It’s that time of the year again, when Apple fans go crazy about the release (发行) of the new iPhone. The new model, which will be released in the Chinese mainland later this year, is a little bit longer than the iPhone4S.

Although the size changed, the model is actually thinner and lighter than last one. It comes with a high-resolution “retina” screen that’s sharper than the 4S, according to Apple.

So far, demand for the iPhone5 has been higher than expected (预计的), with 2 million pre-orders (预定) made in the first 24 hours. But while the new phone excited many people, it also left a lot of people disappointed (失望). Mat Honan called the iPhone5 “completely amazing and very boring”. “Though we’ve reached the sixth iPhone, things have got so good that Apple does not change very much any more,” he said. “And so you get the iPhone5, which looks like a longer, thinner one of the iPhone4.”

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone back in 2006, it won praise from all over the world. Similar praise was given to Apple when it introduced the first iPad in 2010.

However, recent smart-phone designs have failed to satisfy people as much. Stephen Shankland said “it’s time to lower your expectations (期望).” This is because we have entered a time where it is harder for phone designers to come up with better ideas and changes. It could be some time before someone comes up with the next big idea.

Imagine that one day you live in a highly immersive (身临其境) virtual world. You can go to a virtual concert, take a trip online, view or create artworks and try on or buy digital clothing. Amid a pandemic like COVID-19, instead of seeing teachers and classmates on a video call screen, you could join them in a virtual classroom. This may help you understand the concept, metaverse.

The term metaverse refers to a shared virtual 3D world in which people can access via the Internet. Currently, most virtual spaces look more like the inside of a video game than real life. However, metaverse’s made the digital spaces more realistic by the use of virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR, 增强现实).

Metaverse was first used in Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash in 1992. The novel is about Hiro, a pizza delivery man by day and a VR superhero by night who lives in an online universe called The Metaverse. “He is in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his glasses and pulling into his earphones,” the novel says of the city that everyone pops into in VR. The idea rings in many other works, for example, in Ready Player One directed by Steven Spielberg.

In recent years, metaverse has become the latest popular word to capture the tech industry’s imagination so much that one of the best-known Internet platforms is renamed to embrace the futuristic idea-Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that he changed his company’s name to Meta.

Tech companies are also dedicated to exploring metaverse-related products. Facebook has launched meeting software for companies, called Horizon Workrooms, to use with VR headsets. The headsets cost $300 or more, putting the metaverse’s most cutting-edge (尖端的) experiences out of reach for many. For users who can afford it, they can enter the virtual worlds created by different companies. Fans of metaverse see it as the next stage in the development of the Internet.

So, do you expect the coming of metaverse?

When you install an app on your smartphone, you’re often asked whether you’d like to share your list of contacts with that app. That might be a convenient way to connect with friends and family, but it also means you’re giving away their personal information to the app developers.

And that personal information could end up being used to create so-called “shadow profiles” of your contacts —even if they don’t use that app or social media service.

Shadow profiles appeared as a potential problem in 2011 when an Ireland-based advocacy (辩护) group accused Facebook of gathering information on non-users, including names, email addresses and phone numbers.

The following year researchers showed that social network companies such as Facebook could use machine learning to pretty accurately predict whether two non-members known by the same member also know one another. And a recent study in the journal Science Advances raises the stakes.

In that work, David Garcia, chairman of systems design at the sci-tech university ETH , used a social network member’s personal information to infer relationship status and sexual orientation (倾向) of the members’ contacts who did not have their own user accounts on that social networking site.

He was able to do that using data from the Friendster social networking site. He says he chose those two attributes—relationship status and sexual orientation—because they can carry important privacy consequences and were both available in the Friendster data set.

Garcia is careful to point out that he didn’t prove that shadow profiles exist, just that they can be created. His work also reminds us how much we wind up giving away online-- about ourselves and about the people in our lives.