7-Eleven stores in Denmark shut down today after a cyberattack disrupted stores' payment and checkout systems throughout the country. Bleeping Computer reports: The attack occurred early this morning, August 8th, with the company posting on Facebook that they were likely "exposed to a hacker attack." The translated statement says that the company has closed all the stores in the country while investigating the security incident: ""Unfortunately, we suspect that we have been exposed to a hacker attack today, Monday 8 August 2022. This means that we cannot use checkouts and/or receive payment. We are therefore keeping the stores closed until we know the extent. We naturally hope that we can open the stores again soon." - 7-Eleven DK." At this time, there are no further details about the attack, including whether ransomware was involved, which has become the most common cyberattack causing wide-scale outages.

Only days after being launched to the public, Meta Platforms' new AI chatbot has been claiming that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election, and repeating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. From a report: Chatbots -- artificial intelligence software that learns from interactions with the public -- have a history of taking reactionary turns. In 2016, Microsoft's Tay was taken offline within 48 hours after it started praising Adolf Hitler, amid other racist and misogynist comments it apparently picked up while interacting with Twitter users. Facebook parent company Meta released BlenderBot 3 on Friday to users in the US, who can provide feedback if they receive off-topic or unrealistic answers. A further feature of BlenderBot 3 is its ability to search the internet to talk about different topics.

The company encourages adults to interact with the chatbot with "natural conversations about topics of interest" to allow it to learn to conduct naturalistic discussions on a wide range of subjects. Conversations shared on various social media accounts ranged from the humorous to the offensive. BlenderBot 3 told one user its favorite musical was Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats," and described Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as "too creepy and manipulative" to a reporter from Insider. Other conversations showed the chatbot repeating conspiracy theories.

Communications giant Twilio has confirmed hackers accessed customer data after successfully tricking employees into handing over their corporate login credentials. From a report: The San Francisco-based company, which allows users to build voice and SMS capabilities -- such as two-factor authentication (2FA) -- into applications, said in a blog post published Monday that it became aware that someone gained "unauthorized access" to information related to some Twilio customer accounts on August 4. Twilio has more than 150,000 customers, including Facebook and Uber. According to the company, the as-yet-unidentified threat actor convinced multiple Twilio employees into handing over their credentials, which allowed access to the company's internal systems. The attack used SMS phishing messages that purported to come from Twilio's IT department, suggesting that the employees' password had expired or that their schedule had changed, and advised the target to log in using a spoofed web address that the attacker controls.

If it weren't for Slashdot, Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't be facing a six-hour deposition over alleged involvement in the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, argues long-time Slashdot reader theodp: In 2003, Harvard's student newspaper the Harvard Crimson reported that Zuck's programming skills attracted attention from the likes of Microsoft and others following a 2003 Slashdot post. That post — titled Machine Learning and MP3s — described how "Students at Caltech [freshman Adam D'Angelo, Quora CEO and co-founder] and Harvard [freshman Zuck] developed a system that analyzes playlists and learns people's listening patterns." The playlist-making software, Synapse AI, was Zuck's high school senior project at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Interestingly, in a modded-up comment ("Informative") on the post, Slashdot user Mark Zuckerberg vowed to protect user privacy. "And a note about privacy," promised Zuck. "None of your musical listening data will be available to anyone other than you. We hope to use massive amounts of data to aid in analysis, but your individual data will never be seen by anyone else."

Hey, things change. And Slashdot user SkyIce (apparently D'Angelo) added, "I'm not going to spam people. I promise." .
Zuckerberg was just 18 years old — and Steven Levy's 2020 book Facebook: The Inside Story recounts how all "the Slashdot attention was a boon." Zuckerberg heard from multiple companies interested in the student project, including Microsoft and AOL. Zuckerberg and D'Angelo got an offer approaching a million dollars from one of those suitors. But the payout would be contingent on Zuckerberg and D'Angelo committing to work for that company for three years. They turned it down.
That summer, back in Cambridge, young Mark Zuckerberg "thought it was interesting that I was so excited about Friendster," D'Angelo remembered in the book. Friendster was an earlier social network founded in 2002 (which eventually closed in 2018). D'Angelo remembered that Zuckerberg "wasn't into it as a user, but it was clear to him that there was something there...."

Sociologist Ashley Mears know the secret to making viral videos on Facebook. "It's like a magic trick," one creator explains. Literally.

"Many of the most successful people in the content-creation game on Facebook are magicians," Mears explains in a video. "I think that that's not such a surprise, because magicians are extremely skilled in manipulating people's attention, which is basically what the viral video economy does."

Mears recently visited the "new creative elites," a group of creators regularly getting 100 million to 200 million views, which includes former jazz singer Anna Rothfuss and her magician boyfriend Justin Flom: Rothfuss and Flom are among the 180 video-makers (or "creators" in the industry's jargon) working with a Las Vegas magician called Rick Lax. They produce short videos timed to last the precise number of seconds that Facebook requires a clip to run to be eligible for an ad (this used to be three minutes but recently went down to one). Though the clips usually look like authentic user-generated material, all are scripted. Most fall into genres: diy, crafts, hazards, adultery and proposals. Lax manages his network like a cross between a Hollywood agent and a schoolteacher. He takes a slice of the ad revenue that creators earn. In exchange, he gives them online tutorials about how to make viral content: everything from how to hold the camera to which metrics matter to Facebook. He releases new instructions every time the algorithm changes substantially, and offers feedback on people's videos. He also posts his creators' videos on his own Facebook page, which has 14m followers....

A friend was making videos for Rick Lax, and invited Rothfuss to join in 2019. A year later she bought her first mansion. Entering the viral-content game involves a certain surrendering of artistic aspirations, but Rothfuss says she doesn't care. "I do not want to be famous," she says. "I love being low-key and flying under the radar, and just getting rich...."

Lax realised that appetite for these videos was insatiable: the only obstacle to earning more money was how many clips he could make in a day.... Lax wouldn't go into details of his profit-sharing arrangement but his creators are clearly flourishing. Many told me they felt like they were taking part in a 21st-century gold rush. "This doesn't happen to that many people," says Amy Boiss, a one-time Uber driver whose magician boyfriend introduced her to Lax's network. "To make more money than neurosurgeons...." Lax and his friends got rich without anyone knowing who they are....

It's perhaps no coincidence that the two most-viewed Facebook creators in 2021, Lax and Julius Dein, both started out as magicians (as did many of their affiliates). Their videos aren't magic performances as such, but they're informed by the art of magic. "Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception," wrote a former Google employee (and amateur magician) in an essay published on Medium in 2017, "How technology hijacks your mind". Social-media companies, wrote the author, "influence what people do without them even realising it", just as magicians do: "Once you know how to push people's buttons you can play them like a piano."
Ironically, the creators end up driven by "the same dopamine rush they were exploiting in us," the article points out. "If you're looking at the data, you can actually see your earnings go up as people watch your work: making viral videos can be just as addictive as watching them."

One of the magicians in Lax's network even says point-blank that "It feels like a drug."

After a revelation in May that DuckDuckGo's (DDG) privacy-focused web browser allows Microsoft tracking scripts on third-party websites, the company now says it will start blocking those too. From a report: DuckDuckGo's browser had third-party tracker loading protection by default that already blocked scripts embedded on websites from Facebook, Google, and others, but until now Microsoft's scripts from the Bing and LinkedIn domains (but not its third-party cookies) had a pass.

A security researcher named Zach Edwards pointed out the exclusion that he apparently uncovered while auditing the browser's privacy claims, and noted it is especially curious because Microsoft is the partner that delivers ads in DDG's search engine (while promising not to use that data to create a monitored profile of users to target ads, instead relying on context to decide which ones it should show). DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg said at the time that the reason for it was a search syndication agreement with Microsoft, and that more updates on third-party tracker preventions were coming. A backlash ensued, with some seizing on DuckDuckGo's own words that "tracking is tracking," a phrase the company used against Google's cookie-replacing "privacy sandbox" ad technology. Now Weinberg writes in a blog post, "I've heard from a number of users and understand that we didn't meet their expectations around one of our browser's web tracking protections." DuckDuckGo is vowing to be more transparent about what trackers its browser and extensions are protecting users from, making its tracker blocklists available and offering users more information on how its tracking protections with a new help page.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo, written by Jody Serrano: In the early aughts, my wheezing dialup connection often operated as if it were perpetually out of breath. Thus, unlike my childhood friends, it was near to impossible for me to watch videos, TV shows, or listen to music. Far from feeling limited, I felt like I was lucky, for I had access to an encyclopedia of lovingly curated pages about anything I wanted to know -- which in those days was anime -- the majority of which was conveniently located on GeoCities. For all the zoomers scrunching up their brows, here's a primer. Back in the 1990s, before the birth of modern web hosting household names like GoDaddy and WP Engine, it wasn't exactly easy or cheap to publish a personal website. This all changed when GeoCities came on the scene in 1994.

The company gave anyone their own little space of the web if they wanted it, providing users with roughly 2 MB of space for free to create a website on any topic they wished. Millions took GeoCities up on its offer, creating their own homemade websites with web counters, flashing text, floating banners, auto-playing sound files, and Comic Sans. Unlike today's Wild Wild Internet, websites on GeoCities were organized into virtual neighborhoods, or communities, built around themes. "HotSprings" was dedicated to health and fitness, while "Area 51" was for sci-fi and fantasy nerds. There was a bottom-up focus on users and the content they created, a mirror of what the public internet was like in its infancy. Overall, at least 38 million webpages were built on GeoCities. At one point, it was the third most-visited domain online. Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.6 billion. The company lived on for a decade more until Yahoo shut it down in 2009, deleting millions of sites.

Nearly two decades have passed since GeoCities, founded by David Bohnett, made its debut, and there is no doubt that the internet is a very different place than it was then. No longer filled with webpages on random subjects made by passionate folks, it now feels like we live in a cyberspace dominated by skyscrapers -- named Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and so on -- instead of neighborhoods. [...] We can, however, ask GeoCities' founder what he thinks of the internet of today, subsumed by social media networks, hate speech, and more corporate than ever. Bohnett now focuses on funding entrepreneurs through Baroda Ventures, an early-stage tech fund he founded, and on philanthropy with the David Bohnett Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to social justice and social activism that he chairs. Right off the bat, Bohnett says something that strikes me. It may, in fact, be the sentence that summarizes the key distinction between the internet of the '90s-early 2000s and the internet we have today. "GeoCities was not about self-promotion," Bohnett told Gizmodo in an interview. "It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge." When asked to share his thoughts on the internet of today, Bohnett said: "... The heart of GeoCities was sharing your knowledge and passions about subjects with other people. It really wasn't about what you had to eat and where you've traveled. [...] It wasn't anything about your face." He added: "So, what has surprised me is how far away we've gotten from that original intent and how difficult it is [now]. It's so fractured these days for people to find individual communities. [...] I've been surprised at sort of the evolution away from self-generated content and more toward centralized programing and more toward sort of the self-promotion that we've seen on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok."

Bohnett went on to say that he thinks it's important to remember that "the pace of innovation on the internet continues to accelerate, meaning we're not near done. In the early days when you had dial up and it was the desktop, how could you possibly envision an Uber?"

"We're still in that trajectory where there's going to be various technologies and ways of communicating with each other, [as well as] wearable devices, blockchain technology, virtual reality, that will be as astounding as Uber seemed in the early days of GeoCities," added Bohnett. "I'm very, very excited about the future, which is why I continue to invest in early-stage startups because as I say, the pace of innovation accelerates and builds on top of itself. It's so exciting to see where we might go."

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that the company is beginning its international expansion of NFT support on Instagram. The expansion follows the social network's initial NFT test launch in May. With this expansion, users and businesses in more than 100 countries in Africa, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and the Americas will now be able to share their NFTs on Instagram. Prior to the expansion, the support was only available to select creators in the United States. From a report: The company also announced today that Coinbase Wallet and Dapper Wallet are now accepted as a third-party wallet compatible for use. Instagram is also expanding its supported blockchains to include Flow. Instagram's NFT functionality allows users to connect a digital wallet, share NFTs and automatically tag both a creator and collector for attribution. You can share NFTs in your main Instagram Feed, Stories or in messages. Once you post a digital collectible, it will have a shimmer effect and can display public information, such as a description of the NFT. In order to post a digital collectible on Instagram, you need to connect your digital wallet to Instagram. As of today, Instagram supports connections with third-party wallets including Rainbow, MetaMask, Trust Wallet and Coinbase Wallet, with Dapper Wallet coming soon. Supported blockchains include Ethereum, Polygon and Flow. The social network notes that there are no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on Instagram.

Children who grow up in low-income households but who make friends that come from higher-income homes are more likely to have higher salaries in adulthood than those who have fewer such friends. From a report: "There's been a lot of speculation... that the individual's access to social capital, their social networks and the community they live in might matter a lot for a child's chance to rise out of poverty," says Raj Chetty at Harvard University. To find out if that holds up, he and his colleagues analysed anonymised Facebook data belonging to 72.2 million people in the US between the ages of 25 and 44, accounting for 84 per cent of the age group's US population. It is relatively nationally representative of that age group, he says.

The team used a machine-learning algorithm to determine each person's socio-economic status (SES), combining data such as the median income of people who live in the same region, the person's age and sex and the value of their phone model as a proxy for individual income. The median household income was found to be close to $58,000. The researchers then split the individuals into two groups: those who were below the median SES and those who were above. If people made friends randomly, you would expect half of each person's friends to be in each income group. But instead, for people below the median SES, only 38 per cent of their friends were above the median SES. Meanwhile, 70.6 per cent of the friends of people above the median SES were also a part of the same group.

Facebook's parent company Meta and major US hospitals violated medical privacy laws with a tracking tool that sends health information to Facebook, two proposed class-action lawsuits allege. From a report: The lawsuits, filed in the Northern District of California in June and July, focus on the Meta Pixel tracking tool. The tool can be installed on websites to provide analytics on Facebook and Instagram ads. It also collects information about how people click around and input information into those websites.

An investigation by The Markup in early June found that 33 of the top 100 hospitals in the United States use the Meta Pixel on their websites. At seven hospitals, it was installed on password-protected patient portals. The investigation found that the tool was sending information about patient health conditions, doctor appointments, and medication allergies to Facebook.

Meta publicly released information on 21 billion Facebook friendships as part of a research project looking at economic inequality in the United States, the company announced today. Along with new insights into the intersection of money and friendships in America, the partnership between Meta and the researchers gives us another look at who Facebook is willing to share data with -- and why. The Verge reports: The research team wanted to understand why people in some places in the US were more likely to move between economic brackets than in others. Using the information from Meta, along with other data, a research team built a dataset for a pair of studies on economic mobility, published Monday in the journal Nature. One study found that people who grow up in areas where there are more friendships between high- and low-income people are more likely to move out of poverty and up the economic ladder. "Growing up in a community connected across class lines improves kids' outcomes and gives them a better shot at rising out of poverty," Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist and lead researcher on the study, told The New York Times.

Many places, though, don't allow for much interaction between high- and low-income people, the second of the two studies found. And even when a neighborhood does allow for that kind of interaction, people are still more likely to befriend people in similar economic brackets. [...] [T]he full dataset, which covers 21 billion Facebook friendships, is available through Facebook's Data for Good program. People can search the public-facing website and see the economic connectedness of various communities, including their own. Researchers can download the data for additional studies. [...] The new studies offer valuable insight into economic mobility in the US, and the data could help researchers understand how people in the US build relationships.

Engadget writes that "After Meta's revenue shrank for the first time in its history, the company has reportedly told publishers it will no longer pay for content to run in Facebook's News Tab, according to Axios."

Axios notes it's the end of three-year deals Facebook brokers in 2019 with news publishers. At the time, the company was ramping up its investment in news and hired journalists to help direct publisher traffic to its new tab for news. The deals were worth roughly $105 million in the U.S., sources told Axios. In addition to that, the company spent around $90 million on news videos for the company's video tab called "Watch."

"A lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the U.S. Most people do not come to Facebook for news, and as a business it doesn't make sense to over-invest in areas that don't align with user preferences," a Facebook spokesperson told Axios.

"Ten years on from discovery, there's still a lot left to learn about the Higgs boson!" tweeted a researcher anticipating their experiment on the Large Hadron Collider.

But on Facebook, there's posts calling CERN "a demonic/Evil machine that opens up portals to other dimensions/Hell/other spiritual worlds" and "brings in demons wicked spirits/High Evil Principalities." And USA Today reports that similar posts making that same claim "have amassed hundreds of interactions on Facebook and Twitter." (Their article then goes on to assure readers that "the claim is baseless.")

In fact, USA Today's "Fact Check" feature spent some time investigating the claims of a demonic machine opening portals to hell, and after exhaustive research can report that at this time "There is no evidence scientists at CERN are engaged in anything other than scientific-related activities." Physics experts told USA TODAY scientists use the Large Hadron Collider to collide particles at very high energies to study matter. There is no truth to the claim that scientists at CERN are communicating with demonic entities and using the collider to open up a portal to hell, Dejan Stojkovic, a physics professor at the University at Buffalo, told USA TODAY in an email.
The physics behind his explanation is interesting: "To create a black hole or a wormhole, even microscopic ones, with our current technology, in the context of our standard theories of gravity, we need an accelerator as big as the whole universe," Stojkovic said. "So there is no chance whatsoever to create such a portal at the [Large Hadron Collider]."

"Since these are previously unexplored energies in a controlled environment, we might expect production of some new elementary particles that we did not know if they existed," Stojkovic said. "However, these are microscopic particles, so there is no chance such a portal would open."
Facebook has now attached a warning to its user's post about a demonic machine opening up portals to hell, notifying users that the post contains "False information." (It adds that this assertion has been "checked by independent fact-checkers," linking back to USA Today's article for support.)

USA Today ends its analysis with a definitive summation: Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that scientists at CERN are communicating with demonic entities and opening a portal to hell. There is no evidence scientists at CERN are engaged in anything other than scientific-related activities. The collider cannot open up portals to other dimensions. Experts said scientists use the machine to collide particles at very high energies to study matter....

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Iamthecheese for sharing the story!

Meta Platforms, grappling with its first-ever quarterly sales slump, now has another problem: Jobs in the metaverse are disappearing. From a report: New monthly job postings across all industries with "metaverse" in the title declined 81% between April and June, according to workplace researcher Revelio Labs, after surging in the months following Facebook's rebranding last fall. The dropoff coincides with a broader slowdown across the tech sector, which has prompted layoffs and hiring freezes, leaving workers from the Bay Area to Bangalore increasingly rattled. Job postings in tech hubs like San Francisco and Austin, Texas, dropped 8.4% in the past four weeks, according to job site Indeed.

Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg's big bet on virtual reality and other nascent, immersive technologies encouraged companies of all stripes to look for experts in those fields, which may have created "short-lived hype from the demand side," Revelio Labs economist Jin Yan said. Now, as employers recalibrate their hiring needs and labor budgets amid growing concerns of a recession, that hype has come face to face with a sobering, and fully non-virtual, reality.

Kenya's national cohesion watchdog threatened to suspend Facebook from the country Friday if it doesn't mitigate hate speech ahead of the country's general elections next month. From a report: The regulator has given the company one week to remediate the problem, which included Facebook's approval of ads advocating for ethnic cleansing. Human rights organizations and the Facebook whistleblower are calling on Facebook to immediately suspend all advertising in Kenya and take other emergency steps. The National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), a Kenyan agency founded to mitigate ethnic violence and promote national healing in the wake of the 2007-08 post-election crisis, told reporters on Friday that Facebook was "in violation of the laws of our country."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Instagram will walk back some recent changes to the product following a week of mounting criticism, the company said today. A test version of the app that opened to full-screen photos and videos will be phased out over the next one to two weeks, and Instagram will also reduce the number of recommended posts in the app as it works to improve its algorithms. "I'm glad we took a risk -- if we're not failing every once in a while, we're not thinking big enough or bold enough," Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said in an interview. "But we definitely need to take a big step back and regroup. [When] we've learned a lot, then we come back with some sort of new idea or iteration. So we're going to work through that."

The changes come amid growing user frustration over a series of changes to Instagram designed to help it better compete with TikTok and navigate the broader shift in user behavior away from posting static photos toward watching more video. Redesigns often incur the wrath of users who are hostile to change, but in this case the high-profile dissatisfaction was backed up by Instagram's own internal data, Mosseri said. The trend toward users watching more video is real, and pre-dated the rise of TikTok, he said. But it's clear that people actually do dislike Instagram's design changes. "For the new feed designs, people are frustrated and the usage data isn't great," he said. "So there I think that we need to take a big step back, regroup, and figure out how we want to move forward."

The company also plans to show users fewer recommendations. On Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said [on an earnings call (PDF)] that recommended posts and accounts in feeds currently account for about 15 percent of what you see when you browse Facebook, and an even higher percentage on Instagram. By the end of 2023, that figure will be around 30 percent, Zuckerberg said. But Instagram will temporarily reduce the amount of recommended posts and accounts as it works to improve its personalization tools. (Mosseri wouldn't say by how much, exactly.) "When you discover something in your field that you didn't follow before, there should be a high bar -- it should just be great," Mosseri said. "You should be delighted to see it. And I don't think that's happening enough right now. So I think we need to take a step back, in terms of the percentage of feed that are recommendations, get better at ranking and recommendations, and then -- if and when we do -- we can start to grow again." ("I'm confident we will," he added.) Mosseri made clear that the retreat Instagram announced today is not permanent.

Instagram's head defended the app against a user backlash, after the social network launched a series of changes intended to make it more like its arch-rival TikTok. The Guardian reports: The changes, which include an extremely algorithmic main feed, a push for the service's TikTok-style "reels" videos, and heavy promotion of the TikTok-style "remix" feature, have resulted in users struggling to find content from friends and family, once the bread and butter of the social network. "We're hearing a lot of concerns from all of you," Adam Mosseri said in a video posted to Twitter. "I'm hearing a lot of concerns about photos, and how we're shifting to video. We're going to continue to support photos, but I need to be honest: more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time. We're going to have to lean in to that shift while continuing to support photos."

The Instagram boss also defended the platform's new "recommendations" feature, which puts content from people users do not follow on to their feed. "The idea is to help you discover new and interesting things on Instagram that you might not even know exist," he said. "You can snooze all recommendations for up to a month, but we're going to try and get better at recommendations because we think it's one of the best ways to help creators reach a new audience and grow their following. He added: "We're going to need to evolve, because the world is changing quickly and we're going to need to change with it."

Instagram's makeover is widely seen as a response to TikTok's continued growth, in particular among younger American users. [...] By boosting algorithmic recommendations, allowing users to "remix" posts (akin to TikTok's "Duet" feature), and promoting full-screen vertical video above photos, Instagram is attempting to turn its main app experience into something similar to that of the Chinese-owned upstart. In a widely shared story, Kardashian clan member and social media star, Kylie Jenner, called on the service to "make Instagram Instagram again." She added: "Stop trying to be TikTok, I just want to see cute photos of my friends."

UPDATE: Instagram Is Walking Back Its Changes For Now

Facebook parent company Meta has just reported its earnings for the second quarter of 2022, and it was another quarter of shrinking profits. Engadget reports: Total revenue of $28.8 billion was only down one percent compared to Q2 one year ago, but net income dropped 36 percent to $6.7 billion. Making almost $7 billion in profit is not a bad quarter for anyone, but the size of the decline compared to a year ago is pretty significant. And, according to the Wall Street Journal, this is the first-ever drop in revenue for Meta / Facebook -- so even though we're only talking one percent, it's still noteworthy.

Revenue from advertising and Meta's "family of apps" was essentially flat year-over-year, and Reality Labs (home to hardware like the Meta Quest and other metaverse-related initiatives) actually grew 48 percent year-over-year to $452 million. But Reality Labs accounted for a $2.8 billion loss this quarter, a 15 percent larger loss than Q2 one year ago. At this rate, it seems likely that Reality Labs will lose Meta more than the $10 billion it cost the company in 2021. Indeed, the company said it expects Reality Labs revenue to be lower in the third quarter. [...] In June, Meta said that it had 2.88 billion daily active users in its family of apps (which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) and 3.65 billion monthly active users, both of which are up four percent compared to a year ago. Facebook-specific growth was smaller, though -- average daily and monthly users only increased three percent and one percent, respectively. Further reading: FTC Files To Block Meta's Virtual Reality Deal

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within, limiting the company's push into the so-called metaverse and signaling a shift in how the agency is approaching tech deals. From a report: The antitrust lawsuit is the first to be filed under Lina Khan, the commission's chair and a leading progressive critic of corporate concentration, against one of the tech giants. Ms. Khan has argued that regulators must stop violations of competition and consumer protection laws when it comes to the bleeding edge of technology, including virtual and augmented reality, and not just in areas of business where companies have already become behemoths. "Meta could have chosen to try to compete," the F.T.C. said in its lawsuit. "Instead, it chose to buy" a top company in what the government called a 'vitally important' category.

Mark Zuckerberg believes that Apple and his company are in a "very deep, philosophical competition" to build the metaverse, suggesting the two tech giants are ready to butt heads in selling hardware for augmented and virtual reality. The Verge reports: The Meta CEO told employees earlier this month that they were competing with Apple to determine "what direction the internet should go in," according to a recording of his comments during an internal all-hands meeting obtained by The Verge. He said that Meta would position itself as the more open, cheaper alternative to Apple, which is expected to announce its first AR headset as soon as later this year. "This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience," Zuckerberg said of the brooding rivalry. "And we believe that there is a lot to be done in specialization across different companies, and [that] will allow a much larger ecosystem to exist."

Since rebranding Facebook's company name to Meta, Zuckerberg has been pushing for the concept of interoperability for the metaverse, or what he sees as the next major chapter of computing after mobile phones. Meta recently helped stand up the Metaverse Open Standards Group with Microsoft, Epic Games, and others. The idea is to spur the creation of open protocols that will let people easily move through future immersive, 3D worlds with their virtual goods. Apple is absent from the group, which Zuckerberg called out as not surprising in his comments to employees. He explained how Apple's approach of building hardware and software it tightly controls had worked well with the iPhone, but that for the metaverse, "it's not really clear upfront whether an open or closed ecosystem is going to be better."

[...] If VR and AR do take off like Zuckerberg hopes, it seems he wants to position Meta as the Android to Apple's iOS. There is a parallel to draw already: Meta's Quest headset already allows the side loading of apps that are not approved by Meta's VR app store, similar to how Google's Android allows for sideloading. And even though it just increased the price of the Quest by $100, Meta's hardware is still mostly sold at a loss or breakeven. [...] Zuckerberg's remarks suggest that even as he tries to invent his way out of being under Apple's thumb on mobile, the two tech giants are going to be battling for years to come.