2/3rds of the world does not have internet. It's easy for us to forget that. It's a serious issue, and Facebook is well-positioned to tackle it.
Agreed. It's easy to criticize.
Facebook Leads an Effort to Lower Barriers to Internet Access
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Re: Facebook Leads an Effort to Lower Barriers to Internet Access
#32Sad to see a lot of people being cynical about this just because Facebook is taking the lead. Facebook may have personal interest in it but if the global good is greater, we must learn to be appreciative. Most discoveries and inventions, heck even the space race dint start out of the goodness of heart; but aren't we glad they did? I am all up for anything that brings people new source of information. Atleast its better than sitting in a corner and grunting how we don't have Google Fiber or how a 1px scroller disrupts the workflow while failing to realize that 2/3rds of the world has never visited a single webpage in their life.
Re: Facebook Leads an Effort to Lower Barriers to Internet Access
#33No thanks, Mark. Here's hoping that your plan to AOLify the rest of the word and violate the privacy of your future would-be users fails miserably.
Re: Facebook Leads an Effort to Lower Barriers to Internet Access
#34tl;dr: Zuckerberg says "Screw net neutrality, I've got dibs on billions of people for my walled garden." > Twitter ... has struck its own deals ... in more than 100 countries to offer some free Twitter access; ... it bundled free Facebook access with some of its Asha feature phones.; Globe Telecom, has used free Twitter, Facebook or Google access > "if you can afford a phone, I think it would be really good for you t…
Here is an opportunity to see if an app can be created to privately tunnel through whatever FB pipe they give you.
If you can have a dummy account - and be able to get a tunneled connection through it, then that would be good.
Otherwise; I would never trust them with ANYTHING
Re: Facebook Leads an Effort to Lower Barriers to Internet Access
#35Sad to see a lot of people being cynical about this just because Facebook is taking the lead. Facebook may have personal interest in it but if the global good is greater, we must learn to be appreciative. Most discoveries and inventions, heck even the space race dint start out of the goodness of heart; but aren't we glad they did? I am all up for anything that brings people new source of information. Atleast its bett…
FB is a front for the NSA at this point. Not willingly, perhaps, but by-proxy
Re: Facebook Leads an Effort to Lower Barriers to Internet Access
#36Google seems to be conspicuously absent. It's terrible to be cynical, but can't help feeling like this is just a reaction to project loon. Basically a banding together of companies who might see Loon as a threat, to offer some kind of alternative that they are in control of instead of Google. However unlike Loon, reading the entire page I can't see anything solid they will actually do - develop better compression alg…
Facebook is an investor in the Asia Pacific Gateway[1], and, despite the minuscule size of the Wikipedia article, it stands to reason that the project will be very big for the SEA region.
Their interest in providing internet to as many people as possible isn't new, however Facebook's "internet for everybody" initiative is indeed unexpected.
Re: Facebook Leads an Effort to Lower Barriers to Internet Access
#37Connectivity: a human right.
Privacy: not a human right.
The right of the NSA and any other three letter agency to get access to all your private messages or 'private' accounts on Facebook: inviolable.
Re: Facebook Leads an Effort to Lower Barriers to Internet Access
#38Sad to see a lot of people being cynical about this just because Facebook is taking the lead. Facebook may have personal interest in it but if the global good is greater, we must learn to be appreciative. Most discoveries and inventions, heck even the space race dint start out of the goodness of heart; but aren't we glad they did? I am all up for anything that brings people new source of information. Atleast its bett…
FB is a front for the NSA at this point. Not willingly, perhaps, but by-proxy
You might as well say the internet is a front for the NSA
Re: Facebook Leads an Effort to Lower Barriers to Internet Access
#39These proposals look too vague / generic. There's already a lot of people who build mobile apps today and try to compress as much as possible, or limit how much they download.
It's like announcing you're leading an initiative to improve the health and nutrition of children, but you won't actually be distributing any vaccines or food, but laying down a set of principles to align local supplier incentives and politicians.
Bill Gates criticized Loon because, and probably rightly so, concentrating on health of children with easily preventable measures is the biggest bang for the buck. But this initiative seems even more like Vaporware.
Re: Facebook Leads an Effort to Lower Barriers to Internet Access
#40tl;dr: Zuckerberg says "Screw net neutrality, I've got dibs on billions of people for my walled garden." > Twitter ... has struck its own deals ... in more than 100 countries to offer some free Twitter access; ... it bundled free Facebook access with some of its Asha feature phones.; Globe Telecom, has used free Twitter, Facebook or Google access > "if you can afford a phone, I think it would be really good for you t…
Here is an opportunity to see if an app can be created to privately tunnel through whatever FB pipe they give you. If you can have a dummy account - and be able to get a tunneled connection through it, then that would be good. Otherwise; I would never trust them with ANYTHING
I actually did that years back when my carrier offered free Facebook and I had no mobile connection. It was essentially just a really dodgy HTTP proxy with their messaging system and another account sitting on a remote server. I got it responding to basic requests, but it took a lot more effort than I could be bothered with. I can only imagine that continuous use would get you banned very quickly under their spam filter.
Just for funsies, you can prefix base64 messages with ?OTR?v2? and they'll be recognised as OTR encrypted messages, which replaces them in the web view with "[encrypted]".