301–310 of 356 posts
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…
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In my experience many people have outdated phone numbers on Whatsapp, since changing phone numbers on Whatsapp requires all your contacts to update your contact manually. This happens in particular for people that move between countries frequently. Why go through the trouble of updating Whatsapp to your current phone number, especially if you still have access to your old phone number for when you move back to your h…
When you update your phone number, as long as you register the transfer in WhatsApp (as opposed to creating a new account) it's pretty seamless. There's no need for everyone to update your contact.
To stay connected with your contacts, we recommend you inform them about your new phone number before changing phone numbers and ask them to make any necessary changes in their phones’ address books.
[1] https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/account-and-profile/about-c...
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…
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I’m going to count HN as a social network. It’s one of my favorite places on the internet. It surfaces great content, and the comments are a gold mine of top-notch information and advice (by and large). What general principles can we learn from HN that can be applied elsewhere? Does HN self-select its audience? No profit motive? Great moderation? (Thanks Dang!)
To me a few things: - dang’s moderation and example - no images - no intentional sub-cultures - smaller audience - topical - charmingly ugly - a generally invested community that appreciates this is a special outcome The interesting thing to me is that Slashdot shares many of these attributes, has a relatively sophisticated moderation feature and is a cesspool. It feels like a ship adrift in the Caribbean and the fou…
It helps that something like HN can be easily duplicated, so there will probably always be a space like HN where interesting and civil discussions happen.
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…
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…
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The other option for them would be not to talk to GP at all.
This is more likely imo
Friends don't ask friends to submit to Facebook surveillance.
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I sometimes think the Internet is like the Mirror of Erised from Harry Potter. It can show us what we want: if what we want is knowledge it will show us that, if what we want is proof that we are right it will show us that and if we want to see how horrible other people are, that is what we will see. It was just that people turned out to value less truth less, than being told they were right. You can fault the engine…
> You can fault the engineers who built this for it, but then you are faulting them for thinking too highly of people. Well, that's my argument against a communist society. It was designed only for perfectly altruistic people, and that's a kind of people I have never found anywhere. If we want something that actually works, we need something designed for the people that actually exist. It's the same with the Internet…
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…
It's strange that you're ignoring the massive area between "unregulated" and "nationalized" (which is where most companies fall already). No one is saying to break up Facebook and give it to the government. The idea is to break up Facebook because they've been buying competitors instead of trying to compete. It is an attempt to make the market more competitive.
That seems like your own interpretation of the tweet. The author says in a later tweet that they think Whatsapp should be treated as a utility. That seems to suggest they do want Whatsapp to be handed to the government.
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> Ars Technica has a lot of reports about this, if you wish to learn more about it: with all due respect, your links don't seem to be relevant. I skimmed the first few and none of them look related to the question of "did the government give phone providers/ISPs money with no strings attached?" > https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/11/big-telcos-slam- ... appears to mainly talk about unbundling rather than wheth…
I don't know why you are so hung up on the "strings attached" part. It doesn't matter how many conditions the government imposes if no one is held accountable for actually achieving them.
Is that what's happening though? Are there a bunch of strings attached but the FCC isn't bothering enforcing them? If so, can you substantiate this? At least from the batch of links from the parent post, the only requirement seems to be "needs to be spent on building infrastructure", not that we get gigabit fiber or whatever.
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> Ars Technica has a lot of reports about this, if you wish to learn more about it: with all due respect, your links don't seem to be relevant. I skimmed the first few and none of them look related to the question of "did the government give phone providers/ISPs money with no strings attached?" > https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/11/big-telcos-slam- ... appears to mainly talk about unbundling rather than wheth…
the links are relevant. the isps took billions and didn't expand municipal wifi when promised nor did they lower costs for calls.
They're only relevant insofar as "ISPs bad", not to the original question of what conditions are attached to the funding.
>the isps took billions and didn't expand municipal wifi when promised nor did they lower costs for calls.
1. sources for these "promises"?
2. what type of promises where these? contractual obligations, or optimistic statements on press releases?