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You won't find FSF on Facebook

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Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#101

Post by forensic »

dctoedt wrote: post #75
forensic wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Stallman supports the free market, he's just anti intellectual property. Without property rights, I'm not sure what if anything -- except services, a.k.a. labor -- can be consistently monetized in a free market. In other words, in a world without property rights, the only thing of (monetary) value is labor. And if memory serves, the labor theory of value is the foundation of Marxian economics; see http://en.wikiped…

He believes in private property, just not copyright.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#102

Post by statictype »

hasenj wrote: post #26
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…

> 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…

Strawman.

There's no technical reason why a decentralized system can't work. The main road blocks would be finding a compelling reason for people to switch away to one in the first place.

Email is decentralized. It seems to have worked pretty darn well.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#103

Post by statictype »

protomyth wrote: post #8
r00fus wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm making a guess that FSF (and EFF) would probably have preferred the most influential person to win, namely Julian Assange.

You gotta wonder though, how many people are touched each day by the work of Zuckerberg versus the work of Assange.

If directly touching people's lives was any sort of criteria then I think Jonathan Ive or Steve Jobs ought to be a better candidate. Or Larry/Sergey.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#104

Post by finiteloop »

elehack wrote: post #22
smcl wrote: post #20

"Because 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" I thought you had to have a facebook account to "like" something, either on facebook itself or sites with the FB "like" link. Anyone know otherwise? edit: Just logged out of FB, opened a random Time article ( http://www.time.com/time/world/arti…

The "Like" button infrastructure (images, JavaScript) is loaded from Facebook's servers via a cross-domain request. Those servers can theoretically use cookies or IP addresses in conjunction with referrers to do tracking even without clicking Like, for both authenticated and unauthenticated users. Some content is loaded off of their CDN, which I highly doubt is doing any tracking. The non-CDN pings are quite possibly…

We delete the logs from social plugins (including the Like button) after 90 days:

https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17512

The purpose of social plugins is to enable you to share things to your Facebook profile easily - not tracking.

Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#105

Post by finiteloop »

SwellJoe wrote: post #32
elehack wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Like" button infrastructure (images, JavaScript) is loaded from Facebook's servers via a cross-domain request. Those servers can theoretically use cookies or IP addresses in conjunction with referrers to do tracking even without clicking Like, for both authenticated and unauthenticated users. Some content is loaded off of their CDN, which I highly doubt is doing any tracking. The non-CDN pings are quite possibly…

"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…

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283036

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#106

Post by docgnome »

drm237 wrote: post #60

Don't look now but Adsense and every other ad network can track your movements online too! In keeping with their Facebook stance, FSF should block the GoogleBot and get off of Google too.

I hate the argument of "Google is doing it too!" Just because someone else is behaving (what I would consider to be) badly doesn't make the behavior any less reprehensible.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#107

Post by SoftwareMaven »

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…

My mom and dad don't know what a browser is. This is not fantasy or creative editing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ

If so, so many people don't know what a browser is, you can only image how smooth a distributed social network would have to be to work.

Bit torrent works because it's three steps: 1. Download a bit torrent client, 2. Search Pirate Bay, 3. Click on the torrent. Occasionally, you hear the failure mode: why won't this stupid thing download? The only people who say things like "More people need to seed this" are tech literate.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#108

Post by SoftwareMaven »

trotsky wrote: post #79
adw wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

I think you are massively over-inflating your 300M estimate. The typical usage of bit torrent is to leave it running 24-7 to download the 300 torrents you've got queued. I would bet it is is far lower than 5-10 times and I really doubt it has tripled since 2008.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#109

Post by SoftwareMaven »

statictype wrote: post #102
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…

Strawman. There's no technical reason why a decentralized system can't work. The main road blocks would be finding a compelling reason for people to switch away to one in the first place. Email is decentralized. It seems to have worked pretty darn well.

Email is just as much a strawman. Compare how simple email is to all of the features Facebook provides (and don't forget your ability to click on your cows in Farmville).

You say there are no technical reasons why it can't work. That is very akin to the "You can do anything, it's just a simple matter of coding." The reality is that some problems become intractable due to their complexity. Distributed social network may not be intractable (Diaspora will probably figure that out), but it's a hell of a lot harder than email.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#110

Post by [deleted] »

Natsu wrote: post #99
rflrob wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]
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