Moscow, December 3: A Moscow district court will hear on December 24 new case protocols against Google and Meta that are facing fine of up to 10% of their annual revenue for repeated failure to remove prohibited content, a court representative told Sputnik on Friday.
“The judge has received administrative materials initiated on the basis of protocols on administrative offenses drawn up by [Russian internet watchdog] Roskomnadzor,” the document read.
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The protocols on Google and Meta were drawn up in accordance with part 5 of article 13.41 of the administrative code for repeated failure to delete information. The fine ranges is from one twentieth to one tenth of the annual revenue.
“Court hearings are scheduled for December 24,” the document added.
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, Morning Tidings Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Washington, December 2: You can now book an Uber ride via WhatsApp in India. Uber has partnered with Meta, formerly known as Facebook, to launch a ride-booking feature via WhatsApp in India.
This is a global-first feature for the popular ride-booking app and will dismiss the need for a standalone Uber app on your phone to book a cab. It will let users register on Uber, book a cab, and even get the trip receipt on WhatsApp itself, reported Beebom.
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Booking a cab via the popular messaging application will be pretty easy and can be achieved in three different ways. Users can send a message to the Uber Business phone number (which hasn’t been disclosed in the official blog post, for some reason), scan a QR code, or visit a link to open the Uber chat window in WhatsApp.
Once there, users can start booking cabs and get pick or drop locations, cab fare details, and more on the chat itself.
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Talking about the partnership, Nandini Maheshwari, Senior Director, Business Development, Uber APAC said, “We want to make it as easy as possible for all Indians to take an Uber trip, and to do that we need to meet them on platforms they are comfortable with. We are thrilled at this global-first integration for Uber, and look forward to rolling it out across India.”
As per Beebom, Uber on WhatsApp will also get the same features as available on the Uber app. Users can see the driver’s name and more details on the chat, track the driver’s location, and can even speak to the driver without revealing the phone number.
In case of an emergency, people can type ‘help’ and select the emergency option. Following this, they would get a call from Uber customer care to talk about the concern. Users can also get access to a safety line for 30 minutes after the ride is completed.
The functionality is currently available in English but is expected to be available in more Indian languages soon.
The feature is currently being tested as a pilot in North Lucknow and should be expanded to more cities in India (first to New Delhi) soon. The Uber cab WhatsApp chatbot is available for both new and existing Uber users who have registered with their phone numbers.
Apart from the new ride-booking feature, WhatsApp has added a host of features that allows users to get a lot done. It has allowed businesses to launch chatbots for people to order groceries, find COVID-19 vaccination slots, and more services.
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, Morning Tidings Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
New Delhi: Meta (formerly Facebook) is developing sci-fi haptic gloves that can reproduce a range of sensations in virtual worlds, including texture, pressure and vibration, using air pockets. The team is building advanced hand-tracking technology to enable it to identify precisely where your hand is in a virtual scene, whether you’re in contact with a virtual object and how your hand is interacting with the object. Meta-Owned WhatsApp Developing New Apps for Windows & macOS: Report.
“Even with a way to control air flow, the system needs to know when and where to deliver the right sensations,” Meta said in a statement late on Tuesday. “The use of air (a fluid) means we can fit many more actuators on the glove than would otherwise be possible with electronic circuitry,” Meta added.
How do we touch the virtual world? Our Reality Labs team is working to create the technology to make it possible. Today we shared some progress in researching and developing haptic gloves to bring the sense of touch to the metaverse. Check it out https://t.co/MliVQQdtfspic.twitter.com/mdOsMwXE5Q
The company is also developing the world’s first high-speed microfluidic processor – a small microfluidic chip that controls the air flow that moves the actuators.
While the research is still in early stages, the goal is to one day pair the gloves with your VR headset for an immersive experience like playing in a concert or poker game in the metaverse, and eventually they’d work with your AR glasses. Imagine working on a virtual 3D puzzle with a friend’s realistic 3D avatar. As you pick up a virtual puzzle piece from the table, your fingers automatically stop moving as you feel it within your grasp.
“You feel the sharpness of the cardboard’s edges and the smoothness of its surface as you hold it up for closer inspection, followed by a satisfying snap as you fit it into place,” Meta said.
Building these gloves is a challenge that requires inventing entirely new domains of scientific research. Existing mechanical actuators create too much heat for such a glove to be worn comfortably all day. To solve this, Meta is creating new soft actuators – tiny, soft motors all over the glove that move in concert to deliver sensation to the wearer’s hand.
“Our haptic renderer sends precise instructions to the actuators on the hand, based on an understanding of things like the hand’s location and properties of the virtual objects (such as texture, weight and stiffness) that the hand comes in contact with,” the company elaborated.
(The above story first appeared on Morning Tidings on Nov 18, 2021 09:13 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website morningtidings.com).
Facebook is now ‘Meta’. During the Connect conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced plans to create Metaverse, which will be a combination of virtual, augmented and mixed reality into a single platform with integration of apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. As per a report from Bloomberg, Meta is also working on a smartwatch that will have a camera and will compete with Apple Watch. The smartwatch was found inside the ‘FacebookView’ app, which is used to control Ray-Ban Stories. The image of the watch was first spotted by app developer Steve Moser and shared with Bloomberg. Facebook Rebrands to ‘Meta’, CEO Mark Zuckerberg Announces Metaverse Plan To Create New Virtual World.
As per the leaked image, Meta’s upcoming smartwatch is expected to come with a round screen with curved edges, a front-facing camera at the bottom of the display and a controller button to the right side.
Announcing @Meta — the Facebook company’s new name. Meta is helping to build the metaverse, a place where we’ll play and connect in 3D. Welcome to the next chapter of social connection. pic.twitter.com/ywSJPLsCoD
The smartwatch is said to have a detachable wrist strap, and its display imitates the style of the Apple Watch. As a reminder, Apple’s Watch does not have a camera. The camera of the device could be used for video conferencing and will make it unique from all other smartwatches from companies like Samsung, Garmin and Fitbit.
The report also mentions that Meta plans to launch the smartwatch as early as 2022, but the final launch timeline has not been decided yet. The upcoming Meta smartwatch is likely to be compatible with both Android, iOS devices and could feature heart-rate monitoring. Zuckerberg also announced to introduce new hardware in 2022. Also, the company is working on a new high-end headset codenamed ‘Project Cambria’ that will be a mixture of virtual and augmented reality.
(The above story first appeared on Morning Tidings on Oct 29, 2021 12:21 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website morningtidings.com).
Sydney: Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has announced the company will change its name to Meta, saying the move reflects the fact the company is now much broader than just the social media platform (which will still be called Facebook). The rebrand follows several months of intensifying discourse by Zuckerberg and the company more broadly on the metaverse – the idea of integrating real and digital worlds ever more seamlessly, using technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Facebook’s AR Group Effects Now Available on Messenger Video Calls & Rooms/
Zuckerberg said he hoped the metaverse will be a new ecosystem that will create millions of jobs for content creators. But is this just a shallow PR exercise, with Zuckerberg trying to reset the Facebook brand after several scandal-ridden years, or is it a genuine bid to set the company on course for what he sees as the future of computing?
Announcing @Meta — the Facebook company’s new name. Meta is helping to build the metaverse, a place where we’ll play and connect in 3D. Welcome to the next chapter of social connection. pic.twitter.com/ywSJPLsCoD
Facebook’s journey into the metaverse: What’s not in contention is that this is the culmination of seven years of corporate acquisitions, investments and research that kicked off with Facebook’s acquisition of VR headset company Oculus for US$2 billion in 2014. Oculus had risen to prominence with a lucrative Kickstarter campaign, and many of its backers were angry that their support for the “future of gaming” had been co-opted by Silicon Valley. While gamers fretted that Facebook would give them VR versions of Farmville rather than the hardcore content they envisioned, cynics viewed the purchase as part of a spending spree after Facebook’s US$16 billion stock market launch, or simply Zuckerberg indulging a personal interest in gaming.
Under Facebook, Oculus has gone on to dominate the VR market with over 60% market share. That’s thanks to heavy cross-subsidisation from Facebook’s advertising business and a console-like approach with the mobile “Quest” VR headset.
Beyond Oculus, Facebook has invested heavily in VR and AR. Organised under the umbrella of Facebook Reality Labs, there are nearly 10,000 people working on these technologies – almost 20% of Facebook’s workforce. Last week, Facebook announced plans to hire another 10,000 developers in the European Union to work on its metaverse computing platform. While much of its work remains behind closed doors, Facebook Reality Labs’ publicised projects include Project Aria, which seeks to create live 3D maps of public spaces, and the recently released Ray-Ban Stories – Facebook-integrated sunglasses with 5-megapixel cameras and voice control. All these investments and projects are steps towards the infrastructure for Zuckerbeg’s vision of the metaverse.
As he said earlier in the year: I think it really makes sense for us to invest deeply to help shape what I think is going to be the next major computing platform.
Why does Facebook want to rule the metaverse?
The metaverse may eventually come to define how we work, learn and socialise. This means VR and AR would move beyond their current niche uses, and become everyday technologies on which we will all depend. We can guess at Facebook’s vision for the metaverse by looking to its existing approach to social media. It has moulded our online lives into a gigantic revenue stream based on power, control and surveillance, fuelled by our data. VR and AR headsets collect enormous amounts of data about the user and their environment. This is one of the key ethical issues around these emerging technologies, and presumably one of the chief attractions for Facebook in owning and developing them.
What makes this particularly concerning is that the way you move your body is so unique that VR data can be used to identify you, rather like a fingerprint.
That means everything you do in VR could potentially be traced back to your individual identity. For Facebook – a digital advertising empire built on tracking our data – it’s a tantalising prospect. Alongside Project Aria, Facebook launched its Responsible Innovation Principles, and recently pledged US$50 million to “build the metaverse responsibly”.
But, as Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein note in their book Data Feminism, responsible innovation is often focused on individualised concepts of harm, rather than addressing the structural power imbalances baked into technologies such as social media.
In our studies of Facebook’s Oculus Imaginary (Facebook’s vision for how it will use Oculus technology) and its changes over time to Oculus’ privacy and data policies, we suggest Facebook publicly frames privacy in VR as a question of individual privacy (over which users can have control) versus surveillance and data harvesting (over which we don’t).
Critics have derided Facebook’s announcements as “privacy theatre” and corporate spin. Digital rights advocacy group Access Now, which participated in a Facebook AR privacy “design jam” in 2020 and urged Facebook to prioritise alerting bystanders they were being recorded by Ray-Ban Stories, says its recommendation was ignored.
Is the internet a blueprint for an open metaverse? Appropriately enough, the metaverse under Facebook is likely to resemble the term’s literary origins, coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash to describe an exploitative, corporatised, hierarchical virtual space. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Tony Parisi, one of the early pioneers of VR, argues we already have a blueprint for a non-dystopian metaverse.
He says we should look back to the original, pre-corporatised vision of the internet, which embodied “an open, collaborative and consensus-driven way to develop technologies and tools”.
Facebook’s rebrand, its dominance in the VR market, its seeming desire to hire every VR and AR developer in Europe, and its dozens of corporate acquisitions – all this sounds less like true collaboration and consensus, and more like an attempt to control the next frontier of computing. We let Facebook rule the world of social media. We shouldn’t let it rule the metaverse. (The Conversation).
Washington, October 29: Facebook chief executive officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday announced that the company he founded is rebranding itself as Meta.
The change comes with a new logo designed like an infinity-shaped symbol, slightly askew, almost like a pretzel. Facebook, Instagram and other apps will remain, but under the Meta umbrella, The New York Times reported.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about our identity with this new chapter,” Zuckerberg said, speaking at a virtual event to showcase Facebook’s technological bets of the future. “Over time, I hope we’re seen as a metaverse company.” Joining Social Media Before Age 11 Is Associated With Problematic Digital Behaviours, Finds Study.
Zuckerberg has been committed to building the metaverse, a composite universe melding online, virtual and augmented worlds that people can seamlessly traverse. He has said the metaverse can be the next major social platform and that several tech companies will build it over the next 10-plus years, New York Times reported.
The name change comes as Facebook continues to face intense scrutiny. Dozens of news stories have been released this week based on internal documents provided by whistleblower Frances Haugen painting a company that prioritizes profit over user safety, The Hill reported.
According to the publication, lawmakers have taken notice, pledging to move forward with regulations on the back of Haugen’s testimony earlier this month.
The new model, of which details are scant, appears to be one where the company’s collection of apps, including Facebook proper, Instagram and WhatsApp, will all be under the umbrella of Meta. That reorganization is similar to what Google did in 2015 when it formed Alphabet, The Hill reported.
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, Morning Tidings Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)