AMD's custom Instinct MI450-based AI accelerator for Meta will use three times less memory than the fully-fledged Instinct MI455X and will be optimized primarily for recommendation systems operated by Facebook and other social platforms, according to SemiAnalysis. If the report is accurate, it is reasonable to expect Meta to keep using Nvidia hardware for training frontier AI models and running inference.

The custom Instinct MI455X for Meta will carry 144GB of HBM4 memory using six 8-Hi packages, whereas the full-blown Instinct MI455X will be equipped with 432 GB of HBM4 memory, according to SemiAnalysis. In addition, the part will reportedly offer 'significant decreases in compute.' The new design will offer a more competitive bandwidth-per-dollar ratio for recommendation systems, but will not be optimized for training of frontier AI models or running inference, the report claims.

Cutting compute performance and reducing HBM4 capacity from 432GB to 144GB should dramatically reduce the bill of materials, as HBM4 is exceptionally expensive. Furthermore, the reduction would cut the package size of the custom Instinct MI450-series accelerator for Meta, which is another way to reduce BOM costs. By using custom cut-down Instinct MI450-series accelerators instead of fully-fledged models, Meta can potentially save tens of millions of dollars.

As added bonuses, these custom Instinct MI450-series accelerators will also consume significantly less power when running recommendation workloads without significantly reducing performance. Also, such accelerators can offer better CPU/GPU balance for recommendation systems, according to SemiAnalysis. If Meta runs these accelerators primarily on recommendation workloads for their entire useful lives, the custom design could deliver substantially better total-cost-of-ownership.

However, such cutting down has many disadvantages. The biggest problem is loss of versatility. The reductions in both compute and HBM make it less attractive for LLM training and inference. The standard Instinct MI455X has 432 GB of HBM4 and 19.6 TB/s of bandwidth, which is particularly beneficial for large-scale training and inference. By contrast, the 144 GB capacity may be particularly restrictive for modern LLM training and inference.

In addition, there is also an interchangeability problem. A general-purpose Instinct MI455X can be reassigned from recommendation workloads to training, inference, or other workloads. Meta's specialized version is less attractive outside its intended workload. If Meta's compute demand shifts toward model training and LLM inference, it may find itself sitting on a huge installed base of accelerators optimized for a different workload mix.

As a result, for Meta's model training and inference workloads, the alternative to Meta's cut-down custom MI400 would likely be full-fat AMD Instinct MI455X systems or Nvidia's high-end platforms. Meanwhile, Nvidia has chances to become an obvious beneficiary because Meta already operates massive Nvidia infrastructure. The irony in that Meta customized an AMD accelerator to reduce costs and optimize recommendation systems, but that specialization could force its frontier AI division to buy more general-purpose accelerators — potentially from Nvidia — anyway.

When AMD and Meta inked an agreement under which the former will supply the latter with 6 GW of Instinct AI accelerators over the next five years, they did disclose that at least some of them will be custom accelerators, including custom accelerators based on the Instinct MI450 design. As it seems now, these custom AI accelerators will only be used for select workloads, not a broad set of workloads.

Broadcom and Meta this week announced the extension of their relationship with a long-term agreement under which Broadcom will supply Meta multiple generations of custom-designed Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) hardware through 2029. The package includes supplying hundreds of thousands of AI processors. The deal is significant enough for Hock Tan, chief exec of Broadcom, to leave Meta's board of directors, ostensibly to avoid a conflict of interest.

Under the terms of the deal, Broadcom will supply Meta multiple generations of custom-designed AI accelerators for training and inference that will be built around Broadcom's foundational XPU platform, which enables to combine custom differentiating silicon with standard logic, memory, and high-speed I/O to greatly improve efficiency and lower the cost of such bespoke processors. The companies are tight-lipped about the exact volumes of hardware to be supplied, though they say that it will consume multiple gigawatts of power, with initial commitments exceeding 1 GW of compute capacity. In addition, Broadcom will supply Meta Ethernet networking solutions for scale-up, scale-out, and scale-across requirements.

It is necessary to note that Broadcom participates in Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI-led multi-source agreements for unified optical compute interconnects for scale-up interconnects. To that end, Broadcom will likely supply Meta custom AI accelerators with optical scale-up interconnects over time.

"Meta is partnering with Broadcom across chip design, packaging, and networking to build out the massive computing foundation we need to deliver personal superintelligence to billions of people," said Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "As we roll out more than 1GW of our custom silicon to start and then multiple gigawatts over time, this partnership will give us greater performance and efficiency for everything we are building."

One of the interesting implications of the deal is that MTIA accelerators use modified RISC-V-based cores from Andes Technology for scheduling and orchestration, as well as some basic processors. While compute blocks (tensor engines, vector engines, systolic arrays, etc.) are not RISC-V-based, the scale of the deal will likely benefit both Andes Technology and the RISC-V ISA ecosystem in general.

Hock Tan will step down from Meta's board of directors and move into an advisory role, likely in a bid to avoid a conflict of interest as he remains chief executive of Broadcom. Nonetheless, in his new role, he will guide Meta's custom silicon roadmap and influence its future infrastructure investments.

"We are pleased to expand our strategic collaboration with Meta as they pioneer the next frontier of artificial intelligence," said Hock Tan, President and CEO, Broadcom. "This initial MTIA deployment is just the beginning of a sustained, multi-generation roadmap to serve the trajectory of massive growth over the next few years highlighting Broadcom’s unmatched leadership in AI networking and the power of our foundational XPU custom accelerator platform."

Meta is setting up Meta Compute, an organization that will be responsible for an aggressive expansion of its computing infrastructure, reports Reuters. Meta Compute plans to deploy infrastructure that will consume tens of gigawatts of power already this decade and scale to hundreds of gigawatts over a longer horizon, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday. Meta Compute will be jointly led by Santosh Janardhan, head of global infrastructure and co-head of engineering, and Daniel Gross.

"Today we are establishing a new top-level initiative called Meta Compute," Zuckerberg wrote in a post over at Threads. "Meta is planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time. How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage."

Janardhan's responsibility remains general and deeply technical: it will span Meta's overall system architecture, in-house silicon efforts, software stack, developer tools, as well as the buildout and day-to-day operation of the company's worldwide data center fleet and network.

Gross will run a newly created group focused on long-range capacity planning and developing supply chain that is capable of delivering equipment that will consume gigawatts of power (i.e., that is a lot of chips and servers). His responsibilities include defining Meta's future compute needs, managing strategic supplier relationships, following industry dynamics, and developing planning and business models to support infrastructure expansion at multi-gigawatt scale.

Given the responsibilities of Janardhan and Gross, Meta is establishing Meta Compute to systematically expand AI-scale infrastructure at a level far beyond traditional data-center growth. As advanced AI models now demand compute measured in tens of gigawatts and hundreds of gigawatts over time, Meta indeed needs to secure sophisticated hardware and construct actual buildings. A dedicated organization allows Meta to plan power, land, networking, and system architecture years in advance, rather than scaling reactively as demand rises.

The new structure also centralizes ownership of the full technical stack — from software and system architecture to in-house silicon, networks, and data centers — to ensure that hardware and software decisions are made together to maximize efficiency. At the same time, Meta Compute separates operational execution from long-term capacity strategy and supply chain creation.

Both executives will coordinate closely with Dina Powell McCormick, who has joined Meta as president and vice chair. Dina Powell McCormick will work closely with the compute and infrastructure organizations to ensure that Meta's multi-billion-dollar investments align with the company's objectives and deliver tangible economic benefits in the regions where the company operates. In addition, she will lead initiatives to establish new strategic capital alliances and develop new approaches to boost Meta's long-term investment capacity.

Meta establishes its Meta Compute organization at an interesting period. On the one hand, the company spent $72 billion on its AI initiatives in 2025 alone. On the other hand, these investments have yet to pay off as the company's Llama 4 model received a muted response and the company is not considered as a major AI leader like Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI.

Being considerably behind other major high-tech companies with its artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, Apple is open to acquiring third-party companies to accelerate its AI roadmap as its management gets that gradual expanding its internal AI initiatives won't cut in to become competitive with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, or xAI.

'Open' to M&A

"We are very open to M&A (Mergers and Acquisitions) that accelerates our road map," said Apple CEO Tim Cook during the company's earnings call with financial analysts and investors, when asked about possible acquisitions of AI companies. "We are not stuck on a certain size company, although the ones that we have acquired thus far this year are small in nature. But we basically ask ourselves whether a company can help us accelerate our roadmap and if they do, then we are interested. But we do not have anything to share specifically today."

During the call, Cook confirmed the company is increasing spending and reorganizing teams to address expansion of its AI initiatives. Apple is moving a significant number of employees to AI-related work and these teams are tasked with developing new features that leverage machine learning and related technologies across Apple's hardware and software ecosystem.

"The way that we look at AI is that it is one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime, and I think it will affect all devices in a significant way," Cook said. "We are embedding it across our devices and platforms and across the company. We are also significantly growing our investments. Apple has always been about taking the most advanced technologies and making them easy to use and accessible for everyone, and that is at the heart of our AI strategy."

Cook stated that Apple intends to grow its AI investment substantially, which is proven by the company's increased CapEx (more on this later). This includes not only organic growth of the Apple's existing teams and efforts, but also acquisitions of other companies of different sizes. In fact, the company has already made around seven takeovers this year, though not all were related to AI, according to Cook.

Apple's high-profile takeovers

Historically, Apple has made numerous high-profile acquisitions that either expanded its market presence, or strenghtened its vertical integration.

Apple's most notable acquisition remains Beats Electronics, purchased in 2014 for $3 billion. This transaction brought both the popular Beats headphone brand and the Beats Music streaming service, which became the foundation for Apple Music. For now, the Beats-branded portfolio clearly helps Apple to maintain the No.1 position on the market of wireless headsets and justifies development of custom silicon for these devices.

Other acqusitions were mostly focused on enhancing the company's vertical integration.

In 2019, Apple expanded its hardware capabilities by acquiring Intel' smartphone modem business for $1 billion, gaining key patents and over 2,000 employees to accelerate the development of its own 5G modems in a bid to reduce dependence on Qualcomm. This year the company finally released its first smartphone with its in-house developed modem inside and said that eventually it would use its own modems inside its devices.

Earlier, in 2018, Apple spent $600 million to acquire a portion of Dialog Semiconductor, including licensing power management technologies and hiring over 300 Dialog engineers, helping Apple bring more of its chip design in-house. In the early 2010s, the company broght Anobit Technologies to bring development of NAND controllers in house; fingerprint sensor company AuthenTec (Touch ID), and 3D sensing designer PrimeSense (Face ID).

Limited spending

Despite this renewed focus on AI, Apple's infrastructure spending remains modest compared to other major high-tech companies. Apple allocated $3.46 billion on CapEx in Q3 FY2025, a rise from $2.15 billion in the same period last year. So far this fiscal year the company has spent $9.473 billion on 'acquisition of property, plant, and equipment,' which is how it calls its capital expenditures. Even if the company spends another $3.46 billion in Q4 FY2025 (which ends on September 29), its CapEx for the fiscal year 2025 will total $12.933 billion. If we annualize Apple's CapEx to calendar year, its spendings will be between $13 billion and $14 billion, which is far behind Google’s $85 billion forecast for fiscal 2025, Meta’s projected $72 billion, and Microsoft’s $80 billion for calendar 2025, according to CNBC estimates.

Strong results

Facebook's heavy-handed censorship of Linux groups and topics was "in error," the social media juggernaut has admitted. Responding to reports earlier this week, sparked by the curious censorship of the eminently wholesome DistroWatch, Facebook contacted PCMag to say that it had made a mistake and that the underlying issue had been rectified.

"This enforcement was in error and has since been addressed. Discussions of Linux are allowed on our services," said a Meta rep to PCMag. That is the full extent of the statement reproduced by the source. Still, it helps us to dismiss various conspiracy theories about the Silicon Valley establishment feeling threatened by the open source movement. Like most big companies, Meta seems slow to respond and react to gaffes that adversely affect users.

Copenhagen-hosted DistroWatch says it has appealed against the Community Standards-triggered ban shortly after it noticed it was in effect (January 19). PCMag received the Facebook admission of error on January 28. The latest statement from DistroWatch, which now prefers posting on Mastodon, indicates that Facebook has lifted the DistroWatch links ban.

In the above post, DistroWatch notes that it is aware of the supposed lifting of its ban but that the account still seems to be locked. We just checked DistroWatch's Facebook page (so you don't have to). A post yesterday was '403 Forbidden' by Facebook (10 likes), but one about a new BSD release published earlier today seems successful (2 likes).

So, it looks like we have a satisfactory outcome from the situation, though it wouldn't have hurt Facebook to apologize to DistroWatch, among others, publicly. Meanwhile, the reason for the 'Facebook Linux ban' remains a mystery. If we had to put forward a theory behind the ban, it would probably highlight how Facebook is transitioning its fact-checking to an X-like Community Notes model.

Transitions often have teething problems, and Facebook posts a lot of data to its platforms every minute of the day. It is ironic, however, that shifting away from professional fact-checker-driven 'censorship' should result in innocuous discussions of open-source operating systems being so strictly censored on this social media platform.

Facebook is banning posts that mention various Linux-related topics, sites, or groups. Some users may also see their accounts locked or limited when posting Linux topics. Major open-source operating system news, reviews, and discussion site DistroWatch is at the center of the controversy, as it seems to be the first to have noticed that Facebook's Community Standards had blackballed it.

A post on the site claims, "Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with Linux as being 'cybersecurity threats.' We tried to post some blurb about distrowatch.com on Facebook and can confirm that it was barred with a message citing Community Standards.

DistroWatch says that the Facebook ban took effect on January 19. Readers have reported difficulty posting links to the site on this social media platform. Moreover, some have told DistroWatch that their Facebook accounts have been locked or limited after sharing posts mentioning Linux topics.

If you're wondering if there might be something specific to DistroWatch.com, something on the site that the owners/operators perhaps don't even know about, for example, then it seems pretty safe to rule out such a possibility. Reports show that "multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed." However, we tested a few other Facebook posts with mentions of Linux, and they didn't get blocked immediately.

Copenhagen-hosted DistroWatch says it has tried to appeal against the Community Standards-triggered ban. However, they say that a Facebook representative said that Linux topics would remain on the cybersecurity filter. The DistroWatch writer subsequently got their Facebook account locked…

Facebook's overzealous ban on some Linux topics in the name of Community Standards and its protection of its users from threats come with a large ladle full of irony. "Facebook runs much of its infrastructure on Linux," DistroWatch points out, "and often posts job ads looking for Linux developers."

However, the Linux news site was gracious enough not to sneer at Facebook's record of (not) protecting its users. For example, some consider Facebook to have been instrumental in election interference around the world, to have fuelled genocide in Myanmar, and, despite its terrible past, has recently decided to dispose of its independent fact-checkers.

There is some hope that banning Linux links and topics is a temporary blip on the radar. Facebook will soon realize that it has mistaken what is a flock of migratory birds for a squadron of assault drones. DistroWatch notes that it also suffered from an RSS feed ban hammer when Twitter changed its name to X-rated content implying X.

If you have noticed any other Linux-related domains, links, or phrases that Facebook has banned, please tell us in the comments section.

Meta is planning to build a 40,000-kilometer fiber-optic subsea cable to span the entire length of the globe. This project is expected to cost over $10 billion, say some experts, and will connect the East Coast of the U.S. to South Africa, India, and Australia before going up across the Pacific to the West Coast. However, TechCrunch says that the biggest thing about this planned undersea cable is that Meta will be its sole owner and user. This means that the tech giant will guarantee global connectivity for its services, ensuring that its traffic will always be a priority in its subsea cable.

Aside from this reason, the planned route shows that it will bypass areas with instability. Suspected undersea cable sabotage has been on the rise lately, with one recent incident involving a Chinese ship traveling from Russia to Egypt suspected of intentionally dragging its anchor across two marked undersea cables. This act damaged two connections—one between Finland and Germany and another between Sweden and Lithuania—disrupting traffic between them. Because of this, one source says the company will “avoid geopolitical tension,” including high-traffic areas like the Red Sea, the South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, and Singapore.

Although the company has already made some plans for the project, it hasn’t announced it yet. The Meta will likely discuss it publicly in early 2025, confirming its intentions, route, budget, and capacity. However, we don’t expect Meta to have its exclusive undersea network within the next year, as projects like these take several years to complete. Furthermore, companies that lay down these cables are few and far between, with many already having their services reserved by other tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

This isn’t Meta’s first foray into undersea cables, as it’s part owner of the 2Africa subsea cable that circumnavigated the continent and connected it to Europe and the Middle East. It also partly owns Echo (alongside Google), which connects Singapore and Indonesia to the U.S. via Guam and Palau; Bifrost, which traces a similar route to Echo; Havhingsten, which connects the British Home Islands to Denmark; and Amitie, which crosses the Atlantic to connect the U.S. to France and the U.K. Finally, Meta is the sole owner of Anjana, which serves the U.S. and Spain.

Meta’s planned massive investment shows how crucial uninterrupted traffic is to tech giants. While undersea cables are the traditional domain of telecommunications companies, companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon see the benefit of keeping their services online and serving their customers in the quickest and most efficient way possible through their own exclusive subsea data highways.

Energy constraints are set to become the IT industry’s next bottleneck, reckons Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In a recent interview, he said he thinks that the long-running GPU drought is basically over, and AI growth and development won’t be reined in by capital constraints in the near term. Instead, energy issues are going to become the next major pinch point.

Zuckerberg tells interviewer Dwarkesh Patel that with the GPU drought now over, businesses will be tempted to “invest a lot of money in building out these things,” like data centers. However, before capital becomes a question, industry is going to be confronted by energy constraints, reckons Zuckerberg.

Providing some support to his assertion, the Facebook boss observes that a lot of new data centers are consuming 50 to 100 megawatts, with particularly large ones that “might be 150 megawatts.” It seems only a question of time before data centers start requiring 300 or 500 megawatts, or even pushing to a gigawatt.

How long will the exponential AI training and energy curve keep going – Zuckerberg asks rhetorically. This question brings the topic of energy production into focus. The Facebook CEO highlights that energy production is probably worth investing in soon.

Making a new power station is not a trivial task. Taking into account regulations (particularly with nuclear energy), powerline planning, and construction it can take many years from drawing up a plan to power flowing to the grid.

Georgia’s example

In a timely article, the WSJ looks closely at the US state of Georgia and how it is coping with the opening of a multitude of tech and industrial businesses.

Many of the new businesses “hoover up huge amounts of electricity,” notes the WSJ. At the same time, states are trying to lessen reliance on fossil fuel generated electricity, making attracting key businesses while assuring them of energy supplies a tightrope walk. Making things more complicated is the question of demand and supply affecting consumer prices and supplies.

Going forward, flexibility seems key, utilizing diverse power sources from renewable like solar and wind, employing batteries for spike management, using nuclear where available, and pragmatically using fossil fuel resources as required.

Interestingly, and relevant to the Zuckerberg interview above, the WSJ notes that Meta / Facebook is collaborating with a Georgia co-op and solar developer called Silicon Ranch, to help power its data centers.

A privacy consultant based in Ireland says he is in the process of filing a criminal complaint against YouTube for alleged unlawful surveillance. Specifically, Alexander Hanff’s legal action against the video streaming site is based upon YouTube’s recent controversial enthusiasm for running scripts to detect ad-blocking browser plug-ins. The Register reports that Hanff has already filed a similar complaint regarding Facebook’s collection of data without explicit consent.

The criminal complaints made by Hanff can be seen as a stern follow-up to an earlier privacy fight-back initiative. Two weeks previously he filed a civil complaint about YouTube’s browser extension snooping. However, Hanff sees the criminal complaint route as potentially more effective, as he asserts that “historically, EU regulators have been absolutely terrible at enforcing the ePrivacy Directive.” The criminal complaint route will also protect the privacy consultant from the risks of high costs associated with civil litigation.

Many YouTube watchers have been annoyed by the site probing their browser settings, and popping up warnings with paid subscription adverts, as you can see above. Hanff also has strong opinions about YouTube’s ad-block sniffing activities. “I consider YouTube’s script to be spyware – aka surveillance technology, as it is deployed without my knowledge or authorization to my device for the sole purpose of intercepting and monitoring my behavior,” he explained. All this snooping happens despite Hanff having set the Do Not Track (DNT) option in his browser of choice. Consent for site owners running scripts, analytics, and so on needs to be sought by sites like YouTube and Facebook. Hanff seems to have a strong case, as such consent is required under EU law.

Interestingly, Ireland has its own computer abuse law that will fortify Hanff’s case against the Silicon Valley tech giants. Sections 2 and 5 of this law state that those intentionally accessing information by infringing security measures, or doing so without lawful authority “shall be guilty of an offense.” So, these criminal cases could have a real impact on the sticky data fingers of YouTube and Facebook, at least in Ireland and the wider EU.

Representatives from YouTube and Facebook have yet to respond to the above legal actions.

Immersion cooling specialist Iceotope has published a study sharing its findings in the wake of a series of tests completed at one of Meta’s (Facebook) data centers. The study looked carefully at the pros and cons of precision single-phase immersion cooling in businesses that use high-density data storage servers. Iceotope asserts that its results were “conclusive” in demonstrating this cooling methodology is a superior solution when compared to air cooling, as well as other forms of liquid cooling such as cold plates, tank immersion, or two-phase immersion.

HDDs are still in high demand in data centers, with Seagate saying that 90% of cloud storage uses this mechanical magnetic storage technology. At the same time, consumer demand for higher bitrate content, and the generation of storage-hungry new content (photos, videos, etc) will continue to ramp up for the foreseeable future. Thus it is important for companies like Meta, who partnered with Iceotope for this study, to optimize storage facilities with regard to reliability, efficiency, and total cost of ownership (TCO).

In the tests, a standard air-cooled commercial storage system with 72 HDDs and supporting components was re-engineered to work with Iceotope’s precision single-phase immersion cooling. Specifically, the modified system used a dedicated dielectric loop connected to a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger and pump. Single-phase cooling is much simpler than dual-phase - where the coolant boils from liquid to gas, travels into a condenser and then flows back into the system (hence dual-phase). Instead with single-phase, the coolant just flows around the hotter and cooler areas of the loop, doing its job without any phase change.

Four main observations were made by the Iceotope testing team. Firstly, the 72 HDDs showed very little variance in temperature (just 3° C) wherever they were located in the server array. It is important to highlight that the storage array used hermetically sealed helium-filled HDDs. Secondly, the liquid could climb in temperature to an easily manageable 40°C with no impact on reliability. Thirdly, the power consumption of the cooling system was <5% of the system total. Lastly, it was noticed that the single-phase precision cooling was virtually silent and vibration free.

Overall, these benefits can lead to improved TCO figures and greater reliability of the storage hardware. Thanks to the demonstrable benefits,  Iceotope’s solution can also be beneficial to a company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) regulatory evaluations.

But of course, this is a study undertaken by a company that sells this service. So take it with a few grains of salt. And let huge companies like Meta incur conversion and cooling costs for at least a few years before deciding it's worth it to liquid-cool the media collection currently sitting on your NAS drive. 

Being the world’s largest maker of motherboards and one of the world’s largest producers of PC hardware in general, Asus supplies almost everything imaginable, from humble mouse mats to large-format displays. But there are a few things that are missing in Asus’s portfolio; among them are solid-state drives. But it looks like the company will fill this gap real soon.

The company posted a teaser with its ROG Strix SQ7 drive over on its Taiwanese Facebook page on Saturday, just weeks ahead of the looming Computex 2022 trade show. The ROG Strix SQ7 will contend with the best SSDs today.

The teaser does not mention detailed technical specifications of the product but only says that this is a 1TB M.2-2280 drive with a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface that is ‘coming soon.’ Additionally, the drive comes with a simplistic graphene heat spreader to fit into desktops, laptops, and potentially the Sony's latest PlayStation 5 console.

The rather simplistic graphene heat spreader is not an indicator of anything. It can hide a modest mid-range turnkey SSD solution or a custom high-performance drive with a proprietary controller and firmware (Samsung’s top-of-the-range 980 Pro client SSD comes with a graphene heat spreader, for example). Given that this is Asus’s first hooray into internal SSDs, we believe it is reasonable to assume that the company is using a turnkey solution, yet with some customizations to justify the Asus ROG branding. Meanwhile, a 1TB capacity indicates that Asus wants to address the sweet spot of the gaming SSD market.

Virtually all leading gaming hardware makers (Gigabyte, MSI, to name a few) started to offer SSDs in recent years. Of course, it is a risky business as SSD costs and prices fluctuate because of fluctuating 3D NAND prices, and competition is cutthroat. Still, you get a steady revenue stream from loyal customers and additional exposure to your brand as a reward.

Enthusiasts who buy leading-edge hardware, such as platforms based on Intel’s 12th Generation Alder Lake processors, eagerly await SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. Unfortunately, these SSD platforms will not be ready for prime time for some time, so Asus is proceeding with a PCIe Gen4 drive. After all, the first product is always a test, so why not go with a proven platform?

Meta (previously known as Facebook) is building a new AI supercomputer, called the AI Research SuperCluster, at a currently undisclosed location. According to Meta, it'll be the world's fastest supercomputer to date when complete with a performance metric of over 220 Linpack petaflops. RSC is operational right now but is still being built out.

Specs for this new supercomputer are quite impressive, as the RSC currently features 760 of Nvidia's cutting-edge DGX A100 AI compute units and includes eight Nvidia A100 GPUs in each unit. This makes for a total of 6,080 GPUs for the entire supercomputer. But, once complete, RSC will pack a whopping 16,000 GPUs with an additional 1,240 DGX nodes to its name. The second installation phase will be completed sometime in July.

For networking, the supercomputer will come equipped with Nvidia's Quantum InfiniBand networking system, which outputs up to 200Gb/s of bandwidth. For storage, the supercomputer comes with 175PB of Pure Storage FlashArray, 10PB of Pure Storage FlashBlade, and 46PB of cache storage.

The RSC will be completely isolated from the internet, with all connections from the internet passing through Meta's own data servers first. This is because the supercomputer will be handing internal production data from Meta, and not just public data, making securing RSC a big concern.

The security system encrypts nearly everything from the storage systems to the GPUs. Data is only decrypted in memory just prior to being used in AI training.

Once complete, RSC should have nearly 2.5 times more computing power than the current system, making it one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

AMD stock rose by 11.2% today as Facebook announced the use of AMD-based EPYC processors in its data centers. With the inclusion of Facebook, AMD now supplies numerous top companies with large data centers, giving it additional ammunition to fight Intel for market share.

On top of this, Microsoft will use EYPC processors in its Azure cloud service, with AMD making a custom SKU specifically for Microsoft with extra memory.

All of this combined has allowed AMD's stock to rise by over 75% in the past six months and we suspect it'll continue to climb if AMD can gain more market share over Intel in the server space.

The CPU manufacturer just announced its new Milan-X EPYC CPUs that will be equipped with 765MB of L3 cache, thanks to the introduction of V-Cache. According to AMD, the performance of the new Milan-X is expected to be around 66% faster than the current Milan chips in server biased workloads such as Synopsys VCS, This is a huge leap in CPU performance for any company that can take advantage of all that L3 cache.

AMD also released an official Zen 4 roadmap update today, with the announcement of a new 96-core EPYC codenamed "Genoa" that will be coming next year. Genoa will run on the brand new Zen 4 architecture that will utilize TSMC's new 5nm process node, and integrate new standards such as DDR5 and PCIe Gen 5.0.

For 2023, AMD is upping the bar even further with a 128-core EPYC chip codenamed "Bergamo". These chips will be designed for high-performance cloud computing running on what AMD calls "Zen 4 C" cores.

AMD is poised to grab even more market share in the server, enterprise, and cloud sectors over the upcoming few years. It'll be exciting to see how many more companies are willing to select AMD over Intel for their needs.

In a livestream for Facebook Connect 2021, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Project Cambria, a next-generation, high-end Mixed Reality headset that will raise the bar for how customers interact with virtual words. It's still in the development stages, but with "encouraging progress" being made towards a bridge between VR and AR, Meta (which Facebook renamed itself as during the event) feels it will have a product ready as early as next year.

Project Cambria will features high-resolution, full-color video passthrough to the headset’s screens, which will allow it to showcase not only the physical space you're involved in, but also overlay it with augmented reality. Zuckerberg explained the cutting-edge nature of the device as requiring  price tag high end of the price spectrum” price tag.

Project Cambria is expected to make use of a new generation of optics that would make it slimmer than existing headsets. New sensors handle the improved tracking features, as well as take in, algorithmically process, reconstruct and augment your immediate physical reality.

The headset features face and eye tracking, which will work in conjunction with avatars that closely mimic your actual movements into the digital real. And so that those lifelike avatar interactions are more engaging than simple digital video conferencing, Facebook also announced Horizon Home for Oculus experience, enhancing the existing virtual home by allowing users to invite digital friends over to play games, watch movies, or hang out. Customization for these virtual spaces will take slightly longer to arrive.

Also bundled into today's announcements and teases was the news that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is under development for the VR space. We're getting a remastered version of San Andreas already this year as part of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy, so it would make sense that a VR version may make use of the remastered assets coming out of that release, but details were virtually absent. Like project Cambria, we'll have to wait for further details.

Intel has added yet another important name to its graphics research efforts. Anton Kaplanyan, a Ph.D. in light transport who played an important role in NVIDIA's RTX and DLSS developments, has joined Intel as Vice President of Graphics Research of Intel's AXG Group. Given his pedigree, the blue giant is likely looking for him to help develop the company's own super sampling solution. This rings especially true when one considers his July 2020 paper on Neural Supersampling, which does pave the way for related contributions to Intel.

Anton Kaplanyan invented the one-sample-per-pixel denoising approach used by NVIDIA in its DLSS implementation and was among the first to integrate neural networks and graphics technologies. His previous work includes a stint at game developer Crytek (who have had one of the most impressive game engines on their hands at one point in time in the form of CryEngine); co-founded Lightrig, a company specializing in digital illumination and control; and then followed up with his undertaking of RTX and DLSS on Nvidia. He finally settled with Facebook, directly working with the company's VR division in developing virtual reality graphics technologies. 

Machine learning and light simulation have been the core technologies at the heart of Anton's contributions, and he does boast of an impressive resumé in that particular field. He explains it on his website, where he defines his work as: "I enjoy advancing research in computer graphics with a current focus on real-time rendering, including neural rendering, perceptual rendering, shading and appearance, as well as differentiable rendering. My research is used in Nvidia's middleware and RTX hardware, game engines (UE4, Unity, CryEngine) and games, and in Pixar's RenderMan. My Ph.D. is on light transport simulation, also a former game dev at Crytek.)."

Intel has been heavily investing in its graphics technologies ever since the "original" poaching of AMD's then-Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of Radeon Technologies Group Raja Koduri. The blog post penned by Anton on Intel's website represents an interesting, corporate-approved look at his future work in the company; as he puts it, Intel's resources "(...) gives us an opportunity to not only completely reinvent how we co-design graphics hardware and software with these technologies in the driver’s seat, but also to look at a larger picture of a potentially novel graphics ecosystem that can include heterogeneous distributed systems and multi-level compute for movie-quality visuals on a wide range of consumer devices." 

Of course, the objective has always been lifelike visuals directly beamed into our retinas - and Anton may be a key piece in Intel's efforts to capitalize on that vision.

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal citing people familiar with the matter, Intel is in talks to buy GlobalFoundries for roughly $30 billion. Intel has not confirmed the report, but if true, the plan would intercept GlobalFoundries' widely-reported plans for an IPO later this year. We reached out to Intel about the report and the company responded that it does not comment on rumors and speculation.

The news comes on the heels of recent reports that Intel is in talks to buy RISC-V chip designer SiFive for $2 billion as it undergoes a major restructuring effort under new CEO Pat Gelsinger. 

Intel's rumored buy-out plan also comes as it lobbies the US government for subsidies to boost its manufacturing capabilities, particularly to help fund its IDM 2.0 initiative that will find it producing chips for other companies through a newly-formed Intel Foundry Services (IFS). Intel has pledged $20 billion of its own money to kick-start that initiative with two fabs in Arizona.

Acquiring GlobalFoundries would be an immediate shot in the arm for that initiative, particularly because it would bring in experienced leadership teams and an already-healthy third-party foundry business. GlobalFoundries' production capacity of trailing-edge nodes, which are the largest volume movers for most third-party fabs, would also fit well with Intel's plans to begin offering its manufacturing services to other parties.

Even though GlobalFoundries famously abandoned the race for leading-edge node technology, it has plenty of its own existing fabs in the US with impressive production capacity. GlobalFoundries has long serviced contracts with the US government, which requires certain indigenous chip production for some of its military projects. As such, the company's existing work with the US government makes it a shoo-in for government funding.

GlobalFoundries, AMD's former foundry, is headquartered in the US. The company is currently owned by the Mubadala Investment Company, an investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government. GlobalFoundries has been widely reported to be seeking an IPO, but it scuttled its plans last year amidst the turmoil of the pandemic. However, according to the WSJ, GlobalFoundries could move ahead with its planned IPO if talks with Intel fall through.

The proposed deal would dwarf Intel's $16.7 billion Altera acquisition, which was its largest thus far. Intel recently sold off its NAND and SSD business to SK hynix for $9 billion as it looks to focus on its core competency of manufacturing high-margin logic devices. 

However, an Intel-GlobalFoundries deal would certainly face intense regulatory scrutiny, especially amid the tensions associated with the US-China trade war. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has also been on a tour throughout the EU to drum up support for government funding to build fabs there, saying that the company's investments in Europe could total $100 billion. 

Interestingly, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger will provide an update on the company's process and packaging technology and roadmap on July 26 at 2pm PT, streamed via the Intel Newsroom. If an acquisition of GlobalFoundries is in the cards, we're sure to learn more at this event. 

Looks like immersion doesn’t quite beat monetization — Facebook is going to start putting in-headset ads in certain Oculus games within the next few weeks. Welcome to the digital frontier! Instead of the Gateway Arch, we have a McDonald’s billboard.

Don’t expect to have to karate kick pop-ups quite yet, though. According to a post Oculus made on its blog yesterday, this is going to be a slow rollout. The ads will first appear in the Resolution Games title Blastion, plus in a few unnamed games from "a couple other developers."

"This is a test with a few apps," the post explains. "Once we see how this test goes and incorporate feedback from developers and the community, we’ll provide more details on when ads may become more broadly available across the Oculus platform."

If you’re worried that these ads will show up as simple flat windows over your best VR headset footage, at least it seems like they’ll be more naturally integrated than that. A sample gif from the Oculus post shows an ad placed on an in-game wall, with the user able to click on it to access some customization options.

These include the ability to save the ad link for later, to mute it if it plays audio, to report it if it breaks any rules, to hide it and to find out why the algorithm targeted that specific ad towards you. In other words, it’s a very similar menu to ads on Facebook itself, although Andrew Bosworth tweeted out that there will be differences.

He also, very bravely, asked for feedback, which you can submit by reaching out to Oculus Support.

These ads might also explain why Oculus is going to start requiring Facebook accounts to use its devices. A Facebook spokesperson told the Verge that the ad system will use information from your Facebook account, including “"hether you’ve viewed content, installed, activated or subscribed to an Oculus app, added an app to your cart or wishlist, if you’ve initiated checkout or purchased an app on the Oculus platform, and lastly, whether you’ve viewed, hovered, saved, or clicked on an ad within a third-party app."

That said, the company still promises that "We do not use information processed and stored locally on your headset to target ads."

It’s possible that this ad system might also be an attempt to bring a mobile-like experience to the Oculus store. On mobile, many games are free and supported by ads, and Oculus’ blog closes out by saying "We’re excited by the opportunity to open up new revenue streams for developers and as a result, broaden the type of apps and content on the Oculus Platform. A more profitable ecosystem is a critical step on the path to consumer VR becoming truly mainstream."

Let’s just hope it doesn’t undercut the whole point of visiting another reality.

Facebook user Lok LOK has snapped various photographs of shipping boxes with MSI graphics cards that are reportedly heading to the U.S. One of the boxes seemingly contains MSI's unreleased GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Ventus 3X 12G OC, lending credence to the rumors of GeForce RTX 3080 Ti's arrival in May.

However, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti isn't the only SKU that MSI is sending to Los Angeles. Nvidia's flagship GeForce RTX 3090 is also part of the shipment although we couldn't see the exact model of the graphics card. The other photographs also showed a few boxes of MSI's Radeon RX 580 Armor 8G OC and GT 710 2GD3 LP. Both graphics cards are outdated by today's standards, but given the ongoing shortage, anything is better than nothing. Furthermore, the Radeon RX 580 is still the one of the best mining GPUs that money can buy.

According to the latest rumors, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti could arrive with 10,240 CUDA cores, 80 RT cores and 320 Tensor cores. The leaked photographs paint the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with 12 GB of memory, putting to rest the ongoing debate of hether it would come with 12GB or 20GB. The memory chips should be GDDR6X clocked at 19 Gbps. Across the rumored 384-bit memory interface, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti should be good for a memory bandwidth up to 912.4 GBps.

There is strong but unverified information that Nvidia is reworking its Ampere silicon to put a halt to Ethereum mining. If that's the case, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, which is reportedly based on the GA102 die, will debut with Nvidia's reveamped silicon with improved anti-mining mechanisms. Word around town is that once mining activity is detected, the algorithm slashes the hash rate down to 50%.

While Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090 can go toe-to-toe with AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT, the Ampere offering also costs $500 more. Nvidia has a respectable Ampere lineup, but the chipmaker doesn't have anything that competes in the $1,000 bracket. The reason for the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti's existence is to face Radeon RX 6900 XT at the $999 price mark.

If you've been hunting for a high-end Ampere graphics card, we encourage you to keep your eyes peeled in the upcoming weeks. We don't know just how many units are en route to the U.S. but they'll likely sell out fast. The reality of the matter is that the graphics card shortage doesn't look like it'll improve anytime soon. What little of the graphics cards that make their way to U.S. retailers will in all probability sell out quickly.

Asus Vietnam (via momomo_us) has shared renders and the specifications for the Dual GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition (DUAL-RTX3060-O12G) on its official Facebook page. The compact, Ampere-based graphics card will surely attract a lot of attention from SFF lovers.

The Dual GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition is armed with 3,584 CUDA cores, 112 Tensor cores and 28 RT cores. The graphics card's 12GB of GDDR6 memory, which is clocked at 15 Gbps, sits comfortably on a 192-bit memory interface. This setup is enough to allow the Dual GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition to deliver a maximum theoretical memory bandwidth that tops out at 360 GBps. Asus Vietnam didn't reveal the graphics card's clock speeds though.

Similar to other modern day Asus offerings, the Dual GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition features the MaxContact heat spreader that Asus claims is up to 10 times flatter to improve heat dissipation. On this particular model, a total of five heatpipes transfer the heat to the heatsink. Subsequently, a pair of Asus' Axial-tech cooling fans take care of getting rid of the heat.

The exact dimensions for the Dual GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition are unknown for the moment, but the graphics card adheres to a dual-slot design. The shroud does resemble the one that Asus utilizes on its TUF Gaming GeForce GTX 16-series so it's plausible that the Dual GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition may find itself measuring between 20.4cm and 20.6cm. The shroud on the Dual GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition, however, does have more flair and flaunts a discrete RGB strip.

Asus' potrayal of the GeForce RTX 3060 also lands with one HDMI 2.1 port and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs for video outputs. The Dual GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition is more than happy with just one 8-pin PCIe power connector.

As we already know from Nvidia's announcement, the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB officially drops next month. In fact, several Vietnamese retailers have already listed the Dual GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition, but there is no indication on pricing yet.

Facebook haters rejoice: the United States government is with you. On Wednesday, December 9th, both the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of 48 state attorneys general filed separate lawsuits against Facebook citing anti-competitive practices, with special attention to the company’s purchases of Instagram and Whatsapp in 2012 and 2014, respectively.

This follows a similar lawsuit that the Justice Department filed against Google this October, as well as statements from both current United States President Donald Trump and allies of president-elect Joe Biden that big tech companies currently hold too much power over the market and users.

"For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users," New York Attorney General and leader of the 48-state coalition Letitia James said in a press conference on December 9th. “Today, we are taking action to stand up for the millions of consumers and many small businesses that have been harmed by Facebook’s illegal behavior."

The coalition’s lawsuit calls for Facebook to be barred from making any future acquisitions worth $10 million or more without advance notice to state governments, as well as calls for unspecified additional relief and for Facebook to end other anticompetitive practices. The FTC’s lawsuit goes a step further- it’s also pushing for advance notice of Facebook mergers, but in addition, the FTC is seeking to unwind Instagram and Whatsapp from Facebook’s control.

“Personal social networking is central to the lives of millions of Americans,” FTC Bureau of Competition Director Ian Conner said today in a press release. “Facebook’s actions to entrench and maintain its monopoly deny consumers the benefits of competition. Our aim is to roll back Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct and restore competition so that innovation and free competition can thrive.”

Facebook, predictably, denies these claims.

“This is revisionist history,” Facebook vice president and general counsel Jennifer Newstead told ABC News.

She argues that Instagram and WhatsApp “became the incredible products they are today because Facebook invested billions of dollars, and years of innovation and expertise, to develop new features and better experiences.” She also pointed out to the publication that the FTC “cleared these acquisitions years ago.”

A post on the Facebook newsroom Twitter account mirrored Newstead's words, saying that an official statement is on the way and calling out the government for wanting a do-over.

The FTC’s lawsuit, however, follows an 18-month long investigation into the platform and makes additional claims about Facebook’s alleged anti-competitive practices, including accusations that Facebook deliberately cut off API access to rivals like Vine in order to hamper their success. This indicates what the FTC is calling a “systematic strategy” to create a monopoly.

The state coalition lawsuit, meanwhile, argues that Facebook’s acquisitions and anticompetitive conduct violate Section 2 of the Sherman Act and Section 7 of the Clayton Act, both of which are longstanding federal antitrust laws that aim to preserve “free and unfettered competition as the rule of trade.”

Moving into the hardware market, we’re not sure yet how these lawsuits will affect Oculus. Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014, which is the same year the company bought WhatsApp, but neither lawsuit has made any references to it as of yet.

While Facebook claims that Oculus has social potential, its primary use so far has still largely been in games. Since these lawsuits mostly focus on Facebook’s monopoly over social media, it’s unclear whether Facebook will be asked to sell Oculus as well.

However, according to Letitia James, the state coaliation’s lawsuit is also taking into account damage to users. In her press conference, she argued that Facebook "used its power to suppress competition so it could take advantage of users and make billions by converting personal data into a cash cow."

Given that Oculus is now requiring users to log in with Facebook accounts, and thus opening them up to having their data scraped, it could very well come up in either lawsuit soon enough.

The Oculus Quest 2, the first Oculus headset to require new users to log in with a Facebook account rather than an Oculus account, started shipping out to customers this week. But thanks to that Facebook requirement, it might be weeks until some owners actually get to use one of the best VR headsets. That’s because, as UploadVR reported yesterday, some Oculus Quest 2 owners are claiming that their Facebook accounts are being disabled before they can actually log-in to and activate their device.

Oculus announced earlier this August that, starting this October, “anyone using an Oculus device for the first time will need to log in with a Facebook account.” This means Oculus Quest 2 buyers who don’t have Facebook accounts either have to create new ones or reactivate old ones to actually use their purchase. The problem comes, then, in some users getting almost instantaneous suspensions from Facebook when trying to sign up and needing to wait weeks to appeal them.

Yesterday, Oculus support tweeted out that it is aware of the issue, which prompted numerous reports of difficulty from users. One Reddit user complained that “I logged into Facebook’s website to lock down my profile, as I had no intention of using the social media site more than was needed, and within minutes of merging accounts and changing profile settings my account was banned.” On Twitter, another user posted the account denial screen that some are seeing, which says “You can’t use Facebook because your account, or activity on it, didn’t follow our community standards. We have already reviewed this decision and it can’t be reversed.”
 

 Oculus’ support post asks users seeing this message to send a support ticket to Oculus, but another Quest 2 buyer said that Oculus’ response to their ticket simply asked them to refer to Facebook’s help center.

Despite the Facebook account suspension message’s wording, you can appeal a Facebook ban, but it requires sending the website a picture of your driver’s license or some other photographic proof of identity. But the appeals process can be slow, thanks to what is likely human review, which means that Quest 2 owners who are facing difficulty may have to wait a while for their device to be anything other than a paperweight. 

The difficulty here is that Facebook has a unique “real-name” policy tied to its accounts, which asks users to register accounts under the “name they go by in everyday life.” The platform’s hope is that each user will only have one account, which represents who they actually are. And after pressure from the political sphere to crack down on accounts run by bots, the website has only become stricter on who it lets create accounts. So, unlike Twitter or Reddit, signing up for Facebook isn't as easy as just linking an email and pressing go.

This poses a problem when the service essentially acts as a key to start up your new $299 device. 

Facebook Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality Andrew Bosworth also addressed the issue on his Instagram.

"We are working really quickly through those [suspension cases] and resolving all those issues that come up." But in the meantime, he suggested the following advice:

"I think people should continue to make sure their Facebook accounts are in good standing before they buy the headset."

Researchers at Facebook today announced Project Aria, its work on a pair of augmented reality (AR) glasses. Facebook is in the very early stages of the project, not even calling it a prototype and only letting a few personnel use it for R&D purposes.

Project Aria is anticipated to be a critical tool in the development of a future product. The vendor didn't confirm when we could expect to Facebook smart glasses on the market or even when a working sample would be shown off. 

However, the tech giant did confirm a partnership with EssilorLuxottica to use Ray Ban branding on its upcoming smart glasses.

"The partnership will combine Facebook apps and technologies, Luxottica’s category leadership and iconic brands and Essilor’s advanced lens technology to help people stay better connected to their friends and family," EssilorLuxottica's announcement explained. "The first product will be branded Ray-Ban, the world’s most popular eyewear brand and is scheduled to launch in 2021. " 

Facebook emphasized that Project Aria is not a prototype of any sort. Instead, the new device is a research tool intended to help gather data for the development of useful, compact AR components. The news follows a recent blog post from Facebook expressing a desire for an improved surround sound experience in AR environments.

The new glasses only make use of a few sensors. They don't have any display mechanism, so wearers won't see anything in the lens to create an AR experience. The sensors capture things like audio and video from the wearer's perspective with the intention of helping the team better understand how they can go about augmenting day-to-day experiences.

The glasses feature a full sensor suite like the ones found in VR headsets to calculate spacial awareness. They also use a GPS to determine and log location information and can take "high-res" images and "capture multichannel audio and eye images," according to Facebook's blog. 

In alternate reality news, as part of its Facebook Connect event today Facebook also announced the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset and its discontinuing of the Oculus RIft S 

The Facebook Reality Labs research team today highlighted new advancements on the audio front of their augmented reality (AR) work. The ultimate goal is to create a pair of AR glasses. These steps are part of the process to refining the end product.

Seeing Facebook bring more attention to AR is pretty exciting. Oculus has continued pushing virtual reality (VR) closer to the mainstream since being acquired by Facebook, making some of the best VR headsets on the market. That includes the standalone Oculus Quest, which works without tethering to a pricey gaming PC or phone. We've yet to see a pair of AR smart glasses see as much success as the Quest. 

As Facebook Reality Labs progresses towards the final design of its AR smart glasses, they have considerable work ahead of them to ensure the product is desirable and immersive. Recent developments take place in two areas: Audio Presence and Perceptual Superpowers, (which sounds a lot more exciting than the actual technology but is still notably useful).

"The mission of the team is twofold: to create virtual sounds that are perceptually indistinguishable from reality and to redefine human hearing," Facebook's blog post says. 

Audio Presence is centered around reconstructing audio for a virtual environment, so the sound comes from appropriate directions. This is essentially like perfecting surround sound for AR. Refining the Audio Presence is a huge step in creating immersive environments.

When it comes to Perceptual Superpowers tech, the name may be a little generous. But don't let that discredit the seriously useful nature of what it does. This technology is designed to reduce distracting background noise so you can amplify the volume of your target audio source—like a conversation you're having at a table in a crowded restaurant.

Work like this is crucial to creating an optimized AR experience and directly tied to Facebook's AR glasses efforts, although incorporating the technology is still "a ways away," according to Facebook Research Scientist Manager Ravish Mehra. 

"Imagine being able to hold a conversation in a crowded restaurant or bar without having to raise your voice to be heard or straining to understand what others are saying," Facebook's blog says. 

"By using multiple microphones on your glasses, we can capture the sounds around you. Then, by using the pattern of your head and eye movements, we can figure out which of these sounds you’re most interested in hearing, without requiring you to robotically stare at it."

Facebook wants its AR smart glasses to be stylish and understand the visual and acoustic world around you in order to provide useful information.

"When you walk into a restaurant, for example, your AR glasses would be able to recognize different types of events happening around you: people having conversations, the air conditioning noise, dishes and silverware clanking," the blog explains. "Then, using contextualized AI, your AR glasses would be able to make smart decisions, like removing the distracting background noise — and you’d be no more aware of the assistance than of a prescription improving your vision.

Following in the footsteps of Apple and Google locking down their respective app stores, Oculus is finally taking the fear we all had when Facebook bought it and making it a reality. This October, the company will start ending support for Oculus accounts and replacing them with Facebook accounts. 

In a post on its website today, Oculus announced that starting this October, new Oculus users will have to log into their Oculus HMDs with a Facebook account. 

Those with an existing Oculus accounts have two years to merge it with a Facebook account. Beginning in 2023, Oculus will completely end support for Oculus accounts. At that point, if you don’t merge your account with a Facebook account, Oculus can’t promise full functionality for your device.

“We will take steps to allow you to keep using the content you have purchased,” the company said of users who don’t merge accounts, “though we expect some games and apps may no longer work.” 

Oculus explained that this might be because of features that will be shifted to requiring a Facebook account or because of developers choosing to no longer support an app or game.

The company claims that the change is due to the ease-of-use presented by a single log-in, as well as upcoming Social VR features, like Facebook Horizon. Still, it’s unclear why support for Oculus accounts needs to end to make these features accessible for Facebook users. 

Oculus noted that you can still maintain a separate VR profile even after merging accounts. You just need to ensure that your Facebook profile is set to only be visible to yourself after merging it with your Oculus account. Then, your Oculus friends won’t be able to find you by your Facebook name.

These privacy features are supposed works both ways, too. After you merge your accounts, you'll be able to use special settings to control how much of your VR activity shows up on your Facebook timeline, Oculus said.

If you’re like me, then your Facebook account sits mostly abandoned except for the occasional moment when someone needs to plan an event. If you’re like my editor, then you don’t even have a Facebook account. Whether this change stems from Facebook trying to use Oculus to revitalize its platform, or Oculus failing to stand on its own without the platform, we do not know. Regardless, it does point to a new and unfortunate deterrent to some of the best VR headsets on the market.

You can watch the episode in the YouTube embed above or directly on YouTube or Facebook or Periscope (via Tom's Hardware Twitter).

Weekly, you’ll find the Pi Cast by Tom’s Hardware streaming live on Tom’s Hardware’s channels on YouTube, FaceBook and Periscope and available afterwards on leading podcast platforms such as Spotify, Google and Apple.

With more than 30 million units sold and thriving communities of millions of makers, programmers and educators, the Raspberry Pi is one of the world’s most popular platforms. Now, the $35 computer that could and its ecosystem are the subjects of our new weekly show and podcast. Streaming live on Tuesdays at 2:30 pm ET (7:30 pm BST) and available afterwards as an audio podcast, the Pi Cast by Tom’s Hardware will cover everything that’s new and exciting in the world of Raspberry Pi. 

Each week on the Pi Cast, we’ll talk live with special guests who are involved in developing the Raspberry Pi, creating new products for it or pushing the envelope with truly unique and compelling projects. We’ll also take some time to share tips that will help you make the most of your Raspberry Pi and we’ll be taking live questions from the audience. 

Our first show launches on Tuesday, July 14th at 2:30 pm ET (7:30 PM BST) with Raspberry Pi Inventor and co-founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation Eben Upton joining us. Upton launched the original Raspberry Pi back in 2012 and, as CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading, continues to lead its development, recently unveiling the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 and the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera. We’ll get a chance to ask him what’s next for Raspberry PI and get his take on the state of Pi in 2020. And, if you join us live, so will you.

Regular Hosts

Each week, our show will be hosted by Tom's Hardware's three biggest Pi fanatics: Avram Piltch, Les Pounder and Ash Puckett.

Avram Piltch

Tom’s Hardware’s Editor-in-Chief since 2018, Avram is obsessed with Raspberry Pi and always working on new projects with his eight-year-old son Isaac. In recent months, they’ve built robotic cars and retrogaming machines while learning how to program some games in Python.  

Ash Puckett

Ash is a self-employed tech writer and illustrator with a serious affinity for the Raspberry Pi, 3D printing, and retro gaming. She has over a decade of IT experience and has been featured in the official Raspberry Pi magazine MagPi. 

For Tom's Hardware, Ash manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting.  

Les Pounder

Tom’s Hardware’s Associate Editor, Les is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training programme "Picademy". 

Send us your Pi questions here!

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday that his company, Microsoft and other tech companies, including Slack, Pinterest and Twitter, are lending their support to the COVID-19 Global Hackathon. 

The hackathon invites software engineers to "build software solutions that drive social impact, with the aim of tackling some of the challenges related to the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic." Anyone can join the hackathon via Devpost.

Zuckerberg said the COVID-19 Global Hackathon will also offer guidance from the World Health Organization (WHO), the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and "experts from other industries" who can tell participants where their efforts will be most appreciated.

The hackathon's organizers advised participants to focus on six key themes: health, vulnerable populations, businesses, community, education and entertainment. (Then, as if those weren't broad enough, they included a seventh "other" theme.)

COVID-19 Global Hackathon participants have until March 30 to submit their projects with a two-minute video walkthrough. The hackathon's judges, who haven't yet been selected, will decide on the winners in the week leading up to April 3.

Anyone who wants to help fight COVID-19 without participating in a hackathon can do so via Folding@Home, which uses CPU and GPU processing power to aid with medical research. And, hey, why not join the Tom's Hardware team in the process (and beat AnandTech too)?

Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon told employees in Seattle to stay home yesterday as novel coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to spread throughout the Emerald City.

Microsoft said that "all employees who are in a job that can be done from home should do so through March 25." People who have to work from the company's offices are encouraged to come in, however, unless they meet these criteria:

• Are over 60
• Have an underlying health condition (heart disease, diabetes, etc.)
• Are immune system compromised
• Are pregnant

The company advised people who do come into the office to take certain precautions, such as staying at least 6 feet away from other people, keeping in-person meetings as short as possible and not going to work if they feel sick.

• Coronavirus tech show cancellations: what’s gone, what’s still on
• Can you get coronavirus from a package?
• How to help cure coronavirus with your PC's excess processing power 

Microsoft's decision arrived shortly after King County officials released new recommendations for handling COVID-19 after 10 more people were diagnosed with it. More information about the recommendations are available here.

Facebook closed its Seattle office entirely after a contractor was diagnosed with COVID-19. It currently plans to re-open the office on March 9; presumably it will use the intervening days to make a sanitation sweep of the entire work floor.

Amazon followed Microsoft in advising employees who can work from home to do so. It's being a bit more cautious, however, in extending the work-from-home period until March 31 (likely because one Amazon employee already contracted COVID-19).

Facebook announced yesterday that it won't host its annual F8 developer conference this year because of the Coronavirus outbreak. But the company said that it will attempt to make up for the cancellation "through a combo of locally hosted events, videos and live streamed content" and that it still plans to host F8 in 2021.

F8 is just the latest tech-related conference affected by Coronavirus. GSMA canceled Mobile World Congress 2020, Sony pulled out of PAX East and multiple companies announced that they won't attend the Game Developers Conference 2020 because of the viral outbreak. We suspect other events will suffer from similar problems.

• Can you get Coronavirus from a Package Shipped From China.
• Coronavirus to increase price of RAM, and Chip Resistors.
• Breaking: Google to Invest $10 Billion in the US.

The news might be troubling for developers, but it could be devastating for business owners in San Jose who have likely come to rely on the sudden influx of visitors. Facebook also donates a percentage of F8 ticket sales to "an organization working to diversify the tech industry," with the maximum donation amount being $250,000.

This year the company will attempt to address both of those problems by donating $500,000 to "organizations serving local San Jose residents." That should at least help offset the economic impact of F8's cancellation. (Although we doubt $500,000 makes much of a dent in the lost revenues that will result from this decision.)

Facebook said it will "share additional details on our plans for F8 in the coming weeks," and the company updated the conference's website with an email sign-up form people can use to receive more information about its plans for the event. It's not clear if any product announcements intended for F8 will be revealed this way.

A tech company finally admitted the recent Coronavirus outbreak could be a problem. Facebook told UploadVR yesterday that the virus is expected to affect the production and availability of its hardware, which includes its Oculus VR headset line. 

UploadVR originally reported on Wednesday that Facebook stopped accepting orders for the Quest earlier this week, saying that it was "out of stock." Facebook then sent the outlet the following statement to explain the Quest's situation:

"Oculus Quest has been selling out in some regions due to high demand. That said, like other companies we’re expecting some additional impact to our hardware production due to the Coronavirus. We’re taking precautions to ensure the safety of our employees, manufacturing partners and customers and are monitoring the situation closely. We are working to restore availability as soon as possible."

In addition to the Quest, this would presumably impact Facebook's other hardware offerings, like the Oculus RIft S and Portal devices. 

Facebook probably isn't the only company grappling with production issues because of the Coronavirus outbreak, (which you can read more about via the CDC and WHO). But it appears to be among the first to admit that it's having these problems.

Reports about other companies, such as Apple and those in the memory market have claimed that production hasn't been too badly affected by Coronavirus despite the forced closure of some factories. Others have pointed to impacts in Chinese markets.

Facebook could be watching you even more closely than you know. Numerous people have found an issue with Facebook's app on iOS that shows it using their iPhone's camera without permission.

Updated, 11/12/19, 11:45am PT: Facebook responded to our request for comment with the following statement: "We recently discovered that version 244 of the Facebook iOS app would incorrectly launch in landscape mode. In fixing that issue last week in v246 (launched on November 8th) we inadvertently introduced a bug that caused the app to partially navigate to the camera screen adjacent to News Feed when users tapped on photos. We have seen no evidence of photos or videos being uploaded due to this bug. We’re submitting the fix for this to Apple today."

Guy Rosen, the company's vice president of integrity, offered a similar statement on Twitter. It's not clear when the updated Facebook app will reach iOS users; that depends on how quickly it makes it through Apple's process for approving updates via the App Store.

The problem was discovered by 95Visual founder Joshua Maddux, who shared a video of the issue on Twitter on November 10. He later said that he was able to confirm the problem affected five different iPhones, and this morning The Next Web reported that it too had encountered the problem.

The issue only appears to affect iPhones running iOS 13.2.2--earlier versions of iOS don't seem to have the same problem. Nor does the Facebook app on Android. 

It's understandable that some users would have a hard time giving Facebook the benefit of the doubt. There's only so many times privacy-eroding features can be labeled bugs or mistakes before it starts to seem like the company doesn't even make an effort to protect its users. 

We've reached out to Facebook for comment on these reports and will update this post if the company responds. In the meantime, it might be prudent to consider removing the app from your iPhone, or at least preventing the Facebook app for iOS from accessing the device's camera by going into the Settings app for iOS.

Surprise! Facebook might be open to changing its plans for the Libra cryptocurrency to appease regulators. Facebook's David Marcus reportedly said on Sunday that the company "could have a series of stablecoins, a dollar stablecoin, a euro stablecoin, a sterling pound stable coin, etc." rather than a synthetic unit. That concession might help alleviate some of the fears associated with Facebook having its own currency.

Libra attracted scrutiny almost immediately after its revelation in June. Facebook envisioned the currency as part of a broader initiative, Calibra, through which its first goal would be to offer "a connected wallet for a connected world." Both entities would technically be separate from Facebook proper-- but only on paper. Calibra would launch its digital wallet on Messenger, for example, and Facebook is well-known for carefully managing the supposedly independent subsidiaries it sets up.

Regulators have expressed concern about Libra being used for criminal purposes, said it could endanger people's money and accused it of undermining "monetary sovereignty." All that scrutiny has taken a toll: major companies like PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and eBay all pulled out of the Libra Association earlier this month, before it had even held a single meeting. 

Reuters said that Marcus, who leads Calibra, was speaking to a panel at a banking seminar about Libra on Sunday. He told attendees that switching to "a multitude of stablecoins that represent national currencies in a tokenized digital form" is "one of the options that should be considered." It wouldn't be Facebook's preference, he told Reuters, but Marcus said Libra would have to "demonstrate a lot of agility." Fitting, given that Facebook's motto used to be "move fast and break things."

Unsurprisingly, Marcus pushed the blame for any potential Libra delays onto regulators.

"We've always said that we wouldn't go forward unless we have addressed all legitimate concerns and get proper regulatory approval ... so it's not entirely up to us," he said.

Facebook wants to introduce the cryptocurrency by June 2020, which means regulators would have to do an about-face on the project within a few months. Assuming, of course, that Facebook deems their concerns legitimate.

Facebook announced its Libra cryptocurrency project in June with support from major financial institutions, tech companies, and other magnates of industry. But it lost several important backers on Friday as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and eBay all pulled their support just days before the first official Libra Association meeting.

Libra was supposed to "reinvent money" and "transform the global economy." (While simultaneously making Facebook even more important to people's lives, naturally.) Regulators were quick to raise concerns about the project, however, with regulators from the U.S. and France both opposing Libra in the months since its revelation.

Those concerns vary. Some lawmakers have feared that Libra would enable criminal spending, much like other cryptocurrencies, or be used to support terrorist organizations. Others worried that Facebook and its partners wouldn't actually be able to keep Libra users' funds safe against hackers and other malicious actors.

Members of the Libra Association would presumably be held accountable for how the cryptocurrency is used when it finally debuts. They were also expected to financially support the project--Facebook reportedly asked for an initial investment of at least $10 million from each member--to solidify their commitments.

All of which means that members of the Libra Association were facing scrutiny from global regulators over a cryptocurrency primarily controlled by Facebook with the help of tens of millions of dollars contributed by established companies. And that's all happening while Libra is just a concept; it's not expected to debut until 2020.

So which is more surprising: the fact that Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, eBay and PayPal left the Libra Association just a few months after its formation, or the fact that 23 other companies were still willing to bet that Facebook's attempts to introduce its own cryptocurrency wouldn't be stymied by intense regulatory scrutiny?

Facebook announced Monday that it bought CTRL-labs, a New York startup that develops technology that allows people to control computer user interfaces with their minds. CNBC reported that, according to sources close to the deal, Facebook paid between $500 million and $1 billion for the company. The startup will join the Facebook Reality division, which includes Oculus VR as well as augmented reality and brain-reading experiments.

CTRL-labs was developing a wristband that can receive electrical signals from your spine. Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s Vice President of AR/VR, talked about how this works in a post about the acquisition:

“You have neurons in your spinal cord that send electrical signals to your hand muscles telling them to move in specific ways such as to click a mouse or press a button. The wristband will decode those signals and translate them into a digital signal your device can understand, empowering you with control over your digital life. It captures your intention so you can share a photo with a friend using an imperceptible movement or just by, well, intending to.”

Earlier this summer, Facebook presented a similar brain-computer interface technology on which it’s been working for the past two years. However, unlike the CTRL-labs technology, which involves using a wristband, Facebook’s technology was a little more invasive -- it required electrode implants in people’s brains. People would probably be more likely to trust something they can wear over something they have to stick in their brains.

Can You Trust Facebook?

Facebook is an advertising and social media company that makes money off of tracking as much about you online activities as possible. It then uses that collected data to attempt to predict the things in which you may be interested next, so the advertisers using its ad platform can target you more effectively. Being suspicious of the company's efforts to read people's minds--even in as limited a way as this--wouldn't be out of the question.

After all, the datr cookie was initially not supposed to be used for advertising purposes, nor were various other “security features” that Facebook lured users into using, either. However, Facebook has shown again and again that it considers very little (if any) of the data you shared with it to be sacred and not to be used for advertising purposes. How much data might the company be able to glean from a brain-computer interface like CTRL-labs'?

Razer isn’t a small start-up anymore. Founded in 2005, the company is one of the foremost brands in gaming culture, with its logo on peripherals, laptops, cases, smartphones and even an energy drink. Right after the debut of the Razer Blade Stealth 13, which Razer is touting as the first “gaming ultrabook,” I met with CEO and co-founder Min-Liang Tan at IFA in Berlin.

In a wide-ranging, half-hour interview, Tan discussed Razer’s relationship with Intel, interest in AMD, the effects of tariffs on the company’s goods, moving into gaming drinks and crossing over with other brands on PC hardware.

Oh, and we talked about the Razer toaster. We talked a surprising amount about the Razer toaster.

Razer’s European Tour

Razer’s workforce, according to Tan, is spread roughly in thirds across the United States, Europe and Asia. But its laptops were sold predominantly in the United States until just a few years ago.

“Today, in the U.S. we’re actually number one in the premium laptops above $1,800,” Tan said. “And in a very short - about, less than a year, we’ve taken leadership in markets like the U.K. at this point of time. And we’re doing incredibly well. So I think we’ve seen massive growth in Europe. I think there’s been a lot of interest in Razer laptops because we could actually even see back then there were many of the purchases in the U.S. being shipped across to Europe. So now we’re good and ready to launch over here. It’s been just a great time for us.”

A Category Outside of Project Athena

The newly announced Razer Blade Stealth 13 is among the first laptops with Intel’s 10th Gen Ice Lake processors, and the first with a 25-watt TDP. Both companies have called it a “gaming ultrabook.” But it’s not, however, fit to Intel’s Project Athena spec for performance, battery life and connectivity.

Tan told me that the company instead focuses on “our own standards... in terms of gaming laptops” rather than trying to conform to Intel’s new standard. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a close relationship with Intel, which supplies the processors in every single one of Razer’s laptops.

“Now we’ve worked very closely with Intel on the new Razer Blade. I mean if you look at ‘ultrabook’ it’s actually an Intel trademark[.],” he said. “So I think for all intents and purposes right now we’re very focused on creating our own category together with Intel for this “gaming ultrabook” category and you’ll probably see a lot more happening from that perspective.”

Intel CPU Shortages Hit Home

The generally relaxed Tan got a bit cagey when discussing Intel’s CPU shortages. But he ultimately revealed that Razer was affected.

“Well, I would say that I can’t talk specifically about it, but in the market I believe there’s been a shortage and things like that,” Tan said. “We’ve definitely been affected by it and I think, maybe what I can say is that we’ve had a lot more demand for our products than we can supply at this point of time. So we’re trying to work very closely with our component providers so that we can supply that.”

He laughed, adding, “I’m just dodging NDA’s here and there.”

Could AMD Come to Razer Blades?

Right now, Razer’s entire laptop lineup is comprised of notebooks with Intel processors. That’s not to say the company has no interest in AMD’s offerings, though.

“So we do have quite a number of customers reaching out to us asking us about AMD,” Tan said. “And especially in recent years, because AMD has been doing some pretty cool stuff I think, both on the CPU and GPU side of things. I think at this point of time we don’t have anything to disclose, but we’re definitely looking at AMD’s offerings very closely.”

Tariffs: Not Worried

Razer’s production is primarily in China, Tan said, but he didn’t seem too worried about tariffs imposed on many electronic goods by President Donald Trump’s administration.

Despite the fact that peripherals and laptops would fall under the existing lists, Tan said that Razer is working with manufacturers to avoid short term impacts, though he didn’t elaborate on how.

Razer does have some production in Taiwan, where it also has offices, Tan said. But he claimed the company has “no immediate plans” to move to other up and coming manufacturing hotspots in southeast Asia like Vietnam and Thailand.

When asked if he thinks Razer customers would be spared from paying more, he answered in one word: “Yes.”

But if tariffs do end up affecting the company, will consumers pay it, or will Razer swallow the costs?

“Well I don’t think we even need to look at it, because we don’t think it’s gonna happen,” he said.

DIY? Get a Buddy

At CES this year, Razer introduced the Raptor gaming monitor and a few cases, putting the company into the PC building market. Could Razer ever get into components?

“I think usually, when it comes down to PC DIY, we tend to partner,” Tan said. “I think, in fact if you look at our cases, we’ve actually partnered with NZXT, we’ve partnered with Lian Li, we’ve partnered with multiple other vendors,” he said. “Definitely I think you’ll see more partnerships. In respect to motherboards or RAM or things like that, many of which will revolve around Chroma. Because Chroma, for example, today is the biggest RGB platform in the world. We’ve got companies like MSI that we work with, AMD that we work with on Chroma. I think a lot of the partnerships will revolve around that.”

Razer has also previously worked with Lenovo on co-branded pre-built gaming desktops, prior to Lenovo introducing its Legion line-up, and he said he could see Razer doing a team-up in that space again if he saw something he liked.

Why team up, though? According to Tan, that’s because while Razer has a large research and development group, “we have a lot more people looking at the same product and designing for the same product than most other companies.” So when there’s an opportunity but a lack of resources or bandwidth, that’s a time Razer goes for the partnership.

The Birth of the Razer Toaster

“Well,” Tan said, letting out a sigh. “Where do I begin?”

The Razer toaster was originally just a 2016 April Fools’ joke. But people seemed to want it so badly that it became a meme. And Tan, the rare CEO who runs his own Facebook and other social media, engaged with those people.

“I’m part of a community, I don’t have a problem taking shit or you know, trolling somebody or stuff like that,” Tan said. ”So this guy Mark Withers started agitating for a toaster. The more he agitated for it, the more I decided to troll him about it. And I said look, get one million likes and we’ll see how many people want a toaster. And he was hovering at about 50,000 and stuff like that. Where occasionally when I would have time, I would pop in and say ‘just checking in to see how you losers are doing.’”

“Probably not the most professional thing a CEO should do, but hey, you know, I do that,” he added.

And that’s when the tattoos started.

“So at one point in time somebody said ‘hey, what if we got tattoos of the toaster?’ and I was like thinking, well, get me 10 tattoos and I’ll think about doing it, Tan recalled. “And I was like, how many idiots, how many people can you find to do a toaster tattoo?”

By that point, Tan said, people within the company were saying there should be a toaster. So Tan demanded ten tattoos, each worth 100,000 likes towards the total.

Tan has seen Razer tattoos before. He’s even seen his own name and face tattooed on people. But this surprised him.

“Oh my god,” he said, a pause after each syllable. “He got like 12 tattoos of a frickin’ Razer toaster…  Anyway, yeah, at some point I’m gonna have to start working on it. So we will have a Razer toaster. But it will be the best toaster in the world.”

How Does a Gaming Company Make a Toaster?

Tan says he is looking “begrudgingly” at the toaster. Apparently, it’s more interesting than he thought. It ends up, he doesn’t feel that there has been innovation in the toaster market in a long time.

“And curiously enough, now that I’m spending time looking at the toaster, there’s just so much we can do with the toaster. And I don’t even know why I’m having this conversation with you. But I am spending time looking at the toaster and there’s a team of people on it.”

Here’s the thing: you can’t just design a toaster with people who make gaming laptops and keyboards. He’ll definitely keep his design team on the job, because keeping peripherals, keyboards and even clothes in the same style is part of Razer’s ethos. But still, you need someone who knows toasters.

So he thinks Razer will hire some appliance people. But that may be just the first step in a whole line of kitchen appliances.

“Once I start bringing in home appliance people, it means I must have other home appliances, right?” Tan asked aloud. “Because I’m not going to hire somebody for a single project. So I’m still trying to get my mind around that. I think the next thing I’ve been asked for most is a mini-fridge.”

Razer: The Brand You Can Drink

If Razer ever makes a mini-fridge, maybe you can keep some Razer Respawn, the company’s gamer drink, in it.  Tan says it’s a success, and that it’s partly due to the Razer brand. Only a brand so identified with gamer culture could make this work, he said.

For instance: Would you drink something from Logitech?

“When we came up with a drink, it was something that everybody thought was cool [and] funny. But nobody said Razer shouldn’t be doing a drink,” he said. “But if you think about it, there are lots of great companies out there. Like Logitech make great peripherals, Dell makes great laptops. But would you drink a Logitech drink or a Dell drink? And if they came up with that, people would go like ‘huh? What?’ But when we came up with this, we’re so focused on the gamer lifestyle that when we came up with it they said ‘Respawn, I totally get it. It’s gonna work.’”

Tan promised that new flavors are coming, and said it’s the default drink in Razer’s U.S. offices (Respawn isn’t yet available in other markets).

The Future: Cloud Gaming and 5G?

When you’re the CEO of a company steeped in gaming, you have to be looking ahead. So when I picked his brain about the future, Tan told me his mind was on cloud gaming and 5G, the latter of which proved to be a big topic at IFA this year.

“I think with 5G coming up, it’s just this perfect confluence of technology coming aboard to be able to deliver a phenomenal experience,” he said. “I mean, for what it’s worth, cloud gaming is actually old news. It’s been around for a very long time. But I think with where 5G is -- low latency, high bandwidth -- there is so much that we can do. I mean at the end of the day I’m a tech guy and I get excited about tech, you know?”

The market is already starting to crowd with services from Google, Nvidia and Microsoft. Streaming, Tan said, is an area where Razer could again partner.

On Concept Projects: We Use That Tech

It’s hard to think about Razer, especially at a trade show, without thinking about the wild prototypes it has historically brought to the CES tradeshow in Las Vegas. Those, generally, haven’t come to market as consumer products. But Tan said that these are more like concept cars, and that they have taken some of the learnings and put them in hardware that we have seen.

“I’ll give you a case in point,” he said. “The first one that we ever showed off was Switchblade. And Switchblade [had] these dynamic keys that change behind a screen. That was actually put into our first laptop eight years ago.”

Indeed, Switchblade was shown off at CES in January 2011, and the laptop would be announced that fall with changeable buttons and a touchpad that doubled as an LCD display.

He also pointed to Project Christine, the CES 2014 concept that showed a PC broken into modular pieces that could be easily swapped. That, he says, can be seen in the Razer Core and Core X GPU enclosures, which let you plug in your own GPU and swap them out later.

Of course, some ideas may be good enough to launch. In fact, Razer apparently planned to announce a consumer release of one at IFA this year, but it got delayed in engineering. He wouldn’t commit to which project it was, but we’ll see it in a few months, he says. That sounds like it could be CES timing, which is almost ironic.

“I Think It’s Fine Until I Get Fired”

Towards the end of my 30 minutes with Tan, I couldn’t help but ask: how can you be so outspoken? He’s known for it, after all. What’s it like to occasionally troll on Facebook as a CEO?

“I don’t know -- I think it’s fine until I get fired, I guess,” he said. “I have this fatalistic approach that at some point in time I’m gonna say something, I’m gonna offend a whole lot of people and I’m probably gonna get fired but well, you know, life is short."

When asked if he ever runs this stuff by his legal team, he laughed.

“I must say that my PR team and my legal team lives on tenterhooks that I’m gonna say something stupid,” he laughed again. “So Maren [Epping, Razer’s PR lead of Europe, the Middle East and Africa] probably doesn’t get a lot of sleep.”

Some of this, he said, comes from the mentality that Razer is part of the gaming community. So he, to that end, will engage and interact, and expects others in the company will, too. If it’s a crime, it’s one of passion. It’s a startup mentality, despite the fact that there are 18 offices worldwide.

So yes, he’s afraid he’ll one day say something offensive. But he also considers it a duty. But his peers may question it from time to time.

“I mean, I’ve got meetings with other CEOs, and other CEOs go like, “what the hell are you doing?"

“You’re not supposed to say something like that. And if they said something like that they would get in trouble, but I’m getting away with it and stuff like that. I guess I’ve always seen Razer as being part of the community, built by the community. And we just don’t ever want to lose that.”

MORE: All Gaming Content

Facebook can add France to the list of countries opposing its Libra cryptocurrency. The Independent today reported that France's economy and finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, spoke against the social network's efforts during an OECD conference about cryptocurrencies.

Facebook announced Libra on June 18. It simultaneously launched a subsidiary, Calibra, to focus on financial services. The company's hope was to allow "people everywhere to live better lives" by using Libra to "reinvent money" and "transform the global economy."

But it didn't take long for the U.S. to object to those plans; it asked for Libra's development to be suspended in July. The reasons given for blocking Libra's development have varied. Some officials have said that Libra threatened the U.S. financial system--which almost sounds like the point, based on its mission statement--and would put its users at risk of being financially ruined by hackers. Others have said that Libra, along with other cryptocurrencies, pose a national security concern because they're harder to oversee.

The UK raised similar concerns about Facebook's attempts to create its own currency in July, and Le Maire echoed many of those sentiments at the OECD conference today. According to The Independent, he said, "I want to be absolutely clear: In these conditions, we cannot authorize the development of Libra on European soil." He was also said to have called Libra a threat to "monetary sovereignty."

Other countries have been a bit more lenient. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Switzerland wants to subject Libra to strict oversight, for example, and many regulators haven't discussed Libra at all. But there will clearly be a lot of scrutiny from many western countries, and both China and India have considered banning cryptocurrency outright, so many of the world's population centers are wary of Libra.

Facebook won't need to check Libra's horoscope to know the cryptocurrency won't have an easy future. But we doubt the company will give up anytime soon; the opportunity to further embed itself into daily life is worth tussling with a few bureaucrats over.

Most people would have a hard time convincing their bosses that playing Minecraft counts as working. MIT Technology Review reported yesterday that Facebook's latest virtual assistant will be able to do just that, however, because it was created to help Minecraft players with a variety of tasks. Why? Because the company wants to develop artificial intelligence that can learn how to do multiple things, rather than just one thing really well.

Most AI is currently restricted to a specific task. Companies develop systems capable of recognizing the subject of a photograph, for example, or wiping the floor with human players in Quake III. There's no denying the effectiveness of these AI once they're properly trained--which is why AI has become increasingly common in the tech industry--but those systems are specialized to the point that they're all but useless when given a different task.

Tech companies effectively created hammers that can swing themselves. Is that a neat trick? Sure. But there's a difference between carrying out a single task, like these AI do, and being truly intelligent. Even a self-swinging hammer is just a tool; a carpenter who knows how to use multiple tools is intelligent. (These are just generalizations, of course, and we're sure we aren't the only ones who've met people dumber than a door nail.)

Games offer researchers ways to create AI that isn't limited to a single task but also isn't expected to learn in an environment as chaotic as the real world. Minecraft offers players a lot of freedom, but even that freedom is found within a system that relies on clearly defined rules. AI can learn how these systems operate much easier than they'd be able to internalize the far more complex rules we humans deal with outside the physical realm.

MIT Technology review said Facebook imagined the Minecraft assistant taking instructions like "build a tower 15 blocks tall and then put a giant smiley on top" and learning how to achieve those goals. That's more complex than it seems: the AI has to define all of those terms, learn how to build the structure and figure out how to decorate it with a smiley face. It seems easy to us because we know what "tower" and "tall" and "smiley face" mean.

Facebook reportedly hopes the assistant would be able to learn from each of these interactions so it could eventually handle more and more tasks. Similar efforts could lead to dramatic improvements in AI that have nothing to do with Minecraft--imagine a voice assistant that could actually follow multi-step instructions rather than going back-and-forth with a string of single-step tasks. That would be far more convenient than current AI allows.

More information about Facebook's efforts can be found in the paper "Why Build an Assistant in Minecraft?" A beta version of the assistant--along with the datasets on which it relies--can be downloaded from GitHub. We'd explain where to find Minecraft, but with more than 176 million copies of the game sold as of this May, we suspect most people who'd be interested in an AI like the one described here already have the game installed.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. government is considering blocking the previously announced 8,000-mile-long Internet cable between Los Angeles and Hong Kong, called the Pacific Light Cable Network, over national security concerns. The cable’s construction was being backed primarily by Google and Facebook, as well as a private Chinese telecommunications company called Dr. Peng Telecom & Media Group Co.

The WSJ reported that a multi-agency panel led by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and known as “Team Telecom” is objecting to Google and Facebook’s cable to Hong Kong. Google and Facebook’s main goal with the cable is to improve Internet connection speeds between the U.S. and China. 

Team Telecom’s criticism against the cable also comes at a time of a prolonged protest in Hong Kong against the Chinese government's influence on local politics, that has been going on since earlier this year. Additionally, Team Telecom seems to believe that Dr. Peng, which is also the fourth largest telecom in China, has strong ties to the Chinese government. The cable project was also started at the time when Google was talking to Chinese officials to be allowed back into the country, via the much-criticized Project Dragonfly. 

WSJ’s sources also said that if the cable project got the approval from DOJ’s Team Telecom, that could mean increased control by the U.S. government over the project. The U.S. government has approved similar cable projects in the past, with the condition that the companies in charge have taken enough steps to ensure that foreign actors can’t block access to the data flowing through the cable or spy on that data.

The Pacific Light Cable Network would give American companies, primarily Google and Facebook, access to other Asian countries, such as the Philippines and Malaysia. The construction of the cable is almost complete, but the temporary permit for its construction is also expiring in September, which could put pressure on Google and Facebook to agree to whatever restrictions the U.S. government may want to put on the cable if they want to see it go live.

Following increased regulatory scrutiny, as well as previous Facebook scandals, some of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency partners are starting to distance themselves from the social media company, according to a Financial Times (FT) report today. 

Over the past two years, ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened, Facebook has remained under intensive regulatory scrutiny in more than one country. This means that any company directly associated with Facebook could also cross paths with governments around the world if Facebook gets into trouble with regulators. Therefore, today's FT report about Facebook Libra partners potentially exiting the alliance doesn’t come as a huge surprise.

Currently, the Libra Association consists of 28 members, including Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Uber, Spotify, as well as Facebook’s own subsidiary Calibra. Each member of the association has committed to investing at least $10 million for the development and promotion of the Libra currency. 

Multiple governments have reacted strongly and negatively to Facebook’s Libra announcement, and some officials have even introduced bills that would preempt companies, such as Facebook, from creating a digital currency, with arguments including that such currencies could threaten those countries' sovereign currency (including the U.S. dollar).

According to FT, one backer doesn’t want to be put in the spotlight because of Libra, while another fears investigation by government agencies that oversee their business. One of the founding members of this unnamed company said:

“I think it's going to be difficult for partners who want to be seen as in compliance [with their own regulators] to be out there supporting [Libra].”

According to other FT sources, Facebook also seems to have grown tired of being the only one from the Libra Association publicly speaking out in favor of the developing cryptocurrency. 

Another one of the Libra backers said that Facebook and the association members should have approached government officials before the Libra announcement to properly understand objections are and how to address them.

As noted by FT, Democratic representative Rashida Tlaib recently questioned whether Facebook and the Libra Association are forming some kind of “crypto-mafia,” given the tight relationships between the Libra Association executive and how they intend to support each others’ businesses.

Facebook previously said that it intends to launch the Libra digital currency in the first half of 2020. However, with the seemingly unexpected government pushback and now some partners considering withdrawing from the association, Facebook’s Libra plans may suffer a longer (if not indefinite) delay.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) isn't done with Facebook yet. After narrowly approving a $5 billion settlement for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the commission is now conducting an antitrust investigation into the social networking company, according to an August 1 report from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). The FTC is said to be particularly curious about how Facebook decides to acquire startups, like Instagram and WhatsApp.

Facebook has reportedly acquired somewhere around 90 companies over the last 15 years. Not all of those acquisitions have been publicly announced--tech companies often buy startups just for their personnel--and many of the ones that are disclosed to the public don't attract much attention. But now the FTC is formally investigating claims that companies like Facebook acquire smaller companies with the intent of quashing potential competition.

Many have guessed that Facebook's most high-profile acquisitions were motivated by the company's fear that it would lose its hold on the social web. Instagram's popularity suggested the future of social networking was photo-based and mobile. WhatsApp then proved that many people preferred direct communication over public interaction. Buying the companies gave Facebook a way to benefit from services that were vastly different from its own.

Other acquisitions let Facebook improve its existing services with better facial recognition, video compression and other tools. Still others gave it early access to additional platforms--like Oculus did with VR--or let it dabble with new features, like online shopping. At least some of Facebook's acquisitions, one could argue, killed two birds with one stone by helping Facebook adapt to changing markets while simultaneously nixing potential competition.

Now the FTC is wondering if those arguments have merit. The commission is reportedly investigating claims that Facebook "purchased technology startups to keep them from challenging Facebook's empire," according to the WSJ's anonymous sources, who also said "the FTC has begun reaching out to the founders of such companies." 

But the FTC won't have to look far to hear some complaints from startup founders. Instagram's co-founders left the company in September 2018 because they reportedly had less independence from Facebook as time went on. WhatsApp co-founder Brian Actonsaid that same month that he was coached to tell European regulators the services wouldn't "blend" data, even though Facebook was trying to figure out how to share the information.

There are reasons why Facebook's led the social networking market far longer than any of its competitors; the FTC's investigation should help it figure out if being allowed to buy potential competitors for the last 15 years is one of them.

Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei has been dealing with international scrutiny, the 2018 arrest of chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, and serious trade restrictions from the U.S. over the last few months. That doesn't mean he's ignored what other companies are working on, though, and that includes the Libra cryptocurrency Facebook announced in June. It turns out that Zhengfei actually wants to see China announce its own answer to Facebook's coin.

Zhengfei made those remarks in an interview with the Italian website L'Economia published on July 22. Based on a translated version of the interview--which means the Huawei founder's quotes were probably more nuanced than they seem in Google's take on translated English--it almost seems like Zhengfei is setting up Facebook as China's next opponent. Here's what he said in response to a question about China being invited to "the Libra club":

"Even China is able to issue such currencies, why wait for Libra? The strength of a state is greater than that of an Internet company." That last sentence is debatable, considering the ease with which Facebook and other tech companies have shrugged off attempts at regulation from various governments, but Zhengfei is right in saying that China wouldn't have to wait for Libra to adopt a cryptocurrency formally. It just seems rather unlikely right now.

China's actually considered outright banning cryptocurrencies in the past. This could likely be at least partly attributed to the environmental impact of "mining" these digital coins, which has outpaced even the natural mining industry, but it's mostly because cryptocurrencies are harder to regulate. China has traditionally sought to increase its control over its citizens' lives; financial independence via cryptocurrency might undermine those efforts.

The IRS recently showed that it's not impossible to regulate cryptocurrencies, though, by warning more than 10,000 people that they need to report their crypto earnings on their taxes properly. Presumably, a cryptocurrency backed by China's government would also give it more ways to monitor transactions, control spending, and otherwise maintain authority over its citizens' finances. (To say nothing of other ways it controls its citizens.)

But that's just speculation. More interesting was Zhengfei's decision to pit an entire country against one tech company. We swear that sounds familiar... hmm... oh. Right. Maybe that's because Huawei's been company non grata with the U.S. for years. Sales bans, being cut off from its suppliers, and the arrest of Wanzhou are just some of the obstacles the U.S. has put in Huawei's way. No wonder Zhengfei wants China at large to compete with Libra.

Facebook would probably have to worry about Libra's obstacles in the U.S. before it bothers thinking about China introducing its own cryptocurrency. Several members of Congress wrote a letter to the company earlier this month telling it to suspend development of Libra and its underlying infrastructure. Zhengfei doesn't need to invoke a Chinese cryptocurrency to combat Libra; the cryptocurrency has enough opponents in the U.S.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced this week that the Department’s Antitrust Division is reviewing “whether and how market-leading online platforms have achieved market power and are engaging in practices that have reduced competition, stifled innovation, or otherwise harmed consumers.” The investigation will look into large technology companies with online services, including Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook.

The DOJ noted in a press release that over the past few years, concerns about search, social media, advertising-related tracking technologies and the practices of some online retail companies have grown significantly.

Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Antitrust Division said: 

“Without the discipline of meaningful market-based competition, digital platforms may act in ways that are not responsive to consumer demands.”

This Isn't Tech Giants' First Antitrust Rodeo

Some of these tech giants have already been involved in other antitrust cases. For instance, Google was reviewed in 2011, and the FTC’s investigators ended up recommending antitrust action against the company over their findings, which included anti-competitive tactics that allegedly led to the death of Google Maps competitor Skyhook. However, Google escaped an antitrust lawsuit at the last minute, with FTC Chairman at the time Jon Leibowit ruling against the lawsuit.

Google wasn’t so fortunate in the European Union (EU), where the European Commission launched not one, but three antitrust cases against the company related to its shopping comparison service, Android domination and Google Ads' anti-competitive practices.

Facebook’s largest privacy scandal exploded last year with the revelations about its relationship with Cambridge Analytica, a firm that exploited Facebook’s data APIs to build political profiles on users and manipulate them through ads.

The FTC has now found that Facebook violated its previous settlement with the FTC on multiple occasions, including when it lied to users about facial recognition being turned off and when it was asking users for phone numbers for “security purposes” and then using those numbers for advertising purposes.

The DOJ may also review Amazon’s e-commerce practices. Meanwhile, the EU has recently announced its own antitrust investigation into Amazon, accusing the company of anti-competitive tactics against sellers of its own platform, as well as data collection practices that may violate the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The Supreme Court recently ruled that Apple can be sued by its own customers  (and not just iOS developers, as Apple would have preferred) over antitrust issues connected to its App Store. The Supreme Court said that Apple’s 30% fee on each application is an abuse of monopoly power, because the fee is passed down to its customers, inflating prices.

Usually, it's the FTC that prosecutes antitrust cases; the DOJ hasn't had a high-profile antitrust case since it prosecuted Microsoft in 2011. This could be read in different ways: perhaps the DOJ is as serious about these cases as it was about the Microsoft case. Or maybe it's trying to gain points with a public growing weary of the power of tech giants. 

Update, 7/24/19, 9:35 a.m. PT: The FTC today announced that it's reached a settlement with Facebook through which the company will pay a $5 billion fine, which the commission said is "one of the largest penalties ever assessed by the U.S. government for any violation," and change its corporate structure in an effort to better protect user privacy. Facebook will also be subject to new restrictions on its use of user data; the FTC said the settlement "overhauls the way the company makes privacy decisions by boosting the transparency of decision making and holding Facebook accountable via overlapping channels of compliance."

“Despite repeated promises to its billions of users worldwide that they could control how their personal information is shared, Facebook undermined consumers’ choices,” FTC Chairman Joe Simons said in the commission's announcement. “The magnitude of the $5 billion penalty and sweeping conduct relief are unprecedented in the history of the FTC. The relief is designed not only to punish future violations but, more importantly, to change Facebook’s entire privacy culture to decrease the likelihood of continued violations. The Commission takes consumer privacy seriously, and will enforce FTC orders to the fullest extent of the law.”

More information about the settlement is available via the FTC's website (PDF). The commission said that it filed a separate complaint regarding Cambridge Analytica--whose use of Facebook data led to increased scrutiny of the social network's practices and, ultimately, this settlement--The FTC said its complaint alleges that the firm "employed deceptive tactics to harvest personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users for voter profiling and targeting." The FTC has proposed settlements with Cambridge Analytica's former CEO and app developer. The filing is on the commission's website (PDF).

Original article, 7/13/19, 7:44 a.m. PT:

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved a $5 billion settlement with Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal that erupted in 2018. FTC commissioners voted 3-2 in favor of the settlement, which is also expected to include more careful regulations that are meant to protect the privacy of Facebook users, although it's not yet clear what those additional restrictions might be.

This settlement is supposed to resolve the Justice Department's investigation into Facebook following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That scandal erupted in 2018 after it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica took advantage of Facebook's lackadaisical approach to protecting user privacy so it could gather data from 50 million people. That revelation prompted several others that eventually led to international scrutiny of Facebook's practices.

If the Justice Department approves the settlement--and it usually sides with the FTC on these matters--it would be the largest fine U.S. regulators have ever issued a tech company. It's not even a real competition, either, with the second-largest being a $22 million fine issued to Google in 2012. Yet critics have said the FTC should have done more, with Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) saying in a tweet that the settlement was "a Christmas present" to Facebook.

Cicilline said in another tweet that $5 billion is "a fraction of Facebook's annual revenue" that "won't make them think twice about their responsibility to protect user data." That's actually an understatement--the company said it brought in revenues of roughly $15 billion in the first quarter of 2019. It has more than $40 billion in cash reserves, too, which means it could theoretically pay this $5 billion settlement another seven times over with cash alone.

Does that mean Facebook wants to be fined $5 billion a quarter through 2021? Probably not; that would be weird. But it does mean the privacy abuses that prompted this settlement have essentially become little more than accounting problems. The company already warned shareholders in the first quarter of 2019 that it expected this settlement to end up somewhere between $3 billion and $5 billion. Such is the cost of doing business.

The New York Times reported that the new restrictions imposed on Facebook as part of the settlement were also weaker than some expected:

"In addition to the fine, Facebook agreed to more comprehensive oversight of how it handles user data, according to the people. But none of the conditions in the settlement will impose strict limitations on Facebook’s ability to collect and share data with third parties. And that decision appeared to help split the five-member commission. The 3-to-2 vote, taken in secret this week, drew the dissent of the two Democrats on the commission because they sought stricter limits on the company, the people said."

Criticism of this settlement will likely draw attention to the core problem with regulating tech companies like Facebook. They are so massive--and exploiting the privacy of their users is so lucrative--that even a $5 billion settlement would merely be a line-item in their quarterly results. How many such settlements would these companies have to violate for regulators to do more than just tack a few zeroes onto the previous fine? Ask us in 2027.

Neither the FTC nor Facebook have publicly commented on the settlement or the reports describing it.

After President Trump’s recent negative comments on cryptocurrency, including Facebook’s Libra digital currency, the U.S. House has prepared a bill that would essentially ban big tech companies from being involved in any way in the finance industry. The move seems primarily directed at Facebook’s involvement in the Libra project.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned that digital currencies such as Facebook’s Libra or even more conventional cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin pose a threat to national security. 

“Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have been exploited to support billions of dollars of illicit activity like cybercrime, tax evasion, extortion, ransomware, illicit drugs, and human trafficking," 

He added that cryptocurrencies "could be misused by money launderers and terrorist financiers.”

The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Fed chair Jerome Powell, also said recently that the Libra project “cannot go forward” until “serious concerns” are addressed. Facebook’s David Marcus, the head of Facebook’s Calibra, responded in a recent testimony for the US Senate Banking Committee that the Libra Association will be regulated under Swiss law. The Libra Association will be the organization that will govern the Libra digital currency and will be headquartered in Switzerland. 

However, Marcus also said that American services that will use the Libra digital currency, including Facebook’s own Calibra wallet for the Libra currency, will still be governed by U.S. money transmitting laws. 

U.S. House Goes after Big Tech-Run Cryptocurrencies

Some members of Congress and government officials people have made it no secret that they don’t like Libra or conventional cryptocurrencies because they believe they are a threat not just to national security, but also to the U.S. dollar. Libra will attempt to fulfill Bitcoin’s vision of a world digital currency, but instead of being a fully decentralized cryptocurrency, the Libra currency will be controlled by some of the largest technology companies. 

Facebook will spearhead its development and likely control the future of the Libra currency for the foreseeable future, not unlike Google has managed to be the primary developer and the company in charge of the Android Open Source Project.

Although Facebook has promised that Libra will not pose a threat to national currencies, the U.S. House doesn’t want to take any chances. Some Democrats, led by Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.), have begun to consider a new bill, called Keep Big Tech Out of Finance Act, for an introduction on the House floor.

If the bill passes and becomes law, Facebook may be forced to cut its ties to the Libra Association, at least in the United States. The bill also bans other “large platform utilities,” defined as tech companies making over $25 billion in revenue a year from being affiliated with a financial institution.

Even if Facebook cuts its losses in the U.S. and attempts to provide Libra currency elsewhere, it probably won’t have too much success. Several European national governments have also pushed back against Libra, warning that it must not be allowed to become a sovereign currency or to replace the euro.

A number of U.S. Congress people, including Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), the Chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, yesterday sent Facebook’s top executives a letter requesting the immediate suspension of Facebook’s development of its Libra blockchain digital currency, which Facebook announced in June.

So far, Facebook has only released some basic and experimental code for Libra, with the full release being planned for 2020.

The letter states:

“Because Facebook is already in the hands of over a quarter of the world’s population, it is imperative that Facebook and its partners immediately cease implementation plans until regulators and Congress have an opportunity to examine these issues and take action. During this moratorium, we intend to hold public hearings on the risks and benefits of cryptocurrency-based activities and explore legislative solutions. Failure to cease implementation before we can do so, risks a new Swiss-based financial system that is too big to fail.”

The rest of the letter focuses primarily on Facebook’s Libra currency being a risk both to the U.S. financial system (more specifically a risk to the U.S. dollar) and other global markets. The letter points to Libra potentially increasing the risk of people or businesses losing all of their money to hackers. The lawmakers reminded everyone that last year, hackers stole a total of $1 billion worth of cryptocurrency from online exchanges.

Yet another concern was that Libra will provide an “under-regulated” platform for illicit activity. 

The letter argued that these risks need to be emphasized even more because Facebook hasn’t always kept user’s data safe, and, in fact, has often exchanged it with third-party developers or smartphone manufacturers. In other words, why should Facebook be trusted with people’s money when it couldn’t even be trusted with their text messages and photos?

As fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook is expected to pay $5 billion in fines to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC, responsible for protecting U.S. consumers) and remains under an FTC consent order over previous privacy violations and misleading statements to its users from the company.

Facebook has also recently been sued by civil rights groups and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for violating fair housing laws on its advertising platform and through its ad delivery algorithms.

Even though Facebook intends to create a separate entity in Switzerland to handle everything related to Libra, which in theory means it should be bound only by Swiss laws, the U.S. government can still go after Facebook’s core advertising business and social media platform at home. The U.S. feds could make Facebook pay even bigger fines for actions it deems illegal, or by creating new privacy-friendly laws that could severely cripple Facebook’s advertising business model.

Facebook has yet to respond to the letter.

The madmen actually did it. Facebook today announced that it's forming a new subsidiary focused on financial services, Calibra, and that its first application will be a mobile app through which people can manage everything involving the Facebook's cryptocurrency, Libra. The company said it's "still early in the process of developing Calibra" but expects the subsidiary's digital wallet to debut in 2020.

Facebook wasn't shy about its ambitions for Calibra and Libra in promotional materials. Calibra's website says it's "a connected wallet for a connected world," while Libra's site claims it'll "reinvent money" and "transform the global economy" so "people everywhere can live better lives." The company isn't positioning these projects as experiments; it's pitching them as the future of financial services.

That future should look familiar to cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Libra is based on the same blockchain technology as other cryptocurrencies, which is supposed to make transactions simple and secure. And for now Calibra's just building a wallet to handle those transactions. They are technically separate from Facebook proper, but that distinction will probably only be noticed by financial regulators.

Why? Partly because that's how Facebook operates. Instagram, WhatsApp and other subsidiaries are technically independent from Facebook too, but the separations between those entities can erode. Especially when Facebook makes moves like trying to merge user data from all those services to enable a unified back-end.

The lines between Facebook and Calibra will be blurred from the start. Calibra will launch its own digital wallet, sure, but it's also going to be built into Messenger and WhatsApp. People will also be encouraged to use their accounts with Facebook properties to sign up for Calibra. They aren't technically required to, but otherwise they have to supply a government-issued photo ID. Which seems more convenient?

Facebook attempted to ease concerns about how it will handle the privacy of Calibra users. The company said in its announcement:

"Aside from limited cases, Calibra will not share account information or financial data with Facebook or any third party without customer consent. This means Calibra customers’ account information and financial data will not be used to improve ad targeting on the Facebook family of products. The limited cases where this data may be shared reflect our need to keep people safe, comply with the law and provide basic functionality to the people who use Calibra. Calibra will use Facebook data to comply with the law, secure customers’ accounts, mitigate risk and prevent criminal activity."

More details about its plans for Calibra are in a "Customer Commitment" document.

Committing to protecting user privacy is one thing, and actually doing so is another thing entirely. Facebook has a history of failure, whether it's by misusing phone numbers meant for two-factor authentication, accidentally giving employees access to hundreds of millions of passwords, or "unintentionally" uploading the email address books of 1.5 million users.

Now the company's planning to "reinvent money" and, therefore, make itself more central to its users' lives in the process. Even with the best intentions, it's not hard to see how that could backfire, accidentally or not. Hopefully Facebook's efforts are stringently scrutinized by potential users and financial regulators alike.

According to a Financial Times (FT) report, Google tried to make the case to the U.S. federal government that its recent ban against Huawei could force Huawei to come up with an alternative to Google's Android operating system (OS). Google reportedly argued that this sort of competition to its own OS would create a U.S. national security risk.

Google Defends Huawei (and Its Own Interests)

Google’s lobbyists have reportedly asked the officials from the U.S. Department of Commerce for an exemption from the Huawei ban, so that the Mountain View company could continue to collaborate with it. Google reportedly said that if it’s not given this special treatment, then the whole U.S. national security could be at risk, arguing that if Huawei can no longer use its own Android operating system, then the Chinese firm will build a “hybrid” version of the OS with its own modifications. Google warned that this hybrid version will likely contain more security bugs than Google’s OS.

The presumption is that Huawei is not as competent to secure its own OS as Google is. That argument may not be completely without merit, but in the grand scheme of things, existing Huawei phones will continue to receive Google updates for the next two months.

Plus, Huawei tends to abandon most device models (especially the lower-end ones) quickly and stop sending them updates. In other words, even if Google would continue to provide Huawei with updates for the existing phones for much longer than the two months, many of them wouldn’t get to end-users anyway. That means that Huawei’s phones would provide not much greater risk to national security than they already do. 

It seems more likely that Google fears that an Android fork, just like Amazon’s Fire OS, would mean more competition.

Huawei Is Already a National Security Risk (for Different Reasons)

According to previous reports from the U.S. government, as well as more recent ones from the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, Huawei’s hardware and software already represents significant security risk, but not for the reasons Google laid out. Leaving aside the potential for Chinese government backdoors, about which the U.S. government has been warning everyone since at least last year, Huawei’s hardware and software products seem to lack the most basic of security safeguards.

Ian Levy, Technical Director of Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, part of the GCHQ signals intelligence agency, recently said that despite Huawei’s promises to invest $2 billion in fixing its products security issues last year, it hasn’t begun to address them. Huawei has previously stated that it could take up to five years to fix the issues.

Britain’s National Security Council has already blocked telecommunications companies from using Huawei technology in the core parts of their network. Telecom companies are still allowed to purchase non-core network equipment from Huawei for now.

Facebook Bans Pre-Installation of Its Apps on Huawei Devices

While Google is defending Huawei, its data mining arch-rival, Facebook, is going in the opposite direction, banning Huawei from pre-installing the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp apps on its devices, according to a Reuters report today. 

What the Reuters report doesn’t mention is that this likely ended Facebook’s data sharing deal with Huawei, too. In previous reports we learned that Facebook is giving device makers access to the phone users’ data in exchange for pre-installing the applications on those devices. Huawei devices that already have Facebook’s apps pre-installed will continue to be functional.

Huawei declined to comment to Reuters, but it previously promised to work around any issues that may appear due to the U.S. government ban. Even so, customers at stores from Asia and Europe told Reuters that after the U.S. ban they’ve become reluctant to purchase any more Huawei devices.

Galactus is one of Marvel's most terrifying villains. He's giant, older than the universe and bears a hunger that can only be satiated by devouring entire planets. He also seems to be the inspiration for Facebook, because according to The Wall Street Journal's report this week, the social network plans to introduce a cryptocurrency, seemingly finding yet another market it wants to chew up.

The Wall Street Journal said that Facebook's effort is going by the code name Project Libra. According to the report, Facebook wants to create its own currency, which would be used to complement a new online checkout system that allows its users to shop on partnered sites. The company doesn't just want to create its own Bitcoin; it also wants to use that cryptocurrency to entice people to use the checkout option as they shop.

This could become a self-sustaining ecosystem. If people start using what we're imagining will be called Zuck Bucks, using their Facebook accounts to pay for things online and earning Zuck Bucks in exchange for watching ads, they're going to be constantly engaged with Facebook in one way or another. Facebook, like Galactus, doesn't just consume planets; it makes new homes, too.

These efforts were said to have started a year ago, with Facebook approaching "dozens of financial firms and online merchants," according to the report. The company is said to be seeking partners that can help launch the system--and invest a cool $1 billion to kickstart the effort. At least some of that investment would be used to connect the company's new currency to USD, which is meant to lead to more stable pricing than most "coins."

One could just add 'cryptocurrency' and 'online shopping' to the list of markets Facebook wants to compete in, (which at this point includes social networking, video streaming, mobile platforms, smart devices, gaming, virtual reality and probably others we've forgotten) and call it good. Shareholders are always hungry for a better stock price, darn it, so it's past time for Facebook to find something else to try to consume. Right?

But it's worth noting the context in which Project Libra has reportedly been worked on, according to WSJ. Facebook has faced more criticism in the last year than ever before, with regulators around the world finally questioning the social network's privacy practices, especially as the company faces blunder after blunder. It's to the point where Facebook had to swear at the F8 developer conference that it was prioritizing privacy.

Yet, apparently Facebook's also been attempting to become even more central to users' lives. Facebook plays a role in many of the ways people communicate and entertain themselves (video streaming, gaming, content discovery) already. Project Libra could allow the company to become financially important to its users as well.

There is one upside: Just like how Galactus isn't always successful in eating a given planet, Facebook doesn't always manage to devour a particular market. The company's smartphone efforts failed, its social network is becoming less popular and it's facing increasing competition in everything from VR to video streaming. Real companies are--surprisingly enough--even more unpredictable than fictional cosmic beings. It's possible that Project Libra never goes anywhere.

But it's also possible that Facebook's promises will work. Project Libra could debut, become popular and make the social network even more critical to its users. If that happens despite all of the mistakes Facebook has made and scrutiny it's faced, well, maybe the Internet deserves Zuck Bucks.

The Razer Toaster (yes, the bread kind) is becoming a reality. That's according to Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan, who finally relented to fans in a Facebook post. He said that it would likely "take a few years" for a team of engineers.

The toaster, formerly known as Project Breadwinner, was the company's 2016 April Fools' joke. The web page revealing the then-prank toaster still lists it as such. But the idea of a Razer-branded toaster achieved meme status, and every time Tan posted on Facebook (which he frequently does), demands for the toaster would fill the comments. One has to wonder if Tan agreed just to make it stop.

Tan seems to have been particularly enamored by a Facebook page called "Give us the Razer Toaster" that currently sits at just over 44,000 likes. The CEO, however, suggests that each of the twelve Razer toaster tattoos showcased on the page is equivalent to 100,000 likes, bringing it to well over a million by some seriously questionable math.

(You read that last paragraph right, by the way. A dozen people had an April Fools' prank branded toaster permanently inked onto their skin. The spirit of Zune Guy lives.)

This wouldn't be the first ever gaming-related toaster. Last year, Sega crowdfunded a toaster that put Sonic the Hedgehog on bread.

Pricing, features, and specs have yet to be announced. We'll test it if it shows up in our labs. Hopefully it works with Chroma.