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You won't find FSF on Facebook

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Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#91

Post by trotsky »

georgemcbay wrote: post #89
trotsky wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-smashes-12000000-bitt... That's from 2008 announcing Pirate Bay had hit 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker. That's not total users, that's total online. Take that number and multiply it by 5 to 10 to estimate total users, double it to account for the rest of the global trackers (low?) and increase it by some percentage to account for 3 years of growth and you're in the…

By having 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker, aren't they pretty much de facto centralized even if the protocol is theoretically decentralized? If The Pirate Bay disappears tomorrow do all of those users just switch over to another tracker? Very likely not. They'd just wait around to hear about the next Napster->Kazaa->LimeWire->Pirate Bay from their tech savvy friends, remaining mostly oblivious to the tec…

The pirate bay hasn't actually run a tracker for a year now or so. BT uses a system called DHT (and maybe something else) that lets the peers handle the tracking themselves. The peers do need to boot strap off of something, but it's very minimal afaik.

Even when they did use a tracker it's probably more reasonable to think of it as a directory server more like LDAP or such. At their base even classic decentralized protocols like SMTP rely on DNS as a directory, IP on routing tables etc.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#92

Post by nkassis »

michaelchisari wrote: post #87
ubernostrum wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your mother will never have to manage any of that stuff. She'll just log in to socialsite.com and interact with your aunt, who's on othersite.org. As I said when Diaspora first started making headlines, this is incorrect. Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own no…

Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own nodes. Or Microsoft's node, or Yahoo's node, or Amazon's node or anyone else with the infrastructure to run a huge scale social site. But all that aside, you don't consider this a better situation than now, where all data is…

So what your saying is everyone would have access to all the data?

Not exactly better in my view.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#93

Post by jmatt »

sinaiman wrote: post #86
sinaiman wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should just read more. Everything is in Facebook's terms and privacy policy, isn't it? If you can't agree with the terms of service, then you shouldn't use the service IMO.

This mentality should also extend to any sites using the "Like" button...they should all be mentioning that they (and their affiliates) place cookies on your system. Right from Time's privacy policy: We use cookies to understand Internet usage and to improve our content, offerings and advertisements. For example, we may use cookies to personalize your experience at our web pages (e.g., to recognize you by name when y…

It's getting to be difficult to avoid sites that are affiliated or offer Facebook*.

Even ycombinator (and indirectly Hacker News) is guilty of being loosely affiliated with Facebook.

http://ycombinator.posterous.com/facebook-to-begin-giving-y-...

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/11/facebooks...

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#94

Post by rokhayakebe »

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.

What evidence do you have?

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#95

Post by michaelchisari »

nkassis wrote: post #92
michaelchisari wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own nodes. Or Microsoft's node, or Yahoo's node, or Amazon's node or anyone else with the infrastructure to run a huge scale social site. But all that aside, you don't consider this a better situation than now, where all data is…

So what your saying is everyone would have access to all the data? Not exactly better in my view.

So what your saying is everyone would have access to all the data?

Where did I say that?

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#96

Post by [deleted] »

michaelchisari wrote: post #87
ubernostrum wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your mother will never have to manage any of that stuff. She'll just log in to socialsite.com and interact with your aunt, who's on othersite.org. As I said when Diaspora first started making headlines, this is incorrect. Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own no…

Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own nodes. Or Microsoft's node, or Yahoo's node, or Amazon's node or anyone else with the infrastructure to run a huge scale social site. But all that aside, you don't consider this a better situation than now, where all data is…

[deleted]

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#97

Post by sinaiman »

jmatt wrote: post #93
sinaiman wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This mentality should also extend to any sites using the "Like" button...they should all be mentioning that they (and their affiliates) place cookies on your system. Right from Time's privacy policy: We use cookies to understand Internet usage and to improve our content, offerings and advertisements. For example, we may use cookies to personalize your experience at our web pages (e.g., to recognize you by name when y…

It's getting to be difficult to avoid sites that are affiliated or offer Facebook*. Even ycombinator (and indirectly Hacker News) is guilty of being loosely affiliated with Facebook. http://ycombinator.posterous.com/facebook-to-begin-giving-y-... http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/11/facebooks...

This is a good point. I'd imagine that if enough users cared about these sorts of privacy issues then traffic would end up declining enough that companies would have to either dismiss Facebook or Facebook would have to stop tracking users. I personally don't see that happening, except for maybe an uprising of a small minority of users. In which case we have to ask, does this stuff actually matter at all?

If most people don't care or are ignorant of whether they're being "tracked" then does it even matter?

I suppose that if this stuff matters to you, you'll have to just maintain a white-list of sites that you'll allow cookies for... hell, maybe it'll be up to the browser companies to bring this sort of issue to the forefront by touting the idea of cookies being disabled by default as a privacy feature.

Edit: Or maybe this issue is already being covered by some browser extensions a la Ghostery and the ilk. I guess it means that if you care enough about it, it's up to you to protect yourself.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#98

Post by indigoviolet »

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.

Actually, we're mostly the mouth, teeth and tongue of Big Brother. Which He then uses to eat babies. And His teeth are sharp indeed.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#99

Post by Natsu »

rflrob wrote: post #63
Natsu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

To be fair, there are so many examples that it's not unreasonable to expect that people reading the FSF's pages would be familiar with them. I don't think I listed all or even half of the relevant examples.

Even so, you are correct in saying that it would make the piece stronger.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#100

Post by Scaevolus »

trotsky wrote: post #91
georgemcbay wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By having 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker, aren't they pretty much de facto centralized even if the protocol is theoretically decentralized? If The Pirate Bay disappears tomorrow do all of those users just switch over to another tracker? Very likely not. They'd just wait around to hear about the next Napster->Kazaa->LimeWire->Pirate Bay from their tech savvy friends, remaining mostly oblivious to the tec…

The pirate bay hasn't actually run a tracker for a year now or so. BT uses a system called DHT (and maybe something else) that lets the peers handle the tracking themselves. The peers do need to boot strap off of something, but it's very minimal afaik. Even when they did use a tracker it's probably more reasonable to think of it as a directory server more like LDAP or such. At their base even classic decentralized pr…

While DHT is indeed decentralized, a central tracker is still preferred since it can quickly give an authoritative list of peers (rather than a probabilistic one).

Private sites tend to disable DHT anyways, since it's much harder to detect cheating without central trackers.

The important thing is that trackers are easily decentralized, since they're a per-torrent URL.

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