Friday, September 4th 2020
Facebook Technologies Stops Sales of Oculus VR Headset in Germany
Facebook Technologies, a subsidiary of Facebook Inc. and owner of Oculus, has today "temporarily" suspended sales of Oculus VR headsets in Germany. The news is coming today after Oculus announced that all of the new Oculus accounts have to move to the Facebook login system before January 1, 2023, when all of the current Oculus accounts will be suspended. The German data protection law is extremely suspicious of Facebook's behavior and how they handle user data in general, so Oculus has potentially decided to stop the sales to avoid any possible antitrust regulations from the German government. The exact reason is unknown, and it is yet to be revealed, however, the suspicions laid out here may be part of the reason.
Source:
ComputerBase.de
44 Comments on Facebook Technologies Stops Sales of Oculus VR Headset in Germany
But it's up to us to demand the data to be open. Especially governments that WE finance are really bad at this. Governments and regular people should be the ones who push this the most at first. Businesses will only follow when they see that it's much more powerful to have all data be open and available for everyone to use and for science.
Meanwhile, Kool-Aid drinkers like so many in the ArsTechnica DNC/Hollywood/Apple echo chamber are going to downvote critical thinking into oblivion. They're already naively trying to push the narrative that Apple is some sort of benign savior instead of being a bloodsucking corporation like the rest of them. Echo chambers are spreading across the Internet. There is an employee at Disqus who posted the opinion that the path to a better happier online community is to have more censorship. When you question then you are "curated" with nice things like locked threads and blithe dismissals based on fallacies, such as "We discussed that already" — as if a faulty consensus is set in adamantium somewhere in the cosmos for them to point at.
Corporations were invented to siphon resources from ordinary people and the planet so that a small set of people can get much more life out of life. That's what they are. They are a conspiracy of exploitation and all of the censorship in the world can't erase that basic fact. They are not on your side, no matter how many shiny toys they will let you pay for.
Point being... if Burners-Lee comes up with a solution that benefits humanity (aka the plebs) more than it benefits the top .5% (the Bezos class) then it won't sell. Our handlers decide what sells. Money talks. The rest of us follow.
It's the 'benevolent dictator' fallacy. It may be possible that someone may come along to wield power for good and usher in peace and prosperity. But that only ensures that at some point he will be overturned by someone who's lower scruples enable them to seize the upper hand again. Doesn't matter how many people the former benefits or how few the latter.
Or put another way... even grandma's best pie is no good to anyone if there are wolves in the den and ants in the kitchen. Honestly, deal with that and things might actually sort themselves out. But that would mean unifying bodies of power holding corporations to full fiscal and ethical accountability. Which is hard to imagine while the government is not only pocketing the taxes but turning a lot of tax money into a lot more money as a result of their influence on the economy...
That's the way data should be looked at and the way the idea of linked open data works. You can't restrict something that is inherently open-source and decentralized. It's also a more efficient way to hold data, so companies will use it and will integrate with it over time. They will have to embrace it like they had to embrace the internet. Governments can also mandate that certain data needs to be put in this open space like they already do now. Anything is possible from there. At some point, when this worldwide data becomes big enough, it will start to change how we think about the world data. It could be as big of a paradigm shift as we undoubtedly had with the internet. And literally THE inventor of the internet is behind this idea and thinks this should happen. And I think he has more credibility than anyone else on the planet. BUT it's a fairly new idea and needs US to make it as mainstream as it can be. We are still decades away from this happening, basically like it's 1989 for the internet.
Law itself is the protection of elite privilege. All of the benefits we get from law stem from maintaining that privilege. That's not possible as corporations are legal entities. That took the elites to craft and agree. It's not a passive matter at all.
I have worked for corporations, I have seen from inside how inefficient and scatterbrained they do things. Behind the thin shiny veneer of marketing, there are nothing but headless monkeys running around in suits and trying to work as inefficiently as possible until they go home. There is nothing less scary that I would be afraid of than these people carrying out some grand conspiracy about anything successfully.
I won't be buying a new one from them for sure as now I will be forced, but as I never have to use facebook login for my purchase it's good enough.
I've been smart enough to not buy a single item in the occulus store.
However, I don't recall giving over any really sensitive information for the Oculus account and I don't think I even bothered setting up a payment method or two factor authentication. So the info is a relitively small profile with respect to what some people may put on facebook,....errrr,......I mean the evil empire.
Another point that may have escape notice is that the evil empire (facebook) has quite a bit of buying power and could easily buy a great number of different companies at any given time. Therefore one must always be vigilant and safeguarding their personal info at every turn. If your info is out there, companies can buy it directly too. The evil empire has made it very clear at this point in their own blog: Once again, most people that already have a current Oculus VR HMD will likely be moving on to a new one in due time, just like many gamers will be moving on to a new RTX 3090, 3080, 3070 video card, PS5 or XBox Series X.
So again, I won't likely buy another Oculus device after this but I'm not worried about it now on my current Oculus Quest. My old Oculus Rift is now just a quasi nostalgic bit of tech (like an iomega Zip Drive) and the Quest will also be that by 2023.
It should also be pointed out that there is a high demand for VR HMDs. Anyone that has a recent model VR HMD may still be able to sell it "used" at the same price as if it were new. This includes Oculus products VR HMDs.
But I am looking forward to HP reverb 2.. I can’t use oculus anyway because of the low res screen after using my HP reverb pro.. I should say, hp sks when it comes to controllers and battery life... won’t last 2 days.. also not happy about current VR FOV...
The Oculus Quest is a unique VR HMD in that it was introduced as a stand alone gaming product which meant it was akin to any other self contained gaming system such as an XBox, PS4, Switch, nVidia Shield and so on. Such devices have login credentials for the device as a typical requirement and their own store for games. So noting now in this respect and certainly not junk barbecue of their authentication system and ability to use an online store (walled garden).
The major difference being that the Oculus Quest doesn't have an option for optical or solid state game media although stand alone consoles seem to be trying to go in that direction (PS5 for example).
I suspect it wouldn't take much (or nothing at all) to maintain the existing Steam VR functionality though. The addition of PC tethering through Oculus Link really increased the functionality of the Oculus Quest.
Still as I have said before, after a year or two of use, most people will likely be looking to upgrade their VR HMD just like they would be looking to upgrade their video card. So there is no need to act like these are devices that would be in use forever. If they already have an Oculus VR HMD, they are grandfathered in for a number of years and if they don't have one at this late date they likely never will so nothing ventured and nothing gained.
Someone gave me a Samsung speaker and it demands, not requests, that I turn on location tracking to use it. Samsung's software also doesn't work in versions of iOS newer than 9 or so (and newer versions of macOS), making it impossible to set up the wireless with an Apple device. Planned obsolescence is becoming so fast that it's hysterical, and not in a good way.
Also, the quality of implementations is so poor these days. For example, you have to use Samsung's walled garden app (that the company doesn't bother to keep current) to use the speaker with wifi. You can't just connect to it directly with your router. If you try it asks for a password and most of the time it doesn't appear in the network list at all. Because the speaker can't be used normally with wifi you are locked out of doing things like playing audio from Youtube through the speaker via wifi. Every avenue for playing audio via wifi, other than from the local music library, is through some portal that requires a username, password, and subscription. It's completely absurd but fits perfectly with the mentality from corporations these days. Your needs don't matter. The desires of the corporation come first. You will get only the bare minimum and only for a short time, to fool you into parting with your money.
To corporations we're squatters with credit cards.