Month: September 2019

Enlarge / Not pictured here: the USB Type-C cable needed to connect the Quest to a gaming PC to take advantage of today's announced news. (credit: Occulus / Getty / Aurich Lawson)

SAN JOSE, Calif.—At Wednesday's Oculus Connect conference, the virtual reality company took the wraps off a secret that it had apparently hidden in its recent high-quality Oculus Quest headset all along. The $400 device has been marketed as a standalone wireless VR system, but thanks to an incoming "Oculus Link" update, coming in November, it will soon double as a wired-PC option.

Should you have a lengthy USB Type-C cable handy, you can expect to plug a Quest VR headset into a compatible "gaming"-caliber PC, then use that computer to power whatever VR games and software you want to run, as if it were the PC's Oculus Rift system. It's an official alternative to using the Quest's built-in hardware, which revolves around a Snapdragon 835 system-on-chip (SoC) like the ones used in the Google Pixel 2 smartphone.

Since Quest already has an array of inside-out tracking cameras, this PC use case won't require additional cameras or sensors. You should expect to plug a Quest into a compatible PC, run a room-calibration test, and be on your way—just like with certain Windows Mixed Reality headsets and this year's Oculus Rift S.

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Domestic violence accounts for a huge portion of the violent crimes and homicides committed in the US. According to the US Department of Justice, around a fifth of non-fatal violent crimes between 2003 and 2012 were committed by a partner or family member of the victim. The CDC reports that more than half of the women murdered between 2003 and 2014 were killed by intimate partners.

How can domestic violence be reduced? Offenders are often sentenced to treatment that tries to prevent reoffending, but rates of recidivism are still high. A new approach drawing on what's called "restorative justice" could help to reduce the rate of future offenses, according to a paper in Nature Human Behaviour published this week.

Restorative justice focuses responses on addressing the social harms caused by an offense. Compared to a standard treatment program, the restorative justice approach halved arrest rates over a period of two years. There's a lot more research needed, but restorative justice could offer a promising approach.

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Google won't pay anything to French news organizations for the privilege of linking to their articles, the search giant announced on Wednesday.

France is the first country to implement a Europe-wide directive intended to squeeze cash out of technology giants. The copyright overhaul, approved by the European Parliament in March, requires EU countries to give news organizations stricter control over the use of excerpts of their articles. But the European-level law was light on details, allowing individual countries to decide exactly what rights news organizations would get.

Google believes that France's version of the law allows Google to include an article's headline in a search result, but not the "snippet" that often appears below the headline. So to comply with the new French law, Google will remove the snippet below links to French news sites, as well as thumbnail images that sometimes appear next to news results.

Enlarge / Menthol pods for Juul Labs Inc. e-cigarettes are displayed for sale at a store in Princeton, Illinois, U.S., on Monday, Sept. 16, 2019. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

As e-cigarette-maker Juul faces increasingly searing scrutiny for allegedly marketing its products to teens and helping ignite an “epidemic” of youth vaping, the company announced Wednesday that its CEO is stepping down, and it is ceasing US advertising and lobbying for now.

Juul CEO and cofounder Kevin Burns will be replaced by K. C. Crosthwaite effective immediately. Crosthwaite had the title of Chief Growth Officer at Altria Group Inc., formerly Philip Morris Companies, Inc., before the appointment.

At Altria, Crosthwaite oversaw the company’s “expansion into alternatives to combustible cigarettes,” Juul said. He played a key role in the rollout of and “regulatory efforts” related to IQOS, Altria’s heat-not-burn tobacco device. Anti-smoking groups have also accused IQOS of being designed to appeal to youth.