Technology - Google News

Facebook is building an operating system so it can ditch Android - TechCrunch
Apple, Google and Amazon want one language for smart devices - AdAge.com
Over 267M Facebook users had names, phone numbers leaked on dark web - New York Post

Facebook is building an operating system so it can ditch Android - TechCrunch

Posted: 19 Dec 2019 08:15 AM PST

Facebook doesn't want its hardware like Oculus or its augmented reality glasses to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. That's why Facebook has tasked Mark Lucovsky, a co-author of Microsoft's Windows NT, with building the social network an operating system from scratch, according to The Information's Alex Heath. To be clear, Facebook's smartphone apps will remain available on Android.

"We really want to make sure the next generation has space for us," says Facebook's VP of Hardware, Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth. "We don't think we can trust the marketplace or competitors to ensure that's the case. And so we're gonna do it ourselves."

Eye OS

By moving to its own OS, Facebook could have more freedom to bake social interaction — and hopefully privacy — deeper into its devices. It could also prevent a disagreement between Google and Facebook from derailing the roadmaps of its gadgets. Facebook tells TechCrunch the focus of this work is on what's needed for AR glasses. It's exploring all the options right now, including potentially partnering with other companies or building a custom OS specifically for augmented reality.

One added bonus of moving to a Facebook-owned operating system? It could make it tougher to force Facebook to spin out some of its acquisitions, especially if Facebook goes with Instagram branding for its future augmented reality glasses.

Facebook has always been sore about not owning an operating system and having to depend on the courtesy of some of its biggest rivals. Those include Apple, whose CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly thrown jabs at Facebook and its chief Mark Zuckerberg over privacy and data collection. In a previous hedge against the power of the mobile operating systems, Facebook worked on a secret project codenamed Oxygen circa 2013 that would help it distribute Android apps from outside the Google Play store if necessary, Vox's Kurt Wagner reported.

That said, its last attempt to wrestle more control of mobile away from the OS giants in 2013 went down in flames. The Facebook phone, built with HTC hardware, ran a forked version of Android and the Facebook Home user interface. But drowning the experience in friends' photos and Messenger chat bubbles proved wildly unpopular, and both the HTC First and Facebook Home were shelved.

Investing in tomorrow tech

Now Facebook is hoping to learn from past mistakes as it ramps up its hardware efforts with a new office for the AR/VR team in Burlingame, 15 miles north of the company's headquarters. The 770,000-square-foot space is designed to house roughly 4,000 employees. Facebook tells TechCrunch the team will move there in the second half of 2020 to make use of its labs, prototype space and testing areas. The AR/VR team will still have members at other offices across California, Washington, New York and abroad.

TechCrunch asked for more info about the space, and Facebook revealed that it's planning to open a public-facing, experiential space — possibly the first Facebook-branded permanent location that anyone can visit. There, people will be able to come play with its augmented reality and virtual reality products. Those could range from the Oculus Quest headsets and Facebook Portal smart displays it currently sells to potential future products like the camera glasses it's reportedly building with Ray Ban-maker Luxottica and eventually its full-fledged AR eyewear.

A rendering of Facebook's under-construction new space in Burlingame, Calif.

Facebook says it's considering building true retail space into the Burlingame office to let people try and then buy its hardware products. This would be a significant first step toward self-branded Facebook retail spaces in the vein of Apple and Microsoft's stores.

Interested in potentially controlling more of the hardware stack, Facebook held acquisition talks with $4.5 billion market cap semiconductor company Cirrus Logic, which makes audio chips for Apple and more, The Information reports. That deal never happened, and it's unclear how far the talks went given tech giants constantly keep their M&A teams open to discussions. But it shows how serious Facebook is taking hardware, even if Portal and Oculus sales have been slow to date. Facebook declined to comment on the matter.

That could start to change next year, though, as flagship virtual reality experiences hit the market. I got a press preview of the upcoming Medal of Honor first-person shooter that will launch on the Oculus Quest in 2020. An hour of playing the World War II game flew by, and it was one of the first VR games that felt like you could enjoy it week after week rather than being just a tech demo. Medal of Honor could prove to be the killer app that convinces gamers they have to get a Quest.

Social hardware

Facebook has also been working on hardware experiences for the enterprise. Facebook Workplace video calls can now run on Portal, with its smart camera auto-zooming to keep everyone in the board room in frame or focused on the action. The Information reports Facebook is also prototyping a VR videoconferencing system that Boz has been testing with his team. Facebook tells TechCrunch that Boz hosted two internal events where he videoconferenced through VR to about 100 of his team leaders using virtual Q&A software Facebook is prototyping internally. It's hoping to learn what would be necessary to consistently hold meetings in VR.

The hardware initiatives, meanwhile, feed back into Facebook's core ad business. It's now using some data about what people do on their Oculus or Portal to target them with ads. From playing certain games to accessing kid-focused experiences to virtually teleporting to vacation destinations, there's plenty of lucrative data for Facebook to potentially mine.

Facebook tells TechCrunch that Portal currently takes data — like if you log in, make calls or use certain features — to inform ad targeting. For example, it could show you ads related to video calling if you do that a lot. With Oculus, if you connect your Facebook account, then data about apps you use or events you join could be used to tune its algorithms or target ads.

Facebook even wants to know what's on our mind before we act on it. The Information reports that Facebook's brain-computer interface hardware for controlling interfaces by employing sensors to recognize a word a user is thinking has been shrunk down. It's gone from the size of a refrigerator to something hand-held, but is still far from ready for integration into a phone. Facebook tells TechCrunch it's making progress, improving the word error rate significantly up the state-of-the-art research and expanding the dictionary of words that can be recognized. Facebook can now decode brain activity in real time, and it's working on an intermediary system for identifying single words as it pushes toward 100 words-per-minute brain typing.

Selling Oculus headsets, Portal screens and mind-readers might never generate the billions in profits Facebook earns from its efficient ads business, but they could ensure the social network isn't locked out of the next waves of computing. Whether those are fully immersive like virtual reality, convenient complements to our phones like smart displays or minimally invasive sensors, Facebook wants them to be social. If it can bring your friends along to your new gadgets, Facebook will find some way to squeeze out revenue while keeping these devices from making us more isolated and less human.

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Apple, Google and Amazon want one language for smart devices - AdAge.com

Posted: 19 Dec 2019 08:06 AM PST

Apple, Google and Amazon—three of the biggest smart home and voice assistant providers—are joining forces to make internet-connected homes easier to set up and safer to use.

The rivals announced Wednesday that they're working with the Zigbee Alliance, a foundation that promotes standards for the Internet of Things, and its members including Samsung, Somfy and IKEA, on a new standard that will ensure their products work with one another.

While an increasing portion of the home can now be controlled by a voice-activated speaker or remote app, from thermostats to lights and even refrigerators, "the lack of an industry-wide connectivity standard leaves people confused and frustrated when trying to understand what devices work with each smart home ecosystem," Nik Sathe and Grant Erickson, engineers at Google's Nest unit, wrote in a statement. "It also places a heavy burden on manufacturers to make sure all devices are compatible with each other."

Amazon and Google have relatively open systems already, which have allowed tens of thousands of third-party devices to link up with their smart speakers. Apple only supports a few hundred via its HomeKit standard. The global smart home market is projected to grow to $174.2 billion by 2025, according to MarketWatch, up from $55.7 billion in 2016.

But the move could also raise privacy and security questions. For years, Amazon and Google collected data every time someone used a smart speaker to turn on a light or lock a door and asked gadget makers like Logitech to send a stream of information whenever someone engaged in such an action. Bringing more devices together in a home raises the prospect of personal data being shared with a higher number of companies, some of which may have more lax security or privacy standards. Google pared back the number of companies its Nest devices connect to earlier this year due to privacy concerns.

Apple said the project is built around "a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable and seamless to use." After lagging behind Amazon and Google, Apple is rebooting its smart home efforts, developing new software and devices with a new team, Bloomberg News reported earlier this year.

The Zigbee Alliance is aiming to have its new joint protocol ready by the end of 2020.

Notably absent from the group is Facebook. The social network's smart home offering, called Portal, doesn't have a third-party ecosystem like Apple and the others. Facebook's voice assistant is also the most rudimentary on the market and uses Amazon's Alexa to power many of the voice operations.

Major Asian smart home companies such as Baidu, Tmall and Xiaomi are also missing. Trade tensions between China and the U.S. could make such partnerships uncomfortable, and Google and Amazon don't have much of a presence for smart speakers in the region.

—Bloomberg News

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Over 267M Facebook users had names, phone numbers leaked on dark web - New York Post

Posted: 19 Dec 2019 03:31 PM PST

More than 267 million names, phone numbers and user IDs of Facebook users were discovered on the dark web, cybersecurity researchers said Thursday.

For the past two weeks, the massive trove of sensitive information was exposed to anyone who wanted to see it, according to a joint report from tech site Comparitech and researcher Bob Diachenko.

The confidential records were first made available on Dec. 4, according to the researchers' timeline, and made their way to a hacker forum eight days later.

They were taken down Thursday after Diachenko informed its internet service provider about the unsecured information — but not before sitting as a download in the hacker forum for a week.

The database belongs to "a criminal organization" in Vietnam "according to the evidence," the researchers said.

Most of the affected users — 267.1 million in total — were American.

It is not yet clear how the information was accessed, but Comparitech suggested it may have been collected through "scraping," a process by which bots copy and collect data from web pages.

Scraping is forbidden by Facebook's terms of service, but when a profile is listed as "public" it is easy to do.

The leaked information may make victims easier to target with "large-scale SMS spam and phishing campaigns," Comparitech said.

"We are looking into this issue, but believe this is likely information obtained before changes we made in the past few years to better protect people's information," Facebook said in a statement.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based social network has been scrambling to improve its handling of user data since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, which saw the now-shuttered research firm hoover up the personal data of nearly 90 million Facebook users to better target them with political ads during the 2016 presidential election.

Cybersecurity expert J. Eduardo Campos said this month's leak doesn't appear to be as bad as Cambridge Analytica, but that final judgement should be reserved for when more details emerge.

"This one has the potential to be as bad, but we don't know how sophisticated the criminals who got this data are," Campos told The Post. "[Cambridge Analytica] was worse because they were able to clearly define what they were trying to achieve."

Also in 2018, Facebook revealed that a bug in its system accidentally exposed the private photos of nearly 7 million users. The breach gave certain third-party apps access to photos that were uploaded but not yet made public on Facebook, as well as photos on Facebook's Marketplace and Stories features.

Shares of Facebook were flat in extended trading, down just four cents from its closing price of $206.06.

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