Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 201 posts

Re: Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers

#131

Post by ethanwillis »

Ensorceled wrote: post #32
goodluckchuck wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

I can cook dinner, heat my house, call 911 and even check out government websites on the internet without google or facebook.

More government websites are relying on infrastructure from these companies. S3, cloudfront, etc.

And don't worry soon enough Amazon themselves will insert themselves between you and 911 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/modernizing-911-to...

Edit: I would like to point out my original parent comment that started all of this was in the context of FAANGs not just Google/Facebook

Re: Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers

#132

Post by ethanwillis »

krustyburger wrote: post #27
amelius wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the FAANGs are very close to being public utilities, and therefore deserve a special treatment.

How exactly is Netflix close to being a public utility?

How exactly does one thing out of a set of things not form the set of things?

Re: Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers

#133

Post by jandrese »

maest wrote: post #119
jandrese wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it within the rights of a company to dictate what software I have installed on my personal machine? If Facebook wants to ban every account using the software that is within their rights, but they don't get a say in what I have installed.

Different field, but GeForce Now received a lot of cease-and-desist letters from a bunch of game publishers for allowing people to run games on their platform. For context, GFN lets you essentially rent a virtual machine in the cloud, where you can log in with your own Steam account and play the games that you've already purchased. For whatever reason, game publishers saw it appropriate to demand GFN to stop offering…

This is no different than cd.com back in the day. You could rip and upload CDs so you could play your own songs anywhere, and it was immediately shut down by the RIAA. The argument is that streaming doesn't have a doctrine of first sale, even for items you have supposedly "bought" at full price, so publishers get total control over anything that is streamed. The government and the courts have agreed.

Re: Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers

#134

Post by 013a »

tim333 wrote: post #109
013a wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but at that point they'd have to be breaking some kind of law to warrant one, wouldn't they?

Given the wonders of the US legal system Facebook can probably throw a few million in legal fees into fighting the NYU researchers who will have to back down as unable to afford their own legal fees irrespective of who's right or wrong.

I imagine in a situation like this the university (may/would) stand behind them. And, you know, Facebook really picked a target given NYU is a top five US law school.

Re: Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers

#135

Post by rightbyte »

maest wrote: post #119
jandrese wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it within the rights of a company to dictate what software I have installed on my personal machine? If Facebook wants to ban every account using the software that is within their rights, but they don't get a say in what I have installed.

Different field, but GeForce Now received a lot of cease-and-desist letters from a bunch of game publishers for allowing people to run games on their platform. For context, GFN lets you essentially rent a virtual machine in the cloud, where you can log in with your own Steam account and play the games that you've already purchased. For whatever reason, game publishers saw it appropriate to demand GFN to stop offering…

"Devs should control where their games exist."

That seems rather questionable. It is probably the snarkiest tweet I have ever read.

Re: Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers

#136

Post by dredmorbius »

Recent discussion / submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874602 on the WSJ (linked in tweet here) story https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-seeks-shutdown-of-nyu-... (paywalled)

Politico: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/facebook-block-tran...

Re: Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers

#138

Post by tomcat27 »

macspoofing wrote: post #78
tomcat27 wrote: post #15

The world would have been a very different place had Facebook or other big companies built the internet.

Facebook, and Twitter and Google were built by particular libertarian-types who were young and idealistic. They erred on the side of openness and really disliked regulating content. I don't mind them. The people who are taking over these companies, those people I'm afraid of because they are political and their first instinct is to push ideology and censorship.

Everyone talks openness but rarely commit when its really needed.

I think mobile app development would have been a different experience if people had the convictions similar to their 90s parallels that made GNU, WWW or Linux foundations possible and lasting.

The paper "Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech, Masnick 2019" underscores the difference.

Re: Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers

#139

Post by drak0n1c »

aluminum96 wrote: post #82
macspoofing wrote: post #73

Mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, I'm against Facebook censorship, especially of academics. On the other hand, the researchers (and journalists) are going to use this research to browbeat Facebook into more censorship (and specifically censorship of the right, though some non-mainstream progressives will be caught up in the dragnet as well) as they have already done with a ton of hit pieces [1]. What to do, wh…

The evidence just doesn't support your claim that Facebook predominantly censors content from the political right. Facebook produces disproportionately more engagements for right-wing sites[1]. This is reflected in the best performing content on the site -- after the first debate, 9 of the top 10 posts were right leaning [2], which is a regular occurrence. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/09/10/faceb…

The existence of popular engagement with a subset of allowed right-wing content does not mean there is no censorship of other right-wing content. If most of the political content on a platform by volume is right-wing, then it actually wouldn't be surprising if most of the censored political content would also be right-wing.

The most engaged with articles on HN are technology-related. That fact does not magically prove that there is also zero moderation of technology-related articles.

Re: Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers

#140

Post by cbozeman »

ninth_ant wrote: post #122
walrus01 wrote: post #34

> The researchers (w/ the help of others) are responsible for a browser plug-in called Ad Observer, which allows FB users to voluntarily share very limited and anonymous data about the political ads that FB shows them. You can read about Ad Observer here: https://adobservatory.org ================= Absolutely preposterous takedown demand. Facebook doesn't get to dictate what software I run on my own client devices, i…

A lot of people felt Facebook should do more to proactively stop people from scraping and aggregating data from their site after the CA debacle. Which is what they are doing here, and you are labeling “absolutely preposterous”. Which way is it? Should they let people do whatever they want with their accounts as you suggest, and risk a repeat of the CA fiasco? Or try to proactively stop it like they are now?

What Cambridge Analytica fiasco?

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/10/06/1602008755000/ICO-s-f...

The more I learn about CA and this so-called "fiasco", the more I realize other companies know far more and actively did far more than CA did.

They were an easy scapegoat for Hillary Clinton losing what should have been the easiest Presidential election win in American history.

The fact someone made a few hundred thousand - million off a documentary is even more pathetic.

Post reply on HN