The Zuckerberg Files - All public utterances of Mark Zuckerberg | Hacker News Reader

The Zuckerberg Files - All public utterances of Mark Zuckerberg

zuckerbergfiles.org

70 pointsuptown47 comments

"The Zuckerberg Files is an open-access public archive" ... "Scholars wishing to gain access to the full archive should email access@zuckerbergfiles.org with their name, affiliation, and a brief description of the research project or purpose for which the materials will be put."

Open-ish.

> Open-ish.

Aka closed :)

It's like a box on a shelf you can't reach. It's not locked. It's not even closed. If you squint, you can guess what's inside.

But it's in a box. And it's up there. And you have to wait for someone to bring a ladder.

I'm not really sure I understand their argument for restricting access. I'm not into the academic environment (and this might be one of the reasons) but this at first looked something targeted at a wider audience than "scholars".

Also, their quote mentions copyrighted work. A) is this material copyrighted? B) would be legal to open access - with passwords - to a "organized database of copyrighted material"?

Everything is copyrighted. Welcome to the blight.

I had the same reaction: to me they were contradicting themselves in no more than two sentences. Then I read on and followed links: http://zuckerbergfiles.org/?page_id=41

So this is indeed a copyright issue. Like all copyright issues, bittorrent is the answer.

Flagrant disregard for copyrights is most definitely not the answer to copyright issues, and I say that as an inveterate torrenter.

The real answer is changing the laws; torrents are a work-around for the currently broken system, at best.

At least, they are not asking for a yearly membership fee.

I'll be waiting for the "Screw you guys, this should be open, here's HTTP link and torrent for free download. Long live Aaron Schwartz"

To everyone complaining about the password-protected login, there is something you need to understand: this is about copyright, not the library being fake-open. This repository apparently consists of copyrighted works, and by the Fair Use provisions of US Copyright, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee have collected these works together even though they presumably do not have rights to all the works.

You, too, could pull all these works together without arranging the rights, and you could probably make a fair use argument for it. However, I guess they're saying that they aren't going to re-transmit the archive in bulk. It is insinuated that it might run astray of fair use to do so.

Where is Obama files? In fact this seems like a good idea for a huge website for all high level political figures.

I agree with this.

At which point you could throw a redo of theirs (Black Mirror) on the wall when they contradict themselves.

Well, nearly every public speech from members of Congress and the executive office and the judicial branch is recorded, with some notable exceptions like national security, but even then, eventually that information enters the public record by law.

The problem is that much of it is difficult to collate. http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.php is a good start for the Congressional record online, but presidential records and judicial records often end up all over the place.

Ideally the LOC would provide a better online toolkit for this stuff, but you know, good enough for government work.

RapGenius for politics!

While they don't ask upfront for money, they make a commendable effort of actually keeping people away from those files by asking people to email them with a stated research goal. Casually interested normal folks need not apply.

It doesn't help either that their text files are in PDF instead of a format that can actually be programmatically processed.

It certainly would be useful to do some sort of programmatic analysis of speeches mapped over time. Sentiment analysis. Repeated phrases. Cross-reference with others' phrases to see who's saying the same things at the same times.

Oh well. I guess you can print it out really nicely. And it's "portable"!

Not exactly trivial, but text can be extracted from a pdf.

Looking forward to the torrent. Tragic that this is what we are reduced to as a society.

Can you expand? What's tragic?

That there are copyright restrictions on this content.

Who cares? You said it yourself; torrent it.

How is this different than an editor compiling commonly known knowledge into an encyclopedia and selling it to the public?

It isn't, which explains wikipedia.

> Tragic that this is what we are reduced to as a society.

Yeah, it sure is tragic that there are technologies that exist that allow us to bypass things like this.

Interesting, a invitation for scrutiny with concern for privacy.. and on other hand, disallowing people to anonymously get public information collected by them. Interesting!

I wait for this to be hosted somewhere else ;/

Am I the only one that thinks this should absolutely be put up in some open-source version-control-based way? If it's public, it's public. If I have to email you and you get to decide whether or not I'm a scholar, doesn't that defeat the purpose of making something available for learning, sharing, and accountability? Should I really have to have a research project or composed purpose to view "open" things?

Self undermining, that is.

I wish this was easier to browse. For whatever reason, PDFs feel like a barrier, even though it's just an additional click.

>By gaining a better understanding of how Facebook’s founder and CEO conceives of his own company’s role in the policy and ethical debates surrounding social networking [...]

Sure, knowing how the CEO thinks is a good judge to know where Facebook is going, but it's a bit odd to think that Zuckerberg doesn't take note of what the Board say.

Why aren't they logging what Sandberg, Thiel and Graham say/do?

"The dominance of social networking sites, such as Facebook, in contemporary life" ... I find it funny when people make such dramatic statements about facebook. I've reduced my usage to once per week and feel no dominance. I can just as easily log off completely.

The real question is, can you delete it completely? :)

My mind immediately flashed back to "Being John Malkovich."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Fuxkinhug

I'd bet the same kind of scene would work really well with "Zuckerberg."

So I go to the website, and I can't see any "files"... Oh I have to login? Pff, whatever. Don't waste my time. Bye.

This has the quality of one of those things that's actually a pretty good idea but seems like a practical joke.

Someone should just grab the content and upload to rapgenius.

Sites like this will become oboslete... One day "www.lmgtfy.com?q=all public utterances of Mark Zuckerberg" will trigger something a little more interesting than Page Rank...

Kinda of scary that people are collecting X founder's profile. Although these data are publicly available, this is still kind of scary.

Do you realize that 'people are collecting X founder's profile' is essentially nothing highly significant in and of itself in this day and age (much thanks to Zuckerberg&co, ironically enough)? -- because this information is out there anyway and will always be there, anyone who's interested can cull that information with considerably little effort with some clever scraping scripts. What's offered with this initiative in particular is the convenience of not having to do that from scratch, instead letting you get straight to the searchin' of juicy bits.

I do. I wrote that in my comment if you read it.

But it is still quite "creepy" to see someone making that effort to collect all your public appearance and put into a profile, shared on HN when you wake up (although you have to send in an email stating your goal).

And this is normally a job the public relation firm has to do.

This is not creepy, this is an academic pursuit of rounding up information of one individual who is incidentally spearheading big change of privacy in a society. This is one of the things that happens to you when you become a public figure. Is a 'biography' creepy? History researchers do this themselves when they're writing history, when they're writing biographies -- some work is made easier for them with this kind of stuff.

I think Zuckerberg's doings are a lot creepier than this when you really get down to it.

Why is it scary? The other side to our society rewarding you with billions of dollars is that you are now a public figure.

Not only that but he's the CEO of a transnational corporation: their public pronouncements are always examined for any sort of securities edge.

And the CEO of Facebook of all people. If one non-public person in the entire world deserves scrutiny, it's Zuckerberg.

If that scares you, just wait until you hear about this 'facebook' project.

So many orgs and individuals are doing similar data mining under the "collect now, analyze later" strategy. The fact that some of the data is made open-ish is not scary at all.

That's scary? You should see what Facebook has been up to the last 7-8 years: http://pleasedeletefacebook.com/

I wish there was one for PG. Truly.

seriously? why do you need Zuckerberg Files for research?

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