The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as well as several states, including New York, Tennesse and North Carolina, are reportedly investigating Meta’s virtual reality division in relation to potential anti-competitive behavior. According to Bloomberg, the FTC and involved state attorneys general began interviewing third-party developers last year to find out if the company has put them at a disadvantage when they’ve tried to compete against its own software.

Some third-party developers claim Meta frequently copies their best ideas and then makes it harder for their apps to function on its headsets. Among other developers, the outlet points to the experience of Virtual Desktop creator Guy Godin. In 2019, he added a feature to his app that allowed Oculus Quest owners to stream PC games to their headsets. Meta, then known as Facebook, reportedly threatened to delist the app if Godin didn’t remove the feature. That same year, the company released Oculus Link, a feature that allows Quest users to connect the headset to their PC via a USB-C cable.

It’s unclear how close the FTC may be to filing formal charges against Meta. The agency declined to comment on the matter for Bloomberg. However, what is clear is that Meta is firmly in the FTC’s crosshairs over its various acquisitions. In December, The Information reported the agency had opened a probe into its proposed $400 million deal to buy Supernatural studio Within. Separately, this week a federal judge allowed the FTC to proceed with an amended antitrust lawsuit that seeks to undo the company’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram.

Last June, Alphabet’s self-driving unit worked with J.B. Hunt, a trucking and logistics company, to test its Waymo Via technology in Texas. On Friday, the two announced they’re forming a strategic partnership with the hope of deploying a fully autonomous trucking operation within the state sometime in the next few years. In the immediate future, Waymo and J.B. Hunt say they plan to hold multiple pilots involving Waymo Via. That’s the Waymo Driver-powered unit the Alphabet subsidiary developed for Class 8 trucks. They also plan to complete additional market studies.

The expanded partnership follows a successful first pilot in which Waymo and J.B Hunt said they moved 862,179 lbs of freight without their test trucks speeding or ending up in any accidents. The conclusion they drew at the time was that Waymo Driver was ready to deliver freight on-time and safely. Waymo is just one of a handful of companies working on autonomous trucking technology. A few months before the company completed its June pilot with J.B. Hunt, Aurora, the startup that acquired Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, announced it was working with Volvo to build fully autonomous semi trucks that would carry cargo across North America.

Five dozen companies specializing in women’s health products and services say Facebook has frequently rejected their ads over objections they contain “adult content,” according to a report the Center for Intimacy Justice published this week. Facebook’s advertising policies prohibit reproductive health products or services that focus on sexual pleasure, but anecdotes from the companies the Center for Intimacy Justice either interviewed or surveyed paint the picture of a company that enforces those guidelines in a way that’s seemingly arbitrary and sexist.

The 60 companies that took part in the report have all had advertisements rejected by Facebook at one point or another. About half said they’ve also had their accounts suspended by the social media giant. One such company is Joylux. It offers vFit Gold, a product women can use to strengthen their pelvic floor. “Because of the nature of our product, the look of it,” Joylux CEO Colette Courtion told The New York Times Facebook and other companies believe it’s “pornographic” in nature.

Since 2017, Joylux claims Facebook has shut down its advertising account twice. It says the company never provided a reason for those actions. It also claims Facebook has automatically denied ads that include “vagina.” That’s something Meta, Facebook’s parent company, disputes. A spokesperson for the company told Engadget it doesn’t enforce a blanket ban on keywords like “vagina” and “menopause.” Instead, it says it considers “how each ad is positioned.”

Center for Intimacy Justice

With help from an agency specializing in appealing ad rejections, Joylux has managed to get its ads up on Facebook in recent years. However, the company has had to change its copy to the point where those advertisements aren’t helpful to consumers. “We can’t show what the product looks like and we can’t say what it does,” Joylux told The New York Times.

A spokesperson for Meta told Engadget its enforcement isn’t perfect and that sometimes it makes mistakes. The company also noted it has its current policy in place in part because it strives to take into account what people from different countries and cultures will take away from ads that promote adult products.

“We welcome ads for sexual wellness products but we prohibit nudity and have specific rules about how these products can be marketed on our platform,” the spokesperson said. “We have provided detail to advertisers about what kinds of products and descriptions we allow in ads.”

What makes Facebook’s actions in these instances frustrating for the 60 companies that took part in the report is that they believe Meta hasn’t applied the same standards to ads targeting men. “Right now, it’s arbitrary where they’ll say a product is or isn’t allowed in a way that we think has really sexist undertones and a lack of understanding about health,” Jackie Rotman, the founder of the Center for Intimacy Justice, told The Times.

To that point, the organization found an ad promoting an erectile dysfunction pill that promised a “wet hot American summer.” Another, promoting a lubricant, said the lotion was “made just for men’s alone time.”

It’s no secret Meta employs contract laborers to do much of the hard work of enforcing its content moderation policies. And despite assisting one of the most valuable companies in the world, those workers have frequently complained of their jobs involving poor compensation and anxiety-inducing work. Some are now also saying they’re being treated worse than other workers.

According to BuzzFeed News, Genpact, a Meta subcontractor that has previously been accused of fostering poor working conditions, has required the Spanish-language moderators out of its Richardson, Texas office to report for in-person work since April 2021. Those workers have had to put their health at risk against both the delta and omicron coronavirus variants while their English-language counterparts have been allowed to cycle through the office in three-month rotations.

The news of the situation at Genpact comes just one week after workers at Accenture, another Meta subcontractor, successfully protested to force the company to scrap a requirement it had in place for hundreds of Facebook moderators to return to in-person work on January 24th.

Contractors who spoke to BuzzFeed News claim Genpact also holds them to unreasonable standards. They say they’re expected to make moderation decisions in about a minute while maintaining an 85 percent accuracy rate. Complicating everything is the fact that Meta reportedly doesn’t disseminate guidelines on how to apply Facebook’s Community Standards in a language other than English, leaving those workers in a situation where they’re forced to first translate that guidance before applying it. 

And there’s the scale of the problem the team has to tackle. Genpact’s Spanish-language moderation team is named after Mexico but in addition to moderating content posted by people living in the North American country, they’re also responsible for Facebook and Instagram posts from Spanish-speaking users in most Latin American countries as well. In Mexico alone, Facebook has more than 84 million users. By contrast, the Genpact Mexican market team consists of approximately 50 individuals.

“We use the combination of technology and people to keep content that breaks our rules off of our platform, and while AI has made progress in this space, people are a key part of our safety efforts,” a Meta spokesperson told Engadget. “We know these jobs can be difficult, which is why we work closely with our partners to constantly evaluate how to best support these teams.”

Unless you’re a lawyer, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve never read through a website’s entire terms of service. There’s a simple reason for that. Far too often, they’re too long and difficult to parse. Some services offer summary statements, but they’re the exception, not the norm.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers made up of Representative Lori Trahan and Senators Bill Cassidy and Ben Ray Luján of Louisana and New Mexico want to change that. They’ve introduced the Terms-of-service Labelling, Design and Readability Act – that’s TLDR for short. Taking a page from Apple, the proposed legislation would require online businesses to include a “nutrition label-style” summary at the top of their terms of service agreements and make the contracts easy for researchers to examine through the use of XML tags. It would also require them to disclose any recent data breaches, as well as provide information on whether a user can delete their data and how they would go about doing that.

“For far too long, blanket terms of service agreements have forced consumers to either ‘agree’ to all of a company’s conditions or lose access to a website or app entirely. No negotiation, no alternative, and no real choice,” said Representative Trahan. The group cites a 2012 study that found it would take the average American 76 workdays to read all the terms of service contracts they’ve agreed to use their favorite online services as the basis for the need of the TLDR Act. Should the legislation pass, it would empower the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to enforce it.

Google has called on the US government to take a more proactive role in identifying and protecting open-source projects that are critical to internet security. In a blog post the company published following the White House’s Log4j vulnerability summit on Thursday, Kent Walker, president of global affairs and chief legal officer at Google and Alphabet, said the country needs a public-private partnership that will work to properly fund and staff the most essential open-source projects.

“For too long, the software community has taken comfort in the assumption that open source software is generally secure due to its transparency and the assumption that ‘many eyes’ were watching to detect and resolve problems,” he said. “But in fact, while some projects do have many eyes on them, others have few or none at all.”

According to Walker, the partnership would look at the influence and importance of a project to determine how critical it is to the wider ecosystem. Looking to the future, he says the industry needs new ways to identify software that may, down the line, pose a systemic risk to internet security.

Walker said there’s also a need for more public and private funding, noting Google is ready to contribute to an organization that matches volunteers from companies like itself to critical projects that need the most support. “Open source software is a connective tissue for much of the online world — it deserves the same focus and funding we give to our roads and bridges,” he said.

The importance of open-source software has been a topic of a lot of discussions following the discovery of the Log4Shell vulnerability. Log4j happens to be one of the most popular and widely used logging library, with services like Steam and iCloud depending on it. Security researcher Marcus Hutchins, who helped stop the spread of WannaCry, called the vulnerability “extremely bad” as it left millions of applications open to attack.

As if the market for battle royale games wasn’t crowded enough already, you’ll soon have another option in the form of My Hero Academia: Ultra Rumble. Based on the popular manga and anime, Bandai Namco teased the title in a Weekly Shōnen Jump article spotted by Gematsu.

Ultra Rumble doesn’t have a release date yet, but it will come to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam. Compared to battle royales like Call of Duty: Warzone and PUBG, Ultra Rumble looks like it will be a more intimate affair with support for up to 24 players in a single match. Bandai Namco plans to hold a closed beta for the game in the future.

It’s hard to judge the potential quality of Ultra Rumble based on a few magazine scans, but as Eurogamer notes, past My Hero Academia haven’t been great despite the popularity of the source material. 2018’s My Hero One’s Justice, for instance, was greeted mostly with middling reviews. Here’s hoping Ultra Rumble breaks that trend.

Following a year that saw it struggle to shield its users from abuse and harassment, Twitch has published a retrospective of its 2021 safety efforts that includes a look forward to how the company plans to tackle the issue in 2022. Specifically, Angela Hession, Twitch’s vice president of global trust and safety, says the company will update its user reporting and appeals process. 

It also plans to upgrade its Suspicious User Detection feature. The AI tool, which the company launched at the end of last year, automatically flags individuals it believes may be repeat ban dodgers. In 2022, Twitch has updates planned around how streamers can use information from that tool. As the company has indicated previously, it also plans to update its sexual content policy to clarify various aspects of it. Twitch simultaneously intends to share more and “better” educational content across its safety center and other areas.

Twitch spent much of the latter half of 2021 trying to stop automated "hate raid" harassment campaigns. The attacks saw malicious individuals use thousands of bots to spam channels with hateful language, and they frequently targeted streamers from marginalized communities. In September, the company sued CruzzControl and CreatineOverdose, two of the more prolific individuals involved in those campaigns. 

"We’ll likely never be able to eliminate [hate raids] entirely," Hession said. However, she claims Twitch "significantly" cut down on the number of bots on its platform through some of its actions in 2021. In 2022, it looks to continue that work through the improvements it announced today. 

If the company’s safety roadmap feels light on details, Hession says that’s out of necessity. “The honest and unfortunate reality is that we can't always be specific because bad actors can and have used that transparency to attempt to thwart our efforts,” she said. 

At the same time, the executive acknowledged Twitch needs to do a better job of communicating what it’s doing to make people feel safe on its platform. It’s easy to see why the company would say that. When it felt like the hate raids that were occurring on Twitch couldn’t get any worse, many creators banded together to protest the lack of action they saw from the company.

Apple has released iOS 15.2.1, its latest software update for recent iPhone and iPad devices. The patch addresses a vulnerability found within the company’s HomeKit protocol for connecting disparate smart home devices. The bug allowed malicious individuals to force an iPhone or iPad to repeatedly crash and freeze by changing the name of a HomeKit-compatible device to include more than 500,000 characters. Since iOS backs up HomeKit device names to iCloud, it was possible for iOS users to get stuck in an endless loop of crashes.

Security researcher Trevor Spiniolas discovered the vulnerability and publicly disclosed it on January 1st. According to Spiniolas, he informed Apple of the bug back in August. The company had reportedly planned to address the vulnerability before the end of 2022 but later delayed a fix to early 2022. “I believe this bug is being handled inappropriately as it poses a serious risk to users and many months have passed without a comprehensive fix,” Spiniolas said at the time.

Spiniolas found that the vulnerability is present within Apple’s mobile operating system as far back as iOS 14.7, but said he believes it exists in all versions of iOS 14. In other words, if you’ve been holding off on installing iOS 15, now is the time to update your Apple devices.

Ahead of a planned enterprise release later this year, Magic Leap has provided a group of healthcare companies with early access to its second-generation augmented reality headset. One of the companies, SentiAR, offers software that allows doctors to see a 3D model of a patient’s heart while they’re operating them. Another company, Brainlab, wants to make its Mixed Reality Viewer software available on Magic Leap 2.

That Magic Leap is making its latest wearable available to digital healthcare startups first isn’t surprising; CEO Peggy Johnson said as much would happen last April. "Augmented reality may transform healthcare more than any other industry, at least in the near term," she said at the time, noting also that the company would focus on enterprise customers at launch.

Magic Leap has famously struggled since its emergence as one of Silicon Valley’s most hyped startups. In 2019, it came out that the company had reportedly only sold 6,000 units of its $2,300 Magic Leap One Creator Edition headset through the first six months that the device was available. It subsequently spent months laying off employees before a $350 million investment gave it a new shot of life.