If those devices were invented in 2020 you can be certain they would all be "platforms" with monthly subscriptions. They would also have nonstop rabid defenders on social media.
The Razer accounts are in no way mandatory. They just have an app that auto-updates drivers (and probably does a lot of data mining) but you don't need to use it to use the device. It is a funny comment though, I laughed when I read it.
My Razer mouse is basically broken (it's not that the sensitivity is too high, it's just...completely off) until you install and log in with their app. Only after you log in is the mouse movement fixed.
I would never buy another Razer product, specifically because of this.
I have Razer Synapse installed right now, I am not logged into the service but I am still able to make configurations. Don't know what issue you're having. I would feel the same way if this was an issue though
Oh wow, this was only a few months before I bought my hardware. I've been using a Naga since the first model and had it replaced in 2014. I guess I just got a bit lucky on my timing. The old hardware was really bad at trying to force Synapse on you too, used to even appear during Window 10 upgrades.
It would be great if they used the additional on board macro profiles as an 'out of the box' way of adjusting the mouse without software. You nerd the software to change mouse button 4/5 to native actions, otherwise it's just dpi control.
I don't know about Razer recently, but I have a 13 button Logitech mouse (G700s) and it would be essentially useless without the Logitech software to configure it. I assume Razer mice are the same, you could technically use them without Synapse, but if you're doing that you may as well have bought a Microsoft Intellimouse instead.
Personal mouse experience, I had two Razers that died right outside warranty, while my Logitech is at >6 years. Those were before their driver shenanigans, but the drivers aren't even the main reason I wouldn't switch back.
I recommend anyone with Synapse use your firewall to block all of their services from interacting with the Internet. I noticed Synapse was consuming a lot of CPU/network. I'm definitely never going to buy a Razer mouse again, I'll probably get a Zowie.
I'm not sure if this is true for the G700s, but many other Logitech mice store the configuration on the device itself, which lets you configure it once and then get rid of the software or use it on computers or OSes where you've never installed the software. This is true for my G502.
It's true for a single configuration, but not if you want to bind different keys per program with the "Automatic Game Detection" mode.
I mainly use one profile for games and set any keybinds I need in each one, but I've used automatic game detection for other software like repurposing the DPI adjustment buttons for quick shortcuts to blender's popup radial menus.
Ah, gotcha. The G502 stores something like 5 modes and has a mode switcher button on the mouse, but I could see the convenience of wanting automatic switching per program.
I plugged my G700s into a Windows machine with the Logitech bloatware suite installed, programmed it, and I've been using it on a Mac for years since then without any trouble
I have a razer deathadder chroma with a kvm switch on mac/windows/linux systems. I do not have razer app installed on any of the three systems and the mouse works fine (including the forward/back side buttons and pressable scroll (so 5 buttons total)).
No shit. I can't configure the lights on my former razer mouse without logging in.
Must be why I'm using a Steelseries now.
Edit: Apparently they gave up on that idiotic requirement. Sorry Razer, too late. Not touching your products ever again.
Edit 2: And since we're actually talking about Oculus, for me it died when they sold to Facebook. You needed to be pretty naive to think it won't come down to this in the long run.
I've used a Razer mouse for ages solely on a Linux machine. Never made an account. Only used Windows initially to set my preferred LED lighting option via their crappy app.
> Giving people a single way to log into Oculus — using their Facebook account and password — will make it easier to find, connect, and play with friends in VR.
Ugh. I guess Facebook is making a play to become the Steam/XBox Live of VR. Why can't we just have gaming peripherals anymore without some kind of platform tie-in?
Because the companies make a large amount of money on the platform. Look at Apple/Google/MS/Sony/Nintendo charging for access to the platform - either explicitly for online play, by taking a cut of sales on the platform, or in the case of the console makers - both.
As someone who prefers to play games alone, it's frustrating. The first five minutes after installing Steam is a constantly stream of "stfu and stop shoving game release/update/sale announcements in my face", "gtfo with the popup messages that a friend is playing a game", "wtf? why are you auto-logging me into the messenger", "no, I don't consent to you building a hardware inventory of my machine and using it for internal stats", and "jfc, please just leave me alone and let me play some games".
It's almost enough to make me buy a shack in Montana and support the post office.
Some time ago I worked on a tool [1] to do just that, unsure if it would still work. I also got lost between feature development and fixes in my git branches at the time, and never had time to finish this. Looks like upstream [2] became active again and merged some of my improvements, unsure if it works with the trove. I was also just made aware of this new project, dedicated to that issue [3]. I'd advise someone to start looking at the last one.
I don't usually do this, but I don't think it is against the TOS, so here is my HB referral link [4] Here's also a 20% discount on the humble store for 30 days for one lucky person who isn't a subscriber [5]
At least on Mac, Steam doesn't stick around when you close it. I never understood the PC love for when you close apps have them simply stay resident around in the lower right taskbar. Opening is an active choice.
Having to wait for Steam to open and log you in every time you want to launch a game sucks, plus keeping it open in the background lets you keep games up-to-date, lets you use the chatroom features, and some other stuff.
The good thing about Steam, which makes it good software in my opinion, is that you can easily customize it and turn features off, and nothing really gets forced down your throat. It's almost like Valve feels they actually have to make an effort to keep you as a customer. Compare that to anything from the tech giants.
> The good thing about Steam, which makes it good software in my opinion, is that you can easily customize it and turn features off, and nothing really gets forced down your throat. It's almost like Valve feels they actually have to make an effort to keep you as a customer. Compare that to anything from the tech giants.
If there's a way to turn off most of the recent UI updates I'd love to know how.
Which UI updates are objectionable to you? Here's a dump of the changes I make on my system when installing Steam. It's not all of them, just the most generally useful.
To keep Steam from starting when you log in, select "Steam" from the menu bar and then choose "Settings". Under "Interface", untick "Run Steam when my computer starts". While you're in here, uncheck "Notify me about additions or changes to my games, new releases, and upcoming releases" if you want Steam to not tell you about those. You can use "Set Taskbar Preferences" to select what options appear in the right click menu from the taskbar icon.
I run Steam in Small Mode, which makes it look like the old, old version of Steam before they introduced the full screen library. To do this, go to "Steam"->"Settings" and bring up the "Interface" group. Set "Select which Steam window appears when the program starts, and when you double click the Notification Tray icon" to "Library". Click okay and then select "View"->"Small Mode" to show the classic small Steam interface. To the right of the search box at the top of the screen is a selector where you can toggle what is shown - I set this to "Installed" so only installed games are shown. See here[0] for an example. This UI will revert if you uninstall a game - just go to "View"->"Small Mode" to set it again. If you set it before closing Steam then the next time you open Steam it will start in this mode.
To avoid being logged into the Friends system by default, open the "Friends" menu from the menu bar and choose "View Friends". Then click the cog in the upper right hand corner of the window that appears - this brings up the settings window. Set "Sign in to friends when Steam Client starts" to off. There are a bunch of notification settings in here - set them as you will.
To make the Steam store not suck (bandwidth), go to the "Library" tab in "Steam"->"Settings" and set "Low Bandwidth Mode", "Low Performance Mode", and "Disable Community Content".
To turn off Broadcasting, "Steam"->"Settings", "Broadcasting" group and set "Privacy setting" to "Broadcasting Disabled".
You can tell Steam to create desktop shortcuts or Start menu shortcuts if you want to not have to open Steam manually to play a game. When installing a game, tick the "Create desktop shortcut" or "Create start menu shortcut" when installing and then you can start the game (and Steam with it) by double clicking that icon. There is no option to automatically quit Steam after a game exits (because of course there isn't - "wHy WoUlD aNyBoDy WaNt To ClOsE sTeAm" the fanboys go). For installed games, you can right click and choose "Create Desktop Shortcut" to get a desktop shortcut for your game. You can use the "steam://" URL generated anywhere Windows accepts URLs to launch steam games.
Some people like auto-updates. Some people hate that they suck bandwidth, especially for single player games. Unfortunately, there is no option in not auto-update the game - you can chose "Always keep this game up to date", "Only update this game when I launch it", or "High Priority - Always auto-update this game before others" in the game properties. Setting this to "Only update this game when I launch it" will try to perform updates when you start a game - if you have this set and you have the downloads set to not download while in game, you should be able to force launch a game without updates and download will not start.
Set up "Offline Mode" now. If Steam is down and you haven't used "Offline Mode" recently then you won't be able to play your games with Steam offline. Ch...
If you pick "exit" it exits. If you click the close button, it just closes the window but keeps running. You can also set in settings not to run on system startup. Mac has the same behavior.
This is why I love the Switch compared to all the other modern consoles. When I try to use a PS4 or an Xbox it feels like I'm fighting to be able to play - 10's of GB's of updates that take hours to "copy" after download, slow system updates, games that need to install for an hour after you put in the disc, etc. etc.
The Switch is the first console I've used in years where it seems like the maker of the console actually wants me to play games.
Don't sell CODEX/PLAZA short - there are Steamworks and CreamAPI multiplayer fixes shipped sometimes, and sometimes Fitgirl will add them in with the repack.
(Anybody reading this - there are publicly available NFO files and posts from Fitgirl that indicate what is included in a release/repack. I would never advocate violating copyright, and I certainly do not do so in a personal capacity.)
Hardware is difficult and expensive to make, and consumers are very price-sensitive.
In a world where everyone has a service subscription or a data hose to subsidize their hardware (see: most phones, game consoles, kitchen appliances, "smart assistants"), it's very difficult to be competitive just making hardware.
Given that the Oculus Quest is effectively a flagship phone with a strap attached to it at ~1/10 the sales volume of a flagship phone (rough figures: [0] [1]), it would be very difficult to even pay engineering expenses without a secondary income stream enabled by a) real-identity advertisement targeting/data sucking and b) ecosystem lock-in.
Doing anything other than logging in with your Facebook account has been crippled; therefore, logging in with your Facebook account is easier.
It's just like "Download our app" to get a service the company can easily provide through a Web page, but refuse to. It's not there to benefit you. It's there to benefit the company.
Because this is how the industry works now. Investors want to see the consistent revenue of XaaS platforms, so XaaS platforms are what you get -- and if you want hardware, it will be platform-tied.
More like the walled garden Apple App Store approach. Except this time it's a company with a bad track record of tracking you.
Steam is already the Steam of VR, btw. They have the flagship title (Alyx) and Oculus exclusives aren't necessarily compelling enough to make it a deal breaker.
They just want to squeeze as much data as they can out of you. The ultimate goal is to stand as a proxy between you and the real world. I'm not saying this is what they are trying to build with AR and VR, but that's not too far fetched either.
Just imagine eye tracking tech in VR headsets. What a trove of data for advertisers! Did the user see may ad? For how long? Etc.
I hadn't imagined that before writing this, but they could do the exact same thing in the real world with AR. Did you spend some time looking at that car? You are interested in cars. Spending some time in the garden? Watching birds? Running? Etc. What's better than an always-on, always-ouside device which you use as a proxy to see things, and request information? MITM TLS (which Google technically does with Chrome) becomes useless if you just have access to the eyes.
I worded that rather provocatively, but Google chrome is the man in the middle between you and the servers. Since it manages TLS connections, it could access everything if it wanted to. I am not sure it does send detailed telemetry on visited pages and contents to Google, but that wouldn't surprise me (and your sibling comment hints at that).
I wondered if there was some correlation between Google pushing for HTTPS and their introduction of chrome, but I guess that's unrelated, as they didn't have this capability before (except for users of their toolbar).
Oculus was always trying to do this. When they first launched they did the same purchased exclusives stuff epic has done. Their software isn't compatible with other platforms except through unsupported hacks and they have no plans of changing that.
This was the whole oculus spirit since the beginning.
Windows Mixed Reality headsets are the best in this regard. Still locked to Windows but at least that's not a social platform. I really wish there was a version of it with better quality controller tracking, it's fairly good, but not on par with Oculus or Valve controller tracking.
So if I don't have a Facebook account and I buy an Oculus Quest after October, does this mean I may have to submit a copy of my driver's license just to set up a piece of consumer electronics?
I am but I am also aware that a functioning democracy requires that the people trust the polls. And one piece of that is verifying that those who vote are who they say they are (and are citizens of the country they are voting in).
So you're in favor of zero cost licenses and zero cost delivery of said licenses. If your means of identification or authorization to vote aren't free, then you're advocating for a pool tax, which is illegal.
I'm not sure if you realize that there's only a handful of confirmed cases of voter fraud in the US in decades. The current system, based upon an address registration and someone confirming their information at the polling place, has achieved this result.
A further sacrifice of the needs of the people in favor of the whims of our corporate overlords? You don't even really need to vote; Facebook already knows you want to vote for Mark.
It's almost as though Facebook understands how important it is to verify you are who you say you are. A simple verification to certify that those in their system are authentic.
Facebook has a policy where they can arbitrarily ban you for failing to "prove your identity" if they believe your account does not use "the name you go by in real life." One of the ways they ask you to prove your identity is to send in a license.
Unsurprisingly, this ends up hurting all sorts of people who do not use their legal names online: people who have just chosen other names, people who want to avoid being targeted or stalked, trans people, etc. They've updated this policy to allow for some of these situations (https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/facebook-real-names-1.336...) but folks still get banned for failing to comply.
You might not be able to use it even then. I deleted, not suspended, my Facebook account years ago and recently tried to create a new one because there was a Facebook group I needed access to. Created the account and a few minutes later it was suspended with no mention as to why and I was required to submit a photo of my driver's license to appeal the suspension. I did so and ended up waiting weeks before discovering that the account was now permanently suspended with no ability to appeal. No reason given. I literally did nothing between creating the account and it being suspended so I couldn't have violated any policies.
If they suspect you aren't who you are then yeah. Otherwise generally a phone number and email are enough. That's the price for Facebook, but it's good to be informed about what you're sacrificing.
Exactly. I deleted my Facebook account years ago. I have an oculus account. Really disappointing though, it means I either have to link that to my girlfriend’s account or sell the oculus within two years.
Realistically I’ll probably sell the quest, stick to buying steam games from now on, and buy a headset from a different company as soon as they get a wireless headset.
I tried to use an old backup account a while back and got hit with a demand that I send them a copy of my id to prove my identity. I won't do that though.
... and the personal data on how much time you spend in which game, whether those are day times or night, whether it's regualr or irregular etc. from which different information on your situation an be derived.
If it's connected to your desktop, it can also use all the dark patterns Facebook knows to tie it to your other activities ...
Put in a data information request and see what they do actually know about you.
May well be insightful. Friends who have your email and phone number in a contact entry who also have FB and synced contacts - etc etc etc. May well have more information than just an email address and way to look at it is - would you bet a large sum of money that is all they have? Always a good way of putting perspective upon things I find.
This is sad to me. I would like hardware to be hardware and services to be services and I don't want a piece of hardware to require a particular service, particularly when the hardware is of general purpose. I can accept that an XBox wants an XBox live account because an XBox is for one thing, playing games. An Oculus device really ought to just be a display peripheral that is used for communications, for content creation, and yes games. I want something like that to be as open as possible.
Palmer Luckey, the original creator had this to say over on /r/oculus:
I am already getting heat from users and media outlets who say this policy change proves I was lying when I consistently said this wouldn't happen, or at least that it was a guarantee I wasn't in a position to make. I want to make clear that those promises were approved by Facebook in that moment and on an ongoing basis, and I really believed it would continue to be the case for a variety of reasons. In hindsight, the downvotes from people with more real-world experience than me were definitely justified.
A few examples below so people won't make up their own version of what I actually said:
- I guarantee that you won't need to log into your Facebook account every time you wanna use the Oculus Rift.
- You will not need a Facebook account to use or develop for the Rift
- Nope. That would be lame.
- I promise.
Without assuming bad intent, I think it's safe to say people will tend to think in line with what makes them comfortable with the massive amount of money they are about to get.
A combination of his past successes with Oculus, Facebook's track record, and his extraordinarily high confidence that the thing lots of people were afraid would happen, wouldn't happen
Not to mention his demonstrated history of putting his foot in his mouth. This is hardly the first time he was later proven wrong on something he originally promised.
probably because a giant tech behemoth buying up a small company and giving it the good old Borg treatment is a tale as old as time.
Let's be real, the reason he was wilfully naive is because they send him a big fat check, just like they did to the Whatsapp founders, in the same year I think.
I just wish they would at least be honest and say it instead of this whole "I thought our dreams would come true" talk.
He hasn't managed to give all his money away to a wallet inspector yet. That's about the level of naivete needed to believe in a promise FB of all people tells you to get you to sell your company to them.
If I'm reading most of these comments correctly it's that it doesn't matter if he was lied to, he should have known that this is how the world works.
"should have known" is what most of these comments are talking about. As a thought experiment assume he was lied to, most of these comments are talking about the ignorance and whether it was sincere. Was he this naive or is it easy to be this naive (i.e. self imposed ignorance) when there's a deal to be made.
Maybe he assumed that his new position would allow him to veto or persuade the rest of Facebook to not make such a move? I could certainly see somebody being naive enough on that front.
I think he was 17 (or close to that) when starting the original kickstarter.
Carmack also wanted to sell because he had built businesses before and wanted to focus on the technology without having to deal with survival.
It wouldn't surprise me if Luckey believed that would be the outcome. I think Zuck's strategy as CEO was also less clear then. Today it would be obvious, back then though, I'm not so sure.
The one whose business idea it is to lock up all the world's information?
The one that, together with Quora and Instagram, shove a login screen in your face when you haplessly click the wrong link? When all you really wanted some some local business opening hours or contact information?
The one that already owns your contact information, and aren't afraid to tell you so, because they tricked any one of your friends into letting their app suck their contact book dry?
I think performing mental gymnastics to avoid bad intent is silly. Many people have actual bad intentions. “The divide between good and evil cuts through the heart of every man”
I don't believe him at all. If it is true, then that's surprisingly dumb of him. I'd respect him more if he just admitted he sold out for a life-changing amount of money. Heck, I probably would have done it too.
>I don't want to assume bad intent, but I find it hard to believe that someone could be so naive about the project and the organization controlling it.
Let's not assume bad intent and recognize the reality that things change. That any corporate statement or policy is not true in perpetuity. It's very possible that at the time FB really did believe it. It has been 6 years since the acquisition after all.
Step 1: They get an credible offer for a ton of money.
Step 2: Their brain starts to spiral out of control and can't stop imagining all of the things they can do for themselves, their family, their friends, the world, etc
Step 3: They've just created millions of incentives for themselves.
It takes a very strong person to drive out the biases that money creates in our brains. Monetary incentives are the strongest bias creators, beaten (probably) only by sex and blood (i.e. family relations). Breaking them is the work of an iron will. You had better assume you'd do no better.
Exhibit n + 1 on why when you're acquired you're not in a position to promise anything to anyone despite any assurances from the acquirer. Or, from the consumer's side, why those promises should carry no weight.
They usually follow through for some amount of time. This is because it takes time to figure out how they are going to absorb you. If they changed everything on day 1 it would be a cluster fuck. A simple example would be if Orcl bought a company that was 100% on SAP for financials. If all your SAP people walk out the door the first week how are you going to file the next quarter financials. So they claim that nothing is going to change and that the SAP people have nothing to worry about.
The one time facebook did that in a written way was with whatsapp and it made them lose in europe (germany specifically I think) where they had to cancel their plan to share data between the two entities.
Facebook executives openly lied to the European Commission, to get approval for the acquisition. 3 years later they were fined $120M, a slap on the wrist [1].
Facebook deals in contracts, not promises and even if it was contractually agreed upon, what would you do about it? Sue? At a guess you'd count the money one more time, shrug and maybe send a short apologetic note about how terrible you feel about it. And then count the money again.
I'm absolving Palmer of making a promise he couldn't keep because of Facebook. Palmer is correct here and shouldn't be getting the blowback that he is.
Obviously Facebook can do what they want within the terms.
He knew it was a promise he could not keep because he was giving up control. You simply can not make promises like that it is beyond stupid to make promises about how a company will be run in the future when you are no longer at the helm.
He should have known he couldn't promise that. He could not have known Facebook would do what they did but he should have been at least smart enough to know the limits of his own influence.
it really seems a little willfully naive. if it's not in a contract, obviously any promise facebook makes is going to be on an "isn't inconvenient to do" basis
He was 22 years old when Facebook bought Oculus. I assume he expected to stay a part of it and maybe things were different if he did. It's his fault, of course, but I think he was just naive.
Unless he put the promise in the sell contract, in which case he can sue Facebook and stop them from doing this nasty move, he should be getting all the blowback he's getting and more.
Even if it is in the contract the court would not necessarily side with you unless you can show that you were somehow wronged because of this. "They made me look bad" may not be sufficient.
IANAL but I don't think that's the test. If a person commits to not doing something as part of a valid contract that's all that matters.
The point you make may be relevant for deciding damages, but even here there is a concept of Liquidated Damages [0] which is essentially the damages amount set at day 1 so the question of ascertaining the extent of wrong does not arise.
If he got it just verbally then I can't see him having a case, they can claim they didn't say it and that will be hard to prove, it might still work but that's very thin ice.
If he got it written into the contract then it is clear that he does not intend to pursue it.
If it was written into the contract and he pursues it then he will need to show that he has suffered because the contract was not executed and I fail to see how he could make that case and do so with enough teeth that it would matter to FB enough to reverse course.
As someone who used to practice law, any discussion about contractual obligations is nothing more than speculation until you have read the specific contract in question.
As this very thread has made clear, Palmer Luckey's reputation has been damaged by Facebook's choice to renege on their statements regarding requiring a Facebook login. That's an injury. If it had been part of the contract he would absolutely be in a position to enforce it in court. It was NOT in the contract.
The great-great-grandparent post from this one (by
jacquesm) already raised your point and doubted that it is enough. I'm not claiming an opinion on whether this claimed reputational damage qualifies as an injury.
I'm just saying that an injury is required in principle (with an appropriate citation), because the great-grandparent (by vijayr02) didn't think that was the case.
IANAL so would definitely appreciate someone with more background correcting me - my understanding from lawyers is that the test is of disproportionality and penalty.
The example of UK bank overdraft charges in the Wikipedia article for instance can be seen as small powerless individuals vs large corporate.
In the Oculus case, a good lawyer should have been able to set out in the contract why this specific point is important to the seller (Palmer) and why significant damages are in order (damages credibility on future projects, which clearly could be multi-billion in scope).
I don't know Palmer and until 5 minutes didn't know his name. I don't dislike him, I'm sure he's a nice guy and great person, and I think the product and achievement is impressive. But:
I respect him for eating humble pie now.
I absolutely do not respect yet alone absolve him of not doing so originally. Why would one? There's nothing NEW that came to the table: Facebook can do what they want now, and crucially that was the case at the time of those promises.
Founders literally sign away their right to make these promises. Whether they're made out of ego, faith, hope, naivette, inocence, or just riding that payday high and feeling king of the world - acquired founders need to stop making them and we need to stop believing them; and holding accountable / not absolving is a step in that direction. They're not evil people, they don't need to be doxxed or torched... but it's a certain level of wrong to make promises you absolutely positively cannot deliver upon, and good will does not make such ignorance OK :-/
Sorry if that came harsh; I feel bad for Palmer... but hey, should we not feel worse for those who believed him and acted upon that belief??
> Founders literally sign away their right to make these promises.
Well, they don't have to. He could have insisted on writing this condition into the acquisition contract. But he obviously didn't. The most charitable reading of this is that he was just naive and didn't know that this was an option or that it would be necessary in order to enforce such a promise, but that seems unlikely. Acquiring this knowledge is no harder than posing the question to his M&A attorney. Hence...
> I absolutely do not t respect yet alone absolve him of not doing so originally. Why would one?
I wonder if it's possible to make such a contract that works? If it curtails Facebook, and they breach the contract, then what? They pay the seller some more money?
If you reverted ownership there's no way that FB are going to sign that contract (a small risk you could inadvertently lose the asset and the cost price, eg through an unforeseen loophole that favours the seller - lawyers should veto such things, surely).
Also, are you going to make it a perpetual term applied to all future owners? If not then FB can probably make an entity to sell it to. Or use a third-party login that itself requires Facebook login and workaround your selling constraints.
I like the idea of it: just practically I can't see how it would be workable to technically constrain a company in a contract of sale of that company.
Are there examples of where this has been done successfully?
IANAL but my guess is that you could structure it in such a way that every user affected by the breach had standing to sue for some specified amount of damages so that collectively it would have been worth some lawyer's time to take the case on contingency.
It's entirely possible that FB would have balked, but that in itself would have been a useful data point that indicated that they had every intention of bundling the two products together.
In any case, the topic at hand is not so much whether such a deal could have been structured to work, but whether there are any circumstances short of willful ignorance where the founder could have made the promise he did in good faith. I don't see any.
Naivety seems to account for making such a promise, the idea that others have similarly honourable intentions to oneself can persist and cause such errors of judgement.
> I wonder if it's possible to make such a contract that works?
Yes. In short, you expressly identify in the contract that the provision is for the benefit of Oculus Rift users, and then they gain the power to enforce it as “intended third-party beneficiaries”.
Thank you. Any examples of this in the field of computing, where users were made party to the contract of sale of a company in order to protect some aspect of their usage?
The examples I can find [there] don't seem to bear much similarity to this situation at all.
Harshing on Palmer might feel like the right thing for folks, but they should be harshing on Facebook right now. Palmer has little to no agency and by focusing on the scapegoat, we ignore the avenues for change that are available right now.
Ultimately, energy spent on Palmer distracts from getting Facebook to modify its behavior.
I agree. Ultimately it was Facebooks decision to enact this policy. Why do people gravitate towards blaming him ? Is it just because they feel he’s lied to them and should be held accountable even though he may have only been naive ?
Its funny how in situations like this one, where one person facilitates another’s wrongdoing, they (Palmer) are put under the spotlight more so than the bad actor (Facebook)
That's to a certain degree fair; to a certain degree missing the point:
1. It's NOT binary; I generally try not to partake of "You're either with us or against us". We can hold multiple parties accountable, we can be objective about facts, and we can learn multiple lessons.
2. I'm not actually certain there's behaviour for Facebook to modify. They're a corporation with a wildly successful massive SSO program. They've acquired another smaller corporation. Integrating into the mothership SSO feels the right sensible choice from many perspectives. As an annoying privacy conscious geek, sure, I don't love Facebook integration. But this is a reasonable perspective from point of the corporation.
3. Which brings me back to - I still think the truest lesson learned is for all of us naive enough that for whatever unicorn reason, this wouldn't happen. At that includes shareholders, consumers, and the wild-eyed founders making promises :)
As I said, I don't know him, don't intend to bug him, doesn't bother me much, don't intend to "Harsh" on him. But he did have agency, and he did make some claims, and we should all learn some lessons on how to exercise agency and how to make/believe promises.
I completely agree with your assessment, except... Palmer was a kid and they just made him a multimillionaire. There’s no way he was in a headspace to rationally evaluate anything, let alone evaluate the long term weaseliness of a large corporation.
Multimillionaires don't deserve our pity for their lies. They can comfort themselves on their piles of money (whatever is remaining after the amount spent promoting the corruption of the USA government as Mr Luckey did).
1. I feel that was addressed in my post as one of the potential reasons he made the claims
2. Read Ender's game or Dune or live through a civil war as a child or... whatever it takes to agree that a 22 year old can and should be regarded as a responsible, accountable human being. Otherwise really who can?
You are missing an important they in the list of why these empty promises are made: keeping up the value of the property. There's an implicit, and often also an explicit (e.g. in the form of the founder becoming an employee) agreement that the seller won't talk down the value of what they just sold. Claiming that all will be well, despite Facebook, was very much in the interest of Facebook. Including the fact that the promise was made by someone who'd most likely be gone before the promise stopped being true.
> acquired founders need to stop making them and we need to stop believing them
Not just acquired founders. In my opinion we should stop so readily believing in promises by founders, start ups, corporations, celebrities, politicians, etc. unless there is a strong track record keeping them and/or other reasons to believe the promise can and will be kept.
Getting people to (pre-/re-)purchase something should require to build up trust, not just grand visions and good marketing.
> Palmer is correct here and shouldn't be getting the blowback that he is.
This sentence seems self-contradictory. Once again, here's what Palmer said:
> I really believed it would continue to be the case for a variety of reasons. In hindsight, the downvotes from people with more real-world experience than me were definitely justified.
It sounds like he's agreeing that he should be getting the blowback, right? He made a promise he couldn't keep, people told him he wouldn't be able to keep it, he ignored them. He should have known better.
If I make a lot of money in a way that has negative consequences for other people, then it’s human nature to find ways to discount the negative impact. You delude yourself to feel better so you can take the money and run. Not sure I’d be any different, although I like to think I would be.
As would most people, so I wouldn't lose sleep over it. The big mistake is to try to pull the wool over the users' eyes knowing full well he would lose control over that and so was in absolutely no position to promise anything.
That's a non sequitur and your viewpoint is vindictive, uncharitable, and unreasonable.
Palmer Luckey was in his very early 20s and had never been involved in an acquisition before. He acknowledged his mistake and his explanation makes complete sense. Even much more experienced people are prone to making this kind of mistake in the honeymoon period of an acquisition.
Can you explain the leap from someone starting a defense contractor to them not being naive a few years earlier in their life about corporate acquisitions?
Without commenting on this situation, if you're worried about selling something to a large entity who might later change their mind about how they use your thing, you don't usually start selling to militaries.
It's probably real easy to tell yourself you'll donate a couple million to charities that try to help with actual horrific things and that's way more important than some people having to use a different account/login system for their new luxury game system.
Who knows, maybe some (small amount) of people in similar positions actually follow through afterwards and do that.
Those who say they can’t be bought are either saints (rare), or have never had a reasonable chance of being offered their price.
Most humans will get very morally flexible once offered enough resources; this is precisely why we have contracts and courts, to create structural systems more capable of upholding agreements than individual humans can do alone.
Immutability doesn't actually solve much in the way of real-world problems. Most contract lawsuits don't concern accusations of secretly forging altered contracts, or any disparity between copies: they concern interpretations. And if you've ever read a typical boilerplate contract for most any serious transaction, you'll see they cover "if-then" situations about as much as can be reasonably be done.
Explain the mechanism by which a smart contract in this instance would both have made it impossible for Facebook to make this move and, if they did anyway, avoided the necessity of Palmer to sue them over it.
Blockchain contracts definitely do not somehow preclude "evil", for almost any reasonable definition of evil. They preclude forgery and very specific categories of fraud — but beyond that the sky is the limit.
It's auditable, open source, and immutable. It's neutral. Neither good nor evil. It's your responsibility or the community's responsibility to audit the code and assess the risks.
That's great at and all, but I honestly don't understand how that would help in this situation. Unless you write something absurd like "Mark Zuckerberg's stock will be transferred to Palmer Luckey if this promise is broken", which just about no one in Mark's position would agree to, how are you going to actually prevent something like this from happening?
edit: and as ComputerGuru stated - such a clause can just as easily be put into a traditional contract
The problem with block chain is it requires the whole stack be on chain (at least if it is to be referenced in a contract). If that's the case, then you can definitely do this. E.g. a smart contract that represents the login functionality and you can hard-code it has to be some other immutable contract, and can't be changed to FB login.
On second thought, the whole issue is weird because blockchain doesn't have a login concept.
This is known as the “oracle problem”; actually getting the correct real world inputs into an immutable smart contract is a serious hurdle to adoption.
If you pay attention to most smart contract pitches, they polite side step this issue.
Or have never been in a situation where their mother, father, or themself has a serious medical condition requiring over $1,000,000 and many years of fighting to treat it. "I can't be bought" is a failure of imagination.
I put the "developed world" declaimer as I figured in some poor countries you wouldn't be able to get good treatment without paying for it but I imagine even then you will not pay as much as in the US.
Generally free or not available at all to that specific patient, no? At least from the publicly funded system; some Western European countries also allow private practice of medicine where the availability criteria are different.
If it's a treatment that is required for the patient to survive it will generally be available & free. E.g. getting cancer treatments here will be free & almost certainly expensive in the US (even with insurance they will find something the insurance doesn't cover, and/or will charge you for stuff like ambulance rides).
There may be some rare exceptions where you'd be able to pay a lot of money in the US for some experimental treatment not yet available in the public EU system but this is the exception not the rule. What you possibly won't get for free are non-critical treatments.
I will give one declaimer though that I live in Germany & the healthcare system is not in the same quality/extensiveness throughout the EU (the German system is among the best).
There is nothing immoral about a lawful business transaction to purchase a VR company. If this device required some signing of an EULA that has given away all your consumer rights then the onus is on you, no one forced you to buy it and many organisations and individuals have been warning about these business practices unheeded.
As an anecdotal example, many companies are now using instagram for image hosting that pester/ requires me to sign up. I say no thank you and move on, I'm not adversely affected but maybe that company loses some business.
I bought a Rift and I knew the risks. I wanted to try it and in case I don't like it, at least I didn't spend too much money compared to competitors. I hate their app, you cannot even uninstall it by conventional means (you have to do it withing the app).
Headsets are not cheap, but I am not really crying for not attaching it to my PC ever again. I just wonder who would want to develop against that environment. Not that there was that much available as it is.
You bought a thing with a certain agreement then the agreement is changed under you .
Will they reimburse the buyers? If not, then this is nuts and immoral.
If they do reimburse you, then it's just scary. The fact an unscrupulous entity like Facebook have such a strong hold in people life and business, opinions and privacy is a recipe for an Orwellian future (present?)
Virtual reality is the next frontier of cyberspace, a much more engulfing and immersive (if successful), I don't want Facebook to have so much power.
Did they change the EULA? Do we have the info to make that claim?
Even more interesting is I can remember having many a conversation about which headset to buy, always stating avoid oculus because facebook and yet the person buys oculus anyway only to later complain profusely about having a VR headset from facebook. In recent years this seems to be a problem, likely with current generations. Capitalism fails when you don’t exercise your freedom to make smart purchase decisions. If you don’t want facebook to have so much power stop buying them, stop using them, get your friends and family off and make them actually work for their customers.
>Facebook deals in contracts, not promises and even if it was contractually agreed upon, what would you do about it? Sue?
Why shouldn't we expect more from companies? Promises should mean something. But really this is just another example of facebook undermining the basic fabric of society for its own gain.
If that promise wasn't in the actual contract then it wasn't "Facebook" who made it, it was someone at Facebook. Individual employees aren't typically in a position to be making those types of promises anymore than the company being acquired is.
So, let's assume it was in the actual contract. What is he going to do about it? Sue? Annul the deal?
No? Than it doesn't matter. The whole idea that because something is written into a contract that that automatically means that that his how things will be in the indefinite future is an illusion, and I've seen plenty of people burned that way. A contract only matters if (1) you are prepared to sue over it and (2) you will know what kind of remedy you want if you win the suit.
In this case the state of (1) is 'no' and the state of (2) doesn't matter because of (1).
Why the focus on what he would do? The promises were made to Oculus's current and potential customers. That's who would sue and it's fairly clear that they would want money... e.g. to go buy a HTC Vive.
"In this case" there is no provision in the contract which says Facebook needs to keep Oculus accounts separate, so there's nothing to sue over. If that provision were in the contract, then yes I'd expect a lawsuit. Or at least some form of arbitration or settlement. Ideally the contract itself would specify what happens if that condition is violated.
I don't think that is legally feasible but I don't have enough experience in this. He sold the company, aka shares. The contract should determine how the sale happen but afterward, it's afterward.
A contract needs to be legal, and legal means what the law allows in the context. Does the law allow putting such provisions? I've been burnt by this in a rental agreement. Think about it this way: if we have a contract between both of us, where you agree that I'm going to kill you, I'm still going to jail. Having a contract doesn't make killing legal. This also applies to the rest of contracts. The provisions need to respect the law.
But the guy didn't have a contract, sold a patent-heavy company for $3bn (probably an army of lawyers involved) that netted him around $700mn. I'd just call this saving face.
Winner’s Take All by Anand Giridharadas has a few chapters dedicated to B-corps. The issue isn’t that the b-corps themselves are bad, but that relying on a few good companies to fix the problems in the world isn’t going to work, because the bad actors will always more than make up for it.
Taking climate change as an example: 100 b-corps going carbon-neutral aren't going to offset the damage Exxon causes to the environment.
You can say we just need to wait until consumers change their behavior and let the market sort it out, but isn’t that exactly what we’ve been trying and failing to do? At this rate it’s all but certain that climate change won’t be solved via market solutions.
What’s better is forcing the bad actors to stop doing bad. Fighting to pass a carbon tax regulation or a green new deal is what we need, and bandaids like b-corps are often a distraction that tricks people into thinking we can consume our way out of the problem.
Fighting to pass a carbon tax or green new deal is even less impactful than supporting b corps since those things will never get support from the corrupt political class rolling in what are essentially oil dollars.
That might be true! But there are many people working to unbalance that power dynamic as well.
It’s definitely not a guarantee, but mass movements can force change. Look at Bernie, he came pretty damn close to the nomination even with the entire upper class and media throwing their weight behind his opponents.
Sure but during the decades it will take to make generational change, why not support a B-Corp over one that hasn't made similar promises?
You are talking as if this is an either/or proposition. No, B-Corps won't solve our problems but if it moves the needle even a little, that's still a good thing, right?
I disagree that gaining support for and enacting a carbon tax would take decades. It won’t be easy, and maybe isn’t probable, but a mass movement could make it happen.
To your other point about private solutions being good because they move the needle a little:
In my personal life I shop sustainably (but I’m not perfect or obsessive about it). I do think it’s a little better as a consumer to make ethical choices than not to.
But: the rhetoric around climate change as something individual choices will fix is extremely dangerous. If you ask your average person about what we can do to fix climate change, I’d guess most would go straight to market solutions. Why is that? Could it be because that’s what the entire marketing and media establishment wants us to focus on, because a collective solution will cost them a shit-ton of money?
Yes in a different world it’s not either or and we’d have individual and collective solutions working together to save the planet. In this world, however, the powerful have a vested interest in market-based solutions being the only options on the table.
Basically, yes I agree that ethical companies are better than unethical companies. But on a macro level, propaganda around ethical consumption is so dangerous imo that I’m not interested in contributing to it just to move the needle an imperceptible amount.
Basically people use B-Corps and similar concepts to make other people that are uncomfortable and skeptical of general capitalism feel comfortable by pretending there are safeguards built into the corporate structure preventing whatever they are uncomfortable with.
Charters can easily change, anything can be reincorporated at whim anywhere.
Also its typically just Shariah-Compliant investing rebranded for an Islamaphobic audience. S&P has a shariah index right across the border in Toronto Stock Exchanfe since forever while similar enterprisers push B-Corps and Public Benefit Corporations domestically as if they’ve “figured out” the code to sustainable for profit ventures through charter. Shariah in this context is very compatible with what these kind of investors and consumers are looking for, but they don't know it as they probably conflate it with human rights abuses.
People are just gullible, hope I unpacked that enough.
I see exactly one merit in B-corporations: the status makes it legal for management to to decide in favor of conscience over greed. It doesn't force them to decide conscience over greed, they can be just as profit-oriented as a regular corporation, but they can. At least management won't be sued by shareholders for rejecting a an unethical but legal profit opportunity. It's not the big difference some may expect, but it can be an important difference nonetheless (just like it can be no difference at all)
"Third, corporate directors are not required to maximize shareholder value. As the U.S. Supreme Court recently stated, "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so." ( BURWELL v. HOBBY LOBBY STORES, INC. ) In nearly all legal jurisdictions, disinterested and informed directors have the discretion to act in what they believe to be the interest of the business corporate entity, even if this differs from maximizing profits for present shareholders. Usually maximizing shareholder value is not a legal obligation, but the product of the pressure that activist shareholders, stock-based compensation schemes and financial markets impose on corporate directors.
The Shareholder Value Myth , Eur. Fin. Rev. Lynn Stout (April 30, 2013)
The Ideology of Shareholder Value Maxim (Watch), Evonomics"
AFAIK, modern corporate law never required that, and the Supreme Court was affirming the existing state of things. The "Shareholder Theory" stems from an essay Milton Friedman published in 1970 asserting that corporations have no responsibility to do anything other than maximize shareholder value, but this was never enshrined in law or financial regulation -- it was just something a lot of corporations followed. It seems in the intervening decades it's become such an accepted "truth" that people assume that it's a legal requirement.
There has never been a legal requirement for corporations to maximize profit. This is one of the greatest misconceptions propagated in the past 40 years.
A company's management has to act in the interest of shareholders, but that can be very loosely defined. A company that says "When making business decisions, we prefer protecting the environment over short-term profits, because our shareholders are humans living on Earth and without a good environment, our business would fail in the long-term" is not doing anything illegal. But if other companies don't follow suit, the eco-conscious company is in danger of being outcompeted.
If you stop smoking you'll feel better but it's not going to do anything to reduce smoking in the world overall. The only thing that can reduce smoking is the law: taxes, restrictions on where smoking is permitted, and so on.
You should still stop smoking (for your own good) but that alone won't change the world.
A statistically insignificant reduction to the world population of smokers. Without laws to prevent tobacco marketing to minors, the cigarette industry could add 100x as many customers in a day.
That is true. And yet there aren't many good alternatives to voting if we want a free society.
This is one of the reasons why you have to lower the cost of voting as much as possible - in terms of time, money, and hassle - if you want broader participation.
I personally think politicians first and foremost need to try and restore trust in them by the people. I think the biggest reason for people to not vote these days is that they have already heard and seen confirmation for far too many lies.
I used to go to every single election. Not anymore. It feels like a waste of my time. Not because the process is so complicated. No. It is a waste because we get lied to constantly anyway.
It does. If you really want something to change in the government, voting is pretty close to the bottom of the list of things you can do that might make a difference, statistically speaking. You still might as well vote, of course, but the chances of your one vote making an impact are extremely low.
That said, influencing the votes of other people can make a huge difference.
This has been my theory on why in some countries the extreme-right is doing very well (Belgium for example, with Vlaams Belang and NVA). These parties seem to understand that one vote doesn't change much in the grand scheme of things and that the key is to be able to convince a mass amount of voters at the same time. Hence why they are playing the modern media game and spending massive amounts of money into social media campaigns to reach a maximum amount of people. While other parties are not doing that (because they don't realize the game that is being played?) and it shows in election results.
I consider that to be part of the point of voting. If everyone's opinion on societal matter produces a statistically significant effect, there will be endless turmoil.
Don't underestimate the network effect that one person may have by quitting. By sharing their story with others on how they quit, it may inspire others to quit, and so on.
I assumed that the B in b-corp stands for bullshit, but I checked. And the explanation is bullshit (label given to some companies which claim to care about stuff that matters), so unfortunately I was right and so was vmception: you can't believe in stuff because it's certified.
I'm pretty sure there is at least one MLM aka pyramid scheme that is bragging about being a B-Corp which they use to try and ensnare new victims. That's all you need to know to understand that the "B" in B-Corp stands for bullshit and steer well clear of any that explicitly brag about that status (if your business truly acts in a manner that makes the world better you wouldn't need to buy a bullshit certification to prove it).
I mean, this is really a condemnation of any data privacy practices whatsoever claimed by any company, as they may at any point in the future sell the entire company and databases with it.
The only privacy claims one may wish to take seriously are those that occur simultaneously with promises never to sell the company.
I used to use a location tracking app called Moves, which was a neat 24/7 location tracking lifelogging tool. Facebook, the very last people I would like to have that data, bought them, and presumably integrated it into my shadow profile.
Special thanks go to to the founders of Moves: Zsolt Szász, Jukka Partanen, Juho Pennanen, Aapo Kyrölä, and Aleksi Aaltonen. Hope you got paid selling private data that belongs to the users that entrusted it to you.
> I mean, this is really a condemnation of any data privacy practices whatsoever claimed by any company, as they may at any point in the future sell the entire company and databases with it.
Yes! That's why you should be very very careful who you give your data because you are exactly one acquisition away from the same effect as a breach. Fortunately the GDPR affords some protection here, if the data was collected for one purpose it can not suddenly be used for another.
As for never selling the company: there is one other option: you could give users the option to destroy their data just prior to the transfer. Of course no acquirer would be interested but that is another way of dealing with it.
Facebook is not GDPR compliant at all. The only reason they appear to be is that there is no enforcement of this regulation so nobody is actually looking at what they're doing.
There's no mention of any enforcement against Facebook on that website, except for one by the German DPC of EUR 51,000 for failing to notify them about their DPO.
Wait, wait, wait a minute. In the same comment, you are claiming that Facebook is GDPR compliant, and that Facebook was fined for violating the GDPR. It sure seems like there is a major contradiction between those two.
Errm. No. In the same comment I am claiming that Facebook has already received a warning fine and that thus they stand to lose a lot if they are found to be in violation. I am not saying they are GDPR compliant because I can not know that with 100% certainty, but I'm sure they are doing what they can to not cross that line knowingly.
Facebook, Google, Apple & Microsoft are arguably the companies that stand the most to lose from GDPR enforcement, you can bet that they are well aware of this.
They're trying to stay fine free while also violating the spirit of GDPR as much as possible, since their business hinges on irresponsible and invasive data gathering.
I split my comment into two parts, since this one is more my personal opinion, and I don't want it to colour an otherwise straightforward request for sources.
From noyb's fight against Facebook (https://noyb.eu/en/open-letter), to me it is very clear that Facebook does not intend to comply with GDPR. They are actively trying to find loopholes, and according to noyd, also working with the Irish DPO to find and exploit loopholes. It is also worth noting that the total fines Google has faced from GDPR enforcement come to just under EUR 58 Mn (http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/GDPR-2020-Where-C...). 58 Mn is chump change compared to Google's total revenue, and unless the threat of the full 4% turnover fine becomes credible, I doubt it will lead to any better action.
I put in our privacy policy that customers will be notified if majority ownership changes, but had not considered advance notification of the ownership change.
Such a clause might work as long as it's part of the sale contract to adjust the sale price if any customers take that option.
I want to agree with you, really.. but the realistic person in me says that it is likely that if you don’t keep the data, someone else will find a way, because getting the data seems to be irresistible as a form of control and advantage.
So maybe not playing doesn’t really work.
I was thinking, in regards to some grandparent way up there, the same statement “don’t play” might have been true for Oculus in general.
What I mean to say is, don’t sell the company, ever. Then you can “control the outcome”.
Ah, but there lies another fallacy. You really can’t control the outcome even if you try to. Even if you don’t play, likely someone who wants to do the same thing as you, and exploit it, will find a way. Or maybe on their own, Oculus would have never found the right supporter who would honor privacy. Even if they had.. the below could happen.
For example, if Facebook hadn’t bought Oculus, maybe they would have bought the Vive product line from HTC (a bit far fetched) and compete against Oculus.. and then done the same privacy intruding measures.
So even if Oculus had held out and didn’t “play”, they might have been crushed anyway or the privacy problem could have just happened somewhere else.
I’m not saying we should give up trying to protect privacy and “play” the game... but that somehow in the competitive environment we are in, those playing the game are winning more over those who wish not to.
> I used to use a location tracking app called Moves
Same. Nothing since has managed the same usefulness (although I suspect this is because iOS has somewhat neutered tracking apps - e.g. both OwnTracks and Gyroscope have significant issues tracking my phone.)
[edit, 23 minutes later]: Initial impressions were good but it's "detected" 4 segments of car movement when my phone hasn't moved a single inch. Same kind of issues that Gyroscope has, alas.
I mean, this is really a condemnation of any data privacy practices whatsoever claimed by any company, as they may at any point in the future sell the entire company and databases with it.
unless they have clear penalties for themselves in their EULA, and no clause that says they can change anything they want at any time. So yeah I guess you're right.
And, in my opinion, that is exactly the position you SHOULD take. Stop giving up your data to any company. Even if your favorite company is nice now, they'll get hacked, they'll get sold, the CEO will get replaced, etc. There is no cloud, just someone else's computer.
The House Committee interview in the last link (TechCrunch) shows that Zuckerberg does not like to use the "shadow profiles" term, but it's what others use to refer to Facebook's tracking of non-users.
I work there. If "shadow profile" means a profile that's created from PII for a specific person that doesn't have an account on the site, fb doesn't create shadow profiles.
That you are that specific about P2 very clearly tells me that Facebook actually does create shadow profiles. I believe you that P2 isn't the basis of such profiles.
Then how did FB display a lot of info about me, and recommended me all my contact list as friend recommendations when I created an account after not having one for 10+ years?
It's OK to wish to defend your company, but please do not lie; nobody forced you to comment here.
Nitpick: Rather, it's a condemnation of any data privacy claims; a data privacy practice is a technical measure that (by design if not in reality) makes it literally impossible for the attacker to collect private information in the first place. Nothing else actually provides security in practice.
unless you flex your cryptoanarchist power and enshrine strong encryption into your architecture. what WhatsApp did. make it costly for the new owner to change their minds.
One can demand such promises from the acquirer in the form of a contract that states, in effect, this:
a) If acquirer does X, the seller, Y, has the option to repurchase the company for $1.
b) Any future acquirer must agree to the same contract. If it does not, Y must be extended the option to repurchase the company for $1 before the sale.
I don't think anything less could constitute a true promise that the acquirer would avoid X.
Contracts are only binding up to a certain amount of capital. You can only make the violator bleed so much.... i don't see contracts as threats to any of these large corporations.
And that is trivial to get around, instead of a $1 clawback for the company, a $1 clawback for all acquired IP, trademarks, etc including any related developed under the same or derivative marks and companies.
That's closer to what I've done, but in practice that also lowers the value of the company. There is a sweet spot you have to hit of giving up control. Just because you ask for something doesn't mean you will get it. In fact, you normally don't have the advantage in these types of sales, so you don't get to specify these things.
The issue is that the transaction and the outlooks are asymmetric. The purchaser is often playing a longer game than the seller, so the seller doesn't often have the luxury you mention - given the constraints of the types of companies involved in such transactions.
Consider the board on which you have posted - Often, the purchaser is acting over a greater time frame, and the seller has an immediate need. Competitors are at your heels, and you can't realistically enforce patents against the purchaser or competitors, while retaining the market agility that is required.
fwiw, facebook has gotten upset with me when i've tried this exact thing, usually demanding a phone number or email, and refusing contact info i've already provided for other sock accounts. sometimes they'll lock my socks for not acting "human" (never posting anything, no profile picture, etc). just gives me an excuse to care less about facebook in all honesty
In short, no. Facebook has gotten very good at catching and deleting "fake" accounts. Back in the day, I worked on an application that used Facebook's Graph API and I needed to create some bogus accounts for testing, but they were consistently blocked within days.
Using some combination of behaviour analysis, flagging new and/or cookie-less browsers, and (I suspect) human review FB have gone to great lengths to try and assure their customers that all humans have one and only one account under their true legal name and biographical details.
> Using some combination of behaviour analysis, flagging new and/or cookie-less browsers, and (I suspect) human review FB have gone to great lengths to try and assure their customers that all humans have one and only one account under their true legal name and biographical details.
They're not very good at that. A pretty big chunk of people I have as friends have fake names, some of them even after me reporting their names for being fake.
Real names don't matter to social networks. You are you because your behavior is your behavior no matter what the attached label is, and no one bothers to change that for a “fake” account. However, real names are great at keeping the naive crowds deluded about social networks being tools for “personal” communications with “real” “friends”.
> me reporting their names for being fake
So how does it feel to be in a punitive squad? Do they at least pay you well for all the atrocities?
It's somewhat annoying when people on FB are unrecognizable due to name/profile picture changes. I don't especially like FB in general, and would consider it a positive if FB enforcing their T&C caused people to leave the platform. (Or if it forced a change in the T&C.) The people I've reported are aware of my feelings.
That might be what they tell investors but I disagree that they've gotten good at policing accounts. I moderate a large Facebook group and we get flooded with join requests from obviously fake users all the time. Most of them have a handful of southeast Asia friends, some random highly geographically distributed friends in the English speaking world, and stock or stolen photos. The real giveaway is the programmatic nonsense responses they give to the membership questions. I've been reporting these accounts to Facebook a long time and they persist, often with join dates making them multiple years old.
Given how pervasive Facebook tracking is, I'd bet on your pseudonymous account being linked to your shadow profile very quickly. There is no anonymity when Facebook is involved.
I'd also strongly object to moving the needle even the tiniest amount on Facebook's metrics. They wouldn't force users to do this unless it benefitted them; that's plenty enough reason for a lot of people.
Last I tried (1-3yrs ago? don't quite remember), no. They needed a phone number, so I added a VOIP phone number and was informed that I needed a phone number tied to a real phone. I went out and bought a cheap phone so I could make the bloody account, and while I could make and receive calls just fine Facebook still treated it as if it weren't a "real" phone. Long story short, I never made that account, I briefly enjoyed the perks of a burner phone, and I turned the phone into a small web server.
> Exhibit n + 1 on why when you're acquired you're not in a position to promise anything to anyone despite any assurances from the acquirer.
You are in a position to promise something where you have contractually retained control, or at least contractually secured an enforceable promise from the purchaser.
Otherwise, you are in the same position as Joe on the street.
We were in talks with a potential acquirer of our company recently and this was an explicit reason we gave to them why we ended up not taking the deal – we knew that whatever promises they made to uphold our current priorities, there is a very real chance they wouldn't stick. And we weren't happy doing that to our customers in our current stage (all early adopters).
It's also why all of the smart cookies have already left; anyone still there is waiting for a payday or waiting for a VP title. IBM don't pay quality. They pay market share.
It took 2.5 years for IBM to begin the process of gutting the consultancy they bought, for RedHat I think it'll probably take twice as long.
"exhibit" is "example". "n" examples occured before, the "1" is this new one. Hence we have "n + 1" examples already, and the newest one can be called "exhibit n + 1".
It's possible to get assurances but you must write them down in the form of legal agreements.
Getting "company assurance at the highest level" is just as good as is the word of the person at the highest level. There are people for whom their word is their bond, but it's not very common.
Palmer Luckey was just kicked out of a Facebook game developer group, because so many people found his presence objectionable and threatening, due to his divisive political support for Trump, and his secretly funding the shitposting of abusive dirty false memes.
>Oculus founder Palmer Luckey donated $100,000 to fund Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations through shell companies named after elements from classic video game Chrono Trigger, The Washington Post and Mother Jones report. News of the donation broke today, almost a month after Luckey announced he was leaving Facebook, but the money was handed over on January 4th — when he was presumably still under contract with the social media company.
These promises are made from acquirers to acquirees so that they can save face, and tell everyone that they received these promises so that they have a rebuttal to accusations of being a "sell-out."
They aren't done with a wink and a nudge, but everyone knows that they're bullshit, it lets the entrepreneur maintain his public image while letting the carnivore devour its meal in due course.
I would argue that he was and still is lying. He had the power to make good on his promise in the form of contractual terms during the sale, but didn't.
Most of the folks on this thread are commenting from the perspective of 2020, but Facebook had pretty significantly different reputation in 2014, especially around M&A. They had recently brought in both Instagram and WhatsApp without meddling in either their product stacks or their leadership teams. It's easy to claim now that this was all naive, but at the time it was plausible that these organizations and brands would remain fairly independent and autonomous within the Facebook umbrella.
The fact that it was actually discussed back then, people were asking about it and that Luckey was assuring them that it won't happen (even despite of the fact that he wasn't going to be in charge anymore) clearly shows that Facebook's reputation wasn't as "significantly different" back then than how you paint it.
The people here are very on point and no doubt said the same thing in 2014 if they were privacy minded at the time. Most are under no delusion that "we will not do _______ , either now, or in the future" as empty promises. They were right then and they're right now. Facebook has obviously been in the business of selling its users out from the very beginning and no one who lives in this reality would have accepted such a promise from them as anything other than a nicety.
This development was trivially predictable right when Facebook acquired Oculus. Which is why I bought Vive instead.
You don't need to be a genius to see stuff like this ahead of time. All you have to do is refuse to be gaslit and be honest about the high-level drivers of corporate decision-making.
I also spent an extra $100 to buy a Vive instead of a Rift. I didn't predict this exact action but I didn't trust Facebook to keep their fingers off of it
You need a CC attached to buy stuff on the Oculus store.
I've got 100+ VR games and never bought anything on the Oculus store. Steam games work just as well, and will be easier to use if you ever switch to another VR headset.
I have a general policy of not keeping hardware from known user-hostile companies in my house. They have way more time to worm things I don't want into their hardware than I have time to keep tabs on it, so I just don't.
Right? "Oh, you've got this full, 3D, completely spatial work space. Look at the fireplace, isn't it gorgeous? Now EAT A 2D MENU! EAT IT! RIGHT NOW IN YOUR FACE!!!"
More that it constantly asserts that things are working when they aren't and aren't when they are, freaks out if it isn't the only thing connected to an HDMI port though DP and DVI are fine, declares some titles "undownloadable" for no reason.
Nothing, though, compares to the irredeemable idiocy of forcing the user to have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard facing their play area in order to set up the guardian system, which you have to do essentially every time you use it because it will go out of alignment at a gnat's fart despite being screwed to the desk.
As an anecdote, I recently bought the Quest and have had a really seamless experience. None of these issues around display ports or configuring the play area for Guardian are a factor with this version.
> This development was trivially predictable right when Facebook acquired Oculus. Which is why I bought Vive instead.
Did you just predict it happening "eventually"?
If you predicted it would happen before your headset was obsolete, I'd say you were wrong. And that's usually the important part for making a purchase. Six to seven years is enough lifetime for an early VR kit.
Certainly there are better headsets out now than the original Vive, but I'm not sure I'd classify it as obsolete. You can still take a modern VR title and play it and get the full experience. Calling the original Vive obsolete at this stage would be like calling 1080p monitors obsolete.
Tracking keeps improving in important ways, the resolution is not amazing, and we still have more than two years before we actually hit the point where I'm saying it will be obsolete.
A big part of the draw for Oculus is platform-exclusives. Even if the hardware is obsolete, the catalog of games you bought on their store isn't, and if that's tied to staying in their hardware ecosystem when you upgrade....
Because they have several European regulators breathing down their neck when it comes to WhatsApp at least. So it isn't as if Facebook hasn't tried to move into that direction.
I think GP is downvoted because of a misunderstanding. I think GP wanted to highlight the "dumb fucks" quote of Zuckerberg, where he refers to people uploading data to his platform with that term. That quote became public in 2010, almost half a decade before 2014. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg#Quotes
That sentiment is of course not, originally, attributable to kps though.
Regarding people who ascribe benign intent to Facebook, it was first expressed by one M Zuckerberg. In 2004. And first reported by Business Insider in 2010.
Whether or not it's fair to judge people for things they said 16 years ago when none of their subsequent actions or statements give any reason to believe they're a different person today isn't germane to the point, which is that Facebook/Zuckerberg's poor reputation are not new.
That's my point though; it may be irrelevant in many cases, but it is relevant to the matter of how long Zuckerbeg has had a poor reputation. Such a question obviously calls for the examination of old stories and quotes.
I have to disagree, many assumed there would be some kind of hamfisted integration even in 2014. The only surprising thing is how long they held off.
I had huge concerns regarding FB's purchase of Oculus at the time and I wasn't the only one. It was the single reason I did not buy an Oculus. It wasn't that I thought they would be brazen either, I just assumed they would be hoovering data up behind the scenes, and trading data between Oculus and FB.
If this announcement had occurred in 2014, it would not have been surprising, I think the concerns were clear from the outset to most of the community. The only people who were starry eyed were those who just wanted Oculus funded well and were happy to take the word of the founder.
> Facebook had pretty significantly different reputation in 2014
That's not really true. Hipster antitrust wasn't a thing yet, so people weren't talking about it at your neighborhood Starbucks. But serious people were talking about it. Look at the conflicts of interest disclosures for prominent antitrust scholars... they were busy during that period.
Also, the infamous "Zuckerberg destroy mode" email is from 2012.
>Founder at Framework, formerly part of the Oculus founding team
I don't recall it being much different, but I _do_ recall the outcry from Oculus followers and fans when the buyout occurred. This is exactly what we predicted and the fact that PL was assuring us it wouldn't happen would seem to disagree with what you're saying. It seems you may have just been ignoring it at the time for what may be a very obvious reason.
Facebook has historically be truly crappy in this regards. The Instagram founders had a similar story, but rather than publish a half-apology, they left the company (walking away from quite a bit of money in the process.
It's gotta be hard to be a founder in a situation like this.
As a CEO of a company that is being sold you can not make any binding statements about the future of the company you will no longer own. This is really management 101 and Palmer Luckey does not strike me as an absolute beginner here, he knew how to get funded, how to execute and had a ton of people telling him this would happen. Of course he and FB had a pretty strong incentive to ensure that there wouldn't be an immediate break-off risk to the acquisition, and of course there was plenty of evidence from other acquisitions that this is how the world works.
I'd like to believe him, but it is pretty hard to do so given the historic record of acquisitions to date.
For me the heuristic is simple: I won't believe a word a CEO that is selling his company says about what will happen post deal. They are no longer in control and should know better.
I think Brendan Iribe did most of the management and fundraising. I like Palmer, but my impression was he hacked together a series of prototypes in the garage and ended up with a device that showed enough promise to bring in Iribe and Carmack.
(I think he really did believe at the time that Facebook wouldn't Facebook it up.)
Then he shouldn't have been CEO. Sorry, but that title comes with a bunch of responsibilities, both to your shareholders, your team and your customers/users.
Fair enough, even so, as founder non-CEO you have even less standing to make such claims, and at that level you don't get to claim innocence. Incidentally, he then started a defense contractor, also not something where 'naive' is a pre on your resume. I don't know what the share division was at the time, but I am going to assume here that Iribe served at the pleasure of Luckey.
In the end it is nitpicking; the effect is much the same.
Actually, it appears Luckey was never CEO; I guess I remembered that wrong. I'm sure you're right that Luckey was likely the biggest shareholder by a fair bit.
In any case, Luckey was a 20-year old kid who got some lenses to point in the right direction to give a decent FOV. He had a good Kickstarter, hired a CEO, and two years later he sold to Facebook for billions. Should he have made those promises? Probably not. Should any of us have taken his predictions seriously about what Facebook would do in 6 years, which is 50% longer than Luckey's adult life at that point? Also probably not.
Yeah, it's not like, come Facebook acquisition, Palmer Luckey had a stellar record on keeping promises. Honestly, the Quest is the first time I could say the Oculus brand did not "fail to meet expectations". Prior to... uh, last year... they had always been a day late, a buck short.
The whole company was built off semi legally stolen valve tech due to valve naivete when the employees who advocated sharing the tech with oculus for free all got hired by oculus/Facebook.
Bad egg from the start from how they acquired tech and employees, to their exclusive policy on launch and their artificial compatibility issues with other headsets today, getting worse when selling out to Facebook is no surprise.
Could they not have written a clause into the acquisition that stipulated this? I agree with you, I just don't know if this is completely impossible. If a founder was truly serious about something like this (and if they had the leverage etc) they could probably make it happen.
> Palmer Luckey does not strike me as an absolute beginner here
Which is why smart founders can still get away with making these statements during the acquisitions so they can continue to grow their company post close (which means their post close bonus also stays in tact) and then leave after their golden handcuffs are done (usually 2-5 years).
> For me the heuristic is simple: I won't believe a word a CEO that is selling his company says about what will happen post deal. They are no longer in control and should know better.
For me, its on the other side of the coin. If I'm a founder and someone gives me billions of dollars for both acquiring my company and an additional bonus to pump the company I'm 100% incentivized to do everything possible to ensure that...even making forward statements that I don't genuinely believe are going to happen.
For everyone else - don't trust anyting an acquirer says - follow what they do.
> As a CEO of a company that is being sold you can not make any binding statements about the future of the company you will no longer own.
That's objectively not true. There are countless stories of companies unwittingly buying liabilities and lawsuits that they didn't know about or fully appreciate.
>As a CEO of a company that is being sold you can not make any binding statements about the future of the company you will no longer own.
Agreed, but that's no different that ANY corporate statement on anything. Things change. A policy or statement may be true this year, but may not be true next year.
GitHub made many nice statements post-Microsoft acquisition, and you know what, Microsoft execs may even believe all of them today. In 5 years though - who knows.
>Of course he and FB had a pretty strong incentive to ensure that there wouldn't be an immediate break-off risk to the acquisition, and of course there was plenty of evidence from other acquisitions that this is how the world works.
That could be part of it. It could also be the case that FB just didn't make any decisions pertaining to this aspect of Oculus at that point in time. It could also be the case that FB had many different factions within its org that pushed for different things - one faction wanted to use FB login, another did not and the former faction won after a while.
This is less nefarious than people are making it out to be.
While your points are reasonable and I’d normally agree with them, Palmer as a person seems to be the opposite of this.
Look at his exit from FB and his funding of Trump groups in 2016.
His life, in its successes and failures, has often been the result of what appears to be optimistic naivety.
He believed BigCo FB would keep their word to him on FB login not being required. He believed FB wouldn’t essentially fire him for his political opinions as well.
While the story is Palmer founded Oculus (and he was the original founder, so there is truth there), really Brendan Iribe, Michael Antonov and Nate Mitchell (Scaleform Mafia, all serial founders) negotiated the Facebook acquisition. Palmer was pushed out first after acquisition. He's a nice marketing story (nerdy young white boy reinvents VR) but he wasn't the driving force behind the business success (Brendan and Nate) or technical success (Carmack, Antonov, Abrash and many others like Dean Beeler and Volga Askoy).
We're also in a world where all the founders of Oculus have quit and no longer have a say in decisions like this. Facebook foundational employees and recent hires are running the show and the end game for Oculus is to give Facebook a platform that they control that is as pervasive as iOS or Android (or at least Xbox or PlayStation).
As a former Oculus and Facebook employee I'm torn by this. I always understood how a none trivial portion of the Oculus user base is extremely anti-Facebook, or even how people with Facebook accounts didn't want their Facebook account tied to Oculus. At the same time it would seriously reduce technical friction around using Facebook backend features in Oculus products. I know some folks would see this as a complete negative and I understand where you are coming from, but there are some interesting positive use cases as well.
Palmer Lucky did not create Oculus. He was a Masters student at USC and 3D printed a pretty case for a prototype developed by an international research project. I would know, because I've personally tested one of the early prototypes ...in Hamburg, Germany. He took it and ran and came up with some BS about having created it from scratch all by himself in his parents' garage in Silicon Valley. He's a liar and a fraud.
He absolutely knew that this was a very real possibility and made the statements anyways to save face at the time. He was probably hoping no one would care when it eventually happened.
Just make a fake FB account exclusively for this purpose. If you're forced to use a FB account at least don't link it to your actual profile. I have a separate fake FB account for every service that requires FB.
This is great advice until Facebook blocks your secondary accounts, which might end up costing you access to any data/saves/content tied to your oculus or whatever linked services. Just look at how much destruction Google causes people and businesses by closing down all of their accounts for even accidental associations with flagged accounts.
Fine, they can have the number of the burner phone that spends its time in my desk drawer with a dead battery, and is used for nothing but jumping through privacy-invading hoops.
Interesting. Just downloaded the app and the first thing it asks for is my number (which makes sense, I suppose). Without digging too deep -- is there cost associated here?
Until they make you download the FB app to use it, and then they get access to everything you do on your phone and follow you around the internet. So sacrifice your privacy, or sacrifice the Oculus. I know which one I'm going to choose.
also interesting from that reddit thread were these comments:
> I'm mostly surprised that they haven't done this with Whatsapp or Instagram thus far, but they are doing it for Oculus accounts.
> > As of a few days ago, they're starting the process of moving Instagram DMs to Messenger, requiring a FB account. So, they are.
> > > The people I know in product at Facebook are certain it is an inevitability for their entire portfolio. That's second-party hearsay, so take it as you will, but it's my operating understanding that is their long term (multi-year) goal.
Hopefully Palmer Luckey has more foresight into how technology can be used in unintended ways now that he is building autonomous defense and surveillance system at Anduril Industries.
What are we looking for from CEOs? I feel like, if a CEO had made such flatly incorrect promises about something with direct financial implications (sales, costs, the industry in general) they would be seen as failing at their job. Luckey seems comfortable simply pointing out that he didn't make the mistake people have accused him of. It's enough to say he made another (perhaps lesser) mistake. There's nothing in the statement that reckons with his previous understanding of FB or Occulus and what else he might have gotten wrong. It feels disappointing to me.
These same type of statements were made by the whatsapp founders regarding ads on whatsapp(they said they will never happen etc.)[1]
All that went out the window once the company was bought for 19B, sure both founders left a few years later, but their statements were false after the sale.
That kind of promise from Facebook should be enforceable on court.
If it is not it's only because the current government judicial system is so full of spam-cases and it is so inefficient that it doesn't have room for these things.
Honestly, it might well be actionable for purchasers of existing hardware. They can legitimately point towards a public statement made by a company agent authorised by his employer and that they bought the device on that basis.
The problem is that if Facebook had to pay out $20 million to make this go away they'd consider that to be entirely a cost worth paying.
Palmer is a first class jerk and other things I would maybe get banned for saying, but this is as good and honest an apology as I think he can give. Things change, and it has been many years since he said this.
That's kind of the whole point. Unless there is some sort of legally binding contract that says things won't change, and that contract can't be changed without consent of all parties, whatever BS comes out of some exec's mouth should just be completely ignored. All you should look at are the underlying incentives, and it was always clear that Oculus would be fully assimilated into FB.
A lot of people forget just how young Palmer Lucky is.
I absolutely believe his post here. He was young and naive and believed the lies from the Facebook executives. Completely understandable and I hope this doesn't make people think he's a liar.
Don't people realize they're complaining at a billionare and have basically no leverage at all? This backlash should have come BEFORE Palmer got PAID, not YEARS LATER. I don't think Palmer even goes on reddit anymore.
To the extent that Facebook made those promises to someone authorized to disseminate them, I wonder if they've opened themselves up to refund claims well beyond original purchase dates.
If anyone purchased the device relying upon Palmer Luckey's promises, that could be promissory estoppel.
To be fair, in my case, I did not. I actually received one as a gift last Christmas. I never got around to setting it up (still in packaging). I was planning on trying it out when I had some free time. Now I have a useless device that I can’t even return since I refuse to create a Facebook account.
Practically every corporate acquisition in the history of ever goes something like: day 1: "Nothing will change." Six months later: "All you knew is gone."
Yeah like when the promised not to use any WhatsApp data. And here we are, I give it 1 year before we see commercials and deep integration with FB messenger. Who believes anything they say anymore?
Pretty much exactly what I was afraid of when they were first acquired, and what they initially promised they wouldn't do. Looks like the success of the Quest has emboldened the reinholders. That as of this posting, 100% of the comments are a variation of 'WTF', it's pretty telling they felt they could get away with it regardless.
Serious question: do you really think that someone who is enthusiastic about VR would refuse to get the best headset out there because they would have to create an account on some service online? I can’t fathom how that would stop anyone who is truly interested about playing VR. It’s like telling someone they will need a PS account to play the playstation or a Xbox account to play the xbox, they’d probably be fine with that.
So, just to understand what you say correctly, I will ask: Do you think it is ethically tenable to require these VR interested, enthusiastic people to sign up to FB (known to be privacy nightmare), so that they are able to use the product they spent lots of money on? Is it acceptable to force them to do this, just because they are sufficiently interested in VR? Is it in general OK to force people to connect with a third party, which has nothing to do with the actual product?
I am not sure whether you are trying to justify this move, or whether you are questioning that it will have an economic impact or really what the point is.
I think it's fine yeah, I think it's fair to recognize that Facebook has had some privacy issues, but 1) it doesn't mean that it'll impact you if you just create a simple account and 2) it doesn't mean that FB will have more privacy issues in the future
> Serious question: do you really think that someone who is enthusiastic about VR would refuse to get the best headset out there because they would have to create an account on some service online?
As someone who had to make this exact decision. Yes. So there definitely are "someone"s who'd do exactly this.
But if you are asking if the average consumer would do so? Unfortunately the answer is they probably don't mind using Facebook.
I understand what you're saying, but with Facebook it's different, because it's tied to your real identity, which changes the context a lot compared to other services.
In my case, because of that, getting a Facebook account is hard, if not impossible, because those "real identity" checks are obscure: I attempted twice to sign up for work-related reasons, and I failed both times despite providing IDs and pestering support.
I have literally NO idea why I cannot have a FB account.
However, even if I could, I hate Facebook so goddamn much that if this was my only option I would rather not use VR altogether.
And I love my Oculus Rift, especially for game development.
I am royally pissed off, and I will gladly go forward with a class action lawsuit.
Well, as someone who has been social media free since 2015 this really just encourages my feeling that I must not need one. (Even though I want some VR setup )
Well this is horrifying. I bought a Quest for a relative. He loves it, but he doesn't have a Facebook account, and has no interest in signing up. I have a Facebook account, but I don't use it, and I certainly don't want to connect my Oculus account. I guess we'll both have to sell our Quests. That means we'll lose all of our game purchases.
I came to Oculus with eyes wide open knowing it was a Facebook company, but this news still sucks.
Sometimes Facebook requires a photo ID to be submitted before "approving" a new account. Seems to happen when they suspect the person isn't real (fake name, or whatever).
My grandpa accidentally used a phone number to register when he was trying to log in. His original account got promptly locked and for months they would periodically lock it. He had to provide ID proof every time.
I don't use Facebook, but I totally recognize how valuable it is for my grandpa. Sadly, Facebook does not allow any mistakes to be made on its site, which is what older people tend to do when faced with new tech.
FWIW it's quite simple to make fake IDs that pass FB verification. Not that I support making FB accounts, even fraudulent ones. I'd like to see a class action privacy suit, because in conjunction with their real names policy, FB is forcing identity disclosure simply to use hardware.
I used a realistic sounding name, I tried several email addresses that were rejected as blocked, eventually I landed on an email that worked and my account got immediately disabled.
I'm sure I could eventually succeed, but I don't believe that it's fair to brush this off as something that anybody could do easily.
Your tweet indicates that you were stopped by the "government ID required" hoop. I've been there. I'm no graphics design wizard, but I foiled this by (1) taking a photograph of my actual government ID, (2) copying letters around to spell the name I'm known by, (3) applying some noise and blur filters (4) downsampling, and (5) redacting all PII except name & face. Compared to making an actual fake ID, I call this quite simple.
I imagine that you could use a plausible but fake name and a plausible but fake "random person" image, but I'm not interested in actually interacting with that website enough to try.
You might try a clean OS & browser install, to avoid trackers, and maybe if you've been banned a bunch already, use a VPN (or stop using a VPN) or use Starbucks wifi or something.
I don't recommend or use that shit website anymore, so the simple solution is stop doing the thing that's hurting you... but if you really need it for some reason then putting ~30min into making a fake id might be worthwhile.
third party cookies allowed means they can follow you around logged in or out. They can also follow you around by your fingerprint (IP+various browser info bits that uniquely identify you)
Is this confirmed? I made a second account at one point with a new email and have had zero issues with both. Although I rarely log into the first one, maybe once a month or so.
They're going to lose their games if they don't make any account anyway. So if they feel strongly about not making a proper account, they might as well try with a burner one and see how long it lasts?
Again, I've had and technically logged into both accounts concurrently for at least the past 3-5 years. So unless this only applies to new accounts, I have yet to have either one locked out.
That's why I was wondering if it's officially confirmed somewhere.
You can sue them. I think this is what it will take. I've got an orphaned GOG account that they are not responding to me about, and I am definitely entitled to access those games.
You sue; they restore access to moot the lawsuit, but then tie your real info listed on the suit to your account, no longer making it anonymous. Win-win? /sarc
I think for some service which for some reason had just FB signup I made a burner FB account and locked in all the privacy settings, I was thrown out of the account in under an hour. It kept asking for phone number which I didn't want to give.
Just rewatching "Person of Interest" and came across "Finch" casually remarking that he invented social networking in order to increase the quality of data gleaned from his totalitarian surveillance machine... (specifically to fill in the social graph data...).
The society at large was akin to natives of an undeveloped land being preyed upon by an advanced civilization. They were offered glass beads and trinkets, "a mirror to amuse yourself with, your highness!". And society at large behaved precisely as the historic natives.
I made a burner account to be able to login into certain sites that requires fb login. After 2 months without a phone number they disabled it, and since my email was also a burner they removed it. I had then to create an actual email account, and give them my phone number (I don't have a burner number) to be able to activate the account again. Besides my phone number, nothing else is real in there, even my profile image is from one of those "this person does not exist" sites.
Your phone number is probably already verified by being caught in their net from your friends and relatives. I assume it'd be a different situation with a burner number.
> My mum has a shadow facebook account for a number of reasons. She only has one friend, its on a shadow email. It's still active after a good 6 months.
I mean I don't know how I can make it any clearer....
Well this is a pointless discussion. I've tried it and can just repeat myself, try it yourself and see your new burner account locked. I've no insight to how and when your mom created her accounts.
not good enough. maybe if you only play solo games, but once you play with others facebook will get enough data to get an idea, if not identify who you really are. you may get tagged by your friends or family, connected to a location, etc, many ways to leak personal information. the only way to stay safe is to not log in to facebook
I'm sure this just changes which pipe usage data goes down, but this means Facebook directly gets to use your VR usage/purchases to market to you, and they will follow you around the web, because they know. I think that's the main reason folks generally dislike FB connect in the first place, but I don't want to speak for everyone :)
Having your IP address is identifiable enough (combined with all the other joys of big data) to Facebook and its marketing wing, so don't feel too confident, but if you don't care, then that's kind of the point.
Did you try to make a burner Facebook account? I tried doing this since my client needed something to be verified through FB and I don't have an account.
After initial login I was asked to verify myself by either providing ID (sic!) or a phone number.
Well, seems that after 2023 I'll just trash my Quest.
Whoa really? I deleted my Facebook in 2014, so I had no idea they actually did ID verification. If this is the case I guess you could spin up a burner number on Twilio, but this seems like a lot of work to go through. I have a Quest and will likely try these steps, but no way will I ever give Facebook my real identity.
Yep, I’ve had exactly the same thing happen to me. You might be able to delay it slightly if you use an email address they have in their records from other users (i.e. an email address some of your friends have stored for you in their contacts they’ve shared with Facebook). Set up a new gmail / Hotmail account they have no trace of existing before, the red flags go up and it will almost certainly get you to verify with some form of government ID, real phone number or possibly both.
I’ve supported Oculus since DK1 through every single iteration of hardware. This change by Facebook has just killed the brand entirely for me. I simply won’t sign up / back into Facebook (killed my account around 2011 as I found it overwhelmingly toxic and have never looked back) to use a piece of hardware I already purchased.
I had reason to try to create an FB burner account not so long ago, but I couldn't get through into any worthwhile practical use without providing photo ID, despite giving them actual pristine phone numbers on every try. My guess is they force it upon every identity where they don't already have linkability from phone books they've snooped through, and the like.
What do VPN help if you have Facebook firmware on your computer? You also need to never play with friends with the Rift online, or let them borrow your Wifi, etc. If you have Facebook apps or hardware you leak fingerprinting bits. The Rift has bluetooth for the controllers right? Better put it in a Farradays cage because your neighbors will rat on you to Zuckerberg.
There is no having a tiny bit of Facebook. If you give them a finger ...
If you're logged into the account on your computer, sure. Just make sure you either make all purchase on-device, or log into Oculus in a private window.
Not sure, does facebook just assume that everyone connecting from behind a NAT is the same person?
That seems like it could go poorly, like if one person in a household had been buying a secret birthday present or an engagement ring or researching divorce lawyers and then the targeted ads were associated to everyone in the house.
The definitely assume it's the same person. I get advertising clearly targeted at other people on my internet connection (eg. ads for property in a certain suburb, when I don't even actively look at property while another family member does).
How is that different from an Oculus account, though? FB could keep the accounts separate but still funnel data in from Oculus to FB (as I'm sure they'd already been doing). If you create a throwaway FB account just for your Oculus device, the only material difference is which DB the entry is in.
That's my point around changing the pipes. I think it's still meaningfully different though, because there are probably some first party benefits of going directly through FB, but that's speculation.
I'm not sure if you mean "an oculus account owned by Facebook anyway" - but in general terms I'd be somewhat surprised if a "real" game/software/service company (eg: Nintendo, gog.com) kept quasi-/il-legal shadow profiles that they actively tried to pair with your account.
Forcing users to violate their personal moral principles, upon which the decision of never using anything related to Facebook rests, is a big enough difference for many--myself included.
EDIT: I didn't know that Facebook bought Oculus some time ago, back in 2014--for some reason I thought it happened far more recently. I would make the case above for someone who had bought an Oculus device before Facebook's acquisition and now would be forced to use its platform, then. I don't have anything to do with Facebook, personally. I don't even use WhatsApp, so there's that for my moral integrity.
Can you do so without accepting their terms of service? They use every data source they can to build profiles for people so accepting the ToS is going to approve use of your information for as much as they can get away with.
They can do that without an FB account, Instagram and WhatsApp certainly funnel data into a shared storage that FaceBook can read too without me specifically connecting the accounts.
Not sure if you know what device you're talking about. The Oculus Quest is very much a platform, not a "peripheral". There's no device that the Quest connects to to be used as a peripheral. It's a completely stand alone computing device that serves as a platform for third party software, the same as your phone which requires an account.
I know the blog post refers to "Oculus devices" and does not in any way imply that the account is required only for the Quest. I agree that the Quest is not the same as their other headsets. I disagree that any of these should require an account.
Nothing in the announcement limits this to the Quest. It says Oculus "devices" including peripherals. What is the justification for requiring an account to use a peripheral that you plug into your computer?
Even if it were just the Quest: How is it reasonable to require an account to use a "stand alone computing device"? I have many stand alone computing devices in my home without the need for an account with their manufacturers.
I was already skeptical of my Oculus Rift when after buying it I learned I needed to create an account just to download drivers (WTF!) No other device on my computer requires an account to obtain drivers. I would love to hear the justification.
I'm not sure I follow this line of thought. Without an account, what would all the game purchases you make be associated with? What about friends lists? Support requests? The Oculus, and the vision for the product, is more akin to consoles than it is your run-of-the-mill PC.
Take oculus Rift as an example. You own a game (on a different platform) which supports VR (including your device). You plug your Rift in, calibrate the sensors/room and start playing the game. You shouldn't even need internet connection.
For support requests, use the serial number, like everywhere else.
Not the OP, but I was wondering the same thing. I also don't know which devices I'm talking about.
The thing is: to sell me stuff, you don't need to know my name. You don't need to keep tabs on me. You may offer it, but I may decline. Plenty of mortar-and-bricks-stores work this way: there are loyalty cards for tracking, but customers who forego them do not have to register to make a purchase.
Point in fact: there are also internet shops that allow such options. Sure, they need a bit of data to send the parcel and the confirmation/invoice/etc. But that doesn't require everyone to create a username/password combination - and some internet shops blissfully do not require that. They get paid and ship the purchase to the address specified, and that's it.
In this case, it seems purchases could be tied to the Oculus device specified during the purchase. While I can certainly imagine benefits to tying purchases to a user account (e.g., ability to use on multiple Oculus devices), I don't see a reason to require logging in. Am I overlooking something?
> In this case, it seems purchases could be tied to the Oculus device specified during the purchase. While I can certainly imagine benefits to tying purchases to a user account (e.g., ability to use on multiple Oculus devices), I don't see a reason to require logging in. Am I overlooking something?
If (when) the device fails, you would lose all of its associated software licenses and have to buy them again
The amount of people defending Razer is incredible. They fully buy the idea that internet connection and accounts are necessary to use a mouse, or simple features like changing the dpi.
I would call Oculus Rift as "just VR headset" but Oculus Quest would be reasonable to call as "standalone VR computer", not peripheral. Is requiring account for a "computer" reasonable is another question.
Well, both Linux and Windows let you have offline accounts (though the latter heavily discourages it, and I can’t speak for macOS), so there’s precedent in the desktop world for that functionality. Of course, why would Facebook bother to support it?
Considering how TVs can come with bloat, accounts and build advertising these days I wouldn’t be surprised if you ended up needing an account for your monitor.
I mean, my Nvidia card has had one for years because I didn’t realise I could’ve installed the drivers without creating one. What did a graphics card ever need with that? My mouse required one.
It used to work to start the Nvidia installer, let it unpack (other unpacking tools could most likely extract the archive as well) its contents, exit it and instead let Windows search the unpacked files for the correct driver by using the Windows driver selection dialog.
I'm not sure if this still works or if there are other things beside the driver that one would like to have installed nowadays.
I do not like the idea that I need a social media account to use a VR headset, regardless of the realities of using the oculus account data still ending up with facebook.
On Facebook you're required to use your real name. I don't know if the same is true of an Oculus account, but that's a major difference if not. Of course you can create a Facebook account with a fake name, but then you risk getting banned.
so here i am wondering if facebook would be challenged by a constant flood of anonymous [off graph] accounts constantly flooding in. how many 3card monte accounts per second would be required to keep the account verifier demon flooded
Australia for one. I returned my Ring camera when they removed the customisable motion detection zones and it no longer worked as advertised (to this day, many months later) on their own website.
I think you'd have a pretty good case in the UK too - the device is no longer fit for the purposes for which it was sold, and a user could point towards Lucky's statement as a company representation as to what the product was sold for.
I'm in a similar boat. I purchase a Quest a while back (unaware of the Facebook affiliation), and really enjoy it. I can't see myself using it again after this, however.
Do we expect Joey Beercan to know who the explicit owner of any company selling us a product? Is it their fault for not knowing? Is that really fair if that is the expectation?
The parent's downvotes makes it seem like HN expects the purchaser to know about the FB affiliation
As a VR developer I'm really sad to hear this news. I've always been against the walled garden approach. I feel like it's only a matter of time before they block SideQuest.
However - supposedly your oculus account will be valid until the end of 2022 [0]. At that point you could change to a newer hardware platform from another manufacturer.
It's literally impossible, in case you haven't tried recently.
If you don't want to send them a government issued photo ID, you can make a new account that lasts 10 minutes and then is locked on you and holds any accounts linked to it hostage as you can't sign in.
That's exactly why I went for the Rift S instead and bought all my games through Steam. So I can sell that piece of plastic and get something not feom Oculus.
they won't sell them to you, they are simply lying. it takes 30 seconds to make a burner account for the VR headset and you're done. it's stupid you have to do that, but I'm really sick of commenters pretending like they're gonna throw it away. this is the "I'm moving to canada of tech" and if they really are, show me the receipt after you buy both of them, please.
FB can not be trusted. I'd argue they should be dismantled.
Time after time they have not only expressed views that are downright alarming but they have been actively repeatedly caught out deliberately flaunting the law and fucking their customers. (not to mention their Russian connections and their part in the election tampering in the US).
Google are a naught boy compared to the actively evil FB org.
Non-bad companies could set up "will not get bought by Facebook" poison pills. Say they will release all IP to the public domain when acquired by Facebook. Enforceable contract with a third party.
I'm tired of reading these type of comments. Do you enjoy VR? Just create a facebook account, that's not a big deal. There's nothing evil there, people are just grasping for straws.
I deleted my FB account over 5 years ago. A few years after that, I tried creating a new one to sell something on Marketplace, and they closed my account, saying I needed to provide a driver's license due to fraud. I'm not giving FB my driver's license to sell something online, and I'm certainly not going to do it to play a video game in VR.
if you're a seller I'd imagine you have to give a form of ID yes, as a buyer they have pretty much all my information from credit card to address of residence.
I -just- decoupled Facebook from my Oculus account in preparation for deleting Facebook. I guess in two years I make a throw-away account, or better yet, move to Valve's current offering.
Theoretically, but their history suggests they won't. This is the company that made gaming on Linux viable, has a platform open to all VR hardware, and lets people sell keys on alternative stores without even taking a cut even though they are clearly in a very dominant market position.
They have their faults, but acting like a modern big tech company isn't one of them.
Same plan here. The Quest I got earlier this year is my first and will be my last Oculus device. Hopefully someone else makes a comparable headset soon (comparable = full wireless PCVR capability, like what the Quest + Virtual Desktop offers), ideally at a comparable price point as well... how hard can it be, the Quest is 1.5 years old by now, there's gotta be something at least similar in the works somewhere.
I'm able to play Half Life: Alyx natively on Linux with my Valve Index, as well as other games running through Proton. Not only does Valve support Linux natively; they've been funding development on GFX drivers and things like DXVK. Unfortunately OpenHMD (which would let you use the headset completely decoupled from Steam) doesn't support the Index yet, but it has been worked on and it looks like it just needs someone to finish up that work. Not that you necessarily care about Linux support, but it gives you an idea of how they feel about their products and their community.
The headset itself is expensive but it's the best consumer headset in existence right now. I can play for hours (depending on the game) without feeling like I need to stop. There's no single thing that's dramatically better than other headsets, but just about everything about it is at least somewhat better. Comfort, tracking, visuals, adjustability, and so on.
Anyway, Valve is just night-and-day different from Facebook. In fact they're the ones maintaining support for the Rift on Steam, not the other way around. Valve wants VR to be an open platform, and Facebook wants it to be a part of Facebook, entirely owned and controlled by them.
What happens if you were banned from Facebook (for example political censorship or other possible reasons I can't think of off the top of my head)? Is your Oculus device bricked and useless? I'm a fan of Oculus, but this is a bit of a turn off. But I guess if Apple makes their own VR headset, they probably require an Apple account but Apple isn't really a social network so feel less of a risk, same for Microsoft's Mixed Reality headsets too I'd imagine.
Then your purchases and stuff are lost too, I guess as WebXR matures though maybe there will be some great apps you can just pay directly for on the web, but I feel like if rumors of Apple making a headset they'll just skip WebXR and force the app store... I know other headsets including the Oculus supports WebXR but sorta feels like it's a conflict of interest to their own stores to me so wonder how much more advanced it'll get.
Apple is now using the notarization system on desktop to ban apps from companies that broke iOS App Store rules, so you could for instance get your drone strike death toll app that was making a political statement taken down and lose your desktop notarization (which was supposed to be about security only) on a totally unrelated app in retaliation.
Yeah seen that Apple is doing that for Epic's Fortnight. Won't be able to sign for Mac, but people could still install it if they turn off gatekeeper which I doubt many people would mess with, been a while since I've done that myself since I use dev tools. I think now on Catalina and newer Mac versions even more steps. Used to be a checkbox, but I think you have to use the terminal now?
Never really worked with Unreal but wonder if this will affect other games using their engine, not sure if there's like signed dylibs and stuff.
All this security stuff is cool but in a way more control. It's like you paid all this money for something but in a way you don't really own it. Like some graphic card company sells graphic cards including server graphic cards, but their driver's EULA doesn't allow you to use your desktop cards for server use. I guess the hardware being used 24/7 wasn't designed for that, but sounds like they should deny your warranty then instead of turning it into a copyright issue. Some game streaming company ran into this problem.
Discoverability for that is hell, though. If you don't already know about it from a friend, finding out your app isn't a virtual paperweight requires going down a knowledgebase rabbit hole:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24217116
This creates a chilling effect which puts my first ammendment rights at risk as an American, and it should be (and probably is if anyone actually bothered to correctly interpret the law anymore) illegal.
We're talking about an open social platform which half the world's population uses, so it's effectively a public space and the fact that a simple political opinion could be enough to cancel my account means that when hundreds of dollars are on the line, my voice may be effectively silenced.
It's a huge problem and even if you don't realize it now, it is going to be a huge political issue in the future.
And it has a simple solution, albeit an unsavory one to many of America's more free-market minded persons: If they are effectively a public space, then nationalize them and make it official.
That will never happen. The politician that sets it up will be voted out in the next election and everything he's done will be undone. Even as progressive as I am I will never vote for anyone who wants to nationalize a private company. That's what the CCP does, not America.
If America is unwilling to stomach nationalizing a private company, but will stomach privatizing a previously public domain, where do you think that's going to land us?
I agree with everything you said, but the fact remains that the US constitution defines what the US government can do, and Facebook is not a part of the US government. The first amendment does not have anything to do with the policies Facebook may choose to create and enforce on their private platform.
That doesn’t make it a first amendment problem. There’s only one legal case where private property was ruled to be subject to the 1st amendment - a company town where even the roads and sidewalks were owned by the company.
In contrast, if you don’t want to use or get banned from facebook, you can still communicate via SMS/MMS, google chat, email, GnuSocial/ActivityPub, twitter, and dozens of other options.
Actually, banning companies from moderating is probably a first amendment problem in the opposite direction - you’re forcing them to associate with you.
It's not that simple, and I hate it when it's inconsistent.
For example, even in the US, courts have established that Twitter is a public forum with respect to what politicians (such as Trump) say. But do other people get such protections?
In my country, Romania, the supreme court declared that Facebook is a public space, so if you say something like "the police can blow me" you'll get a letter from the police telling you so show up at the station so that they can fine you (swearing is illegal in Romania).
But Facebook can take down something I can say in public, meaning I'm not allowed free speech. It's not fair that I suffer all the consequences of a "public space", but none of the rights.
For example, even in the US, courts have established that Twitter is a public forum with respect to what politicians (such as Trump) say
IANAL but the court said Trump couldn't block you from his twitter account because his use of his feed made it a public forum. This was about Trump, not twitter. Twitter, AFAIK, wasn't forced to unblock the accounts trump had blocked.
This has zero to do with the 1st amendment. That is between you and the government. You have not such 1st amendment rights when dealing with a private company. All you can do with facebook is either do as they tell you, or drop them. There's not much middle ground.
And at one time, the 1st amendment didn't even exist. Then, the argument was, "You don't even have freedom of speech, so don't bother". Just wait and see, eventually a case will reach the Supreme Court which will make us finally face facts that you can only blur the lines so much when dealing with private companies operating large-scale and general social platforms. After a certain point, it's a public forum and your rights should be equally protected if Facebook is to operate in your jurisdiction.
VR adult games is a growing genre. These are real time games and as the tech gets better they can be much more engaging than a static video.
If Apple's device can't run them will that be significant in their adoption?
On topic, it's a reason not to own an FB VR device as I really don't want FB knowing which apps I run (nor do I want Apple knowing which apps I run for that matter)
oh yeah heard VR Porn is a thing haha, never looked into it. Then remember hearing that the VCR won because the porn industry liked it more. I got a feeling Apple will ban those sort of apps unless they support WebXR... but kinda like with iOS PWA and other APIs support is lacking a bit in Safari compared to Android or Chrome. I know there's concerns Apple will dump WebGL since they deprecated OpenGL, but they should be able to create a shim on top of the metal APIs, since that was done for DirectX on Windows.
I don't think it'll have a meaningful adoption-limiting effect, and honestly, this is the most interesting dynamic of technology right now.
Voice recognition is an extremely solved problem. A lot of the hard part of the AI---the stuff that appeared impossible in the '80s---works consistently on Google, Alexa, and Siri. It just needs to know enough about you to make intelligent guesses at your intent.
... which means it needs access to all that big data the big company collected on you and users like you.
There are technologies that are owned by big companies that will leverage them for ecosystem lock-in. Want a neat personal assistant? Sure; just use your Google account. Want some untethered VR? No problem; just login via Facebook. And that's generally how things will be; you don't have to use it, but you'll be off the cutting edge if you don't.
Because ecosystems are where the money is, and cutting-edge tech costs money. That's the iron law of capitalism and technological progress.
(I'm still waiting for my Linux phone. Thought it might be shipped to me in 2020, but with COVID slowing down production, 2021 looks more likely. But at least I'll feel some moral superiority once I have the thing in my hands that other people already have if they just give up and buy into a big-data vendor's ecosystem. ;) )
The general public doesn't give two shits about privacy and the amount of data that Facebook collects. They'll gladly go along with this to continue playing their games.
What this really means is that there is no untethered VR device for privacy-minded folks which make up a tiny portion of the overall VR users.
Honestly, the number of times an acquiring company has promised "we'll never do this" and then "done this" is so staggering, I think any acquisition promises should be codified with the FTC during the acquisition process as consent decrees or the like, and it should require regulatory permission to roll back. And then anything claimed not listed as such should just be assumed to be a lie.
The larger point here is that there needs to be sensible limits on how many markets or products a single company or group can operate in (among many other regulations). Otherwise the endless acquisitions by the global behemoths will continue right into techno-fascism of one kind or another.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] threadI take it you don't have any Razer devices.
Uh, yeah, updating drivers for mice. Just WTF? I get that it makes sense to have a capability of correcting bugs, but that should not require an app.
I would never buy another Razer product, specifically because of this.
It was: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/razer-synapse-3-removes-lo...
It would be great if they used the additional on board macro profiles as an 'out of the box' way of adjusting the mouse without software. You nerd the software to change mouse button 4/5 to native actions, otherwise it's just dpi control.
I got rid of my Razer mouse as my custom key settings wouldn't kick in for about 5 minutes after each reboot
And Synapse did require a login for several years. Looks like it doesn't anymore, thankfully: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/razer-synapse-3-removes-lo...
Personal mouse experience, I had two Razers that died right outside warranty, while my Logitech is at >6 years. Those were before their driver shenanigans, but the drivers aren't even the main reason I wouldn't switch back.
I mainly use one profile for games and set any keybinds I need in each one, but I've used automatic game detection for other software like repurposing the DPI adjustment buttons for quick shortcuts to blender's popup radial menus.
I plugged my G700s into a Windows machine with the Logitech bloatware suite installed, programmed it, and I've been using it on a Mac for years since then without any trouble
Must be why I'm using a Steelseries now.
Edit: Apparently they gave up on that idiotic requirement. Sorry Razer, too late. Not touching your products ever again.
Edit 2: And since we're actually talking about Oculus, for me it died when they sold to Facebook. You needed to be pretty naive to think it won't come down to this in the long run.
I will never buy a Razer product again.
Not just data, either. A year ago or so, Razer was pushing a cryptocurrency miner along with their driver package:
https://www.razer.com/eu-en/softminer
And it's incredibly creepy. Movement just feels like an extremely intimate piece of data.
Luckily my favorite purchases are on steam and 2 years gives me plenty of time to move on from my rift. I'm not going to be forced to use facebook.
Last thing I need is a remote exploit on my tracking cameras and facebook telling them exactly who and where I am.
Ugh. I guess Facebook is making a play to become the Steam/XBox Live of VR. Why can't we just have gaming peripherals anymore without some kind of platform tie-in?
As someone who prefers to play games alone, it's frustrating. The first five minutes after installing Steam is a constantly stream of "stfu and stop shoving game release/update/sale announcements in my face", "gtfo with the popup messages that a friend is playing a game", "wtf? why are you auto-logging me into the messenger", "no, I don't consent to you building a hardware inventory of my machine and using it for internal stats", and "jfc, please just leave me alone and let me play some games".
It's almost enough to make me buy a shack in Montana and support the post office.
You can download an executable installer from their website that is DRM free, can be installed offline, and you can keep a copy of forever.
The quotes have a real Tim Sweeney vibe to them.
Plug in a cartridge and go from power on to playing the game in a matter of seconds, with no privacy invasion.
I don't usually do this, but I don't think it is against the TOS, so here is my HB referral link [4] Here's also a 20% discount on the humble store for 30 days for one lucky person who isn't a subscriber [5]
[1] https://github.com/MayeulC/hb-downloader/tree/next-next
[2] https://github.com/talonius/hb-downloader
[3] https://gitlab.com/silver_rust/trove_downloader/
[4] https://www.humblebundle.com/subscription?refc=Y9dywp
[5] https://www.humblebundle.com/subscription/activate-discount?...
The good thing about Steam, which makes it good software in my opinion, is that you can easily customize it and turn features off, and nothing really gets forced down your throat. It's almost like Valve feels they actually have to make an effort to keep you as a customer. Compare that to anything from the tech giants.
If there's a way to turn off most of the recent UI updates I'd love to know how.
To keep Steam from starting when you log in, select "Steam" from the menu bar and then choose "Settings". Under "Interface", untick "Run Steam when my computer starts". While you're in here, uncheck "Notify me about additions or changes to my games, new releases, and upcoming releases" if you want Steam to not tell you about those. You can use "Set Taskbar Preferences" to select what options appear in the right click menu from the taskbar icon.
I run Steam in Small Mode, which makes it look like the old, old version of Steam before they introduced the full screen library. To do this, go to "Steam"->"Settings" and bring up the "Interface" group. Set "Select which Steam window appears when the program starts, and when you double click the Notification Tray icon" to "Library". Click okay and then select "View"->"Small Mode" to show the classic small Steam interface. To the right of the search box at the top of the screen is a selector where you can toggle what is shown - I set this to "Installed" so only installed games are shown. See here[0] for an example. This UI will revert if you uninstall a game - just go to "View"->"Small Mode" to set it again. If you set it before closing Steam then the next time you open Steam it will start in this mode.
To avoid being logged into the Friends system by default, open the "Friends" menu from the menu bar and choose "View Friends". Then click the cog in the upper right hand corner of the window that appears - this brings up the settings window. Set "Sign in to friends when Steam Client starts" to off. There are a bunch of notification settings in here - set them as you will.
To make the Steam store not suck (bandwidth), go to the "Library" tab in "Steam"->"Settings" and set "Low Bandwidth Mode", "Low Performance Mode", and "Disable Community Content".
To turn off Broadcasting, "Steam"->"Settings", "Broadcasting" group and set "Privacy setting" to "Broadcasting Disabled".
You can tell Steam to create desktop shortcuts or Start menu shortcuts if you want to not have to open Steam manually to play a game. When installing a game, tick the "Create desktop shortcut" or "Create start menu shortcut" when installing and then you can start the game (and Steam with it) by double clicking that icon. There is no option to automatically quit Steam after a game exits (because of course there isn't - "wHy WoUlD aNyBoDy WaNt To ClOsE sTeAm" the fanboys go). For installed games, you can right click and choose "Create Desktop Shortcut" to get a desktop shortcut for your game. You can use the "steam://" URL generated anywhere Windows accepts URLs to launch steam games.
Some people like auto-updates. Some people hate that they suck bandwidth, especially for single player games. Unfortunately, there is no option in not auto-update the game - you can chose "Always keep this game up to date", "Only update this game when I launch it", or "High Priority - Always auto-update this game before others" in the game properties. Setting this to "Only update this game when I launch it" will try to perform updates when you start a game - if you have this set and you have the downloads set to not download while in game, you should be able to force launch a game without updates and download will not start.
Set up "Offline Mode" now. If Steam is down and you haven't used "Offline Mode" recently then you won't be able to play your games with Steam offline. Ch...
The Switch is the first console I've used in years where it seems like the maker of the console actually wants me to play games.
(Anybody reading this - there are publicly available NFO files and posts from Fitgirl that indicate what is included in a release/repack. I would never advocate violating copyright, and I certainly do not do so in a personal capacity.)
The rest of your post stands, just thought you might be interested
In a world where everyone has a service subscription or a data hose to subsidize their hardware (see: most phones, game consoles, kitchen appliances, "smart assistants"), it's very difficult to be competitive just making hardware.
Given that the Oculus Quest is effectively a flagship phone with a strap attached to it at ~1/10 the sales volume of a flagship phone (rough figures: [0] [1]), it would be very difficult to even pay engineering expenses without a secondary income stream enabled by a) real-identity advertisement targeting/data sucking and b) ecosystem lock-in.
[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Galaxy-S20-series-sales-number... [1] https://arinsider.co/2020/05/25/data-dive-has-oculus-sold-80...
It's just like "Download our app" to get a service the company can easily provide through a Web page, but refuse to. It's not there to benefit you. It's there to benefit the company.
Steam is already the Steam of VR, btw. They have the flagship title (Alyx) and Oculus exclusives aren't necessarily compelling enough to make it a deal breaker.
Just imagine eye tracking tech in VR headsets. What a trove of data for advertisers! Did the user see may ad? For how long? Etc.
I hadn't imagined that before writing this, but they could do the exact same thing in the real world with AR. Did you spend some time looking at that car? You are interested in cars. Spending some time in the garden? Watching birds? Running? Etc. What's better than an always-on, always-ouside device which you use as a proxy to see things, and request information? MITM TLS (which Google technically does with Chrome) becomes useless if you just have access to the eyes.
Do you have a source?
I wondered if there was some correlation between Google pushing for HTTPS and their introduction of chrome, but I guess that's unrelated, as they didn't have this capability before (except for users of their toolbar).
Google does not (need to) do this. Download a program like Fiddler and check for yourself.
This was the whole oculus spirit since the beginning.
I'm not sure if you realize that there's only a handful of confirmed cases of voter fraud in the US in decades. The current system, based upon an address registration and someone confirming their information at the polling place, has achieved this result.
Unsurprisingly, this ends up hurting all sorts of people who do not use their legal names online: people who have just chosen other names, people who want to avoid being targeted or stalked, trans people, etc. They've updated this policy to allow for some of these situations (https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/facebook-real-names-1.336...) but folks still get banned for failing to comply.
At least this gives me enough time to sell my Oculus and buy from another company.
I deleted FB for a reason and it will stay that way.
A shame that their shitty growth hacking position will contribute more e-waste to the environment unless the headset can be fully jailbroken.
Realistically I’ll probably sell the quest, stick to buying steam games from now on, and buy a headset from a different company as soon as they get a wireless headset.
Or do they verify accounts in some way now?
An account with no connections is HELLA suspicious.
Well, that's a things from the past with hardware it seems. Effective obsolescence through corporate policy.
https://www.getdigital.eu/Alien-Facehugger-Plush.html
If it's connected to your desktop, it can also use all the dark patterns Facebook knows to tie it to your other activities ...
May well be insightful. Friends who have your email and phone number in a contact entry who also have FB and synced contacts - etc etc etc. May well have more information than just an email address and way to look at it is - would you bet a large sum of money that is all they have? Always a good way of putting perspective upon things I find.
I don't want to assume bad intent, but I find it hard to believe that someone could be so naive about the project and the organization controlling it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4gfpjk/palmer_lucke...
Let's be real, the reason he was wilfully naive is because they send him a big fat check, just like they did to the Whatsapp founders, in the same year I think.
I just wish they would at least be honest and say it instead of this whole "I thought our dreams would come true" talk.
"should have known" is what most of these comments are talking about. As a thought experiment assume he was lied to, most of these comments are talking about the ignorance and whether it was sincere. Was he this naive or is it easy to be this naive (i.e. self imposed ignorance) when there's a deal to be made.
Now that it has proven out as people expected, they're calling him out on it again. Perhaps other people will learn a lesson from it? I can hope.
Carmack also wanted to sell because he had built businesses before and wanted to focus on the technology without having to deal with survival.
It wouldn't surprise me if Luckey believed that would be the outcome. I think Zuck's strategy as CEO was also less clear then. Today it would be obvious, back then though, I'm not so sure.
I think Facebooks business strategy how to make money was pretty clear at that time as well. Just remember the [Facebook Home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home) Android launcher that allowed the company unprecedented access to the data on the device. https://gigaom.com/2013/04/04/why-facebook-home-bothers-me-i...
The one whose business idea it is to lock up all the world's information?
The one that, together with Quora and Instagram, shove a login screen in your face when you haplessly click the wrong link? When all you really wanted some some local business opening hours or contact information?
The one that already owns your contact information, and aren't afraid to tell you so, because they tricked any one of your friends into letting their app suck their contact book dry?
Let's not assume bad intent and recognize the reality that things change. That any corporate statement or policy is not true in perpetuity. It's very possible that at the time FB really did believe it. It has been 6 years since the acquisition after all.
Step 1: They get an credible offer for a ton of money.
Step 2: Their brain starts to spiral out of control and can't stop imagining all of the things they can do for themselves, their family, their friends, the world, etc
Step 3: They've just created millions of incentives for themselves.
It takes a very strong person to drive out the biases that money creates in our brains. Monetary incentives are the strongest bias creators, beaten (probably) only by sex and blood (i.e. family relations). Breaking them is the work of an iron will. You had better assume you'd do no better.
If the new captain doesn't make the promise, you can't give it much weight, and if it is Facebook, probably no weight even if they did :(
No wonder they keep making empty promises.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_...
Obviously Facebook can do what they want within the terms.
He should have known he couldn't promise that. He could not have known Facebook would do what they did but he should have been at least smart enough to know the limits of his own influence.
You can be naive, but naive doesn't mean you go online and argue that people who know better are wrong, which is what he did.
Now he knows better. He has changed his mind. Which is what any rational person should do when presented with new information.
On the one hand I won't vilify him.
On the other hand he merely met the base requirements for "rational thinking" - so I am not about to give him any accolades.
Isn't this exactly what being naive means?
Palmer was suffering from confident ignorance.
The point you make may be relevant for deciding damages, but even here there is a concept of Liquidated Damages [0] which is essentially the damages amount set at day 1 so the question of ascertaining the extent of wrong does not arise.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidated_damages
If he got it written into the contract then it is clear that he does not intend to pursue it.
If it was written into the contract and he pursues it then he will need to show that he has suffered because the contract was not executed and I fail to see how he could make that case and do so with enough teeth that it would matter to FB enough to reverse course.
A contract is a matter for civil law. Breaking a term of a contract doesn't automatically mean that a court will consider a remedy.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law)#Standing_requir...: in the US, "the plaintiff must have suffered or imminently will suffer injury".
I'm just saying that an injury is required in principle (with an appropriate citation), because the great-grandparent (by vijayr02) didn't think that was the case.
The example of UK bank overdraft charges in the Wikipedia article for instance can be seen as small powerless individuals vs large corporate.
In the Oculus case, a good lawyer should have been able to set out in the contract why this specific point is important to the seller (Palmer) and why significant damages are in order (damages credibility on future projects, which clearly could be multi-billion in scope).
I respect him for eating humble pie now.
I absolutely do not respect yet alone absolve him of not doing so originally. Why would one? There's nothing NEW that came to the table: Facebook can do what they want now, and crucially that was the case at the time of those promises.
Founders literally sign away their right to make these promises. Whether they're made out of ego, faith, hope, naivette, inocence, or just riding that payday high and feeling king of the world - acquired founders need to stop making them and we need to stop believing them; and holding accountable / not absolving is a step in that direction. They're not evil people, they don't need to be doxxed or torched... but it's a certain level of wrong to make promises you absolutely positively cannot deliver upon, and good will does not make such ignorance OK :-/
Sorry if that came harsh; I feel bad for Palmer... but hey, should we not feel worse for those who believed him and acted upon that belief??
Well, they don't have to. He could have insisted on writing this condition into the acquisition contract. But he obviously didn't. The most charitable reading of this is that he was just naive and didn't know that this was an option or that it would be necessary in order to enforce such a promise, but that seems unlikely. Acquiring this knowledge is no harder than posing the question to his M&A attorney. Hence...
> I absolutely do not t respect yet alone absolve him of not doing so originally. Why would one?
I think you made the right call here.
If you reverted ownership there's no way that FB are going to sign that contract (a small risk you could inadvertently lose the asset and the cost price, eg through an unforeseen loophole that favours the seller - lawyers should veto such things, surely).
Also, are you going to make it a perpetual term applied to all future owners? If not then FB can probably make an entity to sell it to. Or use a third-party login that itself requires Facebook login and workaround your selling constraints.
I like the idea of it: just practically I can't see how it would be workable to technically constrain a company in a contract of sale of that company.
Are there examples of where this has been done successfully?
It's entirely possible that FB would have balked, but that in itself would have been a useful data point that indicated that they had every intention of bundling the two products together.
In any case, the topic at hand is not so much whether such a deal could have been structured to work, but whether there are any circumstances short of willful ignorance where the founder could have made the promise he did in good faith. I don't see any.
Yes. In short, you expressly identify in the contract that the provision is for the benefit of Oculus Rift users, and then they gain the power to enforce it as “intended third-party beneficiaries”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_beneficiary
The examples I can find [there] don't seem to bear much similarity to this situation at all.
Ultimately, energy spent on Palmer distracts from getting Facebook to modify its behavior.
Its funny how in situations like this one, where one person facilitates another’s wrongdoing, they (Palmer) are put under the spotlight more so than the bad actor (Facebook)
You don't throw something into a wood chipper then get mad at the wood chipper for chopping it up - that's just what it does.
(Of course it's easy for me to say, I haven't spent $$$ on Oculus products)
It is entirely possible that some consumers, if not some developers / investors / etc, made choices and decisions based on those unequivocal claims.
This a thousand times. I wonder however what people like me can do from the outside, save for keep refusing to open a Facebook account.
“Do not anthropomorphize the lawnmower”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=38m34s
1. It's NOT binary; I generally try not to partake of "You're either with us or against us". We can hold multiple parties accountable, we can be objective about facts, and we can learn multiple lessons.
2. I'm not actually certain there's behaviour for Facebook to modify. They're a corporation with a wildly successful massive SSO program. They've acquired another smaller corporation. Integrating into the mothership SSO feels the right sensible choice from many perspectives. As an annoying privacy conscious geek, sure, I don't love Facebook integration. But this is a reasonable perspective from point of the corporation.
3. Which brings me back to - I still think the truest lesson learned is for all of us naive enough that for whatever unicorn reason, this wouldn't happen. At that includes shareholders, consumers, and the wild-eyed founders making promises :)
As I said, I don't know him, don't intend to bug him, doesn't bother me much, don't intend to "Harsh" on him. But he did have agency, and he did make some claims, and we should all learn some lessons on how to exercise agency and how to make/believe promises.
2. Read Ender's game or Dune or live through a civil war as a child or... whatever it takes to agree that a 22 year old can and should be regarded as a responsible, accountable human being. Otherwise really who can?
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/19/15366500/palmer-luckey-tr...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/how-your-oculus-...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/09/palmer-luckey-aundur...
Does that change your opinion?
> need to be doxxed or torched...
?
Not just acquired founders. In my opinion we should stop so readily believing in promises by founders, start ups, corporations, celebrities, politicians, etc. unless there is a strong track record keeping them and/or other reasons to believe the promise can and will be kept.
Getting people to (pre-/re-)purchase something should require to build up trust, not just grand visions and good marketing.
Does he deserve the blowback? Probably not.
Was it an extremely naive promise to make given historical experience and the company that acquired you? Absolutely.
This sentence seems self-contradictory. Once again, here's what Palmer said:
> I really believed it would continue to be the case for a variety of reasons. In hindsight, the downvotes from people with more real-world experience than me were definitely justified.
It sounds like he's agreeing that he should be getting the blowback, right? He made a promise he couldn't keep, people told him he wouldn't be able to keep it, he ignored them. He should have known better.
Probably not a great thing to confess to but I doubt I’d find myself caring what my acquirer was doing with their new real estate.
Palmer Luckey was in his very early 20s and had never been involved in an acquisition before. He acknowledged his mistake and his explanation makes complete sense. Even much more experienced people are prone to making this kind of mistake in the honeymoon period of an acquisition.
Who knows, maybe some (small amount) of people in similar positions actually follow through afterwards and do that.
Most humans will get very morally flexible once offered enough resources; this is precisely why we have contracts and courts, to create structural systems more capable of upholding agreements than individual humans can do alone.
Explain the mechanism by which a smart contract in this instance would both have made it impossible for Facebook to make this move and, if they did anyway, avoided the necessity of Palmer to sue them over it.
edit: and as ComputerGuru stated - such a clause can just as easily be put into a traditional contract
I guess it won't, so...
On second thought, the whole issue is weird because blockchain doesn't have a login concept.
Say I sell you some rope and as part of our contract I say that it shouldn't be used to execute people and you go and use it to hang someone.
How would you even go about expressing that in the world of a blockchain?
How does the blockchain world get to know that you have broken your side of the contract.
How does a blockchain contract enforce penalties for breaking a contract?
If you pay attention to most smart contract pitches, they polite side step this issue.
In Western Europe such things are generally free.
There may be some rare exceptions where you'd be able to pay a lot of money in the US for some experimental treatment not yet available in the public EU system but this is the exception not the rule. What you possibly won't get for free are non-critical treatments.
I will give one declaimer though that I live in Germany & the healthcare system is not in the same quality/extensiveness throughout the EU (the German system is among the best).
As an anecdotal example, many companies are now using instagram for image hosting that pester/ requires me to sign up. I say no thank you and move on, I'm not adversely affected but maybe that company loses some business.
Headsets are not cheap, but I am not really crying for not attaching it to my PC ever again. I just wonder who would want to develop against that environment. Not that there was that much available as it is.
If they do reimburse you, then it's just scary. The fact an unscrupulous entity like Facebook have such a strong hold in people life and business, opinions and privacy is a recipe for an Orwellian future (present?)
Virtual reality is the next frontier of cyberspace, a much more engulfing and immersive (if successful), I don't want Facebook to have so much power.
Even more interesting is I can remember having many a conversation about which headset to buy, always stating avoid oculus because facebook and yet the person buys oculus anyway only to later complain profusely about having a VR headset from facebook. In recent years this seems to be a problem, likely with current generations. Capitalism fails when you don’t exercise your freedom to make smart purchase decisions. If you don’t want facebook to have so much power stop buying them, stop using them, get your friends and family off and make them actually work for their customers.
Why shouldn't we expect more from companies? Promises should mean something. But really this is just another example of facebook undermining the basic fabric of society for its own gain.
No? Than it doesn't matter. The whole idea that because something is written into a contract that that automatically means that that his how things will be in the indefinite future is an illusion, and I've seen plenty of people burned that way. A contract only matters if (1) you are prepared to sue over it and (2) you will know what kind of remedy you want if you win the suit.
In this case the state of (1) is 'no' and the state of (2) doesn't matter because of (1).
A contract needs to be legal, and legal means what the law allows in the context. Does the law allow putting such provisions? I've been burnt by this in a rental agreement. Think about it this way: if we have a contract between both of us, where you agree that I'm going to kill you, I'm still going to jail. Having a contract doesn't make killing legal. This also applies to the rest of contracts. The provisions need to respect the law.
But the guy didn't have a contract, sold a patent-heavy company for $3bn (probably an army of lawyers involved) that netted him around $700mn. I'd just call this saving face.
Details are important.
Facebook are a joke of a company.
Taking climate change as an example: 100 b-corps going carbon-neutral aren't going to offset the damage Exxon causes to the environment.
You can say we just need to wait until consumers change their behavior and let the market sort it out, but isn’t that exactly what we’ve been trying and failing to do? At this rate it’s all but certain that climate change won’t be solved via market solutions.
What’s better is forcing the bad actors to stop doing bad. Fighting to pass a carbon tax regulation or a green new deal is what we need, and bandaids like b-corps are often a distraction that tricks people into thinking we can consume our way out of the problem.
It’s definitely not a guarantee, but mass movements can force change. Look at Bernie, he came pretty damn close to the nomination even with the entire upper class and media throwing their weight behind his opponents.
You are talking as if this is an either/or proposition. No, B-Corps won't solve our problems but if it moves the needle even a little, that's still a good thing, right?
To your other point about private solutions being good because they move the needle a little:
In my personal life I shop sustainably (but I’m not perfect or obsessive about it). I do think it’s a little better as a consumer to make ethical choices than not to.
But: the rhetoric around climate change as something individual choices will fix is extremely dangerous. If you ask your average person about what we can do to fix climate change, I’d guess most would go straight to market solutions. Why is that? Could it be because that’s what the entire marketing and media establishment wants us to focus on, because a collective solution will cost them a shit-ton of money?
Yes in a different world it’s not either or and we’d have individual and collective solutions working together to save the planet. In this world, however, the powerful have a vested interest in market-based solutions being the only options on the table.
Basically, yes I agree that ethical companies are better than unethical companies. But on a macro level, propaganda around ethical consumption is so dangerous imo that I’m not interested in contributing to it just to move the needle an imperceptible amount.
Charters can easily change, anything can be reincorporated at whim anywhere.
Also its typically just Shariah-Compliant investing rebranded for an Islamaphobic audience. S&P has a shariah index right across the border in Toronto Stock Exchanfe since forever while similar enterprisers push B-Corps and Public Benefit Corporations domestically as if they’ve “figured out” the code to sustainable for profit ventures through charter. Shariah in this context is very compatible with what these kind of investors and consumers are looking for, but they don't know it as they probably conflate it with human rights abuses.
People are just gullible, hope I unpacked that enough.
https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...
"Third, corporate directors are not required to maximize shareholder value. As the U.S. Supreme Court recently stated, "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so." ( BURWELL v. HOBBY LOBBY STORES, INC. ) In nearly all legal jurisdictions, disinterested and informed directors have the discretion to act in what they believe to be the interest of the business corporate entity, even if this differs from maximizing profits for present shareholders. Usually maximizing shareholder value is not a legal obligation, but the product of the pressure that activist shareholders, stock-based compensation schemes and financial markets impose on corporate directors. The Shareholder Value Myth , Eur. Fin. Rev. Lynn Stout (April 30, 2013) The Ideology of Shareholder Value Maxim (Watch), Evonomics"
A company's management has to act in the interest of shareholders, but that can be very loosely defined. A company that says "When making business decisions, we prefer protecting the environment over short-term profits, because our shareholders are humans living on Earth and without a good environment, our business would fail in the long-term" is not doing anything illegal. But if other companies don't follow suit, the eco-conscious company is in danger of being outcompeted.
You should still stop smoking (for your own good) but that alone won't change the world.
You should still stop smoking (for your own good)
But if one person in an average household quits that is a 25% reduction.
In the end that person and those around benefit.
You should still stop smoking (for your own good)
This is one of the reasons why you have to lower the cost of voting as much as possible - in terms of time, money, and hassle - if you want broader participation.
That said, influencing the votes of other people can make a huge difference.
The only privacy claims one may wish to take seriously are those that occur simultaneously with promises never to sell the company.
I used to use a location tracking app called Moves, which was a neat 24/7 location tracking lifelogging tool. Facebook, the very last people I would like to have that data, bought them, and presumably integrated it into my shadow profile.
Special thanks go to to the founders of Moves: Zsolt Szász, Jukka Partanen, Juho Pennanen, Aapo Kyrölä, and Aleksi Aaltonen. Hope you got paid selling private data that belongs to the users that entrusted it to you.
Yes! That's why you should be very very careful who you give your data because you are exactly one acquisition away from the same effect as a breach. Fortunately the GDPR affords some protection here, if the data was collected for one purpose it can not suddenly be used for another.
As for never selling the company: there is one other option: you could give users the option to destroy their data just prior to the transfer. Of course no acquirer would be interested but that is another way of dealing with it.
Facebook has already been fined under the GDPR so it looks like that enforcement is working.
If not that's an excellent example and it may lead to FB being held to account.
DPA's typically do not go on fishing expeditions, you have to alert them.
https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
Facebook has already been fined, and if they cross the line again they will be fined again, and quite possibly much higher.
If you know for a fact that Facebook is in some way or other currently not GDPR compliant then I would invite you to contact your local DPA.
Facebook, Google, Apple & Microsoft are arguably the companies that stand the most to lose from GDPR enforcement, you can bet that they are well aware of this.
If you have any sources for this fine, please post them.
From noyb's fight against Facebook (https://noyb.eu/en/open-letter), to me it is very clear that Facebook does not intend to comply with GDPR. They are actively trying to find loopholes, and according to noyd, also working with the Irish DPO to find and exploit loopholes. It is also worth noting that the total fines Google has faced from GDPR enforcement come to just under EUR 58 Mn (http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/GDPR-2020-Where-C...). 58 Mn is chump change compared to Google's total revenue, and unless the threat of the full 4% turnover fine becomes credible, I doubt it will lead to any better action.
Such a clause might work as long as it's part of the sale contract to adjust the sale price if any customers take that option.
The only winning move is not to play
So maybe not playing doesn’t really work.
I was thinking, in regards to some grandparent way up there, the same statement “don’t play” might have been true for Oculus in general.
What I mean to say is, don’t sell the company, ever. Then you can “control the outcome”.
Ah, but there lies another fallacy. You really can’t control the outcome even if you try to. Even if you don’t play, likely someone who wants to do the same thing as you, and exploit it, will find a way. Or maybe on their own, Oculus would have never found the right supporter who would honor privacy. Even if they had.. the below could happen.
For example, if Facebook hadn’t bought Oculus, maybe they would have bought the Vive product line from HTC (a bit far fetched) and compete against Oculus.. and then done the same privacy intruding measures.
So even if Oculus had held out and didn’t “play”, they might have been crushed anyway or the privacy problem could have just happened somewhere else.
I’m not saying we should give up trying to protect privacy and “play” the game... but that somehow in the competitive environment we are in, those playing the game are winning more over those who wish not to.
That said, maybe you should google the phrase "The only winning move is not to play". It's a movie quote ;-)
Shall we play a game?
Same. Nothing since has managed the same usefulness (although I suspect this is because iOS has somewhat neutered tracking apps - e.g. both OwnTracks and Gyroscope have significant issues tracking my phone.)
[edit, 23 minutes later]: Initial impressions were good but it's "detected" 4 segments of car movement when my phone hasn't moved a single inch. Same kind of issues that Gyroscope has, alas.
unless they have clear penalties for themselves in their EULA, and no clause that says they can change anything they want at any time. So yeah I guess you're right.
https://theconversation.com/shadow-profiles-facebook-knows-a...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/anger-mounts-after-facebooks-s...
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-...
https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-infor...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/11/facebook-shadow-profiles-h...
The House Committee interview in the last link (TechCrunch) shows that Zuckerberg does not like to use the "shadow profiles" term, but it's what others use to refer to Facebook's tracking of non-users.
An adage about difficulty trying to convince someone whose salary depends on their not being convinced comes to mind...
It's OK to wish to defend your company, but please do not lie; nobody forced you to comment here.
Nitpick: Rather, it's a condemnation of any data privacy claims; a data privacy practice is a technical measure that (by design if not in reality) makes it literally impossible for the attacker to collect private information in the first place. Nothing else actually provides security in practice.
a) If acquirer does X, the seller, Y, has the option to repurchase the company for $1. b) Any future acquirer must agree to the same contract. If it does not, Y must be extended the option to repurchase the company for $1 before the sale.
I don't think anything less could constitute a true promise that the acquirer would avoid X.
You could always so no and just continue running your company?
Even if you really do want to get out, you can probably get in some conditions if you are willing to reduce the price.
That's what I would assume at least
Consider the board on which you have posted - Often, the purchaser is acting over a greater time frame, and the seller has an immediate need. Competitors are at your heels, and you can't realistically enforce patents against the purchaser or competitors, while retaining the market agility that is required.
Using some combination of behaviour analysis, flagging new and/or cookie-less browsers, and (I suspect) human review FB have gone to great lengths to try and assure their customers that all humans have one and only one account under their true legal name and biographical details.
They're not very good at that. A pretty big chunk of people I have as friends have fake names, some of them even after me reporting their names for being fake.
> me reporting their names for being fake
So how does it feel to be in a punitive squad? Do they at least pay you well for all the atrocities?
I'd also strongly object to moving the needle even the tiniest amount on Facebook's metrics. They wouldn't force users to do this unless it benefitted them; that's plenty enough reason for a lot of people.
They probably don't have the infra set up (yet) to detect they are such SIM cards.
You are in a position to promise something where you have contractually retained control, or at least contractually secured an enforceable promise from the purchaser.
Otherwise, you are in the same position as Joe on the street.
It took 2.5 years for IBM to begin the process of gutting the consultancy they bought, for RedHat I think it'll probably take twice as long.
Then open firmware.
Then support Linux.
Then ...
Getting "company assurance at the highest level" is just as good as is the word of the person at the highest level. There are people for whom their word is their bond, but it's not very common.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/palmer-luckey-the-facebook-nea...
>Palmer Luckey: The Facebook Near-Billionaire Secretly Funding Trump’s Meme Machine
>Palmer Luckey—founder of Oculus—is funding a Trump group that circulates dirty memes about Hillary Clinton.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/19/15366500/palmer-luckey-tr...
>Palmer Luckey reportedly hid $100,000 donations to Trump behind Chrono Trigger references
>Oculus founder Palmer Luckey donated $100,000 to fund Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations through shell companies named after elements from classic video game Chrono Trigger, The Washington Post and Mother Jones report. News of the donation broke today, almost a month after Luckey announced he was leaving Facebook, but the money was handed over on January 4th — when he was presumably still under contract with the social media company.
They aren't done with a wink and a nudge, but everyone knows that they're bullshit, it lets the entrepreneur maintain his public image while letting the carnivore devour its meal in due course.
You can only make promises about what you control.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/30/17304792/whatsapp-jan-kou...
This development was trivially predictable right when Facebook acquired Oculus. Which is why I bought Vive instead.
You don't need to be a genius to see stuff like this ahead of time. All you have to do is refuse to be gaslit and be honest about the high-level drivers of corporate decision-making.
Still possible but most people will not that far to hide information from facebook.
Given the Oculus/FB fallout here I want to buy somewhere else.
And trusting Garmin seems a bit unlikely, sigh.
I've got 100+ VR games and never bought anything on the Oculus store. Steam games work just as well, and will be easier to use if you ever switch to another VR headset.
Nothing, though, compares to the irredeemable idiocy of forcing the user to have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard facing their play area in order to set up the guardian system, which you have to do essentially every time you use it because it will go out of alignment at a gnat's fart despite being screwed to the desk.
Did you just predict it happening "eventually"?
If you predicted it would happen before your headset was obsolete, I'd say you were wrong. And that's usually the important part for making a purchase. Six to seven years is enough lifetime for an early VR kit.
I was far from the only one who was saying this at the time. I don't believe Facebook had a significantly different reputation in 2014.
I also have a follow-up draft from 2016 that talks about how the things predicted in the blog post have already begun.
Dumb fucks.
Regarding people who ascribe benign intent to Facebook, it was first expressed by one M Zuckerberg. In 2004. And first reported by Business Insider in 2010.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
Really, comment got flagged?
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
From the 2014 HN thread[0]
>Please login using your Facebook account to continue.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469242
I had huge concerns regarding FB's purchase of Oculus at the time and I wasn't the only one. It was the single reason I did not buy an Oculus. It wasn't that I thought they would be brazen either, I just assumed they would be hoovering data up behind the scenes, and trading data between Oculus and FB.
If this announcement had occurred in 2014, it would not have been surprising, I think the concerns were clear from the outset to most of the community. The only people who were starry eyed were those who just wanted Oculus funded well and were happy to take the word of the founder.
That's not really true. Hipster antitrust wasn't a thing yet, so people weren't talking about it at your neighborhood Starbucks. But serious people were talking about it. Look at the conflicts of interest disclosures for prominent antitrust scholars... they were busy during that period.
Also, the infamous "Zuckerberg destroy mode" email is from 2012.
>Founder at Framework, formerly part of the Oculus founding team
I don't recall it being much different, but I _do_ recall the outcry from Oculus followers and fans when the buyout occurred. This is exactly what we predicted and the fact that PL was assuring us it wouldn't happen would seem to disagree with what you're saying. It seems you may have just been ignoring it at the time for what may be a very obvious reason.
It's gotta be hard to be a founder in a situation like this.
I'd like to believe him, but it is pretty hard to do so given the historic record of acquisitions to date.
For me the heuristic is simple: I won't believe a word a CEO that is selling his company says about what will happen post deal. They are no longer in control and should know better.
(I think he really did believe at the time that Facebook wouldn't Facebook it up.)
In the end it is nitpicking; the effect is much the same.
In any case, Luckey was a 20-year old kid who got some lenses to point in the right direction to give a decent FOV. He had a good Kickstarter, hired a CEO, and two years later he sold to Facebook for billions. Should he have made those promises? Probably not. Should any of us have taken his predictions seriously about what Facebook would do in 6 years, which is 50% longer than Luckey's adult life at that point? Also probably not.
Bad egg from the start from how they acquired tech and employees, to their exclusive policy on launch and their artificial compatibility issues with other headsets today, getting worse when selling out to Facebook is no surprise.
Which is why smart founders can still get away with making these statements during the acquisitions so they can continue to grow their company post close (which means their post close bonus also stays in tact) and then leave after their golden handcuffs are done (usually 2-5 years).
> For me the heuristic is simple: I won't believe a word a CEO that is selling his company says about what will happen post deal. They are no longer in control and should know better.
For me, its on the other side of the coin. If I'm a founder and someone gives me billions of dollars for both acquiring my company and an additional bonus to pump the company I'm 100% incentivized to do everything possible to ensure that...even making forward statements that I don't genuinely believe are going to happen.
For everyone else - don't trust anyting an acquirer says - follow what they do.
That's objectively not true. There are countless stories of companies unwittingly buying liabilities and lawsuits that they didn't know about or fully appreciate.
Agreed, but that's no different that ANY corporate statement on anything. Things change. A policy or statement may be true this year, but may not be true next year.
GitHub made many nice statements post-Microsoft acquisition, and you know what, Microsoft execs may even believe all of them today. In 5 years though - who knows.
>Of course he and FB had a pretty strong incentive to ensure that there wouldn't be an immediate break-off risk to the acquisition, and of course there was plenty of evidence from other acquisitions that this is how the world works.
That could be part of it. It could also be the case that FB just didn't make any decisions pertaining to this aspect of Oculus at that point in time. It could also be the case that FB had many different factions within its org that pushed for different things - one faction wanted to use FB login, another did not and the former faction won after a while.
This is less nefarious than people are making it out to be.
Look at his exit from FB and his funding of Trump groups in 2016.
His life, in its successes and failures, has often been the result of what appears to be optimistic naivety.
He believed BigCo FB would keep their word to him on FB login not being required. He believed FB wouldn’t essentially fire him for his political opinions as well.
We're also in a world where all the founders of Oculus have quit and no longer have a say in decisions like this. Facebook foundational employees and recent hires are running the show and the end game for Oculus is to give Facebook a platform that they control that is as pervasive as iOS or Android (or at least Xbox or PlayStation).
As a former Oculus and Facebook employee I'm torn by this. I always understood how a none trivial portion of the Oculus user base is extremely anti-Facebook, or even how people with Facebook accounts didn't want their Facebook account tied to Oculus. At the same time it would seriously reduce technical friction around using Facebook backend features in Oculus products. I know some folks would see this as a complete negative and I understand where you are coming from, but there are some interesting positive use cases as well.
> I'm mostly surprised that they haven't done this with Whatsapp or Instagram thus far, but they are doing it for Oculus accounts.
> > As of a few days ago, they're starting the process of moving Instagram DMs to Messenger, requiring a FB account. So, they are.
> > > The people I know in product at Facebook are certain it is an inevitability for their entire portfolio. That's second-party hearsay, so take it as you will, but it's my operating understanding that is their long term (multi-year) goal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/ic4ye1/new_oculus_u...
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his [possible billions] depends upon his not understanding it.
All that went out the window once the company was bought for 19B, sure both founders left a few years later, but their statements were false after the sale.
If it is not it's only because the current government judicial system is so full of spam-cases and it is so inefficient that it doesn't have room for these things.
The problem is that if Facebook had to pay out $20 million to make this go away they'd consider that to be entirely a cost worth paying.
That's kind of the whole point. Unless there is some sort of legally binding contract that says things won't change, and that contract can't be changed without consent of all parties, whatever BS comes out of some exec's mouth should just be completely ignored. All you should look at are the underlying incentives, and it was always clear that Oculus would be fully assimilated into FB.
I absolutely believe his post here. He was young and naive and believed the lies from the Facebook executives. Completely understandable and I hope this doesn't make people think he's a liar.
https://www.reddit.com/user/palmerluckey/submitted/
If anyone purchased the device relying upon Palmer Luckey's promises, that could be promissory estoppel.
(Not a lawyer, etc etc.)
I am not sure whether you are trying to justify this move, or whether you are questioning that it will have an economic impact or really what the point is.
As someone who had to make this exact decision. Yes. So there definitely are "someone"s who'd do exactly this.
But if you are asking if the average consumer would do so? Unfortunately the answer is they probably don't mind using Facebook.
In my case, because of that, getting a Facebook account is hard, if not impossible, because those "real identity" checks are obscure: I attempted twice to sign up for work-related reasons, and I failed both times despite providing IDs and pestering support. I have literally NO idea why I cannot have a FB account.
However, even if I could, I hate Facebook so goddamn much that if this was my only option I would rather not use VR altogether. And I love my Oculus Rift, especially for game development.
I am royally pissed off, and I will gladly go forward with a class action lawsuit.
I came to Oculus with eyes wide open knowing it was a Facebook company, but this news still sucks.
I don't use Facebook, but I totally recognize how valuable it is for my grandpa. Sadly, Facebook does not allow any mistakes to be made on its site, which is what older people tend to do when faced with new tech.
I used a realistic sounding name, I tried several email addresses that were rejected as blocked, eventually I landed on an email that worked and my account got immediately disabled.
I'm sure I could eventually succeed, but I don't believe that it's fair to brush this off as something that anybody could do easily.
I imagine that you could use a plausible but fake name and a plausible but fake "random person" image, but I'm not interested in actually interacting with that website enough to try.
You might try a clean OS & browser install, to avoid trackers, and maybe if you've been banned a bunch already, use a VPN (or stop using a VPN) or use Starbucks wifi or something.
Is it possible to do that with a Facebook account?
Their position is clear. They’re fucking creeps masquerading any user experience they create as anti-spam.
Don't create a burner account. Facebook's TOS is to lock burners and require an ID to unlock, so you'd be locking all your games out of access.
That's why I was wondering if it's officially confirmed somewhere.
I don’t think there are many people that are cognizant in how to break their social graph.
I’ve seen a few other hackernews comments corroborating it over the past year. But it isn't a common case so Facebook gets away with it.
Job done. raise the noise floor.
I ended up using my personal email address because that's how they want it.
My mum has a shadow facebook account for a number of reasons. She only has one friend, its on a shadow email. It's still active after a good 6 months.
it didn't require a phone number either. I mean it asked, but I didn't give it one.
So long as the emails dont bounce, you're good.
Simply not true. I suggest you try yourself and see how long the account stays unlocked.
I mean I don't know how I can make it any clearer....
Only if you use or log into your bogus FB account.
- create burner gmail
- create burner oculus name/account
- create burner Facebook account
- always use a VPN
It seems like you could completely remain anonymous and provide Facebook with data they could never correlate to a real person.
After initial login I was asked to verify myself by either providing ID (sic!) or a phone number.
Well, seems that after 2023 I'll just trash my Quest.
I’ve supported Oculus since DK1 through every single iteration of hardware. This change by Facebook has just killed the brand entirely for me. I simply won’t sign up / back into Facebook (killed my account around 2011 as I found it overwhelmingly toxic and have never looked back) to use a piece of hardware I already purchased.
There is no having a tiny bit of Facebook. If you give them a finger ...
That seems like it could go poorly, like if one person in a household had been buying a secret birthday present or an engagement ring or researching divorce lawyers and then the targeted ads were associated to everyone in the house.
EDIT: I didn't know that Facebook bought Oculus some time ago, back in 2014--for some reason I thought it happened far more recently. I would make the case above for someone who had bought an Oculus device before Facebook's acquisition and now would be forced to use its platform, then. I don't have anything to do with Facebook, personally. I don't even use WhatsApp, so there's that for my moral integrity.
In any case, I personally have never owned an Oculus or anything related to Facebook.
Fortunately, I haven't.
It's a peripheral, not a platform.
Even if it were just the Quest: How is it reasonable to require an account to use a "stand alone computing device"? I have many stand alone computing devices in my home without the need for an account with their manufacturers.
I was already skeptical of my Oculus Rift when after buying it I learned I needed to create an account just to download drivers (WTF!) No other device on my computer requires an account to obtain drivers. I would love to hear the justification.
Take oculus Rift as an example. You own a game (on a different platform) which supports VR (including your device). You plug your Rift in, calibrate the sensors/room and start playing the game. You shouldn't even need internet connection.
For support requests, use the serial number, like everywhere else.
Consoles work offline just fine.
"We require you create an account so that we can protect your personal data."
The thing is: to sell me stuff, you don't need to know my name. You don't need to keep tabs on me. You may offer it, but I may decline. Plenty of mortar-and-bricks-stores work this way: there are loyalty cards for tracking, but customers who forego them do not have to register to make a purchase.
Point in fact: there are also internet shops that allow such options. Sure, they need a bit of data to send the parcel and the confirmation/invoice/etc. But that doesn't require everyone to create a username/password combination - and some internet shops blissfully do not require that. They get paid and ship the purchase to the address specified, and that's it.
In this case, it seems purchases could be tied to the Oculus device specified during the purchase. While I can certainly imagine benefits to tying purchases to a user account (e.g., ability to use on multiple Oculus devices), I don't see a reason to require logging in. Am I overlooking something?
If (when) the device fails, you would lose all of its associated software licenses and have to buy them again
https://insider.razer.com/index.php?threads/i-need-an-accoun...
I mean, my Nvidia card has had one for years because I didn’t realise I could’ve installed the drivers without creating one. What did a graphics card ever need with that? My mouse required one.
I'm not sure if this still works or if there are other things beside the driver that one would like to have installed nowadays.
If you sign in to one of their accounts, you are functionally signing into the facebook website.
Not that he knows. https://theconversation.com/shadow-profiles-facebook-knows-a...
I've also spent a bit of money on Rift games. This is angering.
The parent's downvotes makes it seem like HN expects the purchaser to know about the FB affiliation
However - supposedly your oculus account will be valid until the end of 2022 [0]. At that point you could change to a newer hardware platform from another manufacturer.
[0] https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-facebook-account-required-ne...
If you don't want to send them a government issued photo ID, you can make a new account that lasts 10 minutes and then is locked on you and holds any accounts linked to it hostage as you can't sign in.
come on
I'll buy one of them from you for $300 or the pair for $500. That seems like the going price? Contact is in my profile, let me know.
they even have until 2023 before it matters.
EDIT: Oh, it's $399 retail in the US. Damn Europe.
FB can not be trusted. I'd argue they should be dismantled.
Time after time they have not only expressed views that are downright alarming but they have been actively repeatedly caught out deliberately flaunting the law and fucking their customers. (not to mention their Russian connections and their part in the election tampering in the US).
Google are a naught boy compared to the actively evil FB org.
If I ever move my racing sim rig to VR, it's definitely not going to be an Oculus.
All were predicted given their past record.
Don't buy from bad companies and this isn't an issue.
I'm super done with this company.
They have their faults, but acting like a modern big tech company isn't one of them.
The headset itself is expensive but it's the best consumer headset in existence right now. I can play for hours (depending on the game) without feeling like I need to stop. There's no single thing that's dramatically better than other headsets, but just about everything about it is at least somewhat better. Comfort, tracking, visuals, adjustability, and so on.
Anyway, Valve is just night-and-day different from Facebook. In fact they're the ones maintaining support for the Rift on Steam, not the other way around. Valve wants VR to be an open platform, and Facebook wants it to be a part of Facebook, entirely owned and controlled by them.
Then your purchases and stuff are lost too, I guess as WebXR matures though maybe there will be some great apps you can just pay directly for on the web, but I feel like if rumors of Apple making a headset they'll just skip WebXR and force the app store... I know other headsets including the Oculus supports WebXR but sorta feels like it's a conflict of interest to their own stores to me so wonder how much more advanced it'll get.
Never really worked with Unreal but wonder if this will affect other games using their engine, not sure if there's like signed dylibs and stuff.
All this security stuff is cool but in a way more control. It's like you paid all this money for something but in a way you don't really own it. Like some graphic card company sells graphic cards including server graphic cards, but their driver's EULA doesn't allow you to use your desktop cards for server use. I guess the hardware being used 24/7 wasn't designed for that, but sounds like they should deny your warranty then instead of turning it into a copyright issue. Some game streaming company ran into this problem.
It's a huge problem and even if you don't realize it now, it is going to be a huge political issue in the future.
In contrast, if you don’t want to use or get banned from facebook, you can still communicate via SMS/MMS, google chat, email, GnuSocial/ActivityPub, twitter, and dozens of other options.
Actually, banning companies from moderating is probably a first amendment problem in the opposite direction - you’re forcing them to associate with you.
For example, even in the US, courts have established that Twitter is a public forum with respect to what politicians (such as Trump) say. But do other people get such protections?
In my country, Romania, the supreme court declared that Facebook is a public space, so if you say something like "the police can blow me" you'll get a letter from the police telling you so show up at the station so that they can fine you (swearing is illegal in Romania).
But Facebook can take down something I can say in public, meaning I'm not allowed free speech. It's not fair that I suffer all the consequences of a "public space", but none of the rights.
IANAL but the court said Trump couldn't block you from his twitter account because his use of his feed made it a public forum. This was about Trump, not twitter. Twitter, AFAIK, wasn't forced to unblock the accounts trump had blocked.
If Apple's device can't run them will that be significant in their adoption?
On topic, it's a reason not to own an FB VR device as I really don't want FB knowing which apps I run (nor do I want Apple knowing which apps I run for that matter)
Your social credit goes down, of course
Voice recognition is an extremely solved problem. A lot of the hard part of the AI---the stuff that appeared impossible in the '80s---works consistently on Google, Alexa, and Siri. It just needs to know enough about you to make intelligent guesses at your intent.
... which means it needs access to all that big data the big company collected on you and users like you.
There are technologies that are owned by big companies that will leverage them for ecosystem lock-in. Want a neat personal assistant? Sure; just use your Google account. Want some untethered VR? No problem; just login via Facebook. And that's generally how things will be; you don't have to use it, but you'll be off the cutting edge if you don't.
Because ecosystems are where the money is, and cutting-edge tech costs money. That's the iron law of capitalism and technological progress.
(I'm still waiting for my Linux phone. Thought it might be shipped to me in 2020, but with COVID slowing down production, 2021 looks more likely. But at least I'll feel some moral superiority once I have the thing in my hands that other people already have if they just give up and buy into a big-data vendor's ecosystem. ;) )
What this really means is that there is no untethered VR device for privacy-minded folks which make up a tiny portion of the overall VR users.
And there are plenty of people who aren't techies who still don't want all their info going to facebook.
Tethered to Zuckerberg.