Meta’s past use of facial recognition technology has once again landed the company in potential legal trouble. On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging it had collected the biometric data of millions of Texans without obtaining their informed consent to do so. At the center of the case is Facebook’s now discontinued use of facial recognition technology. The platform previously employed the technology as part of its “tag suggestions” feature, which used image recognition to scan photos and automatically tag users in them.

Last November, Meta shut down that system, citing, among other reasons, “uncertainty” about how the technology would be regulated in the future. The year before, the company paid $650 million to settle a lawsuit that alleged it had violated an Illinois privacy law that requires companies to obtain “explicit” consent before collecting biometric data from users.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Texas sent a civil subpoena to Meta after the outcome of the Illinois lawsuit was announced. The state is reportedly seeking hundreds of billions of dollars in civil penalties. The Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act stipulates Texas can levy a penalty of up to $25,000 per violation of the law. According to the attorney general’s complaint, at least 20 million Texans used Facebook in 2021.

“Facebook will no longer take advantage of people and their children with the intent to turn a profit at the expense of one’s safety and well-being,” Attorney General Paxton said. “This is yet another example of Big Tech’s deceitful business practices and it must stop. I will continue to fight for Texans’ privacy and security.”

“These claims are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously,” a spokesperson for Meta told Engadget.

Meta isn’t the only big tech company that’s in a court battle with Texas. In 2020, Paxton’s office filed a multi-state lawsuit against Google centered on the company’s ad business. Last month, Google asked a judge to dismiss that suit. “AG Paxton’s allegations are more heat than light, and we don’t believe they meet the legal standard to send this case to trial,” Adam Cohen, Google’s director of economic policy, said at the time. “The complaint misrepresents our business, products and motives, and we are moving to dismiss it based on its failure to offer plausible antitrust claims.”

Meta’s Reality Labs VR division has yet to disclose how many Quest 2 headsets it has sold to date. What we do know is that it recently became more popular than ever. On Christmas Day 2021, the Oculus app hit the top of Apple’s App Store charts for the first time. The software achieved that milestone thanks to everyone who bought a Quest 2 headset to gift to their friends and loved ones.

In another more amusing sign of just how popular VR headsets are becoming, insurer Aviva said last year it saw a 31 percent increase in home contents claims involving VR headsets and a 68 percent overall increase since 2016. In 2021, the average claim for VR-related accidental damages was about £650 or $880, and most incidents involved cracked TVs screens.

“As new games and gadgets become popular, we often see this playing through in the claims made by our customers,” Kelly Whittington, Aviva’s UK property claims director, told The Guardian. “In the past, we’ve seen similar trends involving consoles with handsets, fitness games and even the likes of rogue fidget spinners.”

Less than a month and a half into 2022, Aviva has already had to process a number of VR-related claims and the company expects more to come in throughout the year. That still doesn’t tell us how many VR headsets are out there. As far as the Quest 2 is concerned, the closest we have to a solid number is a third-party estimate Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon shared in November 2021. At the time, he said Meta had shipped approximately 10 million units of its latest VR headset. 

This past January, astronomer Bill Gray said that the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket would collide with the Moon sometime in early March. As you might expect, the prediction set off a flurry of media coverage, much of it critical of Elon Musk and his private space firm. After all, the event would be a rare misstep for SpaceX.

But it turns out Elon and company are not about to lose face. Instead, it’s more likely that fate will befall China. That’s because Gray now says he made a mistake in his initial identification of a piece of space debris he and other astronomers dubbed WE0913A in 2015.

When Gray and his colleagues first spotted the object, several clues led them to believe it was the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket that carried the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s DSCOVR satellite into deep orbit that same year. The object’s identification would have probably gone unreported in mainstream media if astronomers didn’t subsequently discover it was about to collide with the Moon.

“Back in 2015, I (mis)identified this object as 2015-007B, the second stage of the DSCOVR spacecraft,” Gray said in a blog post he published on Saturday that was spotted Ars Technica. “I had pretty good circumstantial evidence for the identification, but nothing conclusive,” Gray added. “That was not at all unusual. Identifications of high-flying space junk often require a bit of detective work, and sometimes, we never do figure out the ID for a bit of space junk.”

We may have never known the actual identity of the debris if not for NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer Jon Giorgini. He contacted Gray on Saturday to ask about the identification. According to Giorgini, NASA’s Horizons system, a database that can estimate the location and orbit of almost half a million celestial bodies in our solar system, showed that the DSCOVR spacecraft’s trajectory didn’t take it close to the Moon. As such, it would be unusual if its second stage were to stray off course then and hit the satellite. Giorgini’s email prompted Gray to reexamine the data he used to make the initial identification.

Gray now says he’s reasonably certain the rocket that’s about to collide with the moon belongs to China. In October 2014, the country’s space agency launched its Chang’e 5-T1 mission on a Long March 3C rocket. After reconstructing the probable trajectory of that mission, he found that the Long March 3C is the best fit for the mystery object that’s about to hit Earth’s natural satellite. “Running the orbit back to launch for the Chinese spacecraft makes ample sense,” he told The Verge. “It winds up with an orbit that goes past the Moon at the right time after launch.”

Gray went on to tell The Verge that episodes like this underline the need for more information on rockets boosters that travel into deep space. “The only folks that I know of who pay attention to these old rocket boosters are the asteroid tracking community,” he told the outlet. “This sort of thing would be considerably easier if the folks who launch spacecraft — if there was some regulatory environment where they had to report something.”

With two weeks to go before its February 25th release date, Valve has published CAD files for Steam Deck’s exterior shell to GitHub. Making them available under a Creative Commons license, the company noted the release is “good news” for DIY enthusiasts, modders and most notably, accessory manufacturers. All three groups can use the provided technical drawings and schematics to 3D-print custom shells for the handheld.

As Eurogamer notes, Valve’s decision here is an interesting one. It suggests the company will allow case makers to freely make aftermarket shells for Steam Deck. In fact, Valve said it was “looking forward to seeing what the community creates!” Contrast that to the approach Sony has taken with the PlayStation 5. When Sony’s latest console first shipped and only came in one color, an entire cottage industry of companies sprang up to produce colored plates for the PS5. However, Sony quickly moved to shut down those projects before it went on to announce a set of first-party covers for people to purchase.

A legal rights group has sued Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari to force his government to publish the agreement that allowed Twitter to return to the West African country last month following a seven-month ban. In June 2021, Nigeria suspended Twitter after the company removed a tweet from President Buhari that threatened punishment for local dissidents. At the time, Twitter said it was “deeply concerned” by the country’s actions, noting it considered an open internet as “an essential human right in modern society.”

On January 13th, Nigeria lifted the ban after the company agreed, among other conditions, to open a local office and work with the government to co-develop a code of conduct. On Sunday, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) filed a lawsuit with the country’s High Court to compel President Buhari and Information Minister Lai Mohammed to publish a copy of that agreement.

“Publishing the agreement with Twitter would promote transparency, accountability, and help to mitigate threats to Nigerians’ rights online, as well as any interference with online privacy and freedom of expression,” SERAP said. “Any agreement with social media companies must meet the constitutional requirements of legality, necessity, proportionality and legitimacy.”

SERAP said it had attempted to obtain a copy of the agreement through a freedom of information request. It’s suing partly because the government came back with an “unsatisfactory” response to that request. Minister Mohammed allegedly told the group details on the arrangement were already “in the public space,” and did not forward a copy of its terms.

We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment.

As Reuters notes, SERAP was among several groups that went to court to fight Nigeria’s ban of Twitter. The Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States is scheduled to decide whether to rule on that case this week.

Cent, the company that last year helped Jack Dorsey auction an NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million, is temporarily halting most transactions to address “rampant” sales of fake and plagiarized tokens. In an interview published on Friday, Cameron Hejazi, the CEO and co-founder of the company, told Reuters Cent stopped allowing users to buy and sell most NFTs on February 6th. It continues to operate its Valuables marketplace, the place where people can purchase non-fungible tokens of tweets, but that’s about it.

"There's a spectrum of activity that is happening that basically shouldn't be happening - like, legally" Hejazi told Reuters. He said Cent has tried to ban bad actors but compared the effort to a game of whack-a-mole. “Every time we would ban one, another one would come up, or three more would come up,” Hejazi said.

Last month, OpenSea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces on the internet, said more than 80 percent of the tokens recently created through its free minting tool involved plagiarized work, fake collections and spam. The admission came after the company had tried to limit the number of NFTs users could mint for free. After reversing the decision, the company said it was working on several solutions to deter bad actors. Before January’s announcement, artists and photographers had complained for months that the company hadn’t done enough to address the issue of plagiarism.

"I think this is a pretty fundamental problem with Web3," Hejazi told Reuters. In the immediate future, he said Cent may introduce centralized controls to facilitate a reopening of its marketplace. The company could then later explore more decentralized solutions to the problem.

As anti-vaccine groups in the US attempt to stage their own version of Canada’s disruptive “Freedom Convoy,” foreign content mills have worked to bolster those efforts for their own gains. This week, Facebook parent company Meta told Reuters and NBC News it recently removed several “trucker convoy” groups and pages run by scammers in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Romania and other countries.

The company said many of those groups had recently changed their names to adopt ones that involved terms like “trucker,” “freedom,” and “convoy” in hopes of taking advantage of the sudden interest in the rallies occurring across the border. Many of those same pages included links to websites that sold pro-Trump and anti-vaccine merchandise. At the same time, most of the accounts that took part in those groups were tied to real people. And so you have a situation where foreign players are trying to monetize radicalized individuals.

“Voicing opposition to government mandates is not against Meta’s policies,” a Meta spokesperson told the network. “However, we have removed multiple groups and Pages for repeatedly violating our policies prohibiting QAnon content and those run by spammers in different countries around the world.”

The company said it would monitor the situation. “We continue to see scammers latch onto any hot-button issue that draws people’s attention, including the ongoing protests,” a spokesperson for Meta told Engadget. “Over the past week, we’ve removed groups and pages run by spammers from different countries around the world who used abusive tactics to mislead people about the origin and popularity of their content to drive them to off-platform websites to monetize ad clicks.”

In the more than two weeks since the “Freedom Convoy” descended on Ottawa, Ontario, Canada’s capital has been paralyzed by anti-vaccine protestors who have used their trucks and cars to block entry into the city’s downtown core. The protest has attracted a motley crew of far-right individuals and groups, including Canada’s QAnon “Queen.” In Toronto and other cities throughout the country, police have warned healthcare workers not to wear their scrubs in public while the rallies continue. Those same protests have also clogged up critical border crossings between the US and Canada, prompting the Biden administration to push the federal government to take action.

According to NBC News, anti-vaccine groups in the US plan to stage similar protests in cities across the country. On Facebook, Telegram and voice chat app Zello, those groups have called on their members to travel to Washington DC and Los Angeles on March 5th. The involvement of foreign actors attempting to bolster those efforts mirrors in some ways what happened in 2016 when Russia meddled with the presidential election.

Lamborghini hopes it can continue producing cars with internal combustion engines into the next decade, CEO Stephan Winkelmann told German newspaper Welt am Sonntag this week. “After hybridization, we will wait to see whether it will be possible to offer vehicles with an internal combustion engine beyond 2030,” he said in an interview with the outlet. “One possibility would be to keep combustion engine vehicles alive via synthetic fuels.”

If Lamborghini actually continues making ICE cars into the 2030s, it would put the Volkswagen-owned automaker at odds with much of the industry. Consider Dodge, for instance. The Stellantis-owned brand plans to debut its first all-electric muscle car in 2024. That same year, it also plans to stop producing some of its most popular gasoline-powered models, including the Challenger and Charger. By contrast, Lamborgini won’t offer a fully electric car before the end of the decade.

Practically speaking, even if Lamborghini continues producing ICE cars into the 2030s, it may not be able to sell those vehicles in many places. In the US and other parts of the world, governments have moved to ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars by mid-decade. Countries like Germany have made carveouts for vehicles powered by synthetic fuels, but no company is producing the gasoline alternative at scale yet and may not for many years to come. 

Uncharted series protagonist Nathan Drake is about to make his way to Fortnite. Epic Games has yet to formally announce the crossover, but an unlisted video posted to the battle royale’s official YouTube channel provides all the critical details. On February 17th, one day before the Uncharted film premieres in US theatres, Nathan Drake and Chloe Frazer outfits will debut in Fortnite’s Item Shop.

Those skins will allow you to play as either the film versions of those characters or their Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End counterparts. As usual, Epic will also sell a variety of items you can use to customize your character. For those keeping track, that means Tom Holland is about to make a second appearance in Fortnite after Epic added skins from Spider-Man: No Way Home last year.

Apple is reportedly handing out raises to many of its retail employees in the US. According to Bloomberg, the company has increased the pay of some of its retail workers, including sales staff, Genius Bar support personnel and senior hourly workers, by as much as 10 percent. The exact number depends on the store where each employee works and their specific role. According to the outlet, the hikes don’t apply to all employees, and some have only seen their compensation increase by about two percent.

The pay hikes come in the same week Apple reportedly expanded benefits for all of its US retail employees. Per Bloomberg, the company will offer both full-time and part-time staff at all of its 270 stores nationwide increased sick days, paid parental leave and more starting April 4th. The moves are a response to a tight labor market. Like many other businesses, Apple has struggled to recruit and retain hourly workers during the pandemic. Staffing shortages due to COVID-19 exposures and infections have led to multiple store closures in recent months. Retail staff have also complained of poor working conditions that involve low pay and stressful workloads. Over the same time period, Apple has recorded multiple record-breaking fiscal quarters.