Politicians in Western democracies are demonstrably not more thoughtful, deliberative, logical, rational, or intelligent than their average countrymen.
That’s quite the hate-on someone has at that site. There’s some funny to be had, but it’s mostly very tryhard. The “coverage” of the Vitamin D thing was great, but when there isn’t low hanging fruit it just sort of defaults to generic noise. Without the anger and repetition it could be worth reading, but as it is there’s a lot of predictable 4channery.
I'm pretty sure I'm at least partially it. I like to check the site out every now and then to get a point of view from the other side. HN, although having a lot of high quality discussions, can sometimes be a deafeningly loud echo chamber, and getting a different perspective helps to, well, put things into perspective.
There’s no real scientific data captured there, but my criticism is summed up well:
> As in many areas of science, some researchers disagree about the validity of the studies on physical punishment. Robert Larzelere, PhD, an Oklahoma State University professor who studies parental discipline, was a member of the APA task force who issued his own minority report because he disagreed with the scientific basis of the task force recommendations. While he agrees that parents should reduce their use of physical punishment, he says most of the cited studies are correlational and don’t show a causal link between physical punishment and long-term negative effects for children.
> “The studies do not discriminate well between non-abusive and overly severe types of corporal punishment,” Larzelere says. “You get worse outcomes from corporal punishment than from alternative disciplinary techniques only when it is used more severely or as the primary discipline tactic.”
> In a meta-analysis of 26 studies, Larzelere and a colleague found that an approach they described as “conditional spanking” led to greater reductions in child defiance or anti-social behavior than 10 of 13 alternative discipline techniques, including reasoning, removal of privileges and time out (Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 2005). Larzelere defines conditional spanking as a disciplinary technique for 2- to 6-year-old children in which parents use two open-handed swats on the buttocks only after the child has defied milder discipline such as time out.
The studies that exist largely seem unable or unwilling to distinguish between mild spanking and physical abuse. Those in the spanking-is-evil camp are fine with this and will assert that there is no difference because they’ve already decided and are happy to argue circularly. So they’ll argue that because some physical punishment has clear negative outcomes, all physical punishment must have negative outcomes despite support for that belief being minimal to nonexistent. This is akin to asserting that brief Time Out as punishment is harmful because locking a child in a closet for hours as punishment is harmful.
I feel like there should be more compelling proof that spanking (not a rollup category of “physical punishment”) is harmful. There seems to be little to no evidence for this, which makes the belief pretty suspect.
Strong political polarization in the US guarantees that going forward there won’t be continuity between presidents because there’s likely to be rapid shifts back and forth across the political spectrum
> Justin Osofsky – ‘Twitter launched Vine today which lets you shoot multiple short video segments to make one single, 6-second video. As part of their NUX, you can find friends via FB. Unless anyone raises objections, we will shut down their friends API access today. We’ve prepared reactive PR, and I will let Jana know our decision.
What's really striking is how user-hostile this conversation is. Forget about whether the user wants to share their data or not - it's all about what Facebook wants to do. In this case, that's snuffing competition by denying access, in the case of Cambridge Analytica, it's sharing data for purposes of shady data "research".
Yeah, that seemed unexpectedly flippant/dismissive. But a couple things:
1. If you look at the docs, that's from Exhibit 44 which indicates that it's actually an excerpt from a messenger discussion, not email
2. Twitter had previously blocked both Instagram and Tumblr in the same way
3. Facebook had previously blocked Twitter in the same way
4. In some of the other docs here, you can see that there was much more discussion about what their policy should be around reciprocity and apps competing with facebook's features
5. The first line of that indicates that there was likely discussion/planning about this before that conversation
There's nothing that Facebook did here than any other company, in tech or otherwise, wouldn't have done.
And for the record, Facebook did not "share data with Cambridge Analytica for shady research purposes". A rogue third party developer created one of those shitty quiz apps for Facebook, and then proceed to get users to signup for it; several million did, which allowed said developer to harvest data thanks to the very permissive APIs that Facebook provided at the time. He then proceeded to sell this data to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has a responsibility in what happened there, but "Facebook sold data to Cambridge Analytica" is a widly misconstrued story.
> There's nothing that Facebook did here than any other company, in tech or otherwise, wouldn't have done.
This isn't true. Lots of companies wouldn't steal users' call logs - eg, Mozilla, Signal, and plenty of boring, normal ones who make TODO list apps or whatever.
It also isn't relevant. See how that argument flies in criminal court. "Anybody else would have stolen that car."
What we see here (again) is that FB does nasty things and it's in the public interest to stop them - along with "any other company" who does the same things.
Facebook's business is car stealing. They tell you that upfront: we want your car, and if you park it in our garage we're going to take it.
All this anger over Facebook is ridiculous.[1] Now, if you want to talk about Android and Google's decision to make it more difficult to not only control but to know what data apps (especially theirs!) will take, that's a different matter....
[1] Especially from geeks, and particularly geeks from the 1990s and earlier when we were told that unless we promoted non-centralized publication models that we'd see the very constellation of centralized, user-antagonistic, profiteering services we now have. Whenever someone says, "but why would you want to host your own e-mail/web/chat server, my head wants to explode." It's always "why would you" (or "why would you, it'll never be as good as GMail/Facebook/Twitter/etc"; never, "maybe I should promote and help work on projects that make it easier".
We are all rogue third party developers, and clearly, the priority, much like most businesses is to make a profit, and the customers/ethics come second.
I love the fact that you get bent out of shape that Facebook didn't sell it though, it's a theme I've seen with Facebook employees: "But we didn't sell it!"
I'm not sure if they are lamenting the fact they didn't sell it but I sure as hell can tell what they give a damn about. If you want to hide under "anybody would have done it", lets take a trip down histories gravestones and figure out whether or not we should bother trying to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do.
If exfiltration of user information and data was not the explicit purpose of FB's API policies, they soundly rejected the principle of lead privilege, which dates back 45 years and is no doubt incorporated into FB's own systems.
thanks to the very permissive APIs that Facebook provided
Facebook improved this years ago and you can see the discussion surrounding this change in the released emails. These days a Facebook app can't ask for your entire friends list, instead, it only gets to see your friends that have also authorized that app. Also, user IDs now have a per-app namespace so they can't be (easily) correlated between different apps.
The discussion revealed in this release is pretty fascinating. For example, you can see that at some point Zuck's friends authorized 31 apps and 76% of those apps had "read_stream" access giving access to their entire newsfeed.
Through one lens this is Facebook locking down their API in an anti-competitive way, which is somewhat true, but mostly this feels like an API change making privacy improvements for users. (The Cambridge Analytica data came from an older app that was running before these changes were made...)
Facebook improved this years ago and you can see the discussion surrounding this change in the released emails...
This is the same elision they use. My question was, in the face of almost two generations of awareness of the principle of least privilege (almost typed "lead" again!), why did they design the API so that it gave away so much information and data in the first place?
Through one lens this is Facebook locking down their API in an anti-competitive way, which is somewhat true, but mostly this feels like an API change making privacy improvements for users. (The Cambridge Analytica data came from an older app that was running before these changes were made...)
Read the "Whitelisting" section. The only change they mention is turning off the ability to request permission to access the now-problematic data and information (let's say "D&I"). Of course, we also know that this is selectively applied. That's not "somewhat" anticompetitive, it's not necessarily different that the CA problem, and at any rate is only a marginal privacy improvement for users because there's (my estimate) no way in hell they're going to tell us who still has access to the APIs.
I don't think the Facebook API gives you access to your friends emails...but agreed there are still ways to correlate this. (hash of profile photos for example?)
The "permissive api" is facebook changing what words mean over time. People signed up, shared things, and then facebook changed default behaviors without communicating the change WELL.
That's not true man. Some companies were "allowed" to use/get the data even after it was shutdown and the API was created in the first place to entice the masses.
It's worth remembering that Facebook did share data in violation of their own terms of use with the Clinton came - in fact, that policy came about because Obama "abused" Facebook to collect contact information for friends of people who liked or followed his campaign. Despite this policy change, Facebook allowed Clinton to do the same. They claimed it was by mistake, but even after the mistake was revealed, they didn't change it or cut off Clinton. Clinton's campaign manager speculated it was because "they agreed with us", but also thought that the Trump campaign had similar access (so far, no evidence has emerged to that).
Facebook is not a good actor, anyway you look at it. They are selling data to first or second parties, who are using it to damage our country.
If you own a grocery store and there's a guy on the other side of town who is cheaper, the people who come to your store because it's more convenient would love for you to be forced to just give away half your space to your competitor. Doesn't mean it's "user hostile" to refuse to do so.
But being forced to give away half your physical retail space is hardly the same thing as just letting them keep using an API that you provide explicitly for such use.
Also, more broadly: one would have quite a hard time making the case that Facebook isn’t nakedly, gleefully, and rapaciously user-hostile.
I don't agree, but it's probably not worth making the case. Facebook has billions of users. I assume you think that they want to leave, but they "can't", or that they just don't know how hostile Facebook is towards them.
I think a lot of people who hate Facebook just have a hard time believing that most people just don't care about the same things you do, or to the same degree. They're still on Facebook and Instagram and Whatsapp because they see the world differently from you.
> But being forced to give away half your physical retail space is hardly the same thing as just letting them keep using an API that you provide explicitly for such use.
In this case, Facebook was deprecating the API and declined to provide special whitelist access to a competitor.
So they just heard about Vine, and decided to deprecate the API the same day? That doesn't sound right to me. That conversation seems to indicate they just wanted to block them ASAP (same day), nothing to do with deprecation?
> So they just heard about Vine, and decided to deprecate the API the same day?
No? Where are you getting this read from? The documents clearly show them discussing it from a year prior to shutting down Vine's API access, and planning on announcing it publicly ~6 months prior.
I can't find anything from a quick google search on when the API deprecation actually took effect, but assuming the timeline from Exhibit 43 is accurate, Twitter actually had whitelisted access for over 3 months before being shut down.
Nothing says evil more than preparing reactive PR to bury your competitors. And the nonchalant way his response sends chills down my spine. These people will suffocate innovation just to win.
CEOs and executives are the closest equivalent of royalty in the United States. Their media coverage is often hagiographic as a result. They are humanized and puffed up in the press to an extent that foreign press would never think to do about business leaders in their own countries.
Inch upon inch of columns are dedicated to their morning habits, favourite TV shows and fashion choices, and other fluff content to make them "relatable" to the average joe/jane. This is especially magnified when it comes to SV execs because they wear hoodies and tshirts instead of bespoke suits.
And that's what leads to reactions like "I can't believe he'd be so callous to users", as if the person in question is a hard working bootstrapper and not a billionaire looking to maximize market share and profit.
As the news coverage of the time pointed out, Facebook did this to Twitter a few months after Twitter themselves did the same thing to Instagram (which was already owned by Facebook at that point) and Tumblr: https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3913082/facebook-has-appa... All of the big social networks were and still are like this.
> And the nonchalant way his response sends chills down my spine.
CEOs of massive companies don't have time to write long and explanatory emails. They put people in charge that they trust, so they can just say one word or sentence and know that it'll get handled.
I am definitely no fan of Zuck but on the subject of Elon Musk, this is the same guy who tried to use his high media profile to call an innocent man a pedophile just because he would follow Musk’s crazy plan.[1]
So that another one off the “CEO billionaire but not a sociopath” list.
I'd suggest you find a better source than The Guardian for news about Elon Musk. They have run a relentless smear campaign against him for years now. Just one more reason to loathe that publication, in my book.
> The apology comes after the spelunker, Vern Unsworth, who was involved in the early days of efforts to save the now-rescued boys’ soccer team, threatened legal action against the billionaire executive over the comment.
> Musk said on Twitter late Tuesday that he had made the claim out of “anger” because Unsworth had criticized his idea to rescue the boys with a “mini-submarine” made out of a SpaceX rocket part.
I have a hard time feeling bad for Twitter getting API access pulled out from under them. How many times have they done that to products/services that depended on Twitter APIs?
This was known for a very long time. The "Dumb fucks" comments were brought to the public attention many years ago. The problem is that Silicon Valley gave Facebook a pass on all of the ethical transgressions for years (most likely since they minted many millionaires and billionaires in the valley)
>Michael LeBeau – ‘He guys, as you know all the growth team is planning on shipping a permissions update on Android at the end of this month. They are going to include the ‘read call log’ permission, which will trigger the Android permissions dialog on update, requiring users to accept the update. They will then provide an in app opt in NUX for a feature that lets you continuously upload your SMS and call log history to Facebook to be used for improving things like PYMK, coefficient calculation, feed ranking etc. This is a pretty high risk thing to do from a PR perspective but it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it.’
>Yul Kwon - ‘The Growth team is now exploring a path where we only request Read Call Log permission, and hold off on requesting any other permissions for now. ‘Based on their initial testing, it seems this would allow us to upgrade users without subjecting them to an Android permissions dialog at all.
This is huge, doesn't this make google guilty as well?
>‘It would still be a breaking change, so users would have to click to upgrade, but no permissions dialog screen.
Now remember that Facebook has made agreements with phone manufacturers to have fb installed by default and made un-uninstallable, with all the default permissions to share the users data whether they ever log in and use the app or not!
Sidenote: I've noticed via umatrix that Netflix on pc, during a show, is attempting to load fb js... Netflix wtf!
fb.js is Facebook’s standard JS base, with things like polyfills/ponyfills to ensure certain features in a browser environment. It’s imported by React, Relay, etc.
So this might be what you’re seeing, but normally it’s included in a precompiled JS application bundle.
I believe you're thinking of FBJS (https://github.com/facebook/fbjs), which is a library as you describe, whereas the comment above is referring to loading the Facebook SDK from Facebook's servers. Among other things, Netflix offers Facebook login, which would need the SDK loaded.
Taking advantage of everyone having it already cached on their machine maybe? Or it could just be standard ad retargeting - not unreasonable that Netflix would want to stream behavior data to facebook ads for targeting / lookalike purposes
As of a few years ago, Android asks users to agree to categories of permissions rather than individual permissions, and adding permissions from the same category doesn't count as a new permissions grant. Based on that description it doesn't sound like Facebook was abusing this since they still required users to opt in. (Though I seem to recall from older discussions of this that in actual fact, the opt-in process they implemented was sleazy and high-pressure.)
If their application only needed to run on newer Android, I think they could rely on runtime permissions and not request this permission at all unless the user actually turns the feature on - but even now about a third of Android devices in use are on versions too old to support this.
> This is huge, doesn't this make google guilty as well?
I'm not sure I follow. An app can request permissions, and the user can allow or deny them. I don't understand how this puts guilt on Google. Can you elaborate?
this seems like a hole in their design, additional access is being granted without the user really knowing what is going on and they are deliberately keeping the user out of the loop.
at least, that is how I am interpreting it, it seems that the functionality of their software is not functioning in the 'spirit' of what it is suppose to be doing.
In essence, Android permissions system have (had?) a vulnerability that Facebook exploited, and Google is responsible to a small extent as the maintainer of the vulnerable software.
Google is very culpable because the various problems with Android's permission system were raised hundreds of times by security experts, both internal and external, and they didn't consider it a high priority to fix.
Even when they added a sane permission model in Android $VERSION, developers were allowed to bypass it for years by just building apps targeting Android $VERSION - 1 instead.
Google's web security may be the best in the world, but Android security is a disgrace and they should be called on it. (Fuschia may put them on top of the world if they ever switch Android to that, but we'll have to see whether that happens.)
> Facebook had been aware that an update to its Android app that let it collect records of users' calls and texts would be controversial. "To mitigate any bad PR, Facebook planned to make it as hard as possible for users to know that this was one of the underlying features," Mr Collins wrote
So did this change? I installed Messenger recently and this is pretty much the first thing it requests (no thanks). It also asks to let people search for you by number (no thanks) and to sync with your contacts (no thanks, smells like LinkedIn).
I have zero permissions enabled for Messenger, so I guess it would then ask before uploading my call logs?
Public Relations - how they are perceived by the public. This was seen as a risky move because it had the potential (which Facebook realised and decided to press ahead with anyway) to anger a lot of people.
Public relations -- bad press. Here's some more context from the BBC article:
> Facebook had been aware that an update to its Android app that let it collect records of users' calls and texts would be controversial. "To mitigate any bad PR, Facebook planned to make it as hard as possible for users to know that this was one of the underlying features,"
