Nextech AR also supports virtual events, although it’s just one of many uses for its augmented reality technology.  Their latest venture is to add the ultimate real-world touch to their event experiences: advertising!  Yep, they’ve set up a network to sell ads to virtual event attendees.   Perhaps they can add some stale pastry and luke-warm coffee to complete the simulation.

Advertisers can hope, but the odds against person-based targeting keep falling.  Firefox just extended its already-strong anti-tracking features by adding “cookie jars” that prevent websites from sharing cookies with each other. And privacy-centric browser firm Brave just bought independent search engine Tailcat, which promises not to track users.

Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.