Creepy Messages Will be Found in Facebook's Oculus Touch VR Controllers
Facebook has revealed that hidden messages were inadvertently printed inside VR controllers that will be shipped to customers soon:
Facebook said it accidentally hid bizarre and "inappropriate" messages inside "tens of thousands" of virtual-reality controllers, including "Big Brother is Watching" and "The Masons Were Here." Nate Mitchell, the cofounder of Oculus, the Facebook-owned VR company, said on Twitter on Friday that the company inadvertently printed some unusual messages in its Touch controllers, handheld devices for playing games and navigating VR environments.
These messages were intended only for prototypes, but a mistake meant they were included in regular production devices, he said. Some messages were included in developer kits for people building software for the product, while others made their way into consumer devices in significantly larger numbers. While there should have been no internal messages of any kind in any of the devices, a Facebook representative told Business Insider that the company would not recall them.
"Unfortunately, some 'easter egg' labels meant for prototypes accidentally made it onto the internal hardware for tens of thousands of Touch controllers," Mitchell wrote. "The messages on final production hardware say 'This Space For Rent' & 'The Masons Were Here.' A few dev kits shipped with 'Big Brother is Watching' and 'Hi iFixit! We See You!' but those were limited to non-consumer units," he said. iFixit is a tech repair company known for publicly deconstructing new gadgets and posting photos of their innards online.
Also at Road to VR.
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Creepy Messages Will be Found in Facebook's Oculus Touch VR Controllers
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday April 14 2019, @03:15PM (3 children)
So what purpose did these messages serve on the prototypes? Fun? It's not like a label alters the functionality. I guess the iFixit one could have at least been entertaining. But the others seem to just be stupid, I guess the big brother one could be interesting considering it's Facebook we are talking about, self-deprecation humor? Was this supposed to have been an easter-egg? In that case it was quite lame and didn't really hit the mark.
For all we know these labels are all over all the devices, we should crack them all open and see. Back in ye' olden days of computing it wasn't all that uncommon for hidden messages here and there from the developers. The Amiga 1000 comes to mind, all the developers and a dog paw print signed the inside of the covers.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Sunday April 14 2019, @03:35PM (2 children)
The Masons told me to say: It's just devs being devs. At least it wasn't some developmental backdoor accidentally left in this time.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday April 14 2019, @03:51PM
Exactly. As much as I hate Jewbook I always appreciate good gallows humor.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday April 14 2019, @03:51PM
That sounds about right. Facebook has a loose work culture that leads to goofing around and apparently a lack of quality control.
The messages may be more than self-deprecating: they could also be an indignant take on the amount of criticism the company receives. I think we had a recent story sourced from Facebook insiders that described devotion to Zuck, Sheryl Sandberg, and other leaders as cult-like (I will look for this later).
I'm not sure if the iFixit message is meant to be friendly or not. Regardless, they will still be taking the crap apart. Probably with more zeal now that they know about these little Easter eggs.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @03:16PM (2 children)
It wasn't enough the telescreen is ubiquitous nowadays under the name "smart tv". Facebook took the whole boot-to-the-face (point intended) approach and mounted it straight on your head.
Big brother Inc.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @03:32PM (1 child)
Once again sufficiently advanced capitalism is indistinguishable from Stalinism.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Sunday April 14 2019, @04:42PM
As a simple example: In capitalist America, TV watches you!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @04:07PM (1 child)
Those messages aren't "creepy". Creepy messages would be ...
* Your mom is doing the same thing right now.
* Did you know there's a camera pointing straight down from these goggles?
* One out of 1,000 controllers comes with a free DNA sample.
* You're not afraid of clowns, are you? Not even the one right behind you?
* No employees washed their hands. Ever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @11:54PM
Neither creepy, nor inappropriate TBH.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 14 2019, @04:17PM (7 children)
I've always liked easter eggs. Even when they're stupid looking, finding the easter egg is a feat, however minor it might be. There was a story here some time ago, about an easter egg found after some number of years after publication. I can't remember what it was, but a search for "software easter egg discovered after years" offers articles on
1. Resident Evil 4
2. Bioshock
3. Tesla Model 3
4. Apple II gumball game
5. Lego Dimensions
6. Doom 2 secret uncovered after 24 years - I believe that's the one we had an article on.
7. Mortal Kombat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH8FtAiZ-MM [youtube.com] youtube video entitled "10 Video Game Easter Eggs That Took Years To Find "
So, go ahead, and drop all the easter eggs you want in your software, games or other software.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @04:55PM (2 children)
Yeah. These seem rather 'meh' you have to basically crack the thing open to see it which most people do not do.
This new outrage culture we have is no fun.
This also strikes me as publicity stunt. 3d is not the homerun everyone thought it would be. It is more of a niche market that is sinking a huge amount of capital. It is not going away. But it is miles away from one in every home...
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday April 14 2019, @05:13PM (1 child)
It's a trap! You have to crack open the device to see which message you got, if any. By opening the device you are voiding your warranty so they can now make a subpar product that breaks more often and not having to replace it! Or is that to much of a conspiracy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @05:32PM
That nonsense has been illegal since the '70s.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @08:06PM (2 children)
As a SW engineer, I say that implementing an Easter egg is cool and finding one is even cooler.
As a grown up I say that any organization that lacks sufficient QA to prevent Easter eggs getting out of the door is an organization that can't be trusted. Sure, this particular set of eggs doesn't do any real harm, but remember that this is Facebook. They are sitting on a megaton of personal data. For them to not have Easter eggs under control, says a lot about what else they might not have under control.
I "grew up" the day I put an Easter egg in a SW tool used for E-CAD and released the new version. One of the steps for triggering the egg was to check the environment for a particular variable and its value. As it happens, there was a bug in that check that caused the tool to crash at start in some cases on some platforms. We supported 5 different UNIX & Linux versions back then. Everything was working fine on the platform I used for development - with the egg inadvertently half enabled during pre-release testing: the environment variable was set to one of the special values. The pre-release test cases also worked on all other platforms with no partial egg activation in place - but only by coincidence, as I would later learn. So I released... And then came the user complaints....
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday April 14 2019, @10:03PM
These aren't easter eggs though (as in, they weren't intended to exist in the final version nor intended to be found as a pleasant surprise). It's more like if lorem ipsum accidentally shipped into a final build of a game/prod website in a deactivated portion of the game/website.
Obviously having sufficient QA would have caught this, but I don't think it's worth the investment (Pareto principle: catching 80% of the most common/important bugs costs 20% of the budget, catching the remaining 20% of corner case/insignificant bugs costs 80% of the budget).
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @12:42AM
So allowing a reckless, unskilled programmer with no concept of QA program everything other than Easter eggs is OK? Just not an Easter egg? You being bad at what you were being paid to do shouldn't shit on the entire concept of Easter eggs.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Magic Oddball on Sunday April 14 2019, @09:52PM
I agree -- and I've always found easter eggs to be a good reminder that real, live human beings created the software/hardware, not emotionless automatons. My favorite easter egg was originally a prank that one of the developers of a late-80s tile-based RPG played on the game's producer/director while they were play/bugtesting: dude waited until his target left the room for some reason, then snuck over to the guy's computer and caused it to flip all of the tiles (but not the frame around them) upside-down [mobygames.com]. The producer reportedly went scrambling trying to figure out what kind of bizarre bug could possibly cause that, but upon realizing it was just a prank, found it funny enough to leave it hidden in the game as an easter egg.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday April 14 2019, @06:11PM (1 child)
Just one picture of Zuckerberg would be CREEPY enough for me.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday April 17 2019, @11:09AM
A browser plugin to hide it would be a Godsend. Likewise for the Orange One.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @09:05PM
Facefuck is creepy, not some random Easter egg messages.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @11:31PM (1 child)
They are mocking people with their "The Masons Were Here" messages. It is all over the place, in television, movies, company logos, everything.
The khazar rats are laughing in our face "we took your money and now we control your technology. whatcha gonna do?"
Shame on anyone helping the khazar rats in any way. The right/correct thing to do is BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @12:46AM
(((You))) should probably avoid watching the Simpson's Stone Cutters episode. We don't want (((you))) to get triggered.