If you read all the IM's, carefully, and you know a bit of Facebook history, you should see that the targets Zuckerberg chose from which he stole the ideas he used for Facebook, like Greenspan, were the type of people who could easily be taken advantage of. He knew who he was dealing with. But there is no empathy.
In the IM's Zuckerberg goes so far as to tell Greenspan he considers him to be "like a friend" (see IM for exact wording). This is really sickening.
I thought the same thing. As you see him listing the logs of every Zuckerberg login to houseSYSTEM in the pdf you think "Geez, this is a bit much." And then you consider that sort of snooping is Facebook's core business. They love this sort of information and their engineers have zero conscience about working with it. In fact their logs are probably much more detailed (device, geolocation, etc.) The irony is incredible.
Tally up how many words you type into HN each day. Is it close to 3000?
I think he said at one point in the IM's to Zuckerberg Greenspan said that he writes stuff to vent. And Zuckerberg said he could understood the need for that, but kept such thoughts to himself. (See e.g. Greenspan's White Paper enronforkids.pdf)
Don't underestimate Iran. They aren't quite the US or Japan, but ahead of any middle eastern non Israel nation, probably ahead of India in many ways, and on par with Brazil or Spain or maybe Italy in terms of domestic engineering talent and ability.
On the other hand, they are not geniuses to solve the problems of internet security once and for all. All they might manage to do is stop free flow of information into and out of the country. The "Iron curtain" never helped anyone.
To use Huawei's equipment to achieve their national security needs is just naive. You might as well handover your country's internet infrastructure to China itself.
[EDIT: Added some links regarding Huawei (Whether the allegations are true or not, they are controversial and risky to trust):
DoD runs multiple separate versions of the Internet (I'd call them Internets vs. just a big intranet due to size and scope); NIPRnet for unclassified and SIPRnet for Secret are the two big ones. It's totally reasonable for Iran to do something at that level.
Huawei probably won't help the USG vs. Iran, so using Huawei for this is a better choice than using Cisco, actually.
I fear I was misunderstood. What made me laugh was the thought that the internet is a sort of wild west of ideologies and Iran, from what little I know, is a very tightly controlled ideological context. I did not even read the article. It's just the title that struck me as paradoxical. "Internet" == uncontrollable, Iran == tight control, "Internet" + Iran == WTF? Hope that makes sense.
I realise internet here probably just means a research network. I have tremendous respect for the Iranian people and certainly their computer professionals. From what little I've seen they are very bright. As for comparisons in terms of engineering talent I was thinking almost on par with Russia. If I'm way off the mark it just shows how little I know. Pay no mind.
It's only there to restrict people's access to uncensored information. Cyberattack etc is just an excuse to make people think it's something for their own good.
Since they can tightly control it and it is a national network, they will offer very fast speeds with attractive prices, the actual internet is terribly expensive and incredibly slow, then they'll slowly expand from there, similar to china, they will make their own versions of Twitter and Facebook and Gmail and offer those at very cheap prices with great speed.
Banks and all government organisations are soon going to require people to use a 'national email'. If your emails is @gmail.com they'll simply refuse it and will ask you to open an account on this new email site.
Once it gains some momentum it'll snowball from there. Those who only want to send an email and send a couple of messages to their friends will prefer the national network because it is much cheaper and a lot faster.
Having said that, the whole thing is destined to fail. People will find ways to fight it. At this point there's not enough information about the network architecture but most probably there will be a large pool of computers with high speed and unrestricted access to the internet as part of this network.
They will be the gateways to the internet. For example an Iranian bank will transfer its 'netbank' to the national network. But the server that is hosting this netbank still needs the internet to operate so that server will be connected to the internet with a high quality link.
There's a possibility that people will manage to gain access to these nodes and use it as a proxy to get high speed internet. Obviously if someone manages to do that they'll probably try to stick to it as long as they can so it wont bring the internet to everybody.
The network is being laid out from next week all across the country. We'll see.
> Banks and all government organisations are soon going to require people to use a 'national email'. If your emails is @gmail.com they'll simply refuse it and will ask you to open an account on this new email site.
True, that was a policy statement from Taghipour, however my impression is that the resistance from the banking industry and Majles led to the mandate being scrapped. However, the overall point that Iran has a civil society around the Internet is valid and the reason I am pushing out the paper quickly.
It's one thing to study others' work and take ideas from it. Everyone does that.
It's another thing to actively engage others, talk to them as if you are friends or enter into agreements to work together, and then take ideas from their work. It's the betrayal of people's trust that's gotten him the reputation for being a con and a thief.
In one of the most telling IMs of their entire correspondence (see page 62 of The Complete Timeline), Zuckerberg stated: "i kind of view you as a friend." This came up when Zuckerberg was annoyed that Greenspan made a security hole public. Greenspan handled the situation with immense professionalism, while Zuckerberg simply could not accept responsibility. Mark's friends are only entitled to the appellation when it's convenient for Mark.
Glad to see someone else caught that. But by the same token we have to consider that Greenspan may have hand-picked these IM conversations. It does not appear he's giving us a data dump. More like another one of his White Papers where he is venting.
None of this should be even remotely interesting until you consider hundreds of millions of people have sent their personal information to the manipulative kid in the IM's. Crazy.
I agree that we're only getting limited information. I'd love to see his personal IMs, because I think those would shed even more light on his character. It's curiously ironic how the man who has access to the secrets of millions of people has revealed so little about himself.
Have a look at the last IM exchange between Greenspan and Zuckerberg on the idea of protecting the privacy of students' home adresses from being accessible to any student at any university using Facebook. It is toward the end of the timeline.pdf document. The problem: Thanks to some sloppy php, anyone at any univeristy could download a .csv file of all of someone contacts including their home addresses and other private information, if that person had ever requested to export her data to csv format. Greenspan wanted this security hole fixed promptly. Zuckerberg didn't care; he just fired off an email to someone else (same guy who wrote the sloppy php?) and put it out of his mind. Then when Greenspan made others aware of the problem, Zuckerberg was upset because [un]"savvy" users might learn of security holes in Facebook. What a terrible thing that would be. We see that same sort of denigrating view of users and concealment attitude continuing at Facebook to this day.
Say what you will about Greenspan but at least the guy is responsible. We can't say the same for Zuckerberg. The kid is reckless and unremorseful.
In the IM's Zuckerberg goes so far as to tell Greenspan he considers him to be "like a friend" (see IM for exact wording). This is really sickening.