WhatsApp delays privacy changes following backlash
p.dw.com
p.dw.com
(1) claims that Facebook promised Whatsapp would not be monetised, and that Facebook and and Whatsapp's data would not be combined. This information was also provided to European antitrust regulators
(2) missed out on $850 stock option grants vesting by quitting early over disputes with Facebook about monetisation strategy involving advertising
(3) promoted #deletefacebook on Whatsapp following the Cambridge Anlalytica scandal
(4) Donated $50m to the non-for-profit alternative, Signal.
2068 is in 47 years. A long way away, yes, but still a big difference.
To the recipient.. I don't know why you'd prefer it to a (stipulation-free) donation, but in general it's probably easier to get big loans than big donations.
With inflation $100M will probably buy an ice pop in 50 years.
If I had oodles of money I'd probably do this, "I'm just giving you this money now, but if you got bought up by someone without those same ideals they need to pay up.”
Given it’s the former WhatsApp CEO even more reason to be skeptical.
The acquisition cost of WhatsApp is sunk at this point—the only thing left is to wring as much money out of it as possible.
FB never charged for whatsapp for a good reason.
No, they wouldn't. This thinking is what has lead the world where it is.
Say you have 2 billion (10^9) users paying $1 per year. You follow inflation. That's 2 billion a year. That covers a lot of workforce, and a lot of servers.
This idea of infinite growth boggles me - how can people with math background insist on such impossible thought?
BTW, they had just 50 engineers when FB bought them with 450M users (+1M/day) and they supported more devices back then. Just with those costs and the network effect, keeping the subscription model would have meant a solid source of honest revenue.
5% of that is 50 million.
Unfortunately, the world turned towards 1) freemium, and 2) 'consumer as a product', and it will not be easy to roll back the free chat. But I think it is possible. Make signal survive for 2 years based on donations, or this 1 buck a year/month, and we may be able to have a long term alternative to whatsapp.
I'm unable to find the exact quote but soon after the WhatsApp acquisition, when the $1 fee was waived there was a message that went along the lines of "imagine how much more money WhatsApp could make". If someone has it, please send a link.
For Christ's sake NO!
..
"In 2014, Koum and Brian Acton agreed to sell WhatsApp to Facebook for approximately US$19 billion in cash and stock.[9] Forbes estimates that Acton held over 20% stake in the company, making his net worth around $3.8 billion.[12] According to Acton's personal Twitter feed, he was turned down for employment by both Twitter and Facebook in 2009."
3.8B in 5 years of work? It's scarcely conceivable to me after 20 years of salaried grind. These people are well-connected (fine), but they're also geniuses at spotting opportunities.
http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2...
Also, I got interested in Elixir/Phoenix after I learned about what WhatsApp accomplished.
I'm a bit surprised people are downvoting a technical point on HN but whatever.
1. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FB/history?p=FB
2. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SIGL/history?p=SIGL
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25770464 <-- Suggested reading before replying ;)
Signal, the app (https://signal.org/en/), is a 501c3 nonprofit.
Even more given WhatsApp history of being a very efficient company, supporting hundreds of millions of users with 50 engineers.
Either ways, my WhatsApp was deleted yesterday, FB early last year...
Now I just need to wean off of Google...
That sounds tough.
Too bad google can't just change back to how they were in the beginning. At least just actually hold their old motto above greed and money every now and then.
The only thing I can't figure out is how to get off google calendar.
Actually I'm quite ok paying for this app...I like to support developers, especially if an app is open source. But, my annoyance is less about paying for an app, and more about google's calendar - which is forced upon an android user - not playing nice with caldav...And forces a person to sidestep things.
I was a really big fan when android first came out, thinking i would have plenty of freedom (or at least a reasonable amount of freedom) of bending my phone's OS - at least when compared to Apple's ios very restrictive approach...Wow, how things have changed! I feel like android is too locked down. Ok, some might think that ios is still more restrictive...But, to me, both ios and android are tech prisons just different colors of paint on the wall. I say that last statement with my fingers crossed and praying for pinePhone and other linux-y type phones to really make it mainstream!
Mine was the move from Chrome/Firefox back to Opera.
I'm still puzzled what happened to Firefox. I was using the Developer Edition and the last two years the performance is really suspect. I don't have a million tabs open, don't have a ton of add-ons running and it still lags horribly, crashes and new tabs take forever to open
I thought at first it was either my network connection or maybe a system issue. Switched to Opera and was like, "Nah man, it was definitely the browser."
I'm in the same book with my calendar. I have multiple calendars several family members share. I tried using outlook.com calendars and although I prefer their UI, it wouldn't import Google calendars.
If you have any recommendations, I'm all ears. Its the last thing I need to rid myself of Google.
I'm finding Gmail to be most difficult to transition off of. I do have personal domain and use Zoho with it, but I think there is this mental block.. It will happen..
Edit:
I am also using my personal domain instead of @fastmail.com You never know when / if you need to leave a service provider again, and you don‘t want to change your email address again.
I would gladly pay a subscription fee if it means Google isn't reading my emails to sell me ads.
Their service is excellent. You get answers from real human beings within 24 hours (unlike trying to get help for Gmail; won‘t work).
What I would like is a hardened, privacy focused distro of Android that is guaranteed to be independent from Google. Sounds like a tall order but here's hoping Samsung will come up with their own mobile OS although how unlikely this will be.
Samsung have not demonstrated being any more user friendly than google in my opinion. My S6Edge ran out of OS updates about 3 years after if was released. I have iPhones several years older that are still getting updated to the latest iOS. And there’s a whole bunch of crap undeletable Samsung software on their devices that I trust even less that Google’s apps.
Current strategy is to only have a burner google account on the phone and rotate gmail accounts every year (on phone refresh). Keep personal google accounts off the phone (using linux desktop) with a vpn and in firefox with privacy settings.
Use containers on the browser - never mix google, whatsapp facebook and other activities.
Use a phone registered in EU for privacy settings. Use a paid burner gmail account (again I figure it is better for privacy).
Annoyingly I also need an iphone for i-message with family members.
One time my friend was driving and he asked me to navigate. The exit was coming up, meanwhile I'm stuck trying to get OSM+ to understand what rounte we are on. That was an unpleasant few minutes. Despite trying to stick with it, such moments kept coming up again and again. It made me realise that Maps is mission critical to me.
By contrast, Gmail was easy. Fastmail ftw, forward all google mail to it, and the fact that most of my email use is work email, which is on its own domain anyway.
What makes it so difficult?
Between Android or iOS, I don't see iOS as being much better. At least I can still side-load applications in Android if it gets banned by the censors.
Google Search -> DDG -- Done
Android -> iOS -- Done
Gmail -> Personal domain email (pending, work started)
TV OS from Android -> Dumb TV (very hard)
YouTube -> ? (limited use, very hard)
Google Classroom (for kids) -> ? (very hard)
Google Maps (noted by helmholtz below ) -> ? (very hard)
...
This is just going out of the frying pan and into the fryer. (I assume you mean stock/Google powered Android here.) Replacing one user-hostile walled garden with another user-hostile walled garden is hardly an improvement.
I'd suggest Google Android -> Open-source Android ROM, though I know it can cause issues with some banking apps, annoyingly.
In end, as I said above, it's about reducing the footprint. Eliminating Google is a very difficult undertaking which I'm not really sure is even possible..
1) I find the use of the BlackBerry hub to really help with decreasing the intermittent reward that having to switch between applications to see your messages gives. 2) It is refreshing to use a device that is more purely focused on its intended purpose. (Communication) 3) I can still sideload most Android APKs if necessary.
Some out of the box thinking is in order here. Duringe the initial lockdown, I signed up to pay for Coursera's courses. I found out that what I craved wasn't shirking from work, but rather distraction. It didn't matter that I had to do some homework for the courses. Since I was _watching_ something, my brain thought of it as the same thing.
But I should note that you haven't addressed the biggest bugbear of mine either, Google maps. It's light-years ahead of everything else, and just does not get replaced easily.
Yes, I had missed Google maps. I agree it's indeed light-years ahead of others.
In end it's about reducing Google footprint, elimination is extremely hard.
Indeed. Making peace with this fact has helped me a lot. I don't actually pay Google with anything other than my attention. All of my entertainment is via a uMatrix/uBlockOrigin protected Firefox, so things could be worse.
I prefer Librem 5 or Pinephone instead, not to switch walled gardens.
> YouTube
PeerTube (very hard, but promising)
> Google Maps
> ...
I have a dumb tv from 2006 that we still use and we are happy with but it works because we also use a roku. An old roku.
At some point however not sure how but my roku updated and im pretty sure its monitoring all my stuff (mostly yt)
Ive read about router hacks etc to dumb down the roku and prevent it from calling home but it seems super hard. I was barely able to use my own domain with proton.
Neutering roku seems like mission impossible for a non sysadmin. Is there a simple solution to this with or without roku?
(Described in my last comment if anyone knows the source)
Seemed like every attempt to better describe it as a query took me further from what I was looking for.
Results were all (from my perspective) SEO hijacking, clearly having nothing to do with my search. And that was behind the wall of advertisements and their own google cards of noise they plug up front. Going to the next page of results was surprisingly difficult.
First time I’ve considered, maybe this is the wrong tool for traversing the memory palace of one’s interactions with the internet.
I think the era of "free stuff for your data" is over. People have witnessed the true cost of a zero barrier social network services which is the division of society and people creating their own realities and clashing with others (ex. flat earthers, trump etc.)
Going forward I expect lot of these decentralized, run-by-donations services to trend upwards. We will still have FB, Google, and the likes but as they lose users their pervasiveness will have to increase to compensate for the loss in users.
This is good. This is what blockchain should've been but couldn't.
https://www.ghacks.net/2020/04/08/how-to-restore-the-old-fir...
I don’t think it is, but I share your optimism that perhaps people are starting to realise and understand the real cost of “free stuff” from advertising companies.
The hardest replacement for me is Maps. Their search and traffic data always work for me. They have a webapp and mobile app that are excellent. I could do without the ads but recognize it's the tradeoff for using their app. Nothing I've tried gets close to a replacement. (I've heard good things about Apple Maps on iOS, but I have an android phone)
Using Google some of the time is better that using it all of the time.
DGG has been my default search engine for years now, and like you, I occasionally need to add !g to get the answer I’m looking for. I’m fine with that. I hope DGG uses those failed search followed by a !g search to improve their stuff. (In a privacy preserving way)
Because it would not make sense otherwise, considering how much it must cost them to run something like WhatsApp with millions of users and not get anything in return.
I mean, what's the point of all the data they have from me plus the armies of well paid ML engineers they have on their payroll, when if I order a laptop from Amazon, I'll get bombarded with ads for laptops for the next month. Do advertisers imagine I go through laptops like toilet rolls or something? If this is peak ML, then those who fear an AI uprising can sleep soundly.
They target something like "people interested in computer hardware" and they get them, including those who don't need a laptop. It's bad but must be somewhat better than completely non-targeted ads, as it excludes people who have never expressed any interest (so, while having false positives at least it tries to save on false negatives). And, of course, there is opportunity for Facebook to tell how their superior ad platform is smarter than last year.
The rest (but maybe even more important than actual value advertisers are getting) is advertising of advertising - all those stories how this machine learning agile blockchain big data is our only future. And many people just believe it, and non-ironically talk how Facebook is that omniscient deus ex machina that knows us better than we do ourselves. As this meme lives, those who have a product to advertise are inclined to believe it as well (and this makes them spend money on Facebook Ads).
So, in the end, the fact you're getting ads you're not interested in is less relevant and is kind of shadowed over by the fact advertisers get somewhat better value or maybe even just believe they do.
There are shouts that the king is naked and memes that modern machine learning has two objectives: classifying data and making predictions^W^W^W^W^W bullshitting investors and raising money... but so far, such voices are in minority.
Is there another channel that will accept the money of a small business and provide the same results? Even with a compelling event we don’t have the relationships or budget to achieve the same effect through other channels.
If I had the money I would definitely have both.
Bought a Mac recently? How about a new case? Or some discounted software or games? Or how about a new mouse?
Bought a house recently? How about some gardening services? Or some home insurance?
I'm not convinced that if you went and did an actual scientific study on the efficacy of "big data" teams and ad-targeting and went through every business it would do any better than just regular boring contextual ads.
The lie is telling users that targeted ads are good for them
The ML experts in my company keep telling me maintaining these regexps is too costly dev wise, and that they can use ML to adapt to changes in the real world, and get a better result faster.
After nearly a year of work, buying some fancy new computers with giant GPUs, and countless meetings to describe the problem space, they have something that's around 60-70% as accurate as the current state of the art, and say they're close to closing the gap.
Meanwhile I add a new regexp or tweak an existing one and cause them to go back to the drawing board because I've "changed the entire problem description".
Sometimes I feel like I want the job where the only criteria is that I'm using the fancy new toys. It seems like more fun.
Not believe there is totalitarian is the greatest myth one can have in today workd.
"I've got nothing to hide"
YouTube knows my UI is in English, and I've never watched a Cantonese video, and yet it constantly shows me ads in Cantonese. There are a lot of people in Hong Kong who don't speak Cantonese, or at least who are more fluent in English than Cantonese.
I'd be very curious to know. I don't remember specifics, but they were running a shockingly low number of servers early on in large part because WhatsApp is built on top of Erlang/OTP.
Or justify the costs of buying it. Supposedly the infrastructure and tech-stack is pretty lean.
Is it though? What's the actual benefit for WhatsApp?
All that said, Signal is making steady progress, and I've had zero resistance getting people to use it. Got 12 people on it this past week. Starting a few group threads helped it stick.
Edit: and signal is down...
They used to charge about $1/yr before acquisition and had over 500mm users. And I think they had fewer than 30 employees.
So they were bringing in about $500mm/yr and their infrastructure costs were unlikely to have been in the 100s of millions.
Edit: Bought a piece of software [1] that perfectly exported five years of messages out of my cellphone, then I didn’t hesitate one day to delete my WhatsApp accout. I felt an incredible relief abandoning the last service I used from Facebook.
[1]: „Backuptrans iPhone WhatsApp Transfer for Mac“
The most wonderful thing about WhatsApp was that everyone you knew was there.
Which specifically? I've finally succeeded in showing them the light regarding Signal.
The only usable alternatives that come to mind is Gab for Twitter (or Mastodon but that'd be a stretch for most of them). With respect to Facebook and Instagram, I don't see a clear path to a seamless switch as with Whatsapp and Signal.
It doesn't matter what they say now; Whatsapp needs to be crushed pour encourager les autres.
However, I do think the incentives internally probably were structured in a way to encourage this change, and I doubt anyone is being seen as being "more successful" due to a rollback.
You're right. They're going to pay themselves the bonus regardless of this debacle.
Here's an article from Harvard Law Review about a lawsuit over this - you might be interested in the paragraphs in the "Shareholder Waivers" section: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/09/18/setting-directors...
Some quotes: waive a shareholder’s right to sue the directors for violating their duty of loyalty regarding setting their own pay and For directors setting their own pay, the ruling suggested that a blanket waiver etc.
Disclosure: I work at FB but unrelated to WhatsApp
I think a lot of horses have bolted, but I'm sure there will be plently left once the gate is shut.
We were told nothing would change.
Oh wait, the time of last login will be shared with facebook family of companies? Despite this blog post showing no sharing icons at all - they ARE sharing and now lying about it by not showing a single icon to reflect this sharing.
Oh wait, we need your phone number for 2FA? Sure. Bam - now you've given us permission to spam you! They lied about that.
Check out signal and get away from the lies. This blog post is such a good example of it, all the things not showing as not shared are probably SHARED! So despite EVERY icon saying nothing is shared, they no doubt are pumping your phone number over to Facebook family of companies.
They are trying to do the fake apple privacy label thing - but only including non-sharing labels, not the sharing labels.
Totally disgusting. I'm signing up to signal today and pushing hard for my network to switch.
Now if only signal used go or something lighter weight instead of a monster java stack they could probably scale a lot better.
Wouldn't it be better to just say: "WhatsApp does not share your contacts." or even better "WhatsApp doesn't store any of your contacts especially the ones who doesn't even use WhatsApp"?
My user experience on Signal has been excellent so far, family switched without difficulty.
Amazing what some internal koolaid can do to you (well more than this,it's really probably greed). Please rethink critically the ethics of your employer.
A Facebook employee making claims about privacy or ethics makes me immediately suspicious of those claims.
The point is, this happened to be a watershed moment. Whether the conditions (mining metadata) were met years ago or in a week or two from now is irrelevant.
Why is "personal" present in that sentence?
EDIT
Finally, here's the real reason for the changes:
> "While not everyone shops with a business on WhatsApp today, we think that more people will choose to do so in the future and it’s important people are aware of these services."
My wife recently started to complain about the new instagram UI and that there are shops _everywhere_, and that the UI has reorganised buttons so people will find themselves at shops if they follow muscle memory.
Apparently that's the future of WhatsApp.
Is that written down anywhere?
And the following link https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/end-to...
While back then, there was not enough outcry and momentum to switch people over to Signal, now, with Facebook being seen more negatively even by laypeople, there seems to be enough momentum and I've gotten most people switched over. Hopefully, this will make it easier for their friends to switch too. So if you were unable to switch a few years ago, try again! People may be easier to convince than you thought.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/whatsapp-facebook-data-share-not...
It's mostly "sorry that you don't understand how things work". I've seen this before with these privacy-invading megacorps. They're tone deaf and defensive. Maybe they're worried that people are catching on and the tides are shifting.
[1] https://blog.whatsapp.com/giving-more-time-for-our-recent-up...
The new privacy policy just reformatted how data is shared with facebook from the "Affiliated Companies" section to a new section "How We Work With Other Facebook Companies", but the only real change is, like the bullet point says, an added sentence about how data might be shared to integrate whatsapp into other facebook products, and it's clearly "integrate" in the functional sense.
Similar to facebook messenger recently adding instagram messaging, they're probably planning to add whastapp messenging too. I imagine this change isn't in the EU privacy policy just because just like the integram change, more product integration there is held up by antitrust action.
Notably, facebook using whatsapp data for ad targeting has been allowed by the privacy policy since 2016
I say “manipulative and evil”.
I would actually prefer it these changes weren't delayed since it will also delay the eventual user exodus to Signal / Telegram.
Umm, no. I use both WhatsApp and Signal (way before this hysteria began) but the "just leave" mentality isn't realistic. Most people don't care about this stuff enough to install a new app and start using it. Even for people who will join it, it takes time. The network effect is still there.
Being on HN too much and/or having social circles full of people who think like you misleads people.
Oh, but it is. You just need to accept a drop in your social circle.
Saying "i'm on signal" could be totally considered normal in just a few weeks from now.
"It's not how the world works". Of course it is. Most people downloaded WhatsApp because someone told them to so they could message each other.
You essentially have a personal disagreement with the practices of a specific company and want to inconvenience others who might not think the same way. It's arguably a selfish perspective, family members may be willing to bend to those demands for an individual. But to expect businesses to indulge every single individual preferences for how they wish to be contacted is impractical.
Problem solved.
Everything happens in WhatsApp here. Just moved to a new building and they added me to a whatsapp group for announcements / requests etc. Also, movers, utility people etc would call and ask for a “location”. Not an address. A “location”, meaning sharing a location via whatsapp. Noone even mentions the name whatsapp. It is implied.
If you have children, most schools have whatsapp groups for parents and teachers to get in contact.
I mean I can find much more. Not having WhatsApp is not an option here. It is almost like not having a cell phone.
If the former, my complete sympathies. Carrying around this low-level resentment about an app all while having to use it isn't great.
But if it's the latter, then the solution is obvious. Delete the app and then let the chips fall where they may. I guarantee there is a grumpy 60 year old in your life who just never ditched his Nokia and "it works for him". It's clear that you can't have it both ways.
I make this comment because too often on the internet people will comment on a self-help article, or someone sharing their success story, or a piece of advice with "Yeah, but it doesn't work for me because..."
Well, great? Sorry to hear that? This topic, then, is not for you? Carry on and good luck? It's just too many people expect universal solutions that MUST work EVERYWHERE without exceptions.
Your message seems to boil down to asking people to "get on board or get left behind", and that otherwise they just should delete the app, shut up, and stop complaining.
That may be possible for you, but it isn't for every person, even if they wished it was. "Just don't use it" isn't enough, and I say this as someone who hasn't had Facebook or WhatsApp in over 5 years. That I can go without them is a luxury many don't have.
Lastly, people being outspoken about technology not working for them has led to countless improvements and innovations, often with benefits to the entire population (<curb-cuts-cliche/>). Telling people not to express their criticism and complaints helps nobody.
I have serious doubts that idle complaining on the internet moves the needle too much. What works instead is voting with feet/dollars. In this instance, it's the mass of people who actually HAVE jumped ship that are causing whatsapp to pause, not the ones saying they can't quit, however justified their reasoning.
So I both agree and disagree. On one hand, yes, one person voting with feet/dollars has a relatively large impact compared to one person raising a complaint. But if we look at the entire ecology of users, the story is different.
Many of the people who end up voting with their feet do so after being exposed to people raising complaints. And on the flip side, people who see their friends voting with their feet may then seek out the explanations and complaints leading to that action.
Just uninstalling an app is very low information density as a signal. It doesn't provide any reason why, it's just a single bit. It's value is more as an action rather than a statement.
I think the ideal is somewhere in between, and we need both concrete action (voting with your feet) as well as public discourse (raising complaints). The former without the latter is inscrutable, the latter without the former is toothless.
Maybe you are a person that isn't bothered in the slightest when other people have built their opinions based on a faulty understanding of the situation. I wish I was, it must be very peaceful.
Later on, I signed up to Facebook again (for all the wrong reasons), and not much changed in that communication was mostly off Facebook because that's what my acquaintances and I had established.
I got rid of Facebook again not long after. Then a few years ago I moved into a new property where, just like you, the first thing they asked me is if I had Facebook so I can be added to building's group. I politely told them I do not, and what do you know, the landlord was still able to keep us up to date with announcements and everything else.
I'm sure my situations isn't the same as yours, and I do believe that you're in a worse situation than I was in that sense. Certainly, I don't disagree that it's hard to leave a service when everyone else is on it.
However, something has to give.
Your utility provider will find a way to tell you that you owe them money. The movers will find a way to talk to you to get his business. When they ask for a location, and you send the address instead anyway, they'll copy and paste it.
Maybe I have an oversimplified view of the world, because quite frankly, here in the UK, there is a lot of convenience and professionalism.
Regardless, I've messed up a lot when it comes to privacy in the past, and I'd rather not continue those same mistakes. I've come to learn to value my privacy, and I encourage everyone around me to value theirs, so I lead by example. I implore you to do the same, because your privacy is important. It'll be hard, but it'll be worth it.
For instance I am part of a volunteer organisation, that amongst other things runs some Covid-19 vaccination centers. At a local level this is organised through a WhatsApp group with about 50 members. For now, I am nothing special in this organisation, no-one with special skills that would be called upon to do particular tasks, just a worker drone.
If I left the WhatsApp group, the only result is that I would never hear about anything that was going on ever again. I would effectively be leaving the organisation too.
It does suggest the authorities do have access to WhatsApp chats in some manner, at least.
Durov has publicly stated that the FBI offered bribes multiple times to insert a backdoor into Telegram.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...
And that would be so good because I could be convinced to really uninstall whatsaap
Did you just provide the counterargument to your own argument?
If they backpaddled is likely because there was enough of a negative reaction to raise concern.
I believe it's more likely they are trying to figure out how to announce the next deadline more quietly without breaking too many laws.
A partial exodus doesn't work. With this delay, maybe half of the people who were going to switch won't end up switching.
By boiling the frog slowly, they make sure that a mass exodus never happens, only partial exoduses that end up dying and tiring people out.
I'm not sure. Bad publicity has a critical point after which people leave and move to other services. When people who weren't concerned about privacy before began to have conversations about whether Telegram or Signal is a better replacement to WhatsApp, Facebook realized that they have pushed it too far this time. They're much better served if people think "Oh WhatsApp is owned by a shady company but everyone I know uses it so I need to use it to".
Servers and infrastructure cost money. People's time costs money. You need enough donations for it. If you don't, you have to strategize to get more.
The key distinction being that loan will need to be repaid.
> The initial $50M in funding was a loan, not a donation, from Brian Acton to the new nonprofit Signal Technology Foundation. By the end of 2018, the loan had increased to $105,000,400, which is due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and at 0% interest.[5]
* To elect a female president, there would first have to be a male POC president
* The president immediately after the first POC president would be the whitest, loudest man they could find.
The only thing wrong about the second prediction is that we got the orangest, loudest man they could find.
I don't think he would have done particularly well either, due to lack of charisma.
Highlights from his hourlong livestream to show how relatable and definitely a human he is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVyLlFezj2E
I really can't imagine him giving a speech on a stage with cheering crowds.
* He restructured of Facebook stock trough the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative so that he can run for a office and maintain control (also for tax and other reasons).
* He started with "I'm no longer an atheist", now believes religion to be “very important.”
* Hired Obama's campaign manager (David Plouffe)
* Hired former GWB campaign manager and RNC chariman (Ken Mehlman)
* visited 50 states "to meet people".
* hired more even more political strategists who worked for Obama's and Hillary's campaign. He had something like 150 people working just for his PR according to some sources.
No amount of turd polishing with unlimited money and PR talent was able to make people to like him. Trump is horrible but at least he raises emotions in people.
I don't rule it out. Gates managed to pull it off when I didn't think it was possible
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Bill_Gat...
I wonder what the cost-benefit line looks like for PR person versus life coach.
That's a lot of yes-men. Maybe we should bring back Court Jester as a profession.
As a profession or as a title?
At least we got some memes out of that.
- WhatsApp: Oh wait, SMS etc. is completely insecure
- Signal: Oh wait, WhatsApp is structurally unable to be a force for privacy
- Matrix: Oh wait, even benevolent centralization is an unnecessary risk
I look forward to the public's increasing wisdom with these matter.
As it is now, with WhatsApp being part of it, FB has access to any (non-e2e) data by default. The new agreement might have been them hedging to keep it that way, which backfired spectacularly.
Also, Signal should introduce some kind of paid subscription with a few critically important qualities:
1. Anonymous payment that binds subscriptions to users without retaining anything about who paid. Like a prepaid GSM SIM. All Signal needs to know is that the current terminal uses a paid subscription.
2. Ability to buy a cheaper bulk/family bundle. I use Signal to talk to family and close friends and would like to pay for myself and my parents, at the very least.
3. Price it differently in different countries. $1 in India is as heavy as $10 in US. This is super mega important.
4. Setup dedicated servers for subscription users with a much better service level. The service collapse that happened today should not happen again. There should also be an option for a fully encrypted backup that Signal cannot decrypt just on the server side to store personal conversation logs.
Nonsense. They've been impacted by uninstalls/deletions and trying to salvage things.
I'm amazed how FB keeps falling for such things. From my understanding this story has blown out out of proportion and the main reason is the way FB handled those privacy changes.
Telegram got 25 million new unique users. Signal got 50 million, so much that it melted their servers for a while.
The masses now know that there are options to Whatsapp, maybe that'll trigger a move to more options, maybe not. We'll see.
Use Signal (and donate/make a PR every once in awhile).
Been following Whisper Systems since Redphone and TextSecure, so glad to see them shine.
Matt Stoller from BIG is right, only jail time for executives guilty of breaking the Sherman Act will stop these monopolies now.
That may happen to Facebook in a few years.
Users have been going to Signal en masse, in their millions upon millions, to the point that Facebook had to back down.
It's a sort of democratic consumerism. I don't want to call it capitalism, but is that what it is?
Either way, it's nice to know that people can make big corporations change their minds sometimes.
I think I read that Brian Acton called out Sandberg on that once. That it wasn't just about profitability, but greed.
So, they're gonna keep going.
Facebook-owned WhatsApp said they would work to "clear up misinformation" around its privacy policy.
(I've also heard it claimed that it's an urban legend that frogs won't jump if you cook them slowly. But, maybe it's an urban legend that it's an urban legend.)
Come on, it only takes a moment of critical thinking to realize no animal would allow itself to be boiled alive, be it slowly or quickly.
If you're in a bath and you increase the heat until you're hot, do you keep increasing the heat or do you jump out when it's too hot?
> no animal would allow itself to be boiled alive
You're surely not suggesting frogs have a theory of self, and while there's evolutionary pressure against walking into forest fires or too hot sun-baked rocks, there are very few environments where animals would be subjected to slowly increasing water temperatures that eventually reach fatal temperatures. If it's not obvious that there's evolutionary pressure for this situation, and we don't think frogs have a conscious self-preservation, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the legend out-of-hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
You don't need a theory of self to explain this. Frogs are living creatures with an instinct to live, and heat stroke is bad for survival. It's no different from wandering into the desert sun - you cannot thermoregulate your body past a certain point.
> The legend is that if they're submerged in hot water and heated slowly enough, the brain starts having problems due to the heat before the skin gets too uncomfortable.
By that logic people will stay outside and freeze to death from hypothermia which eventually causes people to believe they're hot while literally freezing to death, even though long before that happens any functioning human being would say "I'm cold and need to warm up now!" before suffering any significant health problems.
It's a fucking dumb legend and regurgitating it does humanity a disservice. I am aware it is a common saying and what it means. I just wish people would think more before repeating everything they hear.
The most plain reading of this statement implies both understanding of the situation, and consent, which implies an understanding of self and the implications for the self. I'm saying you clearly don't mean that... so you must be anthropomorphizing some evolved environmental response as "not allowing".
I'm arguing that very few frogs and their ancestors have been in situations where the best response to slowly rising heat is to move frantically. So, maybe the have some other evolved response that will get them out of the pot, but it's almost certainly not an evolved response to an evolutionary pressure of slowly rising water temperatures.
The best response to a hot desert is to move slowly and surely to some place to hide, which is the opposite optimal strategy for a boiling pot of water (jump rapidly, try as many times as possible in a short time). An evolved response to survive in a hot desert would work against the boiling pot situation.
> By that logic people will stay outside and freeze to death from hypothermia
This analogy makes no sense unless you think frogs have a human-like ability to understand situations and plan. Humans' response to extreme cold is dominated by their understanding of the self and their situation. Even some humans will die of hypothermia in their own homes before seeking help[0]. Humans starting to get hypothermia don't run around frantically, which is what heated frogs need to do in order to survive a hot pot. The analogy is just badly broken.
This is your second response that seems to be anthropomorphizing frogs. Frogs aren't just small slow thinking humans without opposable thumbs. Their response to situation is different in kind, not just degree, from that of humans. Reasoning by analogy with human behavior is downright misleading.
Ah, here's the problem. They don't have an instinct to survive as such. They have a variety of evolved instinctual behaviors that have a net effect of increasing survival rate, but there's no evidence that any of these instincts involve an awareness of mortal danger an in intermediate mechanism. That is, it's not a direct instinctual response to a realization of mortal danger, like you'd get in humans and perhaps some other larger-brained species.
Particularly for smaller brained animals, to say that there's one instinct to survive ("an instinct to survive") is a sloppy over-generalization from a bunch of specific corner-case instincts.
Particularly for more simple-brained creatures like frogs, you can't reason about behaviors as if they've evolved a sense of mortal danger and then deductively reason their response to mortal danger. They have a bunch of evolved survival-enhancing responses to specific stimuli, but it's an over-generalization to say they have a generalized instinct to survive.
Take domestic sheep, for example. Given the chance, they'll often get them stuck on thin cliff edges while looking for grass, and then need to be rescued by humans or else fall to their deaths. You can't just say that sheep have evolved a generalized survival instinct and cliffs are a mortal danger and then use deductive reasoning to conclude that sheep avoid cliffs.
This sort of misuse of deductive reasoning held human civilization back for millennia, until the enlightenment brought much more widespread use of inductive scientific methods. Deductive and inductive reasoning both have their places, but I find it's human instinct to over-use deductive reasoning. (That is, there's a tendency to take overly general high-level axioms and assume they say things about all specific cases.)
I really think you're making something out of nothing, and this is no different from humans, and the entire argument over sense of self is an irrelevant tangent to everything I've said.
My ability to avoid dangerous situations and survive is philosophically no different from an amoeba, and I think all your arguments to the contrary are nonsensical. You can easily concoct situations where humans would die too. I'm getting weird Bible vibes honestly, since you seem to think humans are somehow special.
Well, not just humans, but large-brained animals that show evidence of understanding of their environment and an some degree of planning ahead.
If we were talking about great apes, cetaceans, or perhaps cephalopods or corvids, maybe we could find some middle ground.
But, if you believe a frog's ability to survive is greatly enhanced by its ability to understand and plan ahead, or a human's ability to survive isn't fundamentally altered by their ability to understand and plan ahead (to the extent that analogies between frog and human survival behavior break down), then we're at a fundamental impasse and we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) in Dante's Peak (1997)
Not for anything we can actually sense. Volume, temperature, pressure - you will feel wildly uncomfortable long before any of these are extreme enough to seriously impact your health.
Is there any example of something we can feel, but we don't feel uncomfortable before it kills us? All I can think of are drugs.
Also, I once helped a friend set up and tear down an art project that was a flying remote-controlled statue, held up partially by a weather balloon full of helium. In tearing down, I didn't want to let the helium go to waste. My first breath of pure helium went fine. My second full breath of pure helium in a row, I barely had enough time to sit down, say "whoah" and cough the helium out before falling down and twitching on the gymnasium floor. A woke up right at the same time my artist friend realized I wasn't joking around. Had I died, I would have felt no pain, not even the slightest discomfort.
Breathing pure helium, I learned you have about 1-2 seconds of warning that you're hypoxic before you pass out. I figured it was more like 15-30 seconds. Luckily, I didn't die, partially because, as a low molecular weight gas, helium has a high rate of effusion, and on my back, it being lighter than air helped it escape my lungs. Argon may very well have killed me because it has a much lower rate of effusion, and (also related to its higher molar mass) it's also heavier than air.
Radiation, disease, drugs (chemical poisoning), falling, can all pass the point of inevitable death before you notice that they are a problem.
People frequently die unnecessarily of heart attacks, because they don't realise that the symptoms merit an urgent response.
You can feel heat before you die of heat stroke.
It's funny to read that, until you realize, that it is exactly what humans are doing in regards to global warming.
1. Prepare three bowls of water, one cold (but bearable), one hot (but bearable), and one lukewarm.
2. Place one hand in the cold water, and the other hand in the hot water.
3. Wait a minute or two.
4. Place both hands in the lukewarm water at the same time.
5. WTF, is this hot or is it cold?
Working experiment. Frogs stay in water.
> Heinzmann heated the frogs over the course of 90 minutes from about 21 °C to 37.5 °C, a rate of less than 0.2 °C per minute.
Failed experiment. Frog jumps.
> as the water is heated by about 2 °F (about 1 °C), per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if it can.
There's a bunch of anecdotes from biologists and veterinarians saying 'ofcourse the frog will try to leave', but no modern experiments to see if a frog will escape if the water is boiled sufficiently slow.
Day 1) Users are outraged and company says there will be changes! (Twitter bans Trump)
Day 2) Users are angry and company shows changes they will be making (yup Trumps account is gone.)
Day 3) Users move on to something else and company goes back to whatever they want to do (Trump posts video on twitter, but this one is ok, we'll let this one slide.)
Give it a few days and WhatsApp will be back to business as usual.