Shared posts

30 Jan 18:27

How Much Snow Does It Take To Cancel School?

by Miss Cellania
Chris PeBenito

Seems pretty accurate to me, having grown up in the dark blue part of Illinois. However, the only time I remember having snow days was due to the heat not working, not the amount of snow.

Alexandr Trubetskoy used data points submitted by redditors to create this map showing how much snow will cause the local schools to close. There are some explanations and caveats you can read at the map page. You know that cities and counties that keep snowplows and salt on hand at all times are better at keeping schools open. I would add that the terrain makes a difference. School busses where I live must climb mountains and negotiate curvy roads, often with no guard rails. Heck, the county school system here will close for flooding, because quite a few rural bridges will be under water (the city system stays open). Maybe that's why school starts in early August in the South, since it's easier to build in estimated snow days on the school calendar that to pay for a fleet of snow plows that might not be used. -via Digg

29 Jan 13:27

Avoid Euronet ATMs - they use a dirty trick to cheat tourists

by Mark Frauenfelder

Honest Guide is a YouTube channel for people planning to visit Prague (and sometimes other places in Europe). In this video, you are warned to stay away from Euronet ATMs. Apparently, they are located only in tourist areas. They can detect when a foreign card is inserted and offers terrible exchange rates (15% less than the going rate), plus they tack on a 4 USD fee.

24 Jan 14:00

This video shows how long it takes for light to travel from Earth to Mars and back again

by Mark Frauenfelder

At this scale, light moves at a snail's pace.

From the YouTube description: "This is the distance between Earth, the Moon and Mars with the correct distances but with Earth, Moon and Mars 20 times bigger (so you can see them!)."

24 Jan 13:55

After Net Neutrality repeal, Comcast, Charter and Verizon cut investment in their networks

by Cory Doctorow
Chris PeBenito

How surprising...

When Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai cheated his way to a repeal of Net Neutrality, he justified allowing ISPs to decide to slow down the services you want to use by saying that doing so would encourage investment in network buildout, saving America from its sad status as one of the most expensive, slowest places to use the internet in the rich world.

But after a full year of neutracide, Comcast has made a liar out of Ajit Pai, reducing infrastructure spending by 3% in 2018, according to the company's latest earnings report.

Charter and Verizon are also expected to announce lowered capital expenditures for 2018.

Comcast's network spending should have risen in 2018 if predictions from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and Comcast had been correct. Pai's net neutrality repeal took effect in June 2018. But the vote to repeal net neutrality rules was in December 2017, and Pai claimed in February 2018 that the repeal was already causing increased broadband investment.

Broadband industry lobby group USTelecom also claimed that network investment grew in 2017 because of the anticipated net neutrality repeal and other deregulatory moves. In December 2017, Comcast said the net neutrality repeal would allow for "more competition in the marketplace and increased investment and innovation."

Yet Comcast cable capital expenditures dropped year over year in each of the first three quarters of 2018. The expenditures did rise year over year in the fourth quarter, from $2.15 billion to $2.32 billion, but it wasn't enough to offset the full-year decline.

Sorry, Ajit: Comcast lowered cable investment despite net neutrality repeal [Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica]

(Image: Ildar Sagdejev, CC-BY-SA)

22 Jan 15:03

Plug in at an NSA charging station

by Jason Weisberger

Let me think about that... nope.

(h/t Bob Lord)

22 Jan 13:30

Clever Smartphone Malware Concealment Technique

by Bruce Schneier

This is clever:

Malicious apps hosted in the Google Play market are trying a clever trick to avoid detection -- they monitor the motion-sensor input of an infected device before installing a powerful banking trojan to make sure it doesn't load on emulators researchers use to detect attacks.

The thinking behind the monitoring is that sensors in real end-user devices will record motion as people use them. By contrast, emulators used by security researchers­ -- and possibly Google employees screening apps submitted to Play­ -- are less likely to use sensors. Two Google Play apps recently caught dropping the Anubis banking malware on infected devices would activate the payload only when motion was detected first. Otherwise, the trojan would remain dormant.


11 Jan 15:27

productivity flowchart

by Wrong Hands
13 Dec 14:49

Population Mountains

by Miss Cellania

Matt Daniels presents a heat map of population density around New York. But as you scroll down, it  changes to a different angle and shows you what the population of the cities look like stacked as a 3D graph. That's a population mountain. Every city has a differently-shaped "mountain" that gives you a feel for how dense it is. Daniels goes on to compare some of the mega-cities around the world. Above you see London, England, on the left. It is an old city with nine million people, surrounded by suburbs and other nearby cities. On the right is Kinshasa, DRC, with 13.1 million people. It is a fast-growing city surrounded by empty space and few suburbs. Both are impressive, but do not compare at all with the mega-cities of Asia. Read about Daniels' population mountains around the world, and then you can explore on your own with his interactive world map.    -via Metafilter

30 Nov 13:26

Don't Speed in Indiana

by WTM

On Wednesday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Timbs v. Indiana, a case that could have huge ramifications for the way states and local governments use civil asset forfeiture to target the property of suspected criminals. As most readers are probably aware, asset forfeiture is the process by which law enforcement can seize cars, cash, homes, and pretty much anything else that is suspected of being used to commit a crime or believed to be the proceeds of a crime. Often, suspects do not have to be convicted of anything—sometimes they aren't even charged—before they can be deprived of their property. To top it all off, law enforcement often has a perverse incentive to engage in this sort of thing because the proceeds of forfeiture can get plugged directly into their own budgets.

You can read a summary of the case here, but the gist is that the Solicitor General of Indiana is of opinion that if speeding is a crime, and technically it is, then the state is empowered to seize the vehicle being used to commit the crime (speeding) even if the speed in question is only 5 mph over the local speed limit. Heaven forfend; this sounds like something that Illinois would try to get away with instead.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

06 Nov 13:35

America for sale: 38% of all election funding comes from 0.0001% of Americans (2,210 people account for 25% of the total)

by Cory Doctorow
Chris PeBenito

How unsurprising.

0.5% of Americans given $200 or more in campaign contributions, accounting for 66% of all campaign funding, but that's nothing: only 0.0001% give $10,000 or more, and their donations are 38% of all the money sloshing around in US electoral campaign coffers.

That means a mere 37,000 people account for more than a third of US campaign finance, out of a population of 325,700,00 people.

But even these 37,000 are small fry compared to the 2,210 people who account for 25% of all campaign spending: $1.1 billion in total.

And of course, that's just the money we know about. Thanks to Citizens United, which allowed for unlimited, anonymous campaign spending, there's billions more spent by "dark money groups" whose funders are a secret.

Donors are older, whiter and wealthier than America as a whole. They hail disproportionately from certain places: So far this year, more money has come from the District of Columbia than from 28 states put together. And certain industries – finance, real estate, law, health care, oil and gas – are particularly big givers.

Campaign Spending Isn’t The Problem – Where The Money Comes From Is [Richard Briffault/IB Times]

(via Naked Capitalism)

16 Oct 13:07

See Spot dance: Watch a Boston Dynamics robot get a little funky

by John Biggs
Chris PeBenito

Makes me think of the Black Mirror episode "Metalhead" again...

In this fun video the Boston Dynamics Spot dances, wiggles, and shimmies right into our hearts. This little four-legged robot – a smaller sibling to the massive Big Dog – is surprisingly agile and the team at Boston Robotics have taught the little robot to dance to Bruno Mars which means that robots could soon replace us on the factory floor and on the dance floor. Good luck, meatbags!

As one YouTube commenter noted: if you think Spot is happy now just imagine how it will dance when we’re all gone!

15 Oct 20:09

How DNA Databases Violate Everyone's Privacy

by Bruce Schneier
Chris PeBenito

Gattaca, here we come.

If you're an American of European descent, there's a 60% chance you can be uniquely identified by public information in DNA databases. This is not information that you have made public; this is information your relatives have made public.

Research paper:

"Identity inference of genomic data using long-range familial searches."

Abstract: Consumer genomics databases have reached the scale of millions of individuals. Recently, law enforcement authorities have exploited some of these databases to identify suspects via distant familial relatives. Using genomic data of 1.28 million individuals tested with consumer genomics, we investigated the power of this technique. We project that about 60% of the searches for individuals of European-descent will result in a third cousin or closer match, which can allow their identification using demographic identifiers. Moreover, the technique could implicate nearly any US-individual of European-descent in the near future. We demonstrate that the technique can also identify research participants of a public sequencing project. Based on these results, we propose a potential mitigation strategy and policy implications to human subject research.

A good news article.

31 Aug 12:28

Trump volunteer tries to block reporter from photographing rally protestor

by Rob Beschizza

Evan Vucci's incredible photo from last night's Trump rally in Evansville, Indiana, shows the moment one of his volunteers "blocks the lens of a photographer trying to take a photo of a demonstrator." Evan is the AP's chief photographer in Washington, and you can follow him at @evanvucci. Here's the Instagram embed: https://www.instagram.com/p/BnH8WvzHxMv/?taken-by=evanvucci
14 Aug 17:56

None of the Above won the 2016 election

by Cory Doctorow

Pew's latest very detailed survey of voting patterns in 2016 goes the extra mile, by validating whether recipients actually cast a ballot, thus forming a picture of who voted, who didn't, and what policies nonvoters favored. (more…)

08 Aug 18:56

Voting Software

There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired.
01 Aug 15:46

Koch thinktank inadvertently proves that America would save trillions by switching to socialized medicine

by Cory Doctorow

Mercatus (previously) is part of the Koch Brothers' network of thinktanks which allow the billionaires and their cadre of oligarchs to make it appear that their ideas are mainstream by all singing the praises of the wealthy in chorus. (more…)

31 Jul 12:15

Modified ground telescope captures this remarkable Neptune photo

by Andrea James

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) got this cool shot of Venus by using new adaptive optics that ignore earth's atmosphere while imaging celestial phenomena.

Via Universe Today:

In astronomy, adaptive optics refers to a technique where instruments are able to compensate for the blurring effect caused by Earth’s atmosphere, which is a serious issue when it comes to ground-based telescopes. Basically, as light passes through our atmosphere, it becomes distorted and causes distant objects to become blurred (which is why stars appear to twinkle when seen with the naked eye).

Head over to the article to see a remarkable before and after shot.

This is a photo of Neptune, from the ground! ESO's new adaptive optics makes ground telescopes ignore the earth's atmosphere (Universe Today) .

07 Jun 18:12

Decapitated Rattlesnake Still Manages to Bite and Nearly Kill Victim

by Jake Rossen
Chris PeBenito

Rattlesnakes will kill you from the grave.

In some cases, beheading a snake is just going to upset it more.
30 May 11:47

Creative Restaurant and Bar Menus

by Miss Cellania

(Image source: reddit)

In most restaurants, you get a menu that tells you the name of the dishes or meals and how much each costs. If you're lucky, you get a description. But there are some places that get really creative to convey more information. The cocktail menu above is arranged like a scatterplot, so you can see how relatively strong and creative the drinks are. The menu below is a Venn diagram with all the possible breakfast sandwich combinations and prices.   

(Image source: reddit)

Other menus have ranked charts for the spiciness, or size, or temperature of the offerings. Some are weird, like the beer board with prices that change due to supply and demand, and others are just fun. See a roundup of creative restaurant menus at Buzzfeed.

24 May 11:51

One Kid's Trumpet

by Miss Cellania

Jacques Ruffin found a letter sent to his mother in 2009, when she was struggling to keep up the rent on his musical instrument for school. He played the trumpet for the rest of his time in school. Allegro Music is still in business, and redditors who know the store vouch for the authenticity of such a gesture from the owner. The discussion thread is full of stories about special people who helped out when they were children, and calls to donate money or musical instruments so that more students can participate in school band who would otherwise not be able to. Every school band director knows students who could really use the help.  

30 Apr 20:02

Particle Physics Resurrects Alexander Graham Bell’s Voice

by Allison Marsh


It takes some doing to extract sound from an 1885 wax disc
30 Apr 17:40

Damn, Mother Nature: Pictures Of A Bird Of Prey Carrying A Shark That's Eating A Fish

bird-shark-fish-1.jpg Because sometimes the circle of life is just a dot, these are several photos captured by Doc Jon of a western osprey (aka seahawk) flying off with a young shark that was in the process of eating a fish. Obviously, I'm really not looking forward to having to put on my scuba gear and go give Nemo's dad the bad news. He's already been through so much. Keep going for some zoomier shots while I prepare for life underground. "Like in a cave?" If Mother Nature has anything to do with it, a coffin.
24 Apr 18:49

Professional Stuntmen Recreate The Fighting Styles From Their Favorite Video Game Franchises

This is a video of seven professional stunt performers (with credits including several Marvel Cinematic UNNiverse films and The Walking Dead) recreating the fighting styles of five of their favorite video game franchises: Assassin's Creed, Metal Gear, Witcher, Uncharted, and God Of War. Speaking of -- I heard there's an amazing new God Of War game that just came out today. I guess I know what I'll be doing all weekend! "Playing it?" Close. WISHING I was playing it. My mom watched a review and said it's too violent. Keep going for the video while I hit my cubicle neighbor with an elbow drop off the top of our shared wall.
24 Apr 12:16

Mosaic, the First HTML Browser That Could Display Images Alongside Text, Turns 25

by BeauHD
Chris PeBenito

Feeling old now. I remember using this.

NCSA Mosaic 1.0, the first web browser to achieve popularity among the general public, was released on April 22, 1993. It was developed by a team of students at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and had the ability to display text and images inline, meaning you could put pictures and text on the same page together, in the same window. Wired reports: It was a radical step forward for the web, which was at that point, a rather dull experience. It took the boring "document" layout of your standard web page and transformed it into something much more visually exciting, like a magazine. And, wow, it was easy. If you wanted to go somewhere, you just clicked. Links were blue and underlined, easy to pick out. You could follow your own virtual trail of breadcrumbs backwards by clicking the big button up there in the corner. At the time of its release, NCSA Mosaic was free software, but it was available only on Unix. That made it common at universities and institutions, but not on Windows desktops in people's homes. The NCSA team put out Windows and Mac versions in late 1993. They were also released under a noncommercial software license, meaning people at home could download it for free. The installer was very simple, making it easy for just about anyone to get up and running on the web. It was then that the excitement really began to spread. Mosaic made the web come to life with color and images, something that, for many people, finally provided the online experience they were missing. It made the web a pleasure to use.

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Read more of this story at Slashdot.

24 Apr 12:13

Every Nintendo Switch Can Be Hacked, and Nintendo Can’t Patch It

by Joel Hruska
Chris PeBenito

I don't have one of these, but it is pretty neat to see successful cold boot attacks on the root of trust.

445873-nintendo-switch

The Nintendo Switch is vulnerable to hacking in a way that Nintendo will never be able to patch. Can we have saved game backups now?

The post Every Nintendo Switch Can Be Hacked, and Nintendo Can’t Patch It appeared first on ExtremeTech.

23 Apr 19:24

Development of eSIM tech halted thanks to legal feud with Verizon and AT&T

by Joe Maring
Chris PeBenito

I don't know what benefits an esim supposedly has over a real sim, other than 0 physical size, but you had to know this was going to happen. Of course they want to make it as hard as possible to switch away.

The Justice Department's been conducting an investigation since February.

Trying to switch carriers is a royal pain the butt, and it was recently discovered that Verizon and AT&T are trying to make this process even more difficult. According to a report from The New York Times, the two carriers are under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for working with GSMA to develop a technology that'll allow them to lock eSIMs to their networks.

The antitrust investigation is said to have begun this past February after Apple and an unnamed carrier filed complaints to the Justice Department regarding the matter. AT&T says it's "aware of the investigation" and Verizon notes that it has been working with the Department regarding –

A difference of opinion with a couple of phone equipment manufacturers regarding the development of eSIM standards.

As a quick refresher, eSIM is a new technology that's aiming to eliminate the need for physical SIM cards by allowing you to switch carriers as you please thanks to an embedded chip – making it much easier for folks to flee the clutches of Verizon, AT&T, etc. if they so choose. The Pixel 2 was the first Android phone to feature this technology with Project Fi, and it still is in late April of 2018.

GMSA says it's been cooperating with the Justice Department as much as possible, but even so, will be putting the development of eSIM tech "on hold" throughout the rest of the investigation. There is already a version of eSIM that can be locked to a specific carrier, but customers would be required to give carriers permission to do this on their behalf.

It's unclear at this time when GSMA will continue its work on eSIM technology and if Verizon and AT&T will be granted with their locked-down versions. As policy expert Ferras Vinh points out –

The actions would limit choice for consumers and harm competition.

What's your take on all this?

23 Apr 16:39

Gmail users find spam in their sent folder, but don’t panic

by Killian Bell

Gmail users are reporting that spam emails are turning up in their sent folder. To the users involved, it looks as if their own accounts were used to send that spam, and many have rushed to change their passwords and enable stronger security. But in actual fact, it’s just a clever spam campaign and affected accounts have not been compromised.

When you find spam emails in your sent folder, your first thought is that your account has been hacked.

Read More

Gmail users find spam in their sent folder, but don’t panic was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

19 Apr 19:31

White evangelical support for Donald Trump at all-time high

by Mark Frauenfelder

White evangelicals love Trump more than ever.

From PRI:

Trump’s support among white evangelicals at this stage of his presidency is strikingly solid. While there are modest differences by gender, Trump’s favorability among white evangelical women is still a robust 71 percent, compared to 81 percent among white evangelical men. And Trump’s favorability is still a strong 68 percent among college-educated white evangelicals, compared to 78 percent among those without a college degree.

Looking ahead to the 2020 election, Trump’s support among white evangelicals is also strong. White evangelical Protestants who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party say they would prefer Donald Trump, rather than another candidate, to be the GOP nominee for president in 2020 (69 percent vs. 23 percent).

White evangelicals are on the decline: "About 17 percent of Americans now identify as white evangelical, compared to 23 percent a decade ago," according to PBS. It could be that they are afraid of going extinct, and think of Trump as their lifeboat.

30 Mar 14:25

Accountant is Suddenly a Hockey Star

by Miss Cellania

National Hockey League teams keep two goaltenders ready, plus an emergency backup goalie in case both of the pros become injured. The emergency goalie is often from a recreational league, and it's an honor for them to be selected to sit on the bench. They rarely get to play, and when they do, they aren't expected to shine. That wasn't the case for the Chicago Blackhawks last night.

“I am an accounting professional with experience in financial services. I have expertise in fund accounting and financial reporting.”

That’s the first sentence on the LinkedIn page of Scott Foster, a 36-year-old accountant (duh) who works in Chicago and played college hockey more than a decade ago. Tonight, he played his first competitive game since finishing his career at Western Michigan University in 2006—for the Chicago Blackhawks, who picked him up as their emergency goaltender today, and then found themselves actually having to play him in the third period of tonight’s game against the Jets.  

(YouTube link)

Foster stole the show by blocking seven goals and preserving the Blackhawk's 6-2 lead over the Winnipeg Jets during the third period. It was a night he'll never forget. A good time was had by all.  -via Metafilter

22 Mar 13:52

Now would be a good time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign

by Devin Coldewey
Chris PeBenito

Yep. I purged by FB profile of as much data as possible and deactivated it. I'd be fine if FB died.

Facebook is at the center of a dozen controversies, and outrage is peaking. The social network has failed again and again at expanding beyond a handful of core features. Doubts of its usefulness, and assertions of its uselessness, are multiplying. A crisis of confidence at multiple levels threatens the company’s structure and mission. Now is the time for Mark Zuckerberg to spare himself the infamy and resign — for Facebook’s sake and his own.

I’m not calling for his resignation, and I don’t say this out of any animus toward Zuckerberg; I personally believe him to be genuine and driven in his stated desire to connect the world — but likely increasingly frustrated by the unexpected consequences of this naive ambition and the haste with which he has pursued it. I just think that it has come to the point where the best way for him to advance that ambition is to leave.

There are three major reasons why.

Facebook has failed

Of course, it’s also true that Facebook has succeeded beyond every expectation. But its success arrived early and remains essentially a simple thing: being a broadly accessible, functioning social network. A single network of friends, a basic news feed from them and a few adjunct capabilities were industry-defining ideas and to a certain point were executed quite well. Beyond that admittedly towering success, Facebook has accomplished remarkably little.

Attempts to make Facebook a ubiquitous social graph layer connecting all apps and services failed because consumers found it creepy, companies found it threatening to rely completely on the company for demographic data and tech was moving too quickly for the data Facebook had to be universally applicable. (Except, of course, in advertising, where it is evergreen.)

Attempts to make Facebook a gaming platform failed partly because the social aspect of gaming is radioactive, and partly because the attention economy produces really bad games. Repurposing an established community into a gaming one was a non-starter, and what’s left of the brief Facebook gaming flash in the pan is just an oily residue clinging to the side of the news feed.

Attempts to make Facebook a VR/AR powerhouse are ongoing, but that entire segment of tech has proven incredibly disappointing and eye-wateringly expensive for everyone involved. So far they’re a market leader in a market that seems to only exist for the purpose of swindling money out of investors. It’s too early to call it a complete boondoggle with certainty since Facebook is supposedly playing a longer game here, but it sure isn’t promising.

Attempts to improve messaging beyond the basics have failed; chatbots are of poor quality and largely pointless, in-chat games are novelties at best, business applications are politely declined and while aesthetic changes like stickers could make a little money in the short term, that’s not really the kind of thing that supports a global infrastructure.

Attempts to make Facebook a reliable news source ran into the many-headed hydra that is “objectivity” and everything that comes with it. Boy, they didn’t think that through. I’m not even going to get started on the ways it’s failed here.

Attempts to make Facebook an infrastructure provider have arguably so far failed as either abortive or fanciful. Free basics failed despite good intentions because the company has not earned the trust to be in that position. The laser-based Aquila internet glider is a wonderful science project but strikes me as something of a Spruce Goose situation: Underserved communities would be served better by, off the top of my head, grants offsetting large broadband providers’ advantages in infrastructure contracts, or just paying for laying fiber or building towers. (Later efforts at Internet.org have been more limited and practical and I applaud them.)

Attempts to make Facebook a media company failed (or are stumbling) for a multiplicity of reasons: strong and agile competitors, a lack of focus, too many ads, incompatibility with the like economy.

Attempts to branch out on mobile have failed, though none very spectacularly — which is almost a failure in itself. The main app is of course fabulously popular, as is Instagram. Only by paying a billion dollars and literally subtracting a fundamental feature from the original app were they able to increase the number of icons on most phones.

Attempts to make Facebook cool have failed almost from the beginning. I hesitate to go so far as to define coolness, but I will say that it’s generally thought to be incompatible with ubiquity. They bought some cool with Instagram, but the shine is starting to wear off that one.

This litany of failures (by no means comprehensive, and of course there have been minor successes, too) is also conspicuously a list of things Zuckerberg has personally set his sights on. Over and over he has said, “this is what we’re going to do.” And then they don’t do it — not really. A cash infusion and a bit of borrowed momentum from the ongoing original success of the basic social network, and each effort begins with a semblance of self-propulsion. But all of them have lost steam as Facebook failed to follow through, mindlessly followed through on the wrong thing or just moved on to the next target.

As founder and CEO, Zuckerberg should by all means take substantial credit for the initial success of the platform. But he also has to take responsibility for the laundry list of botched attempts to do much more than provide the basic service people valued since the earliest days.

By no means is he alone in this type of failure, by the way: All the tech giants have products and phases they’d rather not speak of or, though they might refuse to acknowledge it, have been crushing defeats. But Zuckerberg is on his own in the level of personal ownership he has tried to exert over these numerous misadventures.

Facebook is not about connecting the world

It’s become clear over the years that Facebook left its original mission statement behind a long, long time ago.

Fifteen years back, perhaps even 10 or 5, Facebook was just what we needed. But the world has changed, the way we interact with technology and each other has changed and Facebook hasn’t. The platform’s greatest failure isn’t any of those side projects listed above; it’s the failure to evolve its core product to succeed by its own metrics of quality time and meaningful connection.

Facebook started as a rough approximation of sharing your life with a group of friends. But as its scope has increased, this approximation has been found to be increasingly inadequate. What’s also become clear is that Facebook has been working hard to redefine how people interact online to fit better with its own limited capabilities. Faced with the square peg of human interactions and the round hole (the image of a pit is inescapable) of Facebook’s news feed and algorithms, they decided it was the former that needed modification.

The root of that is simple: Fitting Facebook to the people’s needs is not as lucrative as vice versa. Facebook runs on ads, and ads run on eyeballs. That’s the business model that has dominated the last decade or so — well, the last couple of centuries really, but in its current form, 10-15 years. Facebook has been one of the most successful practitioners of it because, as they never tire of telling their customers (that is to say, advertisers), they know things about us that others don’t. Important things. This is, as I mentioned earlier, the one place where its troves of seemingly trivial data add up.

Facebook is not a platform for connecting people, it’s a platform for monetizing the connections they make on their own. The company simply doesn’t prioritize the quality of these connections themselves in any meaningful way — nor, I think, can it. That’s probably a realization they reached early on. These flailing attempts to grow appendages were always just ways to multiply the number of superficial connections and train users to conflate constant, convenient updates with meaningful interactions.

The parallel track to this is on the sales and advertising side, where Facebook has repeatedly been cavalier with the data it has been entrusted with and selectively honest with the users from which it was sourced. People have stopped trusting it, if they ever really did. No one believes its executives when they say things about quality time, and respecting your data and so on. Some of them may be sincere — but it doesn’t matter.

The work that needs to be done to connect the world can’t be done by an entity as compromised as Facebook; it’s just the wrong tool for the job. Zuckerberg’s mission to connect the world isn’t happening the way he planned and it isn’t going to happen. Ironically, it was the success of his own vision that demonstrated the limits of that vision.

The time is right for him and for the company

Facebook has grown big enough that it was never going to be free from controversy. But for the last few years there seems to have been a constant hum of disappointment from practically every quarter, every demographic, every customer, every country and regulator.

During the tumultuous last year, the fundamental idea of advertising on Facebook based on hidden character traits has been shown to be an insidious, easily abused practice. It responded much as its big tech colleagues have: affect shock, assure users this was never intended and promise action. Zuckerberg, who is politically active and of course deeply involved in all the operations at Facebook, has been almost completely silent.

He has occasionally addressed such controversies. But more often than not he has offered little more than lip service, lines so tired — “at Facebook we take this very seriously,” for instance — that they’ve become parody. As I was writing, in fact, he did exactly this. “I’m serious about doing what it takes to protect our community” were his exact words.

But not just those words!

“I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I’m responsible for what happens on our platform,” he wrote.

The exact form this responsibility takes is not specified. But the best thing for him to do would be resign.

I don’t mean instantly — that would be chaos. But soon. Think about it: it’s really the best thing for everyone.

For Facebook, it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card. Zuckerberg can easily take a lot of the heat being pointed at the company right now, since as he says he is responsible for what happened. He can shield loyal employees and executives who really were likely doing his bidding. He could do a junket of Congress, the FTC, a few courts and so on to express his personal responsibility for the actions and to beg people to understand that Facebook should not be held to be synonymous with his mistakes of many years. Meanwhile at the company there would be carte blanche for reinvention, reversing years-old policies, admitting faults.

For users, it’s a nice clean break and a new hope for the platform. For a long time people have rolled their eyes at the promises of change, and seen mainly aimless algorithm tweaks and failed attempts to imitate competitors. The election debacle and this ongoing Cambridge Analytica situation are just the latest problem to appear; user faith is long since eroded, and many more would leave if not for some strong network effects binding them to the platform. For Zuckerberg, the avatar and origin of all of Facebook’s many mistakes (and of course successes) to personally step aside is meaningful change, and may lead to meaningful change at the platform level. At the very least even skeptical users like myself would be curious to see how it all plays out.

For Zuckerberg, this could be the best thing that ever happened to him. The optics are great — brave and idealistic young CEO sacrifices himself so that the company can live on. And it’s not like he doesn’t have another life waiting for him. How does retiring in your early 30s with billions in the bank, spending a year or two with your wife and young daughter, then reemerging to dedicate yourself full-time to your philanthropic causes sound? The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and Internet.org could help more people in more meaningful ways than Facebook ever could. It might even be time to grow a nice beard.

I don’t think he’s really going to do it, of course (resign, that is — he may still grow a beard). At the risk of sounding like an armchair psychiatrist, his ego identifies too strongly with Facebook. Separating himself from it would be traumatic, perhaps impossible. Furthermore, my pessimistic view of Facebook’s works would be more than balanced by his own optimistic view. If he read this I doubt he would agree with much I’ve written.

All the same, I don’t think he will ever have a better chance to leave than this, and he may in the near future wish he had bowed out around now. Free of Zuckerberg, Facebook might blossom anew or it might wither; but most damningly of all, its users probably won’t care either way.