An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta Platforms is planning to release four virtual reality headsets between now and 2024, according to an internal road map viewed by The Information. The aggressive timeline reflects Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's desire to advance his vision of the metaverse by getting more people to use VR devices. Whether he can meet the timeline, however, is far from certain. Meta is planning to release Project Cambria, a high-end VR and mixed-reality headset it is billing as a device for the future of work, around September, according to a person familiar with the matter. Cambria was originally supposed to come out last year but its launch was delayed by supply chain and other pandemic-related issues, which could again push back the launch date, the person said. A second version of Cambria, code-named Funston, is slated to come out in 2024. Meanwhile, Meta plans two new versions of its less expensive Quest headset -- internally code-named Stinson and Cardiff -- for release in 2023 and 2024, the road map shows. All four code names for the devices on Meta's Cambria and Quest lines refer to locations in California, following the pattern of the earliest Quest prototypes, made under the name Project Santa Cruz.

28-year-old Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people in New Zealand in 2019. The Associated Press reports that at that point he'd been reading 4chan for 14 years, according to his mother — since the age of 14.

The year before, 25-year-old Alek Minassian, who killed 11 people in Toronto in 2018, namechecked 4chan in a pre-attack Facebook post.

But the Guardian now adds another a story from nine days ago — when a 23-year-old shooter with 1,000 rounds of ammunition opened fire from his apartment in Washington D.C. Just two minutes after the shooting began, someone under the username "Raymond Spencer" logged onto the normally-anonymous 4chan and started a new thread titled "shool [sic] shooting". The newly published message contained a link — to a 30-second video of images captured from the digital scope of Spencer's rifle....

Even as police stormed the apartment building where Spencer hid, with officers maneuvering past a surveillance camera that he had set up in the hallway and was monitoring, Spencer continued to post to the message board. "They're in the wrong part of the building right now searching," he posted at one point. A few minutes later: "Waiting for police to catch up with me."

As he waited, Spencer logged on to Wikipedia to edit the entry for Edmund Burke School, which he had just opened fire on....

Police believe Spencer shot himself to death as officers breached his apartment.

The European Union has joined the social network Mastodon, which has seen a staggering 30,000 new users after Elon Musk's bid for Twitter was accepted. PC Magazine reports: On Thursday, the European Commission said it had set up its own server, dubbed EU Voice, to join Mastodon's decentralized social network, also known as a "Fediverse." The effort is currently only a pilot, but it represents the EU's goal of supporting private and open-source software capable of rivaling mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. On the same day, the European Commission also launched an account for PeerTube, another decentralized platform that revolves around video sharing. "With the pilot launch of EU Voice and EU Video, we aim to offer alternative social media platforms that prioritize individuals and their rights to privacy and data protection," said European Data Protection Supervisor Wojciech Wiewiorowski.

"In concrete terms this means, for example, that EU Voice and EU Video do not rely on transfers of personal data to countries outside the European Union and the European Economic Area; there are no advertisements on the platforms; and there is no profiling of individuals that may use the platforms," he added. "These measures, amongst others, give individuals the choice on and control over how their personal data is used."

The Snapchat founder, Evan Spiegel, has dismissed Facebook's "metaverse" ambitions as "ambiguous and hypothetical" as he announced a raft of new augmented reality features coming to phones and Snap's experimental AR Spectacles over the next year. The Guardian: Speaking ahead of the Snap Partner Summit, the company's flagship annual event, Spiegel argued Snapchat was uniquely placed to guide the next decade of technology thanks to the company's vast array of augmented reality services, such as the "lenses" that are used by millions of people every day.

[...] The updates sound like they could be the foundations of a shared virtual universe of the type that Facebook recently decided was so fundamental to its future that it even rebranded the company as Meta. But, Spiegel says, the word "metaverse" is never uttered in Snap's offices. "The reason why we don't use that word is because it's pretty ambiguous and hypothetical. Just ask a room of people how to define it, and everyone's definition is totally different."

Earlier this month, demolition began on the Nakagin Capsule Tower, an iconic building designed by Kisho Kurokawa. Still, in many ways, Kurokawa's dynamic vision is woven into the fabric of our architectural present. From a report: The building at the time was in a conspicuous state of disrepair. Its concrete surface was pockmarked; many of the circular windows were papered over. Last year, after more than a decade of back-and-forth over the building's fate, the owners' association agreed to sell the towers to a consortium of real-estate firms, and earlier this month news came that demolition of the structure had finally begun. Recent photos posted by a preservationist initiative on Facebook show that its base now half gone; the hundred and forty-four capsules float above the construction, bereft and doomed. The future that Kurokawa and the Metabolism movement imagined didn't come to pass, yet in many ways their dynamic vision is woven into the fabric of our architectural present.

Metabolism officially launched with a manifesto, in 1960, as Japanese cities were being reconceptualized after the destruction of the Second World War. Part of a new postwar generation of architects, Metabolism's founders -- among them Kurokawa, Kiyonori Kikutake, and Fumihiko Maki -- were driven, as Kurokawa wrote in his 1977 book, "Metabolism in Architecture," by "traumatic images of events that took place when we were in our formative childhood years." Born in 1934, in Aichi Prefecture, Kurokawa was the son of an architect whose style he described as "ultra-nationalistic." In his own studies, he was drawn first to Kyoto University, for its sociological approach to architecture, then to Tokyo University, where he studied under the modernist architect Kenzo Tange, who worked after the war on the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. But Kurokawa was more interested in looking forward. "I felt that it was important to let the destroyed be and to create a new Japan," he wrote.

[...] The Nakagin capsules suggest a kind of utopian urban life style. Their paucity of space and equipment meant that activities typically done at home, like eating and socializing, would instead be conducted out on the street. The Nakagin capsules were not full-time residences but pieds-a-terre for suburban businessmen or miniature studios for artists and designers. The individual capsules were pre-assembled, then transported to the site and plugged in to the towers' central cores. Each unit -- two and a half metres by four metres by two and a half metres, dimensions that, Kurokawa noted, are the same as those of a traditional teahouse -- contained a corner bathroom fit for an airplane, a fold-down desk, integrated lamps, and a bed stretching from wall to wall. Televisions, stereos, and tape decks could also be included at the buyer's discretion. [...] In some ways, Kurokawa's vision of a domestic architecture that prioritized mobility and flexibility proved prophetic. The capsules were the original micro-apartments, an ancestor to today's capsule hotels, and a forebear of the shared, temporary spaces of Airbnb.

Major technology companies have been duped into providing sensitive personal information about their customers in response to fraudulent legal requests, and the data has been used to harass and even sexually extort minors, according to four federal law enforcement officials and two industry investigators. Bloomberg: The companies that have complied with the bogus requests include Meta, Apple, Alphabet's Google, Snap, Twitter and Discord, according to three of the people. All of the people requested anonymity to speak frankly about the devious new brand of online crime that involves underage victims. The fraudulently obtained data has been used to target specific women and minors, and in some cases to pressure them into creating and sharing sexually explicit material and to retaliate against them if they refuse, according to the six people.

The tactic is considered by law enforcement and other investigators to be the newest criminal tool to obtain personally identifiable information that can be used not only for financial gain but to extort and harass innocent victims. It is particularly unsettling since the attackers are successfully impersonating law enforcement officers. The tactic is impossible for victims to protect against, as the best way to avoid it would be to not have an account on the targeted service, according to the people. It's not clear how often the fraudulent data requests have been used to sexually extort minors. Law enforcement and the technology companies are still trying to assess the scope of the problem.

Twitch, the Amazon-owned live-streaming website, is weighing potential changes to how it pays top talent, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the planning, an effort that would boost its profits but would also risk alienating some of its biggest stars. From a report: The updates under consideration would offer incentives for streamers to run more ads. The proposal would also reduce the proportion of subscription fees doled out to the site's biggest performers, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. Some changes to Twitch's monetization structure could be implemented as soon as this summer, the people said. Twitch staff is considering paring back the revenue cut of channel subscriptions granted to the top echelon of streamers in its so-called partnerships program to 50%, from 70%. Another option is to create multiple tiers and set criteria for how to qualify for each one, two of the people said. In exchange, Twitch may offer to release partners from exclusivity restrictions, allowing them to stream on Google's YouTube or Facebook.

em1ly shares a report from Motherboard: Facebook is facing what it describes internally as a "tsunami" of privacy regulations all over the world, which will force the company to dramatically change how it deals with users' personal data. And the "fundamental" problem, the company admits, is that Facebook has no idea where all of its user data goes, or what it's doing with it, according to a leaked internal document obtained by Motherboard. "We've built systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy: Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand. This bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data (3PD, 1PD, SCD, Europe, etc.) You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) ... and it flows ... everywhere," the document read. "How do you put that ink back in the bottle? How do you organize it again, such that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake?" (3PD means third-party data; 1PD means first-party data; SCD means sensitive categories data.)

The document was written last year by Facebook privacy engineers on the Ad and Business Product team, whose mission is "to make meaningful connections between people and businesses," and which "sits at the center of our monetization strategy and is the engine that powers Facebook's growth," according to a recent job listing that describes the team. This is the team that is tasked with building and maintaining Facebook's sprawling ads system, the core of the company's business. And in this document, the team is both sounding an alarm, and making a call to change how Facebook deals with users' data to prevent the company from running into trouble with regulators in Europe, the US, India, and other countries that are pushing for more stringent privacy constraints on social media companies. "We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can't confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as 'we will not use X data for Y purpose.' And yet, this is exactly what regulators expect us to do, increasing our risk of mistakes and misrepresentation," the document read. In other words, even Facebook's own engineers admit that they are struggling to make sense and keep track of where user data goes once it's inside Facebook's systems, according to the document. This problem inside Facebook is known as "data lineage."

Chess.com, writes in a blog post: Yesterday, Chess.com was banned by the Russian government agency Roscomnadzor, the "Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media." Roscomnadzor is responsible for censorship within Russia, a busy occupation these days. Since the start of Russia's war against Ukraine on February 24th, Roscomnadzor has banned hundreds of sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google News, BBC News, NPR, and Amnesty International. According to Roscomnadzor, their goal is to block two webpages: "On The Invasion of Ukraine" which outlines our policy and actions regarding the war on Ukraine and addresses FAQ and "Ukrainian Chess Players In Times Of War" which is a piece interviewing Ukrainian chess players on their circumstances and views during the early days of the war. Since Chess.com uses secure https webpages, Roscomnadzor is unable to ban these single pages and has banned the entire Chess.com site. Our members report that Chess.com's apps are unaffected. We happily encourage our Russian members to continue accessing our site using our apps or any of the many outstanding VPN services that are so essential in Russia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The EU has agreed on another ambitious piece of legislation to police the online world. Early Saturday morning, after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to 6 percent of their annual turnover for noncompliance.

"The DSA will upgrade the ground-rules for all online services in the EU," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a statement. "It gives practical effect to the principle that what is illegal offline, should be illegal online. The greater the size, the greater the responsibilities of online platforms." [...] Although the legislation only applies to EU citizens, the effect of these laws will certainly be felt in other parts of the world, too. Global tech companies may decide it is more cost-effective to implement a single strategy to police content and take the EU's comparatively stringent regulations as their benchmark. Lawmakers in the US keen to rein in Big Tech with their own regulations have already begun looking to the EU's rules for inspiration.

The final text of the DSA has yet to be released, but the European Parliament and European Commission have detailed a number of obligations it will contain [...]. Although the broad terms of the DSA have now been agreed upon by the member states of the EU, the legal language still needs to be finalized and the act officially voted into law. This last step is seen as a formality at this point, though. The rules will apply to all companies 15 months after the act is voted into law, or from January 1st, 2024, whichever is later. "Large online platforms like Facebook will have to make the working of their recommender algorithms (used for sorting content on the News Feed or suggesting TV shows on Netflix) transparent to users," notes The Verge. "Users should also be offered a recommender system 'not based on profiling.' In the case of Instagram, for example, this would mean a chronological feed (as it introduced recently)."

The tech giants will also be prohibited from using "dark patterns" -- confusing or deceptive UIs designed to steer users into making certain choices. A detailed list of obligations contained in the DSA can be found in the article.

Meta's campus in Burlingame, California will be home to its first physical retail space where you can check out Quest 2 and its accessories as well as the Ray-Ban Stories sunglasses and the Portal video-calling device. UploadVR reports: The store opens May 9 with interactive demos for "Beat Saber, GOLF+, Real VR Fishing or Supernatural on a large, wall-to-wall curved LED screen that displays what you're seeing in-headset," according to a blog post from the company. "If we did our job right, people should leave and tell their friends, 'You've got to go check out the Meta Store,' Martin Gilliard, Head of Meta Store, is quoted as saying. "We're not selling the metaverse in our store, but hopefully people will come in and walk out knowing a little bit more about how our products will help connect them to it."

The store is said to be 1,550 square feet and also offers the ability to do a test call with the Portal video calling device and try out different styles of the Ray-Ban Stories camera glasses. It sounds like the main attraction here, however, will be the Quest 2-powered mixed reality installation, which promises to give VR players "a 30-second mixed reality clip of your demo experience that's yours to share," with the video wall offering a live view into VR as it is being experienced.

Earlier today, Twitter announced that it has agreed to be acquired by Elon Musk for approximately $44 billion. The announcement led to speculation that former President Donald Trump may return to the social media platform after being permanently banned in January 2021 for his role in the January 6th insurrection. However, according to TechCrunch, "it looks like he's not interested and is instead planning to formally join his own Truth Social platform over the next seven days." From the report: "I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on Truth," Trump told Fox News. "I hope Elon buys Twitter because he'll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on Truth. The bottom line is, no, I am not going back to Twitter." [...] Trump's comments from today come as shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp, which announced a deal in October to acquire Trump Media & Technology Group, fell 9.5% as Twitter officially announced its deal with Musk. It's possible that Truth's shaky start could cause Trump to change his mind about rejoining Twitter down the road.

Trump's media group released its Truth Social iOS app in February, but the app remained unavailable to users for quite some time. Truth is being marketed as an alternative to social media giants like Twitter and Facebook. If Trump does end up posting on Truth regularly this week, it will mark the former president's return to social media following his ban from numerous platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. So far, he's only posted on Truth once.

As for Twitter, Musk says that "free speech" is key to Twitter's future. Twitter says the transaction, which was unanimously approved by the board, will likely close this year following shareholder and regulatory approval and "the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions."

theodp writes: The University of Washington's Strategic Plan for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Access (DEIA) relies on "a set of objective measurements that will enable us to assess our progress." So, what might those look like? Well, for Goal O.3 "have effective pipelines for students to enter the Allen School as Ph.D. students with a focus on increasing diversity," the UW's 5-Year Strategic Plan for DEIA (PDF) specifies these 'Objective Measurements':

1. Measure the percentage of women at the Ph.D. level and, by year 5, evaluate whether the percentage is at least 40%.
2. Measure the percentage of domestic Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native, Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Ph.D students and, by year 5, evaluate whether the percentage is at least 12% (the UW-Seattle average for Ph.D. students).
3. Measure the percentage of Ph.D. students with disabilities (measured based on DRS use) and, by year 5, evaluate whether the percentage is at least 8% (the UW-Seattle average).

But with an Allen School Incoming Ph.D. Class of only 54 students -- of which 63% are International -- that suggests race/ethnicity success for an incoming PhD class could be just one Black student and one Hispanic student, if my UW DEIA math is correct.

Even if it falls short, at least UW attempted to publicly quantify what their overall DEI race/ethnicity goals are, which is more than what Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have done. That the UW felt compelled to break out U.S. and International students separately in an effort to facilitate more meaningful comparisons also suggests another way that the tech giants' self-reported race/ethnicity percentages and EEO-1 raw numbers for their U.S.-based tech workforce (which presumably includes International students and other visa workers) may be misleading, as well as a possible explanation for tech's puzzling diversity trends.

Thoughtworks is a technology consultancy/distributed agile software design company. The principle technologist in its CTO's office warns that managers of IT assets "need to keep up" with the changing economics of open source: Early 2022 has brought with it an unusually high level of commotion in the open-source community, largely focused on the economics of who — and how we — should pay for "free" software. But this isn't just some geeky flame war. What's at stake is critical for vast swaths of the business world....

We know of many open-source enthusiasts who maintain their software personally while leading busy professional lives — the last thing they want is the responsibility of a service-level agreement because someone paid them for their creation. So, is this the end of the road for the open-source dream? Certainly, many of the open-source naysayers will view the recent upheavals as proof of a failed approach. They couldn't be more wrong. What we're seeing today is a direct result of the success of open-source software. That success means there isn't a one-size-fits-all description to define open-source software, nor one economic model for how it can succeed.

For internet giants like Facebook or Netflix, the popularity, or otherwise, of their respective JavaScript library and software tool — React and Chaos Monkey — is beside the point. For such companies, open-source releases are almost a matter of employer branding — a way to show off their engineering chops to potential employees. The likelihood of them altering licensing models to create new revenue streams is small enough that most enterprises need not lose sleep over it. Nonetheless, if these open-source tools form a critical part of your software stack or development process, you might want some form of contingency plan — you're likely to have very little sway over future developments, so understanding your risks helps.

For companies that have built platforms containing open-source software, the risks are more uncertain. This is in line with Thoughtworks' view that all businesses can benefit from a greater awareness of what software is running in their various systems. In such cases, we advise companies to consider the extent to which they're reliant on that piece of software: are there viable alternatives? In extreme circumstances, could you fork the code and maintain it internally?

Once you start looking at crucial parts of your software stack where you're reliant on hobbyists, your choices begin to dwindle. But if Log4J's case has taught us anything, it's this: auditing what goes into the software that runs your business puts you in a better place than being completely caught by surprise.

Writing for the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow reports on Pegasus, "a spyware technology designed by NSO Group, an Israeli firm, which can extract the contents of a phone, giving access to its texts and photographs, or activate its camera and microphone to provide real-time surveillance — exposing, say, confidential meetings." Pegasus is useful for law enforcement seeking criminals, or for authoritarians looking to quash dissent.... In Catalonia, more than sixty phones — owned by Catalan politicians, lawyers, and activists in Spain and across Europe — have been targeted using Pegasus. This is the largest forensically documented cluster of such attacks and infections on record. Among the victims are three members of the European Parliament... Catalan politicians believe that the likely perpetrators of the hacking campaign are Spanish officials, and the Citizen Lab's analysis suggests that the Spanish government has used Pegasus....

In recent years, investigations by the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have revealed the presence of Pegasus on the phones of politicians, activists, and dissidents under repressive regimes. An analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research group at the University of London, has linked Pegasus to three hundred acts of physical violence. It has been used to target members of Rwanda's opposition party and journalists exposing corruption in El Salvador. In Mexico, it appeared on the phones of several people close to the reporter Javier Valdez Cárdenas, who was murdered after investigating drug cartels. Around the time that Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia approved the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime critic, Pegasus was allegedly used to monitor phones belonging to Khashoggi's associates, possibly facilitating the killing, in 2018. (Bin Salman has denied involvement, and NSO said, in a statement, "Our technology was not associated in any way with the heinous murder.") Further reporting through a collaboration of news outlets known as the Pegasus Project has reinforced the links between NSO Group and anti-democratic states.

But there is evidence that Pegasus is being used in at least forty-five countries, and it and similar tools have been purchased by law-enforcement agencies in the United States and across Europe. Cristin Flynn Goodwin, a Microsoft executive who has led the company's efforts to fight spyware, told me, "The big, dirty secret is that governments are buying this stuff — not just authoritarian governments but all types of governments...." "Almost all governments in Europe are using our tools," Shalev Hulio, NSO Group's C.E.O., told me. A former senior Israeli intelligence official added, "NSO has a monopoly in Europe." German, Polish, and Hungarian authorities have admitted to using Pegasus. Belgian law enforcement uses it, too, though it won't admit it.
Calling the spyware industry "largely unregulated and increasingly controversial," the article notes how it's now impacting major western democracies. "The Citizen Lab's researchers concluded that, on July 26 and 27, 2020, Pegasus was used to infect a device connected to the network at 10 Downing Street, the office of Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.... The United States has been both a consumer and a victim of this techÂnology. Although the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. have their own surveillance technology, other government offices, including in the military and in the Department of Justice, have bought spyware from private companies, according to people involved in those transactions."

But are the company's fortunes faltering? The company has been valued at more than a billion dollars. But now it is contending with debt, battling an array of corporate backers, and, according to industry observers, faltering in its long-standing efforts to sell its products to U.S. law enforcement, in part through an American branch, Westbridge Technologies. It also faces numerous lawsuits in many countries, brought by Meta (formerly Facebook), by Apple, and by individuals who have been hacked by NSO....

In November, the [U.S.] Commerce Department added NSO Group, along with several other spyware makers, to a list of entities blocked from purchasing technology from American companies without a license. I was with Hulio in New York the next day. NSO could no longer legally buy Windows operating systems, iPhones, Amazon cloud servers — the kinds of products it uses to run its business and build its spyware.

The world's biggest technology companies could face billions of dollars in fines for breaches of new European Union legislation, details of which are expected to be agreed upon by lawmakers as soon as Friday. From a report: The landmark Digital Services Act is the EU's answer to what it sees as a failure by tech giants to combat illegal content on their platforms. Noncompliance could cost companies as much as 6% of their global annual sales when the rules go into effect as early as 2024.

Failures could be extremely costly. Based on their reported 2021 annual sales, Amazon, for instance, could face a theoretical fine of as much as 26 billion euros ($28 billion) for future noncompliance with the DSA, or Google as much 14 billion euros. Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen said the DSA could represent a "global gold standard" for regulating social media companies. After more than a year of internal wrangling, key rules expected to be announced include:

1. A ban on using sensitive data such as race or religion for targeting ads
2. A ban on targeting any ads to minors
3. A ban on so-called "dark patterns," specifically tactics to push people into consenting to online tracking.

Russia on Thursday expanded an entry ban on U.S. officials to include U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris and 28 other American officials, businesspeople and journalists. From a report: The sanctions list, published by the Russian foreign ministry, included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Deputy Defence Secretary Kathleen Hicks and Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby, among others. "These individuals are denied entry into the Russian Federation indefinitely," the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement.

Brave announced a new feature for its browser on Tuesday: De-AMP, which automatically jumps past any page rendered with Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages framework and instead takes users straight to the original website. The Verge reports: "Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether," Brave said in a blog post. "And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP / Google code from being loaded and executed." Brave framed De-AMP as a privacy feature and didn't mince words about its stance toward Google's version of the web. "In practice, AMP is harmful to users and to the Web at large," Brave's blog post said, before explaining that AMP gives Google even more knowledge of users' browsing habits, confuses users, and can often be slower than normal web pages. And it warned that the next version of AMP -- so far just called AMP 2.0 -- will be even worse.

Brave's stance is a particularly strong one, but the tide has turned hard against AMP over the last couple of years. Google originally created the framework in order to simplify and speed up mobile websites, and AMP is now managed by a group of open-source contributors. It was controversial from the very beginning and smelled to some like Google trying to exert even more control over the web. Over time, more companies and users grew concerned about that control and chafed at the idea that Google would prioritize AMP pages in search results. Plus, the rest of the internet eventually figured out how to make good mobile sites, which made AMP -- and similar projects like Facebook Instant Articles -- less important.

As Facebook/Meta faces rising pressure in west, it is investing in digital infrastructure elsewhere. From a report: When government officials in the southern Nigerian state of Edo set about radically improving poor internet access for its population of 4 million, they didn't have to look far for help. MainOne, a company responsible for laying a vast network of fibre-optic cables across west Africa, was an obvious partner. Another, perhaps less obvious one, was Facebook. A joint agreement was signed to install fibre-optic cables running across the state's capital, Benin City. Since 2019, 400km (250 miles) of cables have been laid in Edo, about a quarter via the partnership between the two companies and the government. "Obviously, Facebook isn't really a digital infrastructure company, but they invested in these cables," said Emmanuel Magnus Eweka, who worked as a senior government official for the Edo government until last September. In recent years, as Facebook has come under rising legislative pressure in the west, the company has increased its focus on Africa, particularly in countries where the regulatory and legislative environment tends to be much looser.

The combination of weak and expensive internet coverage for most of Nigeria's fast-growing population of more than 200 million people has meant that companies hoping to tap into a potential goldmine of new users -- and their data -- have sought to invest in the business of helping those potential users get online in the first place. "To make internet data more affordable, Facebook needs to build infrastructures that are almost free," Eweka said. "In fact, I'd say Facebook actually loses in terms of making money out of those cables. But then they gain it back on the user data that they will generate, and obviously that has huge potential in a country like Nigeria."

Citing an article from The Verge's Alex Heath, Fast Company breaks down "Meta's plan to shape the metaverse by building its own wildly ambitious augmented-reality hardware." From the report: eath's article, "Mark Zuckerberg's Augmented Reality," covers two codenamed products. "Project Nazere" is a high-end pair of AR glasses that don't require a smartphone, with the first version shipping in 2024, followed by upgraded ones in 2026 and 2028. Also due in 2024 is "Hypernova," a more economy-minded take on AR eyewear that does piggyback on a smartphone's connectivity and computing muscle. The piece is full of technical details, such as Nazere's use of custom waveguides and microLED projectors to fuse your view of the real with a digital overlay. Both Nazere and Hypernova will supposedly work with a wrist device that uses differential electromyography to detect electric neurons, allowing for input that feels akin to mind control.

But along with all the specifics in Heath's story, what's also striking is its discussion of how these planned products roll up into Meta's highest-level goals. They are, of course, an extension of Mark Zuckerberg's hopes, dreams, and aspirations: "If the AR glasses and the other futuristic hardware Meta is building eventually catch on, they could cast the company, and by extension Zuckerberg, in a new light. 'Zuck's ego is intertwined with [the glasses],' a former employee who worked on the project tells me. 'He wants it to be an iPhone moment.'"

Everybody's entitled to their own definition of an "iPhone moment." Presumably, it involves a product of truly epoch-shifting impact -- not necessarily the first in its field but an unprecedented blockbuster that defines the category by bringing it to the masses. Something like, well, you know, the iPhone. For a tech CEO such as Zuckerberg, creating an iPhone moment isn't just about selling something enormously successful; it also provides full control over an ecosystem. That lets a company chart its own destiny in a way it can never do if it's building on someone else's platform. Zuckerberg has long been bugged by the fact that Facebook/Meta's products have historically sat atop environments operated by other companies, such as Apple and Google. I know this because he told me so himself...