Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 112 posts

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#51

Post by jonny_eh »

IBM wrote: post #3

>At a White House dinner in 2015, Mr. Zuckerberg had even asked the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, whether Mr. Xi might offer a Chinese name for his soon-to-be-born first child — usually a privilege reserved for older relatives, or sometimes a fortune teller. Mr. Xi declined, according to a person briefed on the matter. Laughed out loud at this. I can understand wanting access to the market but this is just embarrass…

I dunno, I would think it's an honour to have the president of China give your child a Chinese name. But I'm not Chinese, and neither is Zuckerberg.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#52

Post by detaro »

ben_jones wrote: post #50
adiabatty wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want to keep in touch with other people? Yeah, I think so.

TIL Facebook is the first human invention that lets you keep in touch with others.

Please refrain from such blatant mischaracterizations, they really don't help the discussion.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#53

Post by pnathan »

The Great Myth of cyberspace was that individuals in it or the servers that ran the software were not subject to the laws of the nations they existed within.

The cold reality is that this is not true. And, thus, in time, to exist within a repressive regime requires importing the repression within the software. This is the bargain Facebook wants to make.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#54

Post by StavrosK »

cookiecaper wrote: post #27
justinmk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A distributed web with many small nodes would still be hard to control and police effectively. I would guess that today's distributed web (IPFS, etc.) has more content, and users, than the "wild web" of 1992 or whatever era you fondly recollect. Yes, centralized players created tools that produced exponentially more content (and control). But it's lazy to blame that peripheral phenomenon for a perceived "loss". The…

IPFS is stopped by its insistence on things that are considered anti-features by non-cryptopunks, like immutability. There's a lot of promise behind the "distributed web" or "P2P web" prototypes, but they haven't been effectively commoditized, and their value proposition over the top-level "spyweb" isn't strong enough for normal users who don't understand the inner workings. In fact, they tend to offer less end-user…

I don't know, I think IPFS has at least a good few use cases. For example, it's great for posting censorship-resistant content, and I wrote something to do just that: http://ipfessay.stavros.io/

There are also things like OpenBazaar and a whole host of other applications running on IPFS that are quite useful. Sure, it may not be mainstream, but nothing starts out being mainstream.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#55

Post by robbrown451 »

ben_jones wrote: post #43
robbrown451 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it is a net negative, but it kind of needs to be clarified because if Facebook didn't exist, it would be someone else. Maybe MySpace would have evolved to fill the niche, or maybe another company, or maybe even an open solution. I tend to think that it would be quite possible for a company to fill the Facebook niche in a much more positive way, while still making a profit. But they certainly won't be able to…

Was there really such a NEED for fb to exist that it was inevitable?!

Need is a strong term. But it doesn't have to be needed, it only has to be desired. And yes I think a way to make communication between acquaintances more efficient is desired.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#56

Post by sharno »

ouid wrote: post #46
skybrian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wild Internet is definitely still there. The problem is that it got too hostile for most users due to spam, viruses, malware, phishing, trolls, doxing, and so on. It will get worse, as attackers adopt machine learning techniques and automate social engineering at scale. So users have a problem. Companies that solved it the right way became enormous, because protection from all that crap is something people want,…

>Snapchat helped teens avoid creating a permanent record of things. Why isn't Snapchat more popular than Instagram? I assumed that it was the case that more people have stage fright than don't. Is this a faulty assumption, or are people just acting in defiance of this fear?

Instagram became more famous because it had the same feature of self deleting posts with a user base. Also people would rather use 1 app for doing everything (posting permanent posts or temporary ones) rather than use many apps. That's why WeChat is became huge too

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#57

Post by Gaelan »

cookiecaper wrote: post #27
justinmk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A distributed web with many small nodes would still be hard to control and police effectively. I would guess that today's distributed web (IPFS, etc.) has more content, and users, than the "wild web" of 1992 or whatever era you fondly recollect. Yes, centralized players created tools that produced exponentially more content (and control). But it's lazy to blame that peripheral phenomenon for a perceived "loss". The…

IPFS is stopped by its insistence on things that are considered anti-features by non-cryptopunks, like immutability. There's a lot of promise behind the "distributed web" or "P2P web" prototypes, but they haven't been effectively commoditized, and their value proposition over the top-level "spyweb" isn't strong enough for normal users who don't understand the inner workings. In fact, they tend to offer less end-user…

IPNS is a layer on top of IPFS that allows mutability.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#58

Post by Gaelan »

amrrs wrote: post #2

>The diplomatic game that unfolded in Vietnam has become increasingly common for Facebook. Yes, At least this should ring a bell to all those who still think they can write anything on FB about a Government and get away with it. Facebook while being pushed and portrayed as your personal diary is actually your digital repository only accessible for the most elite like Government. While an average FB user can easily sh…

Facebook, for better or worse, seems to adapt to local laws. I haven’t heard anything about FB removing anti-government posts in countries that have strong speech protections for non-internet speech.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#59

Post by didip »

StavrosK wrote: post #54
cookiecaper wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS is stopped by its insistence on things that are considered anti-features by non-cryptopunks, like immutability. There's a lot of promise behind the "distributed web" or "P2P web" prototypes, but they haven't been effectively commoditized, and their value proposition over the top-level "spyweb" isn't strong enough for normal users who don't understand the inner workings. In fact, they tend to offer less end-user…

I don't know, I think IPFS has at least a good few use cases. For example, it's great for posting censorship-resistant content, and I wrote something to do just that: http://ipfessay.stavros.io/ There are also things like OpenBazaar and a whole host of other applications running on IPFS that are quite useful. Sure, it may not be mainstream, but nothing starts out being mainstream.

I have always wondered about IPFS and its relationship with DNS.

What's stopping authoritarian entity from poisoning/redirecting ipfs.io to static page?

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#60

Post by detaro »

didip wrote: post #59
StavrosK wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I think IPFS has at least a good few use cases. For example, it's great for posting censorship-resistant content, and I wrote something to do just that: http://ipfessay.stavros.io/ There are also things like OpenBazaar and a whole host of other applications running on IPFS that are quite useful. Sure, it may not be mainstream, but nothing starts out being mainstream.

I have always wondered about IPFS and its relationship with DNS. What's stopping authoritarian entity from poisoning/redirecting ipfs.io to static page?

Nothing, but that would hopefully primarily encourage people to set up IPFS clients themselves instead of relying on the public bridge.

(Which is IMHO one of the weaknesses of IPFS, that they haven't made that more prominent/easier, through browser plugins or a dedicated IPFS-browser. Compare to e.g. the publicity boost Dat got from Beaker Browser)

Post reply on HN