You won't find FSF on Facebook
fsf.org
Well, you might, but they say it isn't them.
fsf.org
> so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers.
I would think just about any popular web site would be a gold mine for such information. It has nothing to do with Facebook. Doesn't this sentence hold true if we replace Facebook with Google? This seems like a tinfoil/scare everyone into believing Facebook is evil and out to get you.
> and then maybe relays it to the intended destination, if it suits him. In some cases he does not — witness the recent reports of Facebook's messaging service blocking messages based on the words and links in them, because those links point to services which Facebook would prefer we not discuss.
Comeon, examples/proof please. Is Facebook blocking URLs to competition or child porn sites? There is a pretty big difference here.
I would think that the FSF should be on Facebook, trying to spread their message, gaining support, and discovering new users. They have an interesting problem, a lot of support, and some very big challenges ahead of them... and yet they spend time publishing articles like this and making fancy dislike buttons. FSF you should be ashamed.
Whether other sites, like Google, can do this too, is immaterial. When people are logged into Facebook, an ever increasing slice of their browsing history can be logged and tied to their real identity. Almost none of the people I know who aren't hackers have any awareness of this.
It's material if the FSF isn't putting up a "Google is evil" page on their website and handing out "Don't google me, bro" buttons, like they are doing with Facebook.
The FSF seems to think it's better to attack Facebook with ideological ad corporatio arguments, rather than concentrate their resources on educating people about how to their services intelligently. Facebook isn't sharing anything about me that I don't want them to know. And I understand that if I'm not paying for it, I'm the product. So I don't give them my address or my phone number or my cat's nickname. And that's what I tell every friend and family member on Facebook. I don't tell them that Zuckerberg is "evil". The FSF has tried that before with other companies and you'd think they would have figured out by now that it simply doesn't work.
Facebook, meanwhile, is working to sell your entire social graph to advertisers for profit. If they're being singled out, it's because they're the worst of the lot.
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ejpepffjfmamnamb...
I've been using it for months... no regrets. And the web is generally faster because Facebook JS takes ages to load.
You haven't been paying attention, have you?
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-blocks-lamebook/
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=31987371885&topic=...
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/84319/20101122/facebook-priv...
The problem with the statement in the original article is that it's not clear if they're referring to blocking torrent sites, or links to Diaspora. In the age of hypertext, it's just polite to link to examples inline, rather than making people hunt down what you're talking about.
Even so, you are correct in saying that it would make the piece stronger.
What do you mean? This is what FSF has always been like.
They're shockingly zealots in defending absolute gpl-style freedom over all your digital goods.
In all honesty I don't think a decentralized and "Free" facebook would work. The centralization is a feature that most people want; it's part of why it "just work" without you having to become a system (or a network) administrator.
Imagine:
Mom: How come I'm not receiving updates from your aunt anymore?
You: Well, you have to wait for $INSERT_TECHNICAL_TERM to propagate or something.
Mom: Do I have to enter her hash-thing again?
or worse:
Mom: I'm getting a lot of spam
You: You have to install morton anti-spam social-edition
Mom: It won't install.
You: sigh here I come.
It's like email, but much worse because it has way more features, and more ways for things to go wrong.
Plus, I think Mark Zuckerberg actually donated money to the Diaspora project.
If there's an issue with communication between them, the administrators of respective sites will deal with them. Your mom won't notice it anymore than when she notices Facebook's internal servers are experiencing a glitch.
And honestly, people don't "want" centralization of social networking any more than they "wanted" the centralization that AOL featured over the decentralization of the web.
As I said when Diaspora first started making headlines, this is incorrect. Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own nodes.
Because, really, the only way decentralized social networking will work is if everybody ends up centralized again on one node, run for free (most likely) or very cheap (not as likely) by some big company they trust. AKA, Google, who'd certainly love to have access to all the types of data Facebook currently has.
Or Microsoft's node, or Yahoo's node, or Amazon's node or anyone else with the infrastructure to run a huge scale social site.
But all that aside, you don't consider this a better situation than now, where all data is walled off and silo'd and the biggest player is an effective monopoly with much, much less interest in privacy and data security than Google? And geeks have no option whatsoever to operate a social network independently?
If not, what do you propose, other than acquiescence?
Not exactly better in my view.
Where did I say that?
Imagine a plug&play thingy, which you configure by subscribing to one and only one online-looking service. One subscription for e-mail, instant messaging, Blog, "social" thing, and more. No ads, private infos at home, encryption everywhere, no need to trust any big corporation, reliable automatic backup…
Even my mom would want that.
Is your point that only companies worth $50bn can build usable web apps, or that anyone that doesn't want to sell your data can't do UX?
That's from 2008 announcing Pirate Bay had hit 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker. That's not total users, that's total online. Take that number and multiply it by 5 to 10 to estimate total users, double it to account for the rest of the global trackers (low?) and increase it by some percentage to account for 3 years of growth and you're in the hundreds of millions of users range, possibly as high as 300M or more.
I'm not a crazy bittorrent fanboy, in fact I'm quite the opposite, but I think it's clear that the number of users of a decentralized system can far exceed any "rounding errors" of facebook's numbers.
If The Pirate Bay disappears tomorrow do all of those users just switch over to another tracker? Very likely not. They'd just wait around to hear about the next Napster->Kazaa->LimeWire->Pirate Bay from their tech savvy friends, remaining mostly oblivious to the technology being used under the hood.
Even when they did use a tracker it's probably more reasonable to think of it as a directory server more like LDAP or such. At their base even classic decentralized protocols like SMTP rely on DNS as a directory, IP on routing tables etc.
Private sites tend to disable DHT anyways, since it's much harder to detect cheating without central trackers.
The important thing is that trackers are easily decentralized, since they're a per-torrent URL.
If so, so many people don't know what a browser is, you can only image how smooth a distributed social network would have to be to work.
Bit torrent works because it's three steps: 1. Download a bit torrent client, 2. Search Pirate Bay, 3. Click on the torrent. Occasionally, you hear the failure mode: why won't this stupid thing download? The only people who say things like "More people need to seed this" are tech literate.
Like others said, the only way a decentralized facebook would work is when everyone uses one (or two) central nodes (site) which will most likely be run by something like Google or Microsoft, and the end result will be the same: big company has access to all your data.
The "Like" button probably wouldn't work though. If you're some external website, which "like" button will you embed? Google's like button? or Microsoft's?
By setting an extremely high bar, they've managed to get a lot of people to move towards that bar. Not as close as they'd like, I'm sure but much closer than they'd otherwise have moved.
The FSF has made a priceless contribution whether or not we're going to see a world that conforms to their vision.
There's no technical reason why a decentralized system can't work. The main road blocks would be finding a compelling reason for people to switch away to one in the first place.
Email is decentralized. It seems to have worked pretty darn well.
You say there are no technical reasons why it can't work. That is very akin to the "You can do anything, it's just a simple matter of coding." The reality is that some problems become intractable due to their complexity. Distributed social network may not be intractable (Diaspora will probably figure that out), but it's a hell of a lot harder than email.
The end result is the same: a few BigCompanies have access to alot of your data.
I think most people here on HN use gmail (but I could be wrong).
I bet many people on HN have their own domain and their own mail server. Hell, for a few dollars a month you can get a web hosting company to set it up for you.
For those who care about those things, they can do that and still be able to communicate with people who use gmail or yahoo mail.
But there is room in the world for a decentralised and distributed social net. I wrote one (called Friendika). There are people who have a need for a social service of their own. There are online communities which still exist and where people send messages to each other and interact.
It is not whether or not they will replace Facebook. It is simply that Facebook doesn't cater to every social need of every organisation on the planet. Other services need to fill the gaps. One day some will realise that they are spending more time on network 'x' than on Facebook. In fact many of us are doing this today. At that point Facebook becomes irrelevant and loses its grip. Most people don't care who runs the servers. They also don't care if it is centralised or not. All they care about is communicating with people who matter. I would like to point out that girls who rejected you in high school that are now on your Facebook friend list - don't matter. If your mom is on Facebook - chances are that it is reluctantly and she'd much rather you just called her on the phone.
You mean there was a time when FSF didn't launch ideological arguments to demand that people use software from the GNU Project?
I'm not picking a side, just pointing out that this is par for the course. If it isn't GPL, it's evil.
They maintain a very comprehensive and useful listing[1] of 3rd party licenses which goes over their histories, tradeoffs, and whether they're compatible with the GPL.
And that compatibility is treated independently of whether they consider those licenses to be 'Free'.
Of course they'd prefer use of their own licenses, but this self-interest takes a back seat to helping the overall ecosystem.
http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-guid...
Fun quote from the post:
No (said Google). That's what I mean - you really don't understand. You see, I don't care if people come and look at these hen scratches or not. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. As long as I can sell a few advertisements on that page of my guidebook I really don't care. After all, what better praise for a Guidebook than to help people find out what's wrong with it? Just leave your manuscript with me. I'll look after it.
He held out his hand, imperious now. I felt disheveled after my long night. My brain was spinning. I could see no alternative. In a vain attempt to maintain some self-respect I drew myself up to my full height and pulled back my shoulders, adopting a bearing appropriate for my class. "All right Google. Here you go. Don't lose it now."
"Thank you sir. You can be sure I won't lose it. I never do lose anything you know."
I turned away from him and stumbled down the stairs. I had ended up giving him an order, and he had accepted it. Yet I could not shake the impression, even as he brought me a glass of sherry that evening in my sitting room, placing the silver tray beside me with deference, that Mr. Google - far from being a butler and travel guide - was more a master than a servant.
It would be nice for more people to realize this. Really, they're lining up like sheep for government monitoring, and Zuckerberg and Co. are happy to comply. FB seems thrilled with the prospect of being the eyes and ears of Big Brother, actually.
Right from Time's privacy policy:
We use cookies to understand Internet usage and to improve our content, offerings and advertisements. For example, we may use cookies to personalize your experience at our web pages (e.g., to recognize you by name when you return to our site), save your password in password-protected areas and enable you to use shopping carts on our sites. We also may use cookies to offer you products, programs or services. Similarly, as part of an arrangement with our business partners (including, those who present or serve the advertisements that you see on our web pages) we may also access cookies placed by others and allow others to access certain cookies placed by us.
We may also use small pieces of code such as "web beacons" or "clear gifs" to collect anonymous and aggregate advertising metrics, such as counting page views, promotion views or advertising responses. These "web beacons" may be used to deliver cookies that conform to our cookie policy. For more information regarding cookies, please click here.
If you're not cool with that, stop visiting the site or disable your cookies. ;)
Even ycombinator (and indirectly Hacker News) is guilty of being loosely affiliated with Facebook.
http://ycombinator.posterous.com/facebook-to-begin-giving-y-...
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/11/facebooks...
If most people don't care or are ignorant of whether they're being "tracked" then does it even matter?
I suppose that if this stuff matters to you, you'll have to just maintain a white-list of sites that you'll allow cookies for... hell, maybe it'll be up to the browser companies to bring this sort of issue to the forefront by touting the idea of cookies being disabled by default as a privacy feature.
Edit: Or maybe this issue is already being covered by some browser extensions a la Ghostery and the ilk. I guess it means that if you care enough about it, it's up to you to protect yourself.
Recently Twitter was the only large internet company of several to challenge a government request for data. We rarely hear about Facebook, Google, Yahoo or really anyone refusing requests for data, while at the same time there have been reports about the vast amount of requests the FBI and other agencies have made under the Patriot Act. The depth and type of information that Facebook has about so many individuals must be highly desirable to many agencies.
Disclaimer: I'm not comparing, just pointing out that the FSF's reaction is kind of attacking the straw man here.
Facebook is seriously changing people's lives on a large scale. Wikileaks has mostly provided diplomatic gossip, with a few things tossed in that will harm people, and a smaller number of things tossed in that will help people.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/25/whispering_...
And the potential for decentralized alternatives in places like Tunisia and Egypt are much greater than Facebook.
Centralized services are much easier to block or shut down than decentralization.
Every day we are exposed to crapload of advertisement that are in no way related to me and what those ads do is only annoy me. But there is nothing I can do, I cant turn off all the ads on Time Square, or pay the TV network to turn off all of the ads on my favorite tv channels, same for radio (thanks to adblock I manage to get rid of large portion of ads on the web).
If advertisers knew that I am a male ( a no secret, nothing I would hide) it would escape me from being exposed to all of the annoying ads of pads, make up, and other women centric products. that only would be a huge relief. If advertisers knew I am straight ads for gay social networks would not come up on facebook for me. I can state at least 10 more points.
The bottom line is, as long as a certain lines are not crossed (like diseases, home address, etc.) letting advertisers know more about us could be good.
I thought you had to have a facebook account to "like" something, either on facebook itself or sites with the FB "like" link. Anyone know otherwise?
edit: Just logged out of FB, opened a random Time article (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2049569,00.htm...) and clicked "like" - and was asked to login to FB. Hmm
Some content is loaded off of their CDN, which I highly doubt is doing any tracking. The non-CDN pings are quite possibly not doing tracking, but it would be possible for Facebook to enable some tracking with most people never noticing.
edit: And then I did the math. A 15 byte IP (pretending all IPs are made of four 3 digit numbers) plus a 400 byte URL across 1b accesses is less than half of a terabyte hard drive. Guess we're doomed.
An IP address is just a 32 digit binary number. 4 bytes, not 15. The dotted quad notation is just to help the humans typing them in.
It is not inherently evil to track users. What you do with that information decides the morality of the situation. It seems to me that rolling this non-issue into the arguments against Facebook is actually harmful to the FSFs cause - why would they bother telling us about something trivial if they had real concerns to air?†
† I am not saying that there aren't real concerns, or that the FSF isn't airing them - just that airing a non-issue looks bad
On what evidence do you have this doubt?
facebook has a long history (the entirety of their existence) of being extremely greedy about personal data. Whenever outsiders have had the chance to see inside their thought process on collecting data, it has always been clear they'll collect anything and everything they can. What they're doing with it might not be nefarious; but they love personal data like no company ever before, and go to great lengths to own it.
I'd be surprised if they aren't tracking every request that passes through their servers and gathering usage patterns of everyone on the Internet, regardless of whether someone is logged into facebook or not, and regardless of whether the request originated on a facebook property. That's just the kind of thing facebook does, as far as I can tell. If they aren't doing it already, it's just a matter of time.
I could be completely wrong.
But, IP alone would be enough to follow the trail of most people (I know all the caveats about IP!=individual, but that data is still far from worthless), and collecting IP trails would be absolutely trivial and practically free from a performance perspective. The difference in a high performance webserver environment with logging vs. without logging is less than one percent...probably much less.
With a bit of clever data juggling, and logging of user agents and other information about the client, compare that to past visits from the same IP on properties where facebook has more data (from cookies and logged in activity), and identify users by name with pretty good accuracy.
In short: Performance is not a factor for logging, and facebook wouldn't need a large amount of additional cooperation from the client, like cookies or JavaScript bugs, to track users who aren't logged in. They just need to combine the already available log data in useful ways. A big part of the reason all these fancy distributed key/value stores and BigTable imitators exist (and why facebook has developed their own in-house) is for processing exactly this kind of data.
I'm extremely confident that facebook logs everything, though I have no idea what sorts of things they do with the resulting data.
https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17512
The purpose of social plugins is to enable you to share things to your Facebook profile easily - not tracking.
Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook
At another level, it's disappointing they didn't take the time to get things right
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that people have the right to their views and their right to licence things and act accordingly, but the zealotry in the FSF is just too much for me to handle.
[1] Clarification
Also, an FSF fan club without the most doctrinaire FSFers (who refuse to use Facebook) is an interesting syncretic phenomenon in itself, for reasons that both overlap and diverge from the reasons the FSF itself is interesting.
Diaspora and other such projects are a complete joke. People aren't going to run their own server. Make it easy, make it fast and get their friends to use it, that's it. Nothing else matters.
Why do people keep repeating this fallacy? People won't have to. None of these projects are focused on single-user P2P approach. For all of 30 seconds, Diaspora insinuated that, but that was before they had actually written any code.
If you feel these projects (including mine) is a joke, I'd love to hear feedback why, but please don't repeat falsehoods about how the software is meant to be used.
If individuals don't run their own server and hold control of their own data, then who does? Whoever is running the node.
I know as nerds, we like to get our geek boners over cool projects that aren't mainstream, and fight the man and all, but people on the street could give a crap less. It means that these are stillborn ideas. Does this mean you should stop fighting the good fight? No, but I wouldn't hold my breath for critical mass.
People don't need to know what an apache, django or drupal is in order to use a website based on it. It's a fallacy to think that the user has to be aware of what the underlying software is in order for that software to catch on.
Counter example: XMPP/Jabber. People who use Jabber can talk to each other with no problems. Including Google Talk, which is a huge use base. I regularly talk to friends on Google Talk with my account on my local server.
Another large counter example: SMTP. Put someone's address in your email program and it just works. Plenty of people run their own email server, despite them being notoriously complicated to set up.
I don't take anything they or their pseudo-communist leader say seriously anymore. Back when Stallman started attacking OpenBSD because of their ports tree I knew he had finally lost it.
[0] (My understanding (I'm Canadian) is that this use of the word is a rather quaint Americanism, and has, fortunately, mostly failed to propagate into other dialects of English.)
I view the FSF as software socialists, as in they have a utopian view of how things should be and everyone should buy in and give all of their stuff to everyone else for the good of the community. I also view socialism as an impossible ideal to achieve. In my opinion, all attempts at socialism have ended in communism, where the ruling class tells the people they have socialism but in reality the people at the top of the chain don't buy into it and live much better lives.
Finally, I used the prefix "pseudo" because obviously we're talking about software and not the rise and fall of empires (although Facebook is sort of a digital empire) so I didn't want to attach a full-on label of "communism" to it.
edit: I'm sure someone who has studied politics way more than I have will come in here and point out that I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground, and that's fine. I bitched about the FSF and I feel better so my mission was accomplished.
Yes, vote me down further! PUNISH ME FOR USING WORDS YOU DO NOT LIKE.
Hello! :)
Socialism, Communism, et all are very broad terms. It would behoove any points you make to not use them pejoratively, because they are simply too broad to use in the way you're using them. Especially utopianism, which no more describes socialists than it describes many capitalists.
You could make an argument that the FSF follows the ideals of a very soft libertarian socialism, but that's a stretch.
The FSF is very single-issue, they don't talk about social equality, they don't even have a critique of capitalism and wages. If they're communists, they're particularly undeveloped ones.
Stallman repeatedly condemns the use of the term "intellectual property", because it: A) lumps together a bunch of unrelated/dissimilar things (Copyrights, patents, trade marks, trade secrets) and B) because it implies that they are all "property" and should be owned, like property, perpetually.
Without property rights, I'm not sure what if anything -- except services, a.k.a. labor -- can be consistently monetized in a free market.
In other words, in a world without property rights, the only thing of (monetary) value is labor.
And if memory serves, the labor theory of value is the foundation of Marxian economics; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value.
Consequently, it's not clear to me how it's possible even to have a free market in intellectual work product, as opposed to a free market in labor, without some kind of legally-enforceable rights in intellectual property.
Bias disclosure: I'm an IP lawyer by background.
EDIT: The GPL couldn't exist without IP rights, that is, the right (under copyright law) to haul others into court to force them to comply with the GPL terms or to fine them for failing to do so.
I am personally willing to compromise quite a bit on the free software issues for other gains, but I think the "right to read" consideration for consuming materials other than code are less ok for compromise. I use and enjoy facebook, but look at their motivations and culture as a company before deciding how much to trust them.
I trust the people at facebook a lot more than a lot of companies, so one of my main concerns with facebook is that third parties might purchase, steal, or compel access to their data to use against users (e.g. Corrupt governments).