... the expectations surrounding the Oculus Rift have always been huge, ever since an 18-year-old named Palmer Luckey hacked together a rough proto­type in his parents’ garage in Long Beach, California, in 2011. In June 2012, John Carmack—the legendary founder of id Software, the company that created Doom, Quake, and the entire concept of 3-D gaming—brought that early proto­type to the E3 videogame show, reintro­ducing VR to the popular conversation for the first time since The Lawnmower Man. A year later, Oculus brought an HD proto­type to E3 and blew minds all over again. Then it brought another, even more advanced one to CES this past January. Then another unit to the Game Developers Conference in March. And finally, the $2 billion purchase by Facebook. All for a company that doesn’t even have a commercial product yet and is chasing a dream that most of the tech community had seemingly given up on decades ago.

If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world. It would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens. Private conversations, family photos, and records of road trips, births, marriages, and deaths all stream into the company's servers and lodge there. Facebook has collected the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behavior.

The study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project also found that men were nearly twice as likely as women to have posted content online that they later regret. Sixty-three percent of social network users have deleted people from their friend lists, according to the study, up from 56 percent in 2009. Sixty-seven percent of women who maintain a social networking profile said they have deleted friends compared with 58 percent of men.When it comes to privacy, 58 percent of social network users set their profile to private so that only friends can see it. Nineteen percent allow friends of friends to view their profile and 20 percent keep their profile public. Women are significantly more likely than men — by a 67 percent to 48 percent margin — to set their profile to private, the study said. The study found that men are nearly twice as likely as women to have posted updates, comments, photos or videos that they later regret. Eleven percent of social network users say they have posted content they regret with 15 percent of men saying they have done so and just eight percent of women. The survey of 2,277 adults was conducted in April and May of last year and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.

Forgoing opportunities to appear on more high profile and mainstream platforms, David Choe recently sat down with talk show host Howard Stern to talk about the recent news surrounding his alleged $200 million pay day thanks to Facebook’s $5 billion IPO. For those unaware of Choe’s personality, the extensive interview offers an honest look into his background, interest in gambling, sex and above all else his loss of privacy at the hands of Facebook’s IPO.

The graffiti artist who took Facebook stock instead of cash for painting the walls of the social network’s first headquarters made a smart bet. The shares owned by the artist, David Choe, are expected to be worth upward of $200 million when Facebook stock trades publicly later this year.

"The US-Military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.Centcom spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said: "The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US." He said none of the interventions would be in English, as it would be unlawful to "address US audiences" with such technology, and any English-language use of social media by Centcom was always clearly attributed. The languages in which the interventions are conducted include Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto." "