[P2P-F] Fwd: origins of facebook

Sun Mar 20 15:44:49 CET 2011

thanks Dante!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 10:14 PM
Subject: origins of facebook
To: econowmix at googlegroups.com

 http://www.brainsturbator.com/articles/facebook_the_cia_and_you/

excerpt :

Just Kids Being Kids

[image: Mark Zuckerberg Facebook]Anyone who has concerns about their
“privacy” being violated by Facebook is completely, unconditionally
justified in their concern.  After all, Facebook was born out of data
theft—founder Mark Zuckerberg <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg>
 *stole tens of thousands of digital files on his fellow Harvard students,
directly from the University’s “secure” servers.* Maybe that’s alarming to
you, but I find it endearingly psychotic.  Anyone who can found a
multi-billion dollar business with *stolen property* is worth paying
attention to.  From the always-excellent Fast Company
magazine<http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/115/open_features-hacker-dropout-ceo.html>
:

Harvard didn’t offer a student directory with photos and basic information,
known at most schools as a face book. Zuckerberg wanted to build an online
version for Harvard, but the school *“kept on saying that there were all
these reasons why they couldn’t aggregate this information,”* he says. *“I
just wanted to show that it could be done.”* *So one night early in his
sophomore year, he hacked into Harvard’s student records.* He then threw up
a basic site called Facemash, which randomly paired photos of undergraduates
and invited visitors to determine which one was “hotter” (not unlike the Web
site Hot or Not). Four hours, 450 visitors, and 22,000 photo views later,
Harvard yanked Zuckerberg’s Internet connection. After a dressing-down from
the administration and an uproar on campus chronicled by The Harvard
Crimson, Zuckerberg politely apologized to his fellow students. But he
remained convinced he’d done the right thing: “I thought that the
information should be available.” (Harvard declined to comment on the
episode.)

The next anaecdote in the article is even more telling and fairly funny,
too.  Since Fast Company was kind enough not to sue me over my excessive
quotitude in the Clotaire Rapaille
article<http://www.brainsturbator.com/site/comments/clotaire_rapaille_we_salute_you/>,
I figure I’ll push the envelope a little further:

The new project consumed so much of his time that by the end of the first
semester, with just two days to go before his art-history final, he was in a
serious jam: He needed to be able to discuss 500 images from the Augustan
period. “This isn’t the kind of thing where you can just go in and figure
out how to do it, like calculus or math,” he says, without a trace of irony.
“You actually have to learn these things ahead of time.” *So he pulled a Tom
Sawyer: He built a Web site with one image per page and a place for
comments. Then he emailed members of his class and invited them to share
their notes, like a study group on cybersteroids. “Within two hours, all the
images were populated with notes,” he says. “I did very well in that class.
We all did.”*

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