3 ms·

tl;dr: Zuckerberg says "Screw net neutrality, I've got dibs on billions of people for my walled garden." > Twitter ... has struck its own deals ... in more tha

by quink 13y ago

tl;dr: Zuckerberg says "Screw net neutrality, I've got dibs on billions of people for my walled garden." > 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.

debt 13y ago
Looks like it's more about making the internet more accessible to people without it.
- quink 13y ago
  > However, the Internet.org team does not plan 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. 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.
  - onedev 13y ago
    There are a lot of people who have "access" to internet infrastructure but don't have "access" to internet because it's too expensive. If we, as an industry, can cut these costs, then that makes internet more "accessible" for everyone. 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.
  - josh2600 13y ago
    To be frank, that has a lot to do with the shifting Australian regulatory conditions, specifically deregulation. Your fixed line services, at the national level, are still relatively small. What you're referring to is what we call Last mile connectivity and competing exchanges. 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.
samstave 13y ago
Here is an opportunity to see if an app can be created to privately tunnel through whatever FB pipe they give you. 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
- nwh 13y ago
  I actually did that years back when my carrier offered free Facebook and I had no mobile connection. It was essentially just a really dodgy HTTP proxy with their messaging system and another account sitting on a remote server. I got it responding to basic requests, but it took a lot more effort than I could be bothered with. I can only imagine that continuous use would get you banned very quickly under their spam filter. 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]".
samstave 13y ago
I posted the following 2 years ago here on HN: --------- 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.

by quink 13y ago

debt 13y ago

Looks like it's more about making the internet more accessible to people without it.

quink 13y ago
> However, the Internet.org team does not plan 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. 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.
- onedev 13y ago
  There are a lot of people who have "access" to internet infrastructure but don't have "access" to internet because it's too expensive. If we, as an industry, can cut these costs, then that makes internet more "accessible" for everyone. 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.
- josh2600 13y ago
  To be frank, that has a lot to do with the shifting Australian regulatory conditions, specifically deregulation. Your fixed line services, at the national level, are still relatively small. What you're referring to is what we call Last mile connectivity and competing exchanges. 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.

samstave 13y ago

Here is an opportunity to see if an app can be created to privately tunnel through whatever FB pipe they give you. 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

nwh 13y ago
I actually did that years back when my carrier offered free Facebook and I had no mobile connection. It was essentially just a really dodgy HTTP proxy with their messaging system and another account sitting on a remote server. I got it responding to basic requests, but it took a lot more effort than I could be bothered with. I can only imagine that continuous use would get you banned very quickly under their spam filter. 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]".

samstave 13y ago

I posted the following 2 years ago here on HN: --------- 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.