facebook is literally an infinite well of data. I don't see how we could eradicate it without a truly terrible abuse of power coming to light from within the company.
IMHO solving the Facebook walled garden would be one of the most interesting startups to create today.
I've spent several months studying how to create tools that get around walled gardens (unfortunately they aren't mine and I can't open source them) but this is definitely a problem I wouldn't mind working on next. There are ways to get your information out of Facebook that would be extremely hard for them to counter, but it's a fulltime job to create something robust enough and maintaining it in the face of changes Facebook makes.
I didn't even try scrolling. I watched the video and then closed the page because I didn't know that there was some other action to take next. They should put a call to action at the end.
tl;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 to have access to the Internet."
Yet... it seems like they're equating Twitter, Facebook and Google to "The Internet".
> Cut the cost of providing mobile Internet services to 1 percent of its current level within five to 10 years by improving the efficiency of Internet networks and mobile phone software.
Now how that metric is measured, I'd like to know. In countries with $10 a month plans, does that mean a 10 cent a month plan instead? Somehow I don't think so. Or do they mean to say by that that Google, Twitter and Facebook will be quota-free?
> Facebook is already working on techniques to reduce the average amount of data used by its Android mobile app from the current 12 megabytes a day to 1 megabyte without users noticing.
That seems like more of an incentive on carriers to make Facebook quota free as much as anything else... I mean what good is that if you aren't going to:
> tackle some thorny infrastructure issues that are huge barriers in the developing world, particularly the long-distance transmission of data to far-flung places.
So, this is no Loon. What is this then?
> “We’re focused on it more because we think it’s something good for the world,” he said, “rather than something that is going to be really amazing for our profits.”
Being the founder of a publicly traded company that had a big IPO, I'm sure the emphasis is on "really amazing for our profits". Having access to Facebook, even at the detriment of other services, being something good for the world apparently is now uncontroversial enough that even the NY Times doesn't report critically.
This is how net neutrality dies, people. This is how the World Wide Web disappears into a rapidly diminishing sea of walled gardens. This is, unlike Loon, really more about ensuring that the next billions of people on the web never consider net neutrality as natural thing.
> However, the Internet.org team does not plan to tackle some thorny infrastructure issues that are huge barriers in the developing world, particularly the long-distance transmission of data to far-flung places.
The only way this initiative will therefore accomplish access to the Internet to people without it seems to be in increasing the profit margin to the local telco. How? Through vertical integration. What does that mean? Get free Facebook with your phone. What's so bad about that? Goodbye, net neutrality in developing countries.
I'm leaving the morality judgment for others, and it's far from straightforward that this is a bad thing. But I'm rather more inspired by Google's Loon as actually having a positive impact on the developing world than this here thing.
Basically, 3G, 4G, the lot, is no good for large amounts of data. The percentage of mobile traffic of total traffic is actually dropping here in Australia - mobile data is being thrashed by fixed line services. Fixed line is growing 50% while mobile data would 10% every 6 months. And Loon acts more like a fixed line service than mobile data.
There are a lot of people who have "access" to internet infrastructure but don't have "access" to internet because it's too expensive. If we, as an industry, can cut these costs, then that makes internet more "accessible" for everyone.
We need to tackle these problems first in my opinion, before we go on to the infrastructural problems. It will make a good foundation for the infrastructure that will come later on.
To be frank, that has a lot to do with the shifting Australian regulatory conditions, specifically deregulation. Your fixed line services, at the national level, are still relatively small. What you're referring to is what we call Last mile connectivity and competing exchanges.
In reality, there aren't very many transcontinental cables being laid right now because the ROI is greater than 30 years in most cases.
Basically my point is this: your fixed line services are growing at a fast rate because they're just now being opened to competition, but, over time, like the rest of the developed world, wireless networks will subsume your fixed line services.
Just my opinion and my two cents from talking to Aussie Telcos.
You sure about that? Plus, how are you going to transmit 1 Gbps with an acceptable level of contention, with a very very thin wall or two in the way over any distance greater than let's say a hundred metres?
Plus, this deregulation that you speak of, the national telco was being privatised starting in 1997, and deregulation happened before that even. Broadband ISPs have been around forever, and their DSLAMs for more than a decade too.
> Your fixed line services, at the national level, are still relatively small.
In some areas, we've got three networks running to the same premises. Fixed line services are near enough fully built out and have been forever.
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]".
It started innocently enough. Everyone is on it. Everyone. In the more than 20 years since it was founded - and now - daily life just could not be managed without it. Sure, it started innocently enough. Connect with your friends, post your pics, keep up with the fam. Yeah, that was then.
It wasn't too long before they started adding features. Adding value they called it. Extending your circle. Enabling you they'd say. Yeah, in the same way a spiders web is beautiful. The pattern and symmetry, glistening like shiny gossamer art. Its beauty pulls you in - you don't realize at first as you touch it, that it sticks. No, more than sticks - you become imbued with it. The more you move it wraps around you, encasing you... entombing you. For the data-mining black widow to come and suck the marketable value right out of you, your connections... every aspect of your life is now a product.
Classified, organized, tagged, sorted, tracked, pegged, followed, poked, monetized, labeled... owned is what you are. A commodity. A small spec among 3.5 billion in the user base of the book.
That's what it was these days... just simply 'the book'.
Everyone knows - everyone is aware. They are all in the book. Not even a page, or a word either... more like a letter. A single letter. An iconographic digital hologram of the total sum of your parts - all wrapped up real nice in a uniform singular profitable little package called your user profile. Displayed and viewed and consumed and tracked billions of times over. With more than thirty trillion page views per month, the cancerous blue and white digital encapsulation of the human soul was now blazoned across innumerable screens as nearly half the worlds population interacted on the book - more than 20% of the worlds population on the book at any given moment.
A study, one of the countless to be sure, said that now more than 90% of real human interactions occurred through the book. What does that even mean anymore... real? Real human interactions? Through the book? how is that even possible.
It was no wonder that in the last few years the backlash has switched to resisting this unexpected strangle-hold on the human condition. Most never saw it coming... happily going along with every new feature update, privacy change, "enhancement". MZ was repeating himself a lot these days... except his frame of reference had gotten bigger. Where years ago the book was likened to that which only came along to change humans interactions every 100 years... now his statements were 10 fold. MZ thinks of himself as the embodiment of the singularity... whatever that means. Some fucking fantasy of a long dead cybervisionary that couldn't recognize the makings of our current prison I'm sure. Fuck him.
Looking around looks a lot more like binary slavery than any form of singularity. None of our old problems have been solved - in fact the book has only made things worse. After it became a "platform for governance and outreach" we, people like - those who really see, knew. We knew what this meant. Game fucking over.
This era of hyper connectivity and ultra social awareness was supposed to usher in some sort of Utopian orgasm -- one in which MZ would be carried on the shoulders of the masses to stand next to fantastical human saviors like Jesus. Fictional allusions to stellar bodies be damned!
The only problem is that most of the world is too busy. Feeding their attention into the black hole of the book to notice... or care I guess.
With ubiquitous access thanks to the assimilation of the largest global fiber network a few years ago, the book was now able to offer complete and total "free" access via the acquired goog-net.
Years ago, when Athena rolled out - it was a huge success. Welcomed into every neighborhood - direct, very high speed fiber access in every home was quickly made into a "right". The model was seen as our manifest...
How are they well-positioned? I don't mean to sound crass, but what has Facebook ever done that makes you think they're well-positioned? They're pretty much a software/advertising company. Sure, they have their Open Compute project, but besides that, what significant contribution to technical engineering have they contributed to that suggest they have the know-how and ability to scale such a massive infrastructure project.
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 algorithms? Introduce "business models"? That's it? It sounds suspiciously weak.
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.
This is of a large enough magnitude that I'm suspicious it could be something created out of the Project Loon announcement in terms of timing.
Also, given that Facebook's mission is to "Make the world more open and connected," this is just the next logical step to me. Not everyone has extra billions hanging around that Google does, and therefore FB + partners need another method to pull it off.
Those people probably dont have any internet, because:
1 - they dont have jobs and lack of money
2 - they are still strugling for food security
3 - their village or city have no energy
4 - they are maybe even without water
5 - they maybe have a low level education
so if they are so good and passionate about helping people all over the world, and they are insanelly wealthy people why they also dont make a bigger plan..
Thats one of the reasons i really admire bill gates right now.. he spend his fortune for a real common good..
while what facebook and others are doing is not bad at all, on the contrary can be a good thing.. what piss me off is that sort of marketing bullshit, like if we are stupid people that would buy that is "all for the common good, rainbows and unicorns"
Do it, show the good side of it, but also show the real reasoning behind it
A human being asking himself, about what he could do to help improve the life of others.. would get a lot of answers to start with but in none of those cases it would start with "extend the internet to the people that can barelly read so they can share their plate without any food in it for lunch time"
Firstly, Bill Gates is being a philanthropist with the billions he earned by running a lot of other entrepreneurs to the ground. But if he's had a change of heart, then I applaud him, even though it doesn't absolve him of what he did in the past.
Secondly, I'm under no illusions about FB's motives, but if this can bring educational resources such as Khan Academy to more people in developing countries, I'm for it. The worst thing you can do to developing nations is to give them handouts (see: Africa). There will be no permanent progress without education.
Sad 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.
Well, you're correct - however, nobody aggregates the non-US userbase better, more accurately and so cleanly as FB - with 80%++ of their users non-US-based, they are THE goldmine for the NSA.
With the new FB policy office in DC, I am sure they are nice and comfy - as well as with their Security head from NSA-FB-NSA (along with all the other spooks FB has) -- its damn clear what is going on.
Why should we assume that Facebook is trying to be a good steward of the Internet with this project and not simply motivated purely by profits? There are plenty of examples of Google pursuing projects that don't readily contribute to their bottom line, but I'm skeptical that a company led by a man who called his users "dumb fucks" is truly benevolent.
1) These people who will be accessing the internet from these channels are going to bring in ~$0 revenue. You think advertisers are want to target these low-income areas?! This is a specious argument at best -- attempting to create this lame binary "Google = good, Facebook = bad"
2) He said the 'dumb fucks' statement when he was 19 -- I'd hate for shit I said when I was that age to be held against me for the rest of my life =/
3) Given that their mission is "Making the world more open and connected," this project is just in line with that.
These 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.
This is all just rubbish so that they can find more eyeballs to stick into the service. They've reached almost everyone, so the next logical step is to bring Internet to the only audience they can't yet reach.
Quite a high percentage of the people in the world without internet access live under governments with poor human rights records. In this new age of massive unscrupulous spying and data mining by governments, bringing the internet to new populations without making sure they understand the risks makes them vulnerable to unprecedented levels of tyranny.
Any initiative that tries to expand internet access without addressing these basic moral issues is suspect, and we obviously aren't going to see responsible behavior on this front from the likes of Facebook.
One could argue that even those in the USA do not understand or cannot avoid these risks, making them (as you said) "vulnerable to unprecedented levels of tyranny".
How do you create a society where organizations would have a vested interest in leading efforts to lower barriers to electricity. Even in present conditions, electricity is after-all a prerequisite to better internet access. I wonder why there are fewer juggernauts looking into electricity than internet.
I think this time, Facebook need not sell, it just need to propose the govt.,rest all will be a breeze as the Big boys want more data,more and more to churn, bubble and victimise each citizen possible every day.
Hail Facebook,Hail NSA and Other organised shit giving us false promise of security while churning our own data.
Frankly, it sounds like he's just recharacterizing basic efficiency plans to make it seem like Facebook is on some sort of altruistic mission. There's little to no action called for, no commitments towards altrustic ends. It's just a "hey, we should get more people online" (which only helps Facebook's bottom line) and a "we're trying to make Facebook load faster" (again, bottom line).
69 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadIt being the de facto source for internet services for large populations is only going to make things worse.
I've spent several months studying how to create tools that get around walled gardens (unfortunately they aren't mine and I can't open source them) but this is definitely a problem I wouldn't mind working on next. There are ways to get your information out of Facebook that would be extremely hard for them to counter, but it's a fulltime job to create something robust enough and maintaining it in the face of changes Facebook makes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/technology/facebook-leads-...
Anyone have any links to any good tutorials to embed background videos like this?
Found it when snooping around some New York Times webpage code ;).
> 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 to have access to the Internet."
Yet... it seems like they're equating Twitter, Facebook and Google to "The Internet".
> Cut the cost of providing mobile Internet services to 1 percent of its current level within five to 10 years by improving the efficiency of Internet networks and mobile phone software.
Now how that metric is measured, I'd like to know. In countries with $10 a month plans, does that mean a 10 cent a month plan instead? Somehow I don't think so. Or do they mean to say by that that Google, Twitter and Facebook will be quota-free?
> Facebook is already working on techniques to reduce the average amount of data used by its Android mobile app from the current 12 megabytes a day to 1 megabyte without users noticing.
That seems like more of an incentive on carriers to make Facebook quota free as much as anything else... I mean what good is that if you aren't going to:
> tackle some thorny infrastructure issues that are huge barriers in the developing world, particularly the long-distance transmission of data to far-flung places.
So, this is no Loon. What is this then?
> “We’re focused on it more because we think it’s something good for the world,” he said, “rather than something that is going to be really amazing for our profits.”
Being the founder of a publicly traded company that had a big IPO, I'm sure the emphasis is on "really amazing for our profits". Having access to Facebook, even at the detriment of other services, being something good for the world apparently is now uncontroversial enough that even the NY Times doesn't report critically.
This is how net neutrality dies, people. This is how the World Wide Web disappears into a rapidly diminishing sea of walled gardens. This is, unlike Loon, really more about ensuring that the next billions of people on the web never consider net neutrality as natural thing.
The only way this initiative will therefore accomplish access to the Internet to people without it seems to be in increasing the profit margin to the local telco. How? Through vertical integration. What does that mean? Get free Facebook with your phone. What's so bad about that? Goodbye, net neutrality in developing countries.
I'm leaving the morality judgment for others, and it's far from straightforward that this is a bad thing. But I'm rather more inspired by Google's Loon as actually having a positive impact on the developing world than this here thing.
Basically, 3G, 4G, the lot, is no good for large amounts of data. The percentage of mobile traffic of total traffic is actually dropping here in Australia - mobile data is being thrashed by fixed line services. Fixed line is growing 50% while mobile data would 10% every 6 months. And Loon acts more like a fixed line service than mobile data.
We need to tackle these problems first in my opinion, before we go on to the infrastructural problems. It will make a good foundation for the infrastructure that will come later on.
In reality, there aren't very many transcontinental cables being laid right now because the ROI is greater than 30 years in most cases.
Basically my point is this: your fixed line services are growing at a fast rate because they're just now being opened to competition, but, over time, like the rest of the developed world, wireless networks will subsume your fixed line services.
Just my opinion and my two cents from talking to Aussie Telcos.
Source: I'm a telecom geek.
http://abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Products/8153.0~December...
You sure about that? Plus, how are you going to transmit 1 Gbps with an acceptable level of contention, with a very very thin wall or two in the way over any distance greater than let's say a hundred metres?
Plus, this deregulation that you speak of, the national telco was being privatised starting in 1997, and deregulation happened before that even. Broadband ISPs have been around forever, and their DSLAMs for more than a decade too.
> Your fixed line services, at the national level, are still relatively small.
In some areas, we've got three networks running to the same premises. Fixed line services are near enough fully built out and have been forever.
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
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]".
---------
The Book:
It started innocently enough. Everyone is on it. Everyone. In the more than 20 years since it was founded - and now - daily life just could not be managed without it. Sure, it started innocently enough. Connect with your friends, post your pics, keep up with the fam. Yeah, that was then.
It wasn't too long before they started adding features. Adding value they called it. Extending your circle. Enabling you they'd say. Yeah, in the same way a spiders web is beautiful. The pattern and symmetry, glistening like shiny gossamer art. Its beauty pulls you in - you don't realize at first as you touch it, that it sticks. No, more than sticks - you become imbued with it. The more you move it wraps around you, encasing you... entombing you. For the data-mining black widow to come and suck the marketable value right out of you, your connections... every aspect of your life is now a product.
Classified, organized, tagged, sorted, tracked, pegged, followed, poked, monetized, labeled... owned is what you are. A commodity. A small spec among 3.5 billion in the user base of the book.
That's what it was these days... just simply 'the book'.
Everyone knows - everyone is aware. They are all in the book. Not even a page, or a word either... more like a letter. A single letter. An iconographic digital hologram of the total sum of your parts - all wrapped up real nice in a uniform singular profitable little package called your user profile. Displayed and viewed and consumed and tracked billions of times over. With more than thirty trillion page views per month, the cancerous blue and white digital encapsulation of the human soul was now blazoned across innumerable screens as nearly half the worlds population interacted on the book - more than 20% of the worlds population on the book at any given moment.
A study, one of the countless to be sure, said that now more than 90% of real human interactions occurred through the book. What does that even mean anymore... real? Real human interactions? Through the book? how is that even possible.
It was no wonder that in the last few years the backlash has switched to resisting this unexpected strangle-hold on the human condition. Most never saw it coming... happily going along with every new feature update, privacy change, "enhancement". MZ was repeating himself a lot these days... except his frame of reference had gotten bigger. Where years ago the book was likened to that which only came along to change humans interactions every 100 years... now his statements were 10 fold. MZ thinks of himself as the embodiment of the singularity... whatever that means. Some fucking fantasy of a long dead cybervisionary that couldn't recognize the makings of our current prison I'm sure. Fuck him.
Looking around looks a lot more like binary slavery than any form of singularity. None of our old problems have been solved - in fact the book has only made things worse. After it became a "platform for governance and outreach" we, people like - those who really see, knew. We knew what this meant. Game fucking over.
This era of hyper connectivity and ultra social awareness was supposed to usher in some sort of Utopian orgasm -- one in which MZ would be carried on the shoulders of the masses to stand next to fantastical human saviors like Jesus. Fictional allusions to stellar bodies be damned!
The only problem is that most of the world is too busy. Feeding their attention into the black hole of the book to notice... or care I guess.
With ubiquitous access thanks to the assimilation of the largest global fiber network a few years ago, the book was now able to offer complete and total "free" access via the acquired goog-net.
Years ago, when Athena rolled out - it was a huge success. Welcomed into every neighborhood - direct, very high speed fiber access in every home was quickly made into a "right". The model was seen as our manifest...
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 algorithms? Introduce "business models"? That's it? It sounds suspiciously weak.
Their interest in providing internet to as many people as possible isn't new, however Facebook's "internet for everybody" initiative is indeed unexpected.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_Pacific_Gateway
Also, given that Facebook's mission is to "Make the world more open and connected," this is just the next logical step to me. Not everyone has extra billions hanging around that Google does, and therefore FB + partners need another method to pull it off.
Now can we fix the problems before we ship it?
1 - they dont have jobs and lack of money
2 - they are still strugling for food security
3 - their village or city have no energy
4 - they are maybe even without water
5 - they maybe have a low level education
so if they are so good and passionate about helping people all over the world, and they are insanelly wealthy people why they also dont make a bigger plan..
Thats one of the reasons i really admire bill gates right now.. he spend his fortune for a real common good..
while what facebook and others are doing is not bad at all, on the contrary can be a good thing.. what piss me off is that sort of marketing bullshit, like if we are stupid people that would buy that is "all for the common good, rainbows and unicorns"
Do it, show the good side of it, but also show the real reasoning behind it
A human being asking himself, about what he could do to help improve the life of others.. would get a lot of answers to start with but in none of those cases it would start with "extend the internet to the people that can barelly read so they can share their plate without any food in it for lunch time"
Secondly, I'm under no illusions about FB's motives, but if this can bring educational resources such as Khan Academy to more people in developing countries, I'm for it. The worst thing you can do to developing nations is to give them handouts (see: Africa). There will be no permanent progress without education.
With the new FB policy office in DC, I am sure they are nice and comfy - as well as with their Security head from NSA-FB-NSA (along with all the other spooks FB has) -- its damn clear what is going on.
2) He said the 'dumb fucks' statement when he was 19 -- I'd hate for shit I said when I was that age to be held against me for the rest of my life =/
3) Given that their mission is "Making the world more open and connected," this project is just in line with that.
*The political horse-trading supporting fracking, Elon Musk pulling out, etc.
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.
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.
Any initiative that tries to expand internet access without addressing these basic moral issues is suspect, and we obviously aren't going to see responsible behavior on this front from the likes of Facebook.
Hail Facebook,Hail NSA and Other organised shit giving us false promise of security while churning our own data.