Tech Week In Review: Facebook Takes Another Step Toward Metaverse, Favorable Court Ruling for Apple & More

Facebook Widens Access to VR App:

Facebook announced last week that it was opening up its virtual-reality world app, Horizon Worlds, to anyone in the United States and Canada who is 18 years old or older. Previously, users had to be invited to access the app. The move is an important step for the company, which recently changed its name to Meta, in keeping with its ambition of building the metaverse, a 3D digital world where people work and play.

But the move is also raising concerns that the company, which already has difficulty policing hate speech and harassment on its social media platforms, is creating immersive spaces that will only be more challenging to monitor.

“The issue of harassment in VR is a huge one,” Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, reportedly told the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “There’s going to be whole new art forms of how to harass people that are about plausible deniability.” (CNET, CNBC)

Appeals Court Stays App Store Ruling:

A federal appeals court in San Francisco temporarily stayed a lower court ruling last week requiring Apple to let developers embed links to alternate payment methods in their iPhone apps. The decision came the day before the ruling from Yvonne Gonzales Rogers, a federal judge in Oakland, was scheduled to take effect. The stay will allow Apple to maintain control of its App Store and the generous fees it generates until the appeals court issues a ruling. (CNBC)

Amazon Web Services Suffers Outage:

Amazon Web Services, the world’s leading provider of cloud infrastructure technology for businesses, suffered an hours-long outage last Tuesday that disrupted some of the company’s delivery operations and services, including Whole Foods, which it acquired in 2017. As of late Thursday the company hadn’t revealed the cause of the outage. (CNBC)

All-Electric, Self-Driving Transit System Could be Coming to Trenton, NJ:

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) announced last week that Trenton could be the first city in the state to get an entirely electric-powered, micro-transit system with self-driving minibusses. The governor’s office recently issued a call for proposals to design, build, and operation such a system. (NJ.COM)

-- Compiled by KOREY CLARK