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https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18203551/apple-facebook-blocked-internal-ios-apps
Apple has shut down Facebook’s ability to distribute internal iOS apps, from early releases of the Facebook app to basic tools like a lunch menu. A person familiar with the situation tells The Verge that early versions of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and other pre-release “dogfood” (beta) apps have stopped working, as have other employee apps, like one for transportation. Facebook is treating this as a critical problem internally, we’re told, as the affected apps simply don’t launch on employees’ phones anymore.

The shutdown comes in response to news that Facebook has been using Apple’s program for internal app distribution to track teenage customers with a “research” app.

That app, revealed yesterday by TechCrunch, was distributed outside of the App Store using Apple’s enterprise program, which allows developers to use special certificates to install more powerful apps onto iPhones. Those apps are only supposed to be used by a company’s employees, however, and Facebook had been distributing its tracking app to customers. Facebook later said it would shut down the app.

This poses a huge issue for Facebook. While Apple provides other tools a company can use to install apps internally, Apple’s enterprise program is the main solution for widely distributing internal apps and services. In an email, a Facebook spokesperson said “I can confirm that this affects our internal apps.”

In a statement given to Recode, Apple said that Facebook was in “clear breach of their agreement with Apple.” Any developer that breaches that agreement, Apple said, has their distribution certificates revoked, “which is what we did in this case to protect our users and their data.” Apple declined to comment on shutting down all of Facebook’s internal apps in an email to The Verge.

Revoking a certificate not only stops apps from being distributed on iOS, but it also stops apps from working. And because internal apps by the same organization or developer may be connected to a single certificate, it can lead to immense headaches like the one Facebook now finds itself in where a multitude of internal apps have been shut down.

Apple and Facebook have already been bickering over privacy, but this is the first instance of Apple taking an action that directly shuts down some of Facebook’s activities. Last March, Apple CEO Tim Cook criticized Facebook’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica data sharing scandal, saying, “I wouldn’t be in this situation” if he were running the company. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg later said the comments were “extremely glib” and spoke of Apple as a company that “work hard to charge you more.”
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Rei is shit said:
Like forcing zukerberg to take the wall down from his property in Hawaii?
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CharlesBarkley said:
Honestly, instead of the whole fine thing, maybe just punish Zuckerberg by having him zip tied to a jail door, stripped naked, lubed up and then get Jerry Sandusky drunk to wander in and have free reign of his holes for like, two hours.

I mean, that would scare big tech way more. You know Jack Dorsey would snap out of all that faux-vegan aloof hipster shit asap.
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I get that Zuckerberg's an easy scapegoat because of how obviously he is a human suit controlled by our alien overlords, but you guys realize the rot in facebook goes way deeper than just him, right? Any proper disciplinary action against facebook would necessarily take out the top 2-3 layers of the org chart.
 
I really can't see 5 billion as trivial. I know you guys want to see Zuckerberg publicly disemboweled but this seems like more than a slap on the wrist to me.
 
Absolutego said:
I get that Zuckerberg's an easy scapegoat because of how obviously he is a human suit controlled by our alien overlords, but you guys realize the rot in facebook goes way deeper than just him, right? Any proper disciplinary action against facebook would necessarily take out the top 2-3 layers of the org chart.
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I was listening to a Dave Rubin live show recently where he had several people onstage to discuss the problem with Big Tech suppressing free expression. One of his guests, I forget the name, was a mid-level Facebook guy who joined in 2012 (not sure if he still works there). His spiel was that when he joined the company zeitgeist was a lot more liberal (in the real meaning of the word) in allowing dissenting opinion. Upper management, including Zuck, has their town halls every Friday to talk about the company and industry issues and so on and employees can ask Zuckerberg and whoever else on stage any questions they like. Come 2016, a lot of the questions became about things like "Peter Thiel is on our board of directors and he publicly supports Trump's candidacy. Why are we okay with this?" With the clear intent that anyone against the mob's values must be purged. Initially management started getting confused about how to respond to this weird turn in attitude from its employees.

That's his story. Call him a liar if you like, but it sounded very interesting to me. It made me wonder if the progressive boot on all of our necks was a little more driven by a mob of "peasants" (silicon valley workers, each of whom is still relative privileged nobility compared to true poor and marginalized people in America) in the valley and is silicon valley management's attitude more about pleasing their baby employees than we assume. I would still say it ultimately began with the leadership because they promoted an atmosphere of turning their workplaces into hedonistic daycares (to lure in the best of the best, how capitalist of them) but I found it to be a curious and challenging idea.
 
Alec Benson Leary said:
I was listening to a Dave Rubin live show recently where he had several people onstage to discuss the problem with Big Tech suppressing free expression. One of his guests, I forget the name, was a mid-level Facebook guy who joined in 2012 (not sure if he still works there). His spiel was that when he joined the company zeitgeist was a lot more liberal (in the real meaning of the word) in allowing dissenting opinion. Upper management, including Zuck, has their town halls every Friday to talk about the company and industry issues and so on and employees can ask Zuckerberg and whoever else on stage any questions they like. Come 2016, a lot of the questions became about things like "Peter Thiel is on our board of directors and he publicly supports Trump's candidacy. Why are we okay with this?" With the clear intent that anyone against the mob's values must be purged. Initially management started getting confused about how to respond to this weird turn in attitude from its employees.

That's his story. Call him a liar if you like, but it sounded very interesting to me. It made me wonder if the progressive boot on all of our necks was a little more driven by a mob of "peasants" (silicon valley workers, each of whom is still relative privileged nobility compared to true poor and marginalized people in America) in the valley and is silicon valley management's attitude more about pleasing their baby employees than we assume. I would still say it ultimately began with the leadership because they promoted an atmosphere of turning their workplaces into hedonistic daycares (to lure in the best of the best, how capitalist of them) but I found it to be a curious and challenging idea.
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I know it's the hot-button issue du jour, but when I refer to the rot within facebook it's much less the censoring of conservatives and much more the general fleecing of everyone's data for advertisers and willingness to open backdoors to various governments for more spyware. You know, the stuff that affects everybody, not just one wing of a political slapfight.
 
Alec Benson Leary said:
I was listening to a Dave Rubin live show recently where he had several people onstage to discuss the problem with Big Tech suppressing free expression. One of his guests, I forget the name, was a mid-level Facebook guy who joined in 2012 (not sure if he still works there). His spiel was that when he joined the company zeitgeist was a lot more liberal (in the real meaning of the word) in allowing dissenting opinion. Upper management, including Zuck, has their town halls every Friday to talk about the company and industry issues and so on and employees can ask Zuckerberg and whoever else on stage any questions they like. Come 2016, a lot of the questions became about things like "Peter Thiel is on our board of directors and he publicly supports Trump's candidacy. Why are we okay with this?" With the clear intent that anyone against the mob's values must be purged. Initially management started getting confused about how to respond to this weird turn in attitude from its employees.

That's his story. Call him a liar if you like, but it sounded very interesting to me. It made me wonder if the progressive boot on all of our necks was a little more driven by a mob of "peasants" (silicon valley workers, each of whom is still relative privileged nobility compared to true poor and marginalized people in America) in the valley and is silicon valley management's attitude more about pleasing their baby employees than we assume. I would still say it ultimately began with the leadership because they promoted an atmosphere of turning their workplaces into hedonistic daycares (to lure in the best of the best, how capitalist of them) but I found it to be a curious and challenging idea.
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That sounds very plausible given the current state of the millennial code monkey.
 
Absolutego said:
I know it's the hot-button issue du jour, but when I refer to the rot within facebook it's much less the censoring of conservatives and much more the general fleecing of everyone's data for advertisers and willingness to open backdoors to various governments for more spyware. You know, the stuff that affects everybody, not just one wing of a political slapfight.
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You are very correct. I think that issue is going to surface in a very ugly way that should make us reconsider why we didn't admit "we're all in this together" before it got really fucked up.
 
Does Facebook have a horrible amount of tards on it? Someone tried to Zucc me then brought in an alt account an the idiot forgot to switch while giving themselves support.
 

Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors ​


China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social media censors?

There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’ ”

The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it.

When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.”

Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies.

To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: “They take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.”

Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.”

It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”

I won’t share the names of the Facebook employees in question. The point isn’t to spotlight individuals, but to show how foreign nationals from a state that still bans Facebook have their hands on the levers of social media censorship here in America.

The Hate-Speech Engineering team’s staff includes a research scientist based at the Seattle office who earned his master’s degree in computer engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Another member of the team, a software engineer for machine learning based in Seattle, earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Jilin University in northeast China. Still another, an engineering manager, earned his bachelor’s in computer science at Nanjing University in eastern China.

Another software engineer previously worked for the Communist-backed conglomerate Huawei, as well as the Beijing National Railway & Design Institute of Signal and Communication. I reached out to all six employees; two replied to confirm that they are Chinese nationals but refused to comment further; the rest didn’t reply.

Plenty of Big Tech firms, of course, recruit their foreign specialists from China, India and elsewhere, and many of these workers hope to resettle in the United States permanently and share the American Dream.

But some may not, and the trouble is that the society they might return to already deploys one of the most comprehensive and fine-tuned intellectual control mechanisms on its own population. What’s to stop Facebook’s Chinese engineers from delivering their Facebook expertise to Xi Jinping? Globalists thought that engaging with China would make that country more open; I fear it’s making us more restrictive.

A Facebook spokesperson denied that these employees influence broader policies. “We are a stronger company because our employees come from all over the world. Our standards and policies are public, including about our third-party fact-checking program, and designed to apply equally to content across the political spectrum. With over 35,000 people working on safety and security issues at Facebook, the insinuation that these employees have an outsized influence on our broader policies or technology is absurd.”

Yet, as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) put it in an email to me, these revelations are yet “another indication that Big Tech is no longer deserving” of statutory protections that render it immune to a publisher’s liabilities. Big Tech critic Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), meanwhile, said “this is all the more reason for the Senate to demand that Mark Zuckerberg — under oath and before the election — give an account of what Facebook has been up to.”
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Facebook keep digging their own grave. They'll ban users who tell a Sailor Moon joke. The sooner then Facebook became relevant as MySpace, the better.
 
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