The utterly bizarre world of Facebook

I doubt their can ever be an "unbreakable" cypher. It is more like an arms race. If you walk around some parts of London it is clear from the smell alone that few people obey drugs laws. Meanwhile, Public Houses, in which alcohol use can be monitored and controlled, and illegal drug use banned, are closing down at an increasing rate due to high rents, taxes and duty, to leave people drinking supermarket-bought cans on street corners. Is there any sense or logic to this policy decision?

Anyway, back to the subject. I read this this morning: "London based blogger with almost 50,000 friends." I wonder how he manages to keep and to say hello to that many friends? Or, even to remember all their names? I'm terrible at remembering names, so 50,000 is very impressive, and just to say "hello, how are you today," to them all would, I calculate, take him almost 3 days (at 5 seconds per friend.) ;) That would be 6 days, if he bothered to listen to a response.
 
The issue isn't so much whether a cypher can be broken or not, but whether it can be broken within a useful time period using a feasible amount of resources.

So devoting Earth's whole economy to providing sufficient computing power to break a code in no more than a million years isn't much use to anyone, for anything -- until and unless we can make ourselves immortal and independent of the need for a productive civilisation -- and particularly not when the aim is to discover information about a forthcoming attack (terrorist or otherwise).
 
I don't understand why many people even use the word "Friends" especially in situations like the example Dave gives.

On my FB Account I have 33 "Friends" to many people who appear to believe its quantity not quality, that makes me look like I am practically a friendless loner. For a short period I did have nearly 50.

For me, if someone never responds to your posts, and never replies to private messages you send on fb - once the non reply goes beyond a reasonable excuse of "I was busy/ill/family member ill/kidnapped by the CIA" then I just delete them, as I dont actually see the point of having people on my FB who I don't want to talk to, and who don't want to talk to me, basically I ensure that the people on my FB are actual "Friends" not random strangers helping to make you look popular.

It is amazing how important FB can become to some people, or rather, I suspect, the easy way to spy it provides o_O My ex Fiance for example, we split up in July 2010, so over 5 years ago, and yet she constantly sends me FB Friend requests, and every so often a message asking why I haven't accepted her friend request. It baffles me why she is so determined, all I can think is she must be desperate to spy on me, and perhaps to compare the occasional special ladies in my life against herself. It's not anything like she actually wants me back - she is very outspoken/confident and knows full well that I am less confident, and am no good at noticing subtle hints, we were together for over 5 years, so she knows subtlety is a waste of time, if she wanted me back, she would outright message me and say it. I know enough about the couple of guys that replaced me and what happened that I wouldn't be surprised if whilst she does not want me back, she misses the way I treated her, how I saw her and what I was too her, so wants to maintain a friendship cos of that, until she gets a guy the same in her life if that makes sense. I pretty much treated her like a Princess, I adored and worshipped the ground she walked on, and as well as lover, partner, best friend, I was also her PA, Chef, Concierge, Butler, Cleaner, Protector, Defender and anything else that was needed:lol:

I know she struggled keeping a job down after me, cos my replacements werent prepared to go to all the hassle I went to - like she sleeps through alarms, so even when I was working nights, and she was working days, I would stay up after arriving home to ensure she would be up in time for work, and have breakfast waiting. When she too was working nights, but 8:30pm - 08:30am whilst I was working 10:00pm-06:00am I would stay up waiting for her to get home, then remain up most of the morning, putting her uniform in the wash, drying it etc, (she worked in a care home, so was vital to deep clean uniform every day giving the crap that would get spilt (literally) then despite struggling to sleep in the day, I would get up at 6pm to make her tea, get her up, and into taxi etc. Which left me a total zombie, esp as working 5 nights a week, every week was causing problems with my diabetes. And I suspect very few guys would go to all that hassle like I did - I even had my GP begging me to quit saying the job was killing me, but even though I was just the Systems Administrator at work, on the night shift, I was taking home £280 a week, after tax, and so was able to keep her in a decent lifestyle, we had a nice house, she could go have nights out with her work mates, and she didn't need to work as many hours.

For me though, without any children requiring me and an ex keeping in touch and civil, being "friends" just isn't workable, it's too painful.

Most of my FB Friends are people I have met online, some I have known for 15 years! Some from an old Yahoo chat room that had a really great and tight community, others from a Dr Who fan forum. One thing that has amazed over the years from getting to know people online is just how varied Dr Who fans for example can be - I have a friend, Murielle, who is French, she is 54 years old (but looks nearly 20 years younger) and a massive Dr Who fan - never imagined the variety of fandom, as till that point, most Fans I knew were guys around my age or younger. Though as I am 38 this year, I am starting to feel old :devilish: And I know them all well enough, that if I see an article or a meme, I can think oh, so and so would love this, and post it, tagging them, those 33 people aren't just names that occassionaly click "like" or whatever :D
 
My recent FB post had a reach of "1" - like reading out loud to the bathroom mirror.

When VR-enhanced FB is launched I will probably be able to pay to interact with a gazillion imaginary friends who have read my missives. Pay extra and they will even buy a book. Haha. /sarc
 
Meanwhile even the police have warned people NOT to use the "react" button on Facebook, or on other sites linking it to Facebook.
It turns out that "trending" items, politics, included are decided by human Facebook employed editors and not an automatic algorithm. But then they have an an agenda to push and money to make purely from exploiting people to sell advertising.

I always thought NWO conspiracies were nuts, delusional. But "New Tech" / Silicon Valley, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Tencent (as big as Facebook!), Uber, Air BNB etc have me worried. How much power and wealth do some of those have compared to the average nation state?
 
The biggest thieves at the moment are YouTube and Facebook. YouTube has a billion users, half of whom access it via mobile devices. The average time spent on the site is 40 minutes. Facebook now claims to have 1.65 billion monthly active users, who spend on average 50 minutes a day on its services. So if Google is an 800lb gorilla, Facebook is a megaton King Kong.
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That underestimates Googles reach and control and overstates Facebook. Chinese Tencent (various services) is nearly as big as Facebook.

Here is the news – but only if Facebook thinks you need to know | John Naughton

In doing so, they have entered into a truly Faustian bargain. Because while publishers can without difficulty ship their stuff to Instant Articles, they cannot control which ones Facebook users actually get to see. This is because users’ news feeds are determined by Facebook’s machine-learning algorithms that try to guess what each user would like to see (and what might dispose them to click on an advertisement). So once the content disappears into Facebook’s algorithmic maw it becomes mere fodder for its calculations.
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Actually Facebook Employees ultimately decide. Not neutral algorithms.

Google [owns Youtube] and Facebook are a threat to democracy and western Civilisation.
 
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Deep Space Nina said:
"We already know that. It's on facebook."
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That's why I hate it so much. There's no point in having face to face conversations any more. Whatever you have to say is already old news by the time you talk to anyone.

Everyone I know has their face glued to a phone all the time - endlessly wittering on about every minute aspect of their lives.

And when did food taste any better because you photographed it first - and who the hell's business IS it what you eat unless they cooked it for you or are sharing it?

There's more to life that that.
 
JunkMonkey said:
I live in the Highlands of Scotland
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If I was visiting the Western Isles or Highlands, which I would love to do, I'd have my phone off in a sealed waterproof bag.

Best I've managed was staying in Comrie, maybe for a week in 1967 or so.

Even in Film Era, I dramatically cut down on my SLR photography as it was getting in the way of actually being with the family and experiencing the location. Even with Photography, unless it's the day job there needs to be a balance.
 
I have no trubble here wit conspiracies, and it looks like the little tele-brain-substitute boxes may be the best mindcontrol devices ever. Obey your phone, or everyone will know and you can be located and disappear.. and on facerbook people will laugh and say somethin g like: "He didn't trust his programmers' and you can go to the part of the city where non-entities go to search dumpsters forever, and listen to a Sony Walkman like a primitive creature, and that's all you get.
 
Facebook can be hard to avoid. But with that said, it's really not that bad. I particularly enjoy the ability to see photos and activities of my family members and good friends. Many of whom don't live near me.
 
I got pushed into Facebook by my Ex "Author Marketing Success" Coach who insisted it was the best way to promote myself and my yet-to-be-published books. She wanted me to click-click-click friend request with wild abandon to build up my NUMBERS into the THOUSANDS. She wanted me to party crash FB niche interest groups and discussion threads and click-click friend request the members. She wanted me to stalk the lists of my newly-made friends' friend lists and click-click friend request those smiling faces. I dug in my heels. I said NO. I refused to be a cyber stalker, a creepy spammer, or just plain obnoxious. Let's just say that she and I parted company on fairly bad terms.

To this day, I'll only send a friend request to a human being that I have associated with in real life. It's a handy way to communicate with my costume club, or fellow writers, or coordinate family members for an event, etc. Whether or not it helps promote my author brand, I really don't care. I gotta be real.
 
Denise Tanaka said:
She wanted me to click-click-click friend request with wild abandon to build up my NUMBERS into the THOUSANDS. She wanted me to party crash FB niche interest groups and discussion threads and click-click friend request the members. She wanted me to stalk the lists of my newly-made friends' friend lists and click-click friend request those smiling faces. I dug in my heels. I said NO. I refused to be a cyber-stalker, a creepy spammer, or just plain obnoxious. Let's just say that she and I parted company on fairly bad terms.
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Off Topic . About self-promotion --- I regularly post my cartoons on my Flickrstream It started out as a joke after I noticed that a strip called 'Boobs' was always my highest in page views. (It's Here and Perfectly Safe For Work). I now regularly add tags like "No Boobs" and "Honest! No Boobs" to every strip. I'll get a couple of hundred hits over the first couple of days. As an experiment the other day I put up a drawing without mentioning boobs at all in the tags. 9 people looked at it.

Draw your own conclusions.

I'm off to draw some boobs.
 
All accounts I've heard suggest Facebook (and most hitech companies) make Dilbert's company seem sane. Sweatshops that regard workers, especially designers and engineers as disposable resource to use up. Ten to fourteen hours a day, no pay for overtime, weekend work, expected to answer email at home or travel anywhere on short notice.
There are Hi Tech companies that even are prepared to pay young women to freeze their eggs and delay motherhood till late thirties (when they or men will be burnt out anyway.).
I've worked for a couple of such companies and have friends that have suffered in others.

The human cost of the fact that Facebook has humans, not algorithms decide what you see:
Female Facebook employee condemns the company's 'destructive sexism'
 
I still dont use facebook and plan to never use it. I like privacy, disaprove of their (lack of) morality and ethics, and dont like the voyeuristic nature of it all.
 
There was a cartoon in a mag a few yrs. back; a guy was sitting out on his lawn as traffic went by, and he had a big sign up on the lawn with his name, musical preferences and a list of friends.
 
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