Mentioned in today’s edition: Mark Zuckerberg, Apple, Galaxy Z Trifold, Rod Sims, TikTok, DLSS 5, OpenAI and Kagi. Plus, deals on Apple AirTags, Sennheiser headphones and Roborock vacuums.

Meta is shutting down its Metaverse-based social media network, Horizon Worlds, by mid-year (WIRED, $). The company fittingly announced that it will end the VR support for Horizon Worlds on its Quest forums, saying that the animated world will continue as a mobile-only platform (Meta Community Forums). Last month, Meta said it will still support the Quest headsets, but primarily for third-party apps (Meta).

The Sizzle: It doesn't get more official than this: Meta's Metaverse is dead! Despite the tens of billions of dollars, years of engineering, Super Bowl commercials, Imagine Dragons concerts, announcements about getting legs and, yes, changing the company's name, the Metaverse never took off. Why? I think VR remains a hard sell (just ask Tim Cook about the Vision Pro). 

But you can't go past the fact that Meta is uniquely unqualified to push anything new because it is a completely swagless company that most people vehemently distrust, even if they do begrudgingly use its products. Even Meta employees know that's what they're contending with, even if they think that the company doesn't get enough credit for the services it has created. And can you blame them? The downside of Mark Zuckerberg's ruthless but wildly successful ambition for growth — copying features, ignoring safety to juice metrics, his obsequious bending of the knee to whoever is in power — is that people find the company icky. Like, it's not like Zuckerberg truly believes that VR is the future. It was just a potential new paradigm, after the smartphone, where Meta wouldn't have to live under the rules of Apple and Google. 

So, Meta will move on from the Metaverse to AI. It's still printing money and has billions of users. But its name stays as a reminder about the company's cynical failure. 

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Weirdly I haven't seen this reported anywhere but a court filing reveals that a Western Sydney council has been completely pwned by ransomware (Caselaw). Fairfield City Council has been granted an injunction to stop people publishing stolen data, as well as a suppression order over details including the council's communications with the hackers, the IT systems and professionals involved. While the council is still figuring out the full extent of the damage, it told the court that a large amount of data was exfiltrated on October 10 from a server which had personal, financial, property data belonging to ratepayers, council employees, even legal advice given to the council (Fairfield City Council). Ouch!

One little fun fact: the council served the hackers with legal orders by putting a Dropbox link into the hackers' "chatroom" lol

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Major satellite image providers have suddenly stopped selling photographs of the Middle East (The Economist). There's a thriving industry of businesses that typically sell near-real time satellite images that are used by organisations, journalists, and researchers. But, since the US' Iran strikes, these companies have stopped, seemingly due in part to pressure from the Trump administration. While non-US satellite image companies exist, fewer providers mean less frequent updates — and fake images are also apparently filling the gap, too. 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Australia:

Rest of World:

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Yesterday, Sizzler Andy dropped this curious link in the Slack: "kagi translate now supports translation to LinkedIn", he said. I clicked. It's a typical translation interface that did, indeed, translate English ("hey baby how are you") into LinkedIn Speak ("I hope this message finds you well! I'd love to touch base and see how you're navigating your current professional journey"). 

As it turns out, you can ask Kagi to translate into literally anything by changing the "LinkedIn" in the URL to anything. I changed it to Australian, I saw other people do "Maoist English". Enjoy! 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Electronics

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