An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack has been bullish on the idea of "the metaverse" for a long time, as he'll be among the first to point out. But the id Software co-founder spent a good chunk of his wide-ranging Connect keynote Thursday sounding pretty skeptical of plans by the newly rebranded Meta (formerly Facebook) to actually build that metaverse. "I really do care about [the metaverse], and I buy into the vision," Carmack said, before quickly adding, "I have been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times." The reason for that seeming contradiction is a somewhat ironic one, as Carmack puts it: "I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse."

Today, Carmack said, "The most obvious path to the metaverse is that you have one single universal app, something like Roblox." That said, Carmack added, "I doubt a single application will get to that level of taking over everything." That's because a single bad decision by the creators of that walled-garden metaverse can cut off too many possibilities for users and makers. "I just don't believe that one player -- one company -- winds up making all the right decisions for this," he said. The idea of the metaverse, Carmack says, can be "a honeypot trap for 'architecture astronauts.'" Those are the programmers and designers who "want to only look at things from the very highest levels," he said, while skipping the "nuts and bolts details" of how these things actually work.

These so-called architecture astronauts, Carmack said, "want to talk in high abstract terms about how we'll have generic objects that can contain other objects that can have references to these and entitlements to that, and we can pass control from one to the other." That kind of high-level hand-waving makes Carmack "just want to tear [his] hair out... because that's just so not the things that are actually important when you're building something." "But here we are," Carmack continued. "Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build the metaverse, so enormous wheels are turning and resources are flowing and the effort is definitely going to be made."

At an event in Japan today, Toyota unveiled its first all-electric car: the bZ4X. Electrek reports: "bZ" stands for "beyond zero," which is Toyota's latest electrification strategy and a sort of sub-brand for its upcoming electric vehicles, starting with the bZ4X. The electric SUV hasn't been updated much from the concept. It still features some sharp lines and aggressive design. In terms of specs, we finally have more details. Toyota has been clear that every spec it released today is for the Japanese version of the car. Details on the US version are expected to come next month, but it should still give us a good idea.

The vehicle is equipped with a 71.4 kWh battery pack. As for what range it enables, Toyota is only releasing right now "cruising range per charge (WLTC)," which it claims to be 500 km (310 miles) for the front-wheel drive version and 460 km (286 miles) for the all-wheel-drive version. The front-wheel-drive version is equipped with a single 150 kW motor while the all-wheel-drive version is equipped with an 80 kW motor on each axle. The DC fast-charging capacity is apparently capped at 150 kW and Toyota says that it can charge to 80% state-of-charge in about 30 minutes with that capacity.

First off, it's capable of bidirectional charging for vehicle-to-home capacity. It's also offered with an optional solar roof, which Toyota says can "generates electricity equivalent to 1,800 km of driving distance per year." Toyota is also offering the bZ4X with an optional "wing-shaped" steering wheel, which the automaker claims improve visibility. The electric SUV is expected to land first in Japan in mid-2022. More details about pricing, specs and features will be available in the coming months. The news comes after the company said it expects to spend more than $13.5 billion to develop EV battery tech and supply by 2030.

The game formerly known as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds accounts for 97% of the revenue of its maker Krafton. Given that the Seoul-based company is valued at almost $20 billion, we have a rough estimate for how much this single game is worth, according to the stock market. A good chunk of that value is in the potential that title holds for expansion. From a report: Krafton has staked its future on making PUBG -- no longer an abbreviation but a brand for a wider intellectual property franchise -- into a big fantasy universe spanning different games and entertainment genres. The first big test of this strategy is PUBG: New State, the mobile sequel that moves the battle royale action to 2051 and adds more advanced weaponry, vehicles and graphics. It arrives on Nov. 11. I haven't played it to be able to tell you how good it will be, but I would be hugely surprised if it turns into anything other than another money printer for Krafton.

The reason for my confidence is simple: The company isn't straying too far from what made the original 2017 game a hit and is mostly changing the cosmetics atop the underlying physics and gameplay. This approach has proven highly successful in the mobile arena. The smartphone game is launching in more than 200 countries and in 17 different languages and has already had more than 50 million preregistrations. Another essential element for mobile success that Krafton taps into is making the game free to play. The vast majority of smartphone app store revenue comes from games, which seems counterintuitive considering that most of those games demand no upfront payment. The real money, however, is in enticing players to make microtransactions within the game, such as personalizing your character with "skins" or buying a pet or better weapons. This is such a big deal that Epic Games took Apple and Alphabet's Google to court over the split of who gets to profit from those addictive little in-game buys in PUBG rival Fortnite.

Cryptocurrency firms could be forced to take greater steps to combat money laundering under new guidelines released on Thursday by the Financial Action Task Force, an international body that coordinates government policy on illicit finance. From a report: The task force called on governments to broaden regulatory oversight of crypto firms and force more of them to take measures such as checking the identities of their customers and reporting suspicious transactions to regulators. The FATF's guidelines don't have the force of law, and would need to be implemented by national regulators in each country. Still, the Paris-based group is influential in setting standards for government policies against money laundering and financing of terrorism, and its guidelines could shape new crypto regulations around the world. More than three dozen countries are FATF members, including the U.S., China and much of Europe.

Representatives of the crypto industry criticized the guidelines, saying they would undermine privacy, stifle innovation or simply not work in the context of blockchain and digital-asset technology. "It would be inappropriate for anything like these non-specific and confusing standards to replace the current law and regulations we have on the books here in the U.S.," Peter Van Valkenburgh, research director at crypto advocacy group Coin Center, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. Among the targets of the FATF's guidelines is decentralized finance, or DeFi for short. DeFi is an umbrella term for various efforts to implement traditional financial activities -- such as lending or trading -- using software rather than a central intermediary to oversee transactions. DeFi has grown rapidly since last year, with over $100 billion of assets posted as collateral in various DeFi projects, according to data provider DeBank. The guidelines take aim at DeFi projects such as decentralized exchanges, in which crypto traders can swap assets with each other, typically on an anonymous basis. The task force said the people or companies that own or operate such decentralized platforms could be considered virtual asset service providers, or VASPs, a designation that would force them to check users' identities and take other measures against money laundering.

A few years ago, Google started offering a non-college certificate program to help teach basic IT skills to future workers. Now, the tech giant is working to make sure more people -- including community college students -- have access to the curriculum. From a report: The labor market has a big skills mismatch, with companies saying they can't find enough qualified applicants, while plenty of job seekers struggle to find meaningful and lucrative work. As part of the expansion, Google will make the certificate program free for community colleges and vocational high schools across the nation. Connecticut will be the first state to offer Google Career Certificates across its state colleges and universities system. Google is also working with the American Council on Education to allow those who have achieved a certificate to also get college credit for the work.

Google and top Indian telecom network Jio Platforms said on Friday that their much-anticipated budget smartphone, JioPhone Next, will go on sale in the world's second largest smartphone market on November 4. From a report: The firms said the JioPhone Next will cost 6,499 Indian rupees ($87), and can also be purchased in multiple instalments with an entry price as low as $27. The smartphone runs Pragati OS, which is powered by an "extremely optimized" Android mobile operating system with a range of customized feature. The two firms also revealed the specifications of the JioPhone Next. The smartphone features a 5.45-inch HD+ display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. It is powered by Qualcomm's quad-core QM-215 chipset that clocks up to 1.3GHz, coupled with 2GB of RAM and 32GB internal storage, which is expandable.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is developing a smartwatch with a front-facing camera and rounded screen, according to an image of the device found inside one of the tech giant's iPhone apps. The photo shows a watch with a screen and casing that's slightly curved at the edges. The front-facing camera -- similar to what you'd see on a smartphone -- appears at the bottom of the display, and there's a control button for the watch on the right side. The image was found inside of the company's app for controlling its new smart glasses launched in partnership with Ray-Ban. The picture was located by app developer Steve Moser and shared with Bloomberg News.

The watch has a detachable wrist strap and what appears to be a button at the top of the watch case. Its large display mimics the style of Apple's watch -- rather than the more basic fitness trackers sold by Google's Fitbit and Garmin. The camera suggests the product will likely be used for videoconferencing, a feature that would make Meta's device stand out. Apple's smartwatch doesn't have a camera, nor do rival products from companies such as Samsung. Facebook has been planning to launch its first watch as early as 2022, but a final decision on timing hasn't been made yet and the debut could be later, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company is working on three generations of the product aimed at different release time frames, the person said. The device in the image could ultimately represent a version that is never released, but it's the first evidence of the company's work on the project. Not only does the code inside the software of the watch indicate it'll work with iOS and Android devices, but it may also be used as an input device or accessory for the company's VR and AR headsets.

Google is now making it easier for minors or their parents to have photos of them deleted from search results. CNN reports: In a blog post published Wednesday, the company said it is rolling out a tool that lets parents and kids under the age of 18 request photos be removed from its images tab or no longer appear as thumbnails in a search inquiry. The new form allows users to flag URLs of any images or search results that contain pictures they want removed. Google said its teams will review each submission and reach out if they need additional information to verify the requirements for removal. However, the company emphasized this won't remove the image from the internet entirely; people will need to contact a website's webmaster to ask for that content to be removed. "We know that kids and teens have to navigate some unique challenges online, especially when a picture of them is unexpectedly available on the internet," the company said in the blog post. "We believe this change will help give young people more control over their digital footprint and where their images can be found on Search."

Earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg announced it's changing Facebook's name to Meta. While he said Facebook's existing brands wouldn't be changing, we have learned that's not entirely true. "In a lengthy Facebook post, CTO-in-waiting Andrew Bosworth detailed about 15 minutes later following the completion of the keynote that as part of the new rebrand, they will be killing off the Oculus brand," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Oculus phrasing was conspicuously absent from the presentations today and features like the Oculus Store were consistently referred to as the Quest Store. In his post, Bosworth details that starting early next year the process to rename the Oculus app to the Meta app and the Oculus Quest to the Meta Quest will begin. "We all have a strong attachment to the Oculus brand, and this was a very difficult decision to make. While we're retiring the name, I can assure you that the original Oculus vision remains deeply embedded in how Meta will continue to drive mass adoption for VR today," Bosworth wrote. Facebook bought Oculus VR back in 2014 for $2 billion.

At the time, Zuckerberg said the Oculus Rift VR headset was the beginning of something big: "This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures."

Huq, an established data vendor that obtains granular location information from ordinary apps installed on people's phones and then sells that data, has been receiving GPS coordinates even when people explicitly opted-out of such collection inside individual Android apps, researchers and Motherboard have found. From a report: The news highlights a stark problem for smartphone users: that they can't actually be sure if some apps are respecting their explicit preferences around data sharing. The data transfer also presents an issue for the location data companies themselves. Many claim to be collecting data with consent, and by extension, in line with privacy regulations. But Huq was seemingly not aware of the issue when contacted by Motherboard for comment, showing that location data firms harvesting and selling his data may not even know whether they are actually getting this data with consent or not.

"This shows an urgent need for regulatory action," Joel Reardon, assistant professor at the University of Calgary and the forensics lead and co-founder of AppCensus, a company that analyzes apps, and who first flagged some of the issues around Huq to Motherboard, said in an email. "I feel that there's plenty wrong with the idea that -- as long as you say it in your privacy policy -- then it's fine to do things like track millions of people's every moment and sell it to private companies to do what they want with it. But how do we even start fixing problems like this when it's going to happen regardless of whether you agree, regardless of any consent whatsoever."

Microsoft is rolling out Windows 11 to more PCs this week. After an initial launch to mostly new PCs earlier this month, Microsoft is gradually making the free Windows 11 upgrade available to more existing and eligible devices. From a report: "The availability of Windows 11 has been increased and we are leveraging our latest generation machine learning model to offer the upgrade to an expanded set of eligible devices," says Microsoft. "We will continue to train our machine learning model throughout the phased rollout to deliver a smooth upgrade experience." If you've been waiting for the Windows 11 upgrade to appear in Windows Update, you might find the above prompt this week. Anecdotally, we've been offered the upgrade on a variety of devices today, including a custom gaming PC.

Facebook said Thursday it's changing its name to Meta. "From now on, we''ll be metaverse first, not Facebook first," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company's Oculus Connect event. "Over time you won't need to use Facebook to use our other services."

Microsoft on Thursday said it plans to work with community colleges across the United States to fill 250,000 cybersecurity jobs over the next four years. From a report: Microsoft said it will provide scholarships or assistance to about 25,000 students and will provide training for new and existing teachers at 150 community colleges across the country. The company also said that it will provide curriculum materials for free to all community colleges, as well as four-year schools, in the country. "Over the next three years, we'll put many tens of millions of dollars behind this effort," Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a press briefing. "This is an opportunity for us to get started. This is not the ceiling on what we'll do."

Facebook unveiled a series of new moves in augmented and virtual reality on Thursday, as part of its longer-term effort to help build a "metaverse" that will bring physically distant people closer together. From a report: Facebook has said this is its next major push, but it comes as the company is under intense scrutiny for how it is managing the impact of its existing services. The company is using its annual Facebook Connect conference to outline a series of new features and products, as well as some investments to spur adoption of the technologies. Among them:

Horizon Home: Facebook is making the home screen on Oculus Quest more social, allowing friends to gather, watch videos together and dive into games and apps.
Messenger calling in VR: This will start with being able to call from VR and eventually that will be a launch point for hanging out in virtual reality.
Bringing more 2D apps to VR: More than 20 apps are coming to Horizon Home, with the ability to be placed on a virtual screen. Apps include productivity titles like Slack and Dropbox as well as Facebook's own services, including Instagram. Developers will also be able to offer their own progressive web apps for use in VR.
Horizon Marketplace: The company plans to operate its own marketplace where creators and developers can sell their own virtual goods.
On the augmented reality front, Facebook is adding hand and body tracking to its Spark AR developer tools as well as Polar, a new app that allows people to create augmented reality filters without needing to code.

Photographs from a historic moment in tech news history, the day a Gizmodo reporter published hands-on pics of the then-not-yet-announced iPhone 4, are now missing. From a report: And they're not alone -- vast quantities of pictures from G/O Media sites like The Onion, Jalopnik, and Deadspin (as well as Gizmodo) have been removed, reportedly intentionally, according to Gawker. A recent Gawker report highlights that Buzzfeed has also been wiping many older images from the web. Still, Buzzfeed's reason for doing so is relatively apparent after management explained the copyright claims on old photos deemed some of them "high-risk." Both cases are examples of "link rot," where content on the internet is drastically changed because it either disappears entirely or because essential pieces have gone missing.

Google on Thursday warned some customers that antitrust bills targeting the tech giant could jeopardize the services small businesses rely on. From a report: By turning to its customers, Google could drum up opposition from small businesses that may give lawmakers pause in advancing legislation. Google is emailing small and medium sized businesses that use its advertising, analytics and free business profile tools, to tell them antitrust bills in the House and Senate could "cost your business time and money." Google said the dangers could include: Making it harder for customers to find businesses because listings, including address and business hours, may no longer appear in Google Search results or on Google Maps, and hurting the effectiveness of digital marketing if Google Ads products were broken up and disconnected from Google Analytics.

"[W]e're concerned that Congress' controversial package of bills could have unintended consequences, especially for small businesses who have relied on digital tools to adapt, recover and reach new customers throughout the pandemic," a Google spokesperson told Axios. Google declined to say how many businesses it contacted. Customers using some Google products will also see a prompt encouraging them to opt in to receive more information about the bills.

Physicists in China claim they've constructed two quantum computers with performance speeds that outrival competitors in the U.S., debuting a superconducting machine, in addition to an even speedier one that uses light photons to obtain unprecedented results, according to a recent study published in the peer-reviewed journals Physical Review Letters and Science Bulletin. Interesting Engineering reports: The supercomputer, called Jiuzhang 2, can calculate in a single millisecond a task that the fastest conventional computer in the world would take a mind-numbing 30 trillion years to do. The breakthrough was revealed during an interview with the research team, which was broadcast on China's state-owned CCTV on Tuesday, which could make the news suspect. But with two peer-reviewed papers, it's important to take this seriously. Pan Jianwei, lead researcher of the studies, said that Zuchongzhi 2, which is a 66-qubit programmable superconducting quantum computer is an incredible 10 million times faster than Google's 55-qubit Sycamore, making China's new machine the fastest in the world, and the first to beat Google's in two years.

The Zuchongzhi 2 is an improved version of a previous machine, completed three months ago. The Jiuzhang 2, a different quantum computer that runs on light, has fewer applications but can run at blinding speeds of 100 sextillion times faster than the biggest conventional computers of today. In case you missed it, that's a one with 23 zeroes behind it. But while the features of these new machines hint at a computing revolution, they won't hit the marketplace anytime soon. As things stand, the two machines can only operate in pristine environments, and only for hyper-specific tasks. And even with special care, they still make lots of errors. "In the next step we hope to achieve quantum error correction with four to five years of hard work," said Professor Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, which is in the southeastern province of Anhui.

In a project that could unlock the world's research papers for easier computerized analysis, an American technologist has released online a gigantic index of the words and short phrases contained in more than 100 million journal articles -- including many paywalled papers. Nature reports: The catalogue, which was released on October 7 and is free to use, holds tables of more than 355 billion words and sentence fragments listed next to the articles in which they appear. It is an effort to help scientists use software to glean insights from published work even if they have no legal access to the underlying papers, says its creator, Carl Malamud. He released the files under the auspices of Public Resource, a non-profit corporation in Sebastopol, California that he founded. Malamud says that because his index doesn't contain the full text of articles, but only sentence snippets up to five words long, releasing it does not breach publishers' copyright restrictions on the re-use of paywalled articles. However, one legal expert says that publishers might question the legality of how Malamud created the index in the first place.

Some researchers who have had early access to the index say it's a major development in helping them to search the literature with software -- a procedure known as text mining. [...] Computer scientists already text mine papers to build databases of genes, drugs and chemicals found in the literature, and to explore papers' content faster than a human could read. But they often note that publishers ultimately control the speed and scope of their work, and that scientists are restricted to mining only open-access papers, or those articles they (or their institutions) have subscriptions to. Some publishers have said that researchers looking to mine the text of paywalled papers need their authorization. And although free search engines such as Google Scholar have -- with publishers' agreement -- indexed the text of paywalled literature, they only allow users to search with certain types of text queries, and restrict automated searching. That doesn't allow large-scale computerized analysis using more specialized searches, Malamud says.

In response to mounting pressure from activists, parents and regulators who believe tech companies haven't done enough to protect children online, businesses and governments around the globe are placing major parts of the internet behind stricter digital age checks. The New York Times reports: People in Japan must provide a document proving their age to use the dating app Tinder. The popular game Roblox requires players to upload a form of government identification -- and a selfie to prove the ID belongs to them -- if they want access to a voice chat feature. Laws in Germany and France require pornography websites to check visitors' ages. The changes, which have picked up speed over the last two years, could upend one of the internet's central traits: the ability to remain anonymous. Since the days of dial-up modems and AOL chat rooms, people could traverse huge swaths of the web without divulging any personal details. Many people created an online persona entirely separate from their offline one. But the experience of consuming content and communicating online is increasingly less like an anonymous public square and more like going to the bank, with measures to prove that you are who you say you are. [...]

Critics of the age checks say that in the name of keeping people safe, they could endanger user privacy, dampen free expression and hurt communities that benefit from anonymity online. Authoritarian governments have used protecting children as an argument for limiting online speech: China barred websites this summer from ranking celebrities by popularity as part of a larger crackdown on what it says are the pernicious effects of celebrity culture on young people. "Are we going to start seeing more age verification? Of course," said Hany Farid, a professor of engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who has called for more child safety measures. "Because there is more pressure, there's more awareness now, on how these technologies are harming kids." But, Mr. Farid said, regulators and companies need to proceed with caution. "We don't want the solution to be more harmful than the problem," he said. Further reading: 'Banning Anonymous Social Media Accounts Would Only Stifle Free Speech and Democracy'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Stripe is signing up to pay for carbon-removal technologies that haven't been invented yet. The payments company has formed a partnership with Deep Science Ventures, a London investment firm that specializes in building technology companies from the ground up. DSV will recruit scientists to develop ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If they come up with viable concepts, Stripe will be their first customer. It will pay DSV startups $500,000 each up front to capture and store carbon, then a further $1 million if they meet performance milestones.

The new partnership marks an expansion of Stripe's effort to provide a market for unproven technology that could potentially help limit the damage of global warming. The United Nations' scientific panel on climate change says the least-bad global-temperature scenarios depend on people removing billions of tons of planet-warming gases from the atmosphere. It also cautions that companies and governments may never be able to deploy the technology on the scale required to make that happen. Since August 2019, when it promised "to pay, at any available price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure, long-term storage," Stripe has committed $9 million to 10 carbon-removal projects.

Stripe's carbon-removal procurement is led by Ryan Orbuch, who was a product manager before focusing on climate, and the team's projects are vetted by a panel of industry experts. Costs vary, with the most expensive service costing more than $2,000 per ton of carbon removed. Scalability is more important than current pricing. Stripe says technologies should have the potential to remove half a gigaton of carbon dioxide a year by 2050 at a cost of $100 per ton, and store it for at least 1,000 years. Stripe has tethered its core business of operating payment infrastructure to its side project. Stripe Climate, a tool introduced in October 2020, lets Stripe's customers divert a percentage of revenue to the carbon-removal pot. Roughly 9,000 of Stripe's millions of business users have enrolled contributing nearly $3 million a year collectively, and roughly 8% of new Stripe users sign up [...].