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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

#231

Post by throwaway413 »

aninhumer wrote: post #176
throwaway413 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chalking everything up to “society” is a great way to never get anything solved. Change starts with oneself. Connecting on an individual level, making changes on an individual level, understanding and valuing even minute consequences on the individual level - that’s what going to bring about permanent change. Not more groupthink. We have brains and decision-making abilities for a reason. Yes, I understand society has…

So how do you suggest we solve the problem without collective actions? What "changes on an individual level" do you think need to occur, and how do you expect them to come about? Because to me, it seems like the individualist's prescription is just to judge people for making bad choices and hope they make better ones in future.

I hear you - but hopefully the individualists prescription is really one they are taking themselves and not forcing onto others, but leading by example.

Collective action is just a bunch of individual actions. Yes there is power in syncing up, regardless, it still stems from an individuals decision to take action, with or without others.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#232

Post by exodust »

Just watching this now on youtube, and surprised to hear Zuckerberg say he isn't aware of the term "shadow profile", even though he confirmed in the previous sentence that they collect data on people without Facebook accounts. Very odd denial of a term he is surely familiar with.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#233

Post by Thranduil »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #160
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…

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…

Man, I really wish the paranoia around Palantir would die. It's a federated database search system, and that's it. It searches multiple databases, and returns combined results. With all this complete paranoia around it as a company, people seem to have the impression that it's magically summoning data out of thin air, when in reality it's a glorified JOIN statement (obviously a simplification, but you get the sentiment).

Yeah, Thiel is more conservative than most big names in tech, but that's not surprising given that Palantir started focused on the national defense space.

Oh, and "PRISM"? Yeah, that's just a data importer. Completely separate from the secret CIA project, it's just a classic naming conflict. It was originally named "Palantir Data Importer" or something of that ilk, but Palantir loves fancy names, so re-branded it Prism (which is actually a clever name, as prisms takes white light and separates it into colors, much like the importer takes unstructured or semi-structured data and separates the entities and relationships).

Source: Am former Palantir engineer

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#234

Post by 908087 »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #35
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…

On an unrelated note: I always wonder how people nowadays identify the Internet with WWW. There are so many ways to use the Internet in a way not even remotely related to the current power struggles between greedy businesses and duped users, with incompetent governments meddling in from time to time.

If I had to guess, I'd guess that less than 5% of current internet users have ever knowingly and intentionally used "the internet" via any protocol that wasn't HTTP. Even that might be an overestimation.

Companies like Google and Facebook have effectively turned the web into "the internet" for the vast majority of people. Even e-mail has essentially become "the web" for most people thanks to services like gmail capturing so many uninformed and unsophisticated users. IRC, too, is mostly lost to services like Slack.

Corporate interests have mostly erased the concept of an open, decentralized, multi-protocol internet from the public consciousness.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#235

Post by [deleted] »

ryandrake wrote: post #203
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh and Sarah Jeong just now: "Going to tweet out amounts received by each Congressperson from Facebook since 2014 as they speak in this hearing" https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/984075571981266944 this is worth gold!

Sweet! There should be a rule where, whenever a politician is on TV talking about some subject, there needs to be a graphic in the corner showing the total dollar amount of donations that politician received from the 3 most relevant companies.

[deleted]

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#236

Post by uses »

austenallred wrote: post #71
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.

Note how many of the senators who voted to expand surveillance programs and the NSA became suddenly very concerned for privacy. They just wanted to try and dunk on him and get in a sound bite.

> Note how many of the senators who voted to expand surveillance programs and the NSA became suddenly very concerned for privacy

Ok but even from their perspective, and I'm trying to not give too much credit here, but there is a difference between giving specific, authorized government agencies a blank check to spy on whoever they want to in order to achieve their mission of national security, and giving a blank check to any company that wants to collect unlimited information and surveillance on its users in order to accomplish whatever goal it desires. They're very different questions even though they both involve personal privacy.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#237

Post by trophycase »

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.

This is so true. I was watching a Congressional hearing with the head of the SEC and FCTC about Cryptocurrencies about 2 months ago and I clearly remember Elizabeth Warren asking a completely unrelated, derailing question. I remember thinking "What the hell is she doing?" and then "I bet that you're going to find some Youtube clip: 'Elizabeth Warren totally GRILLS head of SEC!'"

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#238

Post by iamatworknow »

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…

The sad part is that a lot of people don't even seem to care.

When my relatively small company announced that they were installing a Palo Alto firewall and that everyone needed to install client side certificates in order for web browsers to continue working, it set off major alarm bells in my head that led to one conclusion -- "No more non-work related web browsing at the office. No exceptions."

Most of my coworkers (albeit mostly those in support and not developers, but still people at least somewhat familiar with the way computers work) only cared that they'd still be allowed to visit Facebook during the day.

I was assured that "nobody was actively looking at employee web traffic" but that doesn't matter. They didn't even think it was a big deal to put this new monitoring in writing until I made a big stink out of it, and they added this to the employee handbook:

>Each of these communication avenues are subject to monitoring by the IT Security Manager, a supervisor, or the President. When using any of these communications, be aware that a business record is made, which is retained by the company and becomes the company's property. This business record may potentially contain sensitive personal information related to the sites you are viewing and into which you are logging on, including user/password information. If you do not wish to share such information, it is suggested you do not access those items using [employer]'s network.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#239

Post by extra88 »

EpicEng wrote: post #180
extra88 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software and construction are not analogous. For one thing, no one is talking about regulation of social media that has to do with life and death matters. Are you proposing that no one should be allowed to create a video sharing platform unless they can prove in advance they can actively monitor all uploaded content, regardless of how popular they get?

> For one thing, no one is talking about regulation of social media that has to do with life and death matters You may not believe that if you live in Myanmar or Kenya. Large amounts of behavioral information in the hands of the wrong people can absolutely be a life or death issue.

I'm not saying there are no life and death matters, I'm saying no one is talking about regulation that would address them. I could be wrong, I'm not current regarding the relevance of Facebook and those countries.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#240

Post by return1 »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #197
return1 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But for how long? usually hype cycles last a few months, until the next outrage takes over to keep people busy.

I should have been more clear: How long before FB pushes back? And what might that look like? Is Congress capable of regulating something like FB? They can't solve immigration / DACA.

Why would FB push back in the first place? Assuming their bottom line is not being hurt, they 'll be glad to be best buddies with the congress.
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