Insert -- If you read between the lines, you understand what someone really means, or what is really happening in a situation, even though it is not said openly
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Techdirt Podcast Episode 333: Walled Culture
from the story-of-copyright dept
One of the oldest and most important topics on Techdirt is copyright, and the many problems with the law both here and abroad. One of the best voices on the subject, here and in many other publications, is Glyn Moody, who recently released his book Walled Culture, that goes through the history of how legacy copyright industries have tried to harm the internet and gain ever greater control over the work of artists and creators. It’s available as a free e-book under a Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication, and today Glyn joins the podcast to discuss the book and the long, often-sad story of copyright law around the world.
Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.
Filed Under: copyright, glyn moody, podcast, walled culture
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Biden’s Executive Order On Surveillance Doesn’t Do Nearly Enough To Protect Privacy; Playing Word Games Doesn’t Actually Limit NSA Surveillance
from the that's-not-going-to-fly dept
Back in March, we noted that the EU and US had announced that they had come to an agreement on transatlantic data flows. This is actually a really big and important story that gets almost no attention, because “transatlantic data flows” sounds boring. However, it’s really, really big and matters for the future of a global internet as opposed to an extremely splintered regional set of internets. People within Facebook have suggested that this is the single biggest issue facing the future of the company, which might be slight hyperbole, but just… slight.
It’s a big deal. . .
As we’ve been saying for almost a decade now: there is one way to fix this and that’s to stop the NSA’s mass surveillance program. The powers that be (Congress and the President) simply seem incapable of admitting that, and thus we go through this same dance every few years.
Filed Under: eu, executive order, max schrems, nsa, privacy shield, surveillance, transatlantic data flows, us
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Employees Reveal Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Vision Is A Clunky, Boring, Ego-Driven Mess
from the all-in-service-to-one-man's-gargantuan-ego dept
It will never stop being bizarre to me that a social media app tried to claim ownership of VR, AR, and effectively every next-gen, Internet-related technology under the “Metaverse” brand… and the entirety of the tech press just simply… went along with it. As a result, we’ve spent the better part of the last few years mired in an endless ocean of unhinged hyperbole about “the Metaverse vision” and what it means.
While the press and investors have spent countless hours propping up Zuckerberg’s ego on this subject, the actual end product isn’t much to write home about. Employees have found Meta’s flagship VR social network, Horizon Worlds, to be a buggy mess they don’t enjoy using:
“Since launching late last year, we have seen that the core thesis of Horizon Worlds — a synchronous social network where creators can build engaging worlds — is strong,” [Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal] Shah wrote in a memo last month. “But currently feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon. Simply put, for an experience to become delightful and retentive, it must first be usable and well crafted.”
At the same time, Zuckerberg’s ego has resulted in all Metaverse marketing utilizing the image of a CEO whose outward-facing charm is muted at best. Despite having an unlimited marketing budget and access to the best marketing talent in the world, most Metaverse marketing looks like it was barfed out of a 2007-era Xbox promotional demo, with Zuckerberg’s pasty visage bizarrely the singular focus.
The new Meta Quest Pro VR headset, released this week, could possibly be a huge evolutionary leap, but again, you’d never really know it because Meta’s update this week featured a gobsmacking and bizarrely heavy dose of poorly rendered simulacrums of an already charisma-challenged CEO.
But inside of the company, far away from early, fluff-filled press coverage, bad marketing choices, VC fawning, and Zuckerberg’s ego, Meta employees are making it clear that many neither understand nor actually like whatever the hell it is they’re building:
“Mr. Zuckerberg’s zeal for the metaverse has been met with skepticism by some Meta employees. This year, he urged teams to hold meetings inside Meta’s Horizon Workrooms app, which allows users to gather in virtual conference rooms. But many employees didn’t own V.R. headsets or hadn’t set them up yet, and had to scramble to buy and register devices before managers caught on, according to one person with knowledge of the events.
In a May poll of 1,000 Meta employees conducted by Blind, an anonymous professional social network, only 58 percent said they understood the company’s metaverse strategy.
The foundational idea that Zuckerberg can convince the entirety of Facebook’s aging populace to migrate to a sometimes vomit-inducing walled garden of sweaty plastic headsets never made coherent sense. But because Zuckerberg is so wealthy, absolute legions of yes men and women have lined up in service to his ego. So far that’s not working out great, with Meta stock seeing a 60 percent drop in the last year alone.
In the U.S. there’s long been a steadily growing chasm between marketing and reality, and the Metaverse personifies this dominant American cultural trait. Marketing could go a long way toward covering the warts of Horizon Worlds, but there’s absolutely nothing about the current marketing that screams cutting edge or futuristic, and Zuckerberg’s mandated presence is just… odd.
Such terrible marketing can’t obscure the fact that Meta can’t seem to innovate its way around competitors like TikTok. Nor has it proven (at any point, really) that it can be innovative enough to become the kind of next-generation AR/VR global town square it envisions itself becoming.
Facebook has never really been known as an innovative company on the kind of scale we reserve for companies like Apple, but the Metaverse hype and investment train requires that everybody pretend otherwise in a strange, greedy, mass delusion. And with the FTC finally (for now) cracking down on the company’s longstanding catch and kill strategies, Meta can’t M&A its way to AR/VR dominance either.
Meta could still possibly succeed if it removed Zuckerberg’s ego (and possibly Zuckerberg himself) from the management equation, stopped using a man with the charisma of a damp walnut in absolutely all Metaverse marketing, and gained a little humility after the last few years of regulatory, political, and market headaches. But there’s scant evidence that any of that seems likely anytime soon.
Filed Under: augmented reality, ego, horizon worlds, hype, innovation, mark zuckerberg, metaverse, video games, virtual reality, vr
Companies: meta
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Justice Department Files Disgusting Attack On Journalist Jason Leopold For Being Good At His Job
from the obey-the-law,-doj dept
We’ve been writing about journalist Jason Leopold for many years, either focused on his FOIA adventures or the amazing (and important) scoops he achieves through them. If you look back through our archives, you’ll see that Leopold knows how to use freedom of information laws basically better than anyone, and thus wields them effectively to help better inform the public of just what our government is up to. That, of course, is the entire point of freedom of information laws in the first place. Our government is supposed to be transparent with us over what they do. FOIA makes that possible, and it only works when it’s used. And Leopold uses it...
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Uvalde School District Kicks Ineffectual Officers To The Curb, Suspends Entire District Police Force
from the failure-to-provide-the-most-essential-of-services:-saving-lives dept
The Uvalde (Texas) PD’s response to a school shooting was to show up and then do nothing for more than an hour. Nearly 400 law enforcement officers from multiple agencies hung back as a gunman terrorized a classroom full of elementary school students, ultimately killing 19 kids and two teachers.
The officers at the scene prevented parents from attempting to rescue their children and threatened certain parents with parole violations if they talked to the press. The immediate fallout was mostly composed of law enforcement officers and officials trying to save themselves by refusing to honestly discuss the event and going to court to prevent documents about the shooting response from being released to the public.
But stonewalling only worked for so long. . .
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University Rolls Back Bizarre Laboratory Surveillance Tech Deployment After Students Call Bullshit
from the because-we-can,-they-explained dept
People come up with some really strange stuff to do when they have a modicum of power and apparently no idea how to utilize it responsibly. Such is the case at Northeastern University, a research university located in Boston, Massachusetts.
A few days ago, students and faculty noticed a new addition to their desks: motion sensors. These were apparently attached to the underside of desks, something that seemed extremely odd to those who noticed them. The whole sad, stupid saga was recounted by student Max von Hippel in his excellent Twitter thread, which describes not only the installation, but the reaction — both by students and the administrators who didn’t really have an explanation for this in-room tracking effort. . .
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