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“One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

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171–180 of 197 posts

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#171
post #130

I hate stuff like this: "A more open and connected world is a better world. It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all of our values. Thank you for being part of our community and for everything you've done to help us reach this milestone. I’m looking forward to seeing what we accomplish together." It reeks of dishonesty.…

I don't blame you for hating this kind of talk since it doesn't actually say much of anything of substance -- but to call it dishonest seems like a stretch. What am I missing?

Do you think Zuck doesn't actually believe these things? I'm not sure I understand the charge of dishonesty here.

Indeed, I'm not sure I even see anything in that quote that isn't true, let alone something that I don't think Zuckerberg believes to be true.

What's more, I think he's actually grateful to the users of facebook. Who wouldn't be? Again: corporate-ese? Sure. Dishonest though? Not really seeing it.

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#172
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it even be possible to exfiltrate all that data? It's hard to imagine even storing all that they're generating in a single day. What's the most an attacker could likely get? Usernames & passwords for all users? Complete profile/album/comment data on a few tens of millions?

Very insightful question. The only way I could see this working is having a botnet network that extracts the data externally, encrypts and stores locally, and then each node serves up its cache over bittorrent to a command and control system. It's just so much data. The more valuable data, arguably, would be plain text profile data about people, not their photos. Assuming 7 billion people in the world (very conservat…

10 megabytes of text data per user? You are orders of magnitude off. A list of friends, all posts and private messages. After compressing it will probably average 10 kilobytes per user.

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there actually people who put stuff on facebook thinking it's private?

Depends how you define private.

I assume that anything I put on facebook is already known to various governments, and might well become known to anyone in the world. I mostly post funny comments and the occasional picture, but would never post anything I didn't want my employer, my children, etc. to see.

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends how you define private.

I assume that anything I put on facebook is already known to various governments, and might well become known to anyone in the world. I mostly post funny comments and the occasional picture, but would never post anything I didn't want my employer, my children, etc. to see.

Me either.

But I post photos of my children with the assumption that I have privacy from the masses, and I think Facebook offers that.

My ex girlfriend can't access those photos. Yes, I agree they're not private, I know someone can copy them and email them to her. The government has access. They're sitting in public CDNs, the URL to them has no security etc etc.

But those photos still have a level of privacy.

So yes, I think there are many people who put things on Facebook expecting they're private. Not private in the way you mean, but private in the way I mean.

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don't see Mark claiming any of that in this post. If your machine requests data from Facebook's machine, it's a use of Facebook. There's no way around that. If Facebook sends personalized content in that request, then there really is no argument that this does not constitute a technical use of Facebook. However, in most cases, users are not voluntarily making those requests to Facebook, but are more or less f…

Why does everyone always think Facebook is lying when it comes to these type of things? What good does it serve them to do so? Seems to me it is mainly just due to the fact that most here haven't worked at anything anywhere close to FB scale and can't believe it can actually be true.

Who thinks they are lying? The same sentence can mean different things to different people depending on what definition is assigned to the words, among other things.

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#177
post #130

I hate stuff like this: "A more open and connected world is a better world. It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all of our values. Thank you for being part of our community and for everything you've done to help us reach this milestone. I’m looking forward to seeing what we accomplish together." It reeks of dishonesty.…

I don't blame you for hating this kind of talk since it doesn't actually say much of anything of substance -- but to call it dishonest seems like a stretch. What am I missing? Do you think Zuck doesn't actually believe these things? I'm not sure I understand the charge of dishonesty here. Indeed, I'm not sure I even see anything in that quote that isn't true , let alone something that I don't think Zuckerberg believe…

The problem is that there's a huge elephant in the room: how much money this kind of milestone represents.

I don't trust anything he says, as the frontman of a giant money-making enterprise, that purports to be about "connecting people" or a "stronger society".

I'm not saying he should be "more honest" by mentioning "and congrats to our investors for making so much $$". I'm saying he should leave the sentimental stuff to someone else, because he's got a conflict of interest that makes everything he says seem like bullshit.

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#178
post #105
post #99

To me it's sad and scary for humanity that one profit seeking corporation has managed to wedge itself in the middle of all our relationships. In my ideal world Facebook would be run by a benevolent nonprofit, ala Wikipedia but more democratic.

To paraphrase Han Solo, "yeah, but who's gonna pay for it, kid? You?"

Sure. Why not? The only thing really stopping us from having distributed apps (like diaspora) is a way for people to easily install them on always-connected hardware they own.

If there were a well designed open source router with a decent app store with equivalents of all the web apps you use online, I'm sure you could get a lot of people to start sharing their baby pictures using software installed on that.

I'd switch to something like that in a heartbeat if it existed.

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#179
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To paraphrase Han Solo, "yeah, but who's gonna pay for it, kid? You?"

Sure. Why not? The only thing really stopping us from having distributed apps (like diaspora) is a way for people to easily install them on always-connected hardware they own. If there were a well designed open source router with a decent app store with equivalents of all the web apps you use online, I'm sure you could get a lot of people to start sharing their baby pictures using software installed on that. I'd swit…

Would your friends and family? Because that's the real trick. It has to be easier than typing "facebook dot com" on your laptop and your phone, anywhere in the world, to be a serious contender. I like the idea, but I don't see that happening.

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Why not? The only thing really stopping us from having distributed apps (like diaspora) is a way for people to easily install them on always-connected hardware they own. If there were a well designed open source router with a decent app store with equivalents of all the web apps you use online, I'm sure you could get a lot of people to start sharing their baby pictures using software installed on that. I'd swit…

Would your friends and family? Because that's the real trick. It has to be easier than typing "facebook dot com" on your laptop and your phone, anywhere in the world, to be a serious contender. I like the idea, but I don't see that happening.

That's my point. At the moment routers are in the same position smartphones were pre-iphone - they're functional beasts for 99% of people and while they can be 'smart' it's a niche geek activity and it's super tedious. Kind of like what smartphones were like pre-iphone.

Once somebody makes an easy to use, beautiful router with a vibrant one-click-install app ecosystem (backup, calendar, photos, dropbox, email), I'm sure people will want to migrate to it. It's not just about privacy it's also about being more in control of your data, being 'closer' to your data (uploading your baby photos wouldn't take as long) and not having your experience dictated by profit seeking (your app won't mysteriously switch itself to top stories every other day).

We're just not there yet. Every kind of 'smart router' and associated OSS software is kind of a pile of crap, to be honest.

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