Meta accounts have arrived. As of today, Facebook parent company Meta has begun rolling out the new login system for Quest owners. “The update will roll out globally on a gradual basis, so if you don’t have the option to create a Meta account and Meta Horizon profile right away, you’ll get the update soon,” the company said. If your headset is currently tied to an Oculus account, you’ll need to register for a Meta account to continue using your device after January 1st, 2023. The company announced the new system last month in a reversal of its controversial decision to require a Facebook login to use Oculus headsets.
While you don’t need a Facebook or Instagram account anymore, you can still use those services to create a Meta account. Conversely, if you’ve already linked your device to Facebook, you can remove your profile from your new Meta account and use an email instead. Once you have one, you’ll need to create a Meta Horizon profile, complete with a unique username, for use in the company's vision of the metaverse.
In a whistleblower complaint, Twitter’s former security chief has raised serious questions not just about the company’s security practices, but the potential for foreign governments and entities to influence the company. According to Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, Twitter’s dealings with other countries could be putting the United States’ national security at risk. As reported by CNN, the complaint details specific concerns relating to Russia, China and India.
“A few months before CTO Parag Agrawal was promoted to CEO, Agrawal suggested to Mudge that Twitter should consider ceding to the Russian Federation’s censorship and surveillance demands as a way to grow users in Russia,” the complaint, published byThe Washington Post, states.
The document doesn’t specify what steps Agrawal proposed. As CNN points out, Russia tried to force large tech companies, including Twitter, to open local offices in the country before its invasion of Ukraine. The complaint states that the “suggestion was never pursued or implemented,” but it notes that the mere suggestion is “cause for concern about Twitter’s effects on U.S. national security,” and that it was at odds with Jack Dorsey’s wishes.
Zatko also raises questions about Twitter’s financial relationship with unnamed “Chinese entities.” The complaint states that Twitter is “dependent upon revenue coming from Chinese entities even though the Twitter service is blocked in China.” The money led to “concerns within Twitter that the information the Chinese entities could receive would allow them to identify and learn sensitive information about Chinese users who successfully circumvented the block, and other users around the world.” It goes on to say that “Mr. Zatko was told that Twitter was too dependent on the revenue stream to do anything other than attempt to increase it.”
Regarding Twitter’s operations in India, the complaint alleges that the Indian government “forced” the company to hire at least one government agent who “would have access to vast amounts of Twitter’s sensitive data.” It later says that a U.S. government source warned the company that “one or more particular company employees were working on behalf of another particular foreign intelligence agency.” The document doesn’t specify what country the source was referring to.
Notably, it’s not the first time Twitter has dealt with an employee accused of spying for another country. A former Twitter worker was recently convicted of acting as an agent for Saudi Arabia. Prosecutors alleged the man was paid to turn over sensitive information about dissidents.
Elsewhere in the complaint, Zatko states that Twitter repeatedly caught employees “intentionally installing spyware on their work computers at the request of external organizations” even though it was against the company’s policy to do so. There are no further details provided about what organizations might be making such requests or why employees would comply, but the complaint notes that as a result some “external people or organizations had more awareness of activity on some Twitter employee computers than Twitter itself had.”
Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the claims. The company previously told The Washington Post and CNN the complaint was “riddled with inaccuracies.” Members of Congress, including the Senate Intelligence Committee, have already said they are looking into Zatko’s allegations.
Google is partnering with National Public Radio to bring the broadcaster’s podcasts to YouTube. On Thursday, the two announced that more than 20 NPR shows, including Up First and Throughline, are now available on the platform. NPR is no stranger to YouTube. Its Tiny Desks concert series has been a hit on the platform for a few years now, with a recent Ludovico Einaudi performance amassing nearly 900,000 views and counting.
The addition of NPR podcasts comes just as YouTube recently added an Explore page dedicated to the format. While it’s only available to some people, the section highlights popular channels, episodes and playlists as well as categories and recommended shows. It may not explicitly market itself as a podcast platform, but both the page and its new partnership with NPR show YouTube getting serious about the medium.
Starting today, Yelp will apply a label to business pages for crisis pregnancy centers (also known as anti-abortion centers) to clarify that these facilities usually have limited medical services. The label also notes that crisis pregnancy centers "may not have licensed medical professionals onsite." The consumer notice could help people avoid confusion with clinics that offer abortion services.
In a blog post, Yelp said it was making the change following the US Supreme Court's decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade, a ruling that conferred a nationwide right to safe abortion access for nearly 50 years. "The trust and safety of our community is a top priority, which is why providing consumers with reliable and useful information to help inform their decisions is critical to our mission — this includes access to reliable information about reproductive health services," Yelp wrote.
Yelp
Many crisis pregnancy centers have religious affiliations, as the Associated Presspreviously reported. Some are said to provide misleading information about abortion and contraception.
Yelp has reviewed tens of thousands of business listings since 2018 with the aim of ensuring crisis pregnancy centers are differentiated from abortion clinics. It noted that moderators have reclassified almost 470 businesses as crisis pregnancy centers or faith-based crisis pregnancy centers this year alone in the US, after reviewing nearly 33,500 business pages. It plans to review more than 55,000 business pages across the US, Canada and Puerto Rico in the coming months.
This is an issue that other tech companies have been contending with. Last week, the Alphabet Workers Union demanded that Google address "misleading search results related to abortion services by removing results for fake abortion providers." Democratic lawmakers have asked Google to stop directing people seeking an abortion to anti-abortion facilities, while some Republican attorneys general warned the company not to limit such centers from appearing in search results. In early July, Google said it would delete abortion clinic visits from user location histories.
Dead Island 2 is coming. The long-awaited zombie-slaying role-playing game is set to hit PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Google Stadia and PC via the Epic Games Store on February 3rd, 2023. Deep Silver showed off the blood-soaked sequel with a cinematic trailer and a gameplay video during Gamescom's Opening Night Live showcase.
Dead Island 2 will feature six playable characters with unique voice acting and traits, and it all takes place in Los Angeles. The game is designed as a love letter to cult-classic horror films and old Hollywood vibes: It has a pulpy narrative to follow, classic RPG elements and a co-op mode for up to three players. All six of the main characters are customizable, and a brand new skill system allows players to adjust their specs on the fly. There are dozens of individual zombie types to slay, too.
Dead Island 2 is the full follow-up to the 2011 hit Dead Island, though there have been smaller installments in the series. The game was announced in 2014 and it's essentially been in development hell ever since, lost among a handful of studio sales and team swaps. It's now in progress at Deep Silver's Dambuster Studios, which worked on Homefront: The Revolution.
Fans of The Expanse will have to wait about another year to play Deck Nine's interpretation of the popular sci-fi series. The studio, best known for its work on Life is Strange: True Colors, and Telltale Games shared a new behind-the-scenes gameplay trailer during Gamescom 2022 and revealed that the title would come out sometime in the summer of 2023. While not revelatory, the clip does show off something we hadn't seen before. The Expanse: A Telltale Series will feature sequences where you'll need to navigate zero-gravity environments.
Set before the TV series, which concluded at the start of this year, the game stars Camina Drummer. After her introduction in the show's second season, Drummer, played by actress Cara Gee in both the TV series and upcoming game, went on to become a fan-favorite character over subsequent seasons. The Expanse is one of two new projects Telltale Games is working on after coming back from financial insolvency. In 2023, the studio also plans to release The Wolf Among Us 2.
Gotham Knights, the DC-soaked open-world title from Warner Bros Games, is due to hit PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC on October 21st. Yes, you read that correctly — the game was previously due to come out on October 25th, but it's now set to land four days earlier. Warner Bros didn't provide a reason for the rush, aside from saying it will allow "players to jump into the action four days early." Which, yeah.
The new release date follows delays and platform changes for Gotham Knights. The game was originally set to come out in 2021, but it was pushed back to 2022 less than a year after its announcement. It was also supposed to hit PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but it's no longer coming to those consoles.
The updated release timing was revealed during Gamescom's Opening Night Live, at the end of a new trailer for Gotham Knights. The trailer focuses on the villains, showcasing Harley Quinn and Clayface. The game also features Mr. Freeze and the Court of Owls, but notably not Batman. Instead, players step into the boots of Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood and Robin.
Sometimes, a game trailer just catches your eye. Phantom Hellcat is the first title in an original hack-and-slash universe from Ironbird Creations, a new studio under Ghostrunner and Chernobylite publisher All in! Games. Phantom Hellcat is a perspective-shifting action game that blends fantasy and pop culture, starring a young woman named Jolene on a mission to save the world from an encroaching evil force. You know, classic action fare.
The interesting bit of Phantom Hellcat is its shifting perspective, which transitions from 2D platforming to 3D close-quarters battling. The game has a skill tree, upgradeable masks with varying abilities and secrets to find in each level. Developers at Ironbird drew inspiration from the Nier series, which is a fantastic starting point for this type of experience.
Phantom Hellcat is coming to PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC at some point — there's no solid release date yet, but it's available to wishlist on Steam.
After 38 years as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced on Monday that he will be stepping down from his role in December. Appointed to the position in 1984 by then-president Ronald Reagan, Fauci has personally overseen the federal government’s response to some of the 20th century’s deadliest infectious diseases — from tuberculosis and COVID to SARS and MERS.
But, as he told The Guardian in 2020, “my career and my identity has really been defined by HIV.” The prevention and treatment of HIV has been a prioritized area of research for the NIAID since 1986, and one that Dr. Fauci has devoted much of his public service to. The current state of AIDS research and response in America is thanks in no small part to his continued efforts in the field.
The NIAID is one of 27 specialized institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which in turn reports to the Department of Health and Human Services. The NIH overall serves as the federal government’s premiere health research program. The NIAID operates within that bureaucratic framework, conducting and supporting “basic and applied research to better understand, treat, and ultimately prevent infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases,” per its mission statement. That includes everything from working to mitigate effects of the annual influenza strain and alleviate asthma in urban youth to leading the development of an effective vaccine against COVID-19. The technology behind that vaccine is now being adapted for use against HIV and malaria as well.
Working at the forefront of immunoregulation research in the early 1980s, Fauci developed treatments for a class of otherwise-fatal inflammatory diseases including polyarteritis nodosa, granulomatosis with polyangiitis (formerly Wegener's granulomatosis) and lymphomatoid granulomatosis. The results of those studies helped lay the groundwork for today’s research by the NIAID’s Laboratory of Immunoregulation. That research includes cellular and molecular mechanisms of HIV immunopathogenesis and the treatment of immune-mediated diseases. Combining the institute’s nearly four decades of HIV/AIDS research with cutting edge genomic technology has brought us not one, but three potentially viable AIDS vaccines, all of which are currently in clinical trials.
“Finding an HIV vaccine has proven to be a daunting scientific challenge,” Dr. Fauci said in a March NIAID release. “With the success of safe and highly effective COVID-19 vaccines, we have an exciting opportunity to learn whether mRNA technology can achieve similar results against HIV infection.”
Fauci’s initial efforts during the AIDS epidemic did more harm than good. In 1983, he published The Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome: The Ever-Broadening Clinical Spectrum in which he warned of “the possibility that routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease.” We know now that this is not at all how HIV works, but at the time — despite the study urging caution until more evidence was gathered — it set off a moral panic in the media. The study was subsequently picked up by right-wing organizations and used as a political cudgel blaming the LGBTQIA+ community for the disease.
Reagan himself didn’t publicly mention the crisis until 1985, three years after it was officially identified by the CDC (and, coincidentally, a month after he admitted his involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal). Social stigma around the disease made funding for basic health research nearly impossible to acquire, and was exacerbated by Reagan’s repeated budget cuts to the NIH and CDC.
"The inadequate funding to date has seriously restricted our work and has presumably deepened the invasion of this disease into the American population," a CDC staffer wrote in an April, 1983 memo to then-Assistant Director, Dr. Walter Dowdle. "In addition, the time wasted pursuing money from Washington has cast an air of despair over AIDS workers throughout the country."
Even after his appointment as Chief Medical Officer — one who was determined to treat the AIDS crisis with its deserved gravity — Fauci faced pushback from the LGBTQIA+ community, who demanded greater action from the government in response to the crisis and sought to accelerate the glacial pace of drug trials at the time.
By 1990, the community’s patience had reached a breaking point, resulting in ACT UP’s (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) attempt to storm the NIH in protest. “One of the things that people in ACT UP said is that we are the people who are experiencing this novel disease, and we are the experts, not just the scientists and doctors,” Garance Ruta, executive director of GEN magazine and an ACT UP member at the protest, told The Washington Post in 2020.
“I was trying to get them into all the planning meetings for the clinical trials,” Fauci told WaPo, in response. “I felt very strongly that we needed to get them into the planning process because they weren’t always right, but they had very, very good input.”
Over the last 30 years, the NIH has helped lead development of numerous antiretroviral therapies. Azidothymidine (AZT), the first drug discovered to inhibit HIV’s replication without damaging cells, was initially developed by the NIH as an anti-cancer drug in the 1960s. Its use as an antiretroviral, approved by the FDA in 1987, helped to establish the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), which further accelerated research into nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs, the class of drug to which AZT belongs). NIAID-funded studies in the 1990s helped establish combination therapies, which combine multiple medications for a synergistic effect, and explored a newly-identified class of drug, non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors or NNRTIs.
NIAID
Today, nearly three dozen antiretroviral drugs are available, many of them combined into fixed-dose tablets. In the 1990s, people living with AIDS would be expected to take up to 20 individual pills at set schedules throughout the day. The average lifespan for someone infected with the disease was roughly a year. Today, assuming you’re lucky enough to live in the developed world, AIDS has become a chronic condition to be controlled with a single daily pill. For the 20 million people living with AIDS but without access to modern treatment, it remains a death sentence.
The state of medical research technology has also evolved, even if the nation’s prevailing notions of fairness and equality haven't improved much in the intervening years since Reagan held power. Advances in laboratory standardization and automation have rapidly reduced development cycles and the occurrence of outlier results. The monotonous tasks that were once performed by lab assistants are now handled by robotic arms equipped with pipette arrays.
Disease prevention and diagnosis efforts have been augmented in recent years with artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. They’ve also found use in helping to stem the spread of HIV and improve access to both retrovirals and PReP with applications including, “ML with smartphone-collected and social media data to promote real-time HIV risk reduction, virtual reality tools to facilitate HIV serostatus disclosure, and chatbots for HIV education,” argue Drs. Julia Marcus and Whitney Sewell, of Harvard and UMass Amherst, respectively.
And just as Dr Fauci is, quite specifically, not retiring — “I want to use what I have learned as NIAID Director to continue to advance science and public health and to inspire and mentor the next generation of scientific leaders as they help prepare the world to face future infectious disease threats,” he noted in Monday’s announcement — the work of the NIAID is far from complete. Even as we slowly conquer existing scourges like COVID and HIV, re-emerging threats like Monkeypox (not to mention ancient killers like Polio) will continue to appear on our quickly warming planet.
Google’s YouTube TV service could soon become more conducive to watching sports. According to Protocol, the company is developing a feature called Mosaic Mode that would allow subscribers to stream up to four live feeds simultaneously. Google reportedly discussed the feature during an event the company held last month for manufacturing partners.
Mosaic Mode is one of a few new updates Google is working on across the YouTube portfolio. Protocol reports smart TV owners can expect an improved YouTube Music experience in the coming months, as well as better Nest audio integration. Oh, and if you used the YouTube app for TVs as a refuge from Shorts, don’t expect that to last. Google reportedly told its partners it was working on bringing support for the video format to the YouTube smart TV app. Google did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment.
Allowing subscribers to watch four streams simultaneously would be a logical extension of Google’s recent partnership with the NBA and other investments the company has made to make YouTube TV more compelling to cord cutters.
