Joanna Stern, on YouTube:

People across the country are offering a service on Facebook Marketplace to disable the recording light on Ray-Ban Meta glasses. They call it “Stealth Mode.” Joanna paid $100 for the modification and went inside the growing business of turning smart glasses into covert cameras. She investigates who is doing it, whether it’s legal and what some are doing to try and stop it.

Of course there’s a market for this. But the true chef’s kiss is that the market to find people who offer the service is on ... Facebook Marketplace. Using a Meta platform to find people to hack a Meta device so you can surreptitiously record strangers. So perfectly Meta.

James Pero, summarizing for Gizmodo this paywalled report by Jyoti Mann for The Information:

But, wait, there’s more: in addition to the fall releases, The Information reports that Meta also has a pair slated for December, codenamed “Mojito VIP.” There are also two prototypes being tested in the fall, according to the report, including one called “Artemis” and another called “SSG,” which is short for “supersensing glasses.”

The Information previously reported that the “supersensing” pair would have always-on cameras capable of looking at your surroundings without you having to prompt the voice assistant or activate the camera with a button. The idea here is that, with a constant stream of visual information, the smart glasses could be a kind of ambient virtual assistant that remembers where you left your keys or other vision-based reminders.

Spitball: Meta’s entire business is predicated on knowing as much about people as possible. Their interest in building out a virtual “metaverse” world was motivated by the fact they could track everything people do, see, say, and hear there. That didn’t play out so they’re pivoting to building out devices that will let them track everything people do, see, say, and hear in the real world.

One more bit of “metaverse fever dream” follow-up. The one company in the field that Nick Heer doesn’t mention is Apple, makers of the best-known (albeit not best-selling) virtual reality headset. Think and say what you want about the Vision platform (I still think it’s the first inning of a long game), but no one at Apple ever once gave a hint of endorsing “metaverse” hype. In fact, as I’ve noted before, at a 2022 WSJ event, seven months before Vision Pro was announced and over a year before it was released, Joanna Stern asked Greg Joswiak and Craig Federighi:

Stern: You have to finish this sentence, both of you. The metaverse is...

Joz: A word I’ll never use.

“Fever dream” is right.

A follow-up point from my post yesterday linking to Nick Heer’s blockbuster “The Metaverse Fever Dream”. In particular, the connection Heer draws between the rise of “metaverse” hype and the pandemic.

I always sort of knew that metaverse hype roughly coincided with the Covid lockdown and our collective period of isolation and loneliness, a year-plus stretch when we relied mostly on computer platforms for nearly all socializing. But here in 2026 it’s now clear that metaverse hype and lockdown-induced isolation coincided precisely. They didn’t roughly overlap; they exactly overlapped. So much so that I’m now wondering if any of the “metaverse” hype would have happened if Covid hadn’t happened. Facebook still likely would’ve renamed itself, because they’d so poisoned the “Facebook” brand itself, but maybe to something other than “Meta”.

We allowed the necessary initial emergency lockdown to extend indefinitely because it seemed like maybe we could get by for a long stretch using technology. The extended lockdown never would have happened if the Covid pandemic had broken out 20 or more years earlier. In 2020 and 2021, we could squint and say, sure, maybe kids can “go to school” via Zoom. We never would have kept all kids home for an entire year pre-Zoom. But the truth is Zoom “school” wasn’t much better than no school at all. Same for Zoom “work collaboration”, and Zoom “friend gatherings”. It was an illusion that today’s technology is even close to a sufficient substitute for being in each others’ physical presence. The siren call of “the metaverse” was exactly what we craved — technology that would be a sufficient substitute for real-world experiences and socializing. The best audience for snake oil are people with actual ailments. And during Covid, we were all ailing socially.

Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

CBS News faced a fresh wave of turmoil on Monday after Scott Pelley, the “60 Minutes” correspondent, laced into the show’s newly hired executive producer during a staff meeting and accused Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, of “murdering” the longstanding Sunday news program.

In an extraordinary exchange, Mr. Pelley, his newscaster’s baritone sometimes shaking in anger, told Nick Bilton, the new executive producer, that he had “slender” qualifications for his new job and questioned the network’s commitment to the future of the program, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.

The 10 a.m. gathering, held at the program’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, was intended as a formal introduction to Mr. Bilton, a tech journalist and filmmaker who was appointed last week as part of a major shake-up at “60 Minutes.” CBS fired Tanya Simon, the previous executive producer, and her deputy, along with Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, two of the show’s correspondents — an event that Mr. Pelley referred to as “Black Thursday.”

It’s worth noting that the night before the firings, 60 Minutes won two news Emmys. It’s even more worth noting that 60 Minutes’s TV ratings were up 9 percent year-over-year, and digital video views doubled. In both quality and popularity, the show is thriving, not struggling. (See also: The Late Show With Stephen Colbert was, by far, the top-rated late night talk show.)

“Broadcast is an ice cube that is melting, OK?” Mr. Bilton said, saying the show had to adapt. “Bari loves this institution,” he added. “She loves ’60 Minutes.’”

At that, Mr. Pelley interrupted.

“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

Oof.

Oliver Darcy obtained a recording of the entire Bilton-Pelley exchange, and transcribed much of it, but it’s behind the (worth it!) Status paywall.