31–40 of 118 posts
I would like to see these used in the US to break the telco monopoly stranglehold. Of course it's likely the FAA/FCC would make sure not to let that happen. edit: I mean same tech, but not deployed by Facebook.
This is more about reaching remote, sparsely populated areas.
This video has given me a newfound respect for Facebook. Many engineers at tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. report that they feel overqualified for their work. I imagine many yearn for the chance to work on moonshot projects like these - is there any reason why secretive research divisions at these companies are so small, when there is plenty of engineering talent to go around internally?
The amount of code you can write grows linearly with number of engineers, but communication costs grow quadratically. Therefore, the speed at which you can execute is inversely proportional to the size of the team, unless you can cut communication costs. Established projects can do this with architectural decisions that prevent one engineer from needing to know about or communicate with other engineers working on unrelated parts of the product. New projects cannot, because the architecture hasn't been established yet. That's why every innovative product grows out of a small team.
Just, no. This is frightening on many levels. A facebook plane? To get people on facebook, right? To get them on the internet is secondary to Zuckerbergs goals here, lets be honest. A walled garden? Come on. It should be the whole internet or they shouldn't even bother. A walled garden, with no security protocols, with the intention of getting the entire world on facebook? Not cool.
How is the world with no Facebook plane in any way better than the world with a Facebook plane that provides Facebook access? If you don't want Facebook access, or you already have it, the two worlds are indistinguishable.
Even ignoring the massive man-in-the-middle attack problems from running old phones on a proxy, Facebook is positioning themselves to control exclusive access to large number of users for websites.
You could argue that Google already does this - but Google has competitors that users could switch to in a heartbeat. Internet.org users don't have options, and websites need to pander to Facebook to be in that walled garden. It also makes it easier for third world countries to censor the internet.
In the end, this is damaging to the open internet ecosystem. Facebook could have just implemented a rate-limited or data capped system like other ISPs, but they opted to create a more restrictive system that gives them more power.
Just, no. This is frightening on many levels. A facebook plane? To get people on facebook, right? To get them on the internet is secondary to Zuckerbergs goals here, lets be honest. A walled garden? Come on. It should be the whole internet or they shouldn't even bother. A walled garden, with no security protocols, with the intention of getting the entire world on facebook? Not cool.
How is the world with no Facebook plane in any way better than the world with a Facebook plane that provides Facebook access? If you don't want Facebook access, or you already have it, the two worlds are indistinguishable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is the world with no Facebook plane in any way better than the world with a Facebook plane that provides Facebook access? If you don't want Facebook access, or you already have it, the two worlds are indistinguishable.
Because internet.org's proxy server gives Facebook monopsonic control over the internet. Even ignoring the massive man-in-the-middle attack problems from running old phones on a proxy, Facebook is positioning themselves to control exclusive access to large number of users for websites. You could argue that Google already does this - but Google has competitors that users could switch to in a heartbeat. Internet.org us…
You mean control over the internet access they're providing, that otherwise doesn't exist?