News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Musk Meets Apple’s Tim Cook, Gives Critical Update on App Store Twitter Ban ‘Misunderstanding’

Musk said in a post on Twitter late Wednesday that he and Cook had a “good conversation” and that they “resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store.”

“Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so,” Musk added.

Musk also shared a brief video clip of a pond at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, saying in the caption that Cook had shown him around the “beautiful” site.
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Pulling Twitter from Apple’s App Store would have meant the social media platform’s app wouldn’t be available on any iOS-using devices aside from a web browser.

Such a tactic was deployed by Apple, Google, Amazon, and others against free speech-promoting social media platform Parler in 2021. Critics of the move compared it to a form of censorship.

Several months after Parler changed its content moderation policies, the app was restored on the App Store.

But data show Parler’s usage dropped significantly since early 2021, after Amazon Web Services abruptly took the platform down for about a month as the company had to find a new host.

Facebook in Race Against Time to Turn ‘Metaverse’ Into Success

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is staking its future on the success of its virtual reality platform. But the project is bleeding money so fast, it raises the question of how long the company can keep it going.

About a year ago, Meta was the fifth-most valuable publicly traded company in the world, trailing only Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon. Today, it’s No. 25, behind Home Depot.

Meta has seen measures of its financial health decline across the board. Revenue dropped by more than 4 percent in the third quarter, year-over-year. Administrative expenses went up, while profit was halved.

The company has acknowledged that it went on too much of a hiring spree in recent years, announcing layoffs of 11,000 employees and a hiring freeze until March.

But the largest factor appears to be the financial drain of Meta’s virtual reality (VR) division, Reality Labs, which has accumulated an operating loss of more than $21 billion over the past two years, including more than $3.6 billion lost in the third quarter of 2022 alone.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors he expects those losses to continue piling up, with the company expecting it to take years for the VR effort to mature.

Honestly, I'm not interested in a VR world.
This world is a mess. Why wouldn't people make the VR version a mess as well?