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

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 356 posts

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

#221

Post by dividedbyzero »

sandworm101 wrote: post #159
tablespoon wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

n=1 and all. I think "almost never used" isn't far off the mark. All of this sounds like hardcore nerd territory to me, with the possible exception of Signal, which still has strong nerdy vibes and is very tiny compared to its competitors. Sending encrypted e-mail from Linux definitely seems to be something that's almost never done, at population scale. If that isn't crypto nerd territory, what is?

If you were looking for everyday things lots of people do that make use of powerful security technology, Whatsapp's e2e encryption or https would be much better examples I guess; people actually use these en masse and can do so all by themselves, without support or nagging by experienced hardcore nerds.

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

#222

Post by herbst »

leokennis wrote: post #209
system2 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they aren't. There are hundreds if not thousands of competitors to these services. Infrastructure is just a web server. It is not similar to utilities like electric and water. They are built on physical cities which are controlled by the government. Whatsapp is just an app. It just happens to be a popular one and people chose to use it. That's it. Just like ICQ, MSN Messenger, etc.

> Whatsapp is just an app. It just happens to be a popular one and people chose to use it. That's it. Just like ICQ, MSN Messenger, etc. Hard disagree. In some countries, WA is used by the government for communication between them and citizens. And it is also deeply ingrained into the private economy for communication. I'm making the assumption here that Facebook likes that the above happens and that their IM app is…

> In some countries, WA is used by the government for communication between them and citizens.

Last time I checked everything but private use was against their TOS. Other than that this sounds like a horrible situation the government should be blamed for.

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

#223

Post by herbst »

MaKey wrote: post #217
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…

Calls can be listened to and texts can be read by Governments. In my opinion that's unlikely to change so there will always be a good reason to use apps like WhatsApp or Signal for communication.

Yep that's why Signal, Threma and Telegram are big. But how would that explain Whatsapp success?

The US gov obviously had and likely has access to the WhatsApp infrastructure

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

#224

Post by herbst »

vxNsr wrote: post #144
zarzavat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone calls are essentially dead technology, kept alive by people who can't or won't install an app. Thus the price is whatever squeezes out the most revenue out of the residual users until the well runs dry. In some countries this process is happening faster than in others. Entire economies have been built on the principle that the price of a call or message is 0 and you only pay for data used (if any). That is the…

But don’t you see what you’re saying? If the phone companies (TMobile, Verizon, etc) offered competitive pricing these apps/internet services wouldn’t exist! We would all happily pay Verizon the reasonable fees, instead they try to milk us and end up losing our business entirely.

I and my partner have several telephone packages that allow practically unlimited calling within Europe (which we regularly do) yet we mostly use Telegram and Signal because they are more comfortable.

Edit:// in my phone I even have a internet only SIM, without number attached.

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

#226

Post by streamofdigits »

rendall wrote: post #198

I despise the company that Facebook is, and hope that it crashes and burns in ignominy such that by comparison we remember AOL fondly. That said, I'm utterly alarmed by calls such as this to "regulate" Facebook. We really want to legitimize f*cking Facebook like that by nationalizing / turning it into a utility? Then we'll be stuck with it for-goddamn- ever Let's stick to principles, enforce existing (or write effect…

agree, there is only one stab at the vampire, and it better be the right instrument at the right place

imho its the freaking business model that is the core of the problem. everything else (monopoly, poor regulation, dark patterns etc) are things the world has seen before, again and again

but we have never (in recent times) seen such amoral political and market endorsement of what is essentially a dehumanizing societal regression: they treat their (largely unsuspecting and ignorant or captive) human users as classifiable, data minable, bidable data objects. Nothing good will ever come out of that. This is a practice that simply has to be tarnished as contravening basic (digital) human rights and incompatible with any society that has any pretense to cohesion and fairness.

NB: they are neither the first nor the only ones following this heinous business model but their are its single most effective promulgator

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

#227

Post by madeofpalk »

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…

> In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened

I completely disagree.

Corporate power changed, and sure, companies like Google and Facebook probably hold more power globally than companies in a single country.

But, individuals have gotten more power also. People can be more informed, and affect more change than they could previously, which is both a good and bad thing.

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

#228

Post by ComodoHacker »

vdddv wrote: post #225

I don't understand how "No Whatsapp = no way to communicate to relatives". Are SMS not available in some countries?

At certain age and health conditions, the only viable communication media you have left are voice and/or visual.

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

#229

Post by madeofpalk »

snek_case wrote: post #80
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…

It's easy to feel blasé about the internet, but it's also played a huge role in making information easily accessible. I learned about electronics from online tutorials. Taught myself programming. Also learned a lot about home repairs and renovations. Made a lot of contacts, landed jobs, etc. I met my partner through a dating app. I would say the internet has brought a lot of positive things in my life so far. The ope…

> I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result.

Of course, this completely depends on where you are on both Twitter and Reddit. There are bad and toxic parts of Reddit, and there are good and wholesome parts of twitter.

The one main difference though that's useful to compare between the two is that a post escaping the original audience, with the context collapse and everything else that brings, is a foundational feature of Twitter. It's a lot harder for that to happen on Reddit.

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

#230

Post by madeofpalk »

leokennis wrote: post #208
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…

For one thing, many governments will have laws about availability of key infrastructure (roads, snail mail, 4G and 5G, wired internet, financial services etc.) which result in resilience decisions: * Have at least 2 or 3 mobile networks; if 1 fails, people can still dial 112 (911) over the remaining one(s) * If banks break down, you can still withdraw up to €xyz from an ATM during the emergency * Even if all mail isn…

I'm confused - SMS and other telephone services already go down. Regulating something doesn't make it more reliable.

Arguably the regulation of "classic" telephony services is what lead to the innovations of Whatsapp and everything else.

Post reply on HN