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Encryption

Messenger's End-To-End Encrypted Chats and Calls Are Available To Everyone (theverge.com) 41

Messenger has fully rolled out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to everyone, with toggles to encrypt text messages as well as group chats and calls. As The Verge notes, Messenger first added E2EE in 2016 back when it was still called Facebook Messenger and Meta was still Facebook. "Meta has discussed switching to E2EE as a default, but that may not happen until next year at the earliest, as some regulators claim this would harm public safety," adds The Verge. From the report: There are two ways Messenger users can opt in to the secure chats, either via vanish mode, by swiping up on an existing chat to enter one where messages automatically disappear when the window is closed or the original version that was introduced in 2016 as Secret Conversations. You can turn that on by toggling the lock icon when you start a new chat.

In addition to a full rollout of the feature, Messenger has some new features to enable as well. Now, in end-to-end encrypted chats, you can use GIFs, stickers, reactions, and long-press to reply or forward messages. The encrypted chats also now support verified badges so that people can identify authentic accounts. You can also save media exchanged in the chats, and there's a Snapchat-style screenshot notification that will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

Bitcoin

Meta's Ill-Fated Cryptocurrency May Be Close To Dissolving 39

Diem, Meta's ill-fated cryptocurrency previously known as Libra, may never actually materialize. According to Bloomberg, the Diem Association is reportedly "weighing a sale of its assets as a way to return capital to its investor members." Engadget reports: It's unclear what assets the Diem Association owns, but the report notes the group is talking to bankers about selling its intellectual property and finding "a new home for the engineers that developed the technology." If a sale were to happen, it would seem to be the final nail in the coffin for Diem, the cryptocurrency project that Mark Zuckerberg has championed. Plans to get the stablecoin off the ground have stalled for years amid regulatory pushback and lawmaker concerns. After first launching as Libra, several high-profile partners pulled out in 2019.

Last fall, Facebook started a small pilot of Novi, the cryptocurrency wallet formerly known as Calibra. But the fact that Novi was forced to launch without support for Diem -- it used a different stablecoin called the Pax Dollar -- was a sign that Diem's future remained uncertain. Longtime Facebook exec David Marcus, who oversaw the social network's crypto plans, said at the time that Facebook remained committed to Diem. "I do want to be clear that our support for Diem hasn't changed and we intend to launch Novi with Diem once it receives regulatory approval and goes live," he wrote. Marcus announced a month later that he was leaving Facebook.
AI

Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer (wsj.com) 48

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Meta said Monday that its research team built a new artificial intelligence supercomputer that the company maintains will soon be the fastest in the world. The supercomputer, the AI Research SuperCluster, was the result of nearly two years of work, often conducted remotely during the height of the pandemic, and led by the Facebook parent's AI and infrastructure teams. Several hundred people, including researchers from partners Nvidia, Penguin Computing and Pure Storage, were involved in the project, the company said.

Meta, which announced the news in a blog post Monday, said its research team currently is using the supercomputer to train AI models in natural-language processing and computer vision for research. The aim is to boost capabilities to one day train models with more than a trillion parameters on data sets as large as an exabyte, which is roughly equivalent to 36,000 years of high-quality video. "The experiences we're building for the metaverse require enormous compute powerand RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement provided to The Wall Street Journal. Meta's AI supercomputer houses 6,080 Nvidia graphics-processing units, putting it fifth among the fastest supercomputers in the world, according to Meta.

By mid-summer, when the AI Research SuperCluster is fully built, it will house some 16,000 GPUs, becoming the fastest AI supercomputer in the world, Meta said. The company declined to comment on the location of the facility or the cost. [...] Eventually the supercomputer will help Meta's researchers build AI models that can work across hundreds of languages, analyze text, images and video together and develop augmented reality tools, the company said. The technology also will help Meta more easily identify harmful content and will aim to help Meta researchers develop artificial-intelligence models that think like the human brain and support rich, multidimensional experiences in the metaverse. "In the metaverse, it's one hundred percent of the time, a 3-D multi-sensorial experience, and you need to create artificial-intelligence agents in that environment that are relevant to you," said Jerome Pesenti, vice president of AI at Meta.

AI

Meta Researchers Build an AI That Learns Equally Well From Visual, Written or Spoken Materials (techcrunch.com) 22

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Meta (AKA Facebook) researchers are working on [...] an AI that can learn capably on its own whether it does so in spoken, written or visual materials. The traditional way of training an AI model to correctly interpret something is to give it lots and lots (like millions) of labeled examples. A picture of a cat with the cat part labeled, a conversation with the speakers and words transcribed, etc. But that approach is no longer in vogue as researchers found that it was no longer feasible to manually create databases of the sizes needed to train next-gen AIs. Who wants to label 50 million cat pictures? Okay, a few people probably -- but who wants to label 50 million pictures of common fruits and vegetables?

Currently some of the most promising AI systems are what are called self-supervised: models that can work from large quantities of unlabeled data, like books or video of people interacting, and build their own structured understanding of what the rules are of the system. For instance, by reading a thousand books it will learn the relative positions of words and ideas about grammatical structure without anyone telling it what objects or articles or commas are -- it got it by drawing inferences from lots of examples. This feels intuitively more like how people learn, which is part of why researchers like it. But the models still tend to be single-modal, and all the work you do to set up a semi-supervised learning system for speech recognition won't apply at all to image analysis -- they're simply too different. That's where Facebook/Meta's latest research, the catchily named data2vec, comes in.

The idea for data2vec was to build an AI framework that would learn in a more abstract way, meaning that starting from scratch, you could give it books to read or images to scan or speech to sound out, and after a bit of training it would learn any of those things. It's a bit like starting with a single seed, but depending on what plant food you give it, it grows into an daffodil, pansy or tulip. Testing data2vec after letting it train on various data corpi showed that it was competitive with and even outperformed similarly sized dedicated models for that modality. (That is to say, if the models are all limited to being 100 megabytes, data2vec did better -- specialized models would probably still outperform it as they grow.)

Social Networks

Facebook and Instagram May Help You Create and Sell NFTs (techcrunch.com) 23

According to the Financial Times, Meta is developing ways to create, display and sell NFTs on Facebook and Instagram. TechCrunch reports: The company's Novi wallet technology would power much of the "supporting functionality," one tipster said. Instagram is reportedly testing a way to showcase NFTs, while Meta is also said to be discussing a marketplace that would help you buy or sell these digital collectibles.

The company has already declined to comment, and the sources cautioned the effort was still early and could change.However, Instagram leader Adam Mosseri said in December that his social network was "actively exploring" NFTs. The technology is on the company's mind, at least.
Twitter appears to have beat Meta to the chase. According to Engadget, the social media company is testing a new feature that allows NFT owners to authenticate NFTs displayed in their profile photos. It's currently only available for Twitter Blue subscribers, but the authentication symbol will be visible to everyone on Twitter.
Facebook

Meta's Oculus Unit Faces FTC-Led Probe of Competition Practices (bloomberg.com) 5

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and multiple states are investigating Meta's virtual reality unit Oculus over potential anti-competitive practices. Bloomberg reports: The FTC and a group of states led by New York have quizzed outside developers that make Oculus apps in recent months as part of the inquiry, the people said. The officials have been scrutinizing how Meta, the world's largest social media company, may be using its market power in the VR space to stifle competition, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter isn't public. In interviews with several developers, the antitrust enforcers asked how the Oculus app store may be discriminating against third parties that sell apps that compete with Meta's own software. They were also curious about Meta's sales strategy for the Oculus VR headset and how the price of the company's device undercuts competitors. Meta sells the Oculus Quest 2 headset for $299, well below some models from HTC Corp. and others.

The FTC and states including New York, Tennessee and North Carolina began reaching out to developers concerned about Oculus-related antitrust issues last year, one of the people said. [...] Developers have complained that Meta uses its market power to thwart companies that offer competing games and services on Oculus. They allege the company copies the most promising ideas and makes it harder for some apps to work properly on the platform. [...] The antitrust scrutiny could complicate Meta's plans to build out what Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg calls the metaverse -- immersive digital worlds accessed through virtual and augmented reality-powered devices. Zuckerberg has said he thinks the devices will become the next major computing platform for human communication, after mobile phones, eventually replacing some in-person interactions.

The Courts

The FTC's Antitrust Suit Against Facebook Moves Forward (engadget.com) 7

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can move forward with its latest antitrust lawsuit against Meta, a US district judge ruled on Tuesday. The decision is a significant win for the regulator, which had seen its first complaint thrown out by Judge James Boasberg last June. Engadget reports: Per The Washington Post, Boasberg now says the agency can move forward with its complaint thanks to the "more robust and detailed" evidence it presented with its amended suit, which the FTC filed in August. "Although the agency may well face a tall task down the road in proving its allegations, the Court believes that it has now cleared the pleading bar and may proceed to discovery," the judge said.

In October, Meta asked the court to dismiss the suit, arguing the FTC had failed yet again to present a "factual basis for alleging monopoly power." The agency's amended complaint is approximately two dozen pages longer than its original one, but it puts forward many of the same arguments. Specifically, the FTC alleges Facebook used the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 to secure its dominant position in the social media market.

Facebook

Meta Sued For Alleged Role In Extremist-Linked Murder of Federal Guard (engadget.com) 34

The surviving sister of Dave Patrick Underwood, a federal security guard who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2020, has filed a lawsuit against Meta, the parent organization of Facebook. The suit seeks to hold the company accountable for connecting the two men charged in the murder plot and giving them a space online to plan the attack. Engadget reports: Underwood was shot outside a federal building in Oakland, California in May of 2020. The two men charged inn the case were later linked to so-called "boogaloo" anti-government movement, which Facebook banned from its platform in June of 2020 citing the group's history of "actively promoting violence against civilians, law enforcement and government officials and institutions."

"The shooting was not a random act of violence," the lawsuit states. "It was the culmination of an extremist plot hatched and planned on Facebook by two men who Meta connected through Facebook's groups infrastructure and its use of algorithms designed and intended to increase user engagement and, correspondingly, Meta's profits." The lawsuit alleges the two men would never have met if not for Facebook's recommendations, which pushed them both to join groups that "openly advocated for violence." A spokesperson for Meta said in a statement to The New York Times that the "claims are without legal basis," and pointed to the company's work to ban "militarized social movements."

Announcements

What Were Slashdot's Most Popular Stories of 2021? (slashdot.org) 16

Another 12 months gone by, and with it nearly 8,000 new Slashdot headlines — so which ones drew the most views?

Click here for lists of Slashdot's top 10 most-visited and most-commented stories of the year — and also the all-time top 10 lists since Slashdot's creation in 1997.

Here's some of 2021's highlights:
  • Remember that big electrical outage that left millions of Texans without power in the middle of a winter storm? As the crisis was still raging, CNN asked the million-dollar question: who's actually to blame? This became Slashdot's 9th most-visited story of the year — and also the 7th most-commented.
  • Two of the 10 most-visited stories of the year were "Ask Slashdot" technical questions: In April RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) asked whether a software RAID is better than a hardware RAID? And in January of 2020 Slashdot reader lsllll asked for suggestions on a a battery-powered wi-fi security camera supporting FTP/SMB

    Interestingly, one of the year's most-commented poll topics had asked whether bitcoin would break $100,000 before the end of 2021. 4,951 voters — a full 25% — had said "Yes" — and were off by more than half, with bitcoin actually tumbling 8% in the last week of 2021 to wind up somewhere near $46,371 as of late Friday afternoon.

    At the time of the poll — October 8th — the price of Bitcoin was already up to $53,963. One month later it had reached it's highest price of 2021 — $67,582 — before dropping 31.7% over the next 53 days.

    In the October poll asking whether bitcoin would reach $100,000 in the final 84 days of 2021 — another 14,687 Slashdot readers voted "No."

The Almighty Buck

Metaverse Property Mogul Touts 10-Fold Appreciation In Virtual Real Estate Portfolio (businessinsider.com) 65

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Markets Insider: Andrew Kiguel, CEO of crypto-asset investment firm Tokens.com, estimated his metaverse portfolio is valued at 10 times more than his purchase price, USA Today said in a report published Wednesday. "It's all about the location," he told the newspaper, saying that land in the core of a virtual downtown is key. "The more visitors who come, the more valuable the land, and the more a retailer and advertisers will be willing to spend to reach those people." Toronto-based Tokens.com acquired a 50% stake in Metaverse Group in October for $1.7 million, then completed an additional investment last week to give it a 67% ownership stock in the firm. The deal comes after Metaverse Group last month made a then-record $2.43 million purchase of parcels in the Decentraland metaverse platform.

Kiguel has high hopes for that virtual plot of land. "I think we're going to see a quick appreciation and monetize renting that land and space very soon," he told USA Today, adding that the plan is to develop the virtual area into a destination for luxury brands. Metaverse Group CEO Lorne Sugarman told Insider in November that the Decentraland property purchase, which was in its Fashion District, provides an early foothold in upscale commercial opportunities in the metaverse. "We think the Fashion District purchase is like buying on Fifth Avenue back in the 1800s or the creation of Rodeo Drive," he said, referring to the high-end shopping areas in Manhattan and Beverly Hills.
Earlier this month, someone by the name of P-Ape bought a plot of digital land in Snoop Dogg's new virtual world, Snoopverse, for $450,000. "The rapper announced that he would be building his own virtual world in the metaverse on the Sandbox platform this September," reports Fortune.
Facebook

Apple Reportedly Hires Away Meta's AR Public Relations Head (theverge.com) 19

Apple has reportedly hired Andrea Schubert, Meta's communications and public relations lead for its augmented reality (AR) products, according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter. The Verge reports: Schubert's LinkedIn page indicates that she's been working for Meta for nearly six years. "Meta, with Oculus, has been the market leader in headsets, so such a hire makes sense as Apple nears its launch," Gurman explains. On both Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year, Meta's Oculus Quest 2 was one of the top-selling products. Not to mention that Meta's Oculus app topped the App Store in the US on Christmas Day, and became the number one free app on the Google Play store today, a potential sign that a significant amount of people received the headset as a gift this holiday. According to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the company's AR headset could launch sometime in 2022, featuring 8K displays and "Mac-level" computing power. It may also cost a whopping $3,000 and be geared largely for developers at launch.
Facebook

Despite EU Court Rulings, Facebook Says US Is Safe To Receive Europeans' Data (politico.eu) 32

Despite the European Union's highest court twice declaring that the United States does not offer sufficient protection for Europeans' data from American national security agencies, the social media giant's lawyers continue to disagree, according to internal documents seen by POLITICO. Their conclusion that the U.S. is safe for EU data is part of Facebook's legal argument for it to be able to continue shipping data across the Atlantic. From the report: In July 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) struck down a U.S.-EU data transfer instrument called Privacy Shield. The court concluded Washington did not offer adequate protection for EU data shipped overseas because U.S. surveillance law was too intrusive for European standards. In the same landmark ruling, the Luxembourg-based court upheld the legality of another instrument used to export data out of Europe called Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs). But it cast doubt on whether these complex legal instruments could be used to shuttle data to countries where EU standards cannot be met, including the U.S. The CJEU reached a similar conclusion in 2015, striking down the predecessor agreement to Privacy Shield because of U.S. surveillance law and practices. In both rulings, Europe's top judges categorically stated Washington did not have sufficiently high privacy standards. Still, Facebook -- the company at the heart of both cases -- thinks it shouldn't follow the court's reasoning.

The company's lawyers argue in the documents that the EU court ruling "should not be relied on" for the social media company's own assessment of data transfers to the U.S., because the judges' findings relate to Privacy Shield data pact, and not the Standard Contractual Clauses which Facebook uses to transfer data to the U.S. "The assessment of U.S. law (and practice) under Article 45 GDPR is materially different to the assessment of law and practice required under Article 46 GDPR," the document reads. That refers to the two different types of legal data transfer instruments under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation and indicates that assessment under SCCs is different to assessment under Privacy Shield. The company also says that changes to U.S. law and practices since the July 2020 ruling should be taken into account. As an example, it cites the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, a watchdog, "carrying out its role as a data protection agency with unprecedented force and vigour." Those arguments have been central to Washington's pitch during ongoing transatlantic negotiations over a new EU-U.S. data agreement.
"Though companies have to take the EU court ruling into account when making their own assessments of third party country regimes, they can, in theory, diverge from the court's findings if they believe it is justified in a particular situation," notes Politico. "This means that companies like Facebook can, in theory, continue to ship data out of Europe if they can prove its sufficiently protected."
Facebook

Facebook Bans 7 'Surveillance-For-Hire' Companies That Spied On 50,000 Users (npr.org) 9

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The parent company of Facebook and Instagram has banned seven firms it says used its platforms to spy on some 50,000 unsuspecting targets, including human rights activists, government critics, celebrities, journalists and ordinary people in more than 100 countries. These "surveillance-for-hire" companies were linked to around 1,500 accounts on Facebook and Instagram that were used to collect information on people and try to trick them into handing over sensitive personal information so that the firms could install spyware on their devices, according to a report released on Thursday by Meta, formerly known as Facebook.

"Each of these actors rely on networks of fake accounts on our platforms that are used to deceive users and mislead them," Nathaniel Gleicher, Meta's head of security policy, told NPR. Some firms also used Meta's WhatsApp to infect targets' phones with malware. The surveillance was also carried out over other internet services, from email and text messages to Twitter and YouTube. The goal, Gleicher said, is to "spy on people or snoop on them without them knowing about it." Gleicher's team spent months investigating surveillance activity before taking action against the seven companies for violating Meta's community standards and terms of service. Four of the firms are based in Israel, and the other three in China, India, and North Macedonia.

They include Black Cube, an Israel-based intelligence group reportedly used by Harvey Weinstein to dig up dirt on his accusers and journalists. Meta said Black Cube created fake accounts posing as graduate students, human rights workers and film and TV producers and tried to set up phone calls and get email addresses for a wide range of targets, from Palestinian activists to people working in medicine, mining and nonprofit organizations to figures involved in Russia's tech, finance, real estate and media sectors. [...] Another Israeli firm called Bluehawk CI tried to trick government opponents in the United Arab Emirates by pretending to be reporters for Fox News and Italy's La Stampa, Meta said. Meta also took down accounts connected to "an unidentified entity in China" that, Meta says, made tools used by Chinese law enforcement to spy on minority groups in Xinjiang, Myanmar and Hong Kong.
"Meta has banned the companies from its platforms, removed the accounts it linked to them, and sent them cease-and-desist warnings," adds NPR. "It is notifying around 50,000 people whom it believes were targeted, and shared its findings with security researchers, other tech companies and policymakers."
Power

Metaverse Vision Requires 1000x More Computational Power, Says Intel (intel.com) 79

Leading chip-maker Intel has stressed that building Metaverse -- at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real time -- will require a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from what we have today. Insider reports: Raja Koduri, a senior vice president and head of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, said that our computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this Metaverse vision, being popularized by Meta (formerly Facebook) and other companies. "We need several orders of magnitude more powerful computing capability, accessible at much lower latencies across a multitude of device form factors," Koduri said in a blog post. To enable these capabilities at scale, the entire plumbing of the internet will need major upgrades, he added.
Social Networks

Meta Opens Up Access To Its VR Social Platform Horizon Worlds (theverge.com) 22

More than two years and a company rebrand later, Meta is finally opening up access to its VR social platform Horizon Worlds. Starting Thursday, people in the US and Canada who are 18 and up will be able to access the free Quest app without an invite. From a report: Horizon Worlds is Meta's first attempt at releasing something that resembles CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision of the metaverse. It's an expansive, multiplayer platform that meshes Roblox and the OASIS VR world from Ready Player One. Originally just called Horizon, it requires a Facebook account and lets you hang out with up to 20 people at a time in a virtual space. First announced in September 2019 as a private beta, Horizon Worlds has evolved from primarily being a Minecraft-like environment for building games to more of a social platform. Its thousands of beta testers have held regular comedy shows, movie nights, and meditation sessions. They've also built elaborate objects like a replica of the Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters. "Now we can open up and say we have interesting things that people can do," Vivek Sharma, Meta's VP of Horizon, tells me.
Facebook

Meta Has a 'Moral Obligation' To Make Its Mental Health Research Transparent, Scientists Say (theverge.com) 46

In an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg published Monday, a group of academics called for Meta to be more transparent about its research into how Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp affect the mental health of children and adolescents. The Verge reports: The letter calls for the company to allow independent reviews of its internal work, contribute data to external research projects, and set up an independent scientific oversight group. "You and your organizations have an ethical and moral obligation to align your internal research on children and adolescents with established standards for evidence in mental health science," the letter, signed by researchers from universities around the world, reads.

The open letter comes after leaks from Facebook revealed some data from the company's internal research, which found that Instagram was linked with anxiety and body image issues for some teenage girls. The research released, though, is limited and relied on subjective information collected through interviews. While this strategy can produce useful insights, it can't prove that social media caused any of the mental health outcomes. The information available so far appears to show that the studies Facebook researchers conducted don't meet the standards academic researchers use to conduct trials, the new open letter said. The information available also isn't complete, the authors noted -- Meta hasn't made its research methods or data public, so it can't be scrutinized by independent experts. The authors called for the company to allow independent review of past and future research, which would include releasing research materials and data.

The letter also asked Meta to contribute its data to ongoing independent research efforts on the mental health of adolescents. It's a longstanding frustration that big tech companies don't release data, which makes it challenging for external researchers to scrutinize and understand their products. "It will be impossible to identify and promote mental health in the 21st century if we cannot study how young people are interacting online," the authors said. [...] The open letter also called on Meta to establish an independent scientific trust to evaluate any risks to mental health from the use of platforms like Facebook and Instagram and to help implement "truly evidence-based solutions for online risks on a world-wide scale." The trust could be similar to the existing Facebook Oversight Board, which helps the company with content moderation decisions.

Bitcoin

Meta Allows More Cryptocurrency Ads (engadget.com) 32

Meta is backing away from its longstanding (if not absolute) ban on cryptocurrency ads. Engadget reports: As CNBC reports, Meta has greatly loosened its ban by expanding the number of regulatory licenses it accepts from three to 27. The crypto landscape has "matured and stabilized" enough to justify the change of heart, the company said, including an increased amount of government regulation that sets "clearer responsibilities and expectations."

Advertisers still need written permission to run ads for cryptocurrency exchanges, lending and borrowing, crypto mining tools and wallets that let you buy, sell, stake or swap tokens. This does, however, open the door to cryptocurrency businesses that previously couldn't run any ads, not to mention would-be investors who might not be familiar with the market.
The report goes on to note that "the shift comes just a day after Meta's crypto overseer, David Marcus, said he was leaving the company."
Facebook

UK Regulator Expected To Block Meta's Giphy Deal (ft.com) 14

The UK competition regulator is expected to block Meta's $315m acquisition of online gif platform Giphy in the coming days in an escalation of the watchdog's assault on Big Tech. Financial Times: The Competition and Markets Authority is set to reverse the deal according to individuals close to the matter, in what would be the first time the CMA has unwound a Big Tech deal. The watchdog began investigating Meta's acquisition of New-York based Giphy -- the biggest provider of animated images known as gifs to social networks -- in June last year. A decision to block the deal would set an eye-catching precedent from the UK regulator, which has never sought to reverse a completed tech deal. In August the CMA provisionally ruled Meta, formerly known as Facebook, should be forced to sell Giphy due to competition concerns. It has until December 1 to make a final call. At that time the CMA argued Meta could cut off its rivals' access to gifs, and demand platforms like TikTok or Snapchat hand over more of their data in order to access gifs, consolidating power in Meta's hands. The watchdog also said the deal could remove a competitor to Meta in the display advertising market in the UK, despite Giphy's lack of presence in that sector.
Facebook

Three Out of Four Adults Think Facebook Is Making Society Worse, Poll Finds (cnn.com) 159

An anonymous reader shares the results of a new poll (PDF) from CNN, adding: "Facebook should be treated like cigarettes." From the report: Roughly three-quarters of adults believe Facebook is making American society worse, a new CNN poll (PDF) conducted by SSRS finds [...]. Americans say, 76% to 11%, that Facebook makes society worse, not better, according to the survey. Another 13% say it has no effect either way. That broadly negative appraisal holds across gender, age and racial lines. Even frequent Facebook users -- those who report using the site at least several times a week -- say 70% to 14% that the social network harms, rather than helps, US society. Although majorities across parties say Facebook is doing more harm than good, that feeling spikes among Republicans (82%).

Among the majority overall who think Facebook is worsening society, however, there's less of an overwhelming consensus on whether or not the platform itself is primarily to blame: 55% say that the way some people use Facebook is more at fault, with 45% saying it's more due to the way Facebook itself is run. Overall, about one-third of the public -- including 44% of Republicans and 27% of Democrats -- say both that Facebook is making American society worse and that Facebook itself is more at fault than its users.

AMD

AMD Signs Up Meta in Another Big Win on Server Customers (bloomberg.com) 58

Advanced Micro Devices said Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, is becoming a user of its server processors, further eroding Intel's hold on that lucrative market. From a report: Meta will use AMD Epyc processors in its data center computers, the two companies said Monday at an event. AMD also unveiled a new version of that chip with extra memory, which Microsoft Corp. will use in an offering from its Azure cloud computing service. The chipmaker also showed off a new graphics chip for artificial intelligence workloads and gave hints about its next generation of processors coming in 2022. The addition of Meta, the world's largest social media company, to AMD's customer list means it now supplies all the top operators of the giant computing networks that run the internet. Winning those major spenders was part of Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su's plan to resurrect AMD and have it reach market share levels it had only briefly flirted with amid years of struggling to keep up with Intel.

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