Oculess – Removes account requirements and telemetry from Oculus Quest devices
github.com
github.com
Edit: Wait... Immersed is available for Linux. For someone who doesn't know what all the requirements are for a VR desktop environment, can anyone list them? Assume I'm thinking about buying the Oculus 2 and want to use it with Linux + Immersed.
> What doesn’t work?
> Most apps downloaded through the Oculus Store because of entitlement errors (including Virtual Desktop :/)
I would assume Immersed uses this.
Disclaimer: Considering getting a Quest 2 just for Immersed.
"Varjo XR-3 now available for €5495 + XR Subscription"
And the subscription seems to be 1.5k/year. :o
What Doesn't Work?
Most apps downloaded through the Oculus Store because of entitlement errors (including Virtual Desktop :/ )
The quest app is one of the popular ways to wirelessly connect to a PC and play PCVR experiences. Other ways include Oculus's offical Airlink, and a free open source app called ALVR. Personally, I find Virtual Desktop the best experience out of those, but I think many people prefer Airlink.
if you purchase the steam version instead of the oculus store version, you would need to find another method to connect your Quest to a PC.
Facebook is selling at a loss in an attempt to destroy the competition and build another monopoly. They don't care if they don't make a profit now, as they will be able to gauge you later.
Don't buy facebook stuff.
Given the fact one of their main competitors is Valve, I don't think you have to worry about them destroying their competition financially either. Facebook isn't even really competing with them, FB is going for the low end market.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/tech/facebook-ftc-antitrust-d...
I don't mind it needing a PC, but I don't want to have a wire to tangle up in.
Incidentally, the business version is also twice as expensive and comes with a yearly $180 support subscription. The price of privacy, I suppose.
It's tied to the FB cloud. Not standalone AT ALL.
(it also makes sense, as Quest doesn't work in CN due to blocked FB)
it appears, that nowadays people do take Zuck(and jokes that fly over them) too serious, just like it was with Bill Gates... heh
It's not a great idea to buy products which require you to hack them.
But it is too bulky and expensive to appeal to the very casual VR users. And the only two use-cases are watching YouTube or using subscription meditation / fitness apps.
They can try to sell it to enterprise clients or hospitals though
A 500$ Quest 2 without Facebook spying sounds great.
That's ok if you aren't strapping two screens on your face and trying to get the to run as high a refresh rate as you can go.
As someone who bought into the new VR revival right away and followed the development of the initial headsets as closely as someone outside the companies developing them could, and has owned and currently owns multiple headsets, I can tell you my experience with VR is performance is very key, and that standalone VR is pretty garbage.
PCVR is nice, but has it's limitations. Location is a big one. my desktop is located in an area with no space. Being able to go to a different room with my quest and just play drastically reduces the friction of the reality-VR transition.
You of course get different annoyances like fidelity/battery, but the freedom of truly wireless VR is a massive bonus.
The pixel 4 is better than the original pixel. This shouldn't surprise anyone. Extrapolate.
Mine does too, although the unlimited photos has nothing to do with the phone but just google services.
>For example after a software update the usb-c port is no longer reversible, it only charges if cable is inserted in specific direction.
I currently have both a Pixel 3 and a Pixel 3a XL in front of me and this isn't true for either phone. Have you tried cleaning out the usb-c port of dust? There might be dirt build up on one side that isn't allowing all the charging pins to engage properly or something. Another issue might be with the cable.
Paying them money is cutting your own throat.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28871907
Carmack's actions in light of the pattern of Oculus acquiring tech from valve in shady ways can't be seen as anything other than just another guy betraying his former employer for oculus.
A giant stain on his reputation for anyone who can see just how oculus was built.
Also don't see the issue with Carmack. Code you write ethically belongs to you, no matter what the law or your employment contract says
Code you write under contract to an employer doesn't belong to you. Someone paid you for that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28871907
It's not that valve co-developed the rift, its that CV1 was exactly the steam sight headset with the CV tracking system and new fresnel lenses.
Valve employees convinced whoever made decisions over there to just give the tech over to oculus without a license or contract, and then those employees jumped ship to facebook/oculus in one of the most egregious unethical backstabs in recent tech memory.
Carmack couldn't convince his employer to give away the work he did, so he just took it with him and somehow was involved in a 'clean room' reimplementation of work he did for someone else. It's part of a pattern of unethical behaviour for the big names in oculus.
I wouldn't give them a penny.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28871907
Oculus is company built on lies and scams.
No one is arguing whether the company is bad, that is not relevant to whether standalone VR is bad. How is it bad when everyone is saying the experience is actually really good? You can’t just say the company is bad, that is irrelevant to the point.
Saying it not stand-alone because you need to connect it to a PC is just absurd.
Nobody said anything about it not being standalone because you need to connect to it PC, rather that standalone VR is a poor experience and once you connect it to a PC for a much better experience, it's no longer standalone.
This is also why Walmart went out of business, because their stuff, while cheap, is of lower quality. Why would I want a $10 "leather outer" belt when I can get full grain hyde from Sacks. Their grocery business failed too once Whole Foods showed up.
The original v1 release vive specs still exceed the quest and quest 2 in all ways related to hardware except maybe comfort and peripherals. Framerate, resolution, diopter adjustment, external tracking, the ability to actually use a real PC and video card without extra latency. The vive wins. And later vives and valve headsets like the index win more.
Quest 2: 1832x1920 per eye, up to 120 fps Vive: 1080×1200 per eye, up to 90 fps.
And as a owner of both, the screen door effect is extremely noticeable on vive, but just about eliminated on quest 2.
External tracking is a tradeoff, it is more accurate but requires more setup and the cable gets in the way frequently.
Personally with a wifi 6 router and 120fps, latency in wireless mode is good enough that I rarely if ever use my vive these days.
I will upgrade eventually now that I can afford it but except for high res applications the vive still holds it own. The tracking is excellent to this day.
And the input method blows hard
Honestly, I hated setting up, packing up and re-setting up my Vive. As a VR dev, I had to do it so often that the benefits of the sensor-free, wire-free, and; of course, most importantly computer-free operation of the Quest - combined with its ability to mimic 90% of the experiences I’d had on the Vive without the need for that extra PC - far far outweigh anything the Vive has to offer.
And if I want what the Vive has to offer, I can just plug in to my PC.
This is speaking from years of experience as a VR dev and user. This external sensorless experience means everything.
Say what you will about the need to register with a Facebook account. I need to register with PSN to get a lot of serious leverage out of a PlayStation console. That’s been consoles for decades. It’s obvious people just pick on this because of its attachment to Facebook. I’m just glad it’s opening up the experience of VR to more people in a massively low cost and practical way that did not exist before.
2. They are not a pain to setup. You just plug them in and then put them somewhere where they can see you. It's no more of a pain than charging your phone.
>This external sensorless experience means everything.
The headset and controllers have do tracking just by using sensors internal to them. Again, lighthouse do not do the tracking.
Come the hell on. Don't make me laugh. There aren't 3 cables to my phone that need to be specifically placed in certain areas in order to work, plus the cable to the phone itself.
Plus, my phone works if I don't have those 3 extra cables plugged in and meticulously placed around the room.
I get that you want to defend the unit, but honestly making fairly ridiculous claims such as it's as easy to set up as charging your phone won't really help convince anyone.
The Quest 2 - as long as you've established your guardian boundary - is the most seamless and flawless VR experience I've had the joy of having.
As a dev continually dragging the Vive from work to home to my gf's place was insanely annoying to re-set-up every time. Now I throw the Quest in my backpack and roll - for fun.
Easier said than done. I personally have some clamps I 3D printed, but there isn't always a convenient place to clamp to.
Considering the Quest knows your accurate billing and shipping info, and they have a real name policy enforced by showing ID, it’s a very big risk to use a fake account for the Quest.
But Alien: Isolation in VR is the greatest entertainment experience of my life. Amazing.
Is that true? From my understanding, Oculus has exclusive games, as well as supporting all open games, so Oculus basically supports all Vive games + a bunch of exclusives Vive doesn't. What games do Vive support that Oculus doesn't?
I know for a fact that on my Quest 2 I can play any games from Oculus Store (both for Quest and Rift), as well as any SteamVR games (played halfway through Half-Life:Alyx with Quest2). Wasn't aware of any Vive-exclusive SteamVR games though.
I'm still wondering what went through Bill's head hearing that.
This was before the days of software becoming walled-garden lock-in subscription-ware; when quarterly revenue relied solely on the number of licenses sold and pirated licenses were seen as lost revenue.
I assumed they just though that if everyone had only legit copies, then Microsoft's revenues would quintuple overnight effectively turning Bill Gates into the world's richest man. Oh wait, he already was the world's richest man at that time. Nevermind.
Then again, people mostly pirated it because they couldn't afford it, so a strong piracy-free DRM solution would have probably pushed everyone to Linux right off the bat (nobody in Eastern Europe could afford Macs at the time), causing Microsoft's market share to fall off a cliff and not be the 400 pound gorilla it is today.
Microsoft was not in this alone (piracy in eastern part of the world), even companies like Adobe was in same situation and Adobe perhaps was more affected as they were smaller and less diversified.
But for them piracy in China, India, Romania et al. was not a problem, as they knew it increases user base and they can monetize that in corporates. The same people who pirate at home and school will pay for the license when they are in office (bigger ones).
Piracy was a training and demand generation channel.
Adobe didn't care about piracy for a long time. Up until CS4 a simple keygen was sufficient, up until CS6 you'd need to null-route a couple Adobe hosts in your /etc/hosts.
The result was that lots of young students grew up with Adobe tooling - Photoshop, Premiere, Dreamweaver, Flash - and virtually set the standard for the media industry once they entered the work force.
Yes.
- they killed Netscape in the 90s because they realised owning the web browser market meant locking people into Windows
- they ran the Xbox division for years at a loss knowing it would eventually pay out
- they bailed out Apple financially knowing that a long term competitor to Windows meant a reduced likelihood of monopoly violations
- they had a long term strategy attacking Linux (even going so far as to call it “communism”) before eventually caving and public ally supporting FOSS
- the whole long term “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy is synonymous with old Microsoft. Eg Lotus Office comparability to sell MS Office licenses, then dropping support when MS Office became dominant.
- Windows 2000 and Me were never intended as long term strategies but instead as a gateway into merging the NT and 9x line of operating systems.
I could go on with examples from their dealings with IBM, Apple, Dr DOS, MSN and so on and so forth but I have two screaming kids I need to deal with. However you should get the idea
Commercial companies did this to themselves as they raced to the bottom with aggressive pricing and a need to dominate at a global scale.
I always assumed so, and same for Adobe. For many years, their software was trivial to pirate. My understanding is, they let individuals pirate Windows/Photoshop to ensure widespread popularity, especially among people who wouldn't be able to pay for that software anyway - and applied pressure to any business using their software.
There's only so much money they could get from the cohort of teens and their parents trying to play games or trim their photos, but every year, a part of that population graduated to becoming employees and business owners, preferring to use the software they already know, and having money to finally pay for it.
Many years, including this year (or at least, that's what a "friend" who's running Photoshop 2021 tells me).
In Hungary Ballmer got eggs thrown at him by an OSS activist for that exact reason in 08.
What I never understood though is why did Microsoft (or anybody else) invest in all this activation bullshit anyway. The only things working always were reasonably affordable pricing of legal copies, legal enforcement risk coming from the local police and the value of commercial support. All the software mechanisms of licensing enforcement have always been cracked and stopped no one. If I were to release commercial software I would only put a simple (no actual anti-crack protection at all) offline serial check to stop the most stupid and unmotivated people, everyone else will get a crack (which will inevitably emerge if the app actually is of any value) anyway.
I relate this to the adage "locks are to keep honest people honest."
Similarly, bypassing a valid license has to be just hard enough that people have time to think about what they're doing.
To push the metaphor a bit further, someone is more likely to try the credit card trick to shim a door open (type in a fake or shared serial key) than acquire lockpicking tools (download a crack).
There's probably some convenience factor there as well...
In theory this sounds reasonable but in reality - no, it's no difference. Serial, keygen, crack - it's all just a minor, negligible variation of the ritual people do when they want an app but are not going to pay for it (because from the perspective of an eastern user all the big apps genuinely look exorbitantly overpriced).
So unless you disable all updates I assume most settings will be reset after an update.
This app is more like an interface for some settings than a hack.
It's also a statement.
They're everywhere and its a problem. Google taught humanity that its OK to have tracking everywhere, if that's used only to enhance user experience. However, now other identity ecosystems are using that power for purposes which people may not be ok with. It should be easy to opt out of it [0].
EDIT: Apologies, I re-read your question and it appears to be a genuine one which I did not answer i.e. if doing this hampers the usage of the oculus device. I'll leave my answer up though, if anyone else is interested in this aspect of the discussion.
[0]: Facebook does appear to have an opt out page. Try going there and opting out. Just go there, please, before responding: https://www.facebook.com/ads/settings
I don't mind using EQ2 with telemetry off as long as my activity in it is detached from my other devices.
If the plan is to use one for a monitor replacement for extended periods, which is a better choice?
E: out of curiosity, I pulled up immersed to browse this thread on HN and my eyes can't take it for too long.
If you do use it as a monitor replacement, here's a suggestion: make your screens small and keep them close to you. Scanning with your eyes doesn't work as well, you should be moving your head a lot more.
Sold the Quest 1 immediately and kept the Quest 2.
Although I wouldn't use either as a monitor replacement for more than 30 minutes. The tech is just not there yet for eye-stranious work like reading small text like code. Best kept for entertainment and content consumption.
[1] https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385
> If you need corrective lenses, get lens inserts: it’s superior to wearing glasses, and I find it better than wearing contacts. For horrible astigmatic myopia like mine (-7.5), it was cheaper than most pairs of glasses I’ve had, and a totally reasonable expense since I use them all day for work.
Only 3 options is definitely a weird choice on Oculus' part (especially since the device apparently includes a potentiometer, so it actually acknowledges in-between settings!), but at least there's a workaround.
It's still usable for games without any headaches, but I wouldn't use it for reading text or long gaming sessions.
1: bad reason: because good-enough displays are cheap! why not double down on it.
If you want to be ethical get an HMD from someone other than Oculus/Facebook. I wouldn't give them a dime.
Sources:
alan yates (posting as vk2zay on reddit) said the CV1 architecture was identical to the valve room headset architecture with its own tracking implementation and its own fresnel lens system.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4klu94/oculus_becomin...
>While that is generally true in this case every core feature of both the Rift and Vive HMDs are directly derived from Valve's research program. Oculus has their own CV-based tracking implementation and frensel lens design but the CV1 is otherwise a direct copy of the architecture of the 1080p Steam Sight prototype Valve lent Oculus when we installed a copy of the "Valve Room" at their headquarters. I would call Oculus the first SteamVR licensee, but history will likely record a somewhat different term for it...
---
Ben Krasnow (former valve employee who now has the youtube channel "Applied Science" https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/ which you should check out if you haven't yet) posted here on hackernews back in 2017 during the oculus lawsuit.
> It fits a pattern. I was a hardware engineer at Valve during the early VR days, working mostly on Lighthouse and the internal dev headset. There were a few employees who insisted that the Valve VR group give away both hardware and software to Oculus with the hope that they would work together with Valve on VR. The tech was literally given away -- no contract, no license. After the facebook acquisition, these folks presumably received large financial incentives to join facebook, which they did. It was the most questionable thing I've seen in my whole career, and was partially caused by Valve's flat management structure and general lack of oversight. I left shortly after.
and then further down that thread
> Overall, I think Valve is a good place to work, and I learned a lot from all of the incredibly smart people there. The main reason that I left was the difficulty in merging hardware development with the company's exceptionally successful business model. The hardware team was pressured to give away lots of IP that could have been licensed, with the explanation that hardware is just so worthless anyway compared to online software sales, there was no other choice. It's possible that this was a good faith gamble, however it still doesn't preclude the use of business contracts that would have protected our investment. It also isn't so great for morale to hear everyday that your years of work are going to be given away to another company, and then watch that company get acquired for $2B. This is especially the case since many employees strongly voiced concerns about just such a scenario.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414190
Oculus was built on stolen tech taken by employees working at valve who convinced valve to give the tech away in the spirit of cooperation, and then jumped ship to facebook right away for the $$$.
Every time people post things praising John Carmack all I can think about is that he was doing the same thing from his former employer to oculus as well. No matter what he did back in the day to make video game engines amazing, his involvement in oculus is a stain on his reputation. Even if you think he was innocent in a vacuum, along with the rest of the shenanigans with oculus and valve tech I don't think it was so innocent. He took the source code he wrote for another company, sent it to himself, then he was involved in the "clean room" reimplementation? I don't believe it no matter what the courts ruled could be proven.
This is especially strange since Apple makes tons of money off online software sales tied to their hardware. I believe several other companies (like all the console manufacturers in the game space that Valve is in) do to.
It's fundamentally a very bad call.
they're getting there but they're not exactly there yet. I think oculus taking their research tech and turning it into a $2b acquisition and a threat to steam because of its closed garden was a big wake up call.
We'll see how they do in the future I guess.
Valve has traditionally focused on their Steam platform, which has a much tighter feedback loop and none of the aforementioned effort that comes with physical products.
Iteration cycles are way longer and more expensive. Find a bug in a piece of software / firmware? Push out an update and the bug is gone. For hardware bugs you have to pray you can fix it in firmware somehow, or you have to call back hardware from the customer and send them replacements in the worst case, or deal with the fallout of class action lawsuits or regulatory punishments (e.g. if you mess up something that causes inappropriate RF emissions).
Additionally, developing for hardware is way harder than developing software. In software, you have clean, somewhat-well designed APIs to get you up and running, and there's bazillions of StackOverflow posts and open source code you can have a look at if you have problems. In hardware, you have to deal with half-assed documentation, reference designs that do not work / are buggy / cause unwanted RF emissions / produce signals that are outside of standards, tight NDAs / stuff that isn't even available under NDA but is vital in debugging issues, BSPs (board support packages) with outright fossilized and Frankenstein'd bootloaders and Linux kernels, not to mention binary blob stuff such as early stage bootloaders, WiFi/BT/GPU firmware and other completely intransparent and barely-working crap.
And once you do have a working prototype in your hand, you have to deal with more bullshit: certifications (UL/TÜV electrical safety, FCC RF emissions, CE, and whatever specific local markets require) primarily (and the findings of the certifications may well send you back to the drawing board, which means more expenses), ridiculous minimum-order quantities, supply chain establishment and upkeep (=preventing counterfeit components in your chain) in general, manufacturing QA, logistics of getting the hardware to consumers, returns/warranty claim/repair/spare parts logistics, keeping track of components getting EOL'd or outright being unavailable due to some component availability crunch, keeping track of recalls of components before your product ends up setting someone's house on fire (=the usual trouble with Lithium batteries and shoddy power supplies), dealing with insurance to cover your butt in case your product does end up setting someone's house on fire or electrocuting someone...
Hardware is ugly and it's rare to have hardware, firmware and software be matched in quality (which is also why so many hardware Kickstarter/Gofundme projects fail or under/late deliver). The only vendor where that is closest to reality is Apple, and they command a hefty premium for that.
But ethically, oculus is bankrupt.
If that's unclear to you, you're probably going to have problems on the ethics exam.
This isn't rocket surgery - it's not complicated. You're just trying to minimize unethical actions by a group of people who sabotaged their employer.
Tracking and lenses are what make headset. I'm struggling to think of what non-trivial decisions are even left if you exclude those. Panel choice and illumination strategy I guess?
I guess you haven't thought deeply about developing hardware
i feel like simply not playing is the real way to win this game. otherwise facebook still profits
I like this solution because you still get to use the hardware and use the apps, but it denies the overlords of the thing they want the most.
That doesn't bode well for things working all that well. As someone who ran linux on chromebook for two years, then on a macbook for three, i'm a bit burnt out on this sort of thing.
things can work and respect your freedom at the same time. its not like either or.
Now it’s iOS / macOS / iCloud and a headless Ubuntu box. Never been more productive and never had more free time. Choose your battles.
The point is that these fun projects to circumvent baked-in awfulness are practically destined to stop working properly due to the nature of the hardware itself. It's always better, if possible, to support the non-awful varietal. In this case, I guess that's "almost any other VR headset, lacking a login requirement". Does Steam count?
Sailfish uses a proprietary UI, so I hesitate to recommend it. There's an alternative that replaces their UI, can't recall the name right now.
edit - found it https://grapheneos.org/faq#legacy-devices
> It cannot do that once device support code like firmware, kernel and vendor code is no longer actively maintained. Even if the community was prepared to take over maintenance of the open source code and to replace the rest, firmware would present a major issue, and the community has never been active or interested enough in device support to consider attempting this
Even with Android vs iOS, they aren't quite the same because Android clearly gives you more control and freedom as a consumer. If you care about any of this at least don't buy the worse offender.
Looking at Vive, they don't seem ready to enter the regular consumer market anytime soon. Google and Samsung threw the towel long ago. I'm not sure Microsoft could be a better actor than Facebook if they wanted to (remember it all came down on us way after the devices were sold).
Then chances are Facebook would also kill any incoming competitor in the egg.
Huh?
I wish them to succeed, but wouldn't count on it until we have actual release info.
It actually reminds me that Sony is rumored to release a Playstation VR2, which might be an interesting, though not standalone, as the PSVR 1 was decently good.
Also, I only realized while checking Valve's headset that HTC had a consumer grade headset gone public yesterday, though it doesn't have controllers and its future is a bit murky at this point.
I don’t know if Valve will be able to get down in price. For instance their Steam Deck which is in the 400+$ range for a handheld, when Nintendo went with lower specs but also lower price. Valve doesn’t seem that interested in that strategy.
Peripherals, including mice, monitors, keyboards, VR headsets or any other device used to process input or output from a computer, may NOT be connected to any cloud service with an account. Any such cloud connections MUST be for software updates only and software updates MUST be capable of permanent opt-out without any loss of usage.
I mean I grew up with my logitech mouse, keyboard and monitor not connected to a cloud account and I expect to die that way. Why does Facebook get to do things differently.
It has been getting harder, but fuck, why not use this opportunity to turn this shit around?
Because your proposed legislation would outlaw most IoT devices. This is, in fact, bad.
Only if it were drafted carelessly. Which, yeah, plenty of laws are, but it's not a requirement.
PCVR software sales are just absolutely abysmal, there is no way to make a profit on a large scale app, so theyre only going to invest in AAA content for standalone now.
https://reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/pwrgb1/buyer_beware_s...
I've used color lasers in the past, but it was a higher end and was very pleased with its results.
I like how we've hijacked an oculus thread on printers!!
Let me tell you, the longer I have it, the longer it keeps blowing my mind. I've only set it up once, and then forgot about it forever. Since then, I added bajillion different devices, built a new desktop, switched routers multiple times and completely redid my wireless networking, etc. On every new device (including smartphones), without having to install any additional software or screwing around with settings, I can reliably expect to just click "print", and my printer will show up in the list of available printing devices, and it will just work. Toner cartridges last forever and are priced very reasonably. I can simply take the printer, put it wherever I want, and it will just work with any device from which one can print without any extra actions.
Normally, a lot of devices start like that at first, and then problems start arising, and things start becoming unreliable due to compatibility issues with newer devices and such, new firmware updates are needed, maybe certain workarounds in settings, etc. But nope, not a single hitch with this one, as it is coming close to 5 years of regular use in many different configurations.
And no, I am not getting paid to advertise for Brother printers. I just simply love when a tool is super powerful like that, but also "just works" extremely reliably without any thought needed, very seamlessly and in the background.
This is something that I came across last night. Sadly, it had nothing to do with what I was looking for, but was the closest.
If Facebook wants to make a VR headset that requires that you upload a monthly video of you doing the chicken dance, just don’t buy their product.
Attempting to use government to make private entities build the kinds of technology you like is a pretty heavy hammer to drop on individual freedoms.
Yes, I do think groups should not have rights individuals have. It's more about the scale than the amount of people, and the line between that gets blurred when an individual can control thousands of PCs.
I suppose, I don't think the line between groups and individuals is quite so clear. When does a group become "greater" than the individual in a way that requires the individual to give up certain rights?
Humans are dumb and they buy it, and it sets the precedent. We have to make laws sometimes. You can barely even buy a TV without smart features now and yet everyone that knows about such features that don't want them still HAVE to buy them if they want a gd tv.
Should we just make it legal for oil companies to have no consequences for oil spills because it doesn't really affect much, we can just stop eating fish in the sea. There's still plenty of food elsewhere.
Oil spills harm the environment. We regulate them because the ocean can’t just choose to not receive the oil, not out of a desire to make sure we can keep eating fish.
EDIT: To say the thing out loud: I buy smart TVs on purpose, and I’d like to think I’m a smart person who understands the technology involved. Is the case you’re making that I am in fact dumb?
I mean go and look at the other HN thread on 100K US deaths per year on plastic. I mean I bought plastic today and highly likely will do so again tomorrow.
If the pitch here was that vendors were lying about cloud/connectivity requirements, and we wanted legislation to prevent them from obscuring the truth, I’d be 100% down. Thankfully, we already have those laws.
The IKEA bookshelf doesn't violate your privacy nor have an always on connection to a much more powerful entity always looking to make another buck.
The IKEA bookshelf isn't an avenue for your attention and your time - whereas things like gambling (considered addictive and regulated by almost everyone) are - and we regulate them heavily.
Why would Facebook with its billions be exempt from regulation? It's not something we "want" - its to make their product basically useful without the IKEA subscription service to make sure your shelf doesn't fall apart every month.
Along the same lines, the law should say Facebook can't sell hardware that forces you to give up all your privacy to protect the individual.
This is not "I want Facebook to design a headset with blue stripes", this is "I don't want to be forced to give up my private data to use a product that would work just fine without".
I think the difference between the two should be obvious.
That works in theory, but in practice when all the products from all the vendors work that way, you no longer have a choice.
Plenty of examples like that - Try buying a TV that's not a "smart" TV nowdays, you basically can't. If you want a good quality picture, then it's also coming with telemetry and in many cases advertisements, too.
Electrical service has limitations around things like termination of service / fair pricing / safety, but we don’t mandate how they design their software and servers.
I mean, we can mandate minimum services. Something that has a webbrowser, email client, texts and calls. If you want to say that apps don't fit into that, I suppose that works.
FB is banking heavily that VR will become a necessity, to one extent or another. I sincerely hope FB fails, but my suspicion is that it would fail not because FB failed, but rather because VR itself failed (e.g. Google Glass for consumers). Still to be seen.
Another less known example could be Kolor, the maker of Autopano Giga (IMHO the best panorama creation tool so far) being gobbled by GoPro, likely for the talent, then shut down without replacement.
I see these contradictory narratives on HN.
Of course you do. HN (or any platform) is not a monolith with a single opinion. I see this argument all the time, and it baffles me
It's a different story if it's eg. an Alexa device thats primary purpose is to be connected to the internet.
If a device is in a class of product that doesn't necessarily need a cloud connection/account/whatever, it shouldn't require it.
Often it's not practical to switch to a competing product. Sometimes it's not possible at all. Consumers should have rights here, and it's legislation's job to provide them, in a just society.
Now, if you want to take a screwdriver and serial cable to the tractor and hack the crap out it, and you manage to bypass the requirement, have at it. You own the tractor. They can feel free to void your warranty / not give you updates, but you can do whatever you want with your property.
But to buy a device that says “internet connection required” and then be angry when it requires an internet connection doesn’t make sense to me, nor does asking the government to mandate the business model used by tractor (or VR headset) manufacturers.
Companies have determined that's what they're going to offer the customer and they'll brick any attempts at modifying the hardware. They're making money refining their AI and selling off customer data, so why not?
You need the high end tractors because they're the only machines that meet the requirements of what you're doing.
This is what the legislation folks want to stave off. It's in a similar vein to the right to repair movement (which is dealing with similar restrictions right now, in the real world - see John Deere tractors).
I appreciate that folks in this thread are attempting to propose legislation to stave off behavior they believe is dangerous. My concern is that using legislation in this way has knock on effects that make free society radically worse, because at its core it requires being OK with using government to restrict what technology combinations are legal to bring to market.
It is not. They used their money and power to hire some of the brightest minds in VR to design hardware and to create exclusivity deals with some of the best developers. I either take facebook's offering or I don't have access to those things at all.
> With the government you have no room for flexibility.
You do. You can "say bye!" as you phrased it and move to another place with a another government. I've done it several times now.
For example, when AT&T owned all the telecoms equipment in the US, other companies couldn't make new products using their system (like answering machines or modems). Having anyone able to design, connect, use and sell new devices on top of their infrastructure is an incredibly important feature.
And facebook knows that. They launched facebook on the internet (which is an open platform). Facebook couldn't have been created in the first place if not for that.
Facebook owes its existence to open platforms. Lets not allow the train of innovation to stop here.
In certain circumstances, we already do (kind of): FRAND licensing for technical standards are a good example.
>[...] (FRAND) terms, denote a voluntary licensing commitment that standards organizations often request from the owner of an intellectual property right (usually a patent) that is, or may become, essential to practice a technical standard.
Same as you are not forced to use facebook.
This isn't you making a free decision between competitors, like in an idealized econ 101 example. Facebook has already used its money to consolidate its grasp on the standalone VR market - can you think of a viable competitor to an Oculus Quest? Should people just have to put up with privacy abuses or be excluded from VR altogether?
When the market fails, it's time for the government to step in.
Taking your argument to the extreme if you don't like coal perhaps you should avoid buying electricity. Good luck with that in the real world of today
Allowing tones of resources and brains to be dumped into the advertising industry is a pretty terrible use of what we usually call a "society".
What alternatives are even available for standalone VR? Vive has something that's about 4x the price...
Some of the strictest privacy laws existed in Germany for a reason, because the country new what an SS or a Stasi would do with the data once it gets its hands on it.
Some of the laxest privacy laws are in the US, the country whose businesses supplied the SS[1] and nowadays the CCP[2] with surveillance technology to facilitate genocide.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
[2]https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/us-tech-products-080...
This is, of course, fraud. Why doesn't current law apply? I think it does. But courts are funny: when fraud becomes common and accepted, and people cease to recognize it as fraud, it becomes acceptable. In those cases, a new law is reasonable.
All-consuming capitalism isn't a public liberty, and if companies are in the mind of lowering costs by using cancer-inducing materials, slave work, corruption or indeed trading people's very identities, then it's in the purview of political institutions to intervene.
[0] This phenomenom is inherent to and a natural byproduct of a free market, which is why regulation and laws are essential to keep some sort of balance.
For instance most people don't know what is an acceptable level for various pollutants in drinking water. As such if there was no government oversight most people would be happy drinking poluted water and the few that care wouldn't be serviced as the cost of cleaning water for a niche wouldn't make it profitable. But hopefully we have laws that dictate safe levels and vendors have to respect them.
For hardware it's the same, experts are pretty clear about the risks: at the most basic level if hardware stop to function when some server crash then the whole society becomes dependant on this and as such any outages starts to have catastrophic consequences by domino effect. On the spying activity linked to those accounts the risk is pretty clear as well: it opens people to leaks of intimate details about their life to Facebook employees and various hackers in case of failure.
So it seems clear that public safety would require making those two activities illegal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kur94OyXf3U
What is this all about?
- let a whistleblower (who seems intent on describing Facebook employees as smart and humanistic folks, despite those employees designing and maintaining FBs content delivery systems) make a case that Facebook needs government regulation.
- agree that such a regulatory agency should be created, and offer FBs assistance in outlining the parameters involved — because who better than the problem to design the solution?
- agency is created. Perhaps the whistleblower can even be a high level figure within it, as the face of the issue.
- Suddenly FB is no longer liable for anything because they are “adhering to government regulation”.
- Regulatory capture ensues as expected.
FOR FB this is preferable to thr other options:
1. Calls for FB to be broken up
2. Regulation that FB doesn’t have a primary role in designing.
nor is it all that different from apple or google dumping millions and millions into ios and android os/base level platform development, software update/delivery infrastructure and proactive platform security and then recouping those costs on sales and in-app purchases through the app stores.
it's been going on since the original nintendo entertainment system with its approval process. prior to that was the atari 2600 debacle, where the platform languished and the ecosystem of software was such crap that people just sort of gave up on it.
that said, are they a form of monopoly? it certainly amortizes the costs of developing hardware and os platforms to the point that consumers are willing to buy in, but it also results in undue control over the resulting platforms. hard to say... i think it all comes down to how that control is wielded... (and without it, it's the atari 2600 all over again)
only alternatives i can think of are to regulate the platforms for fairness or force platform vendors to offer full price/off contract versions of their hardware.
It’s not required that you have an account or even use the software, but of course they actively push all of the above and require it to use special device features.
Razer, Steelseries, and the rest do the same, and I think Razer’s account is mandatory.
I don’t like it one bit. Thankfully most of that crap doesn’t work on Linux.
That's the key point. The fact that some people weren't even able to use their Oculus device when FB went down for hours is insane. Imagine not being able to use your mouse or keyboard because Logitech went down.
There's a very big difference between an optional cloud system that brings convenience (settings sync) vs a required cloud system that the device cannot be used without.
From my understanding, the comment about was specifically trying to write regulation against the latter.
And they are just plain xml file that are not even being encrypted.
OnBoard Memory Manager (OMM) is a utility for pro gamers to quickly configure the on-board memory profiles of compatible Logitech G mice by adjusting DPI, report rate, assignments, and by enabling the pairing/unpairing of devices. In an effort to meet the critical requirements for tournament use, OMM does not install itself, does not leave files on your drive(s), and does not access the internet. While OMM is used for on-board memory settings, additional device settings and customization are available through G HUB.
The current version is a little buggy with configuring the different DPI modes on my mouse (which I was disabling anyway), but I'm glad it exists. Thanks, pro gaming tournaments!
At this point, that's a keyword that indicates not to buy a product.
Mice and keyboards that don't operate without online-registration-required accounts?
Chairs and keyboards that look cool for streamers but are utterly unergonomic?
And headsets with cat ears on them...
No thanks.
When it comes to RGB crap and gamer audio gear or gamer chairs, yeah, it's all pure-gimmick rubbish.
But I would like to see such a legislation for anything that is Turing-complete and sufficiently performant (e.g. can run Doom at 800x600 32bpp 60FPS).
What authentication do I need or want on a local device that is software specific?
TLDR this legislation could be fine but it would have to target Windows, Android, Steam, Playstation, Mac OS, etc and has ramifications that eventually software might just stop working. It might accelerate the push to move everything to the cloud also and make all devices dumb terminals that play video.
If you own a quest, what’s the appeal of disabling the fb part? To me it’s the telemetry that’s most incendiary, especially as a friend at Oculus suspected people’s video is uploaded as part of data sets for training the tracking algorithms (which means the inside of my home is in FB servers… even worse if you consider some popular VR movies and their related activities…)
How would this even be useful as part of a dataset? The official story is that Oculus created the dataset for Oculus Insight by also using OptiTrack to also track the HMD and controllers to create a ground truth of what be the actual location should be. For robustness certain Oculus employees took this setup home to capture data in various environments. Being able to test changes to your tracking algorithm and see how close you get to what it should be is clearly useful. Recording videos from random people seems much less useful.