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You won't find FSF on Facebook

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Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#61

Post by adw »

trotsky wrote: post #46
hasenj wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this what FSF has become? What do you mean? This is what FSF has always been like. They're shockingly zealots in defending absolute gpl-style freedom over all your digital goods. In all honesty I don't think a decentralized and "Free" facebook would work. The centralization is a feature that most people want; it's part of why it "just work" without you having to become a system (or a network) administrator. Imag…

Seems like a pretty misguided point of view. Something tells me a sizable amount of the facebook crowd is comfortable downloading torrents, I'm pretty sure that counts as distributed/decentralized. As far as free software, is your mom unable to use any website that uses apache, ngix, php or ruby? Almost everyone has a broadband router that is almost entirely open source. My Mom and Dad both use an open source browser…

The Facebook crowd is 500m people. The number who even know what BitTorrent is compared to that is a rounding error.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#62

Post by SwellJoe »

elehack wrote: post #39
SwellJoe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I highly doubt is doing any tracking." On what evidence do you have this doubt? facebook has a long history (the entirety of their existence) of being extremely greedy about personal data. Whenever outsiders have had the chance to see inside their thought process on collecting data, it has always been clear they'll collect anything and everything they can. What they're doing with it might not be nefarious; but they…

I'm speculating that the CDN servers are running stripped-down, static-file-only HTTP servers that don't integrate with a more complex user-identification and logging infrastructure to help with throughput. I could be completely wrong.

I agree that they probably aren't doing complex user-identification...probably no cookies or JavaScript or anything like that happening on their CDN.

But, IP alone would be enough to follow the trail of most people (I know all the caveats about IP!=individual, but that data is still far from worthless), and collecting IP trails would be absolutely trivial and practically free from a performance perspective. The difference in a high performance webserver environment with logging vs. without logging is less than one percent...probably much less.

With a bit of clever data juggling, and logging of user agents and other information about the client, compare that to past visits from the same IP on properties where facebook has more data (from cookies and logged in activity), and identify users by name with pretty good accuracy.

In short: Performance is not a factor for logging, and facebook wouldn't need a large amount of additional cooperation from the client, like cookies or JavaScript bugs, to track users who aren't logged in. They just need to combine the already available log data in useful ways. A big part of the reason all these fancy distributed key/value stores and BigTable imitators exist (and why facebook has developed their own in-house) is for processing exactly this kind of data.

I'm extremely confident that facebook logs everything, though I have no idea what sorts of things they do with the resulting data.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#63

Post by rflrob »

Natsu wrote: post #16
ryanto wrote: post #4

This article is a joke, it's something I would expect to find on some tech/news gossip website. Is this what FSF has become? > so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and fore…

> Comeon, examples/proof please. You haven't been paying attention, have you? http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-blocks-lamebook/ http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=31987371885&topic=... http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/84319/20101122/facebook-priv...

And it wasn't that hard to find those examples, was it?

The problem with the statement in the original article is that it's not clear if they're referring to blocking torrent sites, or links to Diaspora. In the age of hypertext, it's just polite to link to examples inline, rather than making people hunt down what you're talking about.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#64

Post by mkr-hn »

chriscorcoran wrote: post #37
gloob wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't entirely understand why you would spend your time trying to imply something about the FSF that is completely unrelated to what the FSF cares about. Could you fill me in, perhaps?

I tried to make a joke playing off the stereotype of what some people think those working for the FSF look like. In short that they're all typical unix grey beards and are professional internet curmudgeons. It didn't work. Sorry.

I doubt the HN unix gray beards appreciate being lumped in with the FSF unix gray beards.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#65

Post by ascendant »

michaelchisari wrote: post #59
ascendant wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because it gives my rant a nice tinge of political edginess. I view the FSF as software socialists, as in they have a utopian view of how things should be and everyone should buy in and give all of their stuff to everyone else for the good of the community. I also view socialism as an impossible ideal to achieve. In my opinion, all attempts at socialism have ended in communism, where the ruling class tells the people…

I'm sure someone who has studied politics way more than I have will come in here and point out that I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground, and that's fine. Hello! :) Socialism, Communism, et all are very broad terms. It would behoove any points you make to not use them pejoratively, because they are simply too broad to use in the way you're using them. Especially utopianism, which no more describes socialists…

Your logic is really taking the air out of my rant. This is more entertaining than doing actual work though so that's why I'm still going with it.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#66

Post by waqf »

kprobst wrote: post #14
_ouxp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook could (and probably does) collect the data necessary to track people around the web, whether or not they click on 'like buttons'. Whether other sites, like Google, can do this too, is immaterial. When people are logged into Facebook, an ever increasing slice of their browsing history can be logged and tied to their real identity. Almost none of the people I know who aren't hackers have any awareness of this.

> Whether other sites, like Google, can do this too, is immaterial. It's material if the FSF isn't putting up a "Google is evil" page on their website and handing out "Don't google me, bro" buttons, like they are doing with Facebook. The FSF seems to think it's better to attack Facebook with ideological ad corporatio arguments, rather than concentrate their resources on educating people about how to their services in…

* ad corporationem

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#67

Post by Peaker »

forensic wrote: post #48
ascendant wrote: post #7

FSF doesn't like a service that doesn't operate exactly how the FSF thinks they should. Shocking. I don't take anything they or their pseudo-communist leader say seriously anymore. Back when Stallman started attacking OpenBSD because of their ports tree I knew he had finally lost it.

Stallman supports the free market, he's just anti intellectual property.

He's against software copyrights (in their current form) but he's not against trade-marks, for example, which are usually included in the vague term "intellectual property".

Stallman repeatedly condemns the use of the term "intellectual property", because it: A) lumps together a bunch of unrelated/dissimilar things (Copyrights, patents, trade marks, trade secrets) and B) because it implies that they are all "property" and should be owned, like property, perpetually.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#68

Post by jrockway »

code_duck wrote: post #43

>"He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers." It would be nice for more people to realize this. Really, they're lining up like sheep for government monitoring, and Zuckerberg and Co. are happy to comply. FB seems thrilled with the prospect of being the eyes and ears of Big Brother, actually.

As we've learned from the whole HBGary Federal thing, there is plenty of money to be made in doing the government's dirty work.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#69

Post by jrockway »

mkr-hn wrote: post #54
stanley wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Facebook we're talking about, right? Of course they're tracking. If no other reason than for ad retargetting.

It seems like logging enough detail to matter on so many loads would cost more in time and money than the data is worth. edit: And then I did the math. A 15 byte IP (pretending all IPs are made of four 3 digit numbers) plus a 400 byte URL across 1b accesses is less than half of a terabyte hard drive. Guess we're doomed.

A 15 byte IP (pretending all IPs are made of four 3 digit numbers)

An IP address is just a 32 digit binary number. 4 bytes, not 15. The dotted quad notation is just to help the humans typing them in.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#70

Post by mkr-hn »

jrockway wrote: post #69
mkr-hn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like logging enough detail to matter on so many loads would cost more in time and money than the data is worth. edit: And then I did the math. A 15 byte IP (pretending all IPs are made of four 3 digit numbers) plus a 400 byte URL across 1b accesses is less than half of a terabyte hard drive. Guess we're doomed.

A 15 byte IP (pretending all IPs are made of four 3 digit numbers) An IP address is just a 32 digit binary number. 4 bytes, not 15. The dotted quad notation is just to help the humans typing them in.

I was thinking in terms of most logs I've seen where it's stored as text.
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