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Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

theguardian.com

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#221

Post by loup-vaillant »

blobwalker wrote: post #199
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. Fortunately, if everything else fails, we should always be able to connect on 443 via stunnel for example, no matter what protocol we use. That's the price to pay for the net getting more complex and more abused.

Unfortunately, that's not true. Corporate networks got rid of plain old proxies that just passed anything SSL on 443 many years ago. In order to meet regulatory requirements to record employee communications, pretty much every US company of any decent size uses a proxy (blue coat, zscaler, palo alto, etc.) that executes MiTM attacks on all SSL traffic. If it's something other than HTTP over SSL, or if it's to a block…

We can go one step further, and put our payload into an encrypted body in an innocent looking HTTP request. Thus begins the game of cat and mouse…

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#222

Post by ForHackernews »

specialist wrote: post #170
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it was a sham because asking hard questions would require them to admit FB being an important asset for US own intelligence operations. If they drill too deep they'd need to face very uncomfortable questions about other platforms too, e.g Palantir (Thiel was right there lurking ;)). Facebook is the Internet in many countries (making them less resilient and even more prone to meddling than the US). And so looking at i…

Everything about everybody, living or dead, is known in near real-time. We got a demo of Seisent, since bought by LexisNexus, mid-2000s. Our use case was to uniquely identify patients to improve record matching across heterogeneous databases. Back then, Seisent was just based on publicly available data. It spanned all of North America, The Caribbean, and a good portion of Central and South. In those regions, every si…

I really doubt this is true, given how poorly targeted advertising performs, how much stuff credit-reporting agencies get wrong, and how much stuff intelligence services miss.

I'm sure they have a lot of data, but like anyone else, it's dirty data, and it's difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from it.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#223

Post by mkirklions »

davvolun wrote: post #204
mkirklions wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder who is saying things like "reasonable regulations" Do you run your own company and find the regulations dont require you to hire a multi-thousand dollar legal team at every turn? Are you an internet user that thinks that what the government says wont be exploited? I worry that my kids will be unable to start businesses due to regulations, or rather their friends wont be able to start businesses. I am…

I'll tell you, I've worked for a business small enough to avoid needing to hire a "multi-thousand dollar legal team" and a few of the things that I know happened while I was there leave me very suspicious of the things I didn't know about. > Are you an internet user that thinks that what the government says won't be exploited? Nope, I'm a normal person, not actually a strawman. As long as there's government, it will…

>Can your kids' friends start a business now to compete with Facebook? No

I disagree with this. I think at the current time they can.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#224

Post by bonestamp2 »

yodsanklai wrote: post #43
kaitnieks wrote: post #38

Maybe I'm too cynical about politics, but it appears to me that the point of these hearings is not to solve or investigate anything, it's to generate soundbites that voters or potential future voters would like. It's not even that important what the reply is, as long as the politician asks the hard question and demonstrates his concern, and if it makes the news & press, that's victory for them.

What I find particularly annoying in this kind of hearing is the condescending tone of the politicians. They are eager to put the blame on someone else when they are ultimately the ones who vote the laws.

You're not wrong, but on the flipside... do we really want them sitting around all the time thinking up laws they can enact to prevent every possible wrongdoing in society? It's a reasonable expectation that people self-govern with some morality and ethics and not look for every possible way to advance at the expense of someone else.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#225

Post by PurpleBoxDragon »

spacehome wrote: post #5

I was struck that on the surface it looked quite adversarial. Senators were trying to ask fairly pointed questions (despite any technical ignorance). But underneath the surface, the two parties here have fairly well aligned goals -- less freedom on the Internet. The senators want to show that they're doing something, and Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it. I'm sure they're…

What counts as a free internet? Can an internet which is monitored and which the governments in power have ability to enforce penalties of what they consider misuse ever be considered free? How does one decide what material can be outlawed while still maintaining a free internet?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#226

Post by bonestamp2 »

thret wrote: post #72

"the senators elevated him to a kind of co-equal philosopher king whose view on Facebook regulation carried special weight. It shouldn’t." Why not though? I assume he holds more sway than any senator of any country.

True, although the senators are there to protect the people and they can't protect the people from someone if they take advice from that person.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#227

Post by bonestamp2 »

mtgx wrote: post #2

You're not going to get the "real deal" with the next hearing. If anything, they're going to take it easy on Facebook. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/04/face...

Not to mention, Zuck had a private meeting with lawmakers on Monday. I wonder what they talked about then. I assume at a minimum they reminded him that he can't talk about any government spying that facebook assists with.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#228

Post by throwaway413 »

wvenable wrote: post #191
throwaway413 wrote: post #124

Damn social logins. The biggest one is Spotify. They require you to make a whole new account instead of just unlinking your FB one, and then all of your playlists etc are gone. I’m going to set aside a day to migrate all of my services, but it’s going to be a pain. Worth it.

I made the smart choice a long time ago to never use one of those social logins. It actually kept me off of Stackoverflow for a long time. I'm not even particularly socially minded or privacy conscious -- I just don't think one coordinated login is a good idea.

Smart choice, wish I didn’t make that mistake.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#229

Post by throwaway413 »

dishanr wrote: post #155
throwaway413 wrote: post #124

Damn social logins. The biggest one is Spotify. They require you to make a whole new account instead of just unlinking your FB one, and then all of your playlists etc are gone. I’m going to set aside a day to migrate all of my services, but it’s going to be a pain. Worth it.

You can ask the Spotify customer service to migrate your data from the old account to the new one. I did and they transferred all my content.

I actually did contact them and ask and they were the ones that told me to just open a new account as they couldn’t disconnect it (which I obviously knew to be BS).

Maybe I’ll try again asking even nicer...thanks for sharing.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#230

Post by salawat »

kristianc wrote: post #97
simias wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it Sounds like a libertarian conspiracy theory to me, especially when we still don't know what these hypothetical regulations would look like. For instance if they make it easier to access your data, download and delete it they might somewhat weaken the lock-in effect of Facebook and level the playing field somewhat. Beyond that and even if…

> Sounds like a libertarian conspiracy theory to me, especially when we still don't know what these hypothetical regulations would look like. For instance if they make it easier to access your data, download and delete it they might somewhat weaken the lock-in effect of Facebook and level the playing field somewhat. What is the ask here? A ZIP with all your information? A JSON file with your friendship graph? How wou…

How about "information submitted by a person to a third party is still considered private"?

The disingenuous loophole the government is so fond of whereby you sharing information with a third party suddenly negates ALL expectation of privacy and 4th Amendment protections is a farce. Signing up for Facebook should not be a "first sale" of your personal information or right to privacy.

Of course, no tech company that has ridden the free ride of harvesting personal data would be on board with ANYTHING like that.

They can keep their IP and algorithms if they want, but if I don't consent to the fruits of my existence being fed through them, then that is where it needs to stop.

No company should feel safe with involuntarily increasing a user's digital footprint. Period.

That covers not asking to and being explicitly told not to. A person has an inalienable right to maintain final authority over their digital presence. The only exception that makes sense to me is for the press. Though I haven't thought that implication through completely yet.

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