The head of WhatsApp has warned UK ministers that moves to undermine encryption in a relaunched online safety bill would threaten the security of the government's own communications and embolden authoritarian regimes. From a report: In an interview with the Financial Times, Will Cathcart, who runs the Meta-owned messaging app, insisted that alternative techniques were available to protect children using WhatsApp, without having to abandon the underlying security technology that safeguards its more than 2bn users. The UK's bill, which the government argues will make the internet safer, has become a focus of global debate over whether companies such as Google, Meta and Twitter should be forced to proactively scan and remove harmful content on their networks.

Tech companies claim it is not technically possible for encrypted messaging apps to scan for material such as child pornography without undermining the security of the entire network, which prevents anyone -- including platform operators -- from reading users' messages. Cathcart said the UK's ultimate position on the issue would have a global impact. "If the UK decides that it is OK for a government to get rid of encryption, there are governments all around the world that will do exactly the same thing, where liberal democracy is not as strong, where there are different concerns that really implicate deep-seated human rights," he said, citing Hong Kong as a potential example.

Apple has removed the iOS apps belonging to VK, the technology conglomerate behind Russia's version of Facebook called VKontakte, from its App Store globally. From a report: In a translated statement on its website, VK said that its apps "are blocked by Apple" but that it will "continue to develop and support iOS applications." In response to an inquiry by The Verge, Apple spokesperson Adam Dema confirmed that VK's apps have been removed and its developer accounts shut down.

"These apps are being distributed by developers majority-owned or majority-controlled by one or more parties sanctioned by the UK government," Dema said in a statement. "In order to comply with these sanctions, Apple terminated the developer accounts associated with these apps, and the apps cannot be downloaded from any App Store, regardless of location. Users who have already downloaded these apps may continue to use them."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Daily Beast: Luis Eduardo Garrido couldn't wait to test out his colleague's newest creation. Garrido, a psychology and methodology researcher at Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic, drove two hours between his university's campuses to try a virtual reality experience that was designed to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and different types of phobias. But a couple of minutes after he put on the headset, he could tell something was wrong. "I started feeling bad," Garrido told The Daily Beast. He was experiencing an unsettling bout of dizziness and nausea. He tried to push through but ultimately had to abort the simulation almost as soon as he started. "Honestly, I don't think I lasted five minutes trying out the application," he said.

Garrido had contracted cybersickness, a form of motion sickness that can affect users of VR technology. It was so severe that he worried about his ability to drive home, and it took hours for him to recover from the five-minute simulation. Though motion sickness has afflicted humans for thousands of years, cybersickness is a much newer condition. While this means that many of its causes and symptoms are understood, other basic questions -- like how common cybersickness is, and whether there are ways to fully prevent it -- are only just starting to be studied. After Garrido's experience, a colleague told him that only around 2 percent of people feel cybersickness. But at a presentation for prospective students, Garrido watched as volunteers from the audience walked to the front of an auditorium to demo a VR headset -- only to return shakily to their seats. "I could see from afar that they were getting sweaty and kind of uncomfortable," he recalled. "I said to myself, 'Maybe I'm not the only one.'"

As companies like Meta (nee Facebook) make big bets that augmented reality and virtual reality technology will go mainstream, the tech industry is still trying to figure out how to better recruit users to the metaverse, and get them to stay once there. But experts worry that cybersickness could derail these plans for good unless developers find some remedies soon. "The issue is actually something of a catch-22: In order to make VR more accessible and affordable, companies are making devices smaller and running them on less powerful processors," adds the report. "But these changes introduce dizzying graphics -- which inevitably causes more people to experience cybersickness."

"At the same time, a growing body of research suggests cybersickness is vastly more pervasive than previously thought -- perhaps afflicting more than half of all potential users." When Garrido conducted his own study of 92 people, the results indicated that more than 65 percent of people experienced symptoms of cybersickness -- a sharp contrast to the 2 percent estimate Garrido had been told.

He says that these results should be concerning for developers. "If people have this type of bad experience with something, they're not going to try it again," Garrido said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Meta was sued for allegedly building a secret work-around to safeguards that Apple launched last year to protect iPhone users from having their internet activity tracked. In a proposed class-action complaint filed Wednesday in San Francisco federal court, two Facebook users accused the company of skirting Apple's 2021 privacy rules and violating state and federal laws limiting the unauthorized collection of personal data. A similar complaint was filed in the same court last week. The suits are based on a report by data privacy researcher Felix Krause, who said that Meta's Facebook and Instagram apps for Apple's iOS inject JavaScript code onto websites visited by users. Krause said the code allowed the apps to track "anything you do on any website," including typing passwords.

According to the suits, Meta's collection of user data from the Facebook app helps it circumvent rules instituted by Apple in 2021 requiring all third-party apps to obtain consent from users before tracking their activities, online or off. Meta has said it expected to miss out on $10 billion in ad revenue in 2022 because of Apple's changes. The Facebook app gets around Apple privacy rules by opening web links in an in-app browser, rather than the user's default browser, according to Wednesday's complaint. "This allows Meta to intercept, monitor and record its users' interactions and communications with third parties, providing data to Meta that it aggregates, analyzes, and uses to boost its advertising revenue," according to the suit. A Meta spokesperson said the allegations are "without merit" and the company will defend itself. "We have designed our in-app browser to respect users' privacy choices, including how data may be used for ads," the company said in an emailed statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Chess's top-ranked player, Magnus Carlsen, has finally spoken about the ongoing alleged cheating scandal that has rocked the chess world for the last several weeks and was reignited when Carlsen resigned in protest after making one move against Hans Niemann. Niemann, of course, was accused of cheating against Carlsen earlier this month, but no one has been able to prove this, nor has a mechanism for the supposed cheating been proven.

"I think the whole world is wondering, what is the reason you withdrew [against Niemann]?" a newscaster with Chess24 asked. "Unfortunately I cannot particularly speak on that," Carlsen said. "But, you know, people can draw their own conclusion and they certainly have. I have to say I'm very impressed by Niemann's play, and I think his mentor Maxine Dlugy must be doing a great job." "I will not comment on that," he added when asked if he was accusing Niemann of cheating. He was then asked if he was accusing Dlugy, who is a chess grandmaster, of helping Niemann cheat: "No, I will not say more about that subject ... I hope to say a little bit more after the tournament." Carlsen was then asked if he thought cheating was a problem in chess. "I think individual people will answer the question differently depending on their own experiences. Regardless of whether it's a massive problem or not, it's, I think, fairly easy to cheat. On a general basis, cheaters in the future, it should not be taken lightly neither online nor over the board."

Chess watchers believe that by namedropping Maxine Dlugy, Carlsen is putting down more breadcrumbs. Dlugy is is a Russian-born, American chess grandmaster who currently operates the Chess Max Academy in Manhattan. In July, Dlugy posted a photo with "my student Hans Niemann," congratulating him on "becoming a top 50 player in the world! Go Hans!" After Niemann beat Carlsen earlier this month, Dlugy posted a congratulatory message: "Just 16 months ago or so, I recommended to Hans to really focus on endings. He devoted a lot of time to this pivotal part of the game and today I am proud to say that his endgame play is sufficient to beat the reigning World Champion from a better position. That's powerful! Hans Niemann -- Chess speaks for itself!"

Redditors were quick to point out, however, that Dlugy has his own controversy. Dlugy has been removed twice from a weekly Chess.com tournament called Titled Tuesday, in 2017 and 2020. Benjamin Bok, a chess grandmaster and Twitch streamer, for example, made a whole segment delving into some of Dlugy's old Chess.com matches and pointing out that Dlugy was suddenly removed from Chess.com with no explanation: "Generally that only means one thing," Bok said, not elaborating on what it means, but heavily implying that it means he was caught cheating. "Draw your own conclusions. Draw your own conclusions. That's all I'm going to say." "Question becomes: Is perhaps Dlugy Hans' accomplice, in case Hans is cheating? We'll have to wait and see," Bok says. "But the fact that Magnus makes that statement and drops his name, it means that he knows something we don't know. You can't just drop someone's name in there without really knowing stuff. I feel like he knows something really big."

Former President Donald Trump could be allowed back on Facebook once a suspension of his account expires in 2023, Nick Clegg of parent company Meta Platforms, said Thursday at an exclusive Semafor Exchange event in Washington, DC. From the report: As the company makes its decision, it will talk to experts, weigh the risk of real world harm and act proportionally, he said. It's the first time Clegg, who, as president of global affairs is charged with deciding whether to lift the limit, has publicly discussed his thinking. Trump was prohibited from posting on several online platforms after the January 2021 riots at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., with Facebook, sister app Instagram, Twitter and Google's YouTube citing his role in inciting the violence. "When you make a decision that affects the public realm, you need to act with great caution," Clegg told Semafor editor-at-large Steve Clemons. "You shouldn't throw your weight about."

Facebook and Instagram's speech policies harmed fundamental human rights of Palestinian users during a conflagration that saw heavy Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip last May, according to a study commissioned by the social media sites' parent company Meta. From a report: "Meta's actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact ... on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred," says the long-awaited report, which was obtained by The Intercept in advance of its publication. Commissioned by Meta last year and conducted by the independent consultancy Business for Social Responsibility, or BSR, the report focuses on the company's censorship practices and allegations of bias during bouts of violence against Palestinian people by Israeli forces last spring.

Following protests over the forcible eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli police cracked down on protesters in Israel and the West Bank, and launched military airstrikes against Gaza that injured thousands of Palestinians, killing 256, including 66 children, according to the United Nations. Many Palestinians attempting to document and protest the violence using Facebook and Instagram found their posts spontaneously disappeared without recourse, a phenomenon the BSR inquiry attempts to explain. Last month, over a dozen civil society and human rights groups wrote an open letter protesting Meta's delay in releasing the report, which the company had originally pledged to release in the "first quarter" of the year. While BSR credits Meta for taking steps to improve its policies, it further blames "a lack of oversight at Meta that allowed content policy errors with significant consequences to occur."

In response to stalling growth and intense competition, Meta Platforms executives have spoken of cost cuts, hiring freezes and "ruthless prioritization." One word the company hasn't used: layoffs. From a report: But Meta has begun quietly nudging out a significant number of staffers by reorganizing departments and giving affected employees a limited window to apply for other roles within the company, according to current and former managers familiar with the matter, in a move that achieves staffing cuts while forestalling the mass issuance of pink slips. The reductions are expected to be a prelude to deeper cuts, with Meta looking to trim its costs by at least 10% within the next few months, according to people informed of the company's plans. While some savings will come from cuts to overhead and consulting budgets, the people said, much of it is expected to come from reduced employment. In response to questions, Meta spokesman Tracy Clayton referred to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's July statement that the company would need to reallocate resources toward corporate priorities as pressures mount on the business.

A big group of U.S. states, led by New York, has argued to an appeals court that it should reinstate an antitrust lawsuit against Meta's Facebook because of ongoing harm from the company's actions and because the states had not waited too long to file their complaint. From a report: Barbara Underwood, solicitor general of New York which led the group that consists of 46 states, Guam and District of Columbia, said that it was wrong to treat states like a class action and put a limit on when they can sue. States not involved are Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and South Dakota. She said the states' action was more akin to law enforcement so "laches," which forbids an unreasonable delay in filing, would not apply. She said that Facebook's actions harmed the economy and the marketplace. The states are asking the three-judge panel on U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to reinstate a lawsuit filed in 2020, the same time that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued the company. Both the FTC and the states had asked the court to order Facebook to sell Instagram, which it bought for $1 billion in 2012, and WhatsApp, which it bought for $19 billion in 2014. The FTC fight with Facebook is going forward.

joshuark writes: A Las Vegas surgeon reports tech workers are paying $70,000 to $150,000 to get surgery to increase their height by 3-inches. The doctor is paid to break their legs (both femurs) and then inserts adjustable metal nails that are slowly tweaked over time. "I joke that I could open a tech company," Dr. Kevin Debiparshad told GQ. "I got, like, 20 software engineers doing this procedure right now who are here in Vegas. There was a girl" -- because girls can be tech bros too. -- "yesterday from PayPal. I've got patients from Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft. I've had multiple patients from Microsoft."

A new twist, borrow $70K to $150K from a loan shark in Las Vegas, and they'll break your legs later... "Since the onset of the pandemic's work-from-home era, the LimbplastX Institute (where Dr. D performs his procedures) has been seeing twice its normal number of patients, and sometimes as many as 50 new people a month," reports GQ. "That claim is backed up by a BBC report suggesting that hundreds of men in the U.S. are now undergoing the procedure every year."

"According to a 2009 study of Australian men, short guys make less money than their taller peers (about $500 a year per inch); are less likely to climb the corporate ladder (according to one survey, the average height of a male Fortune 500 CEO is six feet); and, for the cis and straight among us, have fewer romantic opportunities with women (a 2013 study conducted in the Netherlands found that women were taller than their male partners in just 7.5 percent of cases)," adds the report. "The promise of Dr. D's institute is that, for a price, you too can increase your odds of becoming a Fortune 500 CEO. And people are willing to pay..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Mark Zuckerberg's pivot into the metaverse has cost him dearly in the real world. Even in a rough year for just about every US tech titan, the wealth erased from the chief executive officer of Meta stands out. His fortune has been cut in half and then some, dropping by $71 billion so far this year, the most among the ultra-rich tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. At $55.9 billion, his net worth ranks 20th among global billionaires, his lowest spot since 2014 and behind three Waltons and two members of the Koch family.

It was less than two years ago when Zuckerberg, 38, was worth $106 billion and among an elite group of global billionaires, with only Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates commanding bigger fortunes. His wealth swelled to a peak of $142 billion in September 2021, when the company's shares reached as high as $382. The following month, Zuckerberg introduced Meta and changed the company's name from Facebook And it's been largely downhill from there as it struggles to find its footing in the tech universe.

Its recent earnings reports have been dismal. It started in February, when the company revealed no growth in monthly Facebook users, triggering a historic collapse in its stock price and slashing Zuckerberg's fortune by $31 billion, among the biggest one-day declines in wealth ever. Other issues include Instagram's bet on Reels -- its answer to TikTok's short-form video platform -- even though it's worth less in advertising revenue, while the industry overall has been affected by lower marketing spending due to concerns over an economic slowdown. The stock is also being dragged down by the company's investments in the metaverse, said Laura Martin, senior internet analyst at Needham & Co. Zuckerberg has said he expects the project will lose "significant" amounts of money in the next three to five years. In the meantime, Meta "has to get these users back from TikTok," said Martin. It's also hampered by "excessive regulatory scrutiny and intervention," she said. Meta is "down about 57% this year, far more than the declines of 14% for Apple, 26% for Amazon and 29% for Google parent Alphabet," adds Bloomberg. "Meta is even narrowing the gap in 2022 losses with Netflix, which is down about 60%."

After a Florida man was accused of vehicular homicide, his lawyer used Clearview AI's facial recognition software to prove his innocence. But other defense lawyers say Clearview's offer rings hollow. From a report: It was the scariest night of Andrew Grantt Conlyn's life. He sat in the passenger seat of a two-door 1997 Ford Mustang, clutching his seatbelt, as his friend drove approximately 100 miles per hour down a palm tree-lined avenue in Fort Myers, Fla. His friend, inebriated and distraught, occasionally swerved onto the wrong side of the road to pass cars that were complying with the 35 mile-an-hour speed limit. "Someone is going to die tonight," Mr. Conlyn thought. And then his friend hit a curb and lost control of the car. The Mustang began spinning wildly, hitting a light pole and three palm trees before coming to a stop, the passenger's side against a tree. At some point, Mr. Conlyn blacked out. When he came to, his friend was gone, the car was on fire and his seatbelt buckle was jammed. Luckily, a good Samaritan intervened, prying open the driver's side door and pulling Mr. Conlyn out of the burning vehicle.

Mr. Conlyn didn't learn his savior's name that Wednesday night in March 2017, nor did the police, who came to the scene and found the body of his friend, Colton Hassut, in the bushes near the crash; he'd been ejected from the car and had died. In the years that followed, the inability to track down that good Samaritan derailed Mr. Conlyn's life. If Clearview AI, which is based in New York, hadn't granted his lawyer special access to a facial recognition database of 20 billion faces, Mr. Conlyn might have spent up to 15 years in prison because the police believed he had been the one driving the car. For the last few years, Clearview AI's tool has been largely restricted to law enforcement, but the company now plans to offer access to public defenders. Hoan Ton-That, the chief executive, said this would help "balance the scales of justice," but critics of the company are skeptical given the legal and ethical concerns that swirl around Clearview AI's groundbreaking technology. The company scraped billions of faces from social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, and other parts of the web in order to build an app that seeks to unearth every public photo of a person that exists online.

The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms' rules. From a report: Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, last week instructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online to provide a full accounting of their activities by next month after the White House and some federal agencies expressed mounting concerns over the Defense Department's attempted manipulation of audiences overseas, according to several defense and administration officials familiar with the matter.

The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations. The researchers did not specify when the takedowns occurred, but those familiar with the matter said they were within the past two or three years. Some were recent, they said, and involved posts from the summer that advanced anti-Russia narratives citing the Kremlin's "imperialist" war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict's direct impact on Central Asian countries. Significantly, they found that the pretend personas -- employing tactics used by countries such as Russia and China -- did not gain much traction, and that overt accounts actually attracted more followers.

"Whirring as it powered up, a hoverbike lifted directly into the air in Michigan, video shows."

That's the lead from one news report about a big debut at a U.S. auto show in Detroit: a gasoline-and-electric powered hoverbike (using a Kawasaki motor) created by Japanese manufacturing company AERWINS Technologies. They've already started selling them in Japan, and they're now also hoping to sell a smaller version in America in 2023. The hoverbike flies for 40 minutes, Reuters reports, and can reach speeds of up to 62 miles per hour (100 kph). (They added that the bike drew "perhaps inevitable comparisons to the speeder bikes of Star Wars.")

From McClatchy news services: Video from WXYZ's Facebook shows the hoverbike's flight. The test rider checks the vehicle then signals with a fist pump. The engines power up, whirring louder and louder until the bike lifts off. The hoverbike flies back and forth, slightly faster as the ride goes on, then lands smoothly to the ground, video shows. "I feel like I'm literally 15 years old and I just got out of Star Wars," the test rider told Reuters. "It's awesome! Of course, you have a little apprehension, but I was just so amped. I literally had goosebumps and feel like a little kid...."

The price of a hoverbike? Only $777,000 according to current estimates, though the company hopes to get the cost down to about $50,000, The Detroit News reported.
The Detroit News adds this about the company's founder/CEO: As a boy, Shuhei Komatsu loved Star Wars movies, especially the lightning-fast land speeders. So when he grew up, he decided to make one of his own, he said.

"I wanted to make something from the movie real," Komatsu said. "It's a land speeder for the Dark Side...."

Komatsu said his company will make its public offering of stock on the NASDAQ exchange in November.... He said he's hoping the U.S. government classifies its XTURISMO as a non-aircraft.... He said he thinks consumers will buy the machine for recreation, and governments will buy it for law enforcement and for inspecting infrastructure. "I hope that in the future, people will use it for every day," he said.

The Economist notes this business cycle is hurting ad revenue for Alphabet's Google and Meta's Facebook."Last quarter Meta reported its first-ever year-on-year decline in revenues. Snap, a smaller rival, is laying off a fifth of its workforce." But for both companies, "the cyclical problem may not be the worst of it," since they're finally facing some real competition.

"They might once have hoped to offset the digital-ad pie's slower growth by grabbing a larger slice of it. No longer." Although the two are together expected to rake in around $300bn in revenues this year, sales of their four biggest rivals in the West will amount to almost a quarter as much... What is more, as digital advertising enters a period of transformation, the challengers look well-placed to increase their gains. The noisiest newcomer to the digital-ad scene is TikTok. In the five years since its launch the short-video app has sucked ad dollars away from Facebook and Instagram, Meta's two biggest properties. So much so that the two social networks are reinventing themselves in the image of their Chinese-owned rival.... But Meta and Google may have more to worry about closer to home, where a trio of American tech firms are loading ever more ads around their main businesses.

Chief among them is Amazon, forecast to take nearly 7% of worldwide digital-ad revenue this year, up from less than 1% just six years ago. The company started reporting details of its ad business only in February, when it revealed sales in 2021 of $31bn. As Benedict Evans, a tech analyst, points out, that is roughly as much as the ad sales of the entire global newspaper industry. Amazon executives now talk of advertising as one of the company's three "engines", alongside retail and cloud computing.

Next in line is Microsoft, expected to quietly take more than 2% of global sales this year — slightly more than TikTok. Its search engine, Bing, has only a small share of the search market, but that market is a gigantic one. Microsoft's social network, LinkedIn, is unglamorous but its business-to-business ads allow it to monetise the time users spend on it at a rate roughly four times that of Facebook, estimates Andrew Lipsman of eMarketer. It generates more revenue than some medium-sized networks including Snap's Snapchat and Twitter.

The most surprising new adman is Apple. The iPhone-maker used to rail against intrusive digital advertising. Now it sells many ads of its own.... As digital ads work their way into more corners of the economy, "a new order is going to materialise", believes Mr Lipsman. He thinks Amazon will overtake Meta in total advertising revenue, possibly within five years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Magazine: Craigslist emerged in 1995 to connect strangers through a free, web-based platform that has endured as rivals services like Zillow, Facebook Marketplace, and countless dating apps emerged with advanced features and slick interfaces. These platforms survive on advertising and subscription revenue. Craigslist, of course, has none of that. Over the years, the OG online marketplace has all but refused to modernize; its mobile app only came out in 2019 after nearly 25 years in business. Why does the website still look the same after so many decades? That was the main question I had when I sat down for a video call with craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who joined me from the New York City apartment he shares with his wife, Eileen Whelpley.

Newmark stepped down as CEO of craigslist in 2000 after others told him he wasn't cut out for management, he says. Jim Buckmaster has been at the helm since, though Newmark remains a partial owner. He now works on philanthropy full time, supporting groups like the Coalition Against Online Violence, which helps combat harassment against female journalists. Still, the 69-year-old entrepreneur is a billionaire (or near-billionaire since he's given away millions). Our chat yielded much more than expected, from Costco hotdogs to Hello Kitty and his childhood Sunday School lessons. It's clear that the website is the purest and most enduring expression of Craig Newmark, a humble tech mogul who marches to the beat of his own drum. Here's what Newmark had to say when asked about the site's appearance:

Why does the website still look the pretty much the same today as when you founded it? There's even a new CEO. What's going on?
Because that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day.

Well, you can still have simplicity with a modern font or a new UI. The definition of simplicity on the web has changed over the years. Is it just that you're making enough money and there's a desire to keep it the way it is?
I'll challenge the premise that the idea of simplicity has changed. The deal is that people still use the site in great numbers. And again, it helps people get something done. It's fast and easy for people, and that's a big deal.

And maybe you also don't care too much about aesthetics (of the website, for example)?
For me as an engineer, simple as beautiful. Functional is beautiful.

How would you feel if craigslist dramatically changed in its appearance or its function?
I'm okay if the spirit is maintained. I like a very simple site with its use and functionality obvious when you look at it. Now maybe there's a better way to do that, that no one has come up with yet. If it's really better, I can't object to that. If it's genuinely better, I will say something. But again, I can't legitimately try to exert serious influence. Jim's boss.

In summary, what is your most concise answer to why craigslist still looks the same today?
People tell me it gets the job done. They want it done. As I like to put it, a nerd's got to do what a nerd's got to do.

South Korea levied tens of millions of dollars in fines on Alphabet's Google and Meta Platforms for privacy law violations, authorities said on Wednesday. From a report: In a statement, the Personal Information Protection Commission said it fined Google 69.2 billion won ($50 million) and Meta 30.8 billion won ($22 million). The privacy panel said the firms did not clearly inform service users and obtain their prior consent when collecting and analysing behavioural information to infer their interests or use them for customised advertisements. "We disagree with the PIPC's findings, and will be reviewing the full written decision once it's shared with us," a Google spokesperson said. "We've always demonstrated our commitment to making ongoing updates that give users control and transparency, while providing the most helpful products possible. We remain committed to engaging with the PIPC to protect the privacy of South Korean users."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Several years after Facebook-owner Meta acquired WhatsApp and Instagram, the Federal Trade Commission launched an antitrust lawsuit that claimed that through these acquisitions, Meta had become a monopoly. A titan wielding enormous fortune over smaller companies, the FTC said Meta began buying or burying competitors in efforts that allegedly blocked rivals from offering better-quality products to consumers. In this outsize role, Meta stopped evolving consumer preferences for features like greater privacy options and stronger data protection from becoming the norm, the FTC claimed. The only solution the FTC could see? Ask a federal court to help them break up Meta and undo the damage the FTC did not foresee when it approved Meta's acquisitions initially. To investigate whether Meta truly possesses monopoly power, both Meta and the FTC have subpoenaed more than 100 Meta competitors each. Both hope to clearly define in court how much Meta dominates the market and just how negatively that impacts its competitors.

Through 132 subpoenas so far, Meta is on a mission to defend itself, claiming it needs to gather confidential trade secrets from its biggest competitors -- not to leverage such knowledge and increase its market share, but to demonstrate in court that other companies are able to compete with Meta. According to court documents, Meta's so hungry for this background on its competitors, it says it plans to subpoena more than 100 additional rivals, if needed, to overcome the FTC's claims. Meta is asking its competitors for a wide range of insights, from their best-performing features to names of their biggest advertisers. It wants to see all business receipts, which to its competitors is seemingly turning the antitrust litigation into a business opportunity for Meta to find out precisely how other companies attract users, scale products, and gauge success. Among rivals already subpoenaed are Twitter, TikTok owner ByteDance, Reddit, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Snap. More requests could be made in the coming years, though, before the discovery for both sides concludes on January 5, 2024.

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is betting the social-media giant's near-term future on Instagram Reels, the short-video feature he is touting as the company's answer to TikTok. The company's internal research shows that Meta has a lot of catching up to do. From a report: Instagram users cumulatively are spending 17.6 million hours a day watching Reels, less than one-tenth of the 197.8 million hours TikTok users spend each day on that platform, according to a document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that summarizes internal Meta research. The document, titled "Creators x Reels State of the Union 2022," was published internally in August. It said that Reels engagement had been falling -- down 13.6% over the previous four weeks -- and that "most Reels users have no engagement whatsoever." One reason is that Instagram has struggled to recruit people to make content. Roughly 11 million creators are on the platform in the U.S., but only about 2.3 million of them, or 20.7%, post on that platform each month, the document said.

Images and, later, a video of a "Meta Quest Pro" virtual reality (VR) headset surfaced online, posted on Facebook by Ramiro Cardenas, who claims the device was left in a hotel room. From a report: The device shown resembles the Project Cambria headset Meta has been publicly teasing since late last year and looks like the one spotted in leaked setup videos. The video shows Cardenas removing the device from its packaging, revealing a black headset and controller with what looks like an updated design. While the headset has three cameras on its front, the controllers feature a design that drops the hollowed-out loop design that houses the sensors for something more solid. The packaging has the "Meta Quest Pro" label stamped in the top-left corner and a graphic showing the VR headset and controllers. Cardenas also provided a closeup of the label stuck to the box, which says "Not for resale - engineering sample," and told The Verge that the person who stayed in the room has since claimed the headsets.