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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

#101

Post by sandworm101 »

corinroyal wrote: post #90
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…

Tempting. Sadly, if we let the sheep have their FB, the likely result will be that we lose whatever semblance of democracy we have left. Already we're down to one party that belives in free and fair elections. Our system depends on informed citizens, not massive authoritarian psyop experiments. The longer we go where the majority can't get overwhelmingly popular policies accomplished, the closer we get to turning to…

That is the US story. It has less to do with facebook and more to do with the US political system. There are plenty of countries who have very different systems that have not followed the same path in recent years. Tech companies are part of the problem but should not be made scapegoat to avoid the deeper issues within the American political system, issues that existed long before the internet was a thing.

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

#102

Post by zwirbl »

corinroyal wrote: post #90
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…

Tempting. Sadly, if we let the sheep have their FB, the likely result will be that we lose whatever semblance of democracy we have left. Already we're down to one party that belives in free and fair elections. Our system depends on informed citizens, not massive authoritarian psyop experiments. The longer we go where the majority can't get overwhelmingly popular policies accomplished, the closer we get to turning to…

Down from, like, two at the best of times. It's always either them or us, which is likely part of the problem

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

#104

Post by selimthegrim »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #50
Johnny555 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "accessible"? I can call anywhere in the USA for free, and its $0.01/minute to call an overseas relative, yet I almost never call.

Accessible would be the mobile networks allowing people to call overseas for $0.01 per minute. I would not dare try to call an international number via ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile outside of Canada/Mexico, because I would expect to pay at least $10 for the call if not more. I do not know where one would get $0.01 per minute international calls from the US, but it is most likely not as easy as an app on your smartphone.

T-Mobile used to have some kind of international roaming deal...

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

#106

Post by NavinF »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #51
lotsofpulp wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accessible would be the mobile networks allowing people to call overseas for $0.01 per minute. I would not dare try to call an international number via ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile outside of Canada/Mexico, because I would expect to pay at least $10 for the call if not more. I do not know where one would get $0.01 per minute international calls from the US, but it is most likely not as easy as an app on your smartphone.

Honestly, is there a good reason this hasn't happened yet? If people use WhatsApp, the mobile networks get $0, so they ought to be offering at least somewhat competitive prices...

I assume it's more profitable to milk old customers that don't care about price rather than try to get new customers onto POTS.

Realistically the only reason any of us would switch is lower latency calls to people that have shitty WiFi. That's an shrinking market.

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

#107

Post by jvolkman »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #93
jcfrei wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, why shouldn't the next standard (like 6G) introduce support for a better messaging network than SMS? With group chats and image support. Each carrier could decide if you can send unlimited messages or a few thousand. In any case it would remove this dependency on a single company. Edit: Just realized there's RCS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

Such a standard is unlikely to ever introduce end-to-end encryption.

It already exists and is enabled by default (at least on my Pixel phone using the default messaging client).

https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10262381

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

#108

Post by Johnny555 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #50
Johnny555 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "accessible"? I can call anywhere in the USA for free, and its $0.01/minute to call an overseas relative, yet I almost never call.

Accessible would be the mobile networks allowing people to call overseas for $0.01 per minute. I would not dare try to call an international number via ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile outside of Canada/Mexico, because I would expect to pay at least $10 for the call if not more. I do not know where one would get $0.01 per minute international calls from the US, but it is most likely not as easy as an app on your smartphone.

but it is most likely not as easy as an app on your smartphone

You mean an app like Google Voice, or one of the many other SIP/VOIP apps out there? I use Localphone as my home SIP provider, and they have an app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/localphone-international-calls...

There are tons of ways to make cheap calls from your phone -- when I used to travel internationally a lot, I set up my Android phone dialer with my SIP provider, then I could make and receive calls from the default phone dialer.

But now I don't even bother, I just call home via a video call using Hangouts/Meet or Zoom and use my local SIM to make a local call.

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

#109

Post by unethical_ban »

aaron695 wrote: post #22
ALittleLight wrote: post #12

"You have built, bought, or maintained a product which is vital to billions. It's a free service unavailable 0.01% of the year. For this you must be punished."

Shhhhh on HN you can't have independent thought, your hive mind has to hate Facebook for every incident even if it makes no technical or logical sense. The Tweet is a good reminder how Facebook is a utility and more than a 'fun' app. It's nonsense to then go it needs regulation due to this outage. It's obviously unintentional, and as you point out, outages are rare and it would be unlikely any government would have l…

This is a clever troll. It's so full of ignorance I thought of reporting as a troll, but that would only serve to validate one of your false claims that one can't have independent thought.

The point ideologically is that society should not be so dependent on one private company. Government is regulated by the people and serves the public interest. Facebook serves only itself and profit.

Government intervention, so the theory goes, could mandate a market or set of chat protocols that prevents a single operator from dominating the chat sphere via network effects or by technical operation.

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

#110

Post by curation »

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…

Same. I started online in the late 80s with something called Wired Writers - we shared stories online with famous writers who critiqued us. At the time I didn't think much about it (I was a kid) but it was sponsored by an oil company. Now I think about it a lot. I went on to digitize libraries, set up university databases (Silver Platter etc). I think about how my nieces don't know that internet that we saw. It is because the form of our society does not allow decentralization. This censors the content. I think about that.
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