Developers who have apps or games on the Oculus Store can now sell recurring subscriptions to their titles, as opposed to offering them for a one-time fee or choosing to handle the subscription process independently. This should give developers an easier, more sustainable way to offer new content, features, and tools to paid subscribers over time. Oculus told The Verge that the approval process for apps with subscriptions is similar to apps that have in-app purchases and add-ons.
Oculus shared on its blog that starting today, FitXR, the hugely successful Rec Room, Tribe XR, Tripp, vSpatial, and VZfit are the first to begin operating on a subscription model in the Oculus Store — specifically, for the Quest platform versions of the apps. If you’ve purchased or downloaded any of these apps, you’ll keep whatever content you already have access to. Check out the blog for specifics on how each app will handle the jump to the subscription model and what perks each will offer, as they differ.
You’ll see this “Free” button popping up more often in the store.
Popular VR fitness app Supernatural confirmed to The Verge that it will soon bring support for in-headset subscriptions for new members in the near future, but for now, subscriptions are handled through its site or mobile companion app.
Unlike HTC’s Xbox Game Pass-like Viveport service that offers unlimited access to a library of VR apps and games for a monthly or annual cost, the Oculus Store is sticking with per-app subscriptions for now. And don’t worry, Oculus will allow a free trial period for every subscription-based title on the store, so you can try (and cancel) before you buy, but those trial periods vary per app.
Oculus says some apps will now require a subscription to use them at all, while some will make subscribing optional. Though, it’s likely that developers will funnel most new content to subscribers instead of offering it as a free update, as popular Quest games like Beat Saber and In Death: Unchained have done with downloadable content packs, perhaps as a way to encourage in-app spending.
The VR company owned by Facebook stated in February that over 60 titles for the Quest platform are making millions of dollars with apps and games on the Oculus Store. It clearly wants to turn more apps into million-dollar stories, and subscriptions certainly seem like a way to accelerate that. When I asked if Oculus will retain a percentage of a subscription sale, the company told The Verge that it doesn’t discuss fees it collects from developers.
Twitter is starting a new initiative, Responsible Machine Learning, to assess any “unintentional harms” caused by its algorithms. A team of engineers, researchers, and data scientists across the company will study how Twitter’s use of machine learning can lead to algorithmic biases that negatively impact users.
One of the first tasks is an assessment of racial and gender bias in Twitter’s image cropping algorithm. Twitter users have pointed out that its auto-cropped photo previews seem to favor white faces over Black faces. Last month, the company began testing displaying full images rather than cropped previews.
The team will also look at how timeline recommendations differ across racial subgroups and analyze content recommendations across political ideologies in different countries. Twitter says it will “work closely” with third-party academic researchers and will share results of its analyses and ask for feedback from the public.
It’s not clear how much impact the findings will have. Twitter says they “may not always translate into visible product changes,” instead simply leading to “heightened awareness and important discussions” about how the company uses machine learning.
Twitter’s decision to analyze its own algorithms for bias follows other social networks like Facebook, which formed similar teams in 2020. There’s also ongoing pressure from lawmakers to keep companies’ algorithmic bias in check.
Twitter is also in the early stages of exploring “algorithmic choice,” which will potentially allow people to have more input into what content is served to them. CEO Jack Dorsey said in February that he envisions an “app-store-like view of ranking algorithms,” from which people will be able to choose which algorithms control their feeds.
Facebook announced today that it exceededone of its biggest environmental goals: it managed to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 94 percent in 2020. It had previously pledged to cut planet-heating emissions by 75 percent. The company said that it had also achieved its goal of “net zero emissions” — not putting any more emissions into the atmosphere than it can take out.
Facebook also announced that it had achieved another goal: it now purchases enough renewable energy to cover 100 percent of its global operations, which includes its offices and data centers. But that doesn’t mean that all of its operations are actually powered by renewables like solar and wind energy — at least not yet.
Renewable energy is on the rise, but most electricity grids still rely on fossil fuels. When companies can’t purchase enough renewable energy from utilities because there isn’t enough supply, they buy renewable energy certificates that signal that the company invested in renewable energy projects somewhere. Those projects can be located anywhere, and certificates have been sold for so cheap that critics say they don’t really lead to more renewable energy generation.Facebook also relies on renewable energy certificates, but it focuses on signing long-term contracts to support the construction of new solar and wind developments in the same places where it operates. It’s invested in 63 new renewable energy projects located on the same electrical grids as its data centers.
Its next target is to reach net zero emissions by 2030 for its entire supply chain and other indirect emissions that come from things like employee travel and commuting. To hit that goal, Facebook says that it developed environmental standards for its suppliers. It also plans to rely more heavily on emerging technologies that draw carbon dioxide out of the air.
Facebook has recently also tried to limit misinformation about climate change on its platform. Last year, it launched a “Climate Science Information Center” in some countries. In the UK this year, it started adding a label to some posts about climate change that redirect people to its information center. It all comes on the heels of criticism from activists and policymakers over how misinformation about climate change festered on the site, including one high-profile case of Facebook reversing a “false” rating that its fact-checkers gave to an op-ed based on inaccurate information.
“We know the next 10 years will be the defining time for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and that we have a role to play in this effort — both as a platform that connects people to information and as a global company that supports climate action,” Facebook’s director of renewable energy, Urvi Parekh, wrote in a blog today.
A city in France has had a real rollercoaster of a week, after its Facebook page was accidentally deleted for violating the terms and conditions of the site. Of course, the city of Bitche, France (in the Moselle department in northeastern France) hadn’t done anything in particular to violate any of Facebook’s rules — it just sounded a whole lot like it did.
According to a report from Radio Mélodie (via Politico), Bitche’s troubles first began on March 19th, when the city’s official page — titled “Ville de Bitche,” which translates to the perfectly normal “City of Bitche” — was suddenly removed. Valérie Degouy, the city’s communication manager, attempted to contact Facebook to try to appeal the decision but was unsuccessful, and she eventually just made a new page titled “Mairie 57230,” after Bitche’s postal code.
“I tried to reach out to Facebook in every possible way, through different forms, but there’s nothing [I could] do,” Degouy said, explaining that she had already run into similar issues with the social media company when creating the page back in 2016.
Following the viral coverage of the confusion, Facebook quickly reinstated the page on Tuesday, telling CNN that it was “removed in error.”
This kind of content moderation mix-up has been an issue on the internet for about as long as spam and profanity filters have been around. It even has a name: the Scunthorpe problem, after a similar incident in 1996 that saw AOL censor the name of the British town of Scunthrope due to filters confused over an unintentional profanity found within the name.
And while, yes, this is objectively funny, there are larger implications here. Another town in the region — Rohrbach-lès-Bitche — has preemptively changed the name of its Facebook page to ensure that it won’t be accidentally caught up in Facebook’s profanity filter. A Facebook page to be able to communicate with residents and tourists is too important of a thing to not have in 2021, but due to Facebook’s broken content filters, towns are forced to change their digital identity to simply stay online.
Towns are renaming themselves online to stop their Facebook pages from getting taken down. The entire world will one day be governed by Facebook’s content moderation standards.
(Scunthorpe problem redux: the town of Bitche hits a snag)https://t.co/kgObaNYteP
— evelyn douek (@evelyndouek) April 14, 2021
For its part, the city leadership seems to be taking the removal in good stride. A statement posted by Benoît Kieffer, the mayor of Bitche, to both the reinstated Facebook page and Bitche’s official website acknowledges the difficulties of content moderation and points out the importance of using human moderators to help differentiate between false positives (like Bitche) and more serious offenders.
Kieffer goes on to ask Facebook to be more transparent and fair in how it makes these decisions, in addition to extending an invitation to both the head of Facebook’s French business as well as to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to visit Bitche for themselves.
Oculus is announcing that wireless PC streaming, a 120Hz refresh rate, and improvements to Infinite Office will be coming to the Oculus Quest 2 with the v28 software update, which the company says will be rolling out soon.
Infinite Office is a feature that Oculus includes as part of Oculus Home, which lets users work in a virtual environment. With the v28 update, Infinite Office will have an experimental feature that allows users to add a virtual desk where their real-life desk is, letting users know where they can sit and put real-life physical objects down without having to leave VR. The Quest 2 will also be able to show a virtual representation of the Logitech K830 keyboard, though Facebook says that support for visualizing more keyboard models will be coming in the future.
Another feature coming with the update is the ability to stream games or applications from your desktop PC wirelessly. Oculus calls its wireless streaming feature Air Link, named after the Link cable that can be used to connect the headset to a PC. The feature will only work well with some network setups — the instructions to turn it on are pretty clear that you’ll need good Wi-Fi to get an acceptable experience, and that the Link cable will still provide the best visual quality.
Facebook says that it hasn’t ruled out the possibility of bringing Air Link to the original Quest at some point in the future, but it does say that it’s “focused on optimizing Air Link to be the best possible experience for Quest 2 first.”
We do know that the original Quest hardware is capable of wireless PC streaming, because indie developer Guy Godin has built it into his app, Virtual Desktop. The app gives users a virtual space to use their computers in, and it also supports streaming games over Wi-Fi. This is, however, where we have to talk about the controversy.
If you thought the description of Virtual Desktop sounded a little like Facebook’s Infinite Office, you’re not alone — Godin has been talking about how Facebook has been essentially building his app idea into its own Oculus experience then offering it for free for a while now. His case may have been helped by the fact that Facebook blocked the update that allowed Virtual Desktop to be used wirelessly until early this year, requiring users to go through a complicated sideload procedure to get the functionality working.
UploadVR talked to Godin about Facebook introducing Air Link, and got this comment from him:
“In 2017, Facebook copied the base functionality of Virtual Desktop on Rift and incorporated it in their platform, essentially making my app obsolete. I’m not surprised to see them do this again on Quest. They copied the fitness tracking app YUR last year and released Oculus Move; essentially killing the company. They also released App Lab as they saw how popular SideQuest was. That’s what they do. If you have a popular app on Quest today, expect Facebook to copy you and leave you in the dust. As for the fate of Virtual Desktop on Quest, we will have to see how Facebook’s solution competes. Judging by the number of issues plaguing Oculus Link today, I’m confident Virtual Desktop will remain a valuable solution for a while. I’ve also got a lot of cool features in the works that I can’t wait to share with the community.”
Despite the warnings about Facebook copying ideas, he still seems confident in his ability to compete. It’s an open question as to how well Air Link will work initially, and how fast improvements will come.
The update also includes an experimental mode for 120Hz refresh rates, up from the current 90Hz, and the original 72Hz. It’s a slight delay from Oculus’ original estimated March launch. Oculus’ post hints that you many not immediately get to try it out — the Quest 2’s software will still run at 90Hz, so you won’t get to see what it looks like until developers release builds of their games and software that can run at the higher refresh rate. The wait may not be that long, though: Guy Godin has already tweeted that he’s got a 120Hz update for Virtual Desktop ready to go when v28 becomes available.
Yep, the 120hz update is ready to roll out whenever the Quest 2 update lands
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What makes a smartwatch “smart”? Is it the ability to show you notifications from your phone? What about the ability to track your physical activity and wellness, such as step counts, workouts, and sleep? How about providing you information about your day, such as the weather and upcoming calendar events? Or perhaps it’s the inclusion of a voice assistant on your wrist that you can ask to do things without having to use your phone?
Those are the questions I’ve been asking over the past week-plus as I’ve been testing the new OnePlus Watch, a $159 smartwatch and the first wearable from the smartphone company. The OnePlus Watch has all the looks of a modern smartwatch, but as I’ve learned wearing it on my wrist day and night, it doesn’t have all the smarts.
The OnePlus Watch is not like a Wear OS smartwatch, such as those made by Fossil, Motorola, or Mobvoi. Nor is it like a Samsung Galaxy Watch or an Apple Watch. All of those have software platforms that integrate with other apps and services, so you can download apps or watchfaces to the watch itself, just like you might with a phone. That makes them very extensible and customizable — you can easily make the watch look unique and do the things you need it to.
The OnePlus Watch, on the other hand (or wrist?), runs its own proprietary software, based on a real-time operating system. This software is very quick and power efficient, but it is not extensible — there’s no app store or third-party watchfaces to download on the OnePlus Watch. It’s similar to the software on the budget smartwatches you can get on Amazon; if you’ve ever used an Amazfit, Umidigi, or Wyze watch, you’ve used a real-time operating system. The OnePlus Watch is not very different from those in this respect.
This choice of platform affords the OnePlus Watch its greatest strength, long battery life, and also its greatest weakness: it just doesn’t do all that much compared to other smartwatches you can buy.
The OnePlus Watch looks like many other smartwatches, but most especially the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active.
OnePlus Watch software
The OnePlus Watch pairs with and is controlled by the OnePlus Health app for Android — there’s no iPhone compatibility at all. But you don’t need to own a OnePlus phone, it works with basically any modern Android device. I tested it on both OnePlus and Samsung smartphones and the experience was the same.
The app is where you can see what health and fitness metrics the watch has recorded, adjust which apps send notifications on your wrist, and view the available watchfaces. OnePlus has about 50 watchfaces so far, with some offering limited customizability in the form of selectable shortcuts or widgets, such as a weather widget, date, or shortcut to a built-in app like the timer. You can choose up to 14 faces to store on the watch and switch between them without using your phone. The company says it plans on adding more in the future, but as I mentioned earlier, there are no options for third-party watchfaces or third-party app widgets like you get with Samsung, Wear OS, or Apple smartwatches.
The watchfaces themselves are what you’d expect: there is the assortment of analog and digital styles to choose from, with some showing more information about your activity than others. I’m not a big fan of the analog options, so I settled on a digital face. Unfortunately, there’s a bug where digital watchfaces on the OnePlus Watch are stuck in 24-hour time and can’t show 12-hour time. The company tells me it is aware of this bug, and it is slated to be fixed “this month.”
The OnePlus Watch’s interface mimics Wear OS and is easy to navigate.
The watch interface has a familiar layout: swipe down for settings, swipe up to see notifications, press the side button to see your apps. You can swipe right from the watchface to access basic widgets for music control, weather, and activity tracking, similar to Wear OS or a Samsung watch. The design of the interface all looks mostly fine, and there thankfully aren’t any stutters or lags when navigating it.
I do have a few gripes with how notifications are handled. You can’t clear notifications by just swiping them away, like you can with every other smartwatch. Instead, you have to tap into each one and then press clear or scroll to the bottom to clear them all. It’s a clumsy and fiddly process. The OnePlus Watch doesn’t always sync with the notifications I’ve cleared on my phone, either, and occasionally notifications for the same messages would get duplicated, forcing me to see the same alerts more than once.
You can’t do much with those notifications, either. There are no actions you can take other than clearing them from your wrist. OnePlus supports canned message replies in just five apps: WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, Discord, and Facebook Messenger. Notably and frustratingly, that list doesn’t include standard SMS messages. On top of that, there are only four basic replies to choose from: “OK”; “Be right there!”; “In a meeting, contact you later”; and “I’m driving, contact you later.” I frequently use a smartwatch to triage notifications, delete incoming emails, or reply to messages when I’m away from my desk, but I can’t do most of those things with the OnePlus Watch.
The OnePlus Watch comes with a basic set of apps: weather, timer, stopwatch, alarm, workout, sleep tracking, etc. Oddly, it doesn’t have a calculator or a calendar app, so I can’t easily see my next meeting or appointment, something I do a lot with other smartwatches. There’s no way to get your next appointment on your watchface, either. And since there isn’t an app store, I can’t add any apps to that list.
You can forget about streaming music from Spotify or playing podcasts through your favorite app — the only thing you can do with the OnePlus Watch is control what’s playing on your phone or transfer MP3 files from your phone to the watch’s 4GB of storage. Want to track your runs with Strava or MapMyFitness instead of OnePlus’ app? Sorry, no dice. If you want to control smart home devices from your wrist, the OnePlus Watch is entirely useless unless you have a OnePlus TV, where you can use it as a remote. The OnePlus TV is only available in India.
The OnePlus Watch also lacks a voice assistant. I can’t ask it to start a timer when I’m in the kitchen and my hands are dirty, I can’t ask it to turn the lights off or open my garage door, and I can’t dictate a reply to an incoming message. How well voice assistants work varies greatly between smartwatches (Siri on the Apple Watch, pretty good! Bixby on a Samsung watch, less so), but OnePlus isn’t even trying here and I’ve missed having one available.
Lastly, even though the OnePlus Watch has an NFC radio, it does not support mobile payments. You can’t tap your wrist to pay for something like you can with an Apple Watch, Samsung watch, or Wear OS smartwatch.
The OnePlus Watch’s fitness tracking features hit the standard beats.Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
OnePlus Watch fitness tracking
The fitness tracking features are quite basic. It will track your steps throughout the day; the watch will nudge you to get up and move when you’ve been sitting for too long; you can choose between 14 different workouts for the watch to track; and if you wear the OnePlus Watch to bed, it will make an attempt to track your sleep.
I’m not a gym rat, but I did wear the OnePlus Watch on my left wrist with a Fitbit Inspire HR on my right wrist throughout this review and the OnePlus counted thousands fewer steps than the Fitbit every day. None of these devices are perfect with their step tracking, but that kind of discrepancy is going to make tracking a longer-distance run or other intense workout inaccurate or just plain hard to do. I asked a few other reviewers I know who are also testing the OnePlus Watch and each one has had the same issues with inaccurate step counting. OnePlus says a bug fix for GPS optimization and to add more workout modes will be available sometime in mid-April.
While the OnePlus Watch frequently undercounted my steps, it overestimated how much I slept each night.
Sleep tracking, oddly enough, has the opposite problem. The OnePlus Watch consistently overestimates how long I slept each night compared to the Fitbit and Google’s Nest Hub. A bug has also prevented the Watch from syncing its sleep data with the OnePlus Health app, even though other activity synced over fine. The company says this bug should also be fixed sometime this month.
As mentioned earlier, you can’t use other fitness apps on the OnePlus Watch. The OnePlus Health app provides syncing with the Google Fit platform, so it’s possible you could cobble together a syncing solution between other apps using Fit as glue, but I did not test this. In general, the OnePlus Watch’s fitness tracking is fine for basic activity trends, but any fitness enthusiasts will want something more capable and reliable.
The OnePlus Watch only comes in one size: a large 46mm face.
OnePlus Watch hardware and design
In terms of design, the OnePlus Watch is generic-looking — it reminds me a lot of Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Active line. It’s got a round face, there are two buttons on the side, and the body is made of polished stainless steel, which is nice to see at this price point. It comes in silver, black, or a gold-colored special edition — I’ve got the black model and it’s a little boring to look at. Either way, the hardware is solid and put together well — it’s not creaky or plasticky, and there are no rough edges to worry about.
OnePlus is only offering the watch in one size, 46mm, and frankly, it’s big. It’s bigger than I like watches to be on my wrist, and if you have smaller wrists than me you’re not going to have a fun time with this. On the plus side, it’s not the thickest smartwatch I’ve ever worn. Just one size band comes in the box — OnePlus says that customers who need a shorter band will be able to get one by contacting customer service.
The touchscreen is a 1.39-inch 454 x 454 OLED that’s easy to see both indoors and out. It’s colorful, like you’d expect an OLED to be, but there’s no always-on display option, which nearly every other smartwatch has now. That makes it that much more annoying to check the time, though the wrist turn gesture does work well to wake it up.
On the underside are the sensors for heart rate and blood oxygen. As usual, you should not use these sensors for medical purposes — and blood oxygen monitors on even the best smartwatches notoriously struggle with giving accurate readings. Inside the watch are the accelerometers and gyroscopes necessary to track your activity and workouts, plus GPS and Bluetooth radios. There’s no Wi-Fi or LTE here — if you leave your phone behind, you’re going to miss notifications and alerts until the watch is back in Bluetooth range of your phone.
Also missing from the OnePlus Watch are any rotating bezels or crowns — the only way to interact with it is to tap and swipe on the screen itself or push the buttons on the side.
Even though it doesn’t have a voice assistant, the OnePlus Watch does have a microphone and speaker, so you can answer calls from your wrist via Bluetooth. It worked fine in my tests; callers said I sounded clear to them, but the speaker on the watch is a bit crackly at full volume. It works in a pinch.
The OnePlus Watch has exceptional battery life and charges very quickly on its included charger.
The best thing about the OnePlus Watch is its battery life. OnePlus claims up to 14 days of usage between charges — it lasted about 10 days for me, wearing it day and night. Charging the watch is also quick and easy: just 20 minutes on the charger adds half a charge, which translates to literal days of usage. No Apple, Samsung, or Wear OS watch can last this long or charge this quickly.
But at the same time, the OnePlus Watch has such great battery life because, frankly, it just does less than those other smartwatches. The best comparison I can make is that the OnePlus Watch is a fitness tracker in a smartwatch body, which would be an acceptable premise if it were a better fitness tracker.
There are about 50 different watchfaces to choose from for the OnePlus Watch.
The OnePlus Watch may look like a lot of other smartwatches, but I can’t say it compares well to them. It’s limited in features, only comes in one size, and as I’ve gone over, there are several bugs with it that make it feel like an unfinished product. Aside from its long battery life, the OnePlus Watch’s bestselling point is its low price, which is half that of a Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 and over $100 less than the comparably sized Galaxy Watch Active 2. But if you’re looking for a smartwatch for your Android phone, it’s not that hard to find Wear OS models on sale, often for less than the cost of the OnePlus Watch.
For me, a good smartwatch is a lot like a personal assistant on my wrist. It tells me the time, when my next calendar appointment is, what the weather is like, and how active I’ve been throughout the day. I can quickly ask it to set a timer when I’m making a cup of tea or use it to reply to a message from my spouse when I’m running an errand. It also lets me customize its appearance and capabilities through third-party apps, watchfaces, or both. For others, it’s a way to track workouts and keep on top of their personal health.
In that framing, the OnePlus Watch isn’t really a smartwatch and based on my experience, it isn’t a great fitness tracker either. Instead, it’s just a clever watch, and it can be useful if your expectations of it are low. But if a smartwatch is going to take up real estate on my wrist, it has to be more useful than the OnePlus Watch.
The Apple HomePod could soon be back from the dead. Not as another standalone wireless speaker, but rather as a built-in audio system for the next Apple TV, Bloomberg reports.
The site’s sources say this new version of Apple’s TV box will combine video streaming with a built-in HomePod speaker, a camera for TV-based video calls, and other smart home features.
It’s part of the tech giant’s latest push into the smart home space, in order to better compete with its arch rival Amazon. Apple is also said to working on a premium smart speaker with a touchscreen.
Such a device would basically be a mashup between an iPad and a HomePod. It too would have a camera for video calls, and could pan to follow the user around the room, similar to the Amazon Echo Show and Facebook Portal.
Both devices are in the early stages of development at the moment, so Apple might choose to launch one, both or neither.
Apple has lagged behind its cut-price rival Amazon in the smart home space. And its HomePod speaker struggled for sales too. Last month, Apple killed the HomePod, leaving just the smaller, cheaper HomePod Mini as its sole smart speaker.
The Apple TV hasn’t been updated in over three years. Recently, we’ve seen a slew of rumours regarding the next model – it’s been tipped to get a 120Hz frame rate and smart new Siri remote control. The Apple TV+ streaming service is also looking to ramp up production to Netflix-like levels with a recent hiring.
Apple is said to be holding its next event next week. That could be too early for a new Apple TV, but you never know…
Salesforce said Monday that it will reopen its San Francisco headquarters in May, but its employees can still work remotely through the end of the year.
The company has already reopened 22 of its offices, according to company president and chief people officer Brent Hyder, who wrote in a blog post that Salesforce would decide how and when to reopen each location based on guidance from health officials and medical experts. “We have an opportunity to create a workspace and an employee experience that makes us even more connected, healthy, innovative and productive,” Hyder wrote.
The company plans a three-phase approach for offices, with the first phase limited to US employees who live in areas where coronavirus risk is flat or declining. Salesforce will require employees to take COVID-19 tests twice a week. The second phase will see offices gradually reopening from 20 to 75 percent capacity depending on local conditions, and the third stage will be a full office reopening.
Salesforce has been redesigning its offices with COVID-19 in mind, adding plexiglass between desks, air purifiers in conference rooms, touch-free handles for doors, and temperature screening stations, as well as providing hand sanitizer.
Salesforce is the biggest employer in San Francisco, and the company’s return to its downtown headquarters could be a bellwether for other companies in the area. Facebook also plans to return to in-person work at its Bay Area offices next month, and Uber reopened its Mission Bay headquarters, at limited capacity, on March 29th.
As DDR5 memory and supported platforms are approaching their launch, more makers of sophisticated DRAM modules are teasing their upcoming DDR5 products. Galax did exactly this today.
“DDR5 memory module is coming soon,” a statement over Galax OC Lab on Facebook reads.
The post also shows a palette of Micron’s DRAM chips marked as ICA45 D8BNJ R6KB, which are not currently listed at the company’s website, but which we understand are the devices that Galax OC Lab is playing with at the moment.
(Image credit: Galax)
Galax OC Lab is known for its rather exotic Hall of Fame (HOF) components, with overengineered PCBs and cooling systems that are designed to enable great out-of-box performance along with some extra overclocking potential. With DDR5, Galax HOF engineers are going to have a lot of things to play with.
As we noted in our coverage of Team Group’s upcoming DDR5 modules for overclockers, one of the innovative features of DDR5 DIMMs is that they can be equipped with their own voltage regulating modules (VRMs) and power management ICs (PMICs) to lower voltage fluctuation ranges, decrease power consumption, potentially increase DRAM yields, and boost performance.
Memory modules with onboard VRMs and PMICs will be particularly important for servers that use up to 4TB of memory per socket (and with DDR5 this number might grow to 32TB in the coming years), where power consumption of the DRAM can surpass that of processors.
Meanwhile, makers of memory modules for client PCs can also take advantage of this capability and equip their DIMMs with sophisticated VRMs and PMICs to amplify performance, differentiate from rivals, and maximize overclocking potential.
Right now, makers of memory modules for enthusiasts are improving performance by improving PCB design, cherry-picking DRAM (after sourcing the ‘right’ devices from IC vendors), playing with voltages, and tweaking timers. With DDR5, the game will get a bit tougher and easier at the same time as companies will be able to choose and tweak VRMs and PMICs.
That said, so far neither Galax nor Team Group confirmed that they will use onboard VRMs and PMICs for their first overclockable DDR5 modules. Still, we do know that the specification supports this capability.
Intel’s Alder Lake-S, expected at some point later this year, promises to be the industry’s first desktop platform to support DDR5 memory.
As all adults across the US become eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, Facebook is making it easier for its users to find information based on where they live. The company has started rolling out a feature that pins a box with state-specific information about where to get a COVID-19 vaccine at the top of the News Feed for every US user living in a state where the general public is eligible to receive the shot.
The box, once available, will appear at the top of your News Feed and show you state-specific information, confirming that you are now eligible to receive the vaccine, including a link on where to find the vaccine in your province, as seen in the image below:
The new feature is a box that is pinned to your News Feed.Image: Facebook
Most US states have now made vaccination appointments available to all adults, although some states are still lagging. With more availability, it has become a challenge for some people in certain parts of the US to book an appointment, leading some volunteers to build dedicated websites to help people in their search.
The feature is also available in “nearly 20 countries,” according to Facebook, with the ultimate goal to release it in more areas as countries begin opening COVID-19 vaccinations to the general public.
Facebook rolled out a similar feature to its mobile app last year, which helped fight misinformation about COVID-19 appearing on its platform as the site saw a surge in users. Facebook says more than 3 million US users clicked through those promotions between January and March, suggesting the new vaccine links may reach a significant number of Facebook users in the months to come.
Apple is reportedly developing a new TV accessory that combines elements of its Apple TV with a HomePod speaker and camera for video calls, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Alongside it, Apple is also said to be working on a smart speaker with a display, similar to Amazon’s Echo Show or Google’s Nest Hub. Development of both devices is said to be in its early stages, with plans subject to change.
The unannounced TV accessory would have the hardware to fulfill a variety of roles. As a TV accessory it could offer access to games and the streaming video services supported by Apple TV today; while its built-in speaker would likely be an upgrade over those found in most TV sets, similar to Roku’s soundbars. It would also support HomePod features like music playback and Siri voice assistant controls, much like the Sonos Beam offers with Alexa and Google Assistant. Finally, the camera would let it serve as a video calling device like a Facebook Portal TV. It’s potentially a lot of functionality in a single Apple device.
The second device is a smart display similar to what competitors Amazon and Google already offer, combining features of an iPad and HomePod. Apple’s work on the device was previously reported by Bloomberg last month. Like the TV accessory, this device would also offer video chat features, but via its built-in screen rather than a connected TV. Apple is said to have explored using a robotic arm to rotate the display and track users, similar to Amazon’s 2020 Echo Show.
While Apple’s existing smart home devices have focused on one or two key areas, the functionality offered by the two rumored devices would be much broader. Bloomberg notes that Apple merged its HomePod and Apple TV engineering groups in 2020.
Apple’s smart home lineup could use a shot in the arm. The company hasn’t updated its Apple TV hardware lineup since 2017, and it recently discontinued its high-end HomePod to focus on the more affordable HomePod mini. A hardware update for the Apple TV has been rumored for several months now, and recently discovered code suggests it might include support for 120Hz refresh rates.
Personal data for some 1.3 million users of the social audio app Clubhouse has been leaked online, Cyber News reported. a SQL database with users’ IDs, names, usernames, Twitter and Instagram handles and follower counts were posted to an online hacker forum. According to Cyber News, it did not appear that sensitive user information such as credit card numbers were among the leaked info. But the information could be used in phishing attempts to get users to hand over that more sensitive info.
Last week, Cyber News reported on another data breach from a social platform: it found that personal data for 500 million LinkedIn users had been scraped and posted online. The Microsoft-owned company said that no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in the leak.
That news came just a couple of days after it was discovered that personal data for some 533 million Facebook users also was leaked online for free. The Facebook leak reportedly included users’ phone numbers, birthdates, locations, email addresses, and full names.
Clubhouse had a monster first year—despite being invite-only and available only on iOS devices— seeing more than 10 million downloads. Twitter, LinkedIn, Discord, Spotify, and Slack have all launched or are working on competing social audio platforms, and Facebook reportedly has one in the works as well.
Clubhouse did not immediately reply to a request for comment from The Verge on Sunday.
An audit by researchers at the University of Southern California found that Facebook’s ad delivery system discriminates against women, showing them different ads than it shows to men and excluding women from seeing some ads.
“Facebook’s ad delivery can result in skew of job ad delivery by gender beyond what can be legally justified by possible differences in qualifications,” the researchers wrote in their report, “thus strengthening the previously raised arguments that Facebook’s ad delivery algorithms may be in violation of anti-discrimination laws.”
The team of researchers bought ads on Facebook for delivery driver job listings that had similar qualification requirements but for different companies. The ads did not specify a specific demographic. One was an ad for Domino’s pizza delivery drivers, the other for Instacart drivers. According to the researchers, Instacart has more female drivers but Domino’s has more male drivers. Sure enough, the study found that Facebook targeted the Instacart delivery job to more women and the Domino’s delivery job to more men.
The researchers conducted a similar experiment on LinkedIn, where they found the platform’s algorithm showed the Domino’s listing to as many women as it showed the Instacart ad.
Two other pairs of similar job listings the researchers tested on Facebook revealed similar findings: a listing for a software engineer at Nvidia and a job for a car salesperson were shown to more men, and a Netflix software engineer job and jewelry sales associate listing were shown to more women. Whether that means the algorithm had figured out each job’s current demographic when it targeted the ads is not clear since Facebook is tight-lipped about how its ad delivery works.
“Our system takes into account many signals to try and serve people ads they will be most interested in, but we understand the concerns raised in the report,” Facebook spokesperson Tom Channick said in an email to The Verge. “We’ve taken meaningful steps to address issues of discrimination in ads and have teams working on ads fairness today. We’re continuing to work closely with the civil rights community, regulators, and academics on these important matters.”
This isn’t the first time research has found Facebook’s ad targeting system to be discriminating against some users, however. A 2016 investigation by ProPublica found that Facebook’s “ethnic affinities” tool could be used to exclude Black or Hispanic users from seeing specific ads. If such ads were for housing or job opportunities, the targeting could have been considered in violation of federal law. Facebook said in response it would bolster its anti-discrimination efforts, but a second ProPublica report in 2017 found the same problems existed.
And in 2019, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development filed charges against Facebook for housing discrimination, after finding there was reasonable cause to believe Facebook had served ads in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
HUD said in a complaint that Facebook’s targeting tools were reminiscent of redlining practices, as it allowed ads to exclude men or women from seeing particular ads, as well as a map tool “to exclude people who live in a specified area from seeing an ad by drawing a red line around that area,” according to the complaint. Facebook settled the lawsuit and said in 2019 it had dropped ad targeting options for housing and job ads.
Updated April 9th 11:53AM ET: Adds comment from Facebook spokesperson
There is plenty that scientists don’t understand about the long-term effects of COVID-19 on society. But a year in, at least one thing seems clear: the pandemic has been terrible for our collective mental health — and a surprising number of tech platforms seem to have given the issue very little thought.
First, the numbers. Nature reported that the number of adults in the United Kingdom showing symptoms of depression had nearly doubled from March to June of last year, to 19 percent. In the United States, 11 percent of adults reported feeling depressed between January and June 2019; by December 2020, that number had nearly quadrupled, to 42 percent.
Prolonged isolation created by lockdowns has been linked to disruptions in sleep, increased drug and alcohol use, and weight gain, among other symptoms. Preliminary data about suicides in 2020 is mixed, but the number of drug overdoses soared, and experts believe many were likely intentional. Even before the pandemic, Glenn Kessler reports at TheWashington Post, “suicide rates had increased in the United States every year since 1999, for a gain of 35 percent over two decades.”
Issues related to suicide and self-harm touch nearly every digital platform in some way. The internet is increasingly where people search, discuss, and seek support for mental health issues. But according to new research from the Stanford Internet Observatory, in many cases, platforms have no policies related to discussion of self-harm or suicide at all.
In “Self-Harm Policies and Internet Platforms,” the authors surveyed 39 online platforms to understand their approach to these issues. They analyzed search engines, social networks, performance-oriented platforms like TikTok, gaming platforms, dating apps, and messaging apps. Some platforms have developed robust policies to cover the nuances of these issues. Many, though, have ignored them altogether.
“There is vast unevenness in the comprehensiveness of public-facing policies,” write Shelby Perkins, Elena Cryst, and Shelby Grossman. “For example, Facebook policies address not only suicide but also euthanasia, suicide notes, and livestreaming suicide attempts. In contrast, Instagram and Reddit have no policies related to suicide in their primary policy documents.”
Among the platforms surveyed, Facebook was found to have the most comprehensive policies. But researchers faulted the company for unclear policies at its Instagram subsidiary; technically, the parent company’s policies all apply to both platforms, but Instagram maintains a separate set of policies that do not explicitly mention posting about suicide, creating some confusion.
Still, Facebook is miles ahead of some of its peers. Reddit, Parler, and Gab were found to have no public policies related to posts about self-harm, eating disorders, or suicide. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the companies have no policies whatsoever. But if they aren’t posted publicly, we may never know for sure.
In contrast, researchers said that what they call “creator platforms” — YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch — have developed smart policies that go beyond simple promises to remove disturbing content. The platforms offer meaningful support in their policies both for people who are recovering from mental health issues and those who may be considering self-harm, the authors said.
“Both YouTube and TikTok are explicit in allowing creators to share their stories about self-harm to raise awareness and find community support,” they wrote. “We were impressed that YouTube’s community guidelines on suicide and self-injury provide resources, including hotlines and websites, for those having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, for 27 countries.”
Outside the biggest platforms, though, it’s all a toss-up. Researchers could not find public policies for suicide or self-harm for NextDoor or Clubhouse. Dating apps? Grindr and Tinder have policies about self-harm; Scruff and Hinge don’t. Messaging apps tend not to have any such public policies, either — iMessage, Signal, and WhatsApp don’t. (The fact that all of them use some form of encryption likely has a lot to do with that.)
Why does all of this matter? In an interview, the researchers told me there are at least three big reasons. One is essentially a question of justice: if people are going to be punished for the ways in which they discuss self-harm online, they ought to know that in advance. Two is that policies offer platforms a chance to intervene when their users are considering hurting themselves. (Many do offer users links to resources that can help them in a time of crisis.) And three is that we can’t develop more effective policies for addressing mental health issues online if we don’t know what the policies are.
And moderating these kinds of posts can be quite tricky, researchers said. There’s often a fine line between posts that are discussing self-harm and those that appear to be encouraging it.
“The same content that could show someone recovering from an eating disorder is something that can also be triggering for other people,” Grossman told me. “That same content could just affect users in two different ways.”
But you can’t moderate if you don’t even have a policy, and I was surprised, reading this research, at just how many companies don’t.
This has turned out to be a kind of policy week here at Platformer. We talked about how Clarence Thomas wants to blow up platform policy as it exists today; how YouTube is shifting the way it measures harm on the platform (and discloses it); and how Twitch developed a policy for policing creators’ behavior on other platforms.
What strikes me about all of this is just how fresh it all feels. We’re more than a decade into the platform era, but there are still so many big questions to figure out. And even on the most serious of subjects — how to address content related to self-harm — some platforms haven’t even entered the discussion.
The Stanford researchers told me they believe they are the first people to even attempt to catalog self-harm policies among the major platforms and make them public. There are doubtless many other areas where a similar inventory would serve the public good. Private companies still hide too much, even and especially when they are directly implicated in questions of public interest.
In the future, I hope these companies collaborate more — learning from one another and adopting policies that make sense for their own platforms. And thanks to the Stanford researchers, at least on one subject, they can now find all of the existing policies in a single place.
This column was co-published with Platformer, a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.
Sơn Gầy Custom, a Vietnamese modder, recently built a tube-free all-in-one liquid cooler that’s integrated into itself — essentially a low-profile CPU cooler, but instead of using heatpipes, it uses water and a water pump to transfer heat to the fin stack, or 120mm radiator in this case.
But although it looks simple on the surface, there’s more to it than initially meets the eye. He uses an Alphacool waterblock with an integrated pump as a base, which pushes fluid into custom manifolds from where the fluid is pushed through a small 120mm radiator. It’s then dissipated by a Noctua NF-A12x15 PWM fan.
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(Image credit: Sơn Gầy Facebook)
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(Image credit: Sơn Gầy Facebook)
Sơn Gầy hasn’t said anything about thermal performance yet, nor anything about noise levels. We know that the Noctua spinner he used, the NF-A12x15 PWM Chromax.Black, isn’t very loud with a maximum noise rating of 23.9 dBA.
That being said, this isn’t a very big cooling setup, and although the radiator does use copper fins (which also creates a very striking look), we can’t imagine this is the kind of liquid cooling setup you would push high overclocks on.
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(Image credit: Sơn Gầy Facebook)
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(Image credit: Sơn Gầy Facebook)
In fact, between the risk of leaks and likely limited added cooling benefit over a normal low-profile cooler, there’s probably little more to this unit than the cool factor of it being an integrated, low-profile (63mm tall) liquid cooler that doesn’t need an external radiator.
No word on pricing, nor do we know when or if Sơn Gầy will bring the product out onto the open market at all.
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