I think about this a lot, both in IT and civil infrastructure. It looks so trivial to “fix” from the outside. In fact, it is incredibly draining to do the entirely crushing work of real policy changes internally. It’s harder than drafting a blank page of how the world should be.

Facebook may well be exceptionally nasty and it’s leadership particularly deceitful, but the whole enterprise is the natural conclusion to an ad-powered social network. Ever greater surveillance, hyper targeting, and engagement baiting is what the basic incentives demand.

Facebook cannot change course. The best they can do is keep dishing out empty apologies, commit to inconsequential adjustments to its algorithms, and spend more money on positive PR and negative projection. The rot is at the core of its very being.

This is why we, consumers and citizens, must make the change for Facebook. Antitrust forcing a breakup of the business, and consumer revolt driving #DeleteFacebook. Zuckerberg will never conclude that what he built has become such a net negative for the world on his own.

That’s why its so tragic that WhatsApp sold out to Facebook in particular. Finally a challenger that had a different model and different ethics. But few would say no to $19B, which is why we need antitrust enforcers to do it for them.

It is 2018 and this error message is a mistake from 1974.
This limitation, which is still found in the very latest Windows 10, dates back to BEFORE STAR WARS. This bug is as old as Watergate.

When this was developed, nothing had UPC codes yet because they'd just been invented.
Back when this mistake was made, There was only one Phone Company, because they hadn't been broken up yet. Ted Bundy was still on the loose. Babe Ruth's home run record was about to fall.

When this bug was developed, Wheel of Fortune hadn't yet aired. No one had seen Rocky Horror. Steven Spielberg was still a little-known directory of TV films and one box-office disappointment. SNL hadn't aired yet. The Edmund Fitzgerald was still hauling iron ore.

WHEN THIS STUPID MISFEATURE WAS INVENTED, THE GODFATHER PART II HAD JUST OPENED IN THEATERS.

So, why does this happen? So Unix (which was only 5 years old at this point) had the good idea of "everything is a file" which mean you could do things like write to sockets, pipes, the console, etc with the same commands and instructions.

I went looking for a remote-controlled power switch (the wireless christmas kind, not the modern IoT kind) and didn't find it, but I did find this thing I bought just to figure out why it exists.
It's a timer outlet, but you program it from your phone... but it's not wireless.

Yeah instead it plugs into your phone's HEADPHONE PORT

I got it on sale.
probably because iphone dropped the headphone port and they had to get with the 21st century and make it bluetooth

So inside the box is the device. it's got a little 2-prong polarized outlet with no ground.

on top is the only controls: on/off/timer.

When you complain about an open source project's management you'll get the reply, "Use something else if you don't like it!" That'd be true except for the tiny problem that *many* projects also strive for complete monopolistic dominance.

Let me tell you about Java in early 2k:

I was programming in Java since it's release, and all through the late 90s into the early 2000s. At first Java was very determined to unseat C++ and it used various propaganda tactics to turn C++ and malloc into a weird enemy for all of us to hate. This worked great!

Everything was fine though because there were plenty of jobs in tech because of the dot-com boom, and then suddenly there were not jobs because of the dot-com bomb.

Overnight it seemed as if the *only* way to get a job was at giant companies, and they *loved* Enterprise Java.

Now, this is the golden ticket for many open source projects and corporations. They all want to be the top dog #1 in the industry for their particular use, and once they gain that position they become abusive by ignoring user needs and extracting wealth from them.

With Java the dominance was so insane that *every* language had to copy Java's weirdness to survive. If you wonder why a language has some odd CamelCase things it's because early Python, Ruby, and others had to copy Java's semantics and style to even be considered "serious".