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So did significant improvements to HBase, PyTorch, Haxl, PHP compilers, and much more.

And Facebook is inventing sophisticated AI hardware (https://code.fb.com/ml-applications/the-next-step-in-facebook-s-ai-hardware-infrastructure/) including semiconductor design (https://www.networkworld.com/article/3268974/hardware/is-facebook-looking-to-build-its-own-data-center-chips.html). and is the primary contributor to the Open Compute Project's work on more efficient data center hardware (https://www.opencompute.org//

TL/DR: The only reason they are able to invade our privacy that effectively is that they really are an impressive technology company.

In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship. When there's no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn't make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Sessions. America most definitely has such a system.

That entire paragraph is plagiarism.

And when independent candidates run for office and can't get their message out for being shadow banned, and the corporatist candidates are always the number one trending subject, you'll be there to finger wag for not bothering to set up their own world-class content distribution system first.

So is this one.

Any time you try to talk about how internet censorship threatens our ability to get the jackboot of oligarchy off our necks you'll always get some guy in your face who's read one Ayn Rand book and thinks he knows everything, saying things like âoeFacebook is a private company! It can do whatever it wants!â Is it now? Has not Facebook been inviting US government-funded groups to help regulate its operations, vowing on the Senate floor to do more to facilitate the interests of the US government, deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments, and handing the guidance of its censorship behavior over to the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO and Gulf states? How "private" is that? Facebook is a deeply government-entrenched corporation, and Facebook censorship is just what government censorship looks like in a corporatist system of government.

Well that sure looks familiar too.

What takes random paragraphs from internet sources based on key words, with a time span ranging in years, and cobbles them together to make forum posts?

In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship. When there's no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn't make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Sessions. America most definitely has such a system.

And when independent candidates run for office and can't get their message out for being shadow banned, and the corporatist candidates are always the number one trending subject, you'll be there to finger wag for not bothering to set up their own world-class content distribution system first.

Any time you try to talk about how internet censorship threatens our ability to get the jackboot of oligarchy off our necks you'll always get some guy in your face who's read one Ayn Rand book and thinks he knows everything, saying things like âoeFacebook is a private company! It can do whatever it wants!â Is it now? Has not Facebook been inviting US government-funded groups to help regulate its operations, vowing on the Senate floor to do more to facilitate the interests of the US government, deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments, and handing the guidance of its censorship behavior over to the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO and Gulf states? How "private" is that? Facebook is a deeply government-entrenched corporation, and Facebook censorship is just what government censorship looks like in a corporatist system of government.

They're being very holistic in their approach to these numbers:
https://sustainability.fb.com/...

Their carbon footprint calculation includes corporate travel, employee commuting, and building construction.

It is, at least if what Google censored is similar to what Facebook censored, which has more integrity than a lot of legitimate US media.

Facebook VP: "The Majority Of Russian Ad Spend Happened AFTER The Election" https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2...

"many of these ads did not violate our content policies. That means that for most of them, if they had been run by authentic individuals, anywhere, they could have remained on the platform."

Shouldn't you stop foreigners from meddling in US social issues?

The right to speak out on global issues that cross borders is an important principle. Organizations such as UNICEF, Oxfam or religious organizations depend on the ability to communicate - and advertise - their views in a wide range of countries. While we may not always agree with the positions of those who would speak on issues here, we believe in their right to do so - just as we believe in the right of Americans to express opinions on issues in other countries.

• the ads were non-political in nature, and didn't feature or favour a political candidate
• 56% of the ads were run AFTER the 2016 US federal election
• 25% of the ads were never displayed to anyone due to Facebook's algorithms not finding them relevant to trending interests
• only 25% of the ads were geographically-targeted
• Facebook is not sure that the ads were part of an organized campaign
• Facebook is not sure that the accounts the ads were purchased with are associated with each other
• Facebook is not certain that the ads were purchased by Russians
• many of the ads were not purchased using Russia's currency
• huge numbers of actual political ads are bought and run on Facebook from all countries around the world, and that is normal and OK
• the "overwhelming majority" of ad-space purchases from Russia by Russians are normal and not suspicious in any way

So, after all the investigations and debunked conspiracy theories, the strongest argument for alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US federal election is $100K of non-political or partisan Facebook ads - more than half of which ran after the election, and a quarter of which never ran at all.

Putting it into perspective: Total election spending: $2.4 billion. Total Clinton/Trump Facebook ad buys: $81 million.

And they are not the only ones, at this scale it is normal. Facebook worked with Intel to create teh Xeon-D processor (which is now available on the normal market as a SoC ITX board) https://code.fb.com/data-cente...

Side note: The Democrats ordered the media to cover Trump. Wikileaks confirms. It was part of their strategy to elect Hillary. Never forget this.

The really sad part is that the media obeyed of their own free will. It's one thing when they've got a gun to their heads, but this level of corruption? It's so harmful to our democracy that the free press has picked a side.

Facebook VP: "The Majority Of Russian Ad Spend Happened AFTER The Election" https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2...

"many of these ads did not violate our content policies. That means that for most of them, if they had been run by authentic individuals, anywhere, they could have remained on the platform."

• - the ads were non-political in nature, and didn't feature or favour a political candidate
• - 56% of the ads were run AFTER the 2016 US federal election
• - 25% of the ads were never displayed to anyone due to Facebook's algorithms not finding them relevant to trending interests
• - only 25% of the ads were geographically-targeted
• - Facebook is not sure that the ads were part of an organized campaign
• - Facebook is not sure that the accounts the ads were purchased with are associated with each other
• - Facebook is not certain that the ads were purchased by Russians
• - many of the ads were not purchased using Russia's currency
• - huge numbers of actual political ads are bought and run on Facebook from all countries around the world, and that is normal and OK
• - the "overwhelming majority" of ad-space purchases from Russia by Russians are normal and not suspicious in any way

So, after a year of investigations and debunked conspiracy / false claim after debunked conspiracy / false claim, the strongest argument for alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US federal election is $100K of non-political or partisan Facebook ads - more than half of which ran after the election, and a quarter of which never ran at all. That's telling.

The lawyer for one of the indicted companies told the court that the other indicted company didn't even exist during the time the "crimes" were committed. If you still think it's all "clear", (versus, you know, not entirely clear) then that's some motivated reasoning — which is what my original post talked about.

Yeah, I'm going to rely on Mueller's research a lot more than a claim made by a lawyer there. But the point is that they've been charged with a variety of specific crimes; that they haven't used a specific statute really doesn't say much, and I'm confused as to how you think it has nothing to do with the "Russian collusion story" when these are indictments of Russians about actions they took regarding the US election; and Mueller is definitely not the sort to play politics or games. He isn't going to make an indictment that he cannot backup. The indictment lays out in a fair bit of detail and is worth reading in its entirety. Moreover, it isn't like we only the Mueller information. And we have other data: For example, the adds which the IRA bought have been released https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/05/russian-ads-released-by-congress/ and that was by Congress, completely separate from Mueller's work.

Honestly, there may be people engaging in motivated reasoning when they decide that Trump somehow stole the election given the evidence we have. But one has to be about as irrational not to see this is pretty strong evidence that Russia tried to interfere. One can discuss the degree of success of that interference, but the fact that a Russian company with deep ties to the Russian government and oligarchs bought Facebook adds and ran twitter accounts on the 2016 election is pretty well established, and it would seem that it would take about as much motivated reasoning to think otherwise.

"many of these ads did not violate our content policies. That means that for most of them, if they had been run by authentic individuals, anywhere, they could have remained on the platform."

Shouldn't you stop foreigners from meddling in US social issues?

The right to speak out on global issues that cross borders is an important principle. Organizations such as UNICEF, Oxfam or religious organizations depend on the ability to communicate - and advertise - their views in a wide range of countries. While we may not always agree with the positions of those who would speak on issues here, we believe in their right to do so - just as we believe in the right of Americans to express opinions on issues in other countries.

- the ads were non-political in nature, and didn't feature or favour a political candidate
- 56% of the ads were run AFTER the 2016 US federal election
- 25% of the ads were never displayed to anyone due to Facebook's algorithms not finding them relevant to trending interests

So, after a year of investigations and debunked conspiracy / false claim after debunked conspiracy / false claim, the strongest argument for alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US federal election is $100K of non-political or partisan Facebook ads - more than half of which ran after the election, and a quarter of which never ran at all. That's telling.

Apparently the Russians were advocating for BLM. But now we're told that BLM is bad, because it causes racial division. And they sent the ads to people who don't like BLM, that is, the ones who actually need convincing.

It seems that literally anything is counted as evidence in favor of "collusion" any more. And we don't care about any other countries. So it's just fine if Comey pays 100k to British spies for dirt on Trump that contain 4chan piss fetish hoaxes. And it's totally fine if the Democrats sell our uranium to Russia. But if someone in Russia wants to encourage America to value the lives of black people, then even if they're unconnected to Trump, that's somehow treason?

The DNC literally rigged a national primary election to get the result they wanted.

Hillary Clinton took millions of dollars in foreign donations for her campaign.

Hillary's campaign colluded with multiple media outlets, telling which stories to run, when, and getting editorial control.

Obama administration was literally wiretapping Trump's campaign manager DURING the election.

But we go batshit crazy over $100k of facebook ads? Over half of which aired AFTER the election? Facebook VP: "The Majority Of Russian Ad Spend Happened AFTER The Election"

It's no secret that Facebook's various offenses and Zuckerberg's pretty damning responses to the blowback are troubling the Facebook eloi. One can only imagine how difficult it must be to concentrate on automating the liberal safe space they all dream of while navigating this ongoing shitstorm. They thought they were working on behalf of the most virtuous of all the virtue mongers in the Valley, but it turns out they're actually employed by a bunch of piratic shitheels.

Facebook VP: "The Majority Of Russian Ad Spend Happened AFTER The Election" https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2...

"many of these ads did not violate our content policies. That means that for most of them, if they had been run by authentic individuals, anywhere, they could have remained on the platform."

Shouldn't you stop foreigners from meddling in US social issues?

The right to speak out on global issues that cross borders is an important principle. Organizations such as UNICEF, Oxfam or religious organizations depend on the ability to communicate â" and advertise â" their views in a wide range of countries. While we may not always agree with the positions of those who would speak on issues here, we believe in their right to do so â" just as we believe in the right of Americans to express opinions on issues in other countries.

- the ads were non-political in nature, and didn't feature or favour a political candidate
- 56% of the ads were run AFTER the 2016 US federal election
- 25% of the ads were never displayed to anyone due to Facebook's algorithms not finding them relevant to trending interests
- only 25% of the ads were geographically-targeted
- Facebook is not sure that the ads were part of an organized campaign
- Facebook is not sure that the accounts the ads were purchased with are associated with each other
- Facebook is not certain that the ads were purchased by Russians
- many of the ads were not purchased using Russia's currency
- huge numbers of actual political ads are bought and run on Facebook from all countries around the world, and that is normal and OK
- the "overwhelming majority" of ad-space purchases from Russia by Russians are normal and not suspicious in any way

So, after a year of investigations and debunked conspiracy / false claim after debunked conspiracy / false claim, the strongest argument for alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US federal election is $100K of non-political or partisan Facebook ads - more than half of which ran after the election, and a quarter of which never ran at all. That's telling.

"There is no allegation in this indictment that any American had any knowledge."

"[There is] no allegation in the indictment of any effect on the outcome of the election."

-- Rod Rosenstein

Facebook VP: "The Majority Of Russian Ad Spend Happened AFTER The Election"

"many of these ads did not violate our content policies. That means that for most of them, if they had been run by authentic individuals, anywhere, they could have remained on the platform."

"Shouldn't you stop foreigners from meddling in US social issues?
The right to speak out on global issues that cross borders is an important principle. Organizations such as UNICEF, Oxfam or religious organizations depend on the ability to communicate â" and advertise â" their views in a wide range of countries. While we may not always agree with the positions of those who would speak on issues here, we believe in their right to do so â" just as we believe in the right of Americans to express opinions on issues in other countries."

come from an outfit called "The Internet Research Agency", which you can read about on Wikipedia.

TL;DR: The Internet Research Agency is a St. Petersburg based company which has among its customers the government of Russia. The company specializes in astroturfing -- not just in the US but in Russia as well. In Eastern Europe they're focused on Ukraine but in the US they post on both sides of issues (e.g. posting as socially conservative groups or as radical LGBT groups) in order to stir up division, e.g. posing as American Muslims or gays or as American evangelical Christians.

Most of the services people use regularly would not exist.

"Service"? Facebook, for example, is a surveillance platform. It exists to provide intelligence to advertisers. It exists to silo and isolate and mediate its user's experience of the web. It exists to treat you like cattle. It exists to extract profit from the control of attention. If Facebook dies, so what? Nothing of value will be lost. So called social media is bad for you, which is why Facebook is now launching its counter-narrative to try to convince you otherwise.

Mark Zuckerberg thinks web users are dumb fucks. Is he right?

Yes, I know Facebook fancies itself to be all things to all people and has incorporated a lot of functionality that has been around for ages in other systems. I personally wouldn't use the word "innovative" to describe that process.

The only thing on your list that possibly could have been innovative at the time Facebook adopted it is the 360-degree video, and that certainly doesn't appear to me to be the case. About 30 seconds of searching confirmed that YouTube introduced 360-degree video support in March 2015 while Facebook didn't introduce it until September 2015. So yeah, it appears it actually was Google.

Like... just as "representatives of Facebook" had to come out to the congressional investigation that they've "discovered" that they've sold "roughly 3,000 ads", from June of 2015 to May of 2017, for "approximately $100,000" to "about 470 inauthentic accounts and Pages" which were "affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia."...
 
...their "computer scientist at Facebook" found these ""collusion networks" run by spammers" (not Facebook mind you... not their fault) "producing as many as 100 million fake "likes" on the systems between 2015 and 2016"... in a scam "users are knowingly entering into... to falsely obtain "likes.""

Like... see... Facebook is totally NOT responsible for what other people do with their accounts.
And you can't even imply that Facebook was somehow... I don't know... being criminally negligent with its security.
Just look at how they "purged millions of fake accounts" and that whole 'nother "extensive Facebook scam involving fraudulent "likes" that Facebook said it had disrupted in April".

Surely it's just coincidence that there's a paper out on "collusion networks" of "spammers" and "users"...

A paper outlining the research was first posted Wednesday and will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Internet Measurement Conference in London in November. One of the authors is Nektarios Leontiadis, a threat research scientist at Facebook.

...the very same day Facebook comes out about knowingly selling adds to Russian troll factories trying to influence US elections...

Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators Wednesday that the social network has discovered that it sold ads during the U.S. presidential campaign to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company's findings.

How much longer before companies like Facebook and Twitter decide an election?

Somewhere between -1 and -9 years. I'm sure they've been deliberately influencing them for much longer. They both have programs that assist politicians in targeting ads and news to voters. Quick searches turn up open use of Facebook helping politicians. Google will help deliver their message too.

There's something bothering me about the article and Facebook's announcement --

It talks as if photographs and content are deleted forever, but it's carefully carved out the language in a way such that they never directly say that:
* "The Instagram community has shown us that it can be fun to share things that disappear after a day, so in the main Facebook app we’re also introducing Facebook Stories, ..."
* "Your friends can view photos or videos your story for 24 hours, and stories won’t appear..."
* ...We’ve also added Direct, an option that’s designed for sharing individual photos and videos with specific friends for a limited time."
* "When you send a photo or video via Direct, your friends will be able to view it once and replay it or write a reply. Once the conversation on the photo or video ends, the content is no longer visible in Direct."

"view ... for 24 hours," "...a limited time," "...view it once..," "...no longer visible..."

OK, but nowhere does it ever actually say DELETED.

Given that there is likely going to be sexual and personally sensitive (black-mail?) content here, isn't this a big deal?

Uh, you don't understand the value of LinkedIn to an enterprise focused company?

No, i really don't. Twitter is a purely consumer product - what use would tweets have within a company?

Crossing the line from consumer to enterprise is not easy, even when you're not Twitter. Facebook is, IMHO, making the same mistake with Workplace in world where Slack and Hangouts/gDocs already exist.

I immediately wanted to install this to replace the behemoth that is the real Messenger; after diving through the various links (because why would you bother to link the source?), I found this:

Messenger Lite is starting to roll out to people in Kenya, Tunisia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Venezuela. Look for Messenger Lite in other countries in the coming months.

So I suspect it might not come to "western" regions; I've seen this before with some of the 'basic' versions of apps.

FWIW I have a Nexus 4, maybe 3 years old, which now feels like a cheap, basic smartphone. Most of those big fat apps like FB Messenger run like an absolute dog. I am not sure why; I think it's a combination of the IO speed of the disk starting to suck plus the fact that I have full encryption on (IIRC the Nexus 5+ series have dedicated hardware that deals more gracefully with full encryption on the device).

Facebook's latest diversity stats: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/20...

The are doing well in some areas but poorly in others. Apple is fairly similar, with minorities in particular being over-represented in the low paying, low skill retail jobs and underrepresented in the more desirable skilled jobs.

And before you say it, the solution isn't to fire them and hire more white guys at retail. We are trying to make things better, not worse. The solution is to increase opportunities for the better jobs, which will also allow the balance at retail to correct over time too.

Well, in that case, they can use these neat little things. To find *exactly* where you are.

The actual statement from Facebook continued on beyond the single sentence quoted in the summary: "We only access your microphone if you have given our app permission and if you are actively using a specific feature that requires audio. This might include recording a video or using an optional feature we introduced two years ago to include music or other audio in your status updates."

Picking up on the "hovering" in the summary "Now memorialized accounts will have the word 'Remembering' hovering above a person's name", I was going to ask a sarcastic question along the lines of whether there would also be a "tasteful" angel's wings icon alongside the "hovering" text.

But looking at the linked facebook page" all I see on the example is "Remembering" placed above the person's name. No apparent "hovering".

The words actually used by Facebook are "We’ve also redesigned memorialized profiles to pay tribute to the deceased by adding “Remembering” above their name", so why does the summary use "hovering", which seems just wrong?

The other missing context is the actual proportion of white people at Facebook. Considering that the proportion in the general population is 64%, perhaps this "lily white" (Valleywag's words) company is 80% white? 90%? No, in fact just 53% of tech employees are white - you can check for yourself. The actual overrepresented group is asians, who make up a whopping 41% of Facebook's tech employees - more than 8 times higher than the proportion of the overall US population.

What I said in my previous post is verified in Facebook's actual press release. If you watch the video, this is what the guy says:

You can make adjustments to the types of ads you see. To tell us how you feel about an ad, just click the top right corner of the ad, and click or tap on "Why am I seeing this ad?" From there you can learn more about the ad and update your preferences. The number of ads you see won't change, but because we'll know more about what you like, they'll be more relevant.

That's the whole point of this. It isn't mainly for people to opt-out of targeted advertising. It's Facebook asking you to help them in targeting their ads better.

You seem to have a strange divergence from reality.

The deal is four billion dollars cash, the rest in stock. Facebook's net income for 2013 was $1.5 billion. The deal ate up 35% of Facebook's cash on hand, so there's not necessarily any debt here to make up, and all things being held constant, my math would have them in the green again within three years.

I don't think that Facebook has any more chance of long-term success than those people silly enough to sell operating systems, but at the moment they're both pretty good rackets. This is a heavy investment for Facebook, but they're not an untalented bunch; they have by necessity made a very fast pig out of a PHP application, and they have (apparently) a lot of money to throw at a new market. Can anyone really say that this makes less sense than whatever chunk of Google's $6.8B R&D budget is going to autonomous vehicles and Glass?

Besides, you're giving Zuckerberg & co. far too much credit for long-term thinking.

According to this, there's 680 million logins per day.
I couldn't find an official Facebook word on it, and the latest estimates are from last August, but they say a magnitude lower, 180k. I highly doubt that within 7 months there would be a 10 fold increase in server numbers.

So going by these numbers, there's 680.000k/180k = 3778 user/server/day. For a web server, this is pretty good number, as I can imagine, serving 3778 users is a sort of continuous thing, unlike many other websites. Notifications are polled pretty frequently, and as you scroll requests are made constantly to the servers.

I don't like Facebook, and I think this is a waste of energy and space for storing cat videos and sex-quizzes but the numbers in this case do add up.

I won't be satisfied until SURGE returns. http://fb.com/surgemovement has something like 14k members now, and a billboard outside the Coca-Cola HQ...here's hoping Coke listens and at least does a throwback.

I'm sure they know what they're doing. But I do find it interesting that this foxconn plant will employ ten times as many people as all of facebook.com (with 3500 employees). The idea that there could ever be enough "knowledge worker" jobs to replace what manufacturing used to be just doesn't hold up.

Millions? How big do you think facebook is exactly? Even Safeway does not have millions of employees. Kroger? no. Amazon? no. Exxon Mobile? No. News Corp? No.

Facebook has 3500 employees.
http://newsroom.fb.com/content/default.aspx?NewsAreaId=22

Walmart, McDonalds, and the Department of Defense are the ONLY american employers with more than 1 million employees.

Facebook is MORE efficient than Craigslist. Craigslist has 28 employees serving 1 billion pages/month.

Facebook has 3500 employees serving 1 trillion pages/month

Craigslist: 35.7 million pages/employee
Facebook: 285.7 million pages/employee

So how does that contradict my point? Huge websites are not free or cheap.

I find Saverin's move distasteful, certainly, but I can't solely blame him for exploiting loopholes in tax law - the IRS & Congress must share a good portion of the blame for *creating* and *leaving* those loopholes in the tax laws. Water will seek the path of least resistance. Tax payers will seek the path of least taxes. There should be nothing surprising about this - if you LET them pay low taxes, why should they pay more? Change your tax laws, don't criticize people for (legally) minimizing their tax bills.

And out of curiosity - what, exactly, is "parasitic" about taking part in the creation of a company that provides a comfortable middle class salary for 3,500+ employees, a large proportion of whom are probably making *upper middle class* salaries? Not to mention the application developers for Facebook who also are making some non-trivial amount of money building off of Facebook as a platform?

If I built something that created that many jobs, I'd expect a reward, not criticism.

I can understand you hatin' on Facebook but what have you got against The American Farm Bureau Federation?

Why not - Aren't they the FarmVille people?

Integration would be great though as I'd never have to go to FB.com again.

I can understand you hatin' on Facebook but what have you got against The American Farm Bureau Federation?

Milk is not very common or popular in China, and the government there has been making a big push to get the people drinking it for health reasons. But they also had to set up a special hotline to handle all the cases of lactose intolerant people drinking it for the first time. And that'd be most of them.

http://www.fb.com/issues/analysis/China_Briefing_I ssue19.pdf

I read the original Wall Street Journal article referenced, but don't have reg at wsj.com so can't link to it. It was quite interesting.

This is just a plan to let President Bush take care of all those PETA wackos. You see, by making oil from turkeys, he'll surely upset any self-righteous PETA member. They'll boycott the new oil and continue to use oil from the middle East, and consequently they'll be supporting terrorism.

PETA is already known to support domestic terrorist groups...there's really no need to work in a Middle East angle when dealing with them.

Looks like it was presented at the Watershed Heroes Field Training Workshop and Conference in Amana, Iowa in April of 2001 also.

http://www.fb.com/programs/waterheroes/2001/upda te 2-2001.pdf