Techmeme
October 31, 2021, 9:55 PM

Top News

Patrick McGee / Financial Times:
Estimate: Apple's iOS App Tracking Transparency policy has cost Snap, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube almost $10B in combined ad revenue in H2 2021  —  Forcing apps to ask for permission to track users for advertising purposes leads to big hit for social media platforms
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
In 2018, Oculus' Jason Rubin sent a paper to Facebook executives laying the foundation for Meta's ambitions and detailing the need to own the VR market  —  - In 2018, an Oculus executive named Jason Rubin wrote a 50-page document headlined “The Metaverse” that he sent to a Facebook board member and some top execs.
Gene Park / Washington Post:
Meta is just playing catch-up as Roblox, Steam VR, VRChat, and other platforms have already developed metaverse-like experiences  —  In addition to announcing Facebook's rebranding to Meta on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg delivered a number of lofty promises about the metaverse and its features.
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
Facebook's metaverse is designed to solve several problems: an aging userbase, dependence on Google and Apple, regulatory risk, and reputational damage  —  If his new strategy works — a big if — it could help address several of Facebook's biggest problems.
Ethan Zuckerman / The Atlantic:
Meta's promised metaverse is going to be boring and is meant to distract us from the world that Facebook helped break  —  In a booth at Ted's Fish Fry, in Troy, New York, my friend Daniel Beck and I sketched out our plans for the metaverse.  It was November 1994, just as the graphical web …
Zack Zwiezen / Kotaku:
After a three-day outage, Roblox says it is back online  —  According to Roblox's status page, all versions of the game have been down since Oct 28 starting at 7 pm EST  —  Roblox, one of the most popular games in the world, has been down for over a day now and while many frustrated players …
Wall Street Journal:
Experts say sourcing chips has almost turned into a lottery amid the global chip shortage, as wait times ballooned to 22 weeks in October  —  Nearly a year into the crisis, some customers are finding it is taking months more than expected to get needed parts
Politico:
Industry and government officials say Gaia-X, a project to reduce the EU's cloud dependency on US tech giants, is clogged by infighting and bloated bureaucracy  —  The initiative, meant to boost Europe's cloud services, is failing to fix the problems it was intended to solve.
Daisuke Wakabayashi / New York Times:
Apple's $19 Polishing Cloth has become its most back-ordered new product with shipments delayed until January; source: the company isn't surprised by the demand  —  It's a $19 cloth.  —  OAKLAND, Calif — Apple this month unveiled an array of new gadgets: more powerful MacBook laptop computers …
Delia Cai / Vanity Fair:
Q&A with EIC Nilay Patel on The Verge's 10th anniversary, tech media's advance from early breathless gadget reviews, subject-source relationships, and more  —  After a decade covering the Zucks, Googles, and Ubers of the scene, the Verge editor in chief reflects on tech's troublesome relationship with the rest of the world.
Bloomberg:
A look at student activity monitoring software GoGuardian, whose usage in US schools exploded during lockdowns as some say it adds to kids' psychological strain  —  The pandemic caused schools to embrace laptops, tablets, Zoom, and an app called GoGuardian that tracks everything students (and, sometimes, parents) do online.

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