From The Webaverse #004 Oct. 22 - Quest2 jailbreak, Filecoin tanking, Hacked by Comic Sans, Discord as Metaverse, and more.
Exclusively curated bites of tech trends directly from the Webaverse community
The future is spatial, but it risks being owned by one or two companies. Webaverse brings together open standards like WebXR and distributed infrastructure for apps and virtual objects to be owned by users instead.
The webaverse team is currently working on an app demo release, and a whitepaper. Stay in touch with this newsletter to grasp more and more of the concepts of this incredible world, one email at a time.
#xr-hardware
The Quest 2 jailbreak adventure has begun. If privacy dies in VR, it dies in Real Life.
As people around the world are unboxing their early Christmas VR gifts, the lock-in implied by Facebook's mandatory login on the Quest2 has infuriated the community so much that a bounty starting at $5.000 snowballed to ~$30k in a blink of an eye.
Even among the legitimate users sacrificing their privacy to FB, many got their device locked after trying to merge their oculus account or making a new one just to use their Q2.
Some people were able to bypass the login using an old android app using an old oculus app version (ios v77) (unstable) + pi-hole to block FB validation domains.
It took only 48 hours for someone to pop in like a flower and claim the price.
Since then the discord locked in and the messages were cleared to protect the participants and the potential winner.
He was directed to a team of security and legal professionals who can evaluate this claim and determine how to responsibly publish these findings.
This locking move seems to be dragging everyone down as Microsoft just said it will now require a Microsoft account to enjoy Minecraft as well.
Oddly enough, the overall moral panic seems to be receding regarding privacy issues at least in the UK.
Links:
The OG tweet [TheVerge] - Facebook is accidentally locking some users out of their new Oculus headsets [RoadToVr] Quest2 Teardown, what is it made of? [Deloitte UK Study] [Destructoid]Minecraft microsoft account
Bonus: Keep on your radar Wifi 6 & Quest 2
But the VR revolution is still hard to follow. What keeps virtual reality stuck in the future?
The VR revolution has been 5 minutes away for 8 years.
Part of the issue, paradoxically, is that VR technology keeps getting better, and less expensive. So there are too many generations of new products. Imagine a new Playstation every 3 months better than the previous one. So you’re then stuck in a “to buy or to wait for the next cycle of indecision”.
A lot of people on the discord end up with a pile of headsets taking dust on their shelves.VR does not have a good solution to hair or makeup problems. Yes, a lot were reluctant to use the strap and crushing their hair.
There just isn't a meaningful collection of experiences to keep most people coming back yet. And it’s hard to fit in the day-to-day lifestyle
You're either playing arcade games for 2 weeks and putting it down or you're getting into social VR and never looking back - @Shaw
Somewhat related Kindles had a 30% abandonment rate. And Ebooks have not taken over print. Something can look like the future if you work in tech but end up as a niche.
Despite all that Gartner has updated their hype cycle, with new placements for AR, VR and MR with VR reaching the slope of enlightenment with AR & MR on its tail.
Link: What is gartner hype cycle What means AR MR XR?
Bonus: A mysterious HTC VR Headset appears in FCC Filings and 25 Years of Gartner Hype cycle
#webdev
We talked about it in the previous newsletter QUIC is now experimental in the newly released Node 15! That makes the webaverse builders happy as we believe that the web is the best application platform with Javascript as its best ecosystem.
Unhandled rejections are now raised as exceptions by default. If there's any one issue you're going to run into that'll get you scratching your head, it's this one.
--unhandled-rejections=warnwill let you revert this change in the short term, if needed.AbortControlleris a way to signal cancellations in some Promise-based APIs. Time to easily kill those pending fetch without an additional package.
According to Cloudflare V8 is not only one of the fastest implementations of JavaScript, but one of the fastest implementations of any dynamically-typed language, period.
Due to the immense amount of work that has gone into optimizing V8, it outperforms just about any popular server programming language with the possible exceptions of C/C++, Rust, and Go.
As an odd-numbered version of Node, Node 15 will not become a LTS release eventually in the way that Node 14 is. Be aware of this if considering Node 15 for production use, as you'll be forced to upgrade in mid 2021 when maintenance releases cease.
So if you want an easy maintenance life, stick with (or migrate to) Node 14 for production in the short term, or be prepared for more frequent upgrades if you move to 15.
Bonus: Neon bindings wants you to superpower your node with the power of Rust. And very closely Wasmerio wants to become the webassembly (WASM) package runner.
#m3
M3 members are experimenting with open standards like WebXR and VRM. We want to build a long lasting foundation for the open Metaverse. Some of our followers call us the ‘Homebrew Computer Club of the Metaverse’.
M3 finds a token name: After looking at $PIE, $HONY, mac and cheese (?), $FLAN, the Teletubbies and a pineapple they finally settled on a TEST run with a delicious 🥧$MMM deployed on uniswap seemingly without troubles. The final token will mainly support decentralized trading & perks for the webaverse.
[Discord]
From the Hubs Archive room this week:
Avaer talks about Liquid Work on what’s coming up in 2021 [Youtube]:
Big Idea: Discord IS the current metaverse.
Favorite Quote:
“I can pull stuff out of my inventory and hand it over to you guys and it’s a one second transaction that is gonna work on top of all the existing virtual worlds”Big Concept: We can move ERC's across worlds, we can move files across browsers, we can move avatars across monoverses.
NFT Hub wants to be a centralized “Guilds Hub” to solve the “What’s going on today in the NFT world”. And halt the fact that everyone wants to be king in their own castle… and cut the noise at the same it. Then also a token. Ambitious since it revolves on community driven and no capital yet. [Youtube]
Hot takes of the week:
DEFI is the adtech of crypto, turn people into numbers and run algo bidding to skim value from them - @Avaer
Decentraland is an awareness campaign, albeit an expensive one. - @Jin
If I was a billionaire I'd buy your whole network just to prove that it takes one son of a billionaire to come in and buy every asset and resell it for 5% more. I could hire a team to help me build a network to control your whole economy from my phone. So now you have a Webaverse but 1/3rd of it is Shawtown. Forever. - @Shaw [Discord]
It's clear that if we could all just hang out in the metaverse, our basic needs were met, and we met some societal expectation of being productive / contributing meaningfully but it was fairly open ended to our own interests, everyone would be a lot happier. There is a way to synthesize it though, which is to give people the feeling that they are part of something bigger, and that their actions contribute meaningfully to the world for everyone. And if you fail they will always eventually rise against you, like in Second Life, when the community realizes that they aren't building something bigger, they're just the customer. - @Shaw
Honorable mentions: A bit after its release on Steam, and some lovely reviews, Metachromium (MC) gets some spotlight during VRARA Seattle (40min mark for demo). Mainly used to get cross-worlds multi-apps.
Some M3 members (and namely @jaredmonkey from the above video) are working on a free & open source branch that we will all be able to maintain together in the W3C. Pretty cool!
They’re trying hard on the rebase to upstream (of chromium). It's going to take a while since their last diff was 14 million lines of code changes.
#crypto
Is Bitcoin holiday moon starting?
PayPal to allow cryptocurrency buying, selling and shopping on its network. PayPal's service does not allow bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to be withdrawn or deposited.
Once you buy the coins, they stay in your account until you sell. You own the Cryptocurrency you buy on PayPal but will not be provided with a private key.
Will Stripe FOMO and follow up on this after they folded up on crypto in 2018?
Links: Coindesk Article on the Paypal Move Ending Bitcoin Support (2018) Stripe No withdrawals
Meanwhile Filecoin ($FIL) searches itself around 20$ after a 200$ peak right after its launch on Oct. 19
Filecoin is a decentralized storage network on top of the InterPlanetary File System (a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to make the web faster, safer, and more open)
The token sale ultimately raised over $200 million, the largest ICO to that point.
Some claims that FIL devs had disregarded the rules by dumping 1.5 million tokens.
Links: Filecoin.io Dumping Allegations
#graphics
Mind blowing Fovea detector: Look at any specific point and you should clearly see the extent of your fovea (the stars only seem to be rotating in a small circle at the center of your vision). Move your head back and forth to see it grow/shrink.
Link: ShaderToy
#scripting
There goes this month Halloween scare 🎃. Chrome 0-Day in the wild. Update now!
This one seems to steem from Truetype. Causing a heap overflow.
In theory you could get hacked just visiting a website (or an iframe), or an ads, that would use a crafted “font.ttf” and do something like:
<style>
@font-face {
font-family: "pwnfont";
src: url(font.ttf) format("truetype");
}
html,body {
font-family: pwnfont;
}
</style>#memeology
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