An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Gamer: The Oculus Quest 2 is a hell of a lot of hardware for $299. In fact, we're convinced that Facebook is making a loss on each unit sold. Even so, that pricing is one of the main reasons it's the most popular headset on Steam and our pick as the best VR headset. Well, that and the ease of use. [...] The thing is, that price seems too good to be true, with no other manufacturer's VR headset close to the specs list of the Quest 2 -- in either tethered or standalone form -- hitting the same low, low price. That money gets you a robust virtual reality headset with 6GB of RAM, a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 CPU, 64GB of storage, 1832x1920 per eye display and a pair of controllers. [...]

But there's one factor that could potentially offset that price -- Facebook has access to a whole lot of your data. This is something the Oculus Quest 2 is upfront about: You absolutely need a Facebook account in order to use the device and it does have its data collection policies in black and white. Although what isn't quite so obvious is how much your data is worth to Facebook. At least it isn't without a tiny bit of digging.

There is another version of the Quest 2 that isn't as discounted as the consumer version, and that's the one aimed at businesses. The actual hardware is identical, but the difference is you don't need to login in with a Facebook account in order to use it. The price for this model? $799. There's also an annual fee of $180 that kicks in a year after purchase, which covers Oculus' business services and support, but that just muddies the waters a little. The point being, the Quest 2 for business, the headset from which Facebook can't access your data directly, costs $500 more. So that's looking essentially like the value the social media giant attributes to your data, which either seems like a lot or barely anything at all, depending on your stance. The Supplemental Oculus Data Policy outlines what sort of data is actually being collected when you use the Quest 2. Such things as your physical dimension, including your hand size, how big your play area is using the Oculus Guardian system, data on any content you create using the Quest 2, as well as more obvious stuff like your device ID and IP address.

For at least the third time since the beginning of this year, the U.S. government is investigating a hack against federal agencies that began during the Trump administration but was only recently discovered, according to senior U.S. officials and private sector cyber defenders. Reuters reports: The new government breaches involve a popular virtual private network (VPN) known as Pulse Connect Secure, which hackers were able to break into as customers used it. More than a dozen federal agencies run Pulse Secure on their networks, according to public contract records. An emergency cybersecurity directive last week demanded that agencies scan their systems for related compromises and report back.

The results, collected on Friday and analyzed this week, show evidence of potential breaches in at least five federal civilian agencies, said Matt Hartman, a senior official with the U.S. Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency. "This is a combination of traditional espionage with some element of economic theft," said one cybersecurity consultant familiar with the matter. "We've already confirmed data exfiltration across numerous environments." The maker of Pulse Secure, Utah-based software company Ivanti, said it expected to provide a patch to fix the problem by this Monday, two weeks after it was first publicized. Only a "very limited number of customer systems" had been penetrated, it added.

Over the last two months, CISA and the FBI have been working with Pulse Secure and victims of the hack to kick out the intruders and uncover other evidence, said another senior U.S. official who declined to be named but is responding to the hacks. The FBI, Justice Department and National Security Agency declined to comment. The U.S. government's investigation into the Pulse Secure activity is still in its early stages, said the senior U.S. official, who added the scope, impact and attribution remain unclear. Security researchers at U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye and another firm, which declined to be named, say they've watched multiple hacking groups, including an elite team they associate with China, exploiting the new flaw and several others like it since 2019.

Zoe Roth, the centerpiece of the "Disaster Girl" meme, has made nearly half a million dollars after selling the original copy as a non-fungible token (NFT), the New York Times reports. From a report: The market for ownership rights to digital art and media as NFTs has recently soared in popularity. Roth's photo was taken in 2005 when she was 4 years old. Her family went to go see a controlled fire in their Mebane, North Carolina, neighborhood. Her father entered the picture in a photo contest in 2007 and won, and for the past decade the "image [has been] endlessly repurposed as a vital part of meme canon," the Times writes. Most Americans are not at all familiar with NFTs, though they have become major buzzwords among asset managers and market participants. All NFTs contain a unique segment of digital code as an identifier of authenticity and are stored on the blockchain, a public digital ledger.

The European Parliament approved a new law on terrorist content takedowns yesterday, paving the way for one-hour removals to become the legal standard across the EU. From a report: The regulation "addressing the dissemination of terrorist content online" will come into force shortly after publication in the EU's Official Journal -- and start applying 12 months after that. The incoming regime means providers serving users in the region must act on terrorist content removal notices from Member State authorities within one hour of receipt, or else provide an explanation why they have been unable to do so. There are exceptions for educational, research, artistic and journalistic work -- with lawmakers aiming to target terrorism propaganda being spread on online platforms like social media sites.

The types of content they want speedily removed under this regime includes material that incites, solicits or contributes to terrorist offences; provides instructions for such offences; or solicits people to participate in a terrorist group. Material posted online that provides guidance on how to make and use explosives, firearms or other weapons for terrorist purposes is also in scope. However concerns have been raised over the impact on online freedom of expression -- including if platforms use content filters to shrink their risk, given the tight turnaround times required for removals.

Rei_is_a_dumbass shares a report from CNBC: Tesla is defending itself in the U.S. and Germany against allegations that it has violated environmental rules and regulations, according to a new financial filing. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency accused Tesla last week of failing to prove it is in compliance with federal emissions standards for hazardous air pollutants. Specifically, the EPA is seeking details about how Tesla handles "surface coating" of its vehicles. As CNBC has previously reported, the "paint shop" at Tesla's main U.S. car plant in Fremont, California, has a history of problems, including fires, improper cleaning and maintenance. Some vehicle re-touching, to fix flaws in paint on the cars, has been done in a tented "paint hospital" at the Fremont factory, employees previously told CNBC. In 2020, Tesla embarked on massive improvements to its paint facilities, Fremont building permits revealed.

Tesla said in the filing Wednesday that the company "has responded to all information requests from the EPA and refutes the allegations." The company does not expect any "material adverse impact" on its business from its dealings with the EPA in this matter. Tesla is also still tangling with local air quality authorities in California -- the Bay Area Air Quality Management District -- over previously disclosed "notices of violation," relating to "air permitting and related compliance for the Fremont Factory."

In Germany, Wednesday's financial filing said, authorities have fined Tesla 12 million euros, or about $14.5 million, for allegedly failing to make public notifications and properly fulfill their obligations to take back old batteries from customers. German law requires automakers selling electric cars to take back batteries and dispose of them in an environmentally sustainable manner. Tesla wrote in the filing: "This is primarily relating to administrative requirements, but Tesla has continued to take back battery packs." Tesla filed an objection in Germany and said that the matter should not have a material impact on Tesla's business.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Coming on the heels of the Neuralink announcement earlier this month -- complete with video showing a monkey playing Pong with its mind, thanks to a wireless brain implant -- researchers with the BrainGate Consortium have successfully demonstrated a high-bandwidth wireless brain-computer interface (BCI) in two tetraplegic human subjects. The researchers described their work in a recent paper published in the journal IEEE Transactions in Biomedical Engineering. As for the latest Neuralink breakthrough, Ars Science Editor John Timmer wrote last week that most of the individual pieces of Neuralink's feat have been done before -- in some cases, a decade before (BrainGate is among those earlier pioneers). But the company has taken two important steps toward its realization of a commercial BCI: miniaturizing the device and getting it to communicate wirelessly, which is harder than it sounds.

According to [John Simeral of Brown University, a member of the BrainGate consortium and lead author of the new paper], the BrainGate wireless system makes the opposite tradeoff -- higher bandwidth and fidelity -- because it wants all the finer details of the data for its ongoing research. In that regard, it complements the Utrecht and Neuralink systems in the BCI space. The new BrainGate system is based on the so-called Brown Wireless Device (BWD) designed by Arto Nurmikko, and it replaces the cables with a small transmitter that weighs about 1.5 ounces. The transmitter sits atop the user's head and connects wirelessly to an implant electrode array inside the motor cortex.

There were two participants in the clinical trial -- a 35-year-old man and a 65-year-old man -- both of whom were paralyzed by spinal cord injuries. They were able to continuously use the BCI for a full 24 hours, even as they slept, yielding continuous data over that time period. (The medical-grade battery lasts for 36 hours.) "We can learn more about the neural signals that way because we can record over long periods of time," said Simeral. "And we can also begin to learn a little bit about how people actually will use the system, given the freedom to do so." His team was encouraged by the fact that one of its study participants often asked if they could leave the wireless transmitters on a little longer. He has a head tracker he can use as a fallback, but several nights a week, he would choose to use the wireless BrainGate system because he liked it. "Right now, we typically decode or interpret the spiking activity from networks of neurons," said Simeral. "There are other encoding mechanisms that have been studied in the brain that have to do with how the oscillations in the brain are related to these spiking signals. There's information in the different oscillation frequencies that might relate to, for example, sleep state, attention state, other phenomenon that we care about. Without a continuous recording, you've surrendered the ability to learn about any of those. Learning how this all happens in the human brain in the home as people are behaving and having different thoughts requires having a broadband system recording from the human brain."

"The ability to potentially have individuals with disability using these systems at home on demand, I think is a great step forward," said Simeral. "More broadly, going forward, having more players in the field, having more funding, is important. I see nothing but great things from all of these interactions. For our own work, we see things on the horizon that were impossible five years ago, when there was essentially nobody in the corporate world interested in this space. So I think it's a very promising time."

The vast majority of the world's mountain glaciers are losing 31 percent more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to 3D satellite measurements. Scientists blame human-caused climate change. NBC News reports: Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world's 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday's journal Nature. That's enough melt flowing into the world's rising oceans to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet (7.2 meters) of water each year.

The annual melt rate from 2015 to 2019 is 78 billion more tons (71 billion metric tons) a year than it was from 2000 to 2004. Global thinning rates, different than volume of water lost, doubled in the last 20 years and "that's enormous," said Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France who led the study. Half the world's glacial loss is coming from the United States and Canada. Alaska's melt rates are "among the highest on the planet," with the Columbia glacier retreating about 115 feet (35 meters) a year, Hugonnet said.

Almost all the world's glaciers are melting, even ones in Tibet that used to be stable, the study found. Except for a few in Iceland and Scandinavia that are fed by increased precipitation, the melt rates are accelerating around the world. The near-uniform melting "mirrors the global increase in temperature" and is from the burning of coal, oil and gas, Hugonnet said. Some smaller glaciers are disappearing entirely.

For the first time in nearly 15 years, Microsoft is changing the default Microsoft Office font -- and it wants your help to pick a new one. The Verge reports: While there are more than 700 font options in Word, Microsoft has commissioned five new custom fonts for Office, in a move away from the Calibri font that has been the default in Microsoft Office for nearly 15 years. The five new sans-serif fonts feature a variety of styles, including traditional, modern, and even one inspired by German road and railway signs. Microsoft is starting to gather feedback on these five new fonts today, and it plans to set one as the new Office default font in 2022.

Microsoft is now releasing these five new fonts in Microsoft 365 so everyone can try them out before a new default is chosen. Polls and feedback will be considered as part of how Microsoft picks a winner, and the company is going to spend the next few months evaluating these new fonts and seeing which ones are proving popular. Once a decision has been made, the new default font will appear in Microsoft Office apps in 2022.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Chinese social groups, enterprises and public entities will have increased responsibility to combat foreign espionage under new regulations issued by the country's ministry of state security. The regulations, which were released and took effect on Monday, come amid deepening hostilities between China and some western governments, including over the detention of foreigners accused of national security crimes. According to state media, state security will work with other government departments to "adjust" the list of groups susceptible to foreign espionage and to develop measures to safeguard against it, including Chinese Communist Party and state organs, social groups, enterprises and public institutions.

Once organizations are designated as having anti-espionage responsibility, state security will provide "guidance, supervision and inspection" of their efforts, including personnel vetting, and strict training, monitoring and debriefing for staff trips overseas. Identified organizations must report suspicions and incidents to authorities. It come amid increasing public campaigns to watch out for foreign spies, which state media has warned could be an "intimate lover" or "an online friend with the same interests." According to Li Wei, an expert on national security and anti-terrorism at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, the new regulation "places emphasis on companies and institutions taking precautionary measures against foreign espionage." Li said key fields would include companies or institutions working in national defense, diplomacy, economy, finance and tech.

A tweet from Oracle Executive VP Ken Glueck goading his followers into harassing a female reporter was found to violate Twitter's policies, the company told Gizmodo on Wednesday. From the report: Glueck, who's previously made headlines as one of the top lobbyists under Oracle, was forced to take down the tweet and have his account suspended in a read-only mode for the next 12 hours, a Twitter spokesperson said. "The Tweet you referenced was in violation of the Twitter Rules. The account owner will be required to delete the violative Tweet and spend 12 hours with their account in read-only mode," a Twitter spokesperson said in an email. The tweet we reference was, of course, Glueck's. That tweet was the latest attack on the Intercept's Mara Hvistendahl, who last week published an expose detailing how reseller networks in China reportedly funnel Oracle's tech into the hands of the country's government. In response, Glueck published roughly 2,700 words worth of rebuttal on the official Oracle blog, helmed by a request for readers to send "any information about Mara or her reporting" to his personal Protonmail email address.

"Self-driving" vehicles could be allowed on UK roads by the end of this year, the government has said. The BBC reports: The Department for Transport said automated lane-keeping systems (ALKS) would be the first type of hands-free driving legalized. The technology controls the position and speed of a car in a single lane and it will be limited to 37mph (60km/h). Following a consultation last year, the government has now said that vehicles with ALKS technology can be legally defined as self-driving, "as long as they receive GB type approval and that there is no evidence to challenge the vehicle's ability to self-drive." The government confirmed that drivers will not be required to monitor the road or keep their hands on the wheel when the vehicle is driving itself. But the driver will need to stay alert and be able take over when requested by the system within 10 seconds. If a driver fails to respond, the vehicle will automatically put on its hazard lights to warn nearby vehicles, slow down and eventually stop. The Highway Code is now consulting on what rules will be put into new laws to make sure the technology is safely used. "ALKS as currently proposed by the government are not automated," cautions Matthew Avery, director of research at Thatcham Research. "They are assisted driving systems as they rely on the driver to take back control. Aside from the lack of technical capabilities, by calling ALKS automated our concern also is that the UK government is contributing to the confusion and frequent misuse of assisted driving systems that have unfortunately already led to many tragic deaths. Consumers will expect the car to do the job of a driver, which current models can't do."

With Covid-19 restrictions lifting, more people are booking trips and hotels online, which is very good for Google's advertising business. Google's employees, however, are working from home and not traveling as much on the company dime -- and that's also good for its business. From a report: During the first quarter, Google parent Alphabet saved $268 million in expenses from company promotions, travel and entertainment, compared to same period a year earlier, "primarily as a result of COVID-19," according to a company filing. On an annualized basis, that would be more than $1 billion. Indeed, Alphabet said in its annual report earlier this year that advertising and promotional expenses dropped by $1.4 billion in 2020 as the company reduced spending, paused or rescheduled campaigns, and changed some events to digital-only formats due to the pandemic. Travel and entertainment expenses fell by $371 million. The savings offset many of the costs that came with hiring thousands more workers. And the pandemic prudence allowed the company to keep its marketing and administrative costs effectively flat for the first quarter, despite boosting revenue by 34%.

DigitalOcean has emailed customers warning of a data breach involving customers' billing data, TechCrunch has learned. From the report: The cloud infrastructure giant told customers in an email on Wednesday, obtained by TechCrunch, that it has "confirmed an unauthorized exposure of details associated with the billing profile on your DigitalOcean account." The company said the person "gained access to some of your billing account details through a flaw that has been fixed" over a two-week window between April 9 and April 22. The email said customer billing names and addresses were accessed, as well as the last four digits of the payment card, its expiry date, and the name of the card-issuing bank. The company said that customers' DigitalOcean accounts were "not accessed," and passwords and account tokens were "not involved" in this breach. "To be extra careful, we have implemented additional security monitoring on your account. We are expanding our security measures to reduce the likelihood of this kind of flaw occuring [sic] in the future," the email said.

New submitter oblom writes about Mighty, a new approach to web browsing: In short, server-side web navigation, with client-side rendering. Per Y Combinator founder Paul Graham: "Usually when people talk about grand things like changing "the future of computing," they're full of it. But not this time. Suhail [founder of Mighty] has been working on this for 2 years. There's a good chance it's the new default infrastructure. Suhail writes in a blog post: After 2 years of hard work, we've created something that's indistinguishable from a Google Chrome that runs at 4K, 60 frames a second, takes no more than 500 MB of RAM, and often less than 30% CPU with 50+ tabs open. This is the first step in making a new kind of computer. [...] When you switch to Mighty, it will feel like you went out and bought a new computer with a much faster processor and much more memory. But you don't have [to] buy a new computer. All you have to do is download a desktop app.

To make Mighty work, we had to solve a lot of complex engineering problems, including designing a custom server to keep costs low, building a custom low-latency networking protocol, forking Chromium to integrate directly with various low-level render/encoder pipelines, and making the software interoperate with a long list of macOS features. We are working hard at ramping up server capacity across the world as we roll it out to users. You might be thinking: "Yeah but what about the lag?" Lag would have been a real problem 5 years ago, but new advances since then have allowed us to eliminate nearly all of it: 5 Ghz WiFi bands, H.265 hardware-accelerated low-latency encoders, widespread 100 Mbps Internet, and cheaper, more powerful GPUs. We also designed a new low-latency network protocol, and we locate servers as close to users geographically as possible. As a result, a user with 100 Mbps internet will rarely notice lag while using Mighty. Watch this demo video and see for yourself.

CES 2022 is going back to Las Vegas following this year's all-digital event, the Consumer Technology Association said Thursday, as coronavirus restrictions ease in the US. The event will take place Jan. 5-8, with media days taking place Jan. 3-4. From a report: Around 1,000 companies -- including Amazon, AMD, AT&T, Daimler AG, Dell, Google, Hyundai, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, LG, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Samsung and Sony -- are on board for the event, according to the CTA, with more being added. You'll also be able to attend digitally. Plans for the event will evolve depending on coronavirus safety measures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CTA noted.

Google's YouTube is already the world's largest online video platform. If continues growing the way it has the last several quarters, it could also match Netflix in revenues by year's end. From a report: In its first-quarter earnings report Tuesday, Google parent company Alphabet said YouTube brought in revenue of $6.01 billion in advertising revenue during the quarter -- up from $4 billion from a year ago, for a growth rate of 49%. That's an acceleration over its 46% growth in Q4. It's also nearly twice the growth rate of Netflix, which reported 24% revenue growth in Q1, and expects growth to slow to 19% next quarter. If its current growth trajectory continues, YouTube will book between $29 billion and $30 billion in revenue this year. Netflix is expected to report $29.7 billion in revenue for 2021, according to an average of estimates from analysts polled by Refinitiv.

tiltowait writes: My organization has an acceptable use policy which forbids sending out spam. Every few months, however, the central IT office exempts itself from this rule by delivering deceptive e-mails to all employees as a test of their ability to ignore phishing scams. For those who simply delete the messages, they are a small annoyance, comparable to the overhead of having to regularly change passwords -- also done largely unnecessarily, perhaps even to the point of being another bad practice. As someone working in a departmental systems office, I can also attest that these campaigns generate a fair amount of workload from inquiries about their legitimacy. Aside from the "gotcha" angle, which perpetuates some ill will amongst staff, I can't help but think that these exercises are of questionable net value, especially with other countermeasures, such as MFA and Safelinks, already in place. Is it worth spreading misinformation to experiment on your colleagues in such a fashion?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The most recent crash involving a Tesla Model S and alleged connections to running driver-assist features without a driver behind the wheel spurred a lot of talk on how to handle advanced technology and its growing impact on drivers. Following Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Ed Markey's calls for enhanced guidelines from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the two introduced new legislation on Monday that aims to tackle the problem.

With Sen. Amy Klobuchar signed on as a sponsor, the Stay Aware for Everyone Act would compel the Department of Transportation to study driver-monitoring systems installed in vehicles. With findings delivered to the appropriate committees within 180 days, the Transportation Secretary would then need to finalize a rule within four years deciding if the systems should become mandatory on all new vehicles. Not just vehicles with any level of driver-assist system, like Tesla's Autopilot, but all new cars sold. Automakers would then have two model years to meet compliance with any new vehicles going on sale.

The language in this bill, however, is interesting since it covers all new vehicles, rather than vehicles equipped with advanced assist systems. Naturally, this opens up privacy concerns, and all the bill says on this front is that the Transportation Secretary would determine "appropriate privacy and data security safeguards." The SAFE Act is one of four new bills the pair of Democratic senators introduced today, proposing potential legislation to speed up recall reporting from automakers, to bolster vehicle seat backs to reduce related fatalities and to set up a system to help automakers report possible vehicle defects earlier for NHTSA to investigate.

Legal services startup DoNotPay is best known for its army of "robot lawyers" -- automated bots that tackle tedious online tasks like canceling TV subscriptions and requesting refunds from airlines. Now, the company has unveiled a new tool it says will help shield users' photos from reverse image searches and facial recognition AI. The Verge reports: It's called Photo Ninja and it's one of dozens of DoNotPay widgets that subscribers can access for $36 a year. Photo Ninja operates like any image filter. Upload a picture you want to shield, and the software adds a layer of pixel-level perturbations that are barely noticeable to humans, but dramatically alter the image in the eyes of roving machines. The end result, DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder tells The Verge, is that any image shielded with Photo Ninja yields zero results when run through search tools like Google image search or TinEye.

The tool also fools popular facial recognition software from Microsoft and Amazon with a 99 percent success rate. This, combined with the anti-reverse-image search function, makes Photo Ninja handy in a range of scenarios. You might be uploading a selfie to social media, for example, or a dating app. Running the image through Photo Ninja first will prevent people from connecting this image to other information about you on the web. Browder is careful to stress, though, that Photo Ninja isn't guaranteed to beat every facial recognition tool out there.

kackle writes: I just received an email telling me that "Popular Science" magazine is no more. That is, it is to be delivered to readers from now on only via ones and zeros. I can't say I had a subscription since its beginnings in 1872, but I did learn much from the rag and will sincerely miss it. "Today, we're unveiling our biggest change in my tenure: Popular Science is now a fully digital magazine," writes Editor-in-Chief Corinne Iozzio. In addition to "redesigned" and "reimagined stories" made especially for mobile devices, Iozzio notes that their various apps "include an archive of 15-plus years of back issues..."

"The mediums may change, but even after all these evolutions and iterations, our core belief remains as fixed and focused as it was in 1872: Embracing science and tech means living in the realm of possibility."