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Exactly. It started out as something good: see what friends and family are up to. But now: scroll infinite algorithmically placed or sponsored rage bait trying to trigger you into behaving the way that advances certain corporate or foreign interests at the expense of whatever was left of our already tattered social fabric and our collective mental or literal health.

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Your own source [2] says:

> But to be clear, there is no evidence DARPA or the U.S. intelligence services had any role in the creation of Facebook.


Do you require everything you read to spell out everything for you point blank? Are you unable to connect dots?

The DARPA lifelog project ended the day Facebook was announced by a college dropout no one had ever heard of before. Facebook just happened to have the exact same goals / features as the lifelog project. Must just be a giant coincidence huh?


I require at least some evidence.

Your own source says there is none.


I think they’re trolling you, see their username.

Oh yes, because intelligence agencies are known for broadcasting their moves to everyone.

I can guarantee you believe in a lot of things that you have no actual evidence of happening - just some perceived authority figure you trust for whatever reason, telling you it happened.

Also -

WHYY.org has received support through NewsMatch partner funds, which often includes contributions from large technology firms like Facebook (Meta) to support local journalism. These funds are generally used to match donations, helping stations like WHYY increase their financial sustainability and support public media.

What a surprise!


You chose your sources, not me.

Besides bloggers / youtubers who have written / talked about this, there's a single news story returned by Google, which I sourced. If there were other articles to source from, I would have. Given that our internet was created by DARPA and has always been under the control of intelligence agencies / governments, it's not shocking that there aren't a plethora of sources regarding Facebook emerging from DARPA.

yeah I'm sure an immensely powerful and shadowy conspiracy trusted their most critical operation to a 20 year old college dropout. Makes sense to me.

Have you ever considered the idea that Zuck is just an actor / a face?

No way, we've known for 15 years that it was the CIA, not DARPA, after The Onion broke the story:

https://youtu.be/ZJ380SHZvYU


Distracting from actual stories like DARPA's lifelog program ending the same day Mark Zuckerberg announces Facebook to the world, with dumb videos from the onion, is really doing the world a great service.

> It started out as something good

No it didn’t. That was just like the first free sample from the drug dealer. Give a “good” free service to rope them in, always with the next steps in mind.


I disagree. I feel like earlier social networks hadn't yet huffed the "lean startup" gas and weren't obsessed with engagement and thus were not yet trying to hook their users into an engagement cycle like where we are today.

I feel like the Myspace/Friendster and early Facebook were nowhere near as harmful (albeit for addiction, those sites were still vulnerable to grooming) as where we are today.


OG Facebook was perfectly fine. In your analogy it’d be more like someone replacing your Diet Coke with actual cocaine. Like, yeah Diet Coke isn’t great for you, but it’s not cocaine.

Sure, but do we agree that the unitedstatesian's (pet peeve: they shouldn't be called americans, per definition) Congress could at least stop one side of the war (the one that initiated the aggression). The Iranians would probably call that a victory, and probably not pursue further retaliation.

The US would then need to comply with whatever sanctions the UN might apply due to them having started an illegal war.


> The Iranians would probably call that a victory, and probably not pursue further retaliation.

I highly doubt it. Here are the facts from the viewpoint of Iran:

- The US and the UK overthrew the democratic iranian government of Mohammad Mosaddegh

- The US terminated the working nuclear deal.

- The US ambushed Iran twice in the midst of ongoing negotiations.

- Israel is on a conquest to annex new land and to rule over the middle east. At least that is likely there goal.

Iran clearly stated their demands. The US should pay up for the damage they caused and the US should give up its military bases in the Arab countries.

While the money will probably not be that big of a problem to negotiate, the military bases will be. At least Iran will insist on something substantive that guarantees that they are not ambushed a third time.


you also left out all of the now-burning Middle Eastern powers, all of whom also hate Iran, and who won't just go away.

The US can take their ball and go home to a different hemisphere, but ME violence will continue.

IMO the real question is how long the Arabs will let Israel dictate their foreign policy via the US


- Israel killed Irans negotiations last year as well.

But from the non-Iranian point of view, those countries want those bases to protect them against Iran. So that's going to be problematic.

I mean, the US could unilaterally decide "no, we're not going to defend the Middle East anymore, good luck everybody" and leave. But it's not like the US is oppressing, say, Qatar by having a base there. They willingly let the US stay there.


> those countries want those bases to protect them against Iran.

As far as I know: Israel and Saudi Arabia want these bases. I do not know the current opinion of the other Arab countries.

> Qatar by having a base there. They willingly let the US stay there.

At least they are now noticing that there are risks in hosting the US military too.

> “One of the most significant outcomes of this war is the shattering of the concept of a regional security system in the Gulf region,” Mr. al-Ansari said. “The regional security framework in the Gulf was based on certain axioms. Many of these axioms have been bypassed in the current war.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/world/middleeast/qatar-us...


I don't look forward to corporations "automating" (unleashing) their "defenses" (hackbots) with AI, and ending up bricking random people's and businesses' phones and devices because they start hallucinating attacks.

Not sure if I agree that the only solution is to give up now; we need sensible people that know how the technology works in power and that are not beholden to serve big corporations, but rather the average person. We need less populist and long-drawn campaigns. We need less politicizing. And we need all of that yesterday.

> sensible people that know how the technology works in power

You had me right up until that sentence. Good one.


It is the fault of the coders, the salespeople who over-promised the capabilities of the system, the lawmakers who have not regulated or demanded a minimum percentage of accuracy from those products, the AI' company's onboarding trainers, the cops that were trained to use the software, the jailers, and maybe other related positions that should've taken a better interest in making a better system, not a more cruel one

Which means that, if the cops (and other relevant personnel) gets it wrong, they should get served with the same injustices that they committed, no questions asked... you know, because they didn't raise any when they were the ones dishing out punishments.

Edit: wording, formatting


>if the cops (and other relevant personnel) gets it wrong, they should get served with the same injustices that they committed

What if no one would want to work as a policemen and you end up alone against local gang?


> What if no one would want to work as a policemen

This is by far the worst argument. What if we held doctors accountable for malpractice and no one wanted to be a doctor? What if we held engineers liable for faulty designs that break and kill people and no one wanted to be an engineer? What if we held OCCUPATION accountable for DOING JOB BADLY / BREAKING THE LAW? Its a nonsense argument.

What would happen is that only the people that intended to be bad police would not want to the job and/or the people that were bad police (intentional or otherwise) get kicked out of the police force. Same as with every other profession. This is a fantastic outcome and we should do it immediately.


That's a straw-man argument

What if the police force is the local gang?

There are plenty of westerns about it

And tied to inflation (or to a % of gross income), too, otherwise it'll be cheaper in X years to get fined than to hire information security officers

> The ~foo as backup convention is not part of any standard. > [...] > It's the second thing I fix in either Vim or Emacs: Put backup files in a central location. (The first is proper indentation/spacing rules.)

Perhaps not a standard, but you yourself admit it's the default behavior.

Though I agree that the simple mechanism acts ... er,... simply, shouldn't it be at the very least aware of the default behavior of common editors?


They will be able to do banking at least once the legislators tear down the walled gardens in a sensible way. Are the security benefits from the Appstore/Playstore real or security theatre?

I'm pretty sure that, if there are security benefits, they have been artificially tied to the use of the company's distribution method, that coincidentally really needs to be sending usage statistics, monitoring, etc. Surely there exist no conflicts of interest to be found.


fifteen years ago I use to do mobile pentests for banks and when we could not find anything significant for the reports we could’ve always count on “lack of rooting detection” and pin the risk on some vague mobile banking malware threat pushed by marketing. I am sorry I contributed to this nonsense.

100% security theater, and here we are.


It's understandable; I would maybe expect to undergo an extra step in verification for a sensitive app like, "we noticed this is the first time you are using this system that is not locked down; please type in the token we have mailed you".

But locking users out (which may not directly be the bank's fault for relying on OS's security APIs) seems anti-competitive.


Would you bet your company on that happening soon? :)


Ha! Well, not right now! Previous to the last year or so, this wouldn't have escalated to the current situation where we're actively having to be wary of fending off Big Brother or blatant power grabs.

However, given that we're talking about a European phone, I'm willing to bet that this type of effort goes hand in hand with decoupling from American-backed services (at least for those who've seen the writing on the wall and understand the risk to their sovereignty if they put all their eggs on an American basket).


A similar question could be asked of the banks too.


Common sense and decency has departed the world's economic and legal systems for a while, huh?

It now seems to be a "how evil can I be without it affecting our bottom line?" system.


It's all just games, they just want to win. Dollars are the overall points, but they're even willing to sacrifice some of those to win bigger cases more brutally.


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