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Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

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Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#151

Post by annadane »

strogonoff wrote: post #149

Why break Facebook down instead of requiring large social platforms to provide exhaustive open APIs? The latter is much more constructive, purely technical, and instead of levelling field as a one-off actually lays down the foundation required for a heterogenous social tech landscape. Meanwhile, the breaking down is political, and does not address the underlying mechanics that will keep producing these quasi-monopoli…

Don't say that on here, you'll get the droves coming in with their talking points of "But open APIs are how cambridge analytica happened"

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#152

Post by forgotpwd16 »

paxys wrote: post #53
darth_avocado wrote: post #24

I know it’s hard for a lot of people but why do we automatically blame everything on Facebook? The inaccessibility to WhatsApp completely brings life to a standstill for a lot of people across the world. Isn’t that more of a failure on the part of the governments, people and companies that exist there? How is a app that needs access to internet somehow a bigger necessity than the basic function of the device the app…

We did focus on making the services accessible and affordable. Then phone providers and ISPs took the goverment funds and went "nah". As late as 2005 I was paying AT&T ~$9/minute to call my family abroad and up to $1 per text. If it weren't for tech companies like Skype/WhatsApp/Facebook/Google I have no doubt that would still be the case today.

That's my experience as well. Not sure why tweet's author thinks government will necessarily improve rather worsen a service.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#153

Post by red_trumpet »

jkelleyrtp wrote: post #94

Why would breaking Facebook down and regulating them solve anything related to the global dependence on WhatsApp? Aren’t the only people who know how to run these services already running them? Like, do we expect the government to take WhatsApp away from Facebook and then create government contracts for companies like Oracle to maintain the infrastructure? So we’re back to square one but with the bureaucratic mess of…

If you regulate WhatsApp so that it has to be interoperable with other IM systems (similarly to how email or matrix work), then not everyone has to be dependent on WhatsApp.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#154

Post by raxxorrax »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #75

Was talking about this with a friend today, and I think this incident highlights why I sometimes get really depressed about my career and technology. I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the domina…

Tech enthusiasts never had the numbers to realize that world. It was the "It just works" users that determined how economic interest would shape the net in large parts.

That said, the classical internet is still there, it just isn't as buzzing as social media. I really appreciate that.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#155

Post by whitepaint »

mrpopo wrote: post #76
Jugurtha wrote: post #68

How does the author come to the conclusion to break Facebook down and regulate it after the outage ? There are a lot of power outages in the world by companies that are regulated, sometimes even state-owned.

I think the point of breaking down Facebook into smaller entities is to reduce centralization of operations, and thus the impact of single-point failures. The same conclusion should be made of a giant state-owned company.

What about Cloudflare? Should it be illegal?

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#156

Post by mseidl »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #75

Was talking about this with a friend today, and I think this incident highlights why I sometimes get really depressed about my career and technology. I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the domina…

On the information super highway!

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#157

Post by sandworm101 »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #128
sandworm101 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ Don't go for the 15$ bare-bones options. Buy one of the 50-100$ kits so you have at least some basic antennas and necessary cables.

If you're spending $50-$100 on equipment, maybe it's worth buying a better dongle too with more than 2-3 MHz of bandwidth.

When it comes to radio-related gear, there is always a slightly better model for a few dollars more.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#158

Post by m_fayer »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #75

Was talking about this with a friend today, and I think this incident highlights why I sometimes get really depressed about my career and technology. I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the domina…

About the same age here.

One thing that adds to this feeling for me, is that any device I own that has an OS, unless that OS is Linux, feels distinctly hostile. I can't own a handheld computer that's not trying to enmesh me in an "ecosystem" of some sort, curate my options without my consent, do god-knows-what in the background, brick itself on a timer, and the list goes on.

It's even worse with laptops and desktops, unless I'm willing to devote big chunks of my dwindling free time to making a hobbyist OS (which, to be fair, is a breath of fresh air when it works) behave.

When even the terminals to our increasingly-hostile internet are themselves hostile, it makes me dream of just walking away from it all that much more.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#159

Post by sandworm101 »

tablespoon wrote: post #146
sandworm101 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let the sheep have their facebook apps. Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government can censor, read or even detect that I have sent. I have a dongle that plugs into my phone that can decode a…

> Let the sheep have their facebook apps. Those "sheep" (i.e. people who aren't crypto-nerds) are the people I mainly want to communicate with. > Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government ca…

>> And those pathways are almost never used

I used signal this morning to talk to a team of 100+ people on a big project. I sent an encrypted email to my parents last night. A month ago I used Tor to bypass a hotel's silly DNS block on "Torrentfreak.com". My laptop is running a linux distro that I downloaded as a torrent. These are all everyday non-cryptonerd activities that leverage very powerful security products.

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