Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 112 posts

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#61

Post by driverdan »

amrrs wrote: post #2

>The diplomatic game that unfolded in Vietnam has become increasingly common for Facebook. Yes, At least this should ring a bell to all those who still think they can write anything on FB about a Government and get away with it. Facebook while being pushed and portrayed as your personal diary is actually your digital repository only accessible for the most elite like Government. While an average FB user can easily sh…

> At least this should ring a bell to all those who still think they can write anything on FB about a Government and get away with it.

They should be able to. Free speech is a human right. FB should not be helping governments violate human rights.

> This reiterates the capitalist world that we live in where Democracy is just a myth.

Those are two different things.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#62

Post by odammit »

ouid wrote: post #46
skybrian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wild Internet is definitely still there. The problem is that it got too hostile for most users due to spam, viruses, malware, phishing, trolls, doxing, and so on. It will get worse, as attackers adopt machine learning techniques and automate social engineering at scale. So users have a problem. Companies that solved it the right way became enormous, because protection from all that crap is something people want,…

>Snapchat helped teens avoid creating a permanent record of things. Why isn't Snapchat more popular than Instagram? I assumed that it was the case that more people have stage fright than don't. Is this a faulty assumption, or are people just acting in defiance of this fear?

Not to be old, but I had many friends get into Snapchat for a hot minute. My wife and I never did. Instagram let us share photos. Snapchat seemed like just gimmicky cat ears and showboating. The platform very much feels like "look at me" not "hey I had this cool experience and I want to share it."

Full disclosure: I bought a bunch of snapchat stock at the bottom because I fully invest in the self-centeredness of humankind. Worked great w/ FB.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#63

Post by StavrosK »

detaro wrote: post #60
didip wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always wondered about IPFS and its relationship with DNS. What's stopping authoritarian entity from poisoning/redirecting ipfs.io to static page?

Nothing, but that would hopefully primarily encourage people to set up IPFS clients themselves instead of relying on the public bridge. (Which is IMHO one of the weaknesses of IPFS, that they haven't made that more prominent/easier, through browser plugins or a dedicated IPFS-browser. Compare to e.g. the publicity boost Dat got from Beaker Browser)

This is a very nice Chrome extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipfs-station/kckhg...

It'll redirect all IPFS URLs to your local daemon.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#64

Post by StavrosK »

didip wrote: post #59
StavrosK wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I think IPFS has at least a good few use cases. For example, it's great for posting censorship-resistant content, and I wrote something to do just that: http://ipfessay.stavros.io/ There are also things like OpenBazaar and a whole host of other applications running on IPFS that are quite useful. Sure, it may not be mainstream, but nothing starts out being mainstream.

I have always wondered about IPFS and its relationship with DNS. What's stopping authoritarian entity from poisoning/redirecting ipfs.io to static page?

Nothing, but what does it matter? There are loads of public gateways. I run one at https://www.eternum.io. Also, running your own node is trivial.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#65

Post by detaro »

StavrosK wrote: post #63
detaro wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing, but that would hopefully primarily encourage people to set up IPFS clients themselves instead of relying on the public bridge. (Which is IMHO one of the weaknesses of IPFS, that they haven't made that more prominent/easier, through browser plugins or a dedicated IPFS-browser. Compare to e.g. the publicity boost Dat got from Beaker Browser)

This is a very nice Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipfs-station/kckhg... It'll redirect all IPFS URLs to your local daemon.

Ohh, interesting, that seems to have most of the things I was looking for. Not sure why I missed it when I went looking for one recently. Thanks!

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#66

Post by StavrosK »

detaro wrote: post #65
StavrosK wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very nice Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipfs-station/kckhg... It'll redirect all IPFS URLs to your local daemon.

Ohh, interesting, that seems to have most of the things I was looking for. Not sure why I missed it when I went looking for one recently. Thanks!

No problem, I had missed it too but someone here pointed me to it. I wish we had one for Firefox as well!

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#67

Post by hnaccy »

vkou wrote: post #20
scrumper wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, to complete the thought, the behavior of those corporate centralizers has rendered it politically acceptable for the government to do so.

Censoring speech has been politically acceptable for every single Western government, besides the US^, since at least WWII. It has not yet brought about the collapse of civilization, or a descent into despotism. ^ It has also taken place in the US, but to a different extent.

>It has not yet brought about the collapse of civilization, or a descent into despotism.

That's quite a short time scale.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#68

Post by rexpop »

IBM wrote: post #3

>At a White House dinner in 2015, Mr. Zuckerberg had even asked the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, whether Mr. Xi might offer a Chinese name for his soon-to-be-born first child — usually a privilege reserved for older relatives, or sometimes a fortune teller. Mr. Xi declined, according to a person briefed on the matter. Laughed out loud at this. I can understand wanting access to the market but this is just embarrass…

This comes off to me as an insult directed at the Chinese president.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#69

Post by romwell »

ben_jones wrote: post #50
adiabatty wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want to keep in touch with other people? Yeah, I think so.

TIL Facebook is the first human invention that lets you keep in touch with others.

Yup, for that reasons you still write letter with pen and paper, and print out photos when you want to show them to someone who doesn't live in the same city as you do.

There's clearly no value in sharing digital photographs, videos and links with other people with ability to get feedback from them.

By extension, there's no need for HN, right?

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#70

Post by bogomipz »

AlexandrB wrote: post #8

I find that the headline and the article mischaracterizes what is happening. The "Wild Web" was reigned in long ago by commercial interests. A distributed web with many small nodes would still be hard to control and police effectively. However as much the web has been centralized by the likes of Google, Facebook, and large media conglomerates effective government censorship is once again possible. This is like a wild…

>"The "Wild Web" was reigned in long ago by commercial interests."

Perhaps, but the "reigning in" referenced in the title is now being done by commercial interests at the request of governments in exchange for staying in those government's good graces.

Post reply on HN