhere Windows accepts URLs to launch steam games.
Some people like auto-updates. Some people hate that they suck bandwidth, especially for single player games. Unfortunately, there is no option in not auto-update the game - you can chose "Always keep this game up to date", "Only update this game when I launch it", or "High Priority - Always auto-update this game before others" in the game properties. Setting this to "Only update this game when I launch it" will try to perform updates when you start a game - if you have this set and you have the downloads set to not download while in game, you should be able to force launch a game without updates and download will not start.
Set up "Offline Mode" now. If Steam is down and you haven't used "Offline Mode" recently then you won't be able to play your games with Steam offline. Choose "Steam"->"Go Offline..." to run Steam in offline mode. This has the benefit of being disconnected from the Steam service, updates, friends, etc.
An adage about difficulty trying to convince someone whose salary depends on their not being convinced comes to mind...
It's OK to wish to defend your company, but please do not lie; nobody forced you to comment here.
I don’t think there are many people that are cognizant in how to break their social graph.
I’ve seen a few other hackernews comments corroborating it over the past year. But it isn't a common case so Facebook gets away with it.
But I want that, as a consumer. For example: part of the benefit, perhaps one of the greatest benefits, is knowing that everyone using the device is subject to the same constraints. This makes cheating in online games on consoles much harder on consoles. It still happens, but it's much harder.
Why should it be illegal to sell me a device that limits the use of arbitrary code? I _want_ that in the product I'm buying.
While on consoles... It's much better.
This is normal.
The price increase would not have been mild - at the time this was written, it was the cost of a full game. When most only own a handful of games that's a significant difference.
Tells us something about the real price of that console, though. People don't see the price of the walled garden, since (i) it's always been this way, and (ii) it looks like the garden is providing flowers (in the form of a store). Such hidden (or externalised) costs are a bit of a lie. I'd rather be aware of the true price of what I'm buying.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/sony-still-losing-on-every-playsta...
If not that's an excellent example and it may lead to FB being held to account.
DPA's typically do not go on fishing expeditions, you have to alert them.
If you have any sources for this fine, please post them.
From noyb's fight against Facebook (https://noyb.eu/en/open-letter), to me it is very clear that Facebook does not intend to comply with GDPR. They are actively trying to find loopholes, and according to noyd, also working with the Irish DPO to find and exploit loopholes. It is also worth noting that the total fines Google has faced from GDPR enforcement come to just under EUR 58 Mn (http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/GDPR-2020-Where-C...). 58 Mn is chump change compared to Google's total revenue, and unless the threat of the full 4% turnover fine becomes credible, I doubt it will lead to any better action.
Facebook, Google, Apple & Microsoft are arguably the companies that stand the most to lose from GDPR enforcement, you can bet that they are well aware of this.
https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
Facebook has already been fined, and if they cross the line again they will be fined again, and quite possibly much higher.
If you know for a fact that Facebook is in some way or other currently not GDPR compliant then I would invite you to contact your local DPA.
Most humans will get very morally flexible once offered enough resources; this is precisely why we have contracts and courts, to create structural systems more capable of upholding agreements than individual humans can do alone.
Explain the mechanism by which a smart contract in this instance would both have made it impossible for Facebook to make this move and, if they did anyway, avoided the necessity of Palmer to sue them over it.
Say I sell you some rope and as part of our contract I say that it shouldn't be used to execute people and you go and use it to hang someone.
How would you even go about expressing that in the world of a blockchain?
How does the blockchain world get to know that you have broken your side of the contract.
How does a blockchain contract enforce penalties for breaking a contract?
Who knows, maybe some (small amount) of people in similar positions actually follow through afterwards and do that.
As an anecdotal example, many companies are now using instagram for image hosting that pester/ requires me to sign up. I say no thank you and move on, I'm not adversely affected but maybe that company loses some business.
If they do reimburse you, then it's just scary. The fact an unscrupulous entity like Facebook have such a strong hold in people life and business, opinions and privacy is a recipe for an Orwellian future (present?)
Virtual reality is the next frontier of cyberspace, a much more engulfing and immersive (if successful), I don't want Facebook to have so much power.
Even more interesting is I can remember having many a conversation about which headset to buy, always stating avoid oculus because facebook and yet the person buys oculus anyway only to later complain profusely about having a VR headset from facebook. In recent years this seems to be a problem, likely with current generations. Capitalism fails when you don’t exercise your freedom to make smart purchase decisions. If you don’t want facebook to have so much power stop buying them, stop using them, get your friends and family off and make them actually work for their customers.
Headsets are not cheap, but I am not really crying for not attaching it to my PC ever again. I just wonder who would want to develop against that environment. Not that there was that much available as it is.
If you pay attention to most smart contract pitches, they polite side step this issue.
More generally, locked down hardware means you have to trust a central third party. The cypherpunk in me doesn't like that. There has to be a better way (though I don't know what).
The better way is to buy a general computing device if that's what you prefer, and let others buy their locked down devices if that's what they prefer.
For me to chose an open device, that open device has to exist in the first place. Where is the open equivalent of the PS5? I don't see any. And even if it did: I bet many competitive game would exclusively found in the locked down version. Or, more insidiously, there would be two arena: the locked down one with fewer (or no?) cheaters, and the open one with (presumably) all the cheaters. There would be a strong incentive to get the locked down version for this reason alone, and one isn't going to waste money & resources on a redundant piece of electronics just so they can play without cheats and access the homebrew market.
Now that I think of it, there might be a way: how about optional signatures? You'd take the same hardware, and run it in two modes: the open mode, and the signed mode. The signed mode would be thoroughly locked down by the hardware vendor, and run only signed code. This could affect networking too: just sign the encryption keys with the secure chip, and pass that along with a certificate from Nintendo or whoever. That way one would know the communication was initiated in "signed mode", thus guaranteeing the integrity of the game's binary, just like we would in an actually locked down console.
Heck, we could go even a step further: have the hardware security module be swappable. That way we can separate the hardware vendor from the certificate authority. Of course, they'd be one and the same by default, but we could still switch for another if we need to. (You could have a tournament specific CA, or the hardware vendor could revoke it's own HSM and send a new one to people.)
DRM for the people. Never thought I'd say that.
I respect him for eating humble pie now.
I absolutely do not respect yet alone absolve him of not doing so originally. Why would one? There's nothing NEW that came to the table: Facebook can do what they want now, and crucially that was the case at the time of those promises.
Founders literally sign away their right to make these promises. Whether they're made out of ego, faith, hope, naivette, inocence, or just riding that payday high and feeling king of the world - acquired founders need to stop making them and we need to stop believing them; and holding accountable / not absolving is a step in that direction. They're not evil people, they don't need to be doxxed or torched... but it's a certain level of wrong to make promises you absolutely positively cannot deliver upon, and good will does not make such ignorance OK :-/
Sorry if that came harsh; I feel bad for Palmer... but hey, should we not feel worse for those who believed him and acted upon that belief??
The only thing non-exclusive stores can't do is protect people from themselves. And even then you could still have the kid gloves on by default, yet let people take them off whenever they want. For instance by displaying some mildly scary warning about some program not being verified by the OS vendor, and then still let people click on the "install anyway" button. (The "Windows protected your PC" popup would be like that, though I think it overshoots to the point of dishonesty.)
[1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/steam-game-allegedly-mi...
I'm a PC Gamer myself, but I also stopped playing anything ranked. There's no point.
Well, they don't have to. He could have insisted on writing this condition into the acquisition contract. But he obviously didn't. The most charitable reading of this is that he was just naive and didn't know that this was an option or that it would be necessary in order to enforce such a promise, but that seems unlikely. Acquiring this knowledge is no harder than posing the question to his M&A attorney. Hence...
> I absolutely do not t respect yet alone absolve him of not doing so originally. Why would one?
I think you made the right call here.
If you reverted ownership there's no way that FB are going to sign that contract (a small risk you could inadvertently lose the asset and the cost price, eg through an unforeseen loophole that favours the seller - lawyers should veto such things, surely).
Also, are you going to make it a perpetual term applied to all future owners? If not then FB can probably make an entity to sell it to. Or use a third-party login that itself requires Facebook login and workaround your selling constraints.
I like the idea of it: just practically I can't see how it would be workable to technically constrain a company in a contract of sale of that company.
Are there examples of where this has been done successfully?
Ultimately, energy spent on Palmer distracts from getting Facebook to modify its behavior.
Its funny how in situations like this one, where one person facilitates another’s wrongdoing, they (Palmer) are put under the spotlight more so than the bad actor (Facebook)
This a thousand times. I wonder however what people like me can do from the outside, save for keep refusing to open a Facebook account.
“Do not anthropomorphize the lawnmower”.
1. It's NOT binary; I generally try not to partake of "You're either with us or against us". We can hold multiple parties accountable, we can be objective about facts, and we can learn multiple lessons.
2. I'm not actually certain there's behaviour for Facebook to modify. They're a corporation with a wildly successful massive SSO program. They've acquired another smaller corporation. Integrating into the mothership SSO feels the right sensible choice from many perspectives. As an annoying privacy conscious geek, sure, I don't love Facebook integration. But this is a reasonable perspective from point of the corporation.
3. Which brings me back to - I still think the truest lesson learned is for all of us naive enough that for whatever unicorn reason, this wouldn't happen. At that includes shareholders, consumers, and the wild-eyed founders making promises :)
As I said, I don't know him, don't intend to bug him, doesn't bother me much, don't intend to "Harsh" on him. But he did have agency, and he did make some claims, and we should all learn some lessons on how to exercise agency and how to make/believe promises.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/19/15366500/palmer-luckey-tr...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/how-your-oculus-...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/09/palmer-luckey-aundur...
Does that change your opinion?
Not just acquired founders. In my opinion we should stop so readily believing in promises by founders, start ups, corporations, celebrities, politicians, etc. unless there is a strong track record keeping them and/or other reasons to believe the promise can and will be kept.
Getting people to (pre-/re-)purchase something should require to build up trust, not just grand visions and good marketing.
> need to be doxxed or torched...
?
2. Read Ender's game or Dune or live through a civil war as a child or... whatever it takes to agree that a 22 year old can and should be regarded as a responsible, accountable human being. Otherwise really who can?
He should have known he couldn't promise that. He could not have known Facebook would do what they did but he should have been at least smart enough to know the limits of his own influence.
This sentence seems self-contradictory. Once again, here's what Palmer said:
> I really believed it would continue to be the case for a variety of reasons. In hindsight, the downvotes from people with more real-world experience than me were definitely justified.
It sounds like he's agreeing that he should be getting the blowback, right? He made a promise he couldn't keep, people told him he wouldn't be able to keep it, he ignored them. He should have known better.
Does he deserve the blowback? Probably not.
Was it an extremely naive promise to make given historical experience and the company that acquired you? Absolutely.
The point you make may be relevant for deciding damages, but even here there is a concept of Liquidated Damages [0] which is essentially the damages amount set at day 1 so the question of ascertaining the extent of wrong does not arise.
On second thought, the whole issue is weird because blockchain doesn't have a login concept.
edit: and as ComputerGuru stated - such a clause can just as easily be put into a traditional contract
I guess it won't, so...
You don't throw something into a wood chipper then get mad at the wood chipper for chopping it up - that's just what it does.
(Of course it's easy for me to say, I haven't spent $$$ on Oculus products)
It is entirely possible that some consumers, if not some developers / investors / etc, made choices and decisions based on those unequivocal claims.
In Western Europe such things are generally free.
Palmer Luckey was in his very early 20s and had never been involved in an acquisition before. He acknowledged his mistake and his explanation makes complete sense. Even much more experienced people are prone to making this kind of mistake in the honeymoon period of an acquisition.
Raspberry Pi w/ RetroPi or Batocera. Perhaps sometime in the future it'll be Batocera on a RISCV.
You won't get better because without huge corporate dollars, as is the case with the Linux kernel, Gnome and KDE, you won't be able to fund the QA and devs necessary to do the bullshit boring work that is essential to making certain that consoles are a polished experience; from the operating system through to every game you purchase.
TCRs and TRCs are a thing, after all. You cannot ship without meeting a certain level of minimal tolerable quality.
> And even if it did: I bet many competitive game would exclusively found in the locked down version.
Yes. Of course.
What's in it for the developers when consumers demand anti-cheat measures, which are hideously expensive to maintain, and active and pervasive moderation which is, likewise, hideously expensive to maintain? To say nothing of the _total absence_ of any strong example of a FOSS video game performing well enough to fund a AAA-quality title.
> You'd take the same hardware, and run it in two modes: the open mode, and the signed mode.
Sony has done this twice. There was the PSOne's Net Yaroze, and there was the PS3's ability to run Linux (only for the first few iterations). Consumers didn't care enough for Sony to bother with it again.
IIRC, Xbox One indie developer licenses are still basically almost free.
Your idea is still locked down, though; you cannot run arbitrary code because you cannot cross the signed/unsigned boundaries.
> DRM for the people.
Browsers have this in the form of media extensions.
The R-Pi is nowhere near the raw capabilities of the PS5. Can't do that amazing Unreal Engine demo, or VR. A difference in degree large enough to be considered a difference in kind in my opinion. (I do reckon the R-Pi is powerful enough to do serious stuff, up to and including being a blazing fast workstation if we wrote the software for it.)
Batocera is not a piece of hardware? Could act as a platform for sure, but an ISA (fully specified, which means CPU + GPU + most peripherals) would in my opinion be better than an API. Closer to reality. Of course, we'd need APIs on top.
Two interesting aspects of consoles are the fixed ISA, and the fixed performance characteristics. We could possibly lift the latter without much consequences, as long as the hardware provides a well defined set of performance floors, that would determine what can run at which speed.
> you won't be able to fund the QA and devs necessary to do the bullshit boring work that is essential to making certain that consoles are a polished experience; from the operating system through to every game you purchase.
I certainly wouln't. The best I can boast about is having raised $7000 from the OTF for a 7-day security audit.
That said, it seems to me the "polished experience" is composed of fairly separate, or at least separable, problems. At the bottom is the hardware. Or even ISA. We need a hardware company to make that stuff. Not just the CPU, but all the rest. (Repeating what Casey said, stuff like GPU are becoming stable and general enough that fixing an ISA wouldn't have a significant negative impact on their evolution.) To do that, we need a big player like Intel or Nvidia on board — good fucking luck with that, unfortunately.
The second problem is provide high-level services that run on the hardware. OS, middleware… A huge undertaking if we're to have any backwards compatibility (we'd at least have to port Linux, and recompile everything). Perhaps not so bad if we flip the table and go in a direction closer in spirit to the Oberon project (Niklaus Wirth), or STEPS (Alan Kay's Viewpoint Research Institute).
The third problem is writing one or several store fronts like Steam.
The fourth problem is writing the actual games (and other applications). In some ways the easiest problem to solve, and in other ways the hardest. Easiest because game devs will go wherever they could sell their games, providing the ISA/API isn't too horrible (sometimes even when it is). The hardest because (i) that's where most of the effort will go, and (ii) the incentives of making the platform easy to work with may not be commensurate with that effort.
The zeroth problem is separating the above. The current world is set up for vertical integration. Apple and console vendors are the most extreme examples, but even Windows tends to be sold with the PC, in such a way that removing it is often not even cheaper. I have the feeling that we should think about a legal structure that would make it happen. This would include thinking about what corporations are supposed to enable. (This is where I start to question the entire economic system, so let's just note that pushed far enough, pretty much any subject has political implications.)
> Sony has done this twice. [PS3]. Consumers didn't care enough for Sony to bother with it again.
Wait a minute, if the first iterations of the PS3 could run Linux, how hard could have it been to port that ability to the new versions? I suspect they ended it for other reasons. If for instance the console did not by itself generated enough profit, and they compensated with online services, they'd have an incentive to limit sales to actual gamers, and run from the compute-cluster market.
> IIRC, Xbox One indie developer licenses are still basically almost free.
It's not just a matter of price. Can we make and sell porn games on the XBox One? I've heard that platforms like iOS disallow porn. And I don't see console vendors taking the heat for being "that platform with porn on it".
If regulation forced hardware vendors to open up their platforms, you could access questionable content on them, and nobody would take the flak. You'd still have "safe for work" store fronts, and porn hubs, and whatever controversial stuff huge corporation wouldn't feel like supporting.
> Your idea is still locked down, though; you cannot run arbitrary code because you cannot cross the signed/unsigned boundaries.
Locked down, yes, but the idea was to not lock people out of the system entirely. The main idea is that signed mode would give one additional ability: to prove that a given program, and the data it produces, traces back to a certificate chain that goes up to a given trusted certificate authority. (Sony gives Blizzard a certificate, Blizzard uses it to sign Starcraft 3, which then produces Blizzard authenticated network packets to stop cheats).
Unsigned programs should not be locked out of the platform at all. They'd just not be explicitly approved of, and maybe we'd display some warning before installation that this program is not endorsed, and may contain or do stuff that is "Not Good For You".
We probably won't see a competitive erotic wrestling game any time soon (no signatures to help cheat prevention), but at least we don't sacrifice some capabilities just so we can have other capabilities.
There may be some rare exceptions where you'd be able to pay a lot of money in the US for some experimental treatment not yet available in the public EU system but this is the exception not the rule. What you possibly won't get for free are non-critical treatments.
I will give one declaimer though that I live in Germany & the healthcare system is not in the same quality/extensiveness throughout the EU (the German system is among the best).
Yes. In short, you expressly identify in the contract that the provision is for the benefit of Oculus Rift users, and then they gain the power to enforce it as “intended third-party beneficiaries”.
The examples I can find [there] don't seem to bear much similarity to this situation at all.
It's entirely possible that FB would have balked, but that in itself would have been a useful data point that indicated that they had every intention of bundling the two products together.
In any case, the topic at hand is not so much whether such a deal could have been structured to work, but whether there are any circumstances short of willful ignorance where the founder could have made the promise he did in good faith. I don't see any.
You can be naive, but naive doesn't mean you go online and argue that people who know better are wrong, which is what he did.
Now he knows better. He has changed his mind. Which is what any rational person should do when presented with new information.
On the one hand I won't vilify him.
On the other hand he merely met the base requirements for "rational thinking" - so I am not about to give him any accolades.
Isn't this exactly what being naive means?
Palmer was suffering from confident ignorance.
A contract is a matter for civil law. Breaking a term of a contract doesn't automatically mean that a court will consider a remedy.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law)#Standing_requir...: in the US, "the plaintiff must have suffered or imminently will suffer injury".
I'm just saying that an injury is required in principle (with an appropriate citation), because the great-grandparent (by vijayr02) didn't think that was the case.
If he got it written into the contract then it is clear that he does not intend to pursue it.
If it was written into the contract and he pursues it then he will need to show that he has suffered because the contract was not executed and I fail to see how he could make that case and do so with enough teeth that it would matter to FB enough to reverse course.
The example of UK bank overdraft charges in the Wikipedia article for instance can be seen as small powerless individuals vs large corporate.
In the Oculus case, a good lawyer should have been able to set out in the contract why this specific point is important to the seller (Palmer) and why significant damages are in order (damages credibility on future projects, which clearly could be multi-billion in scope).