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Facebook Engineering Tool Mimics Dodgy Network Connectivity
itwbennett writes: Facebook has released an open source application called Augmented Traffic Control that can simulate the connectivity of a cell phone accessing an app over a 2G, Edge, 3G, or LTE network. It can also simulate weak and erratic WiFi connections. The simulations can give engineers an estimate of how long it would take a user to download a file, for instance, given varying network connections. It can help engineers re-create problems that crop up only on very slow networks.
Which mimics massive and creepy privacy invasion - for profit.
Requiem for the American Dream
So they reinvented what was already available and much more flexible with ipfw/dummynet?
Just try it out using Comcast/Time Warner/AT&T/Verizon internet access! Pick your provider... They all suck.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Where I come from, we don't need to SIMULATE such connections................
How is this news? This is a feature of the Linux tc program/package.
Web pages have always been a bit unreliable technology. Who doesn't occasionally meet a page that is almost loaded, but hangs there waiting for one element to be downloaded? At I meet a few times a week a page that gets "stuck". Then you refresh the page and it's fine. Why does this problem still exist? Can't the browser at least quickly try reloading that element?
Imagine if desktop GUI apps were like that. That some GUI element would just randomly not show up. That would be unacceptable.
Big profits for circumventing shitty Great Firewall.
For OSX, Apple provides a superb tool for simulating "bad" networks -- slow, dropped packets, high latency, or all the above -- called Network Link Conditioner
more info at --> http://nshipster.com/network-l...
Linux has had this ability for ages.
i routinely test sites over a dial-up connection. That reveals all sorts of issues.
... Comcast as their beta carrier.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
There's already a tool for this, with a funny name: https://github.com/tylertreat/...
Nice work, Facebook. NIH assholes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
GenyMotion (Android simulator) has this built-in, as does the iOS simulator. This could be done on an open-source router, as well, instead of using a computer behind the router. And, ironically - doesn't Facebook have some powerful Cisco routers that probably have this sort of thing built-in (or optional?)
at least in Internet years. we don't need one more that lays advertisements and not-friends on top of the test data.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This is what's aktually quite amazing about Facebook. They may actually building a stupidly trivial think as a commercial web-centric service, but the effort they put into making their service available for their billions of users around the planet is quite amazing. For instance, most useres actually access FB over a feature phone and not a modern smartphone. In fact, the interfaces and apps for FB most people use are from around 2005. There's a huge effort that goes into UX and testing for 2nd-world and emerging markets, and this is actually where the magic happens - or has to happen - for companies like Facebook.
And that means what, exactly?
Salary has no direct link with competence or usefulness.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I've used netem a lot in the past: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/netem
It's trivial to use, the linked page has all the examples you can just cut and paste to get all common scenarios covered:
- adding massive and/or random lag
- reordering packets, or queuing and sending in bunches
- packet loss
- even packet corruption (even though I wouldn't call that common, but Facebook's tool has that too)
The difference? Netem is available in every Linux system you've used in the last 15 years. This tool's install instructions are longer than the code and it needs at least 3 frameworks I haven't heard of before reading their readme.md. Wow!
I just gave up and filed a bug: https://github.com/facebook/au...
All they needed to do was buy a Sprint phone...
http://wanem.sourceforge.net/
f u cn rd ths, u r prbbly a lsy spllr.
The play store is unusable with an erratic connection. Goes to blank screens if you're trying to open a link to an app from an external source, jumps back to unrelated screens if a problem happens when you're trying to access an apps page, has non-fucking-modal popups that you have to access in your notifications before you can continue using the app if there's a problem during download...ffs.
The *only* app that i've seen handle crappy connections is iheart radio. It'll actually sit there and retry as the buffer depletes, and seamlessly continue. Most others seem to range from strange behavior to crash.
Why explain anything? Anyone worth my time has my phone number and/or email. The only response required to queries about me and facebook can be "phone me" or "email me" or "text me".
If anything, using facebook is more trouble than picking up a phone or tapping out an email or sms, and NSA dragnets notwithstanding less intrusive as well. So after signing up years ago and getting poked and having sheep thrown at me for a couple months my account has been virtually dormant since.