Seriously, stay away from Oculus. I know they currently have the most versatile/best value headset in the Quest 2, but needing to have a FB account linked to it should be a deal-breaker for anyone who doesn't already have an active FB account (and perhaps even those who do). It isn't just an auth system shared by multiple products. It's Facebook, and the ban-hammer can come down swiftly, especially if, like the author, you are just creating an account to link to your Quest. I'm also not confident, as of right now, that FB is gonna fix this in a meaningful way.
Yes, and if you have trouble getting a refund for your defective device, there’s a bunch of state attorneys general who are interested in anything Facebook right now.
But the issue is that in having his account terminated, he's also losing access to all historical purchases made over the years. The CC company may be willing to accept a charge-back on recent purchases, but what about the application/game purchased four years ago that's tied to the account. It's no longer accessible, but is the CC willing to refund for a purchase made that far back?
I honestly don't know, but if I had to guess it would be no.
"No need for chargebacks, I purchased it from John Lewis in the UK so they wont have any issues refunding me. All my previous Oculus purchases on their store are now unplayable on my CV1 though so I might have to pursue a small claims court claim to get any money back on those."
It's a shame that John Lewis are probably going to have to eat the loss on this; it would be interesting to see what the effect of suing Facebook in the UK small claims court will be.
I recently made the mistake of buying an iPad because I was excited to use Side Car with the Apple Pencil to draw in Mac apps.
It turns out I can't use the advertised features of the Apple devices I bought because Side Car requires 2FA with a phone number and my phone service is data only.
Given that I connect the iPad to the Mac via a USB-C cable, it's not clear why iCloud is required at all. They're just intentionally crippling their expensive devices.
That's pretty fucky, especially since their 2FA doesn't go through SMS for me (it's a system popup). FWIW, there are (or were) other apps which provided similar functionality without going through Apple's hoops.
Man, I really hope this is just a temporary peak of insanity in the industry history and a total change is going to happen soon. You know, there were times in history when horrible, bizarre things were norms, and somehow the societies overcame those. This is our only hope.
> Given that I connect the iPad to the Mac via a USB-C cable, it's not clear why iCloud is required at all. They're just intentionally crippling their expensive devices.
I believe they just want to make you get used to that so one day you would't even think about using any of your devices/apps without iCloud. Their vision probably is to make all the devices merely interfaces to iCloud and to make "offline usage" sound as ridiculous as using a toaster without electricity.
Your data line still has a phone number. I know on T-Mobile they only block sending SMS on data lines, it can still receive. Maybe your service works like that.
Sounds like that would work for services that send a verification code via SMS and ask you to enter it elsewhere, but not services that demand a reply. Luckily most 2FA is the former, but I've seen the latter with things like verifying flagged credit card transactions (although they have non-SMS alternatives).
With this new MagSafe charger it looks like the end goal is to remove one more port. Plugging in may not be an option soon. The 2nd gen pencil charges without plugging in for instance.
If you can set up a US Google voice number you cold try to receive SMS there or hangouts. Maybe set it with a unique Google email to prevent hacking attempts.
Note that once you have at least one phone number added, you can switch it to be device-based instead, where it will send 2FA codes directly to any Apple device you're logged into (there's a little system popup) and the phone number becomes strictly a backup for if all devices are unavailable. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204915
> Given that I connect the iPad to the Mac via a USB-C cable, it's not clear why iCloud is required at all.
Sidecar is primarily designed for wireless usage, and there's something behind-the-scenes where it's using the iCloud account to sync identity info so that that user doesn't have to manually set up any cross-device authentication stuff.
I don't find this a convincing rationale. I already had to jump through hoops with an authentication code to make my iPad "trust" my Mac before it appeared at all in Side Car.
Now that it does appear, I get a pop-up when clicking on the iPad income, saying I can't use it because the account doesn't have 2FA set up. Nowhere in the advertising for the device was there a disclaimer that a legacy phone number was required to use the features.
FB ownership is definitely an instant deal-breaker regarding the Oculus for me. I've heard that the Valve Index is a good alternative. Does anybody with VR experience have any input on that?
HP Reverb 2 is coming soon with much higher resolution, though lower refresh rate. Whats better depends on if you're planning on playing sims or action games really.
I'm playing tons of simulation games with my Oculus Rift and starting some weeks ago looking around for an upgrade. HP Reverb 2 is certainly an alternative, anything else I should check out? Playing mostly flying simulators, but also racing and space.
I was thinking of maybe upgrading to the new Oculus' but after announcing it will require a Facebook account I started to rethink that. This submission really hit the nail in the coffin and will absolutely not get another Oculus now.
> All the extra angles of FOV are very distorted, and there is a red static constantly fuzzing away in the display.
> Plus, you have to deal with the Pimax company, which has to be one of the most incompetent companies I've ever met when it comes to taking money and delivering product without stepping into the realm of actual fraud. When I bought mine, it was 3 false "it's shipped" announcements, 2 months, and a threat to reverse my credit card charge before I finally received it.
Why would Facebook spin off anything? I see that happening only if congress forces a break up. Spinning Oculus out of FB seems like a low hanging fruit of a forced break up.
Because when facebook bought oculus they claimed that it would never require a fb account and tracking kept at a minimum. That lasted all of maybe six months and finally totally fell apart with the announcement of the 'facebook only' login.
Confirming the confirmation that the Index is a good collection of hardware. I don't have experience with an Occulus or Vibe, but the Index fell squarely into the "works out of the box" territory.
The only thing I really did to improve it was to 3d print a stand for the hand controllers. More an aesthetic choice than anything.
I picked something off Thingiverse, and it's no longer up there. They do have some (IMO better designed) stands on there, however. Many of which support using the magnetic USB-C charging adapters, which I'd personally recommend for the controllers.
Index is awesome but you also need a well spec'd PC, have $999 on hand, and wait a few months for one. I believe the waiting list is 2-3 months now. I missed my reservation the first time, so if you really want one be vigilant in checking your email and Steam account.
Pros
- Knuckles controllers, still nothing like them
- External base station tracking, the only option that opens up full body tracking and makes it easy to do feet based movement
- High Refresh rate
- Good FOV
Cons
- Knuckles still isn't universally supported
- LCD screen and no OLED
- Reverb G2 has a much better screen
- Wires
I would recommend the G2 but its tracking and controllers just aren't as good as the Index, unless you're just going to use it for driving and flying games.
I have experience with the original pc tethered oculus, the htc vive and the valve index.
The valve index is a very nice upgrade over the original htc vive and the original oculus. The 'screen door' effect is all but gone the new controllers are very comfortable and the tracking is stellar. The index is heavier than the original oculus but the way the weight is distributed and the way the strapping works makes it a non issue. My only complaint is also a problem in the 'gen 1' headsets. Reflection off the fresnel lenses can cause some banded 'flare', especially noticeable when most of the screen is very dark but there is some portion of very bright light.
Sadly I have no experience with the 'upstart' headsets from Microsoft, HP, etc.
It's not really an alternative in that sense since it's tethered, needs a computer and a completely different ballpark price wise. If you have the money, a good gaming PC and the possibility to set up a dedicated VR space I would definitely buy an Index or HTC Reverb 2 though.
> I've heard that the Valve Index is a good alternative
They're not even comparable. The Quest is a headset and two controllers you put it on and pick the controllers up, draw a room boundary and you're in. Works in any room in your house, completely stand alone.
Index requires you to install multiple sensors in a specific room in your house, and requires a connection to a desktop PC tower and fiddling around with Steam to play.
I think the FB account requirement is incredibly dumb from Oculus (Don't understand why it couldn't just be a shadow account like Insta/Whatsapp which everyone seems fine with weirdly) but really the product their offering is entirely in a class of it's own for a fraction of the price a normal VR setup costs and a fraction of the hassle.
I think if the market was different and what they were offering wasn't unique I think far fewer people would care and we'd all just buy different headsets.
Selling a loss leader to build mindshare and market share isn't my idea of value extraction as compared to building the base for future value extraction.
If you don't think they're trying very hard though, I'm not sure if you've been following VR particularly much.
Maybe they think the entire market is drying up? The AAA blockbuster everybody thought would make VR mainstream (Half Life) seems to have fizzled with great reviews but not many sales. Maybe Facebook now believes VR will prove to be a bubble and they want to juice it for all they can while they still can.
Not sure this makes much sense. All the top end VR headsets are constantly sold out and require waiting months to get one (Index and soon the HP Reverb G2). People want to play Alyx but they can't.
Also a PC only game is niche enough, no PCVR game will ever make VR mainstream. Really, the mainstream VR game is Beat Saber - that alone has probably sold more VR headsets than any other app or game combined.
The only way to make VR mainstream imo is to offer it at console prices or less and make it standalone, which is exactly what the Quest is doing. It's really unfortunate it requires an FB account. I guess they justify it because Xbox and PS5 both require online accounts too.
>Really, the mainstream VR game is Beat Saber - that alone has probably sold more VR headsets than any other app or game combined.
Ironically, Facebook also acquired Beat Games (who makes Beat Saber) last year and effectively ruined it by intentionally breaking all the mods and custom songs, leaving it a shell of its former glory.
According to steamcharts [1], player counts peaked around July 2019 and have only dwindled since the acquisition (with the exception of two small bumps when the acquisition happened in November). Average player counts are have been cut in half since then, in less than a year.
I have almost 200 hours in Beat Saber, but I haven't played it for almost a year now, now that it's just the same two-dozen songs over and over.
Modders (luckily) keep finding a way. It's just unfortunate for the player that having Facebook as an owner means they need to show more good will in preventing the distribution of custom songs so they don't get held accountable for piracy.
I paid attention to the dev discord servers for a few months after the acquisition when they were churning through new mods when the old ones broke and people gave up on trying to maintain them, but haven't checked it recently. I would expect there's probably working mods still, but it's also probably a lot harder to keep them working over time.
FB's official stance on modding is that they will support mods that don't engage in "piracy or illicit modding, including mods that infringe on third-party IP rights". [1]
That's really sad to see. I also found the included songs pretty boring, and without custom beatmaps and scoresaber it's not really very good. I wonder what FB's strategy is here - why cut out the enthusiasts?
I dunno, I feel like it’s reaching saturation. Those that want VR are getting it, but then there’s those of us who are gamers, but forget it’s even a thing until someone mentions it. I am a gamer myself (have a 2080, sitting out the 3000 series), and I honestly don’t want one nor see how it can make gaming more enjoyable for me. So to me it seems like it’s going the same route attempt #1 did in the 90s, there’s some market but not enough.
Well, you need to be open about new experiences. And until I got my first VR headset I didn't know what I missed. Now I feel that having a powerful GPU and playing a 3D game on a flat screen is such a waste.
It’s the Rift, the problem is more that I like to store it somewhere when not in use because headset + controllers + trackers take quite a bit of space on my desk.
Then have to dive behind the computer to connect a HDMI and 3 USB cables (not enough ports on front).
I have owned about a dozen VR headsets at this point, including the Quest (not the Quest 2) and the Vive Index. The Index is fantastic, but it's difficult to compare to the Quest which is truly in a category of its own.
For headsets, there are several properties that segment the market:
1. Tracking: outside cameras/emitters vs inside-out tracking
2. Tethered vs wireless (including PC powered, but using wireless transmission)
3. PC powered vs standalone device
For each of these, there are multiple vendors to choose from, except for standalone devices. In this case, the Oculus Quest is unique. There's no other competition.
Moreover, the Quest is the only device that can be run without a corresponding high end PC. If you don't have a PC like that, then the cost is prohibitive. There's also the space factor. VR needs space, which is already an issue. With the PC powered headsets, you also need that PC to be close enough to your open VR space. Otherwise, you need to rearrange your living space or invest in a VR dedicated PC.
In summary, the Vive Index is fantastic and arguably the best headset in the market right now, but the Oculus Quest fills a different niche of that market.
(And as to the topic of the article: I'm done with Oculus based on Facebook's policies).
Best headset for sitting is a inside-out, tethered VR headset.
Until recently, the Oculus Rift S would be a great pick for that.
I don't yet have an HP Reverb G2, but I expect good things out of that headset. The HTC Cosmos would also be a good choice.
The Valve Index (yes, I mistyped before) is an awesome headset, but the lighthouse emitter based tracking system isn't great for seated. Not only is it a hassle to setup, but it's easier for your chair or monitor or whatever to block the laser grid from the lighthouse units. And if you're seated, you aren't taking advantage of the highly accurate room-scale tracking the lighthouses provide. I'd stick with the convenience of an inside-out headset if you're primarily doing seated VR.
For example, I tended to prefer my Rift S for sim games (sim racing, sim flight) for all the reasons listed above.
> For each of these, there are multiple vendors to choose from, except for standalone devices. In this case, the Oculus Quest is unique. There's no other competition.
The only VR headsets I've seen so far in stores around here (a major metropolitan city) are headsets with only the lenses, in which you slot your own smartphone as the screen and CPU. Wouldn't these also count as standalone devices in your classification?
Google has killed daydream, Samsung also killed GearVR and their VR video stuff. I don't know if there are others that will still work in this kind of headset, so not sure how relevant is anymore.
These are so crappy in comparison that i wouldn't even call them VR. The Quest is several generations ahead.
Its like comparing a pre-model-T car with a car from 1950. You might argue that for some purposes both are equivalent but that doesn't capture the qualitative improvement that has happened almost everywhere. Everything is improved and some areas feel perfected in comparison.
But it's also $999, requires a beefy gaming PC, and the setup is slightly more involved. But if you already have a beefy gaming PC (I'm a PC gamer, so I already did), don't mind spending 10 minutes attaching the lighthouses to the corners of your room, and of course have the $999 to buy the full kit, it's worth it.
I've had a Rift for 3 years (not a Rift-S). I've used a Quest. I bought an Index in August because of this FB account crap but ending up selling it 2 days later.
I'm not a fan of the Index. First problem, it has horrible black levels. Everything looks like you're in a layer of fog compared to the Rift. Maybe if you've never used a Rift before you won't notice but it was shockingly bad for me.
The headphones are utter crap. I don't get whoever thought headphones that hover 1/2 inch away from your ears would work. Take whatever headphones you have now that you're listening to music on and pull them 1/2 inch away for each ear. The sound goes down, it sounds tinny, less full, bases are missing, etc. The Index sounded exactly like that. Some friends said you have to get them perfectly lined up but if that's true the moment you move your head suddenly in some game they're no longer going to be aligned.
This also means the sound leaks into the room far more than it would with on ear headphones. It's not going to be loud but it is going to be annoying for anyone within a room if they aren't making some louder noise.
Next up, Steam VR is just not as good as Oculus Connect (or whatever Oculus's home screen system is called). In part because Oculus has built in "pull up your desktop and/or multiple windows" at anytime in anytime game and pin them to say up. Apparently there's a 3rd party app that will provide this for Index/Vive but I use that feature all the time. Inside a game want to look up a walkthru just pin in there in my view.
Now for some things that no one will admit to but I will...
The Index Controllers didn't feel as good to me as Rift Controllers. I get they have fanciers sensors. I get they grip your hands. But, probably the #1 use for VR is porn. Controllers that require 2 hands to put on are not good for things that require one had to be free.
I have lots of friends in the industry, I see none of them using an Index and plenty of complaints.
As for Quest/Quest 2, even if there wasn't the FB issue it's like choosing an iPhone instead of a PS5. iPhone has tons of great games but it doesn't have PS5 level games. Similarly Quest has tons of great games, but it doesn't have PC level VR games and it will never have any porn games being locked up by Facebook. (and even if it did, do you really want FB knowing which porn games you're playing?)
I'm praying the HP Reverb G2 gets good reviews and solves most of those issues. It's apparently a month or 2 from shipping so I'm crossing my fingers I can get rid of this Rift.
I have an Index. As long as you have a solid PC, the experience is great—it single-handedly convinced me VR was more than a gimmick. Great quality picture + audio, reasonably ergonomic and I love the controls. Overall, I've been super happy with it.
Downsides to consider:
• You need a solid gaming PC (with a 2070 or better).
• Expensive ($1000 for the kit)
• Connected to the computer by a wire, awkward for "room-scale" VR
• Base stations provide great tracking but require setup (mounting high up in your room) and mean that the setup isn't very portable.
• Limited/janky access to exclusive titles. (You can hack around to get Oculus-only titles to work, but it seems rough and I haven't tried it myself.)
If you're not budget-constrained, I believe the Index will give you the best overall experience.
As more anecdata, I had a pretty satisfactory experience with my Vive on an old R9 290x from ~2013. Some more demanding games would occasionally stutter, but everything was generally smooth (based on the performance graph not dropping below the HMD's refresh rate).
The Index is higher resolution/refresh rate and will require more hardware, but if you just want to get into some VR and dick around, the Vive is more than enough to get started, can be found for <$200 used, and a ton of the popular games (e.g., Beat Saber, SuperHot VR, etc) just really aren't that graphically demanding.
The Vive is also compatible with the knuckles controllers and those can be purchased separately, so you're not totally locked out from some of the more game changing stuff either.
> for anyone who doesn't already have an active FB account (and perhaps even those who do).
This. Unless you have built up sufficiently high profile Facebook fame known inside and out of it, beyond just having a moderately active account, I wouldn’t consider it safe to spend a penny on this.
Really unfortunate that virtually no competitor exists in mobile VR segment.
What do you mean? The HTC Vive, non-pro version only costs $599 with base stations. Where are you getting $900 from?
I agree with the high total cost though. Most people pushing PC VR, will forget about how much a real VR ready PC will cost. It's easy to spend close to $3000 even when people loathed to admit it.
Controllers were always part of that $599 package (at launch, 4 years ago). The only other peripheral most owners consider almost a "must have" would be the Deluxe Audio Strap which goes for another $99.
I was so excited for the CV1 after I loved my DK2, but I now own a Vive. The Facebook acquisition was a deal-breaker, for privacy reasons and it bring patently obvious it would eventually result in this type of garbage.
There's been a lot of talk about antitrust investigations and regulating big tech. I think one really useful step would be to require multiple methods of authentication with devices like this. Oculus shouldn't require a Facebook account to use.
Why do "apps" even need to be installed on it. Isn't it just a sensor array and a couple of displays?
I used to think everyone should learn a programming language just so they can experience its expressive power but more and more I wish they would so they wouldn't get duped by really dumb marketing.
good idea...but less profitable, though Facebook will continue to track these "banned" users as they roam around the network and trade on their information anyway.
So you're saying that modern capitalism has completely supplanted the original reason for starting a company in the first place?
I did not write what I wrote as a parody. Shareholder primacy is the foremost blight on this modern existence and is responsible for an innumerably large portion of the negative externalities that cause so such much suffering today.
I would vote with my wallet, but that will accomplish exactly jack shit. There are few who will stand with me if it means threatening their pathetically precious creature comforts which our modern capitalism so dutifully provides.
Also, it is worth noting that the entire goal of capitalism is to eliminate those options, using "free-market economics" as cover for its seemingly insatiable lust for competitors to gobble up or otherwise drive out of business. Some of the very first things they teach you in b-school, about moat building and competitive advantages and all that other crap, is an outright attack on the marketplace model
less profitable wouldn't matter if the law would dictate that every device needs to support multiple vendors with feature parity and the user/owner of a device is legally entitled to use it in whatever way they see fit.
Yes, this would cause price increase. But a lot of people would gladly pay for it. The ones who don't want to, could accept a "discount" in exchange for becoming a glass citizens.
It seems like they're pushing FB as an authentication method for everything. Try and comment on a local news article (yeah, I know) and it wants to authenticate you with your FB account. Same thing with trying to buy something from a small independent web vendor. "Log in with your Facebook account" is becoming the default everywhere and it sucks.
FB sounds like it's trying to be an multinational version of WeChat by becoming the operating system of life. There are many cultural reasons why this is feasible in China but not in the US (and many other places)
I'd guess for starters that an extreme authoritarian centralized state is already normalized in China. USA is creeping that direction but there's still a ways to go
Facebook sounds more like the communist party, where they are requiring your real name, web activity, or get banned and have all your things taken away (Oculus usage, paid apps, can’t message friends, etc).
I agree that’s not a great state to be in, but think about it from that locals new org’s point of view: comment spam is a major and hard-to-solve problem, and by tying commenting to the real-world identity and enforcement of bots that Facebook provides, the news organizations get to solve that thorny problem for free. Plus news orgs are already using FB to syndicate/share, so it’s really a no-brained for them.
I wonder what the world would look like with a independent, trustworthy, non-advertising-based company/organization which provided a similar anti-spam service for free, with the option to publicly tie to verified identities as well. (For all the flack that real-name policies get, they do reduce spam and hate speech by a big margin, so any service which doesn’t verify identity isn’t really a drop-in replacement for FB as far as that news org is concerned)
> (For all the flack that real-name policies get, they do reduce spam and hate speech by a big margin, so any service which doesn’t verify identity isn’t really a drop-in replacement for FB as far as that news org is concerned)
Did we not see the same studies?
As I recall Google+/YouTube's real name policy came under fire because a large minority of people received substantially more hate speech.
I've been writing about and pushing for a decentralized system that doesn't require centralized services or verified identities - because any centralized system will have biases and flaws, and having real identities tied to your online comments has can have serious real world consequence.
If you want to be authentication for everything then you definitely can't intermingle the authentication part of that (who is this person) with the authorisation part of that (what are they allowed to do). In other words, Facebook deciding I don't have the right to use it's service should have no bearing on whether I have provided evidence that I am who I assert to be, and whether other services should choose to service me.
My sentiment exactly. It’s crazy to think Facebook can simultaneously ban me from their platform and essentially steal whatever $X amount of dollars I spent on the oculus store. What makes it worse is they’re not even letting people who’ve made an oculus account in the past escape from this as they are now forcing ALL accounts to be linked to Facebook in the next couple years.
I think we need full separation of hardware and software. One company makes the hardware, others make the software. And let's not forget that it was like this for a long time (IBM+clones vs Microsoft, OS/2, Linux).
Today, the distinction between hardware and software is murky. Hardware can't even be tested without co-development of software. Even making these things happen in separate departments of the same business, by people who eat lunch together, is inefficient when trying to move fast and create new things. I often have hardware and software development tools open on my computer at the same time.
The Quest 2 is amazing and an important leap for VR. If you care about the state of VR, it must sell well.
Frankly, this is not the hill to die on. If you plan to own a smartphone or really use any kind of service or internet browsing in the modern world going forward you’re going to be faced with these kind of privacy dilemmas. Better to just accept it and move on with your life than to basically live like a Luddite for the rest of your life. Facebook will not be the first or last corporation to ask you to relax your absolute anonymity.
If only there were other companies with competing products which would assuage one’s concerns regarding privacy and/or anonymity and guard against Luddite lifestyles.
“Must sell well...hill to die on” feel a bit extreme, particularly given everything that has transpired in 2020.
Other VR headsets are far more expensive and some require tethering to expensive gaming computers. Oculus Quest 2 has no true competitor at its price point, and some might say any price point.
Mate, if Facebook actually cared about the VR scene they wouldn’t have broken the best VR headset to date by _requiring_ a fb login. Without a fb login the device is broken. If _they_ wanted VR to succeed they wouldn’t have done this. Take it up with them.
This is absolutely the hill to die on. Oculus has competitors. The answer to save VR isn't to buy Oculus, it's to buy other headsets and hope Oculus dies unless they reverse their decision to require a Facebook account.
I wish that was true. If that was the case, I would've bought a headset from a competitor in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, while there are many competitive VR headsets out there, I cannot recall a single other VR headset that works standalone without a PC.
Not even mentioning the price point of Quest and the fact that it can be used for both PCVR and standalone, thus bringing a superset of features of other headsets. No need to set up lightboxes and being able to just buy the headset and play without anything extra is a value proposition that I don't see any other VR headset can provide.
Hopefully, the success of Quest will provide a kick in the ass to other manufacturers to make their own versions. Imo, the standalone+PCVR combo with no lightboxes is the future, with lightbox PCVR-only headsets being reserved for highly niche uses.
> Ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company
Well, at least you know yourself, but I don't appreciate this attempt to normalize your moral bankruptcy and ridicule others who haven't sold and don't want to sell their soul.
Maybe one day you'll be forced to confront the consequences of this lack of ethics. Until then, kindly fuck right off.
I have a Gear VR and I've been on the fence about upgrading to a real proper mobile VR setup but thankfully Oculus required this Facebook integration and made this decision a lot easier.
The quest two barely counts as VR. You will only have mobile titles, which are terrible compared to PC. to run quest with PC you need to have a VR ready PC in the first place.
The content on the Quest may not be "desktop fidelity", but my time with the Quest 1 was VERY much enjoyable (especially compared to the Oculus Go), and often preferred over my desktop VR HMD simply for the convenience. And the content was quite good.
By this same metric, the Switch is also plagued with "mobile titles" given it's Android base and Tegra X1 mobile GPU. But most folks DON'T think of it like that, and for good reason: the Switch can keep up just fine in it's own market.
And if the Quest 2 has improved specs in every area over the Quest 1, then it's completely FINE for what it is.
It's just the company behind it fucked up a good thing.
I am sick of verifying my FB account periodically after deleting the account and re-create with same email. Then, the weirdness came up, such as timeline only shows a couple of posts or nothing even I visited friends page and showed recent posts. And first a few months, FB asked me to upload the verifiable ID to unblock my FB account. (What the hell they need my ID ? I already enabled 2FA but kept complaining suspicious activity.)
Blizzard is asking me for government ID before they'll DELETE my account. It makes no sense. I feel like there should be some government agency that is interested in this misuse of their ID's/info, but I haven't found it.
Once upon a time this issue was resolved by not really ever actually deleting anything - just soft-deleting it and moving it off into an archive somewhere from whence it could be restored... unfortunately not-really-deleted stuff was insanely abused by marketing so that consumers no longer trust it and it's become illegal to retain this information after an account closure in some jurisdictions - so now we can't have nice things.
I don't have any addresses, pictures or names associated with my account that my ID can verify. Plus, if someone deletes my account at this point, they'd be doing me a favor :)
I'd guess gaming companies have to have more robust processes than most companies. They have to deal with bullying, siblings, sore losers and scammers (people have mentality that it's a game so it's not a real scam).
If only we had some sort of bureau of protecting consumers - the tech companies are bad but the people I really want to see fines for bad UI are credit companies. Trying to un-enrolled from once free-of-charge credit reporting is insanely difficult.
That's just it... generally speaking, there's no law against using federal IDs in any way that companies desire. There's also no laws against aggregating data that gives corporations too much information about consumers, and no laws governing how such data can be used, a right to deletion, and other protections.
The laws in the US governing privacy and data use have never been updated for the computer age, because the people who have been in power for the whole computer age generally don't understand computers.
I have an active FB account, but I would never use it to log in to anything other than FB via a sandboxed browser profile, and if I had to, I wouldn't use that service.
Yea - I'd be unwilling to use Oculus unless I could specifically tie it to a fake FB account (or no account at all). I barely use my FB account but I never want gaming integrated with social media in a manner I can't control simply due to personal preference and privacy.
I thought about using a fake, Oculus-only account but that's a false sense of separation as FB would see connections from my accounts coming from the same source IP unless I was going to separate them via anonymizing proxy.
We have smartphones now with a pretty wide rollout - I wouldn't be surprised if people that legitimately all share the same computer do have problems getting flags on their account from facebook.
Honestly though, the real answer is who knows - it's entirely proprietary information and all we can do on the outside is observe the fact that is does seem to be a pretty flawed detection system and guess at why that is. Does facebook use sentiment analysis of posts or post frequency to ban users they think are fake? Do they look for similar content of posts from different users to try and detect troll farms? I don't know and FB really doesn't want to talk about it.
While I agree doing anything with a Facebook account is gross, it seems rather, err, trusting to think that Facebook wasn't already linking accounts anyway and are essentially not just getting rid of the system that does that and forcing users to do it for them.
I couldn’t agree more. I had the fun of a 30 day ban on PlayStation because my kid sent something inappropriate to his friend. Now I imagine a scenario like this happening but the consequences are my Facebook account shut down permanently. Definitely a huge turn off.
Realistically if you don't want to manage hundreds of separate logins then what are your options? On the whole it still seems much easier to get reasonable behaviour and human involvement out of Facebook than out of Google.
Yeah, I think part of the problem is that Facebook has never had an actual product which people pay for and expect to work. Their whole culture and set of priorities are counter to this.
Unfortunately I get the impression that this is how you get proper support from Facebook or Google. Make a Reddit or Hacker News post, get a few upvotes, and someone with influence inside the company files an "Oops Help My Friend" support ticket or contacts another person with the right authority to take a look.
In the Catholic theology, there's a concept of Saints, who are basically humans that intercede with God on the behalf of ordinary mortals. People will sometimes address prayers to saints in the hope that the prayer will be more effective. Probably similar in other religions too but I'm pulling from memories of catholic school
The 21st century is making me rethink how atheist I truely am. I think by following the moral code of face masks and social distancing, I will spare my family from plague and those who scoff at these codes will get smited. I put my faith and security into these big corps that don't even have an corporeal existance, and work with us through intermediaries like Amazon through ups and Microsoft through gamestop, Google doesnt even have a customer service branch and I had no way but to dig up my old school email in order to prove to them I am who I say I am. I tithe to the market, my funding of corps will pay back in future wealth. I perform rituals with my team chanting a praying that azure will stop acting wonky.
They don't intercede for some authority, though. Bodhisattvas are more like the folks that hold the door open for people and don't leave until everyone else has.
Huh. I grew up Catholic and I never understood the point of praying to saints. I always chalked it up to superstition. Your explanation sort of makes sense,
It is superstition, same here for my Muslim country, people pray at the tombs of dead Imams, though it is shunned by almost all scholars, but ignorance begets superstition.
This is a reason why better education for all is the way forward for humanity.
.. and prior to the reformation, people would pay priests to pray to the saints to intercede on their behalf.
People got so upset about the Catholic church selling the right to bend the divine rules that one guy wrote an extremely angry listicle, made a viral post on a church door, and the rest is history. And centuries of sectarian warfare.
I wonder if there is a way to incentivize the behavior of "I work at a big company and have the ability to help out a stranger with a problem"? Perhaps people who help others with these issues (which are public by nature of being discussed on reddit/twitter/etc) can put it as an item on their resume when looking to switch jobs - something like "I care about the community and people who use the products I help build. I advocated for [this person (with link to public forum)] which ultimately resulted in [this solution (with link to release note if possible)]."
Of course there is a discussion to have about incentivizing the _wrong_ behavior (the need to create publicity around issues that shouldn't exist in the first place / only people with "clout" become the ones who get their issues resolved).
People on HN are not really strangers, we are part of a community. By helping one of us, they help one of their in groups. Not helping might devalue their investment in this place.
HN users are the early adopters that small group of users who have much more influence early on in projects. Care of early adopters makes sense.
I assume that quite often those are marketing & PR people who use special tools to track every mention of a product / company name.
Many companies (especially niche ones) buy those services that basically track the whole internet - so their representatives can comment on issues.
Bigger companies seem not to care that much, apart from maybe twitter? And those few thousand upvote posts on reddit.
There are groups inside Facebook to raise issues like this. I can guarantee this one has already been escalated.
They wouldn't allow just any employee to "fix" these issues. Too often there is a lot of context that is omitted from the shared story, so it's not just a matter of hitting a button to remove a block.
The very fact that regular employees of these companies might have the clout to take bribes for simply giving their attention to something, speaks to the absurdity of how much power we've given the organizations. We're talking about Facebook programmers like they're state senators.
This has happened with me re: Intuit, Microsoft and Adobe as well - all companies with proper support channels - issue resolution/escalation for people with the "right contacts" goes about 100x faster.
What about the 99.9% of the rest who don't have those contacts?
Anecdotal, but.. I got dicked around by Wayfair for almost two months (stalled order, various excuses, well meaning but essentially powerless customer support). In the end all it took to resolve was one tweet at their account. Next day the order cleared.
That is a fantastic comment. I was reading through Google SRE stuff. Lots of good info. Lots of very, very bad ideas too. Lots of it is "at scale, you can't make everyone happy, so don't try." You end up with SLOs and SLIs based on percentages of availability, errors, etc. If 99.99% of requests are good, don't worry about the rest. However, at scale, 0.01 can be literally millions of real, breathing people with feeling and priorities and things to do. When you give away your product for free, these are good trade offs. When you sell your product, the same assumptions may not apply.
I cannot afford to ignore 0.01% of incoming requests because we charge per request. At a certain point, yes, money and pros and cons yadda yadda yadda. It just feels that, once again, people are saying, "but Google does it!" -- and that does not mean you should.
100% is unachievable, especially at Google scale. Your car or coffee shop or whatever also fails 0.0x% of the time. Heck the energy net in western countries doesn't reach 99.999% uptime and I would call it very dependable.
I'd say the biggest problem it the non-existent support. It's fine if 0.01% fails, as long as there is human troubleshooting or help available if necessary.
I think you are very confused about how availability is tracked. If a class of users is always getting an error this would be investigated. There is literally no way, at any scale, to guarantee 100% availability.
>I think you are very confused about how availability is tracked. If a class of users is always getting an error this would be investigated.
Oh, please, you are confused. I worked at Google, most teams just don’t have metrics like this.
While I don’t think it’s acceptable, reality is that it’s expensive to compute such metric, i.e. you need to slice you monitoring stream per each user, has privacy implications, and often it’s unclear what action should be taken.
I'm very excited about VR. I bought the GearVR, then the first Oculus Rift, and most recently the Quest 1.
Now, instead of buying the Quest 2 (which is unquestionably the best-value headset available today) I'm waiting for a competitor to enter the space.
Imagine if your desktop monitor would only turn on when synced to an active account on a social media platform. If you decide to leave that platform, or if that platform decides you aren't providing enough invasive information about yourself and decides to leave you, you've got an expensive paperweight. No warning or recourse. No thank you.
The devs working on this are generally not the devs who are decrying the harmful effects. In reality, when you work on such projects you tend to isolate yourself from criticism.
Or, quite possibly, they have no other choice. Some devs have the freedom to walk away from a job that they find morally detestable. But many can't refuse or leave because they're under contract and can't afford the break-contract fee, or they're visa holders whose visa is tied to their employment, or they have a family to take care of and can't afford the time spent job searching. It's unfortunately not hard these days for any sufficiently funded business to find developers for morally questionable or outright unethical business models
The cases where people actually have no options (H-1B who had no idea what kind of business social media is and thus needs the job to stay in the US) are pretty rare.
Yes there are people who think they need a big house in the bay area or need a Tesla, but that doesn't mean they have no other options but to work at Twitter or Facebook.
I was talking less about people who are Facebook employees and more about people who are Accenture / Cognizant / Infosys / etc employees or contractors, who get subcontracted to do work at Facebook or wherever else. They just have to convince a fresh college grad or visa applicant to sign say a 2-year contract, and that person may not realize quite what they're signing until they're put on a project
Edit: I wasn't trying to disagree with you if it sounded like I was. I meant this as "in addition to what you said" not "instead of what you said"
I know many such developers who work at these companies helping build these products and who hate these policies; they don't work on whatever feels most direct like the evil feature itself, but they don't seem to have an issue working for the company helping build parts of the UI or networking or whatever.
Moreover, even if they were the same devs, they're all working on such small parts of a bigger product that no one person or team is responsible for any of the compounding decisions that lead to this.
To be clear, I think the FB/Oculus devs are doing impressive work. I get value out of FB (that's why I still have an account) and Oculus is the primary driver of progress in VR today.
However, I don't believe it's a user-friendly product decision to tightly couple FB's VR hardware to its social media platform. It's yet another push towards a walled garden, much like Google's AMP and Apple's app store.
"Imagine if your desktop monitor would only turn on when synced to an active account on a social media platform...or if that platform decides you aren't providing enough invasive information about yourself"
Yep, they managed to convince me not to order Quest 2. And I already own Quest 1 and Index. Hope Valve is going to ship stand-alone headset, at least their incentives are aligned.
Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed.
As well as the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" bullshit. For every ban they should be required to issue a very specific clarification on why exactly were you banned and let you to speak to a real person.
Many people still will buy. There is a reason we use representative democracy rather than direct democracy - qualified people should outlaw some bad things the crowd can't resist itself.
Oculus is a niche product, it will be forgotten in a few years just like 3D TVs. Facebook knows it and it would not spend a dime on good customer service, they will just implement something good enough.
Folks often overestimate the power consumers have in meaningfully shaping a market. Consumer protections are rarely gained by simply refusing to do business with market leaders who behave in consumer hostile ways. Regulation really seems to be our best shot at reversing course on what is nothing short of the theft of digital goods from consumers.
Strongly disagree. Using the law in this strong arm manner stiffles innovation.
Yes, the current Oculus / Facebook situation sucks.
However, blanket statements like "Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed." Would ban very legitimate products such as Amazon's physical buttons for restocking supplies.
Sure the Dash buttons are discontinued, but there's definitely an interesting area of products that might be developed in the coming years for other products in this wide domain.
> However, blanket statements like "Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed." Would ban very legitimate products such as Amazon's physical buttons for restocking supplies.
OK, rephrase it slightly and say that it must not require an online account from a specific provider. If I can come up with an API endpoint that I want to use instead of Amazon, and I want to reconfigure my Dash button to use it, I should be legally and technically allowed to do so.
The regulation doesn't need to ban any categories of products, or mandate any features. It just needs to say that if your product depends on online connectivity for a significant part of its functionality, then it must not employ technical measures to prevent interoperability. Hardware that's sold to consumers already needs to meet various compliance standards, such as RF emissions testing; this doesn't seem like a heavy burden in comparison.
Of course, such a policy is very unlikely to be enacted in the US any time soon, but hey, I can dream.
Some people seem to believe Internet is the new electricity. Even if this is so, electricity doesn't have colour - only voltage, amperage and frequency. My toaster doesn't restrict me to use only electricity from a specific power plant. I can power it up even from a car battery, if I tinker with it a little. Similarly, a device like the Dash button should use whatever endpoint that implements the required API, and not be restricted to a specific provider.
Those weren't innovations, those were solutions in search of a problem. Probably contributed to their discontinuation. Also, what "innovation" of the past 20 years has been truly innovative, life-changing, and a net positive for humanity? Pretty much everything that has come out of Silicon Valley has been at best neutral for society (creating new markets and revenue for businesses aren't a positive in my eyes).
We need to stop pulling the "stifling innovation" card. Not stifling innovation has led us to society's cancerous relationship with technology.
Smart+cellular phones, I think clearly fit the category of life changing and world changing. World societies have been greatly improved by wireless access, everywhere.
I once had a Logitech universal remote control that required opening an account to use it. Sent it back, bought an AllInOne, and never since considered purchasing any products from Logitech. Unfortunately most people don't give a shit and just do what the companies tell them.
As well as the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" bullshit. For every ban they should be required to issue a very specific clarification on why exactly were you banned and let you to speak to a real person.
GDPR requires that algorithmic decisions get this kind of oversight. GDPR is the way to get redress here.
That would probably a step too far. But also unnecessary.
Make a law that requires them to give you a full refund for all hardware that you can’t use and all software purchased over the lifetime of the account.
That will make them incur a cost that makes it worthwhile for them to be more careful.
Edit: Downstream commenters make a good point. You'd have to put in a formula for "depreciation" of the refund, so you can't just get a refund years later.
> So, after 5 years you can just do something stupid to get banned and get a full refund? Sweet.
If this was the law, then companies would change the way their products work or the way they ban people. Instead of banning, on Facebook, they would prevent the user from posting and interacting with other users. You would in essence get a very nice advert-only feed but not banned.
> So, after 5 years you can just do something stupid to get banned and get a full refund?
Yes. They should be able to ban you from their online platform if you misuse it and don't behave yourself but they shouldn't have a right to brick the device you've bought, no matter what you do.
On the surface, this seems like an elegant solution. However, it also seems to me like it would need exceptions.
Since we are talking about online games, the topic of how to deal with people caught cheating (as in using third party cheating tools) comes to mind. It is typical to ban those people. If a ban was synonymous with a refund, there is little incentive to not cheat.
If the law allowed for exceptions like this (e.g. banned with cause), then it'd be pretty hollow as the company is also the final arbiter of what cause is.
It is possible I am missing something though as this is not something I have put a lot of thought into.
Feels to me like account moderations needs to be handled external to private companies operating a platform... like insurance or a credit history system
The EU actually has such a "conformity" law for goods[0], however I don't see how it would apply in this case. It also takes into account the point raised by the other commenters: "the seller can only refuse if this causes disproportionate costs on him in comparison with the alternative remedy, taking into account the value of the goods or the significance of the lack of conformity"
Presumably the payment method will be banned and getting banned in a old game purposely to get a refund sounds like a lot of work for 60$. I can't imagine that would be significantly abuse.
Sellers should not be able to take away goods after the sell; that's pretty much universally understood as theft.
I would have the law along the lines that Hardware should not be limited or curtailed in usage via any optional on-line related identification.
That way for things that may well suit having linked account - fine, but not curtailing that avenue. Basicly making having it linked to an on line account - optional via consumer choice, as it should always be.
> Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed.
You have just outlawed Roku. An online account is required to make it work, because that's how it was designed to work. It's a rather useless device without the online account.
Well, you could design an open API that others can use, too (server-side, not client side!). So the device can work with competitors, too, meaning it won't require an account at only one company. That would be a compromise - at least in theory others could replace the server parts.
I feel you're ignoring the subtle point - these devices are designed as an extension of their service not as general computing devices. I can easily replace "Roku" with "RSA SecureID keyfob" and have the same conversation - it is not a generic device; it is a targeted hardware extension of their core business model. An "online account" (an account with RSA the company) is required for this keyfob to be of any value other than a LED screen displaying random numbers.
Fundamentally, I don't see a difference there. They are general computing devices, which are then restricted to talk only to a subset of computers, and only on a subset of protocols. Similarly, the RSA SecureID keyfob can be a public/private key, where the private key is secure on the keyfob, used to generate the digits shown, and the public key is printed on the outside. Anyone with the public key can verify that the private key was used to generate it. An "online account" is not required for the keyfob to be of value.
> Fundamentally, I don't see a difference there. They are general computing devices, which are then restricted to talk only to a subset of computers, and only on a subset of protocols.
I would choose to disagree on this concept; from a business perspective, the hardware engineering design going into making the device has a targeted purpose from the outset, and is (cost) subsidized by that company specifically for their service (meaning, they could take a loss on the hardware and make up for it on the Service). Roku and RSA are extracting money for their service, not for their hardware - just like the Amazon Prime TV stick, or imagine if you will a Netflix stick made and sold by Netflix directly. The value to these companies is your service fee month over month, not the hardware they're providing - the hardware is just a delivery vehicle.
That does not mean the devices cannot technically do something other than what their primary intended purpose is; the alternative "TV in a box" projects can run on things like an Amazon Stick with a bit of work (I did it myself to mine, was neat to play with) just that it's not their primary purpose from the OEM. So can you use a RSA key without RSA? Maybe, but that's not what our primary argument is about here. The GP to this thread stated:
> Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed.
This is what I'm discussing - the GP would have the government require a device which is designed to work with a very particular online service be able to work... without their service. "Netflix, your Netflix TV stick which is designed to work with the Netflix service must also be able to work without Netflix service." That is what the GP is proposing be made a law, which I very much don't agree with - it literally ignores the entire point for the existence for certain types of hardware such as a Netflix TV stick.
I don't understand your reply or what you're trying to disagree with; comparing a Yubikey - a product intentionally designed to interoperate with many other services and hardware platforms at it's core - is being compared to a RSA SecureID key which is a singular, targeted Enterprise solution ($$$) which does not intend to interoperate with other competing solutions (TOTP e.g.). RSA SecureID and Yubikey have different core business models.
"We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" is how the Internet has always worked.
The dirty secret of the Internet - going back decades - is that it's concept of moderation mostly relies upon unstated or understated rules half-enforced and adjudicated by volunteers or underpaid contractors with the power of judge, jury, and executioner. This is arguably by design: the vast majority of what moderators are dealing with is spam, which has the properties of being cheap to execute and difficult to filter for. Hence, anti-spam efforts are swift and merciless. More modern efforts to deal with things like foreign election interference and fake news are arguably extensions of this same ongoing effort to summarily hang and execute spammers.
Facebook is not alone in this either: Google's done it from the very beginning and their death penalty stings far harder. There's a few exceptions to this, such as Wikipedia's ArbCom or other collaborative Free Software projects with code-of-conduct rules and moderator transparency. However, even those platforms will summarily execute spammers.
This may be the only way to scale a service that is free to users. But once you are selling a product to paying customers, those customers need to be at a different tier with real customer support.
Those paying customers are already incredibly unlikely to be spammers. They cannot be handled the same way free accounts are.
This is a cultural problem as much as an economic imperative. Apple and Google both run app stores with distribution rules, but Apple will bend over backwards to try and get you in compliance with their rules, while Google will just delete your Gmail. I've also heard far fewer reports of Apple iCloud accounts getting summarily deleted compared to Google or Facebook.
No account would mean anonymous access, wouldn't it? That's fine, but I don't think many people would frequent anonymous communities since moderation would become extremely difficult, unless the presence was tied with the hardware. Tying an an involuntary account to hardware would probably destroy the second hand market.
Wow, thought I'd be one of the few struggling with this.
Bought the device with the hope that I could register an account for the first time in years, but similar to others, my account was instantly banned with no explanation other than "violating community guidelines."
One of Facebook's arguments against anti-trust accusations has been to point to the lack of consumer harm. This is fairly obvious evidence of material harm to consumers who just bought $500 paperweights.
Yeah, it's extremely hard to open an FB account anymore, which is why aged accounts sell for thousands of dollars on the <mumble mumble mumble> <cough>. Won't put that info here.
I'm frankly surprised FB would go this route then, are they assuming only existing FB users will buy? They have to know they've basically killed the ability to create new accounts.
Facebook bans accounts fairly regularly for hate speech, which pretty much means whatever they want. It seems ludicrous to me that an edgy teenager can have their headset bricked because they posted some spicy political memes.
This also happened to me, had an account 5 years ago, stopped using it, deleted the account on their website. Last week decided to create it again to prepare to eventually link to Oculus.. Instantly banned. Literally on the "Confirm Your Email" page got redirected to violated the community guidelines. And I'm not even from the US..
I think it's good to add to the discussion here for other HN readers that the reason I mentioned it was that some people are suggesting this is a measure put in-place by facebook to reduce election interference (as it's happening right now in the US). That may be the case, it may also not be since everyone (doesn't matter where from) seems to be getting banned alike.
There are similar stories on reddit, with people speculating that the old account actually still existed and the ban was because the new account was imitating an existing account. The idea that they would keep a "deleted" account around seems highly plausible given Facebook's hunger for data.
As far as I understand it, there's three account states you can be in:
- Active = Normal
- Deactivated = Deactivated/Not In-Use/Asked to deactivate
- Deleted = After asking for deletion, wait (don't log in) for a period of 60? days and your account is deleted.
In my particular scenario, I downloaded my data, went through deletion, waited the period and then confirmed the account was deleted (5y ago).
Deactivation is what Facebook directs everybody to, but there is actually a way to completely delete an account too. With an actually deleted account, you have to create a new one, there isn't a reactivation option.
Given that Facebook creates shadow profiles for "users" who have never had a Facebook account, I wonder what "deleted" really means in terms of Facebook's social graph. Is your identity back to being treated as a shadow profile or is there now an empty hole in the graph?
It sometimes happens if you create account from a suspicious IP address, such as VPN or shared computer at school or cafe. They are trying to prevent account takeovers and fake accounts when some dormant users left weak passwords and got in a leak somewhere. But Facebook is also sometimes a bit too proactive in banning new accounts, because they use this as an opportunity to extract more information from you - you can only unban the account by providing phone number, scan of your ID card etc.. That suits them so they like banning more.
Facebook, their "real name" policy, and their ban policy when combined with hardware like Oculus seem like a series of really bad product decisions. Like with combining messengers between Instagram and Facebook, the business reason is probably to make Oculus harder to split off in the event of anti-trust action. Pretty gross.
I recently discovered a similar thing with Twitter: when you sign up with e-mail, they block your account and will unblock it only if you give them your phone number.
There are services online that the big providers can use now that give them this info. I don't have one to hand but I've seen then when I've gone hunting for the answer to that exactly question.
How is it not your real phone number? I currently have no cell service on a device. It only uses WiFi. I have a VoIP app on it. People use it, it rings my phone, I answer it.
People's definition of "real" is so arbitrary in a way that suits them, but it's no less correct than the answer I provide.
Statistical models that say "most accounts we don't ban have these characteristics; most accounts we ban have other characteristics; your account is in the second group so BAN!"
Which is just positively-reinforcing tripe making it harder to do anything remotely outside the "norm" even if your intent is 100% non hostile.
- Political memes in the masses are making fact-based and rational political conversation difficult to impossible.
- Teenagers should not be on social networks.
- Teenagers who aren't old enough to vote who want to post political memes - that's like 10x me less caring whether they're banned from Facebook.
I have no problem with the ban.
However, Facebook should separate out its identity service from its social networking service. It might make more money doing this because more people would stick to its services. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to authenticate with a Facebook account even though Facebook deems me unworthy of participating in its social network.
Hard thing is that even legit political opinion will be banned if there is enough people that is not in line with your vision. Or like in Ukraine where Facebook moderation team is very very pro government with very narrow vision.
Imagine USA moderation of Facebook consists only of pro Trump's fans with power instant ban Your account.
I think the bigger problem is Facebook's policing of bots, especially since this is a big election year. I'm going to guess this was the reason for OP's ban
I had a post taken down for posting a link to a local gay event. Their algorithm cant figure out pro vs hate speech.
So I started migrating the few apps I used FB logins from, (spotify), then stopped using google login because of facebook. Taught me, not to trust these companies with my 3rd party accounts THAT I PAY FOR.
The reason they put is 'hate speech' but I'm basically convinced it's a single, stock error message they show regardless of the reason. How can an account be banned for hate speech 7 minutes after it was created?
It seems like unfortunate timing - Facebook's cracking down on fake accounts before the election right as the Quest 2 launches. I'd guess that a lot of the people signing up for Facebook just for the Quest don't follow the same patterns as a typical user, so the algorithm flags them and removes them. I'm sure they'll get reinstated once Facebook manually reviews, but it's definitely a major annoyance.
Sidenote, I got my quest 2 yesterday and from a hardware standpoint, it's blown me away coming from PSVR. Too bad the Facebook nonsense keeps it from being a must have product.
> It seems like unfortunate timing - Facebook's cracking down on fake accounts before the election right as the Quest 2 launches.
No, this isn't new, more people are just seeing it now since they just expanded the market of users.
It has been like this for years: If you go out of your way to create an account disconnected from a social graph so that it doesn't creepily alert people that would have saved your number/email and uploaded all their contacts in the past, Facebook will ban the account within 10 minutes.
Somebody's inevitable rebuttal: "Yeah but my grandma just made an account and didn't get banned"
Okay, good for you. The described reality here is also valid.
To make it not ban the account you can upload a contact photo and try to friend request multiple people in a social graph. The time limit is very short and you will otherwise very quickly get instabanned or stuck in a security verification loop where the verification never comes.
This is just creepy Facebook behavior for their data mining operation, now masquaraded as "ensuring quality of accounts". This is the same behavior as when they use insecure SMS one time passwords instead of client side code generation, and then use that phone number to add it to the social graph.
Their behavior is very consistent and there is no one individual there responsible for it and even understands the use case.
In this case, this is just another byproduct of Facebook employees living in the warped reality where everyone loves the Facebook product and has it. They honestly believe it there and you should see how confused and affronted they will act when you tell them you don't have an account.
This description makes alot of sense and further convinces me that Facebook especially needs some steep regulation to curb that behavior... or disappear.
My Facebook account was banned multiple times during an 8-year period when it was 100% inactive. Each time they demanded more invasive forms of verification. First, verify a phone number. Then, upload a picture of my driver's license. Finally, I had to upload a picture of my driver's license AND a secondary photo of myself that was supposed to be taken right then for that purpose.
I will never consider using any service that requires a Facebook account, nor should anyone else.
It seems to me that the U.S. is ripe for an updating of its consumer protection laws. Particularly w.r.t. shrink-wrap license and other attempts to impose unwelcome terms that the buyer didn't know about at the time of the sale.
I imagine our existing consumer-protection laws were passed over the opposition of monied interests. If so, I wonder how close we are to having the political will do to do that again.
At a minimum, a "ban" of the Oculus account should also include an immediate refund of any and all purchases. It's absolutely ridiculously to think they can just keep all that money while depriving a customer of software licenses they paid for!
Not even that is good enough, a ban on an account should have a VERY high bar, and that bar needs to be highly regulated. Right now it's just games, maybe movies, but it could apply to all kinds of software and apps... and this stuff is important. You can't cut a person off from being able to purchase and use their puchased software. It's too important.
Arbitrary account bans already impact more substantive business services. It's not that rare to read of situations where small businesses have had their Amazon stores, Gsuite, Google Ads, or Google Store (publisher) accounts arbitrarily banned with no recourse.
heck I don't understand why Facebook doesn't exclude accounts linked to a headset from bot bans, max 1 per headset of course. If fake new Facebook accounts are worth $400+ to bad actors we are in bad shape.
Indeed, and it would force Facebook have some skin in the game because banning would cost them real money. I'm betting once each ban starts to cost them hundreds of $ they will start to at least put some human eyes in front of it before the ban hammer comes down.
I agree, and I think there's kind of an elephant in the room with respect to all Terms of Service Agreements.
Anybody with a mobile phone (as well as a plethora of other products) has inevitably agreed to dozens of pages of legal doctrine which they don't understand, any probably wouldn't without a competent lawyer on hand. But nevertheless, every minor service update, we all hit "I Accept", despite having no understanding of what we've agreed to.
Is this not massively problematic? What happens if a company actually tries to draw significant action against consumers using the terms of service as their contract?
My guess re. 'how close': approximately 48 quintillion light years away. The US has been corporatist for a long while and is blatantly so since Citizens United - the idea that a consumer protection law would pass in this environment is as 'possible' as the world taking climate change seriously at any point before we are all boiled alive.
Today my OQ2 arrived. I created an account just for the purpose of pairing the device. I used my real credentials and a gmail email address. I got banned immediately by FB, and cannot init the device. FU FB.
I already filed a ticket. I was told that if I followed community guidelines I wouldn’t get banned. Thanks, “Jessica”. Many of the oculus support pages use Facebook, and I’m banned from reaching them, which is pure irony in this case.
I had a similar experience with Facebook and a business-related thing last summer.
The company I'm working for has a Facebook account that is more or less "broken" — managed by email addresses that no longer work for the company, unmanaged profile page, etc. I also don’t have a personal Facebook account, so I went ahead and created one and then started to clean up the mess.
Immediately my account was deactivated. I went through a process of offering a phone number and countless CAPTCHA's, which would result in my account being reactivated but then deactivated again upon the next login. Eventually I got the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" ban-hammer.
I'm sort of beyond outrage or even annoyance at this point… it's all just kind of funny and stupid. When I try to figure out a way out of this pickle, the best idea I can come up with is making a bot that logs in to Facebook, wanders around "Liking" q-anon posts, and then I'd have an account that Facebook would accept as a real human being for when I need to get actual work done with their platform.
The idea that I could have an account with hundreds of games I purchased be taken away from me without reason, or without recourse is absurd. Facebook, or really anything holding licensed content needs to be regulated.
If you get banned from the Steam community for spamming/harassing/being awful your game library is still there. Even if you get banned for cheating in a game, you only lose access to that game and not the rest of your library.
I lost full access to my account when a friend gifted me a CD key he bought from someone on Ebay. I think it was originally bought with a stolen credit card, so a chargeback was issued, which then meant my whole account was locked out.
Support did restore it, eventually. I got the impression it was a one time mercy. This was back in 2010 so their policies may have changed.
"This account has been disabled as a gift subscription that you recently accepted in your account has been reported as fraudulent. The subscription has been removed. We will make an exception in your case and reactivate the account at this time. Please refrain from accepting Steam gifts from unknown sources in the future."
Putting risk on buyers of "stolen goods" is normal, so I wasn't upset at Steam for that part. But having the entire account impacted is another story.
As @asymptotically3 said, community banning doesn't take away your games, and in-game banning only blocks you from that specific game's multiplayer. In the past you could risk account suspension if you chargebacked purchases or redeemed stolen keys, but even that got changed years ago to just remove the specific game/license from your account instead.
Only large-scale fraud would get you banned, and even then I doubt they would disable your account entirely and not just disable future purchasing.
Much of the backlash regarding the acquisition has centered on Facebook's business model — data mining and advertising. This isn't a concern for Carmack, who says he "just can't get very worked up about it ." While he appreciates the need for privacy, "the idea that companies are supposed to interact with you and not pay attention has never seemed sane to me ... I rather like the recommendations that Amazon gives me on each visit. Educate me. What terrible outcome is expected from this?"
So actually he was fine with this from the start? And while he is moving on to AI and whatnot, he is still currently employed by Oculus, which leads me to believe this is his stance today.
I don't know how to feel about it. Even if you look past the privacy issues, he has engineered a product with hardware DRM! It just a shit product.
It’s VIP tunnel vision. Rich people with celebrity status never suffer the negative effects of those systems. In fact, it actually benefits them because the system knows they’re rich and actively favours them because they’re considered more valuable than the rest of us.
Of course he doesn’t get worked up because if his assistant calls for support on anything they get routed to the VIP support system and a team of people spring into action to solve the problem for him.
People like Carmack don’t have to use the shitty systems they’re building, so they don’t care. He’s just another rich asshole IMO.
As much as I love VR (I even backed the Oculus kickstarter at the time), I can't justify spending money developing for a system that can brick the devices of my users on a whim.
They shot themselves in the foot by having this FB account requirement.
I too have the Quest 1, absolutely love it, and would have immediately purchased the Quest 2 if FB had not gone back on their explicit promise to never require an FB account.
Someone PLEASE make a privacy-first (i.e. "NORMAL") headset with similar specs to the Quest 2 - you can charge more for all I care.
This is what scares me most about google products. If I lost my gmail account, I would be totally screwed. More surface area across google products just gives me more of a chance to get banned by some false positive somewhere, with no recourse because none of these big companies seem to care about the human. So I try to avoid google products.
There parallels with any of these giant single user account companies.
The big difference here is that Google, for now, doesn't care if you create multiple accounts while Facebook requires one and only one account that is tied to your real life identity.
If I could create a fake FB account and not be banned, this wouldn't be an issue at all.
Although I also have various concerns with Google, I feel like lumping them in here is a bit counterproductive. Facebook is on a whole other level to Google in many of these respects.
I think this business model where someone buying purchasing a physical product must register their data with manufacturer or 3rd party service and be constantly online should be made illegal. There is no business need for this apart from spying on people and gathering data to improve manipulation of messages to trick people into buying more into the manufacturer ecosystem. We need to stop this.
What could you do with a Google Home or Amazon Echo without connectivity? The physical product is premised on being able to search the web and stream music.
It should have self-hosted voice recognition software and be able plug to your own music collection on your NAS. If you wanted features like weather forecast, then these should be opt in and only send anonymous data related to weather forecast request. It should be illegal to use even those anonymised requests to do commercial research without paying the customer.
Your comment echoes one aspect of the article discussed here recently (authored by Jaron Lanier and Glen Weyl), arguing that "AI is an Ideology, Not a Technology": people should be compensated for generating data used to train models.
So you think if someone is selling a physical product and they require registration that it's reasonable to force them to stop requiring it with the threat of physical violence from the government?
I just don't see how that is justified. The seller isn't defrauding anyone and isn't using violence themselves. It's so much more easy and ethical to just not buy the product. All you can do is take personal responsibility. Calling for violent coercion like you've done is wrong.
I agree. That's why when Facebook bought Oculus back in 2014 I decided to buy the open platform HMD instead, the Vive. It was obvious even then what Facebook would do. What they always do. And the way to get around it is to not use Facebook products or services.
I don't think we should ban the whole class of online connected products. Just insist they publish a public API under terms that allow competitors to implement it and configure it on the device. Then anybody can create an alternative ecosystem for the device.
One change I implore Facebook/Oculus to make in light of the Facebook account requirement for these devices: Allow enabling of dev mode and APK sideloading, offline, from within the device settings without the dev account requirement. That way these devices can be more than just bricks for people who get locked out by the system.
I wonder if there are any statistics around e-waste for devices that are "bricked" due to an account lockout.
To play devil's advocate: historically, VR apps like VRChat have had an absolutely massive "4chan" problem. Harassment, bullying, vulgarity, NSFW/NSFL content, viral memes, brigading, etc. The gender disparity is also alarming (like 90%+ men!). Many feel unwelcome.
I think Facebook wants to make VR fun and appropriate for everyone. One way to do that is to tie in people's real identities. Facebook threads aren't great, but they are better than twitter threads, and A LOT better than interactions in VRChat.
Isn't that better solved by individual accounts for each game and some moderation? I've never had problems in VRChat, though I didn't find it much fun either.
FWIW, I have a few fakebook accounts, with names like Nopey Nofookinwae, and they're still active... Never bought anything from Oculus Store, though.
Facebook is really shooting themselves in the foot here, imo.
I think this is a reasonable argument for requiring accounts / checks for specific social apps in VR.
But a VR headset is not a chat device any more than a keyboard is a chat device. It's a general I/O device that can be used for all sorts of experiences, including single-user ones.
Jonanin, what is your name? Where do you live? What is your current street address? Where do your parents live, and what is their phone number? How about your kids?
I’m asking rhetorically. All this info and more is available to anyone with a full name and photograph via people-finder sites like Spokeo and SocialCatfish, which is exactly what Facebook accounts with a “real name policy” expose to the world. Using this info, any anonymous troll who you tick off in a VR game can send a SWAT team to your house, or tie up your phone lines, or harass your family and employer, or attempt to do you real physical harm. The Internet creates an extreme asymmetry of power between the abuser and the abused, and there are lots of unstable abusers out there with nothing more exciting to do than make your life hell.
The Mark Zuckerbergs and Larry Pages of the world live in gated communities with many layers of people between them and the world, so they don’t care about any of this.
And to think Facebook wants to get into cryptocurrency and payments/wallets. You'd have to be really stupid to trust them with that especially after this fine demonstration.
Facebook is easily the worst company in big tech, with zero regard whatsoever for privacy or consumers. I can no longer support Oculus since it requires FB authentication.
I recommend creating a separate account if you have no other options.
Seems most likely that they're trying to flag "suspicious" account creations in the run-up to the US election, and that the left hand that implemented this algorithm didn't speak to the right hand that was launching a new product that required an FB account.
Don’t keep anything on social media you can’t lose. Assume the account can get deleted at anytime.
Maintain your own private site of family and friends pictures that you own and share around with people you care about. It’s not that hard and replicates most of the real value of a social network for most people.
Anyone know what Facebook’s benefit is from the mandatory linking? At this point pretty much anyone who wants a facebook account, has one. And the quest is niche. They don’t need it to drive facebook usage.
Is it data? If so what’s the expected value of data they’d get from quest linkage?
This is by no means an exhaustive list nor 100% accurate but yes data, likely to go in to the social profile they build of you to sell/use in advertisements.
Data such as; information provided at sign up, web/links to other users based on sign up info, inferred location information, purchases, interests, visited products, used products, active hours, usage hours, general use metrics... etc
I had the same problem. Created new fb account, linked to Oculus, bought couple of things, got banned. Asked for review, solved within 2 working days. Not even my real name.
Good thing, it's a "soft" ban. They do not allow to log in, but if you are logged in, it's fine. So i could use my bought items even though I could not log in in browser. But if I would have logged out from Oculus, I wouldn't be able to use them.
I tried to do the math on the Quest 2 hardware, and they definitely cut corners to bring the cost down, but not to the point where I think they have an attractive margin. (On the $300 headset, but the accessories/storage increase definitely have a decent margin). They’ll also get some margin on software sales presumably.
That’s important because I believe the revenue generating model is entirely from data. Even if I’m wrong, it’s Facebook, so we know they’re after data for profit.
And consider the kind of data that VR is capable of collecting. It’s biometric data at its core. If you take the data involved in VR, tie it to a person under the real-name policy, and give it to some crafty software engineers, you can get some crazy intimate results.
Was looking at buying the quest 2 today and decided to wait until the weekend to see how the launch would go and then I saw this. I won't buy a quest 2 unless the account requirement is removed
I’ve absolutely stopped recommending it. I won’t link my Facebook account so will use it until it’s disabled.
Looking forward to supporting their competitors. It’s a shame, I enjoy the device.
Unpopular opinion: although I hate how oculus sold out to Facebook (possibly backstab of the decade, after the initial crowdfunding), and although I’m a strong advocate of leaving Facebook regardless of their VR BS, there’s really nothing wrong with them requiring a Facebook account to use it. I have no idea how much the manufacturing/R&D costs of Quest are, but I doubt it makes sense for Facebook to sell it this cheap without requiring users to link/create a Facebook account. Don’t expect stuff to be free/cheap for no reason.
My point is that regulating this space of tech will only lead to less innovation. There’s an extremely easy solution that every single one of us can do: don’t buy it, don’t be tempted by the cheap price Facebook is offering. I closed my Fb account ~5 years ago now (after being on it for about 10 years) and I’m very tempted to buy Quest 2, but I won’t. If enough people do this, what ever scummy plan Facebook is weaving will fail, but even if it doesn’t, you’d be out of it.
> regulating this space of tech will only lead to less innovation
You might be ultimately right about this, but you certainly haven't proved it. A common theme is a large company will use its leverage to make a product that is better and cheaper than the alternatives, demolish their competition, and the sit on their laurels for the next decade, with the exception of a few updates that provide vendor specific features to encourage vendor lock-in.
I wasn’t really trying to prove that point, I also didn’t think it needs proving. But your point somewhat does it I think. There are many examples in tech specifically over the last couple of decades on how free unregulated competition was the reason why we had accelerated development, lower cost, and “democratizations” of tools and information. As long as there’s no regulation preventing others from coming up with a better solution (however “better” is defined), there’s no reason why others can’t come up with a viable alternative. Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebag. IE -> FF and Chrome. Nokias -> iPhone and co, and so on.
Alright, so he bought it 4 years ago. Bu in the EU you have 2 years to start an RMA if a product is not working as expected under normal use. I reckon one would be able to turn it in to their retailer to get a new Oculus.
I believe this is an urban myth. Can you cite the appropriate EU regulation or directive that makes this true? If a directive what about the implementation in the UK?
However I see no reason that you couldn't sue the manufacturer if they arrange to break your product even after six years. That would be a tort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort) and unrelated to your rights under your contract of sale.
I got so excited by the news about Quest 2, I was certain would by it, until I learned that "Quest headsets best accommodate IPDs between 56 and 70 mm, or about 95% of adults". My IPD is 74 - no luck this time.
For PC VR you can find used VIVE sets cheap, and remember that with steamVR you can mix and match hardware. The full Valve index kits are on delay but individual parts are faster.
The day I read the news about Oculus requiring a FB account in the future, that sucker fell right off my shopping list. It's sad because it seems like a really solid piece of hardware.
A bit out of the loop on this, anyone know Carmack's stance on this? Seems like a huge step in the direction of what we afraid of when Fb acquired Oculus.
Most of the people on reddit reporting bans are saying that they made a FB account that they don't actively use. That seems to make the bans more likely. The best way to prevent them is to use your FB account for organic activities
I have a few fakebook accounts and they're active even though I rarely log in to them. They're completely empty and have obviously fake names.
Maybe they ban them if you try to buy something (because the name doesn't match or something)? Which would be a ridiculous thing to do, but hey, I've seen worse...
They're 5-6 years old, so I guess they might've slipped under the radar. But wouldn't they do a check when you first link your Oculus or some other app?
Regardless, I just don't see any use for Facebook besides messaging. Sad that Oculus headsets require FB accounts.
I believe that with heavy handed actions like this, Facebook will alienate Oculus buyers, which aren't your typical Facebook user. I hope that will make them change their approach.
Personally, I couldn't care less about customized ads and "relevant" notifications. But getting your account banned, with all the contacts on it, and all the purchases, is just so anti-customer I don't understand who in their right mind would do it.
> I believe that with heavy handed actions like this, Facebook will alienate Oculus buyers, which aren't your typical Facebook user.
They definitely will, I wanted to get my first VR headset and that move took Oculus out of the running for me. I was leaning towards their headsets because local pricing for Vive -- not to mention Index -- is horrible, but there's no way I'm linking it to my Facebook.
Don't worry, you will get bored with your Oculus Quest after a month anyways. Me and my kids were using our Oculus a lot at the beginning, having great fun. Now it just sits there, although we could use it any time and even have a few great games on it.
Anyways, this has nothing to do with your issue. Facebook should be ashamed for treating paying customers like this.
I bought a Go years ago and recently I got a screen locking the entire device until I logged into Oculus. I selected the option to not connect my Facebook account, but continue to use my Oculus account. There was a sunset date on this option.
I've never bought anything from the Oculus store. I honestly only use VR for Skybox and movies I download to a file server.
Are there any alternative OSes for the GO? Honestly I'd rather just get off the stock OS if I just had a way to play my movies.
I don't get it. He contacted Oculus support, Oculus support asked if he had followed these 4 steps for reactivating his account, and then... what? At that point gave up and posted on Reddit to complain?
Yeah, this sucks. But mistaken account deactivations probably happen a lot - how to handle them is one of the FAQ questions on Oculus. It happened to me with my PlayStation 4 account too; someone in Germany mistakenly signed up using my email address somehow and in the resulting confusion I got locked out of my PlayStation games for a bit. It sucks but support will eventually fix it.
Seriously, stay away from Oculus. I know they currently have the most versatile/best value headset in the Quest 2, but needing to have a FB account linked to it should be a deal-breaker for anyone who doesn't already have an active FB account (and perhaps even those who do). It isn't just an auth system shared by multiple products. It's Facebook, and the ban-hammer can come down swiftly, especially if, like the author, you are just creating an account to link to your Quest. I'm also not confident, as of right now, that FB is gonna fix this in a meaningful way.
Yep, the way we fix this is to avoid Occulus products for now.
Can’t this user return the item as defective? You paid for a VR headset and it doesn’t perform its primary function.
but you existed and broke our ToS in the first place! /s
Yes, and if you have trouble getting a refund for your defective device, there’s a bunch of state attorneys general who are interested in anything Facebook right now.
Also if you buy it on a credit card, the CC company is usually your friend.
But the issue is that in having his account terminated, he's also losing access to all historical purchases made over the years. The CC company may be willing to accept a charge-back on recent purchases, but what about the application/game purchased four years ago that's tied to the account. It's no longer accessible, but is the CC willing to refund for a purchase made that far back?
I honestly don't know, but if I had to guess it would be no.
It seem that it is exactly what this user is going to do (https://old.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/japo1j/faceboo...):
"No need for chargebacks, I purchased it from John Lewis in the UK so they wont have any issues refunding me. All my previous Oculus purchases on their store are now unplayable on my CV1 though so I might have to pursue a small claims court claim to get any money back on those."
It's a shame that John Lewis are probably going to have to eat the loss on this; it would be interesting to see what the effect of suing Facebook in the UK small claims court will be.
A deal-breaker indeed. I am not buying any device I can't use to reasonably full extent without an online account and a cloud connection.
I recently made the mistake of buying an iPad because I was excited to use Side Car with the Apple Pencil to draw in Mac apps.
It turns out I can't use the advertised features of the Apple devices I bought because Side Car requires 2FA with a phone number and my phone service is data only.
Given that I connect the iPad to the Mac via a USB-C cable, it's not clear why iCloud is required at all. They're just intentionally crippling their expensive devices.
That's pretty fucky, especially since their 2FA doesn't go through SMS for me (it's a system popup). FWIW, there are (or were) other apps which provided similar functionality without going through Apple's hoops.
Man, I really hope this is just a temporary peak of insanity in the industry history and a total change is going to happen soon. You know, there were times in history when horrible, bizarre things were norms, and somehow the societies overcame those. This is our only hope.
> Given that I connect the iPad to the Mac via a USB-C cable, it's not clear why iCloud is required at all. They're just intentionally crippling their expensive devices.
I believe they just want to make you get used to that so one day you would't even think about using any of your devices/apps without iCloud. Their vision probably is to make all the devices merely interfaces to iCloud and to make "offline usage" sound as ridiculous as using a toaster without electricity.
You can put in the number of any cell phone you have access to, and get the code form the screen.
Would I later lose access to all my purchases on all my devices if I didn't have access to that phone number anymore?
Continuity - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204681
Apple Wireless Direct Link - https://owlink.org/wiki/
Your data line still has a phone number. I know on T-Mobile they only block sending SMS on data lines, it can still receive. Maybe your service works like that.
Sounds like that would work for services that send a verification code via SMS and ask you to enter it elsewhere, but not services that demand a reply. Luckily most 2FA is the former, but I've seen the latter with things like verifying flagged credit card transactions (although they have non-SMS alternatives).
I have an iPad that sat on a shelf for several years, and now I can't use it all because Apple deleted the account that it's linked to.
With this new MagSafe charger it looks like the end goal is to remove one more port. Plugging in may not be an option soon. The 2nd gen pencil charges without plugging in for instance. If you can set up a US Google voice number you cold try to receive SMS there or hangouts. Maybe set it with a unique Google email to prevent hacking attempts.
> Side Car requires 2FA with a phone number
Note that once you have at least one phone number added, you can switch it to be device-based instead, where it will send 2FA codes directly to any Apple device you're logged into (there's a little system popup) and the phone number becomes strictly a backup for if all devices are unavailable. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204915
> Given that I connect the iPad to the Mac via a USB-C cable, it's not clear why iCloud is required at all.
Sidecar is primarily designed for wireless usage, and there's something behind-the-scenes where it's using the iCloud account to sync identity info so that that user doesn't have to manually set up any cross-device authentication stuff.
I don't find this a convincing rationale. I already had to jump through hoops with an authentication code to make my iPad "trust" my Mac before it appeared at all in Side Car.
Now that it does appear, I get a pop-up when clicking on the iPad income, saying I can't use it because the account doesn't have 2FA set up. Nowhere in the advertising for the device was there a disclaimer that a legacy phone number was required to use the features.
Totally agree. I have a Quest 1, before the forced FB integration. I'll be waiting until something better comes along before upgrading my VR setup.
FB ownership is definitely an instant deal-breaker regarding the Oculus for me. I've heard that the Valve Index is a good alternative. Does anybody with VR experience have any input on that?
I can confirm that, uh, the Index exists and is good. Not sure what else you want to know.
HP Reverb 2 is coming soon with much higher resolution, though lower refresh rate. Whats better depends on if you're planning on playing sims or action games really.
I'm playing tons of simulation games with my Oculus Rift and starting some weeks ago looking around for an upgrade. HP Reverb 2 is certainly an alternative, anything else I should check out? Playing mostly flying simulators, but also racing and space.
I was thinking of maybe upgrading to the new Oculus' but after announcing it will require a Facebook account I started to rethink that. This submission really hit the nail in the coffin and will absolutely not get another Oculus now.
I wonder how good Pimax 5K/8K actually is, selling point is super wide FOV but seems a bit finicky to use or something.
According to another user [0]...
> All the extra angles of FOV are very distorted, and there is a red static constantly fuzzing away in the display.
> Plus, you have to deal with the Pimax company, which has to be one of the most incompetent companies I've ever met when it comes to taking money and delivering product without stepping into the realm of actual fraud. When I bought mine, it was 3 false "it's shipped" announcements, 2 months, and a threat to reverse my credit card charge before I finally received it.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24496969
How could anyone expect anything they use the device for to be private when it is owned and serviced by Facebook?
Apple’s investment in Privacy is going to pay off so big.
I wonder if Facebook can spin off a company that includes Oculus and competes with Apple on Privacy.
I’d guess no.
Why would Facebook spin off anything? I see that happening only if congress forces a break up. Spinning Oculus out of FB seems like a low hanging fruit of a forced break up.
Because when facebook bought oculus they claimed that it would never require a fb account and tracking kept at a minimum. That lasted all of maybe six months and finally totally fell apart with the announcement of the 'facebook only' login.
I was aware of this, I had meant going forward.
Confirming the confirmation that the Index is a good collection of hardware. I don't have experience with an Occulus or Vibe, but the Index fell squarely into the "works out of the box" territory.
The only thing I really did to improve it was to 3d print a stand for the hand controllers. More an aesthetic choice than anything.
Ohh! Would you be willing to share your files for the hand stands?
I picked something off Thingiverse, and it's no longer up there. They do have some (IMO better designed) stands on there, however. Many of which support using the magnetic USB-C charging adapters, which I'd personally recommend for the controllers.
This is why I went Vive back when there were only two options for desktop VR
Index is awesome but you also need a well spec'd PC, have $999 on hand, and wait a few months for one. I believe the waiting list is 2-3 months now. I missed my reservation the first time, so if you really want one be vigilant in checking your email and Steam account.
Pros
- Knuckles controllers, still nothing like them
- External base station tracking, the only option that opens up full body tracking and makes it easy to do feet based movement
- High Refresh rate
- Good FOV
Cons
- Knuckles still isn't universally supported
- LCD screen and no OLED
- Reverb G2 has a much better screen
- Wires
I would recommend the G2 but its tracking and controllers just aren't as good as the Index, unless you're just going to use it for driving and flying games.
Don't forget the revolutionary off-ear audio. It's fantastic, and as far as I know, there's still nothing out there like it.
The Reverb G2 apparently uses the same audio hardware as the Index
Current wait time for Index is 12-14 weeks (got mine in 12) - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10CTIAd7OzNJhzkimpCFD...
I have experience with the original pc tethered oculus, the htc vive and the valve index.
The valve index is a very nice upgrade over the original htc vive and the original oculus. The 'screen door' effect is all but gone the new controllers are very comfortable and the tracking is stellar. The index is heavier than the original oculus but the way the weight is distributed and the way the strapping works makes it a non issue. My only complaint is also a problem in the 'gen 1' headsets. Reflection off the fresnel lenses can cause some banded 'flare', especially noticeable when most of the screen is very dark but there is some portion of very bright light.
Sadly I have no experience with the 'upstart' headsets from Microsoft, HP, etc.
Untethered is a game changer for VR.
It's not really an alternative in that sense since it's tethered, needs a computer and a completely different ballpark price wise. If you have the money, a good gaming PC and the possibility to set up a dedicated VR space I would definitely buy an Index or HTC Reverb 2 though.
> I've heard that the Valve Index is a good alternative
They're not even comparable. The Quest is a headset and two controllers you put it on and pick the controllers up, draw a room boundary and you're in. Works in any room in your house, completely stand alone.
Index requires you to install multiple sensors in a specific room in your house, and requires a connection to a desktop PC tower and fiddling around with Steam to play.
I think the FB account requirement is incredibly dumb from Oculus (Don't understand why it couldn't just be a shadow account like Insta/Whatsapp which everyone seems fine with weirdly) but really the product their offering is entirely in a class of it's own for a fraction of the price a normal VR setup costs and a fraction of the hassle.
I think if the market was different and what they were offering wasn't unique I think far fewer people would care and we'd all just buy different headsets.
Facebook might be sensing that their market is dwindling as other vendors catch up. They might be trying to extract value why they have the lead.
I honestly have no idea though. I don't get why they're in this space as it doesn't appear from the outside that they're trying very hard.
Selling a loss leader to build mindshare and market share isn't my idea of value extraction as compared to building the base for future value extraction.
If you don't think they're trying very hard though, I'm not sure if you've been following VR particularly much.
Maybe they think the entire market is drying up? The AAA blockbuster everybody thought would make VR mainstream (Half Life) seems to have fizzled with great reviews but not many sales. Maybe Facebook now believes VR will prove to be a bubble and they want to juice it for all they can while they still can.
Not sure this makes much sense. All the top end VR headsets are constantly sold out and require waiting months to get one (Index and soon the HP Reverb G2). People want to play Alyx but they can't.
Also a PC only game is niche enough, no PCVR game will ever make VR mainstream. Really, the mainstream VR game is Beat Saber - that alone has probably sold more VR headsets than any other app or game combined.
The only way to make VR mainstream imo is to offer it at console prices or less and make it standalone, which is exactly what the Quest is doing. It's really unfortunate it requires an FB account. I guess they justify it because Xbox and PS5 both require online accounts too.
>Really, the mainstream VR game is Beat Saber - that alone has probably sold more VR headsets than any other app or game combined.
Ironically, Facebook also acquired Beat Games (who makes Beat Saber) last year and effectively ruined it by intentionally breaking all the mods and custom songs, leaving it a shell of its former glory.
According to steamcharts [1], player counts peaked around July 2019 and have only dwindled since the acquisition (with the exception of two small bumps when the acquisition happened in November). Average player counts are have been cut in half since then, in less than a year.
I have almost 200 hours in Beat Saber, but I haven't played it for almost a year now, now that it's just the same two-dozen songs over and over.
[1] https://steamcharts.com/app/620980#1y
Wait, we can’t do custom songs any more? Then what’s the point of the game?
Because the official beatmaps are pretty damn good?
(Are custom songs really broken? Haven't tried in a month or so)
No doubt about that, but I still enjoy playing to my favorite music much more.
Modders (luckily) keep finding a way. It's just unfortunate for the player that having Facebook as an owner means they need to show more good will in preventing the distribution of custom songs so they don't get held accountable for piracy.
I paid attention to the dev discord servers for a few months after the acquisition when they were churning through new mods when the old ones broke and people gave up on trying to maintain them, but haven't checked it recently. I would expect there's probably working mods still, but it's also probably a lot harder to keep them working over time.
FB's official stance on modding is that they will support mods that don't engage in "piracy or illicit modding, including mods that infringe on third-party IP rights". [1]
[1] https://www.oculus.com/blog/welcoming-beat-games-to-facebook...
That's really sad to see. I also found the included songs pretty boring, and without custom beatmaps and scoresaber it's not really very good. I wonder what FB's strategy is here - why cut out the enthusiasts?
I dunno, I feel like it’s reaching saturation. Those that want VR are getting it, but then there’s those of us who are gamers, but forget it’s even a thing until someone mentions it. I am a gamer myself (have a 2080, sitting out the 3000 series), and I honestly don’t want one nor see how it can make gaming more enjoyable for me. So to me it seems like it’s going the same route attempt #1 did in the 90s, there’s some market but not enough.
Well, you need to be open about new experiences. And until I got my first VR headset I didn't know what I missed. Now I feel that having a powerful GPU and playing a 3D game on a flat screen is such a waste.
I have tried VR before
I want to like Alyx, but the hassle of connecting my VR headset to the computer every time I want to play is just too much of a pain.
Simple. Leave it connected.
Joking aside. What headset have you got that takes more than a few minutes to connect?
It’s the Rift, the problem is more that I like to store it somewhere when not in use because headset + controllers + trackers take quite a bit of space on my desk.
Then have to dive behind the computer to connect a HDMI and 3 USB cables (not enough ports on front).
Quest + VirtualDesktop is great untethered experience.
I have owned about a dozen VR headsets at this point, including the Quest (not the Quest 2) and the Vive Index. The Index is fantastic, but it's difficult to compare to the Quest which is truly in a category of its own.
For headsets, there are several properties that segment the market:
1. Tracking: outside cameras/emitters vs inside-out tracking
2. Tethered vs wireless (including PC powered, but using wireless transmission)
3. PC powered vs standalone device
For each of these, there are multiple vendors to choose from, except for standalone devices. In this case, the Oculus Quest is unique. There's no other competition.
Moreover, the Quest is the only device that can be run without a corresponding high end PC. If you don't have a PC like that, then the cost is prohibitive. There's also the space factor. VR needs space, which is already an issue. With the PC powered headsets, you also need that PC to be close enough to your open VR space. Otherwise, you need to rearrange your living space or invest in a VR dedicated PC.
In summary, the Vive Index is fantastic and arguably the best headset in the market right now, but the Oculus Quest fills a different niche of that market.
(And as to the topic of the article: I'm done with Oculus based on Facebook's policies).
If you don't my asking, what do you consider to be the best VR headset for sitting?
Best headset for sitting is a inside-out, tethered VR headset.
Until recently, the Oculus Rift S would be a great pick for that.
I don't yet have an HP Reverb G2, but I expect good things out of that headset. The HTC Cosmos would also be a good choice.
The Valve Index (yes, I mistyped before) is an awesome headset, but the lighthouse emitter based tracking system isn't great for seated. Not only is it a hassle to setup, but it's easier for your chair or monitor or whatever to block the laser grid from the lighthouse units. And if you're seated, you aren't taking advantage of the highly accurate room-scale tracking the lighthouses provide. I'd stick with the convenience of an inside-out headset if you're primarily doing seated VR.
For example, I tended to prefer my Rift S for sim games (sim racing, sim flight) for all the reasons listed above.
> For each of these, there are multiple vendors to choose from, except for standalone devices. In this case, the Oculus Quest is unique. There's no other competition.
The only VR headsets I've seen so far in stores around here (a major metropolitan city) are headsets with only the lenses, in which you slot your own smartphone as the screen and CPU. Wouldn't these also count as standalone devices in your classification?
Google has killed daydream, Samsung also killed GearVR and their VR video stuff. I don't know if there are others that will still work in this kind of headset, so not sure how relevant is anymore.
They’re kind of gimmicky, and don’t give the 6DOF you get with the Quest.
As the others noted, those platforms are all deprecated now. Even when they weren't, they didn't give anywhere near the experience of other headsets.
[I've had the Google cardboard, DayDream and the Samsung Gear headsets.]
These are so crappy in comparison that i wouldn't even call them VR. The Quest is several generations ahead.
Its like comparing a pre-model-T car with a car from 1950. You might argue that for some purposes both are equivalent but that doesn't capture the qualitative improvement that has happened almost everywhere. Everything is improved and some areas feel perfected in comparison.
> Vive Index
Do you mean the Valve Index or the HTC Vive?
I strongly suspect the parent is talking about Valve Index, because HTC Vive is pretty much an old-gen inferior version of Valve Index.
Yes. My bad.
The Valve Index is hands-down the best headset.
But it's also $999, requires a beefy gaming PC, and the setup is slightly more involved. But if you already have a beefy gaming PC (I'm a PC gamer, so I already did), don't mind spending 10 minutes attaching the lighthouses to the corners of your room, and of course have the $999 to buy the full kit, it's worth it.
I've had a Rift for 3 years (not a Rift-S). I've used a Quest. I bought an Index in August because of this FB account crap but ending up selling it 2 days later.
I'm not a fan of the Index. First problem, it has horrible black levels. Everything looks like you're in a layer of fog compared to the Rift. Maybe if you've never used a Rift before you won't notice but it was shockingly bad for me.
The headphones are utter crap. I don't get whoever thought headphones that hover 1/2 inch away from your ears would work. Take whatever headphones you have now that you're listening to music on and pull them 1/2 inch away for each ear. The sound goes down, it sounds tinny, less full, bases are missing, etc. The Index sounded exactly like that. Some friends said you have to get them perfectly lined up but if that's true the moment you move your head suddenly in some game they're no longer going to be aligned.
This also means the sound leaks into the room far more than it would with on ear headphones. It's not going to be loud but it is going to be annoying for anyone within a room if they aren't making some louder noise.
Next up, Steam VR is just not as good as Oculus Connect (or whatever Oculus's home screen system is called). In part because Oculus has built in "pull up your desktop and/or multiple windows" at anytime in anytime game and pin them to say up. Apparently there's a 3rd party app that will provide this for Index/Vive but I use that feature all the time. Inside a game want to look up a walkthru just pin in there in my view.
Now for some things that no one will admit to but I will...
The Index Controllers didn't feel as good to me as Rift Controllers. I get they have fanciers sensors. I get they grip your hands. But, probably the #1 use for VR is porn. Controllers that require 2 hands to put on are not good for things that require one had to be free.
I have lots of friends in the industry, I see none of them using an Index and plenty of complaints.
As for Quest/Quest 2, even if there wasn't the FB issue it's like choosing an iPhone instead of a PS5. iPhone has tons of great games but it doesn't have PS5 level games. Similarly Quest has tons of great games, but it doesn't have PC level VR games and it will never have any porn games being locked up by Facebook. (and even if it did, do you really want FB knowing which porn games you're playing?)
I'm praying the HP Reverb G2 gets good reviews and solves most of those issues. It's apparently a month or 2 from shipping so I'm crossing my fingers I can get rid of this Rift.
I have an Index. As long as you have a solid PC, the experience is great—it single-handedly convinced me VR was more than a gimmick. Great quality picture + audio, reasonably ergonomic and I love the controls. Overall, I've been super happy with it.
Downsides to consider:
• You need a solid gaming PC (with a 2070 or better).
• Expensive ($1000 for the kit)
• Connected to the computer by a wire, awkward for "room-scale" VR
• Base stations provide great tracking but require setup (mounting high up in your room) and mean that the setup isn't very portable.
• Limited/janky access to exclusive titles. (You can hack around to get Oculus-only titles to work, but it seems rough and I haven't tried it myself.)
If you're not budget-constrained, I believe the Index will give you the best overall experience.
> You need a solid gaming PC (with a 2070 or better).
As a counterpoint, I am using Index together with 1070 Ti and the performance is flawless.
As more anecdata, I had a pretty satisfactory experience with my Vive on an old R9 290x from ~2013. Some more demanding games would occasionally stutter, but everything was generally smooth (based on the performance graph not dropping below the HMD's refresh rate).
The Index is higher resolution/refresh rate and will require more hardware, but if you just want to get into some VR and dick around, the Vive is more than enough to get started, can be found for <$200 used, and a ton of the popular games (e.g., Beat Saber, SuperHot VR, etc) just really aren't that graphically demanding.
The Vive is also compatible with the knuckles controllers and those can be purchased separately, so you're not totally locked out from some of the more game changing stuff either.
> for anyone who doesn't already have an active FB account (and perhaps even those who do).
This. Unless you have built up sufficiently high profile Facebook fame known inside and out of it, beyond just having a moderately active account, I wouldn’t consider it safe to spend a penny on this.
Really unfortunate that virtually no competitor exists in mobile VR segment.
HTC Vive?
Not standalone. Last I recall, they _do_ have one, but it's much more expensive than Quest, and didn't have very good reviews.
No, that requires a PC. There isn't much in the all-in-one space other than the Quest.
It needs a PC in addition to spending another $500 - 600 for the headset.
More like 900 USD if you want to use it the way it was meant to be used with the peripherals.
What do you mean? The HTC Vive, non-pro version only costs $599 with base stations. Where are you getting $900 from?
I agree with the high total cost though. Most people pushing PC VR, will forget about how much a real VR ready PC will cost. It's easy to spend close to $3000 even when people loathed to admit it.
If you add the controllers, how much more does it cost?
Controllers were always part of that $599 package (at launch, 4 years ago). The only other peripheral most owners consider almost a "must have" would be the Deluxe Audio Strap which goes for another $99.
My Vive cost me £400 for the whole thing, for reference.
Some sort of Android box that can bolt onto Vive or Index would be great
I was so excited for the CV1 after I loved my DK2, but I now own a Vive. The Facebook acquisition was a deal-breaker, for privacy reasons and it bring patently obvious it would eventually result in this type of garbage.
Yeah, I feel that it's easy for the majority of HN to stay away. I do feel bad for people who can't afford anything else at the moment.
There's been a lot of talk about antitrust investigations and regulating big tech. I think one really useful step would be to require multiple methods of authentication with devices like this. Oculus shouldn't require a Facebook account to use.
That might already be the reason why the Oculus is not available in Germany and Belgium https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375652
How about, no authentication to use the device and an open platform of app stores and/or sideloading?
Why do "apps" even need to be installed on it. Isn't it just a sensor array and a couple of displays?
I used to think everyone should learn a programming language just so they can experience its expressive power but more and more I wish they would so they wouldn't get duped by really dumb marketing.
Because Quest 2 is a stand-alone VR headset. It is not a display device for a computer, it is an all-in-one. So you install games on it to play them.
The camera based tracking is a marvel of modern engineering. Making something seem simple is really really hard.
good idea...but less profitable, though Facebook will continue to track these "banned" users as they roam around the network and trade on their information anyway.
So sick of "but that's less profitable"... these companies should exist to serve their customers, not shareholders
I'm not sure if you're serious about this, but it seems very short sighted. If this were the case, I don't think the word "company" would still apply.
However, capitalism doesn't leave consumers with no options - vote with your wallet!
So you're saying that modern capitalism has completely supplanted the original reason for starting a company in the first place?
I did not write what I wrote as a parody. Shareholder primacy is the foremost blight on this modern existence and is responsible for an innumerably large portion of the negative externalities that cause so such much suffering today.
I would vote with my wallet, but that will accomplish exactly jack shit. There are few who will stand with me if it means threatening their pathetically precious creature comforts which our modern capitalism so dutifully provides.
Also, it is worth noting that the entire goal of capitalism is to eliminate those options, using "free-market economics" as cover for its seemingly insatiable lust for competitors to gobble up or otherwise drive out of business. Some of the very first things they teach you in b-school, about moat building and competitive advantages and all that other crap, is an outright attack on the marketplace model
> However, capitalism doesn't leave consumers with no options - vote with your wallet!
That really works with monopolies! /sarcasm /are-you-serious
Oculus doesn't have a monopoly on VR headsets. They have the most popular offering, but there are still plenty of others to choose from
less profitable wouldn't matter if the law would dictate that every device needs to support multiple vendors with feature parity and the user/owner of a device is legally entitled to use it in whatever way they see fit.
Yes, this would cause price increase. But a lot of people would gladly pay for it. The ones who don't want to, could accept a "discount" in exchange for becoming a glass citizens.
> Yes, this would cause price increase.
Actually, it wouldn't. Facebook makes obscene profits. Rather than be uncompetitive, they'd keep the same price.
> but less profitable
If we gave Facebook the choice of stopping stealing from people like this, or getting shut down, they'd do this in a second.
In a sane society, Facebook would have been shut down years ago, after the 2016 election.
If it's not profitable, then that means the market can't solve it, ergo we need regulation
It seems like they're pushing FB as an authentication method for everything. Try and comment on a local news article (yeah, I know) and it wants to authenticate you with your FB account. Same thing with trying to buy something from a small independent web vendor. "Log in with your Facebook account" is becoming the default everywhere and it sucks.
FB sounds like it's trying to be an multinational version of WeChat by becoming the operating system of life. There are many cultural reasons why this is feasible in China but not in the US (and many other places)
What are these cultural reasons?
I'd guess for starters that an extreme authoritarian centralized state is already normalized in China. USA is creeping that direction but there's still a ways to go
Facebook sounds more like the communist party, where they are requiring your real name, web activity, or get banned and have all your things taken away (Oculus usage, paid apps, can’t message friends, etc).
I agree that’s not a great state to be in, but think about it from that locals new org’s point of view: comment spam is a major and hard-to-solve problem, and by tying commenting to the real-world identity and enforcement of bots that Facebook provides, the news organizations get to solve that thorny problem for free. Plus news orgs are already using FB to syndicate/share, so it’s really a no-brained for them.
I wonder what the world would look like with a independent, trustworthy, non-advertising-based company/organization which provided a similar anti-spam service for free, with the option to publicly tie to verified identities as well. (For all the flack that real-name policies get, they do reduce spam and hate speech by a big margin, so any service which doesn’t verify identity isn’t really a drop-in replacement for FB as far as that news org is concerned)
> (For all the flack that real-name policies get, they do reduce spam and hate speech by a big margin, so any service which doesn’t verify identity isn’t really a drop-in replacement for FB as far as that news org is concerned)
Did we not see the same studies?
As I recall Google+/YouTube's real name policy came under fire because a large minority of people received substantially more hate speech.
I've been writing about and pushing for a decentralized system that doesn't require centralized services or verified identities - because any centralized system will have biases and flaws, and having real identities tied to your online comments has can have serious real world consequence.
https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati... - With this, a site or users of the site can choose many trusted moderators from the network and as the system grows it gets better over time.
What about to use DISQUS? I rarely see spammed DISQUS comments.
If you want to be authentication for everything then you definitely can't intermingle the authentication part of that (who is this person) with the authorisation part of that (what are they allowed to do). In other words, Facebook deciding I don't have the right to use it's service should have no bearing on whether I have provided evidence that I am who I assert to be, and whether other services should choose to service me.
My sentiment exactly. It’s crazy to think Facebook can simultaneously ban me from their platform and essentially steal whatever $X amount of dollars I spent on the oculus store. What makes it worse is they’re not even letting people who’ve made an oculus account in the past escape from this as they are now forcing ALL accounts to be linked to Facebook in the next couple years.
I think we need full separation of hardware and software. One company makes the hardware, others make the software. And let's not forget that it was like this for a long time (IBM+clones vs Microsoft, OS/2, Linux).
Today, the distinction between hardware and software is murky. Hardware can't even be tested without co-development of software. Even making these things happen in separate departments of the same business, by people who eat lunch together, is inefficient when trying to move fast and create new things. I often have hardware and software development tools open on my computer at the same time.
I got a quest 2 (yesterday), and I did not have to use a Facebook account to login. I was able to use my Oculus account.
I did receive a notice that in 2023 the Oculus Account would be deprecated however.
Do not stay away from Oculus.
The Quest 2 is amazing and an important leap for VR. If you care about the state of VR, it must sell well.
Frankly, this is not the hill to die on. If you plan to own a smartphone or really use any kind of service or internet browsing in the modern world going forward you’re going to be faced with these kind of privacy dilemmas. Better to just accept it and move on with your life than to basically live like a Luddite for the rest of your life. Facebook will not be the first or last corporation to ask you to relax your absolute anonymity.
A wild false dichotomy has appeared !
If only there were other companies with competing products which would assuage one’s concerns regarding privacy and/or anonymity and guard against Luddite lifestyles.
“Must sell well...hill to die on” feel a bit extreme, particularly given everything that has transpired in 2020.
Other VR headsets are far more expensive and some require tethering to expensive gaming computers. Oculus Quest 2 has no true competitor at its price point, and some might say any price point.
> If you care about the state of VR, it must sell well.
Isn't the opposite true? If I care about the state of VR as a product free of social media lock-in, I want Oculus to fail hard.
Mate, if Facebook actually cared about the VR scene they wouldn’t have broken the best VR headset to date by _requiring_ a fb login. Without a fb login the device is broken. If _they_ wanted VR to succeed they wouldn’t have done this. Take it up with them.
Are you a Facebook employee or something?
This is absolutely the hill to die on. Oculus has competitors. The answer to save VR isn't to buy Oculus, it's to buy other headsets and hope Oculus dies unless they reverse their decision to require a Facebook account.
The masses need to buy VR headsets. If people can’t buy an amazing VR headset for $300 VR is dead in a shallow grave.
The masses should probably be buying PlayStation VR anyway. The VR market might honestly be better off without Facebook's image attached to it.
Nobody needs to buy a VR headset, let alone Facebook's. It's an expensive toy.
Excellent, better it be dead on FB's terms than create yet one more technology we turn into a horror show.
> Oculus has competitors.
I wish that was true. If that was the case, I would've bought a headset from a competitor in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, while there are many competitive VR headsets out there, I cannot recall a single other VR headset that works standalone without a PC.
Not even mentioning the price point of Quest and the fact that it can be used for both PCVR and standalone, thus bringing a superset of features of other headsets. No need to set up lightboxes and being able to just buy the headset and play without anything extra is a value proposition that I don't see any other VR headset can provide.
Hopefully, the success of Quest will provide a kick in the ass to other manufacturers to make their own versions. Imo, the standalone+PCVR combo with no lightboxes is the future, with lightbox PCVR-only headsets being reserved for highly niche uses.
Getting locked out of your brand new device worth several hundred dollars is not a "privacy dilemma".
> Ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company
Well, at least you know yourself, but I don't appreciate this attempt to normalize your moral bankruptcy and ridicule others who haven't sold and don't want to sell their soul.
Maybe one day you'll be forced to confront the consequences of this lack of ethics. Until then, kindly fuck right off.
I have a Gear VR and I've been on the fence about upgrading to a real proper mobile VR setup but thankfully Oculus required this Facebook integration and made this decision a lot easier.
I will put my money somewhere else.
It's funny that you are talking about Luddites because those were basically beaten into submission by police.
I sense a shill.
The quest two barely counts as VR. You will only have mobile titles, which are terrible compared to PC. to run quest with PC you need to have a VR ready PC in the first place.
Hey, let's not get stupid here.
The content on the Quest may not be "desktop fidelity", but my time with the Quest 1 was VERY much enjoyable (especially compared to the Oculus Go), and often preferred over my desktop VR HMD simply for the convenience. And the content was quite good.
By this same metric, the Switch is also plagued with "mobile titles" given it's Android base and Tegra X1 mobile GPU. But most folks DON'T think of it like that, and for good reason: the Switch can keep up just fine in it's own market.
And if the Quest 2 has improved specs in every area over the Quest 1, then it's completely FINE for what it is.
It's just the company behind it fucked up a good thing.
I am sick of verifying my FB account periodically after deleting the account and re-create with same email. Then, the weirdness came up, such as timeline only shows a couple of posts or nothing even I visited friends page and showed recent posts. And first a few months, FB asked me to upload the verifiable ID to unblock my FB account. (What the hell they need my ID ? I already enabled 2FA but kept complaining suspicious activity.)
Blizzard is asking me for government ID before they'll DELETE my account. It makes no sense. I feel like there should be some government agency that is interested in this misuse of their ID's/info, but I haven't found it.
Probably their threat model is black hats hacking into an account and requesting a delete.
Once upon a time this issue was resolved by not really ever actually deleting anything - just soft-deleting it and moving it off into an archive somewhere from whence it could be restored... unfortunately not-really-deleted stuff was insanely abused by marketing so that consumers no longer trust it and it's become illegal to retain this information after an account closure in some jurisdictions - so now we can't have nice things.
I don't have any addresses, pictures or names associated with my account that my ID can verify. Plus, if someone deletes my account at this point, they'd be doing me a favor :)
I'd guess gaming companies have to have more robust processes than most companies. They have to deal with bullying, siblings, sore losers and scammers (people have mentality that it's a game so it's not a real scam).
If only we had some sort of bureau of protecting consumers - the tech companies are bad but the people I really want to see fines for bad UI are credit companies. Trying to un-enrolled from once free-of-charge credit reporting is insanely difficult.
That's just it... generally speaking, there's no law against using federal IDs in any way that companies desire. There's also no laws against aggregating data that gives corporations too much information about consumers, and no laws governing how such data can be used, a right to deletion, and other protections.
The laws in the US governing privacy and data use have never been updated for the computer age, because the people who have been in power for the whole computer age generally don't understand computers.
I have an active FB account, but I would never use it to log in to anything other than FB via a sandboxed browser profile, and if I had to, I wouldn't use that service.
Yea - I'd be unwilling to use Oculus unless I could specifically tie it to a fake FB account (or no account at all). I barely use my FB account but I never want gaming integrated with social media in a manner I can't control simply due to personal preference and privacy.
I thought about using a fake, Oculus-only account but that's a false sense of separation as FB would see connections from my accounts coming from the same source IP unless I was going to separate them via anonymizing proxy.
How is that different from roommates/family that share a computer?
We have smartphones now with a pretty wide rollout - I wouldn't be surprised if people that legitimately all share the same computer do have problems getting flags on their account from facebook.
Honestly though, the real answer is who knows - it's entirely proprietary information and all we can do on the outside is observe the fact that is does seem to be a pretty flawed detection system and guess at why that is. Does facebook use sentiment analysis of posts or post frequency to ban users they think are fake? Do they look for similar content of posts from different users to try and detect troll farms? I don't know and FB really doesn't want to talk about it.
Anyway I need to buy some games from Oculus Store so I should provide real information. So I believe that fake information account isn't an option.
While I agree doing anything with a Facebook account is gross, it seems rather, err, trusting to think that Facebook wasn't already linking accounts anyway and are essentially not just getting rid of the system that does that and forcing users to do it for them.
That’s what I did. Haven’t had any issues.
I couldn’t agree more. I had the fun of a 30 day ban on PlayStation because my kid sent something inappropriate to his friend. Now I imagine a scenario like this happening but the consequences are my Facebook account shut down permanently. Definitely a huge turn off.
The shrill of millions of nerds realizing they have to choose between the best easiest VR tech and facebook knowing what porn they watch.
Realistically if you don't want to manage hundreds of separate logins then what are your options? On the whole it still seems much easier to get reasonable behaviour and human involvement out of Facebook than out of Google.
Insightful comment from the thread:
Yeah, I think part of the problem is that Facebook has never had an actual product which people pay for and expect to work. Their whole culture and set of priorities are counter to this.
Unfortunately I get the impression that this is how you get proper support from Facebook or Google. Make a Reddit or Hacker News post, get a few upvotes, and someone with influence inside the company files an "Oops Help My Friend" support ticket or contacts another person with the right authority to take a look.
Unfortunately for each of these cases going public there will be about a hundred poor souls being unnoticed.
In the Catholic theology, there's a concept of Saints, who are basically humans that intercede with God on the behalf of ordinary mortals. People will sometimes address prayers to saints in the hope that the prayer will be more effective. Probably similar in other religions too but I'm pulling from memories of catholic school
This is ridiculously accurate and totally makes sense.
The 21st century is making me rethink how atheist I truely am. I think by following the moral code of face masks and social distancing, I will spare my family from plague and those who scoff at these codes will get smited. I put my faith and security into these big corps that don't even have an corporeal existance, and work with us through intermediaries like Amazon through ups and Microsoft through gamestop, Google doesnt even have a customer service branch and I had no way but to dig up my old school email in order to prove to them I am who I say I am. I tithe to the market, my funding of corps will pay back in future wealth. I perform rituals with my team chanting a praying that azure will stop acting wonky.
God help us all .
> I perform rituals with my team chanting a praying that azure will stop acting wonky.
Same but with our Jenkins builds, which appear to be entirely non-deterministic. "Perhaps the praying will help," I think to myself as I create my PR.
There are no atheists in ops roles?
"I perform rituals with my team chanting a praying that azure will stop acting wonky." so accurate it hurts
Too close to home here.
buddhism has Bodhisattva that perform a similar purpose
They don't intercede for some authority, though. Bodhisattvas are more like the folks that hold the door open for people and don't leave until everyone else has.
Huh. I grew up Catholic and I never understood the point of praying to saints. I always chalked it up to superstition. Your explanation sort of makes sense,
> I always chalked it up to superstition.
I mean. It still is.
It is superstition, same here for my Muslim country, people pray at the tombs of dead Imams, though it is shunned by almost all scholars, but ignorance begets superstition.
This is a reason why better education for all is the way forward for humanity.
I wonder where angels would fit in?
Speaking of, https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/13/world/teenager-beatified-chur...
.. and prior to the reformation, people would pay priests to pray to the saints to intercede on their behalf.
People got so upset about the Catholic church selling the right to bend the divine rules that one guy wrote an extremely angry listicle, made a viral post on a church door, and the rest is history. And centuries of sectarian warfare.
(Seriously, most of the 95 theses are about indulgences: https://www.luther.de/en/95thesen.html )
I wonder if there is a way to incentivize the behavior of "I work at a big company and have the ability to help out a stranger with a problem"? Perhaps people who help others with these issues (which are public by nature of being discussed on reddit/twitter/etc) can put it as an item on their resume when looking to switch jobs - something like "I care about the community and people who use the products I help build. I advocated for [this person (with link to public forum)] which ultimately resulted in [this solution (with link to release note if possible)]."
Of course there is a discussion to have about incentivizing the _wrong_ behavior (the need to create publicity around issues that shouldn't exist in the first place / only people with "clout" become the ones who get their issues resolved).
It's incentivized like this:
[At a party] A: What do you do? B: I work for $BIGTECH. A: You suck dude. I bought one of their products and it never worked once.
Response: "Oh yeah I know, the team that made that really sucks. How about that local sports team?"
"The thing about Facebook is, they always try to walk it in."
Couple of pop psych thoughts:
People on HN are not really strangers, we are part of a community. By helping one of us, they help one of their in groups. Not helping might devalue their investment in this place.
HN users are the early adopters that small group of users who have much more influence early on in projects. Care of early adopters makes sense.
I assume that quite often those are marketing & PR people who use special tools to track every mention of a product / company name. Many companies (especially niche ones) buy those services that basically track the whole internet - so their representatives can comment on issues.
Bigger companies seem not to care that much, apart from maybe twitter? And those few thousand upvote posts on reddit.
There are groups inside Facebook to raise issues like this. I can guarantee this one has already been escalated.
They wouldn't allow just any employee to "fix" these issues. Too often there is a lot of context that is omitted from the shared story, so it's not just a matter of hitting a button to remove a block.
You don't want to incentivise this too much or people will start taking bribes.
Also, "I helped a member of the public defeat my organisation's policy" is a negative on the resume not a positive. Sadly.
The very fact that regular employees of these companies might have the clout to take bribes for simply giving their attention to something, speaks to the absurdity of how much power we've given the organizations. We're talking about Facebook programmers like they're state senators.
I wonder if there is a way to incentivize the behavior of "I work at a big company and have the ability to help out a stranger with a problem"?
When the coin in the coffer rings / An account from bannination springs!
This has happened with me re: Intuit, Microsoft and Adobe as well - all companies with proper support channels - issue resolution/escalation for people with the "right contacts" goes about 100x faster.
What about the 99.9% of the rest who don't have those contacts?
Anecdotal, but.. I got dicked around by Wayfair for almost two months (stalled order, various excuses, well meaning but essentially powerless customer support). In the end all it took to resolve was one tweet at their account. Next day the order cleared.
Followers are power
That is a fantastic comment. I was reading through Google SRE stuff. Lots of good info. Lots of very, very bad ideas too. Lots of it is "at scale, you can't make everyone happy, so don't try." You end up with SLOs and SLIs based on percentages of availability, errors, etc. If 99.99% of requests are good, don't worry about the rest. However, at scale, 0.01 can be literally millions of real, breathing people with feeling and priorities and things to do. When you give away your product for free, these are good trade offs. When you sell your product, the same assumptions may not apply.
I cannot afford to ignore 0.01% of incoming requests because we charge per request. At a certain point, yes, money and pros and cons yadda yadda yadda. It just feels that, once again, people are saying, "but Google does it!" -- and that does not mean you should.
100% is unachievable, especially at Google scale. Your car or coffee shop or whatever also fails 0.0x% of the time. Heck the energy net in western countries doesn't reach 99.999% uptime and I would call it very dependable.
I'd say the biggest problem it the non-existent support. It's fine if 0.01% fails, as long as there is human troubleshooting or help available if necessary.
The distribution is important.
If 100% of users are experiencing 0.01% random errors it probably isn't worth bothering about.
If 0.01% of users are experiencing 100% errors than it is much more important.
Enter "windowed user-uptime"[1], which helps differentiate between these conditions.
[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi20/presentation/hauer
Amazon seems to do a pretty good job at it.
I think you are very confused about how availability is tracked. If a class of users is always getting an error this would be investigated. There is literally no way, at any scale, to guarantee 100% availability.
>I think you are very confused about how availability is tracked. If a class of users is always getting an error this would be investigated.
Oh, please, you are confused. I worked at Google, most teams just don’t have metrics like this.
While I don’t think it’s acceptable, reality is that it’s expensive to compute such metric, i.e. you need to slice you monitoring stream per each user, has privacy implications, and often it’s unclear what action should be taken.
They do. They've had digital photo frames for years now. I just don't think anyone bought it.
Facebook Ads is their product.
I'm very excited about VR. I bought the GearVR, then the first Oculus Rift, and most recently the Quest 1.
Now, instead of buying the Quest 2 (which is unquestionably the best-value headset available today) I'm waiting for a competitor to enter the space.
Imagine if your desktop monitor would only turn on when synced to an active account on a social media platform. If you decide to leave that platform, or if that platform decides you aren't providing enough invasive information about yourself and decides to leave you, you've got an expensive paperweight. No warning or recourse. No thank you.
good for you. Vote with your wallet.
> Imagine if your desktop monitor would only turn on when synced to an active account on a social media platform.
We are rapidly heading towards this future and SV devs are decrying it on HN while helping implement it in the background to pad their wallets.
The devs working on this are generally not the devs who are decrying the harmful effects. In reality, when you work on such projects you tend to isolate yourself from criticism.
Or, quite possibly, they have no other choice. Some devs have the freedom to walk away from a job that they find morally detestable. But many can't refuse or leave because they're under contract and can't afford the break-contract fee, or they're visa holders whose visa is tied to their employment, or they have a family to take care of and can't afford the time spent job searching. It's unfortunately not hard these days for any sufficiently funded business to find developers for morally questionable or outright unethical business models
The cases where people actually have no options (H-1B who had no idea what kind of business social media is and thus needs the job to stay in the US) are pretty rare.
Yes there are people who think they need a big house in the bay area or need a Tesla, but that doesn't mean they have no other options but to work at Twitter or Facebook.
It's not that rare.
I was talking less about people who are Facebook employees and more about people who are Accenture / Cognizant / Infosys / etc employees or contractors, who get subcontracted to do work at Facebook or wherever else. They just have to convince a fresh college grad or visa applicant to sign say a 2-year contract, and that person may not realize quite what they're signing until they're put on a project
Edit: I wasn't trying to disagree with you if it sounded like I was. I meant this as "in addition to what you said" not "instead of what you said"
Insightful and an important thing to keep in mind.
I know many such developers who work at these companies helping build these products and who hate these policies; they don't work on whatever feels most direct like the evil feature itself, but they don't seem to have an issue working for the company helping build parts of the UI or networking or whatever.
Moreover, even if they were the same devs, they're all working on such small parts of a bigger product that no one person or team is responsible for any of the compounding decisions that lead to this.
To be clear, I think the FB/Oculus devs are doing impressive work. I get value out of FB (that's why I still have an account) and Oculus is the primary driver of progress in VR today.
However, I don't believe it's a user-friendly product decision to tightly couple FB's VR hardware to its social media platform. It's yet another push towards a walled garden, much like Google's AMP and Apple's app store.
> and Oculus is the primary driver of progress in VR today.
Eh...I'd hand that title to Valve.
It's surely debatable, but Valve's $999 outside-in (lighthouse) wired unit is about two generations behind the Quest 2 (closer to the Rift).
I believe $300 inside-out tracking wireless headsets are much more likely to push VR out of the "trough of disillusionment" and into the mainstream.
it's not on the level of the Q2, but Varjo makes a really good high end headset, probably comparable to the Valve Index
"Imagine if your desktop monitor would only turn on when synced to an active account on a social media platform...or if that platform decides you aren't providing enough invasive information about yourself"
Welcome to your new Samsung SmartTV.
Yep, they managed to convince me not to order Quest 2. And I already own Quest 1 and Index. Hope Valve is going to ship stand-alone headset, at least their incentives are aligned.
Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed.
As well as the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" bullshit. For every ban they should be required to issue a very specific clarification on why exactly were you banned and let you to speak to a real person.
Or maybe just don't buy or use products and services like this?
Many people still will buy. There is a reason we use representative democracy rather than direct democracy - qualified people should outlaw some bad things the crowd can't resist itself.
Oculus is a niche product, it will be forgotten in a few years just like 3D TVs. Facebook knows it and it would not spend a dime on good customer service, they will just implement something good enough.
Folks often overestimate the power consumers have in meaningfully shaping a market. Consumer protections are rarely gained by simply refusing to do business with market leaders who behave in consumer hostile ways. Regulation really seems to be our best shot at reversing course on what is nothing short of the theft of digital goods from consumers.
Except that one day you suddenly have employers that require you to personally own this hardware, or government portals, and then what?
Oh, your driver's license is only available as an app for a device you just got permabanned from. I guess you're not a citizen anymore.
My health care provider is now asking users to move away from physical credentials to use an app. I am livid.
It's like these guys think "Black Mirror" is a business plan, not a dystopian cautionary tale.
Strongly disagree. Using the law in this strong arm manner stiffles innovation.
Yes, the current Oculus / Facebook situation sucks.
However, blanket statements like "Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed." Would ban very legitimate products such as Amazon's physical buttons for restocking supplies.
Sure the Dash buttons are discontinued, but there's definitely an interesting area of products that might be developed in the coming years for other products in this wide domain.
> However, blanket statements like "Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed." Would ban very legitimate products such as Amazon's physical buttons for restocking supplies.
OK, rephrase it slightly and say that it must not require an online account from a specific provider. If I can come up with an API endpoint that I want to use instead of Amazon, and I want to reconfigure my Dash button to use it, I should be legally and technically allowed to do so.
The regulation doesn't need to ban any categories of products, or mandate any features. It just needs to say that if your product depends on online connectivity for a significant part of its functionality, then it must not employ technical measures to prevent interoperability. Hardware that's sold to consumers already needs to meet various compliance standards, such as RF emissions testing; this doesn't seem like a heavy burden in comparison.
Of course, such a policy is very unlikely to be enacted in the US any time soon, but hey, I can dream.
Strongly agreed.
Some people seem to believe Internet is the new electricity. Even if this is so, electricity doesn't have colour - only voltage, amperage and frequency. My toaster doesn't restrict me to use only electricity from a specific power plant. I can power it up even from a car battery, if I tinker with it a little. Similarly, a device like the Dash button should use whatever endpoint that implements the required API, and not be restricted to a specific provider.
Why couldn't dash buttons work on the LAN for whatever use-case you want it to?
Wouldn't impact its intended use case at all. Other than the fact that it could now be used for something useful I guess...
>Dash buttons
Those weren't innovations, those were solutions in search of a problem. Probably contributed to their discontinuation. Also, what "innovation" of the past 20 years has been truly innovative, life-changing, and a net positive for humanity? Pretty much everything that has come out of Silicon Valley has been at best neutral for society (creating new markets and revenue for businesses aren't a positive in my eyes).
We need to stop pulling the "stifling innovation" card. Not stifling innovation has led us to society's cancerous relationship with technology.
Smart+cellular phones, I think clearly fit the category of life changing and world changing. World societies have been greatly improved by wireless access, everywhere.
I agree with you.
But if you can ban me from using a piece of hardware that I bought then you should be required to refund me and pay shipping for the return.
You do have that right, small claims court
I once had a Logitech universal remote control that required opening an account to use it. Sent it back, bought an AllInOne, and never since considered purchasing any products from Logitech. Unfortunately most people don't give a shit and just do what the companies tell them.
As well as the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" bullshit. For every ban they should be required to issue a very specific clarification on why exactly were you banned and let you to speak to a real person.
GDPR requires that algorithmic decisions get this kind of oversight. GDPR is the way to get redress here.
Only for consequential decisions, but yes, a GDPR complaint from someone who purchased the Quest 2 is the right approach here.
That would probably a step too far. But also unnecessary.
Make a law that requires them to give you a full refund for all hardware that you can’t use and all software purchased over the lifetime of the account.
That will make them incur a cost that makes it worthwhile for them to be more careful.
Edit: Downstream commenters make a good point. You'd have to put in a formula for "depreciation" of the refund, so you can't just get a refund years later.
So, after 5 years you can just do something stupid to get banned and get a full refund? Sweet.
Ensuring it can be used without an online account is actually reasonable.
Excellent point on the getting a refund years later. I've edited my comment to add that there would need to be depreciation on the refund.
> So, after 5 years you can just do something stupid to get banned and get a full refund? Sweet.
If this was the law, then companies would change the way their products work or the way they ban people. Instead of banning, on Facebook, they would prevent the user from posting and interacting with other users. You would in essence get a very nice advert-only feed but not banned.
And in the process making the experience deliberately awful.
I don't see how that doesn't indicate that outlawing a requirement for an account is so much more preferable.
> So, after 5 years you can just do something stupid to get banned and get a full refund?
Yes. They should be able to ban you from their online platform if you misuse it and don't behave yourself but they shouldn't have a right to brick the device you've bought, no matter what you do.
On the surface, this seems like an elegant solution. However, it also seems to me like it would need exceptions.
Since we are talking about online games, the topic of how to deal with people caught cheating (as in using third party cheating tools) comes to mind. It is typical to ban those people. If a ban was synonymous with a refund, there is little incentive to not cheat.
If the law allowed for exceptions like this (e.g. banned with cause), then it'd be pretty hollow as the company is also the final arbiter of what cause is.
It is possible I am missing something though as this is not something I have put a lot of thought into.
You bring up a good point, I've edited my comment. You'd need to add in a way to "depreciate" the refund.
For the cheating exception, I don't think it would be a problem. Most of those games have subscriptions, so there wouldn't be a lot to refund.
Feels to me like account moderations needs to be handled external to private companies operating a platform... like insurance or a credit history system
No need to ban them, just put them into a separate matchmaking bracket?
Shadow bans? That's a great idea. Probably even a better punishment than a full ban, too.
I like jedberg's depreciation idea, too. Maybe a combination of these answers all scenarios.
Not even, cheating can be a completely valid playstyle as long as everyone's doing it. Look up hack v hack.
Pointing out to sibling comments that the actual law would be more complex than the specific wording here and that courts exist for a reason.
The bigger problem is that no individual would have any realistic hope of successfully suing facebook to prove unjust account termination.
The EU actually has such a "conformity" law for goods[0], however I don't see how it would apply in this case. It also takes into account the point raised by the other commenters: "the seller can only refuse if this causes disproportionate costs on him in comparison with the alternative remedy, taking into account the value of the goods or the significance of the lack of conformity"
[0] https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer-topics/buyin...
Presumably the payment method will be banned and getting banned in a old game purposely to get a refund sounds like a lot of work for 60$. I can't imagine that would be significantly abuse.
Sellers should not be able to take away goods after the sell; that's pretty much universally understood as theft.
A step in the right direction, but it wouldn't help with the other problem of device-as-a-service, which is the company going bankrupt.
For some features, you can't get around not having an online account. I feel it's better to vote with our wallets.
I would have the law along the lines that Hardware should not be limited or curtailed in usage via any optional on-line related identification.
That way for things that may well suit having linked account - fine, but not curtailing that avenue. Basicly making having it linked to an on line account - optional via consumer choice, as it should always be.
> Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed.
You have just outlawed Roku. An online account is required to make it work, because that's how it was designed to work. It's a rather useless device without the online account.
Well, you could design an open API that others can use, too (server-side, not client side!). So the device can work with competitors, too, meaning it won't require an account at only one company. That would be a compromise - at least in theory others could replace the server parts.
I feel you're ignoring the subtle point - these devices are designed as an extension of their service not as general computing devices. I can easily replace "Roku" with "RSA SecureID keyfob" and have the same conversation - it is not a generic device; it is a targeted hardware extension of their core business model. An "online account" (an account with RSA the company) is required for this keyfob to be of any value other than a LED screen displaying random numbers.
Fundamentally, I don't see a difference there. They are general computing devices, which are then restricted to talk only to a subset of computers, and only on a subset of protocols. Similarly, the RSA SecureID keyfob can be a public/private key, where the private key is secure on the keyfob, used to generate the digits shown, and the public key is printed on the outside. Anyone with the public key can verify that the private key was used to generate it. An "online account" is not required for the keyfob to be of value.
> Fundamentally, I don't see a difference there. They are general computing devices, which are then restricted to talk only to a subset of computers, and only on a subset of protocols.
I would choose to disagree on this concept; from a business perspective, the hardware engineering design going into making the device has a targeted purpose from the outset, and is (cost) subsidized by that company specifically for their service (meaning, they could take a loss on the hardware and make up for it on the Service). Roku and RSA are extracting money for their service, not for their hardware - just like the Amazon Prime TV stick, or imagine if you will a Netflix stick made and sold by Netflix directly. The value to these companies is your service fee month over month, not the hardware they're providing - the hardware is just a delivery vehicle.
That does not mean the devices cannot technically do something other than what their primary intended purpose is; the alternative "TV in a box" projects can run on things like an Amazon Stick with a bit of work (I did it myself to mine, was neat to play with) just that it's not their primary purpose from the OEM. So can you use a RSA key without RSA? Maybe, but that's not what our primary argument is about here. The GP to this thread stated:
> Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed.
This is what I'm discussing - the GP would have the government require a device which is designed to work with a very particular online service be able to work... without their service. "Netflix, your Netflix TV stick which is designed to work with the Netflix service must also be able to work without Netflix service." That is what the GP is proposing be made a law, which I very much don't agree with - it literally ignores the entire point for the existence for certain types of hardware such as a Netflix TV stick.
Yeah, we get it. If the Roku won't work without a Roku account, then forget it, someone else can make a generic TV set top box device
My YubiKey works just fine without an RSA account, go figure
I don't understand your reply or what you're trying to disagree with; comparing a Yubikey - a product intentionally designed to interoperate with many other services and hardware platforms at it's core - is being compared to a RSA SecureID key which is a singular, targeted Enterprise solution ($$$) which does not intend to interoperate with other competing solutions (TOTP e.g.). RSA SecureID and Yubikey have different core business models.
"We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" is how the Internet has always worked.
The dirty secret of the Internet - going back decades - is that it's concept of moderation mostly relies upon unstated or understated rules half-enforced and adjudicated by volunteers or underpaid contractors with the power of judge, jury, and executioner. This is arguably by design: the vast majority of what moderators are dealing with is spam, which has the properties of being cheap to execute and difficult to filter for. Hence, anti-spam efforts are swift and merciless. More modern efforts to deal with things like foreign election interference and fake news are arguably extensions of this same ongoing effort to summarily hang and execute spammers.
Facebook is not alone in this either: Google's done it from the very beginning and their death penalty stings far harder. There's a few exceptions to this, such as Wikipedia's ArbCom or other collaborative Free Software projects with code-of-conduct rules and moderator transparency. However, even those platforms will summarily execute spammers.
This may be the only way to scale a service that is free to users. But once you are selling a product to paying customers, those customers need to be at a different tier with real customer support.
Those paying customers are already incredibly unlikely to be spammers. They cannot be handled the same way free accounts are.
This is a cultural problem as much as an economic imperative. Apple and Google both run app stores with distribution rules, but Apple will bend over backwards to try and get you in compliance with their rules, while Google will just delete your Gmail. I've also heard far fewer reports of Apple iCloud accounts getting summarily deleted compared to Google or Facebook.
No account would mean anonymous access, wouldn't it? That's fine, but I don't think many people would frequent anonymous communities since moderation would become extremely difficult, unless the presence was tied with the hardware. Tying an an involuntary account to hardware would probably destroy the second hand market.
Wow, thought I'd be one of the few struggling with this.
Bought the device with the hope that I could register an account for the first time in years, but similar to others, my account was instantly banned with no explanation other than "violating community guidelines."
One of Facebook's arguments against anti-trust accusations has been to point to the lack of consumer harm. This is fairly obvious evidence of material harm to consumers who just bought $500 paperweights.
Yeah, it's extremely hard to open an FB account anymore, which is why aged accounts sell for thousands of dollars on the <mumble mumble mumble> <cough>. Won't put that info here.
I'm frankly surprised FB would go this route then, are they assuming only existing FB users will buy? They have to know they've basically killed the ability to create new accounts.
Thousands? Quick googling suggests it's only dozens of dollars. Unless there's a better place to offload them than those top results.
Facebook bans accounts fairly regularly for hate speech, which pretty much means whatever they want. It seems ludicrous to me that an edgy teenager can have their headset bricked because they posted some spicy political memes.
If only the reason was hate speech!
This also happened to me, had an account 5 years ago, stopped using it, deleted the account on their website. Last week decided to create it again to prepare to eventually link to Oculus.. Instantly banned. Literally on the "Confirm Your Email" page got redirected to violated the community guidelines. And I'm not even from the US..
> And I'm not even from the US..
Accessing Facebook from outside the US is likely, through a combination of bad signals, why you tripped the ban hammer. Unfortunately.
The majority of Facebook users access it from outside the US.
That doesn’t preclude them from using it as one factor in their abuse detection models.
Whether it’s a good idea or not, geolocation is a common factor that these models take into account.
I think it's good to add to the discussion here for other HN readers that the reason I mentioned it was that some people are suggesting this is a measure put in-place by facebook to reduce election interference (as it's happening right now in the US). That may be the case, it may also not be since everyone (doesn't matter where from) seems to be getting banned alike.
There are similar stories on reddit, with people speculating that the old account actually still existed and the ban was because the new account was imitating an existing account. The idea that they would keep a "deleted" account around seems highly plausible given Facebook's hunger for data.
As far as I understand it, there's three account states you can be in:
- Active = Normal - Deactivated = Deactivated/Not In-Use/Asked to deactivate - Deleted = After asking for deletion, wait (don't log in) for a period of 60? days and your account is deleted.
In my particular scenario, I downloaded my data, went through deletion, waited the period and then confirmed the account was deleted (5y ago).
Unless recently changed, I know my father temporarily re-enabled his Facebook account that had been deactivated for years prior
Deactivation is what Facebook directs everybody to, but there is actually a way to completely delete an account too. With an actually deleted account, you have to create a new one, there isn't a reactivation option.
Given that Facebook creates shadow profiles for "users" who have never had a Facebook account, I wonder what "deleted" really means in terms of Facebook's social graph. Is your identity back to being treated as a shadow profile or is there now an empty hole in the graph?
I filed a GDPR deletion request after it went in to effect. I wonder if such a shadow profile would even be allowed under it.
It sometimes happens if you create account from a suspicious IP address, such as VPN or shared computer at school or cafe. They are trying to prevent account takeovers and fake accounts when some dormant users left weak passwords and got in a leak somewhere. But Facebook is also sometimes a bit too proactive in banning new accounts, because they use this as an opportunity to extract more information from you - you can only unban the account by providing phone number, scan of your ID card etc.. That suits them so they like banning more.
Even if that was true in the needlessly inflammatory way you stated it, it has nothing to do with this.
Facebook doesn't need me to be kind.
This is not about hate speech... Creating new accounts with Facebook often leads to instaban.
Facebook, their "real name" policy, and their ban policy when combined with hardware like Oculus seem like a series of really bad product decisions. Like with combining messengers between Instagram and Facebook, the business reason is probably to make Oculus harder to split off in the event of anti-trust action. Pretty gross.
I recently discovered a similar thing with Twitter: when you sign up with e-mail, they block your account and will unblock it only if you give them your phone number.
You mean the same Twitter that was leaking people's phone numbers earlier this year?
Get a VoIP number solely for using as a social media platform validator. Never use your actual mobile number
Yes, but can you somehow easily get a temporary number? Like those 10 minute email boxes?
Unfortunately, an increasing number of providers are prohibiting VoIP numbers
How are they determining that it is a VoIP number? I don't have any insight on this, so any info would be appreciated
One way that I know of: Twilio and (probably) other providers let you programmatically look up the number provider details for a given number.
There are services online that the big providers can use now that give them this info. I don't have one to hand but I've seen then when I've gone hunting for the answer to that exactly question.
I really don’t know what you can really do about it since using a VoIP number is one of the strongest signals the account is for spam.
Google banned one of my accounts after 6 months - most likely reason (with Google no support you could ask) was not using my real phone number...
Lost access to all info within the account, and other things also. Why not just prevent signup in the first place?!?!
How is it not your real phone number? I currently have no cell service on a device. It only uses WiFi. I have a VoIP app on it. People use it, it rings my phone, I answer it.
People's definition of "real" is so arbitrary in a way that suits them, but it's no less correct than the answer I provide.
Statistical models that say "most accounts we don't ban have these characteristics; most accounts we ban have other characteristics; your account is in the second group so BAN!"
Which is just positively-reinforcing tripe making it harder to do anything remotely outside the "norm" even if your intent is 100% non hostile.
- Political memes in the masses are making fact-based and rational political conversation difficult to impossible.
- Teenagers should not be on social networks.
- Teenagers who aren't old enough to vote who want to post political memes - that's like 10x me less caring whether they're banned from Facebook.
I have no problem with the ban.
However, Facebook should separate out its identity service from its social networking service. It might make more money doing this because more people would stick to its services. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to authenticate with a Facebook account even though Facebook deems me unworthy of participating in its social network.
Hard thing is that even legit political opinion will be banned if there is enough people that is not in line with your vision. Or like in Ukraine where Facebook moderation team is very very pro government with very narrow vision.
Imagine USA moderation of Facebook consists only of pro Trump's fans with power instant ban Your account.
I for one think it's hilarious that future gamergate situations might have real world consequences for the participants.
I think the bigger problem is Facebook's policing of bots, especially since this is a big election year. I'm going to guess this was the reason for OP's ban
I had a post taken down for posting a link to a local gay event. Their algorithm cant figure out pro vs hate speech.
So I started migrating the few apps I used FB logins from, (spotify), then stopped using google login because of facebook. Taught me, not to trust these companies with my 3rd party accounts THAT I PAY FOR.
The reason they put is 'hate speech' but I'm basically convinced it's a single, stock error message they show regardless of the reason. How can an account be banned for hate speech 7 minutes after it was created?
It seems like unfortunate timing - Facebook's cracking down on fake accounts before the election right as the Quest 2 launches. I'd guess that a lot of the people signing up for Facebook just for the Quest don't follow the same patterns as a typical user, so the algorithm flags them and removes them. I'm sure they'll get reinstated once Facebook manually reviews, but it's definitely a major annoyance.
Sidenote, I got my quest 2 yesterday and from a hardware standpoint, it's blown me away coming from PSVR. Too bad the Facebook nonsense keeps it from being a must have product.
> It seems like unfortunate timing - Facebook's cracking down on fake accounts before the election right as the Quest 2 launches.
No, this isn't new, more people are just seeing it now since they just expanded the market of users.
It has been like this for years: If you go out of your way to create an account disconnected from a social graph so that it doesn't creepily alert people that would have saved your number/email and uploaded all their contacts in the past, Facebook will ban the account within 10 minutes.
Somebody's inevitable rebuttal: "Yeah but my grandma just made an account and didn't get banned"
Okay, good for you. The described reality here is also valid.
To make it not ban the account you can upload a contact photo and try to friend request multiple people in a social graph. The time limit is very short and you will otherwise very quickly get instabanned or stuck in a security verification loop where the verification never comes.
This is just creepy Facebook behavior for their data mining operation, now masquaraded as "ensuring quality of accounts". This is the same behavior as when they use insecure SMS one time passwords instead of client side code generation, and then use that phone number to add it to the social graph.
Their behavior is very consistent and there is no one individual there responsible for it and even understands the use case.
In this case, this is just another byproduct of Facebook employees living in the warped reality where everyone loves the Facebook product and has it. They honestly believe it there and you should see how confused and affronted they will act when you tell them you don't have an account.
This is just a byproduct of that sentiment.
This description makes alot of sense and further convinces me that Facebook especially needs some steep regulation to curb that behavior... or disappear.
My Facebook account was banned multiple times during an 8-year period when it was 100% inactive. Each time they demanded more invasive forms of verification. First, verify a phone number. Then, upload a picture of my driver's license. Finally, I had to upload a picture of my driver's license AND a secondary photo of myself that was supposed to be taken right then for that purpose.
I will never consider using any service that requires a Facebook account, nor should anyone else.
It seems to me that the U.S. is ripe for an updating of its consumer protection laws. Particularly w.r.t. shrink-wrap license and other attempts to impose unwelcome terms that the buyer didn't know about at the time of the sale.
I imagine our existing consumer-protection laws were passed over the opposition of monied interests. If so, I wonder how close we are to having the political will do to do that again.
At a minimum, a "ban" of the Oculus account should also include an immediate refund of any and all purchases. It's absolutely ridiculously to think they can just keep all that money while depriving a customer of software licenses they paid for!
Not even that is good enough, a ban on an account should have a VERY high bar, and that bar needs to be highly regulated. Right now it's just games, maybe movies, but it could apply to all kinds of software and apps... and this stuff is important. You can't cut a person off from being able to purchase and use their puchased software. It's too important.
Arbitrary account bans already impact more substantive business services. It's not that rare to read of situations where small businesses have had their Amazon stores, Gsuite, Google Ads, or Google Store (publisher) accounts arbitrarily banned with no recourse.
heck I don't understand why Facebook doesn't exclude accounts linked to a headset from bot bans, max 1 per headset of course. If fake new Facebook accounts are worth $400+ to bad actors we are in bad shape.
Indeed, and it would force Facebook have some skin in the game because banning would cost them real money. I'm betting once each ban starts to cost them hundreds of $ they will start to at least put some human eyes in front of it before the ban hammer comes down.
I agree, and I think there's kind of an elephant in the room with respect to all Terms of Service Agreements.
Anybody with a mobile phone (as well as a plethora of other products) has inevitably agreed to dozens of pages of legal doctrine which they don't understand, any probably wouldn't without a competent lawyer on hand. But nevertheless, every minor service update, we all hit "I Accept", despite having no understanding of what we've agreed to.
Is this not massively problematic? What happens if a company actually tries to draw significant action against consumers using the terms of service as their contract?
My guess re. 'how close': approximately 48 quintillion light years away. The US has been corporatist for a long while and is blatantly so since Citizens United - the idea that a consumer protection law would pass in this environment is as 'possible' as the world taking climate change seriously at any point before we are all boiled alive.
Today my OQ2 arrived. I created an account just for the purpose of pairing the device. I used my real credentials and a gmail email address. I got banned immediately by FB, and cannot init the device. FU FB.
Return the device as defective?
I already filed a ticket. I was told that if I followed community guidelines I wouldn’t get banned. Thanks, “Jessica”. Many of the oculus support pages use Facebook, and I’m banned from reaching them, which is pure irony in this case.
I had a similar experience with Facebook and a business-related thing last summer.
The company I'm working for has a Facebook account that is more or less "broken" — managed by email addresses that no longer work for the company, unmanaged profile page, etc. I also don’t have a personal Facebook account, so I went ahead and created one and then started to clean up the mess.
Immediately my account was deactivated. I went through a process of offering a phone number and countless CAPTCHA's, which would result in my account being reactivated but then deactivated again upon the next login. Eventually I got the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" ban-hammer.
I'm sort of beyond outrage or even annoyance at this point… it's all just kind of funny and stupid. When I try to figure out a way out of this pickle, the best idea I can come up with is making a bot that logs in to Facebook, wanders around "Liking" q-anon posts, and then I'd have an account that Facebook would accept as a real human being for when I need to get actual work done with their platform.
The idea that I could have an account with hundreds of games I purchased be taken away from me without reason, or without recourse is absurd. Facebook, or really anything holding licensed content needs to be regulated.
On a related note, Steam has been getting away with this for well over a decade.
If you get banned from the Steam community for spamming/harassing/being awful your game library is still there. Even if you get banned for cheating in a game, you only lose access to that game and not the rest of your library.
I lost full access to my account when a friend gifted me a CD key he bought from someone on Ebay. I think it was originally bought with a stolen credit card, so a chargeback was issued, which then meant my whole account was locked out.
Support did restore it, eventually. I got the impression it was a one time mercy. This was back in 2010 so their policies may have changed.
"This account has been disabled as a gift subscription that you recently accepted in your account has been reported as fraudulent. The subscription has been removed. We will make an exception in your case and reactivate the account at this time. Please refrain from accepting Steam gifts from unknown sources in the future."
Putting risk on buyers of "stolen goods" is normal, so I wasn't upset at Steam for that part. But having the entire account impacted is another story.
As @asymptotically3 said, community banning doesn't take away your games, and in-game banning only blocks you from that specific game's multiplayer. In the past you could risk account suspension if you chargebacked purchases or redeemed stolen keys, but even that got changed years ago to just remove the specific game/license from your account instead.
Only large-scale fraud would get you banned, and even then I doubt they would disable your account entirely and not just disable future purchasing.
I feel incredible dissonance about John Carmack working for Oculus and by extension, Facebook. Especially when things like this come to light.
I tried to look for some kind of statement from him, I found this verge article from 2014
https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/30/5563440/john-carmack-face...
Much of the backlash regarding the acquisition has centered on Facebook's business model — data mining and advertising. This isn't a concern for Carmack, who says he "just can't get very worked up about it ." While he appreciates the need for privacy, "the idea that companies are supposed to interact with you and not pay attention has never seemed sane to me ... I rather like the recommendations that Amazon gives me on each visit. Educate me. What terrible outcome is expected from this?"
So actually he was fine with this from the start? And while he is moving on to AI and whatnot, he is still currently employed by Oculus, which leads me to believe this is his stance today.
I don't know how to feel about it. Even if you look past the privacy issues, he has engineered a product with hardware DRM! It just a shit product.
It’s VIP tunnel vision. Rich people with celebrity status never suffer the negative effects of those systems. In fact, it actually benefits them because the system knows they’re rich and actively favours them because they’re considered more valuable than the rest of us.
Of course he doesn’t get worked up because if his assistant calls for support on anything they get routed to the VIP support system and a team of people spring into action to solve the problem for him.
People like Carmack don’t have to use the shitty systems they’re building, so they don’t care. He’s just another rich asshole IMO.
Recent supporting evidence: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1315504658186678273
Oculus founder Palmer Lucky promised you would never need an FB account to use Oculus. He said FB promised him the same at the time and seems to regret his naiveté. https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/ic4ye1/new_oculus_u...
Luckey was at least already out of Oculus by the time Facebook altered the deal, right?
Never meet your heroes.
As much as I love VR (I even backed the Oculus kickstarter at the time), I can't justify spending money developing for a system that can brick the devices of my users on a whim.
They shot themselves in the foot by having this FB account requirement.
I too have the Quest 1, absolutely love it, and would have immediately purchased the Quest 2 if FB had not gone back on their explicit promise to never require an FB account.
Someone PLEASE make a privacy-first (i.e. "NORMAL") headset with similar specs to the Quest 2 - you can charge more for all I care.
Better yet.. SideQuest?! (Just got funding) please remove the login requirement as a mod.. or make another OS for it (like Lineage).
This would work really well for SideQuest, since that would give them greater control over new features they can ship.
IIRC, FB is adding new restrictions in 2021 to decrease competition from sidequest/sideloading in general
This is what scares me most about google products. If I lost my gmail account, I would be totally screwed. More surface area across google products just gives me more of a chance to get banned by some false positive somewhere, with no recourse because none of these big companies seem to care about the human. So I try to avoid google products.
There parallels with any of these giant single user account companies.
The big difference here is that Google, for now, doesn't care if you create multiple accounts while Facebook requires one and only one account that is tied to your real life identity.
If I could create a fake FB account and not be banned, this wouldn't be an issue at all.
Although I also have various concerns with Google, I feel like lumping them in here is a bit counterproductive. Facebook is on a whole other level to Google in many of these respects.
I think this business model where someone buying purchasing a physical product must register their data with manufacturer or 3rd party service and be constantly online should be made illegal. There is no business need for this apart from spying on people and gathering data to improve manipulation of messages to trick people into buying more into the manufacturer ecosystem. We need to stop this.
What could you do with a Google Home or Amazon Echo without connectivity? The physical product is premised on being able to search the web and stream music.
It should have self-hosted voice recognition software and be able plug to your own music collection on your NAS. If you wanted features like weather forecast, then these should be opt in and only send anonymous data related to weather forecast request. It should be illegal to use even those anonymised requests to do commercial research without paying the customer.
Your comment echoes one aspect of the article discussed here recently (authored by Jaron Lanier and Glen Weyl), arguing that "AI is an Ideology, Not a Technology": people should be compensated for generating data used to train models.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24753664
So you think if someone is selling a physical product and they require registration that it's reasonable to force them to stop requiring it with the threat of physical violence from the government?
I just don't see how that is justified. The seller isn't defrauding anyone and isn't using violence themselves. It's so much more easy and ethical to just not buy the product. All you can do is take personal responsibility. Calling for violent coercion like you've done is wrong.
Why would they require registration? They should have customer data on the invoice. There is no need for anything else.
I agree. That's why when Facebook bought Oculus back in 2014 I decided to buy the open platform HMD instead, the Vive. It was obvious even then what Facebook would do. What they always do. And the way to get around it is to not use Facebook products or services.
I don't think we should ban the whole class of online connected products. Just insist they publish a public API under terms that allow competitors to implement it and configure it on the device. Then anybody can create an alternative ecosystem for the device.
One change I implore Facebook/Oculus to make in light of the Facebook account requirement for these devices: Allow enabling of dev mode and APK sideloading, offline, from within the device settings without the dev account requirement. That way these devices can be more than just bricks for people who get locked out by the system.
I wonder if there are any statistics around e-waste for devices that are "bricked" due to an account lockout.
To play devil's advocate: historically, VR apps like VRChat have had an absolutely massive "4chan" problem. Harassment, bullying, vulgarity, NSFW/NSFL content, viral memes, brigading, etc. The gender disparity is also alarming (like 90%+ men!). Many feel unwelcome.
I think Facebook wants to make VR fun and appropriate for everyone. One way to do that is to tie in people's real identities. Facebook threads aren't great, but they are better than twitter threads, and A LOT better than interactions in VRChat.
Isn't that better solved by individual accounts for each game and some moderation? I've never had problems in VRChat, though I didn't find it much fun either.
FWIW, I have a few fakebook accounts, with names like Nopey Nofookinwae, and they're still active... Never bought anything from Oculus Store, though.
Facebook is really shooting themselves in the foot here, imo.
I think this is a reasonable argument for requiring accounts / checks for specific social apps in VR.
But a VR headset is not a chat device any more than a keyboard is a chat device. It's a general I/O device that can be used for all sorts of experiences, including single-user ones.
Jonanin, what is your name? Where do you live? What is your current street address? Where do your parents live, and what is their phone number? How about your kids?
I’m asking rhetorically. All this info and more is available to anyone with a full name and photograph via people-finder sites like Spokeo and SocialCatfish, which is exactly what Facebook accounts with a “real name policy” expose to the world. Using this info, any anonymous troll who you tick off in a VR game can send a SWAT team to your house, or tie up your phone lines, or harass your family and employer, or attempt to do you real physical harm. The Internet creates an extreme asymmetry of power between the abuser and the abused, and there are lots of unstable abusers out there with nothing more exciting to do than make your life hell.
The Mark Zuckerbergs and Larry Pages of the world live in gated communities with many layers of people between them and the world, so they don’t care about any of this.
Honestly I'd rather everybody got used to rude people on the internet
And to think Facebook wants to get into cryptocurrency and payments/wallets. You'd have to be really stupid to trust them with that especially after this fine demonstration.
Many Quest buyers reporting similar problems:
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb5z4i/i_dont_under... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb86d1/facebook_del... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb701s/guys_i_reall... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb5wrs/my_facebook_... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jannlj/facebook_req... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jaq477/facebook_scr... https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/jawv6g/how_sho...
Fyi your links don't work.
Thanks, copy-pasted them from elsewhere and didn't notice that they'd been clipped. Fixed now.
Facebook is easily the worst company in big tech, with zero regard whatsoever for privacy or consumers. I can no longer support Oculus since it requires FB authentication.
I recommend creating a separate account if you have no other options.
This seems to be an algorithmic implementation of cancel culture. Due to human nature, it can't be not buggy.
Seems most likely that they're trying to flag "suspicious" account creations in the run-up to the US election, and that the left hand that implemented this algorithm didn't speak to the right hand that was launching a new product that required an FB account.
Don’t keep anything on social media you can’t lose. Assume the account can get deleted at anytime.
Maintain your own private site of family and friends pictures that you own and share around with people you care about. It’s not that hard and replicates most of the real value of a social network for most people.
Anyone know what Facebook’s benefit is from the mandatory linking? At this point pretty much anyone who wants a facebook account, has one. And the quest is niche. They don’t need it to drive facebook usage.
Is it data? If so what’s the expected value of data they’d get from quest linkage?
This is by no means an exhaustive list nor 100% accurate but yes data, likely to go in to the social profile they build of you to sell/use in advertisements.
Data such as; information provided at sign up, web/links to other users based on sign up info, inferred location information, purchases, interests, visited products, used products, active hours, usage hours, general use metrics... etc
I had the same problem. Created new fb account, linked to Oculus, bought couple of things, got banned. Asked for review, solved within 2 working days. Not even my real name.
Good thing, it's a "soft" ban. They do not allow to log in, but if you are logged in, it's fine. So i could use my bought items even though I could not log in in browser. But if I would have logged out from Oculus, I wouldn't be able to use them.
So another example of "if this gets big, suddenly facebook will care, and it'll become quiet."
Staying away from anything facebook related.
Pardon my ignorance, what did he do wrong to provoke the ban-hammer? Is is prohibited to mix products across Facebook properties?
facebook doesn't like shell/side accounts without anything on them
Best quest 2 alternatives ?
Not being able to create a burner account is a deal breaker
At the moment:
For mobile VR? Quest one, that's it.
For wireless? Index/Vive with wireless attachment. That'll be 2-3 times the cost though, and you'll need a PC and router to drive that.
There isn't a wireless attachment for the Index.
Guess I'll do without.
I even have a Facebook, but I don't get why they need this information.
Sue in Small Claims Court. The Oculus terms of service permit that. Your problem will be resolved, one way or another.
Are there any alternative OS options brewing? Its mostly just an Android device. It can't be that hard to root.
I hope someone roots it. I'm offering a $5k bounty https://twitter.com/arobertlong/status/1316177057085177857
I tried to do the math on the Quest 2 hardware, and they definitely cut corners to bring the cost down, but not to the point where I think they have an attractive margin. (On the $300 headset, but the accessories/storage increase definitely have a decent margin). They’ll also get some margin on software sales presumably.
That’s important because I believe the revenue generating model is entirely from data. Even if I’m wrong, it’s Facebook, so we know they’re after data for profit.
And consider the kind of data that VR is capable of collecting. It’s biometric data at its core. If you take the data involved in VR, tie it to a person under the real-name policy, and give it to some crafty software engineers, you can get some crazy intimate results.
I would think the margin comes from their cut of software sales. Seems to work well for Apple.
The headset is the razor and the games are the blades.
Was looking at buying the quest 2 today and decided to wait until the weekend to see how the launch would go and then I saw this. I won't buy a quest 2 unless the account requirement is removed
I’ve absolutely stopped recommending it. I won’t link my Facebook account so will use it until it’s disabled. Looking forward to supporting their competitors. It’s a shame, I enjoy the device.
Lmao thats fucking hilarious. Facebook is one of the worst companies there is and you have to be stupid to buy anything from them
Unpopular opinion: although I hate how oculus sold out to Facebook (possibly backstab of the decade, after the initial crowdfunding), and although I’m a strong advocate of leaving Facebook regardless of their VR BS, there’s really nothing wrong with them requiring a Facebook account to use it. I have no idea how much the manufacturing/R&D costs of Quest are, but I doubt it makes sense for Facebook to sell it this cheap without requiring users to link/create a Facebook account. Don’t expect stuff to be free/cheap for no reason.
My point is that regulating this space of tech will only lead to less innovation. There’s an extremely easy solution that every single one of us can do: don’t buy it, don’t be tempted by the cheap price Facebook is offering. I closed my Fb account ~5 years ago now (after being on it for about 10 years) and I’m very tempted to buy Quest 2, but I won’t. If enough people do this, what ever scummy plan Facebook is weaving will fail, but even if it doesn’t, you’d be out of it.
> regulating this space of tech will only lead to less innovation
You might be ultimately right about this, but you certainly haven't proved it. A common theme is a large company will use its leverage to make a product that is better and cheaper than the alternatives, demolish their competition, and the sit on their laurels for the next decade, with the exception of a few updates that provide vendor specific features to encourage vendor lock-in.
In short, Occulus could become the new IE 5/6.
I wasn’t really trying to prove that point, I also didn’t think it needs proving. But your point somewhat does it I think. There are many examples in tech specifically over the last couple of decades on how free unregulated competition was the reason why we had accelerated development, lower cost, and “democratizations” of tools and information. As long as there’s no regulation preventing others from coming up with a better solution (however “better” is defined), there’s no reason why others can’t come up with a viable alternative. Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebag. IE -> FF and Chrome. Nokias -> iPhone and co, and so on.
Oculus rift is Westworld for facebook
Alright, so he bought it 4 years ago. Bu in the EU you have 2 years to start an RMA if a product is not working as expected under normal use. I reckon one would be able to turn it in to their retailer to get a new Oculus.
I believe this is an urban myth. Can you cite the appropriate EU regulation or directive that makes this true? If a directive what about the implementation in the UK?
https://www.gov.uk/accepting-returns-and-giving-refunds for example says (from a seller's point of view) that "Customers have up to 6 years to make a claim for an item they’ve bought from you (5 years in Scotland)."
However I see no reason that you couldn't sue the manufacturer if they arrange to break your product even after six years. That would be a tort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort) and unrelated to your rights under your contract of sale.
I am referring this: https://europa.eu/youreuright/your-rights_en#node-5
I am not sure about the UK and how they implement the directives. But in Denmark it is most definitely not an urban myth.
I got so excited by the news about Quest 2, I was certain would by it, until I learned that "Quest headsets best accommodate IPDs between 56 and 70 mm, or about 95% of adults". My IPD is 74 - no luck this time.
For PC VR you can find used VIVE sets cheap, and remember that with steamVR you can mix and match hardware. The full Valve index kits are on delay but individual parts are faster.
VIVE Cosmos Valve Index HP Reverb G2
The day I read the news about Oculus requiring a FB account in the future, that sucker fell right off my shopping list. It's sad because it seems like a really solid piece of hardware.
A bit out of the loop on this, anyone know Carmack's stance on this? Seems like a huge step in the direction of what we afraid of when Fb acquired Oculus.
We now live in world where if Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t like your Facebook posts, he (or some nameless flunky) will delete all your video games.
If I need to create a FB account to use an Oculus, I'm not using it. They are not the only option and I'm not bending.
I guess that old saying has now turned into "even if you are paying for it, you are still the product being sold."
I bought an oculus go for my son 2 Christmases ago - he has no Facebook, I have no Facebook - what to do what to do
Sign up to Facebook?
Just don't use the account for anything else.
Most of the people on reddit reporting bans are saying that they made a FB account that they don't actively use. That seems to make the bans more likely. The best way to prevent them is to use your FB account for organic activities
I have a few fakebook accounts and they're active even though I rarely log in to them. They're completely empty and have obviously fake names.
Maybe they ban them if you try to buy something (because the name doesn't match or something)? Which would be a ridiculous thing to do, but hey, I've seen worse...
How recent are those accounts? AFAIK aggressive empty account banning started a relatively short time ago.
They're 5-6 years old, so I guess they might've slipped under the radar. But wouldn't they do a check when you first link your Oculus or some other app?
Regardless, I just don't see any use for Facebook besides messaging. Sad that Oculus headsets require FB accounts.
I believe that with heavy handed actions like this, Facebook will alienate Oculus buyers, which aren't your typical Facebook user. I hope that will make them change their approach.
Personally, I couldn't care less about customized ads and "relevant" notifications. But getting your account banned, with all the contacts on it, and all the purchases, is just so anti-customer I don't understand who in their right mind would do it.
> I believe that with heavy handed actions like this, Facebook will alienate Oculus buyers, which aren't your typical Facebook user.
They definitely will, I wanted to get my first VR headset and that move took Oculus out of the running for me. I was leaning towards their headsets because local pricing for Vive -- not to mention Index -- is horrible, but there's no way I'm linking it to my Facebook.
Don't worry, you will get bored with your Oculus Quest after a month anyways. Me and my kids were using our Oculus a lot at the beginning, having great fun. Now it just sits there, although we could use it any time and even have a few great games on it.
Anyways, this has nothing to do with your issue. Facebook should be ashamed for treating paying customers like this.
They should contact their congress person and/or Senators.
I bought a Go years ago and recently I got a screen locking the entire device until I logged into Oculus. I selected the option to not connect my Facebook account, but continue to use my Oculus account. There was a sunset date on this option.
I've never bought anything from the Oculus store. I honestly only use VR for Skybox and movies I download to a file server.
Are there any alternative OSes for the GO? Honestly I'd rather just get off the stock OS if I just had a way to play my movies.
I don't get it. He contacted Oculus support, Oculus support asked if he had followed these 4 steps for reactivating his account, and then... what? At that point gave up and posted on Reddit to complain?
Yeah, this sucks. But mistaken account deactivations probably happen a lot - how to handle them is one of the FAQ questions on Oculus. It happened to me with my PlayStation 4 account too; someone in Germany mistakenly signed up using my email address somehow and in the resulting confusion I got locked out of my PlayStation games for a bit. It sucks but support will eventually fix it.