Saw her on the news, my guess is that it will lead to nothing. Facebook earn 13 million dollars every minute they can hire the best lawyers and tie things up in knots in court interminably.
She will be discredited as an ex employee with a grudge.
She's talking to the lawmakers, the people who hold the key to regulation. It is about politics and public opinion, not legal issues.
If it is popular, the politicians will create a completely new and very restrictive framework for facebook.
If it is popular. That is why I am suspicious, to put it mildly. Facebook know full well, what is talked about, shared, and gets reactions on their site, leads to the debate on the floor of the legislatures.
If it isn't watched, isn't talked about, isn't shared - you are taking away the oxygen that fuels the fire of public opinion.
Anyone who caught the news, and searched to find out what was going on with Facebook, was confronted by a million pages of drama about the outage. Without that, they might have read what she was saying.
The whole thing was ridiculous. They sent out a new config to the network that morning. Which is so arcane, such a niche interest, it will never get talked about because no one understands it or is interested in network configuration.
Even savvy people on tech web sites got all excited about the drama, because that's the whole deal with news on the internet. We lose our fucking minds. Which is what this girl was saying - Facebook have measured and understood the effect, and it's really bad.
The reality is, many of those commentators are systems administrators. And any sysadmin worth their salt knows a whole ways that you can accidentally stop their systems from working for several hours - because it's their job to make sure they never do it accidentally - and also to think out ways other people could do stuff like that, and prevent them.
Reality - it could happen, because it would about as difficult, and convincing, as pretending your car won't start by using an old key (that only you know about) you know doesn't work.
Now there are conspiracy theories that it's because Facebook was hacked from the outside, and people took data. Which are complete rubbish, the guy who had the data was just saying, he got it legit, it was not hacked, it's part of what Facebook allow all manner of people to do.
And there's no realistic explanation of how an outsider could shut down the network in such a central way. Nope. It happened because they sent out a new network config - and when it hit, it shut down one thing after another, and because they all rely on each other, that quickly meant everything.
I'm not saying they did this deliberately. I'm saying - I don't know. How could I know what was in this or that person's mind? I can't.
But how believable is it that it was an accident?
How believable is it that they made this mistake, the first of it's kind, a perfect total shut down, one that was easily reversed by the next day - for the first time in twenty years, and it happened at that particular moment?
That's a question for anyone.
www.theguardian.com
