facebook

UPDATE 2020-04-17: Zoom hires a bunch of security experts to help fix zero day exploits. https://www.thefpsreview.com/2020/04/17/zoom-invests-into-hiring-outside-security-experts-to-fix-exploits-as-hackers-are-selling-them-online/ UPDATE 2020-04-09: US Senate tells members to not use Zoom...

https://gizmodo.com/oculus-will-now-require-facebook-login-to-use-social-fe-1840376657 Apparently it can be opted out of but I think we all know that that won't last:

(Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) effort to undo a class action lawsuit claiming that it illegally collected and stored biometric data for millions of users without their consent. The 3-0 decision from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San...

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/facebook-reportedly-uploaded-people-email-contacts-without-consent.html Facebook says it ‘unintentionally uploaded’ 1.5 million users’ email contacts without permission *ka-ching* *ka-ching*

Palmer Luckey has released a new blog post entitled "I can’t use Rift S, and neither can you." where he discusses Facebook's decision to save money in the design of the Oculus Rift S by getting rid of the interpupillary adjustment feature. IPD (interpupillary distance, the distance between your...

In a new blog post entitled "Keeping Passwords Secure" Facebook VP Engineering, Security and Privacy Pedro Canahuati explains how the social media giant accidentally stored Facebook user's passwords on internal data storage systems in plain text. Pedro explains how "these passwords were never...

At GDC, Facebook unveiled their next PC virtual reality headset. Among other things, the Oculus Rift S features a "higher pixel density" and "improved optics," but doesn't divulge many technical details. According to UploadVR, the new headset now uses a single 2560x1440 LCD instead of dual...

Facebook and Instagram were down for about 14 hours earlier this week, and earlier reports suggested that the underlying cause was a BGP routing issue. As time went on without an official explanation, many started to suspect that the outage was related to an attack on the platform. But...

Facebook's news coverage hasn't been particularly positive over the past few months, but they had a particularly bad day yesterday. Following a widespread outage that lasted over 14 hours, and likely cost the company millions in advertising revenue, the New York Times released a report claiming...

NETSCOUT has released a statement to BleepingComputer that the Facebook and Instagram outages were caused by a BGP routing error. "'At approximately 12:52PM EST on March 13th, 2019, it appears that an accidental BGP routing leak from a European ISP to a major transit ISP, which was then...

Facebook and Instagram are reportedly down. This probably means that your personal information will have to wait until both services are back up before it is harvested (sarcasm.) Facebook acknowledged the connection troubles on Twitter since it couldn't announce it on its own social media...

Hot on the heels of Nvidia's Mellanox acquisition, EE Times reports that Facebook has acquired Sonics, a Silicon Valley-based IP provider that specializes in on-chip networking and power management. The report initially came from sources claiming "key Sonics executive members are now working for...

In a forum AMA that UploadVR spotted over the weekend, Oculus Director of Ecosystem Chris Pruett said that the upcoming Oculus Quest will be "significantly faster" that Facebook's last mainstream standalone headset, the Oculus Go. This should seem fairly obvious, as the Quest will use a Qualcomm...

Here at HardOCP, I think the sheer volume of garbage that makes its way into Facebook posts before moderators take it down is common knowledge. Facebook itself has the daunting task of trying moderate all that content, and according to a recent writeup from The Verge, they subcontract some of...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that apps are sending sensitive information to Facebook through the Facebook SDK. The Facebook SDK makes it easy for app writers to share information with Facebook through a built-in analytics service called "App Events." 17.6% of the apps on Apple's App...

Nvidia GPUs are the undisputed king of the machine learning hardware market today, but more and more companies are throwing their hat into the AI ring. Google has already introduced their machine learning-focused TPU, and other giants like Amazon and Intel are reportedly following suit, while a...

A security researcher spotted a bug in Facebook that would've allowed attackers to take over accounts from users that clicked on a single link. According to Youssef Sammouda, a vulnerable endpoint easily allowed him to makes posts on a user's timeline, delete profile picture, or delete accounts...

Oculus founder Palmer Lucky many not work for Facebook's VR division anymore, but apparently, he's still supporting some of his company's earliest adopters. In a blog post, he acknowledges that long term use of Oculus Rift CV1 kits can lead to the failure of one, or both, of the headset's...

The NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence published a report on the challenges governments face with online security, and Wired managed to spot a particular interesting experiment within the multi-section report. As part of an experiment, the independent NATO organization used...

Facebook's stock price has recovered from a low of about $124 in December to ~$162 right now, which is about there the stock was in mid 2018 and early 2017. But if you think that means Facebook's bad news train is slowing down, think again. The Guardian says that a report from the UK...

According to a report from the Washington Post, Facebook is negotiating with the FCC over a multi-billion dollar fine for its privacy issues and practices. The fine is expected to be the largest ever levied against a tech company. In 2011, the FTC and Facebook reached a deal to improve the...

Following Facebook's latest privacy scandal, where they, among other things, blatantly violated Apple's guidelines for the iOS Enterprise Certificate program, Apple revoked Facebooks certifications, effectively disabling many of their corporate apps. Now, TechCrunch reports that Apple has...

Facebook recently faced another wave of negative publicity following a TechCrunch report, which claimed that Facebook sideloaded apps onto users' devices that tracked almost everything, and did so with a relatively lax parental consent process. On iOS devices, installing 3rd party apps from...

Thousands of Facebook employees have lost all access to internal iOS corporate apps because Apple has revoked the company's enterprise license that allows Facebook to develop apps outside of the Apple App Store for internal use only. This has caused widespread panic at the social media giant as...

TechCrunch just posted a report claiming that Facebook paid teens to install a "VPN that spies on them" on Android and iOS devices. More specifically, the social media company has allegedly been paying users between the ages of 12 and 35 "up to $20 per month plus referral fees" to download the...

The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled in favor of consumer protections and privacy in a case that has broad implications related to the collection of biometric data. Stacy Rosenbach sued Six Flags Great America over the electronic collection of her son's fingerprints to use a season pass. She...

If you're reading this, you're probably desensitized to bad news about Facebook by now. But, according a recent report from Reveal, Facebook was allegedly involved in a class action lawsuit over duping "game-playing kids and their parents out of money," and this particular rabbit hole seems to...

IEEE Spectrum says that PointView Tech, a Facebook subsidiary, is building a laser satellite communication facility on the peak of Mount Wilson in California. The publication believes that the company is working on a laser communication satellite codenamed "Athena" and says the company has a...

Citing a paywalled report from Business Insider, UploadVR says that Facebook is working on an AR prototype resembling "traditional glasses much more closely than the bulky AR headsets offered by Microsoft (the HoloLens) or Magic Leap." The report also mentions that the company moved "hundreds"...

Wired just ran a story claiming that the Silicon Valley giants spend huge amounts of money to protect their CEOs and other executives. Apple, for example, reportedly dropped $310,000 protecting Tim Cook, while Amazon and Oracle spent $1.6 Million protecting Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison. But...

The fact that Facebook shares data from Android phones, even when users aren't logged in, is no secret. Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram are all baked into my HTC's system image, and it takes work just to keep them disabled. But Privacy International recently tested a wide range of 3rd...

Citing anonymous sources, Bloomberg claims that Facebook is developing its own cryptocurrency for WhatsApp transfers. More specifically, they're said to be developing a "stablecoin." Unlike high profile cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, which make up the bulk of the cryptocurrency...

Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) has announced DeepFocus; an AI rendering system that works in conjunction with its upcoming eye tracking hardware called Half Dome. Half Dome has a varifocal design that that will recognize when users focus on objects in the VR world. DeepFocus AI will recognize this...

The Washington Post reports that Facebook is facing their first U.S. lawsuit related to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Facebook is already in hot water overseas, but now the Attorney General of Washington D.C. is going after the social media giant. Meanwhile, Facebook has responded to...

As part of their big 2018 driver update, AMD added support for streaming SteamVR titles to a wide range of VR headsets, including the "HTC Vive Focus, Oculus Go, Samsung Gear VR, and Google Daydream." However, AMD just sent a statement to PCGamesN claiming that SteamVR support violates the terms...

The New York Times just published a scathing report on Facebook's data sharing practices. Citing over 60 interviews and "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times, generated in 2017 by the company's internal system for tracking partnerships," the publication claims...

On their developer website, Facebook revealed a bug in their Photo API that "may have affected people who used Facebook Login and granted permission to third-party apps to access their photos." Facebook claims some "third parties" may have had access to more photos than they were supposed to...

Gamesindustry.biz reports that ZeniMax and Facebook have finally settled their long-running lawsuit over Oculus technology. As a reminder, the trouble started when John Carmack left ID for Oculus in 2013. ZeniMax sued shortly after that, claiming that Carmack and Oculus stole some of ID's...

While Facebook is reportedly "at war" with itself and the public, the BBC reports that Facebook is also fighting another kind of war. The social media giant is allegedly using a number of tricks to fool popular ad blocking plugins, including "breaking up the word 'sponsored,'" inserting hidden...

The UK Parliament published over 200 pages of internal Facebook emails they recently seized, and media outlets all over the world are picking through them. Among other things, the BBC points out the documents revealed that Netflix, Badoo, Lyft, and Airbnb all used Facebook friend data to...