Facebook isn’t so much about status updates anymore

Chances are your Facebook News Feed is an endless collection of live video, memes, web links and other shared content. Remember when the social network was a place where people posted status updates? According to a report from The Information, the amount of personal sharing on Facebook is in decline. Between the middle of 2014 and halfway through 2015, overall sharing on the social channel dropped 5.5 percent and those personal updates saw a 21 percent drop. When we say personal updates, we’re talking about things like random thoughts, daily activities and other stuff about life in general. The amount of personal posts has continued to decline into 2016 too, falling 15 percent according to the report.

The Information also reports that Facebook has a dedicated team working on ways to increase those personal shares. That includes boosting the position of a friend’s status update in your News Feed. Facebook is constantly making changes to the News Feed with things like prioritizing live video, stories based on interaction and testing multiple topic-based feeds. As you might expect, the folks in Menlo Park are downplaying the numbers, saying that overall sharing remains at similar rates to previous years.

There a lot of other social networks now than there were when Facebook arrived. Twitter, for example, is not only a place to share web links and meme GIFs, but it offers another channel to provide updates about what’s going on during the day. It’s a constant stream of quips about life, news and more. Of course, this reported decline doesn’t mean the end for Facebook. It continues to grow and add new users. However, it will be interesting to see how usage patterns continue to change, specifically if the company can discover how to get folks to get personal once more.

Via: The Verge

Source: The Information

Senate Draft Encryption Bill Called ‘Absurd,’ ‘Dangerous,’ and Technically Inept

A draft of an encryption bill created by Senate Intelligence Committee leaders Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein was released last night, revealing the scope of the legislation that would require technology companies to decrypt data and share it in an “intelligible format” when served with a legal order.

The Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016, a copy of which was shared by Re/code, starts out by declaring “no person or entity is above the law.” It says that all providers of communication services and products, from hardware to software, must both protect the privacy of residents of the United States through “implementation of appropriate data security,” while still respecting the “rule of law” and complying with legal requirements and court orders to provide information stored either on devices or remotely.

To uphold both the rule of law and protect the interests and security of the United States, all persons receiving an authorized judicial order for information or data must provide, in a timely manner, responsive, intelligible information or data, or appropriate technical assistance to obtain such information.

In acknowledgement of the disagreement between the FBI and Apple, the legislation does include a clause that prevents it from authorizing “any government officer to require or prohibit any specific design or operating system to be adopted by any covered entity,” and it shies away from specific technical demands, but the wording of the act itself, with no contingencies for inaccessible data, makes end-to-end encryption impossible. Any data encrypted by companies must also be able to be decrypted.

Security experts have heavily criticized the bill. Daniel Castro of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation told Re/code the bill “sets up a legal paradox” while the ACT/App Association said it amounts to a government-mandated back door. Security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski says the entire bill is dangerous, calling it “a hodgepodge of technical ineptitude combined with pockets of contradiction.”

The absurdity of this bill is beyond words. Due to the technical ineptitude of its authors, combined with a hunger for unconstitutional governmental powers, the end result is a very dangerous document that will weaken the security of America’s technology infrastructure. This will affect everything from the iPhone you hold in your pocket to how data is transmitted over the Internet, allowing the government to effectively break all electronic commerce and Internet security. This is bad legislation in every way, and it very subtly allows for unconstitutional government control of private industry.

In a report yesterday, Reuters said the White House has decided not to offer public support for the legislation, as “the administration remains deeply divided on the issue.” The bill is still in draft form, with the language subject to changes based on input from stakeholders. In a joint statement, Burr and Feinstein said they hope to have a final version completed soon.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

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