An anonymous reader shares a report: Google doesn't accept cryptocurrencies for ad buying, its payments service or its app store. Until recently, Google had banned several categories of crypto ads. Google hasn't touched NFTs. In a recent interview with Bloomberg Television, Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai copped that he "dabbled" in crypto, but didn't own any. Some staffers at Google have also dabbled with the technology, according to multiple current and former employees at the company. Still, Google hasn't laid out a plan for inserting itself into web3. A Google spokesperson said its mobile payments service is "working with several companies" such as Coinbase, Bitpay and Gemini "to support crypto cards, which transact in fiat currencies."

There are a few reasons Google might not want to dive into the new arena -- one is defensive. Web3 evangelists see the technology as "decentralized," controlled by its many participants. They draw stark contrasts to the business models of Google, Facebook and Amazon. These boosters see the blockchain as inherently trustworthy, unlike the current web titans. "Can't do evil > don't be evil," tweeted Chris Dixon, an Andreessen Horowitz partner, in a clear dig at Google. And many Silicon Valley visions for web3 activity, search engines and media decidedly don't involve advertising, Google's main business. But the company isn't completely averse to cryptocurrency. Google has been willing to take crypto money for its cloud business. In September, the division signed a deal with Dapper Labs, a Canadian blockchain company. It also has agreements with Hadera, Block.one and others. Given web3's escalating computing demands, Google will certainly look to ink more of these. (Google will have to weigh crypto's energy needs versus the company's zero-emissions targets.) In some ways, the wait-and-see strategy is typical of Pichai, who has a more deliberate management style than his predecessors. And that doesn't mean the company isn't quietly exploring the technology.

According to job listings on LinkedIn, Google appears to be working on an augmented reality device and operating system to pair with it. Ars Technica reports: On LinkedIn, operating system engineering director Mark Lucovsky announced that he has joined Google. He previously headed up mixed reality operating system work for Meta, and before that he was one of the key architects of Windows NT at Microsoft. "My role is to lead the Operating System team for Augmented Reality at Google," he wrote. He also posted a link to some job listings at Google that give the impression Google is getting just as serious about AR as Apple or Meta.

As 9to5Google discovered, one of the listings ("Senior Software Developer, Embedded, Augmented Reality OS") described Google's objective in clear terms: "Our team is building the software components that control and manage the hardware on our Augmented Reality (AR) products. These are the software components that run on the AR devices and are the closest to the hardware. As Google adds products to the AR portfolio, the OS Foundations team is the very first software team to work with new hardware." Other job listings say new hires will be working on an "innovative AR device." And one specifies that Google is "focused on making immersive computing accessible to billions of people through mobile devices." The roles are largely in the United States, but some are located in Waterloo, Ontario -- the HQ of Canadian smart glasses maker North, which Google acquired in 2020.

Gizmodo's David Nield explains what Web3 is, what it will mean for the future, and how exactly the third-generation internet differs from the first two. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from his report: Let's cut to the chase: For Web3 evangelists, it's a revolution; for skeptics, it's an overhyped house of cards that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. [...] As you might remember if you're of a certain age, Web 1.0 was the era of static webpages. Sites displayed news and information, and maybe you had your own little corner of the World Wide Web to show off your personal interests and hobbies. Images were discouraged -- they took up too much bandwidth -- and video was out of the question. With the dawn of the 21st century, Web 1.0 gave way to Web 2.0 -- a more dynamic, editable, user-driven internet. Static was out and webpages became more interactive and app-like (see Gmail, for example). Many of us signed up for social media accounts and blogs that we used to put our own content on the web in vast amounts. Images and video no longer reduced sites to a crawl, and we started sharing them in huge numbers. And now the dawn of Web3 is upon us. People define it in a few different ways, but at its core is the idea of decentralization, which we've seen with cryptocurrencies (key drivers of Web3). Rather than Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook (sorry, Meta) hoarding everything, the internet will supposedly become more democratized.

Key to this decentralization is blockchain technology, which creates publicly visible and verifiable ledgers of record that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere. The blockchain already underpins Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as well as a number of fledging technologies, and it's tightly interwoven into the future vision of everything that Web3 promises. The idea is that everything you do, from shopping to social media, is handled through the sane secure processes, with both more privacy and more transparency baked in. In some ways, Web3 is a mix of the two eras that came before it: The advanced, dynamic, app-like tech of the modern web, combined with the decentralized, user-driven philosophy that was around at the start of the internet, before billion- and trillion-dollar corporations owned everything. Web3 shifts the power dynamic from the giant tech entities back to the users -- or at least that's the theory.

In its current form, Web3 rewards users with tokens, which will eventually be used in a variety of ways, including currency or as votes to influence the future of technology. In this brave new world, the value generated by the web will be shared out between many more users and more companies and more services, with much-improved interoperability. NFTs are closely linked to the Web3 vision. [...] For our purposes here, the link between cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and Web3 is the foundation: the blockchain. Throw in some artificial intelligence and some machine learning to do everything from filter out unnecessary data to spot security threats, and you've got just about every emerging digital technology covered with Web3. Right now Ethereum is the blockchain attracting the most Web3 interest (it supports both a cryptocurrency and an NFT system, and you can do everything from make a payment through it to build an app on it).

Open source is no place for secrets. From a report: This is a critical time for the Good Chip Intel. After the vessel driftied through the Straits of Lateness towards the Rocks of Irrelevance, Captain Pat parachuted into the bridge to grab the helm and bark "Full steam ahead!" Its first berth at Alder Lake is generally seen as a return to competitive form, but that design started well before Gelsinger's return and there's still zero room for navigational errors in the expeditions ahead. At least one of the course corrections looks a bit rum. Intel has long realised the importance of supporting open source to keep its chips dancing with Linux. Unlike the halcyon days of Wintel dominance, though, this means being somewhat more open about the down-and-dirty details of exactly how its chips do their thing. You can't sign an NDA with the Linux kernel.

Chipmakers are notoriously paranoid: Silicon Valley was born in intrigue and suspicion. Despite Intel's iconic CEO Andy Grove making paranoia a corporate mantra, Intel became relatively relaxed. Qualcomm and Apple would throw you into their piranha pools merely for asking questions if they could, while Intel has learned to give as well as take. But it may be going back to bad habits. One of the new things not open to discussion is something called Software Defined Silicon (SDSi), about which Intel has nothing to say. Which is odd because it has just submitted supporting code for it to the Linux kernel. The code itself doesn't say anything about SDSi, instead adding a mechanism to control whatever it is via some authorised secure token. It basically unlocks hardware features when the right licence is applied. That's not new. Higher performance or extra features in electronic test equipment often comes present but disabled on the base models, and the punter can pay to play later. But what might it mean in SDSi and the Intel architecture?

It is expensive for Intel and OEMs alike to have multiple physical variants of anything; much better if you make one thing that does everything and charge for unlocking it. It's a variant of a trick discovered by hackish school kids in the late 1970s, where cheaper Casio scientific calculators used exactly the same hardware as the more expensive model. Casio just didn't print all the functions on the keyboards of the pleb kit. Future Intel chips will doubtless have cores and cache disabled until magic numbers appear, and with the SoC future beckoning that can extend to all manner of IO, acceleration, and co-processing features. It might even be there already. From engineering, marketing, and revenue perspectives, this is great. Intel could make an M1-like SoC that can be configured on the fly for different platforms, getting the design, performance, and fab efficiencies that Apple enjoys while making sense for multiple OEMs. There could be further revenue from software upgrades, or even subscription models.

Five days after Facebook changed its name to Meta, an Australian artist found herself blocked, with seemingly no recourse, from an account documenting nearly a decade of her life and work. From a report: In October, Thea-Mai Baumann, an Australian artist and technologist, found herself sitting on prime internet real estate. In 2012, she had started an Instagram account with the handle @metaverse, a name she used in her creative work. On the account, she documented her life in Brisbane, where she studied fine art, and her travels to Shanghai, where she built an augmented reality company called Metaverse Makeovers. She had fewer than 1,000 followers when Facebook, the parent company of Instagram, announced on Oct. 28 that it was changing its name. Henceforth, Facebook would be known as Meta, a reflection of its focus on the metaverse, a virtual world it sees as the future of the internet. In the days before, as word leaked out, Ms. Baumann began receiving messages from strangers offering to buy her Instagram handle. "You are now a millionaire," one person wrote on her account. Another warned: "fb isn't gonna buy it, they're gonna take it." On Nov. 2, exactly that happened.

Early that morning, when she tried to log in to Instagram, she found that the account had been disabled. A message on the screen read: "Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else." Whom, she wondered, was she now supposedly impersonating after nine years? She tried to verify her identity with Instagram, but weeks passed with no response, she said. She talked to an intellectual property lawyer but could afford only a review of Instagram's terms of service. "This account is a decade of my life and work. I didn't want my contribution to the metaverse to be wiped from the internet," she said. "That happens to women in tech, to women of color in tech, all the time," added Ms. Baumann, who has Vietnamese heritage.

Google's Pixel 6 line may have served as Android 12's big debut for higher-end phones, but Android 12 (Go edition) plans to bring many of the enhancements and features of Android 12 to lower-end phones, too. Google on Tuesday unveiled a host of new features for the Go edition that are set to roll out to devices in 2022. From a report: Google says that in addition to speed enhancements that'll help apps launch up to 30% faster, Android 12 (Go edition) will include a feature that'll save battery life and storage by automatically "hibernating apps that haven't been used for extended periods of time." And with the Files Go app, you'll be able to recover files within 30 days of deletion. Android 12 (Go edition) will also help you easily translate any content, listen to the news and share apps with nearby devices offline to save data, Google says. The company said Android Go has amassed 200 million users.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has told federal civilian agencies to patch systems affected by the Log4Shell vulnerability by Christmas Eve. From a report: The agency has added yesterday the Log4Shell bug (CVE-2021-44228) to its catalog of actively-exploited vulnerabilities, along with 12 other security flaws. According to this catalog, federal agencies have ten days at their disposal to test which of their internal apps and servers utilize the Log4j Java library, check if systems are vulnerable to the Log4Shell exploit, and patch affected servers. All of this must be done by December 24, according to a timeline provided in the catalog. In addition, CISA has also launched yesterday a dedicated web page providing guidance to the US public and private sector regarding the Log4Shell vulnerability.

The U.K.'s antitrust watchdog has given the clearest signal yet that interventions under an upcoming reform of the country's competition rules will target tech giants Apple and Google -- including their duopolistic command of the mobile market, via iOS and Android; their respective app stores; and the browsers and services bundled with mobile devices running their OSes. From a report: So it could mean good news for third-party developers trying to get oxygen for alternatives to dominant Apple and Google apps and services down the line. Publishing the first part of a wide-ranging mobile ecosystem market study -- which was announced this summer -- the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said today that it has "provisionally" found Apple and Google have been able to leverage their market power to create "largely self-contained ecosystems"; and that the degree of lock-in they wield is damaging competition by making it "extremely difficult for any other firm to enter and compete meaningfully with a new system." "The CMA is concerned that this is leading to less competition and meaningful choice for customers," the watchdog writes in a press release. "People also appear to be missing out on the full benefit of innovative new products and services -- such as so-called 'web apps' and new ways to play games through cloud services on iOS devices."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Four years running, we've been jazzed by the potential of HDMI 2.1 -- the relatively new video connector standard that can provide variable refresh rates (VRR), automatic low latency connections (ALLM), and of course, a giant pipe with 48Gbps of bandwidth (and fixed rate signaling) to deliver up to 10K resolution and up to a 120Hz refresh rate depending on your cable and compression. But today, I'm learning that not only are all of those features technically optional, but that the HDMI standards body owner actually encourages TV and monitor manufacturers that have none of those things -- zip, zilch, zero -- to effectively lie and call them "HDMI 2.1" anyhow. That's the word from TFTCentral, which confronted the HDMI Licensing Administrator with the news that Xiaomi was selling an "HDMI 2.1" monitor that supported no HDMI 2.1 features, and was told this was a perfectly reasonable state of affairs. It's infuriating.

It means countless people, some of whom we've encouraged in our reviews to seek out HDMI 2.1 products, may get fooled into fake futureproofing if they don't look at the fine print to see whether features like ALLM, VRR, or even high refresh rates are possible. Worse, they'll get fooled for no particularly good reason: there was a perfectly good version of HDMI without those features called HDMI 2.0, but the HDMI Licensing Administrator decided to kill off that brand when it introduced the new one. Very little of this is actually news, I'm seeing -- we technically should have known that HDMI 2.1's marquee features would be optional for a while now, and here at The Verge we've seen many a TV ship without full support. In one story about shopping for the best gaming TV for PS5 and Xbox Series X, we characterized it as "early growing pains."

Thelasko shares a report from The New York Times: In Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles, massive billboards recently popped up declaring, "Birds Aren't Real." On Instagram and TikTok, Birds Aren't Real accounts have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral. Last month, Birds Aren't Real adherents even protested outside Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco to demand that the company change its bird logo. The events were all connected by a Gen Z-fueled conspiracy theory, which posits that birds don't exist and are really drone replicas installed by the U.S. government to spy on Americans. Hundreds of thousands of young people have joined the movement, wearing Birds Aren't Real T-shirts, swarming rallies and spreading the slogan.

It might smack of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by an elite cabal of child-trafficking Democrats. Except that the creator of Birds Aren't Real and the movement's followers are in on a joke: They know that birds are, in fact, real and that their theory is made up. What Birds Aren't Real truly is, they say, is a parody social movement with a purpose. In a post-truth world dominated by online conspiracy theories, young people have coalesced around the effort to thumb their nose at, fight and poke fun at misinformation. It's Gen Z's attempt to upend the rabbit hole with absurdism. [...] At the center of the movement is Peter McIndoe, 23, a floppy-haired college dropout in Memphis who created Birds Aren't Real on a whim in 2017. For years, he stayed in character as the conspiracy theory's chief believer, commanding acolytes to rage against those who challenged his dogma. But now, Mr. McIndoe said in an interview, he is ready to reveal the parody lest people think birds really are drones. "Dealing in the world of misinformation for the past few years, we've been really conscious of the line we walk," he said. "The idea is meant to be so preposterous, but we make sure nothing we're saying is too realistic. That's a consideration with coming out of character." [...]

Mr. McIndoe now has big plans for 2022. Breaking character is necessary to help Birds Aren't Real leap to the next level and forswear actual conspiracy theorists, he said. He added that he hoped to collaborate with major content creators and independent media like Channel 5 News, which is aimed at helping people make sense of America's current state and the internet. "I have a lot of excitement for what the future of this could be as an actual force for good," he said. "Yes, we have been intentionally spreading misinformation for the past four years, but it's with a purpose. It's about holding up a mirror to America in the internet age."

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report by Gizmodo, written by Isaac Schultz: The Dark Matter Radio project is attempting to detect hidden photons in a specific frequency range by methodically turning the dial, in what amounts to a patient, sweeping search of the wavelengths where such a particle could sound off. Later generations of the radio will hunt axions. [...] The current Dark Matter Radio experiment is the prototype, or Pathfinder, for larger projects down the line. It consists of a liter-volume cylinder made of superconducting niobium metal, around which is tightly wound niobium wire. It looks a bit like someone wound guitar string on a spool's vertical axis instead of its horizontal axis. That's the Pathfinder's inductor. If a hidden photon resonating at the frequency the Pathfinder was tuned to passed through it, the change in magnetic field would induce a voltage around the contraption's inductor. "The null hypothesis is that there shouldn't be any radio waves inside of that box unless, in this case, hidden photons, which are our particular flavor of dark matter," said Stephen Kuenstner, a physicist at Stanford University and a member of the DM Radio team. Hidden photons "can pass through the box and they have some probability of interacting with the circuit in the same way that a radio wave would," Kuenstner said.

To amplify any signal the Pathfinder picks up, there's a hexagonal shield of niobium plates sheathing the aforesaid components that acts as a capacitor. That amplified signal is then transported to a quantum sensor called a SQUID (a Superconducting QUantum Interference Device), a technology invented by the Ford Motor Company in the 1960s. The SQUID lives on the bottom of the radio and measures and records any signals picked up. The smaller the expected mass for the axion becomes, the more elusive the particle is, as its interactions with ordinary matter are proportional to its mass. So it's important that the next generation of DM Radio becomes more sensitive. The way the experiment is set up, "the frequency on the dial is the mass of the axion," [said Kent Irwin, a physicist at Stanford University and SLAC and the principal investigator of Dark Matter Radio]. Convenient! The mass of these particles doesn't even compare to the smallest things you might think of, like atoms or quarks. These particles would be somewhere between a trillionth and a millionth of an electronvolt, and an electronvolt is about a billionth of a proton's mass.

The helium Pathfinder uses is gaseous, and remains a relatively warm 4 kelvin (in other words, four degrees above absolute zero), but the next experiment -- Dark Matter Radio 50L -- will use liquified helium, cooled to less than one degree above absolute zero. All the better for hearing dark matter with. DM Radio 50L sits in the corner of a large room in the Hansen Experimental Physics Lab at Stanford. The room looks a little bit like the TV room in Willy Wonka's factory; it has high ceilings, lots of inscrutable equipment, and is glaringly white. Two 6-foot-tall dilution refrigerators on one side, abutting a deep closet, are the radio. The two machines are fed gaseous helium sitting in tanks in the next room, which they then cool down into liquid helium of a frigid 2 kelvin. Magnets inside gold-plated copper and aluminum sheathes will do the job of converting any detected axions into radio waves for physicists to interpret. "The particle physics community is -- the analogy is often said -- just like a battleship. It takes a while to turn and it has a lot of momentum," Irwin said. "So even though I think that there's a lot of reasons to believe that these radio-like dark matter signals are more attractive -- the axionic signals -- than [Weakly Interactinv Massive Particles (WIMPs)], there's still a lot of giant experiments searching for little things, which is good." The team behind the Dark Matter Radio is "currently working with the Department of Energy on a next-next-generation experiment that will look for axions in a cubic meter, hence its name of DM Radio-m3," adds Gizmodo. "In the more distant future, Irwin and his team have aspirations for a project called DM Radio-GUT, which would be closer to the scale of some of the largest physics experiments on the planet."

"All told, Irwin said, the favored area for axion mass could be searched in the next couple of decades using larger experiments -- though the team could simply find an axion before then, potentially ending the hunt for dark matter in its entirety. With enough listening, we might have an entirely new particle for the textbooks. Or maybe there'll be radio silence."

Longtime Facebook veteran Andrew Bosworth insists that political and COVID-19 misinformation are societal problems rather than issues that have been magnified by social networks. From a report: Critics say Facebook and other social networks have played a significant role in vaccine hesitancy and the spread of political misinformation. "Individual humans are the ones who choose to believe or not believe a thing. They are the ones who choose to share or not share a thing," Bosworth said in an interview with "Axios on HBO." "I don't feel comfortable at all saying they don't have a voice because I don't like what they said." Bosworth has been leading Facebook's hardware efforts, including those in virtual and augmented reality. Next year he will become CTO for Meta, Facebook's parent company. Asked whether vaccine hesitancy would be the same with or without social media, Bosworth defended Facebook's role in combatting COVID, noting that the company ran one of the largest information campaigns in the world to spread authoritative information.

The Mozilla Foundation today released its financial report for 2020. As usual, this gives us a good picture of the organization's financial health from a year ago, but for the first time this year, Mozilla also provided us with more recent data. From a report: It's no secret that Mozilla recently went through a number of difficult years, with major layoffs in 2020 as it restructured its for-profit arm, Mozilla Corporation. Its flagship Firefox browser, despite a number of technical advances, is also struggling in a marketplace that is now dominated by Chromium-based browsers. Still, in 2020, Mozilla Corporation's revenue was $466 million from its search partnerships (largely driven by its search deal with Google), subscriptions and advertising revenue. That's essentially the same as in 2019, when Mozilla Corporation generated $465 million from these sources.

For 2021, the organization forecasts revenue of over $500 million. What's maybe most important, though, is that Mozilla's new products like its Mozilla VPN service, Firefox Relay Premium, Pocket and other commercial initiatives are slowly but surely starting to pay off. As Mozilla executive VP Angela Plohman and CFO Eric Muhlheim noted in today's announcement, revenue from new product offerings will grow 150% this year and account for 14% of the organization's revenue in 2021. The Mozilla VPN service saw a revenue increase of 450% from 2020 to 2021.

Toyota is charging drivers for the convenience of using their key fobs to remotely start their cars. From a report: According to a report from The Drive, Toyota models 2018 or newer will need a subscription in order for the key fob to support remote start functionality. As The Drive notes, buyers are given the option to choose from an array of Connected Services when purchasing a new Toyota, and one of those services -- called Remote Connect -- just so happens to include the ability to remotely start your car with your key fob. Buyers are offered a free trial of Remote Connect, but the length of that trial depends on the audio package that's included with the vehicle.

The American military news site Defense One shares a cautionary tale from top U.S. Air Force Major General Daniel Simpson (assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance). Simpson describes their experience with an experimental AI-based target recognition program that had seemed to be performing well: Initially, the AI was fed data from a sensor that looked for a single surface-to-surface missile at an oblique angle, Simpson said. Then it was fed data from another sensor that looked for multiple missiles at a near-vertical angle. "What a surprise: the algorithm did not perform well. It actually was accurate maybe about 25 percent of the time," he said.

That's an example of what's sometimes called brittle AI, which "occurs when any algorithm cannot generalize or adapt to conditions outside a narrow set of assumptions," according to a 2020 report by researcher and former Navy aviator Missy Cummings. When the data used to train the algorithm consists of too much of one type of image or sensor data from a unique vantage point, and not enough from other vantages, distances, or conditions, you get brittleness, Cummings said. In settings like driverless-car experiments, researchers will just collect more data for training. But that can be very difficult in military settings where there might be a whole lot of data of one type — say overhead satellite or drone imagery — but very little of any other type because it wasn't useful on the battlefield...

Simpson said the low accuracy rate of the algorithm wasn't the most worrying part of the exercise. While the algorithm was only right 25 percent of the time, he said, "It was confident that it was right 90 percent of the time, so it was confidently wrong. And that's not the algorithm's fault. It's because we fed it the wrong training data."

Ars Technica's reviews editor remembers how Google Toolbar launched back when Internet Explorer "had a rock-solid monopoly" on December 11, 2000, and marked Google's first foray into browser ownership. "Rather than idly sit by and live under Internet Explorer's rule, Google's plan was to hijack Microsoft's browser with various plugins." Once upon a time, Toolbar.google.com offered to guide any wayward Internet Explorer users across the web with the power of Google.... It also patched up long-neglected Internet Explorer with new features, like highlighted search terms in pages, pop-up blocking, spell check, autofill, and Google Translate. Phase 2 of the hijack plan was Google Gears, which augmented IE with new APIs for web developers. Eventually, Google stopped fixing other companies' browsers and launched Google Chrome in 2008, which would make all of this obsolete.
But it ended as Google finally pulled the plug this week on "a dusty, forgotten server" that had spent nearly 21 years blurting out "Take the best of Google everywhere on the web!" Now, it redirects to a support page saying "Google Toolbar is no longer available for installation. Instead, you can download and install Google Chrome." The good news is that we wrote most of this post at the end of November, so this might be the Internet's very last hands-on of the now-dead product....

To say the app had been neglected is an understatement. The about page read, "Copyright 2014 Google," though Google definitely stopped performing maintenance on Toolbar before that. You could still do a Google Search, and you could still sign into Google Toolbar, but so much there was broken or a time capsule from a bygone era....

The "share" settings were a bloodbath, listing options for Google Reader (killed July 2013), Orkut (killed September 2014), Google+ (killed April 2019), and Google Bookmarks (killed September 2021). There were also search shortcuts for Google Blog Search (killed May 2011) and Picasa Web Albums (dead May 2016)....

The spell-check servers didn't work anymore, and I couldn't translate anything. The baked-in-by-default connections to Google+ and Google Bookmarks would also let you know that those products have been shut down. Even some of the "working" integrations, like Gmail, didn't really work because Gmail no longer supports Internet Explorer....

One feature that really blew my mind was a button that said, "Turn off features that send information." Google Toolbar apparently had a one-click privacy kill switch back in the day.

"Windows Me was unstable, unloved and unusable," remembered Computerworld last year, on the 20th anniversary of its release, calling it "a stink bomb of an operating system." Windows Me was a ghastly, slapdash piece of work, incompatible with lots of hardware and software. It frequently failed during the installation process — which should have been the first sign for people that this was an operating system they shouldn't try.Often, when you tried to shut it down, it declined to do so, like a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum over being forced to go to sleep. It was slow and insecure. Its web browser, Internet Explorer, frequently refused to load web pages.
But they ultimately argue that it wasn't as bad as Windows Vista, which "simply refused to run, or ran so badly it was useless on countless PCs. Not just old PCs, but even newly bought PCs, right out of the box, with Vista installed." And they conclude that the worst Microsoft OS of all is still Windows 8. ("You want bad? You want stupid? You want an operating system that not only was roundly reviled by consumers and businesses alike, but also set Microsoft's business plans back years?")

Slashdot reader alaskana98 even remembers Windows ME semi-fondly as "the last Microsoft OS to use the Windows 95 codebase." While rightly being panned as a buggy and crash-prone OS — indeed it was labelled as the worst version of Windows ever released by Computer World — it did introduce a number of features that continue on to this very day. Those features include:

-A personalized start menu that would show your most recently accessed programs, today a common feature in the Windows landscape.
-Software support for DVD playback. Previously one needed a dedicated card to playback DVDs.
-Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player 7, allowing home users to create, edit and burn their own digital home movies. While seemingly pedestrian in today's times, these were groundbreaking features for home users in the year 2000.
-The first iteration of System Restore — imagine a modern version of Windows not having the ability to conveniently restore to a working configuration — before Windows ME, this was simply not a possibility for the average home user unless you had a rigorous backup routine.
-The removal of real-mode DOS. While very controversial at the time, this change arguably improved the speed and reliability of the boot process.

Love it or hate it (well, lets face it, if you were a computer user at that point you probably hated it) — Windows ME did make several important contributions to the modern OS landscape that are often overlooked to this day. Do you have any stories from the heady days of late 2000 when Windows ME was first released?
Slashdot reader Z00L00K remembers in a comment that "The removal of real-mode DOS is what REALLY made ME impossible to use for most of us at the time. It broke backwards compatibility so hard that the only way out was to use any of the earlier versions of Windows instead!"

Is this re-awakening images of the year 2000 for anyone? Share your own memories and thoughts in the comments.

What do you remember about Windows ME?

"A study in 2019 found that the spatial memory used for navigating through the world tends to be worse for people who've made extensive use of map apps and GPS devices..." reports NBC News.

But that's just the beginning, according to Adrian Ward, who studies psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. NBC says Ward's research suggests "People who lean on a search engine such as Google may get the right answers but they can also end up with a wrong idea of how strong their own memory is." In Ward's research, published in October in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, he used a series of eight experiments to test how people used and thought about their own knowledge as they completed short quizzes of general knowledge. Some participants had access to Google while answering the questions — "What is the most widely spoken language in the world?" was one — while others did not. They also completed surveys. He found that people who used Google were more confident in their own ability to think and remember, and erroneously predicted that they would know significantly more in future quizzes without the help of the internet. Ward attributed that to Google's design: simple and easy, less like a library and more like a "neural prosthetic" that simulates a search in a human brain.

"The speed makes it so you never understand what you don't know," Ward said.

The findings echo and build on earlier research, including a widely cited 2011 paper on the "Google effect": a phenomenon in which people are less likely to remember information if they know they can find it later on the internet.... In a review of recent studies in the field, published in September, researchers at Duke University found that the "externalization" of memories into digital spheres "changes what people attend to and remember about their own experiences." Digital media is new and different, they wrote, because of factors such as how easily images are edited or the huge number of memories at people's fingertips.

Each photographic cue means another chance for a memory to be "updated," maybe with a false impression, and each manipulation of a piece of social media content is a chance for distortion, wrote the researchers, doctoral student Emmaline Drew Eliseev and Elizabeth Marsh, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of a lab dedicated to studying memory.

After sentencing one of the "Capitol Hill rioters" to 41 months in prison, a judge added that anyone with Facebook and Instagram posts like his would be "well advised" to just plead guilty right away. "You couldn't have beat this if you went to trial on the evidence that I saw."

And other rioters are now learning the same thing, reports the Associated Press: Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson read aloud some of Russell Peterson's posts about the riot before she sentenced the Pennsylvania man to 30 days imprisonment. "Overall I had fun lol," Peterson posted on Facebook. The judge told Peterson that his posts made it "extraordinarily difficult" for her to show him leniency....

Among the biggest takeaways so far from the Justice Department's prosecution of the insurrection is how large a role social media has played, with much of the most damning evidence coming from rioters' own words and videos. FBI agents have identified scores of rioters from public posts and records subpoenaed from social media platforms. Prosecutors use the posts to build cases. Judge now are citing defendants' words and images as factors weighing in favor of tougher sentences.

As of Friday, more than 50 people have been sentenced for federal crimes related to the insurrection. In at least 28 of those cases, prosecutors factored a defendant's social media posts into their requests for stricter sentences, according to an Associated Press review of court records....

Prosecutors also have accused a few defendants of trying to destroy evidence by deleting posts.

Two leading U.S. Senators "are urging federal regulators to investigate Facebook over allegations the company misled advertisers, investors and the public about public safety and ad reach on its platform," reports CNBC: On Thursday, Senator Warren urged the heads of the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission to open criminal and civil investigations into Facebook or its executives to determine if they violated U.S. wire fraud and securities laws. A day earlier, Senator Cantwell, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, encouraged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Facebook, now called Meta, violated the agency's law against unfair or deceptive business practices. Cantwell's letter was made public on Thursday...

In her letter to the FTC, Cantwell focused on Facebook's claims about the safety of its products, in addition to the allegedly inflated ad projections... She suggested the agency investigate Facebook and, depending what the evidence shows, pursue monetary relief for advertisers and disgorgement of allegedly ill-gotten gains.
Senator Warren points to a whistleblower's recent allegations that Facebook misled both investors and advertising customers about their ad reach, according to the article. But Warren's letter also argued the possibility Facebook violated securities law with "breathtakingly illegal conduct by one of the world's largest social media companies," according to the article. And in addition, Warren "wrote that evidence increasingly suggests executives were aware the metric 'was meaningfully and consistently inflated.'"

Bloomberg adds this quote from Senator Cantwell's letter: "A thorough investigation by the Commission and other enforcement agencies is paramount, not only because Facebook and its executives may have violated federal law, but because members of the public and businesses are entitled to know the facts regarding Facebook's conduct as they make their decisions about using the platform."