[HN Gopher] Facebook employees badges aren't working, unable to ...
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Facebook employees badges aren't working, unable to enter buildings
Author : tantalor
Score : 396 points
Date : 2021-10-04 19:20 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| Seems odd. There is _NO ONE_ that can let people in? Every
| building I 've worked in has required badges, but there's always
| security inside that can check IDs and let people in. And methods
| of security getting in even if there's a power failure.
| mc32 wrote:
| The local readers should have a cache of all known active
| badges as of their last update (whatever their cycle is). It's
| not supposed to require a live connection to auth people in, as
| far as I know.
| EpicDavi wrote:
| I would say this is a bit misleading. Personally, I was able to
| access my FB building this morning (after the outage started) and
| have continued to be able to use my badge with no problem since.
| Not saying that there are no employees experiencing this issue,
| but it is not affecting all Facebook employees.
| hinkley wrote:
| Given it's a routing problem, doesn't it matter where your
| office is on the network with respect to the servers that
| control the door locks?
|
| You could be in a zone of stability that's not affected by the
| overall chaos.
| asdff wrote:
| Honestly having buildings automatically lock down like this
| sounds like an absolute worst practice. FB headquarters is in
| california. What happens when the big one hits? server is
| killed and no one can get inside and look for survivors?
| Shouldn't need a functional network connection to be able to
| open the door of a building, but here we are I guess.
| jauer wrote:
| This is why firefighters practice breaking into buildings.
| afavour wrote:
| In fairness the tweet doesn't say all employees but the title
| here is ambiguous.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Apparently this issue is effecting specifically some of the
| people who are trying to fix the outage
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28749244
| evilotto wrote:
| Facebook isn't by chance experimenting with an advanced self-
| aware AI with access to its security systems, is it...?
| godric-cz wrote:
| I'm afraid I can't let you into the building today, Dave.
| vokep wrote:
| I wish I could look at this as a joke...haha
| efdee wrote:
| Fat chance.
| agucova wrote:
| I imagine the authentication systems for the datacenters are
| more rigorous than most Facebook buildings, right?
| echelon wrote:
| Honest questions!
|
| Do you have any ethical qualms working for Facebook?
|
| Do you feel the criticisms are blown out of proportion?
| [deleted]
| Clubber wrote:
| Tell me your industry and I can probably tell you ethical
| problems with it.
| exdsq wrote:
| How about effective altruism, trying to evaluate the
| usefulness of charities ethics to do the most good in the
| world?
| TheCapn wrote:
| This sounds like fun!
|
| Controls Engineering - Specifically Agricultural: Grain
| handling, cleaning, processing.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Agricultural automation is part of why Uyghur slavery is
| so profitable (similar to how the cotton gin led to a
| revitalization of slavery in the US- with a modicum of
| training, a single slaves productivity was drastically
| increased)
|
| Closer to home, assuming you're in the US, the glut of
| cheap corn syrup plays a big role in our obesity epidemic
| (especially in underprivileged communities). Obesity and
| related issues are some of the top killers in the US.
| uuddlrlr wrote:
| Almost half of US farm labourers are illegal immigrants;
|
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor
|
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/63465/LegalStatus
| 201...
|
| Pretty crazy how they're treated considering that.
|
| Cool job tho, thanks for feeding people!
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Arguably someone working on automating farming systems
| would be reducing demand for labor in that work.
|
| So really, "isn't this putting impoverished people out of
| the only job they can get?"
| papandada wrote:
| Do you ask for consent before all this handling and
| cleaning? You know, consent from the grain.
|
| Ok but seriously, the best I can imagine might be a
| generic environmental impact concern that could be
| levelled far and wide. Honestly seems pretty legit. Are
| there any ethical issues we should know about in the
| field of agricultural grain handling?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Do your control systems enable producers of GMO grain to
| handle and clean their grain with greater efficiency?
| Then you're contributing to the GMO problem :)
|
| (I have nothing against GMO personally)
| InsomniacL wrote:
| Doesn't the Agricultural industry have one of the highest
| mortality rates? Grain handling, everything from gases in
| an enclosed space to being buried alive by a quicksand
| like effect.
| jedberg wrote:
| You're contributing to the monoculture of our planet by
| designing systems that make only certain grains
| profitable.
|
| (I don't actually think this but it was a reasonable
| ethical dilemma I thought)
| itoocode wrote:
| Facebook cannot be compared to any other industry.
| Facebook's ethical problems is not about the services they
| provide, it is about the quantity of data collected with
| consent(ignorance). I hope everyone working inside is
| ethical as believed by the upper management.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| I'll have a go
|
| Legaltech - namely, automating the legal process behind
| startup funding rounds. We have lawyers on staff to help if
| needed, but we automate 95% of the work.
| [deleted]
| agucova wrote:
| The fact that almost all industries have some level of
| ethical problems does not mean that there aren't worse
| industries than the rest, or that you should somehow take
| no moral responsibility in choosing a job.
| [deleted]
| yupper32 wrote:
| Do y'all have vaccine requirements? I know some companies are
| locking people out until they prove their vaccination status.
|
| Could it be people who normally don't go in and haven't yet
| confirmed their vaccination?
|
| Edit: What in the world was I flagged for?
| InsomniacL wrote:
| Lots of people drawing conclusions between recent leaks and some
| sort of attempt to cover them up.
|
| I'd suggest more likely is a disgruntled engineer performing some
| sort of sabotage because of the content of the leaks.
| theHIDninja wrote:
| Good. Facebook should be forcefully and globally taken offline
| for the crimes its sites commit on a daily basis. All Facebook
| employees should be arrested and put into solitary confinement
| until we get to the bottom of the crimes they are individually
| and collectively guilty of.
|
| Terroristic actions taken against these corporations are entirely
| justified. This holds true for Twitter, Google, Apple, and
| Amazon.
| [deleted]
| panarky wrote:
| Twitter, Google, Apple and Amazon are not equivalent to
| Facebook.
|
| Facebook is 100x as malevolent as those four combined.
| theHIDninja wrote:
| Google, Apple and Amazon, maybe. Twitter actively
| participates in and profits from "cancel" culture so they may
| as well be direct political rivals to the West.
| coolspot wrote:
| To reconfigure misconfigured routers one needs physical access ->
| routers are in a high-security area of a secure DC -> physical
| access systems do not let anyone in due to network outage.
| jedberg wrote:
| I worked at eBay many years ago. At the time, the process to
| get into the datacenter involved multiple ID checks by both
| humans and computers and multiple authentication factors. The
| process took about 10 minutes from walking in the front door to
| actually being in the cage.
|
| One day we had a major outage. The first few engineers to
| arrive were started on the 10 minute process. As more engineers
| arrived, a line started to form out the door. Then the VP
| showed up. He told the poor security guard that if they didn't
| open all the doors _right now_ , eBay would find a new
| datacenter (we were probably more than 1/2 the space at the
| time).
|
| They used the emergency fire release to just unlock all the
| doors at once, and then called the fire department and told
| them to ignore the alarm. So now all the doors were open and if
| there were a fire no one would come.
|
| That day, if you happen to know where the eBay datacenter was,
| you could just walk right in. The only check against it was
| that most of use who had DC access knew everyone else who did
| and could call out imposters, but you'd have to stop what you
| were doing and think about it first.
|
| The point is, there is always a way to avoid security when
| needed.
| notyourday wrote:
| The first rule of netops is to have a separate, externally
| accessible, not controlled by the managed routers network of
| serial consoles with the entry points connected to IP over LTE
| or completely dedicated network of a different provider.
|
| We have been doing this since 1996
| deckard1 wrote:
| I think we've all known this since 1968. When HAL refused to
| open the pod bay doors for Dave.
| packetslave wrote:
| ...and then you go to use them during an outage
|
| ...and discover that the POTS into the modem in Finland is
| flaky so you can't dial-in in from the US.
|
| ...and the OOB network access requires a smartcard that's
| kept in a safe... and the safe's combination is in the
| secrets tool that requires network access.
|
| ...and then you cry.
|
| (for sanity's sake: NOT referring to today's FB outage. Don't
| quote me)
| notyourday wrote:
| I'm just saying we have been doing this for decades using
| KISS principal. It is not sexy and we dont write fancy blog
| posts about our super smart BGP software that we wrote, but
| it worked. We had outages. Nasty, nasty outages, where the
| long distance fiber was down and we got our network
| partitioned and our neteng was not able to get into the
| routers via standard means but our OOB worked... because it
| was _dumb_ and dumb allowed us to recover from really bad
| problems within 10-15 minutes.
| packetslave wrote:
| And of course you test your OOB weekly to make sure every
| device in every POP is accessible all the time,
| automatically and systematically, right?
|
| Otherwise, Murphy's Law ensures that when you desperately
| need to access the peering router in 60 Hudson, or
| Equinix Chicago, or 1 Wilshire to fix an outage, that
| will be the modem that doesn't answer the phone, or the
| console cable that got pinched in a door.
|
| (again, not referring to today's outage)
| deeblering4 wrote:
| weekly? just maintain an inventory of deployed systems
| and test out of band connectivity every few minutes with
| standard black box monitoring
| ImBanned wrote:
| I thought the first rule of netops was, "Don't talk about
| netops." But this is a strong number 2.
| easton wrote:
| Isn't the answer here if you can't get someone with keys in a
| reasonable amount of time to break a window? Most doors have
| windows adjacent to them, and the company can just call the
| security people and tell them it's part of DR.
| sectumsempra wrote:
| a break-glass policy if you will
| jws wrote:
| Rent a gasoline powered demolition saw with a diamond blade
| for $55 at Home Depot. Solve problem. Explain later.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Kind of!
|
| Any secured area isn't going to have easily broken windows,
| but there's also no such thing as an intrusion proof
| building. Ultimately the main point of any security system is
| to slow down an attacker before people with guns show up and
| pointedly ask you to stop doing that. If it's _your_
| building, you can use a blowtorch to get in if you need to,
| it just won't be as fast as say, breaking into a residential
| home.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| My company is not Facebook, but in our data center there are
| no windows and the doors and walls in specific areas are
| designed to hold off physical attacks.
| perihelions wrote:
| I think you're supposed to try HVAC first.
|
| https://xkcd.com/705/
| sennight wrote:
| This isn't how badge readers work. Every controlled door is wired
| to a relay panel. That panel connects to a access control db -
| but it always maintains a cache that is very slow to expire...
| because the manufacturers weren't clueless morons.
| cromka wrote:
| > Every controlled door is wired to a relay panel. That panel
| connects to a access control db
|
| Absolutely not. E.g. HID is a well-documented protocol and you
| can do whatever you want using the RS232 interface they come
| with (depending on the model). I personally wrote a gateway
| that would dynamically and directly check the access with my
| own software.
| sennight wrote:
| lol, California fire code makes no exemptions for python
| projects... this whole story has a "virgins talking about
| sex" vibe.
| cududa wrote:
| Except some of the readers were made in house. I've never been
| into a Facebook conference room that didn't use one of their
| custom touch screen/ card readers.
| sennight wrote:
| That isn't access control, that is a an intern project. Those
| readers aren't wired to devices that could trap you in a
| burning building, they simply provide a rube goldberg
| solution to the traditional sign-in sheet.
| daRealDodo wrote:
| The market have never been more ripe for a new player.
| crawsome wrote:
| Locking the doors to shred the evidence!
|
| /s But seriously, such odd timing with Pandora Papers and with
| the Whistleblower.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Internet of Things finally being useful
| ImBanned wrote:
| Now Facebook can see what it's like being banned for 30 days.
| suyash wrote:
| You win the best comment award!! Or what is like to be banned
| indefinitely!
| Jcowell wrote:
| What I wonder if this isn't a scheme on Facebook part to show
| the world what it feels like without it. At first you might
| think it'll "wake up" the addicts and whatnot but you can't
| just cut off an addict from their supply and expect them to
| just be ok with it. Instead they'll relapse harder without help
| and might dig in deeper, never wanting to feel the withdraw
| again. I wonder if there's a phenomenon called Social Withdrawn
| Symptoms.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| I hope that all their workers quit and services never come back
| up. One can only dream...
| suyash wrote:
| Most sophisticated and biggest hack. They really thought about
| all use-cases.
| cbtacy wrote:
| "And sometimes the universe says, 'go get a different job
| already.'"
| rvz wrote:
| Maybe it is for everyone's own good. The Facebook mafia needed to
| be shutdown.
| huetius wrote:
| Would you (or someone else in-the-know) help me, an out-of-the-
| loop person, understand why Facebook is reviled so much more
| intensely on this site than other social media platforms?
| TravisHusky wrote:
| At least for me, a big part of my problem with Facebook is
| both its size and blatant ethical breaches. Obviously most
| large social networks are guilty of similar problems, but
| Facebook jump out at me as bad because of how they use
| information to manipulate people's emotions to increase ad
| revenue.
|
| Just look at how they realized that misinformation upset
| people which in turn caused them to interact with the site
| more, so they allowed that misinformation to spread.
|
| There is also past research that involved trying to
| manipulate the emotions of users without the user's consent (
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17470161155995.
| ..).
|
| They take a lot of the things that I dislike about social
| networks and technology and turn it to 11.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| Because last week's Apple revulsion ran its course. This week
| it is Facebook's turn.
|
| We'll circle back to Google next week, and repeat.
| jspaetzel wrote:
| What other social media platforms?
| huetius wrote:
| Idk, any of the big ones. Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, e.g.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Facebook's algorithm prioritizes divisive political content
| that is commonly disinformation(propaganda) because they
| figured out it increases engagement.
| tayistay wrote:
| Simply because the average reader of *Hacker News* knows more
| about the tech industry than the average user of social media
| platforms.
| drstewart wrote:
| Plain and simple: populism.
|
| It's the political equivalent of "No one ever got fired for
| buying IBM". It's the safest opinion you can have, so
| everyone will spout out without reserve because no one will
| challenge you on it, and if they do they're clearly just a
| Zuck bootlicker.
| fartingflamingo wrote:
| Because making even two pebbles fight is their business
| model.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| I'm not sure it is. If this was Twitter I'm sure the reaction
| would be similar. Besides those two, all other social media
| companies are either much smaller or in a weird category
| where people consider them separate (I.e Reddit)
| skinnymuch wrote:
| More reviled than their big tech contemporaries too. Amazon,
| Apple, Google.
|
| Snapchat, Pinterest, Discord (sort of), Youtube (sort of) can
| round out that social media sites list. Probably a few more
| not being thought of.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| You forgot Twitter, which imo beats FB on toxicity at
| times.
| jb12 wrote:
| Bezos and Jassey, Jobs and Cook, Page and Pichai, Gates and
| Nadella, (((Zuckerberg))) and (((Sandberg))).
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| Suspicious. What timing eh!
| mysterydip wrote:
| [conference room, some years ago, maybe]:
|
| technician: "But if we authenticate using the facebook DNS, how
| will we do our jobs if it goes down?"
|
| boss: "The only way our DNS servers are going down is if facebook
| closes, in which case you're out of a job anyway."
| katmannthree wrote:
| Can't help but feel that the world would be a slightly better
| place if it stayed this way.
| rcurry wrote:
| Facebook said they are working hard to "get things back to
| normal". But so far things seem more normal without them.
| ufmace wrote:
| Alas, if Facebook went down for good, they would probably be
| replaced by something even worse.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ferdowsi wrote:
| Agreed. The theoretical fat-fingering SRE who stopped all
| access to FB has probably done more to benefit humanity than
| any other single engineer in recent memory.
| hinkley wrote:
| If they get fired we may be looking at a GoFundMe situation.
| aroman wrote:
| Many pockets of humanity are materially worse off today
| because of these outages. The (perhaps sad) reality is that
| tens of thousands of small businesses are completely
| dependent on WhatsApp and Instagram, especially in developing
| countries. This outage will cause lots of lost business by
| people who don't have massive cash reserves to ride out the
| lost revenue, unlike Facebook itself.
| Levitz wrote:
| Those businesses should have never depended on Facebook to
| begin with, if anything the fact that what you describe is
| a reality is a testimony of the degree at which Facebook is
| a cancer to be expunged.
| samhw wrote:
| Even if we accept that's true, it still makes no
| difference to the fact that this outage has harmed those
| people.
| snuser wrote:
| Sad!
| cma wrote:
| If it helps them break free of the facebook ecosystem/tax
| authority it could still be good even if expensive in the
| short-term.
| caballeto wrote:
| Businesses which rely on Facebook, as their sole
| distribution channel could get out of business if
| Facebook goes out. A lot of economical value will be
| lost.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Allowing copyrights to expire on pre-1950 creative works
| would also destroy billions of dollars of "economic
| value", but that doesn't mean it would be bad for
| humanity.
|
| We should be careful to not take our values from a
| spreadsheet.
| jkestner wrote:
| Maybe they should not have a single point of failure.
| FAANG is not good for our economy's resilience.
| duderific wrote:
| Many of these businesses are small single-person
| operations with little tech understanding that are using,
| for example, FB marketplace. They wouldn't even know what
| you meant by "single point of failure."
| katmannthree wrote:
| Would these be the same developing countries where Facebook
| has helped facilitate genocide?
|
| Seriously though, is the net utility of Facebook even
| positive there? It's not like those businesses couldn't
| interact with their customers over literally any other
| medium.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Some of us use these services to communicate with our
| friends.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| The poor guy though - he made Zuck blink. And when Zuck
| blinks, people die!!!
| unfunco wrote:
| Can we nominate them for a Nobel Peace Prize?
| barbazoo wrote:
| They should get a raise!
| coffeefirst wrote:
| And some kind of Medal of Honor.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| You should consider that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are
| the primary communication method for large parts of the globe.
| The world might be better off if we transitioned off them, but
| having them cease to exist without any warning most definitely
| won't make the world better off.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| If only my pocket WhatsApp device had other ways to contact
| people, now I'll have to go get a new device.
|
| Seriously as transitions go, leaving WhatsApp and Messanger
| will be the smoothest most painless transition there ever
| was.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| In some parts of the world feature phones and some
| smartphones _are_ pocket WhatsApp devices. Free data _if_
| you 're using FB and WhatsApp, with phone calls and SMS
| also covered (but that doesn't help much with international
| communication, international SMS is even more unreliable
| than domestic SMS). It's not that they'll need a new
| device, they'll need a new service plan that costs more
| money.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| My country had something like this when Facebook Zero was
| around but the telcos regulator ordered it off as it was
| a violation to net neutrality. And iirc, the same
| happened in India and other places where this was
| implemented.
| pushrax wrote:
| Facebook Free Basics was quickly blocked in India
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-regulator-
| netneutra...
| timbit42 wrote:
| Tox is working fine and I've never seen it go down,
| presumably because it is distributed.
| humaniania wrote:
| As if people wouldn't switch to something different and
| equivalent within 24 hours if FB's version ceased to exist.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| It's not that easy. Installing another messenger is easy,
| but you need to migrate your contacts to it as well. If
| you've been communicating through Facebook Messenger and
| don't have their phone number, you're shit out of luck.
| With WhatsApp you're somewhat better off since it uses
| phone numbers as user identifiers, so you at least have
| everyone's number, but international texting is incredibly
| unreliable and international calling is prohibitively
| expensive for lots of people.
| Hokusai wrote:
| > You should consider that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger
| are the primary communication method for large parts of the
| globe.
|
| I wish regulators would have though that before allowing the
| purchase of WhatsApp by Facebook. That both of the main
| messaging apps are down at the same time is worrisome.
| 6510 wrote:
| sms
| touristtam wrote:
| You do know why a lot of people moved away from SMS?
| hint: https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/141867-price-
| gouging-it-c...
| ghaff wrote:
| That article is from 2012. Admittedly a lot of people
| moved off for the pricing reasons but essentially
| everyone I communicate with in the US uses SMS/iMessage
| today.
| officeplant wrote:
| Which sucks because SMS is an increasing attack vector in
| current times and iMessage had a fun pile of zero days
| this year.
|
| Also US based here luckily everyone I talk to is spread
| across signal/telegram/discord/googlechat for the most
| part.
| ghaff wrote:
| I use Gchat at work as essentially an adjunct to Gmail. I
| don't even have any of the other apps installed. I do use
| Facebook Messenger for one good friend who lives in
| Europe.
|
| But, in general TBH, I don't use texting all that much
| day to day.
| 1_player wrote:
| Well, the world is a bit bigger than the US. Everywhere,
| apart from the US and a few other (East Asian?)
| countries, WhatsApp usage is widespread.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| That seems to be a US-specific oddity. My German mobile
| plan still charges per SMS (a few cents per message), and
| apart from verification codes or delivery notices, I
| never receive any SMS at all. No one uses them for
| personal communication over here, to the point where
| people don't know how to send them and I wouldn't know of
| another country apart from the US where SMS are still
| widely used.
| progval wrote:
| I'm French and SMS are ubiquitous here; sometimes even
| more so than email. All operators offer unlimited free
| SMS, even the cheapest 2EUR/month subscriptions. I'm not
| sure I personally know anyone who uses WhatsApp.
|
| SMS used to be priced like you describe until a new
| operator (aptly named "Free") entered the market in 2012
| with free SMS plans and forced the other three operators
| to align.
| 6510 wrote:
| Almost all plans offer free sms in the Netherlands.
| paganel wrote:
| Whatsapp is (and especially was) way better at sending
| photos than whatever SMS app installed on one's phone. It
| also used to work with crappier phones, for which there
| was no easy way (that I know of) of installing a SMS app
| that would send photos. Plus, you have Whatsapp private
| groups, which I don't know if you can emulate using SMS.
| jkestner wrote:
| Maybe now's not the best time.
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xpm8/company-that-
| routes-b...
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Brilliant, why hadn't I thought of this?
| 6510 wrote:
| haha, well at least we didn't fail back on nothing.
| AccountToUse wrote:
| The Internet is the primary communication for large parts of
| the globe. If we let Facebook use this excuse that they are
| the Internet (which is sadly very true for poorer parts of
| the world where a smartphone is the only computer
| accessible), they must be regulated like a telecom provider.
| keb_ wrote:
| > having them cease to exist without any warning most
| definitely won't make the world better off.
|
| It may indirectly, in that it may spur a transition to
| another platform. Most likely, that platform will also be a
| privacy-invading centralized service, but in an ideal world
| it would be something like XMPP, Matrix, etc.
| smsm42 wrote:
| whatsapp uses phone numbers, so if you can do whatsapp can't
| you just do sms?
| tasogare wrote:
| The outage is very good in that is will remind people to have
| backup way of communication for people that matter to them.
|
| Personally I have a least one other messaging app + email
| address of people I contact regularly. At worst I could send
| a paper mail.
| float4 wrote:
| Google searches for "Telegram" are exploding today:
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=te.
| ..
| godelski wrote:
| I added "Signal", "Matrix", and "Session" to compare
| competitors. Looks like only Telegram and Signal are
| benefiting.
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo
| =...
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Your link is for Netherlands only.
|
| Worldwide it looks like Telegram is benefitting. https://
| trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=te...
| godelski wrote:
| Thanks! I just edited the parent's link and didn't
| notice.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| But isn't telegram less secure than Whatsapp (at least in
| terms of the lack of e2e for the former)? Or am I missing
| something?
| 5etho wrote:
| >But isn't telegram less secure than Whatsapp
|
| lol, how can you be on HN and be this not informed
| AegirLeet wrote:
| Yes, going from WhatsApp to Telegram is a sidegrade at
| best. Probably a downgrade for most people, since
| Telegram is unencrypted by default.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| Telegram has the great advantage that you can have it
| working on multiple devices at the same time. Whatsapp's
| web and desktop solutions are terrible.
|
| On the other hand, voice calls on Whatsapp are far
| better.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| I thought Telegram offered e2e encryption.
| AegirLeet wrote:
| It's optional and disabled by default for 1-on-1 chats
| and not available at all for group chats.
| sschueller wrote:
| Do you mean the e2e that WhatsApp claims is in their
| client but since it's closed source no one can check? /s
| godelski wrote:
| We can both recognize that this effects a lot of people and
| recognize that it could be a good thing for the long run. WA
| has a lock-in effect that is difficult for competitors to
| fight against. An outage like this can help bring competition
| simply because people may no longer be so reliant upon a
| single app. Simply having a second app for "backup" helps
| reduce the lock-in. This should always be the response to "I
| don't want to install a billion apps"
| blibble wrote:
| while reading this comment the deus ex dark age ending music
| started playing in my head
|
| "the facebook's going black... no more political battles with
| elderly relatives, transmissions of any kind... we'll start
| again, live in villages"
|
| (then cutting to zuck plugged into the planetsized AI...
| exploding)
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| I'm still waiting for a covid vaccine named Ambrosia
| [deleted]
| pmlnr wrote:
| But it does. People need to learn to have fallbacks and
| backups, and the vast majority of them is only willing to
| learn this the hard way - see backups vs. losing something
| important.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| People can surprisingly adapt though, especially if it's a
| matter of survival.
|
| I've slummed it learning a new OS or using a new keyboard,
| within a couple of weeks you forget you had to change
| anything.
|
| At the very least there are choices in many circumstances.
| na85 wrote:
| An abrupt, unplanned outage will probably do more to hasten a
| transition away from these services than any slow, planned
| transition would.
| hinkley wrote:
| With all of the zeal only a young adult can muster, I hated
| the first people to tell me that they knew about problems
| and waited for them to break before doing anything.
|
| I get no credit for fixing things before they break, and
| sometimes it's shown up negatively on an annual review. If
| you have to cajole people to help you start to look pushy,
| or worst case like a bully. I've heard back from two former
| employers that the moment I left some manager tried to roll
| back things I did and be surprised when it turned out that
| the developers wanted to keep things the way they were.
|
| You can see the lights go on for people in the trenches
| when some bit of software or step saves them from turning a
| 2 alarm fire into a 5 alarm fire, but the managers don't
| notice that non-verbal communication, and maybe half the
| time does someone editorialize the experience for all of
| the non-technical people (If I do it, it sounds like "I
| told you so" so I usually don't).
| johnebgd wrote:
| Only true if this outage is extended.
| SomeBoolshit wrote:
| Let's hope for the worst.
| na85 wrote:
| One can dream!
| jl6 wrote:
| More likely it'll be fixed by tomorrow and everyone will
| forget about it by next week.
|
| Rare problems aren't enough to disrupt entrenched systems.
| It will take users suffering some recurring pain to
| motivate them to move to another network.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| You mistake Facebook with Twitter. Twitter dying will be a boon
| to humanity
| silisili wrote:
| Hey now, no need to be selective, let's knock them both out
| and get rid of the worst of people on both sides!
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Everyone in my country uses WhatsApp. It would be a mild
| inconvenience to switch to Telegram or Signal.
|
| And I'm afraid I'm not naive enough to think that other
| companies wouldn't turn to the Dark Side. All of Silicon
| Valley, perhaps all of the tech industry is evil.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| My general anxiety is already lifting a little.
| entropyneur wrote:
| Have you people considered like, not using it? I, for one,
| enjoy Facebook and am happy it exists even if some aspects are
| not to my liking.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| The problem is that Facebook is disinforming people and just
| getting rid of everyone isn't an option.
| entropyneur wrote:
| By "Facebook disinforming" people do you mean people
| disinforming people using Facebook? Or has Facebook inc.
| itself been a source of misinformation?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Facebook's algorithm prioritizes divisive political
| content that is commonly disinformation because it
| increases engagement. Yes, people are creating and
| sharing the disinformation, but facebook itself is
| choosing to rank that content highly.
| entropyneur wrote:
| So Facebook facilitates the spread of engaging content
| which happens to include disinformation because due to
| our imperfect nature people like to engage with
| disinformation. Seems like wishing that Facebook wouldn't
| exist because of this is analogous to wishing that
| airfare wouldn't exist because it facilitates global
| spread of infections.
|
| Also, the word "divisive" gives me shivers. It's better
| to be divided than to be united in a fallacy. And in many
| cases getting divided is our only hope of ever arriving
| at the truth.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| It's not the divisiveness that upsets me, I agree with
| "And in many cases getting divided is our only hope of
| ever arriving at the truth." It's the fact that facebook
| is propagandizing people because it's shoving the
| divisive content in their face nonstop without
| understanding if it's disinformation first.
|
| There will always be false content on social media, but I
| don't think that means facebook gets a pass for actively
| encouraging it.
| toss1 wrote:
| It is not merely "happens to include disinformation"
|
| It is systematic, algorithmic preferential amplification
| of disinformation (at the expense of real information)
| based on 'engagement' vs truth value, moral compass, or
| societal value.
|
| And it is allowing orgs like Cambridge Analytica to
| harvest vast amounts of PII and use that to specifically
| tune and target the dezinformatsiya.
|
| If you think of Fb as some kind of passive carrier you
| are horribly outdated - it hasn't done that in decades.
| FB curates and manages every word of data coming across
| it's servers at a scale and effectiveness that no actual
| news organization has evrer conceived of, let alone
| implemented. And yet they hide behind the "we're only a
| carrier" fallacy.
|
| It's like the fat epidemic - sure, you can blame each
| bite of what to eat on the individual, but the rapidity
| of the overall trend makes in undeniable that the entire
| food supply has been skewed, limiting the choices such
| that only those who work diligently to avoid all the
| usual choices typically remain healthy.
| weaksauce wrote:
| https://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/tech-
| gaming/almost-...
|
| well not just mary-sue down the road disinforming but
| that of nation level actors doing so to spread discord to
| the detriment of their enemies. facebook amplified the
| velocity and reach of this disinformation.
| JCharante wrote:
| I don't really get the Facebook hate, how are people ending
| up with such "terrible" stuff on their news feed?
|
| I haven't really changed my default settings and all I see
| are posts from my friends, the same ads over and over again,
| and posts from my groups (recipes, potlucks, language
| practice meetups, going to museums, rooms for rent, questions
| from expats).
|
| There's absolutely nothing that could "radicalize" me. If you
| add garbage to your RSS feed reader I wouldn't blame the
| software, I would blame the person.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Quite frankly I think it's the traditional media losing
| importance due to social media and making it look evil. The
| only way they can make money is by selling outrage.
| tayistay wrote:
| Ok plausible theory. Can you prove it?
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| How can I prove that someone has intent of doing
| something? You can take a look at the news revenue over
| the years and the efforts for getting paid for displaying
| headline in Google.
| tayistay wrote:
| Because they want to see it, and then the algorithm feeds
| them more, intensifying their beliefs.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| I don't get so much 'terrible' stuff, I deleted my account
| but re-signed up for a local cause.
|
| After ignoring "region to the West of me" local news, I've
| had to delete about 40 other regions spanning farther
| outwards. FB keep pushing more data for you to interact
| with which in itself is not exactly healthy.
|
| And it's easy to say ignore it, the simple fact it's in
| front of me, in the part of the screen where I'm reading
| new information is the problem.
|
| It's not radicalising, it's just an absolute time and life
| suck. If it weren't for COVID and lockdown I'm sure my
| local cause would prefer not to use Facebook.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Not everyone is subject to compromise via news feed. One of
| the interesting things about the Cambridge Analytica story
| was the idea that they got good at finding people
| vulnerable to radicalization via news feed.
|
| As for the reason for the hate, well, we have to deal with
| the radicalized people here in meatspace. It's a negative
| externality that we are subject to even if we aren't the
| target of the advertising.
| pbalau wrote:
| I don't think I am exagerating on saying that the best
| thing that happened to humanity in the 21st century is
| Facebook's very naive way of doing things: it showed to
| some what is possible to do with technology.
| Unfortunatelly, for the vast majority of the "tech savy"
| wannabe crowd, the lesson they learned stopped at "Facebook
| is bad, mkay?" and since this is all they know, this is all
| they talk about.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > how are people ending up with such "terrible" stuff on
| their news feed?
|
| Because their FB friends post it, or the groups they are in
| post it, and they interact with it (even if to say "stop
| posting this crap" to their family members).
|
| I used to see it a lot, then I unfollowed (but stayed
| "friends") with the family members who posted that crap or
| marked the content "don't show me this" and now I rarely
| see it.
| cybernautique wrote:
| Unfortunately, I'm not given the option about whether I
| interact with Facebook.
|
| Their aggressive insinuation into the fabric of most websites
| ensures that there are very few places I can go without Mark
| Zuckerberg personally stalking me, along with a legion of
| inhuman advertisers.
|
| Facebook and its sites can't stay down long enough; if they
| were offline forever, it wouldn't be enough. Even if this
| doesn't affect their advertising services, any hit to the FB
| ecosystem is a societal good.
| sngz wrote:
| i don't use it. still wish it didn't exist so my parents
| don't upload all my pictures onto there and their personal
| information, then when they hear about leaks or get their FB
| hijacked I'm the one dealing with it. This is before even
| considering all the other messed up stuff. Society is better
| off without it.
| entropyneur wrote:
| Hmm. I wish cars wouldn't exist so my cat wouldn't have
| been ran over by one.
| sngz wrote:
| not sure how that is relevant analogy... but if you
| choose to have an outdoor cat then that's the risk you
| accepted. There's a reason some people choose to keep
| their cats indoors.
| deadalus wrote:
| massive whistleblower leak surfaces about Facebook
|
| public opinion starts to change about fb
|
| Zuck fears people will abandon his platforms
|
| shuts all of the down and claims hax0rs
|
| facebook goes down
|
| divert the story to Russian and Chinese hackers
|
| people instantly forget about whistleblower
|
| facebooks stock balances out after a week
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I put my tinfoil hat on and came up with this early on, but the
| outage has gone on for far too long for the price to be worth
| it now. They're losing millions and millions of dollars from
| this.
|
| I'm now leaning towards possible inside job related to the
| recent string of bad press. If this is an external hack it's
| incredible.
|
| If this is a simple mistake... Facebook seems dangerously
| incompetent.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| People wouldn't abandon Facebook et al. even if Zuckerberg was
| outed as a creature from outer space. Many people just wouldn't
| care.
| enriquto wrote:
| "Well, actually", as someone who has religiously avoided
| Facebook services for almost 15 years... I'd happily join FB
| if Zuck turned out to be an alien!
| asdff wrote:
| FB is in the spy, stock is practically unsinkable at this point
| what with everyones retirement plan buying and holding it.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| Heard a story once about the badge readers at a European Google
| office being suspiciously slow.
|
| As in, "the duration of a ping to the US and back" slow.
|
| Yep, every badge in and out in the whole office had to go cross-
| continental (before the door unlocked).
| mc32 wrote:
| That should not be the case. Any existing user should be in the
| local cache. Most companies will have a controller in some
| control room somewhere which manages the door readers. New
| users yes. Former users should also need a connection. But
| existing users should not need a round-trip ping.
| asdff wrote:
| At what point is this an occupational safety hazard akin to
| blocking a fire door? Ridiculous that something like access to
| a building requires a network at all, but leave it to
| technology companies to overengineer a solution and underthink
| about the implications.
| cesarb wrote:
| _Exit_ from a building is usually not limited by access
| control. Either there 's a button near the door on the inside
| which releases the door (cutting the current to the maglock,
| or energizing the solenoid, or even mechanically releasing
| the latch), or there's an "emergency use only" fire exit
| nearby with a crash bar which opens only from the inside (and
| triggers an alarm when opened), or both. So no, slow badge
| readers are usually not going to be a safety hazard similar
| to blocking a fire door.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Upcoming tweet: "Smoke could be seeen at FB data center, but
| employees said it's nothing to worry about, it's a workaround
| to get the fire alarm to trigger and override all doors to
| open.".
|
| Did Nest smoke detectors have to go to the cloud?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Unrelated anecdote, I once worked in an office where the light
| switches were powered by the cloud. If you pressed the on and
| off button at the same time, there would be some sort of a race
| condition and you'd get blinking disco lighting as two threads
| presumably went
|
| while (!bright) { increaseBrightnessBy10%(); sleep(100ms); }
|
| and
|
| while (!dark) { decreaseBrightnessBy10%(); sleep(100ms); }
|
| Then someone had to log into a server and reboot a process
| before the blinking stopped.
| kevincox wrote:
| This is true and surprised me. Even with 100K employees and a
| separate 4096bit RSA key per badge that is only 50MiB of data.
| You would think that they would preload the readers with the
| access list or at least have a copy on site.
|
| Of course it isn't a no-brainer:
|
| - It is still a non-trivial amount of data for an embedded
| device.
|
| - You want to be able to revoke quickly.
|
| - You still want to log the access if offline (and how big
| should that buffer be?).
| skunkworker wrote:
| I'm surprised they haven't pushed ranges to datacenters
| located near the last access.
|
| You could maintain strong consistency while having fast local
| reads, once you have entered a building in a country it pulls
| you into the local range. So you're only slow when switching.
| TillE wrote:
| Networked (as they are now) but with a complete local cache
| seems pretty straightforward. If you've already got an
| embedded device doing network requests, it's not much of a
| stretch to stick in a 1GB SD card or whatever.
| jandrese wrote:
| There is a requirement to be able to instantly revoke a
| person's badge access, so you can't cache the data. It has
| to check every time.
|
| You could set the system up to push data out to all of the
| badge readers whenever there is a change, but that's a big
| messy operation. A more complex but probably workable
| solution is to have them readers cache the data but also
| have the server maintain a list of those caches, and when
| someone is changed you invalidate all of the readers that
| the person used within the last cache timeout period. Even
| then it is still messy, if a reader has temporarily lost
| network connectivity their cache could be out of sync. It's
| one of those problems that gets really hairy once you're
| down in the weeds working out the details.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| Check every time, but read from cache upon failure and
| update cache on success.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > There is a requirement to be able to instantly revoke a
| person's badge access, so you can't cache the data. It
| has to check every time.
|
| Luckily this isn't a pure IT system, but bound to
| physical bodies moving around. Some delay is acceptable.
| Most likely the person is already in anyways.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| You could maintain a local cache which is updated less
| frequently and a blacklist which gets pushed everywhere
| when updated.
|
| Why is it a requirement to be able to instantly revoke a
| person's badge access eeverywhere in real time anyway?
| zamadatix wrote:
| > You could maintain a local cache which is updated less
| frequently and a blacklist which gets pushed everywhere
| when updated.
|
| That seems like the system GP just described, including
| the hairiness you can get into.
|
| > Why is it a requirement to be able to instantly revoke
| a person's badge access everywhere in real time anyway?
|
| With 140,000 employees and hundreds of locations across
| the globe it becomes a question of dealing with hundreds
| of local databases and dealing with people that need to
| be in more than 1 or 1 central database (be it truly
| centralized or cache coherent).
|
| Also think beyond the "you're fired and standing right in
| front of me" use case of revocation for why it's a
| requirement it be instant. A lost/stolen/replicated card
| can have traveled the world in the time it takes to be
| realized compromised.
| tyingq wrote:
| If only they had a database that could, uh, "span" geographic
| distances.
| [deleted]
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