Facebook Leads an Effort to Lower Barriers to Internet Access
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
> 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 destiny, held in a 62-micron translucent hair that fed us with more 1' and 0's to each person in a single day than the entire digital output of the globe in 1999.
Such an umbilical cannot be bad right!
The only problem is we misjudged the direction of the flow!
Now, with goog-net reaching everywhere, but the book being the only lens into the tubes -- our minds are warped. We are a most technically advanced - yet wholly dependant child-like civilization.
A mutant.
If its not on the platform. Not "in the book" they say -- how can it be trusted - how could it succeed? How can you expect to be relevant?
HOW CAN IT NOT BE RELEVANT!
Slaves! All of them!
This is why we act! This is what is needed. Who are we? Who the fuck were we? Not this! Surely not this. It is time....
We take action now. Rewrite this so called book.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;).
It 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.
Isn't it already happening for a while (or forever, depending on the companies) ? Companies who cared about performance and responsiveness already work on optimizing their apps. Because more usage means more revenue.
Mobile OS and hardware makers already care about battery life and efficiency, because these are strong competitive advantages.
The rest of the effort seems to be into getting carriers to make Facebook/other companies requests out of quota, witch is not new and belongs more to marketing/sales strategy than anything else.
This initiative feels like some generic PR move with nothing special to latch on.
Hail Facebook,Hail NSA and Other organised shit giving us false promise of security while churning our own data.
Now can we fix the problems before we ship it?