Facebook Put Hidden Messages ‘Big Brother Is Watching’ and ‘The Masons Were Here’ in Tens of Thousands VR Controllers
April 15th, 2019Via: Business Insider:
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. [2/3] pic.twitter.com/po1qyQ10Um
— Nate Mitchell (@natemitchell) April 12, 2019
