Facebook...er, Meta Hatred

[WolfEyes]

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid can't do that.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Doesn't everyone do "reload in 10" before committing the final changes to any router update? That way if you get locked out it'll reset to the last saved configuration if something goes wrong. Or are they using some adhoc Facebook brand routers that don't run IOS?

 

[Caete]

All joking aside, Facebook has a lot of enemies... that's why I was quick to assume someone would attack them.

Not all of their enemies are on the outside.

There's a lot more to this than they are admitting to. If your local building security access system is not capable of working in standalone, you've got a lot more issues lurking to strike.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Based on my own experience with card locks and dodgy networking, the locks probably cache recent cards so people who've been checked in recently can still get in when it's offline. But the key network operations guys probably visit the computer center physically maybe never times in their period of employment.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Yeah, that's what I don't get. Facebook should be better than this. I have to go throgh a rediculous multilevel approval process with a detailed MOP and blackout procedure to do the most mundane and nothing level tasks. If it's anything major you get calls going with important parties and you do it from 2AM-5AM.

Granted Facebook is more global, so they don't really have an overnight time. But seriously, how did someone or some comitee fuck up so bad.

(Granted my company probably runs like half the "tubes" of the internet or more so a fuck up could be worse than just FB, but FB is still pretty huge.)

Right. My stuff isn't internet based, but when I push a change to production, it goes through approvals and testing. Obviously, not every minor bug is caught in testing, but we'd know if it just flat crashes...

 

[Romana]

Yeah, that's what I don't get. Facebook should be better than this. I have to go throgh a rediculous multilevel approval process with a detailed MOP and blackout procedure to do the most mundane and nothing level tasks. If it's anything major you get calls going with important parties and you do it from 2AM-5AM.

Granted Facebook is more global, so they don't really have an overnight time. But seriously, how did someone or some comitee fuck up so bad.

(Granted my company probably runs like half the "tubes" of the internet or more so a fuck up could be worse than just FB, but FB is still pretty huge.)

The more cynical view on Twitter is that they shut down to purge incriminating documents after the whistleblower interview. I'm not sure how this would involve the whole service going down, especially when it means the employees couldn't get into the building.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

I didn't even notice it was down until I went to poke my niece about her pattern

 

[WolfEyes]

Facebook’s Apps Went Down. The World Saw How Much It Runs on Them. (msn.com)

Or why I don't use any social medias.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Facebook’s Apps Went Down. The World Saw How Much It Runs on Them. (msn.com)

Or why I don't use any social medias.

cough, VVO, cough

 

[WolfEyes]

cough, VVO, cough

I figured you'd say that. VVO is not FB, Instragram, What'sApp, MySpace or any of those. It's a forum. I don't have any RL friends or family here. Granted VVO has some of the aspects of social media but SLU did not. Generally a forum is categorized by topics, people follow the topics that they are interested in and create threads of discussions. In a forum there was no concept of followers and followings prior to programmers succumbing to whatever idiots thought it would be a good idea to add social media features to forums.

Social media has the concept of followers and followings and friends, this is the foundation of it. Discussion is the foundation of a forum.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Social media has the concept of followers and followings and friends, this is the foundation of it. Discussion is the foundation of a forum.

So reddit or youtube are not social media by your definition? You pick the discussion channels you like or you can like a creator but there are no friends lists or any way for someone to follow me as a non creator.

 

[Free]

cough, VVO, cough

We're not social.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

I figured you'd say that. VVO is not FB, Instragram, What'sApp, MySpace or any of those. It's a forum. I don't have any RL friends or family here. Granted VVO has some of the aspects of social media but SLU did not. Generally a forum is categorized by topics, people follow the topics that they are interested in and create threads of discussions. In a forum there was no concept of followers and followings prior to programmers succumbing to whatever idiots thought it would be a good idea to add social media features to forums.

Social media has the concept of followers and followings and friends, this is the foundation of it. Discussion is the foundation of a forum.

I think message boards qualify as social media but absolutely see your point. They are different... A lot of the psychological problems people have with social media are because of how they make some people compare themselves to others and anonymous message boards aren't quite like that. Forums can still be quite toxic in their own ways, but it's an apples to oranges comparison. ...both fruit, but different fruit.

 

[WolfEyes]

So reddit or youtube are not social media by your definition? You pick the discussion channels you like or you can like a creator but there are no friends lists or any way for someone to follow me as a non creator.

I wouldn't call YouTube social media, no. It focuses on videos, not discussions. Reddit isn't centralized like a forum is. There are people who follow others and they don't have channels or whatever they call them. You don't have to create one to have followers or chat or post. Reddit is not a forum.

Let me put it this way, I post on forums, not social media. You won't find me on FB, Reddit, Instagram, or any of those. The only places you might find me are forums like VVO/SLU.

 

[Free]

 

[Caete]

Oh Facebook, just how inept is your IT staff?
I mean you're pushing the narrative of "Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication," Facebook's vice president of engineering and infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said in a blog post. "This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt."

Yet

"According to Santosh Janardhan, the company's vice president of infrastructure, the outage started with what should have been routine maintenance. At some point yesterday, a command was issued that was supposed to assess the availability of the backbone network that connects all of Facebook’s disparate computing facilities. Instead, the order unintentionally took those connections down. Janardhan says a bug in the company’s internal audit system did not properly prevent the command from executing. "

Think about that. Either someone used a normal command that somehow went from a "hey are you there?" query to a "hey, turn yourself off". If the command was entered normally, the "audit system" would have said valid command, go ahead. Perhaps there was a wrong qualifier used, or maybe Janardhan thought having the system reply "ARE YOU SURE? Y N was strong enough measures...

But that opens up how does an availability query make router config changes? Please Janardhan, explain that to me. Nothing adds up to me.

"...the company had to physically send personnel to its data centers, a task that was complicated by the physical safeguards it had in place at those locations.
“They’re hard to get into, and once you’re inside, the hardware and routers are designed to be difficult to modify even when you have physical access to them,” according to Janardhan."

All the data centers I have been in are indeed well protected to physically access but once I was in the dc itself, it was not that much of an issue to access nor modify any of the routers, switches provided I had the login details. Often I had a network admin on the phone as I doing so. For stores I had to have my laptop to connect with but the dc, most of those had a monitor/keyboard/mouse in each rack so you could just select which box in the rack you wanted to access.

https://www.engadget.com/facebook-outage-explainer-193155776.html

Speaking of access

In late September 2021, a user of a known hacker forum posted an announcement claiming to possess the personal data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users.

Actually is checking out as a true claim and unrelated to an earlier 2021 leak that was 500 million users.

Data of Over 1.5 Billion Facebook Users Sold on Hacker Forum

 

[Essence Lumin]

On an unrelated note, doing a search on VVO for Facebook and checking Search Titles Only does not come up with this thread which must be some sort of bug.

 

[Free]

On an unrelated note, doing a search on VVO for Facebook and checking Search Titles Only does not come up with this thread which must be some sort of bug.

It's the first result (making it the last result on the second page).

 

[Essence Lumin]

It's the first result (making it the last result on the second page).

I stand corrected. Ugh, it should put results in order of last post, not thread created date imo, but yes it's there.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Not too dissimilar from the oil and tobacco industries, Facebook had done internal studies revealing that its product had become a toxic radicalization pipeline but they chose to quash and ignore the results rather than risk making changes that would impact their bottom line.

Facebook knew its recommendation algorithm was a problem, so it set up a study to test out just how bad the problem was.

In the study, entitled “Carol’s Journey to QAnon—A Test User Study of Misinfo & Polarization Risks Encountered through Recommendation Systems,” Facebook set up some brand-new accounts.

Each of these accounts followed a small number of high-quality or verified conservative-interest pages, such as Fox News, former President Donald Trump, and former first lady Melania Trump. The study found that “within just one day, Page recommendations had already devolved toward polarizing content.”

Within two days, recommendations began to include conspiracy content. “It took less than 1 week to get a QAnon recommendation,” the report found.

For years, Facebook ignored the warnings of extremism researchers who flagged the potential threat posed by the rise of QAnon on mainstream platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

This escalated in 2020, as the pandemic saw a rapid uptick in the number of people being radicalized into QAnon conspiracies through Facebook. Yet Facebook only acted when it was too late, and in some cases it even reversed decisions that had helped limit the spread of QAnon.

According to Haugen’s complaint, Facebook knew its ability to connect people in huge numbers via its Groups was facilitating the rise of QAnon.

“The QAnon community relied on minimally connected bulk group invites. One member sent over 377,000 group invites in less than 5 months,” according to an internal Facebook report entitled “Harmful Non-Violating Narratives.”

The report’s author noted that Facebook’s own engineers had found ways to slow this growth. One way was by limiting the number of invites a user could send out in a single day to 100, a measure introduced ahead of the U.S. election in October 2020.

“[However] we have rolled back the pre-election rate limit of 100 Group invites/day due to it having significant regression on Group growth,” the report stated.