Read on Twitter
Some exciting news from my corner of academia: researchers have jailbroken the Oculus Quest 2, Facebook's newest virtual reality headset. Here's a link: https://www.techradar.com/news/hackers-seemingly-jailbreak-oculus-quest-2-vr-headsets-facebook-log-in
This is a thread about why this hack matters.
1/
This is a thread about why this hack matters.
1/
The Quest 2 is a great piece of hardware. It has best-in-class resolution (which _really_ matters for VR), and it is a standalone headset, which means you don't need an expensive computer hooked up to it and you won't get tangled in wires when moving around.
2/
2/
But if you want, you can wire it up to a powerful PC to run top-of-the-line VR experiences. That's a nice feature, too.
3/
3/
It is $299, which is pretty cheap for a VR headset. There are lots of pricey add-ons you can buy to make it more comfortable for longer use, but the starting price is significantly lower than competing VR devices. This is a notable step toward making VR more accessible.
4/
4/
Well, it seemed that way, until this announcement came: FB is requiring all Oculus users to log into a FB account once they turn on their headset. Then it became clear how FB could lower the price of the hardware.
5/ https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/19/21375118/oculus-facebook-account-login-data-privacy-controversy-developers-competition
5/ https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/19/21375118/oculus-facebook-account-login-data-privacy-controversy-developers-competition
Whenever a giant corporation offers a product to a user at a surprisingly low price, it's probably because the users _are_ the product. In the case of FB or any other ad-tech monster, any piece of data their system can scoop up about you is what they sell.
6/
6/
FB sees the future value in VR, so they're looking to capitalize on everyone's data once they get them in their user pipeline. This shouldn't have been hard to predict (even if the founder of Oculus promised it wouldn't happen), but it is tough to swallow nonetheless.
7/
7/
FB has had a lot of privacy issues. That should not surprise you. Requiring VR users and developers--instead of letting them choose--to sign in with an FB account forces them to comply with their sketchy practices.
8/
8/
Yeah, you can just choose not to buy one. But, it is really cool tech. It would be even cooler if it were more freely available to people. And I'm not using "more freely" here to describe the price.
9/
9/
What the researchers from the first tweet have done is offer hope that users can take back control of their devices.
10/
10/
When a user "jailbreaks" a device, they get more control of it. They can run programs that don't go through a proprietary app store, or they can get around other constraints the manufacturer puts on it. Companies don't like this.
11/
11/
Jailbreaking requires a lot of time to get right, and it's risky. There is a subset of users that love that process. After all, tinkering with tech and using it in different ways is how we make new tech. That's how Palmer Luckey made the first Oculus.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-palmer-luckey-created-oculus-rift-180953049/
12/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-palmer-luckey-created-oculus-rift-180953049/
12/
Jailbreaking the Quest 2 presumably will give users the ability to circumvent the FB account requirement. For this reason, we can expect FB to push back using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This is wrong.
https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca
13/
https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca
13/
@doctorow wrote a great thread on companies using the DMCA to criminalize users' modification of the systems they buy. Criminalize! That's nuts. Check it out here: https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1321481237324689411?s=20
14/
14/
We shouldn't have to sacrifice our rights to privacy to use a computer. The fact that researchers could jailbreak the Quest 2 two weeks after it hit the shelves shows how important this idea is to the VR community.
15/
15/
VR is interesting because of how _virtual_ it is. You can experience a world that is not constrained by any of the real world's laws--physical or otherwise. We don't need FB and its privacy violations infecting these worlds as well.
eof/
eof/
