Facebook is bad

[Kurp]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/tech ... -down.html

Facebook and some of its apps go down simultaneously.

Oct. 4, 2021Updated 2:04 p.m. ET

Josh Edelson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook and some of its apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, appeared to go down at the same time on Monday for many users, who turned to Twitter and other social media platforms to lament the outage.

The social network and its apps began displaying error messages before noon Eastern time, users reported. All of the company’s family of apps — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger — showed outage reports, according to the site downdetector.com, which monitors web traffic and site activity.

Outages are not uncommon for apps, but to have so many interconnected apps at the world’s largest social media company go down at the same time is rare. The company has been trying to integrate the underlying technical infrastructure of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram for several years.

Two Facebook security team members, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said it was unlikely that a cyberattack caused the issues. That’s because the technology behind the apps was still different enough that one hack was not likely to affect all of them at once.

In a series of tweets, John Graham-Cumming, the chief technology officer of Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company, said the problem was likely with Facebook’s servers, which were not letting people connect to its sites like Instagram and WhatsApp.

Computers convert websites such as facebook.com to numeric internal protocol addresses, through a system that is likened to a phone’s address book, Mr. Graham-Cumming said. Facebook’s issue was the equivalent of removing people’s phone numbers from under their names in their address book, making it impossible to call them, he said. Cloudflare provides some of the systems that support Facebook’s internet infrastructure.

Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, posted on Twitter, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

On Twitter, the hashtag #facebookdown quickly started trending. Some users said they were miffed by the abrupt outage, while others poked fun at it.

Facebook’s internal communications platform, Workplace, was also taken out, leaving most employees unable to do their jobs. Two Facebook workers called it the equivalent of a “snow day.”

Facebook has already been dealing with plenty of scrutiny. The company has been under fire from a whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who amassed thousands of pages of internal research and has since distributed them to the news media, lawmakers and regulators. The documents revealed that Facebook knew of many harms that its services were causing.

Ms. Haugen, who revealed her identity on Sunday online and on “60 Minutes,” is scheduled to testify on Tuesday in Congress about Facebook’s impact on young users.

[Giovanni]

Facebook might be bad. But at the moment it’s definitely dead.

[Danny]

Hope this thread got nothing to do with this....


GameStop and all..

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/zucke ... TFFK6iJnOr

[Giovanni]

Facebook might be bad. But at the moment it’s definitely dead.

And it lives again…

[climb-up]

Facebook might be bad. But at the moment it’s definitely dead.

And it lives again…

E228C786-3404-4068-850F-F14B58E41AFC.jpeg (409.1 KiB) Viewed 2882 times

[Hazel]

Facebook might be bad. But at the moment it’s definitely dead.

And it lives again…

E228C786-3404-4068-850F-F14B58E41AFC.jpeg

This makes zero technical sense.

[climb-up]

And it lives again…

E228C786-3404-4068-850F-F14B58E41AFC.jpeg

This makes zero technical sense.

and yet I still find it hilarious.
It was posted by a friend when facebook came back on, right after I (and everyone else I assume) was talking about how suspicious it was that facebook went down right after the 60 minutes interview.

Was it actually technically in response? Do servers actually work like that?
I don't know. Maybe not.
Did it still feel suspicious and make these comment funny?
I thought so. YMMV

[FiveSkandhas]

I think this whistleblower 's testimony is a watershed moment. The entire congress was nodding along with her, and in a world where democrats and republicans can barely stand to be in the same room with each other, that kind of bipartisan support for her message was a powerful statement indeed.

I think the momentum is building to actually do something about reigning in the power of social networks. If China could rid itself of it's 19th century opium epidemic, we can get this electronic monkey off our collective backs.

[Tlalok]

It looks like it was a DNS issue that took it down. A relatively minor issue, but compounded by the fact that apparently all of Facebook's internal communication is done through messenger so they shut down completely in the event of it going down. Great infrastructure there!

I work with a lot of people in Latin America and Asia, where WhatsApp and Facebook are the internet. Losing it for 6 hours throws everything, including government services into chaos. It's easy to joke about it in the West, but imagine if you are a refugee and you're using WhatsApp to contact your family in Afghanistan. It is real bad to have one company, especially Facebook, having such influence. It has to be broken up.

[Malcolm]

It has to be broken up.

Strongly agree.

[Queequeg]

The Atlantic has apparently declared war on facebook:

[Arnoud]

It looks like it was a DNS issue that took it down. A relatively minor issue, but compounded by the fact that apparently all of Facebook's internal communication is done through messenger so they shut down completely in the event of it going down. Great infrastructure there!

I work with a lot of people in Latin America and Asia, where WhatsApp and Facebook are the internet. Losing it for 6 hours throws everything, including government services into chaos. It's easy to joke about it in the West, but imagine if you are a refugee and you're using WhatsApp to contact your family in Afghanistan. It is real bad to have one company, especially Facebook, having such influence. It has to be broken up.

I agree but one could use signal.

[Tlalok]

It looks like it was a DNS issue that took it down. A relatively minor issue, but compounded by the fact that apparently all of Facebook's internal communication is done through messenger so they shut down completely in the event of it going down. Great infrastructure there!

I work with a lot of people in Latin America and Asia, where WhatsApp and Facebook are the internet. Losing it for 6 hours throws everything, including government services into chaos. It's easy to joke about it in the West, but imagine if you are a refugee and you're using WhatsApp to contact your family in Afghanistan. It is real bad to have one company, especially Facebook, having such influence. It has to be broken up.

I agree but one could use signal.

Yeah, one person could but it's hard to get an entire community to up and cross apps, especially if they're working off a baseline technological literacy. Ideally though yeah.

[Archie2009]

Facebook is Meta.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... brand-meta

[PeterC]

It looks like it was a DNS issue that took it down. A relatively minor issue, but compounded by the fact that apparently all of Facebook's internal communication is done through messenger so they shut down completely in the event of it going down. Great infrastructure there!

I work with a lot of people in Latin America and Asia, where WhatsApp and Facebook are the internet. Losing it for 6 hours throws everything, including government services into chaos. It's easy to joke about it in the West, but imagine if you are a refugee and you're using WhatsApp to contact your family in Afghanistan. It is real bad to have one company, especially Facebook, having such influence. It has to be broken up.

I agree but one could use signal.

Yeah, one person could but it's hard to get an entire community to up and cross apps, especially if they're working off a baseline technological literacy. Ideally though yeah.

In certain communities signal use is very widespread. If you’re a journalist, investor, politician etc then there’s a good chance a majority of people you interact with have it on their phone.

The guy that created signal - moxie marlinspike (not making that up) was asked by the founder of WhatsApp, jan koum, to implement the same e2e encryption on WhatsApp. When zuckerbot insisted that WhatsApp contacts be integrated into fb, which makes any privacy features of WhatsApp largely moot, koum left fb, forgoing a lot of his deferred consideration from the sale to fb, because he just couldn’t work with fb anymore. What did he do? Created a trust to support signal’s development and funded it with enough money to keep signal running and free for decades.

Signal is not ideal, in that you contact people via their numbers rather than via an arbitrary username, but in general it’s about the best out there, and it’s functionality is roughly on a level with WhatsApp. We should all be encouraging it’s use

[Jesse]

I agree but one could use signal.

Yeah, one person could but it's hard to get an entire community to up and cross apps, especially if they're working off a baseline technological literacy. Ideally though yeah.

In certain communities signal use is very widespread. If you’re a journalist, investor, politician etc then there’s a good chance a majority of people you interact with have it on their phone.

The guy that created signal - moxie marlinspike (not making that up) was asked by the founder of WhatsApp, jan koum, to implement the same e2e encryption on WhatsApp. When zuckerbot insisted that WhatsApp contacts be integrated into fb, which makes any privacy features of WhatsApp largely moot, koum left fb, forgoing a lot of his deferred consideration from the sale to fb, because he just couldn’t work with fb anymore. What did he do? Created a trust to support signal’s development and funded it with enough money to keep signal running and free for decades.

Signal is not ideal, in that you contact people via their numbers rather than via an arbitrary username, but in general it’s about the best out there, and it’s functionality is roughly on a level with WhatsApp. We should all be encouraging it’s use

People need a basic education in privacy to make using apps like this effective. There is no point in using end-to-end encryption if the device you are using the encryption application on is compromised from the start. Everything you type on a cell phone keyboard is automatically sent to the keyboard app owners servers, which means before your sms text is encrypted, it's being intercepted and stored in your digital keyboard makers servers.

This is just one pathway, there are dozens of others that defeat the purpose of encryption. Yes, you are still technically safer using something like signal to start with, as it limits WHO can access your messages. But for example, that does no good if you are a reporter being targeted by a government, as they simply petition the keyboard maker for your logs, or directly access data from google, your ISP, facebook, etc.

If you are someone who needs that level of protection (Journalist, politician, political refuge running from a government), educate yourself on privacy, and security.

[PeterC]

Everything you type on a cell phone keyboard is automatically sent to the keyboard app owners servers, which means before your sms text is encrypted, it's being intercepted and stored in your digital keyboard makers servers.

That’s easy to fix though. On iOS you can disable the learning functionality and stop data being backed up from your device. On an android device you can run graphene or a similar OS. Actually if you’re not running an OS like that you probably should not be on an android device anyway, as iOS is far better for managing what data leaves or stays on your device. The content of what you type on an apple device is not logged verbatim by default, for example. Keywords are if you have Siri on, but although they try hard to make you enable it, it’s not a default setting, you have to actually switch it on in the initial phone setup process.

[Jesse]

Everything you type on a cell phone keyboard is automatically sent to the keyboard app owners servers, which means before your sms text is encrypted, it's being intercepted and stored in your digital keyboard makers servers.

That’s easy to fix though. On iOS you can disable the learning functionality and stop data being backed up from your device. On an android device you can run graphene or a similar OS. Actually if you’re not running an OS like that you probably should not be on an android device anyway, as iOS is far better for managing what data leaves or stays on your device. The content of what you type on an apple device is not logged verbatim by default, for example. Keywords are if you have Siri on, but although they try hard to make you enable it, it’s not a default setting, you have to actually switch it on in the initial phone setup process.

It's not only the learning functionality though. Most keyboards also use AI to predict text, and to correct spelling and grammar, these AI services are generally ran on external servers, and most companies are not entirely honest about their data privacy policies. In particular voice to text on digital keyboards, especially google's keyboard uses a remote server to perform the data crunching.

But yes, changing to an open source secure OS, changing to a secure open source keyboard alternative goes a long way towards real privacy.

In general, stay away from any application made by large corporations whose primary income is data. Although these days, even companies who aren't primarily data brokers also store and sell their users data, as it's a simple way to increase income.

Here is also a good place to start for securing yourself: https://haveibeenpwned.com/

They track data leaks, and allow you to check your logins, emails, and passwords against the data leaks. unfortunately, pretty much everyone has been compromised at some point, but knowing and changing your passwords will help alot. This service is generally regarded as safe to use by the privacy community, if you are worried about checking your passwords there.

I am generally knowledgeable about security, and this is the result of my primary email address:

[Vajradhara]

The Wall Street Journal is publishing some pretty damning articles on facebook. Might be behind a paywall, but this sums it up:

Time and again, the documents show, in the U.S. and overseas, Facebook’s own researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects, in areas including teen mental health, political discourse and human trafficking. Time and again, despite congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them.

Sometimes the company held back for fear of hurting its business. In other cases, Facebook made changes that backfired. Even Mr. Zuckerberg’s pet initiatives have been thwarted by his own systems and algorithms.

The documents include research reports, online employee discussions and drafts of presentations to senior management, including Mr. Zuckerberg. They aren’t the result of idle grumbling, but rather the formal work of teams whose job was to examine the social network and figure out how it could improve.

They offer perhaps the clearest picture thus far of how broadly Facebook’s problems are known inside the company, up to the CEO himself. And when Facebook speaks publicly about many of these issues, to lawmakers, regulators and, in the case of XCheck, its own Oversight Board, it often provides misleading or partial answers, masking how much it knows.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-f ... 1631541353

Its a monster that even its keepers can't control, even if they wanted to. The comparison to a malignant tumor on a humanity's vital capacity for speech is not exaggeration.

IGNORANCE IS BAD.

[justsit]

...

IGNORANCE IS BAD.