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Facebook-owned WhatsApp extends message deletion time
Facebook-owned WhatsApp extends message deletion time
Facebook-owned WhatsApp is changing the amount of time you have to delete messages you've sent for all recipients. According to WABetaInfo, since the release of WhatsApp beta for Android 2.18.69, the messaging app allows users 2¹² seconds (4,096 seconds, which is 68 minutes, 16 seconds) to take back a message you didn't want to send. It replaces it with a "this was deleted" message. The feature has since been added to the iOS and Windows Phone apps via updates.
First released last October, the "delete for everyone" feature used to allow you only 7 minutes to delete a message. The app had a flaw though, allowing people with modified versions of the app from third-party sites to delete messages as far back as three years.
This has been fixed as well, and when a revoke request comes in, it will make sure the message was sent within 24 hours. This time limit was decided in case the recipient of the message that is being deleted didn't have their phone on. If they don't turn their phone on in 24 hours, the message will not be deleted.
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram coming back online after widespread outage
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram coming back online after widespread outage
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are starting to come back online after a widespread outage lasted more than six hours on Monday, disrupting communications for the company's roughly 3 billion users.
"To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We've been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us," Facebook said in a tweet.
The three social networks -- all owned by Facebook -- started having issues around 11:40 a.m. ET, according to Down Detector, a crowdsourced website that tracks online outages.
The company acknowledged that it was having issues shortly after noon ET, saying in a tweet from its WhatsApp account that it's "working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible." Similar messages were shared on the Twitter accounts for Facebook and Facebook Messenger.
Hours later, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said in a tweet that the company was "experiencing networking issues" and working as fast as possible "debug and restore" its services.
Facebook later said in a company blog that it believed a "faulty configuration" change was the cause of the outage
The outage -- and the resulting reaction on Twitter -- underscores both our dependency on the social networks and the love-hate relationship they inspire. Being unable to post on Facebook or Instagram elicited equal parts frustration and relief, with some relishing the break from being constantly connected to our digital lives. Ironically, it's those very social media platforms that allow us to express our collectively mixed feelings about the situation.
Outages are nothing new in the online world, and services often go offline or experience slowdowns. Facebook's outage on Monday, however, was unusual in that it struck a suite of the company's products, including its central site and WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging service used widely around the world. Facebook is deeply enmeshed in global infrastructure and the outage disrupted communications for the company's billions of users. The website and its services are used for everything from casual chatting to business transactions.
It isn't immediately clear what caused the issue for the three properties. Security expert Brian Krebs said it appears to be a DNS related-issue, adding that something "caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online."
Cloudflare, a content delivery network that hosts customers data for fast access around the world, had its own explanation of what might have happened.
"Facebook and its sites had effectively disconnected themselves from the Internet," Cloudflare concluded. "It was as if someone had 'pulled the cables' from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the internet.
Facebook's problem involved a combination of two fundamental internet technologies, BGP and DNS, both instrumental to helping computing devices to connect across the network. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) helps establish the best way to send data hopping from one device to another until it reaches its final destination. The Domain Name System (DNS) translates human comprehensible network names like facebook.com into the numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that actually are used to address and route data across the internet.
Just before 9 a.m. PT, Cloudflare detected a flurry of unusual updates from Facebook describing changes to how BGP should handle Facebook's part of the network. Specifically, the updates cut off network routes to Facebook's DNS servers. With those servers offline, typing "facebook.com" in a browser or using the app to try to reach Facebook failed.
In addition to Facebook's services and apps being down, some of the company's internal tools were also reportedly impacted by the outage. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said in a tweet that it felt like a "snow day."
The Facebook outage appears to have caused a headache for Twitter, as well, with more people heading there after finding Facebook down.
"Sometimes more people than usual use Twitter," Twitter tweeted Monday afternoon. "We prepare for these moments, but today things didn't go exactly as planned."
The outage cost Facebook an estimated $60 million in forgone revenue as of 1 p.m. PT/4 p.m. ET, according to Fortune and Snopes. The two publications calculated the lost revenue by using the roughly $29 billion the company reported in its second-quarter earnings. Facebook makes roughly $319.6 million per day in revenue, $13.3 million per hour, $220,000 per minute, and $3,700 per second. The outlets then used those numbers to calculate revenue loss based on how long the outage has lasted.
Shares in the social network dropped nearly 5% to $326.23 per share amid a broad selloff in social media stocks. (Shares of Twitter and Snap were both off more than 5%.)
The slide in Facebook stock weighed on CEO Mark Zuckerberg's net worth, which dropped to $121.6 billion. His net worth is now less than Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and is the fifth wealthiest person in the world, according to Bloomberg.
The outage creates another headache for Facebook, which is battling a massive public relations nightmare in the wake of a whistleblower's allegations that the social network is aware of harm that content on its services causes. The allegations were detailed in a series of stories published by The Wall Street Journal based on research leaked by the whistleblower that said the company ignored research about how Instagram can harm teen girls and that an algorithm change made users angrier.
The whistleblower, a former Facebook product engineer named Frances Haugen, is scheduled to testify to Congress on Tuesday. She detailed some of her allegations in a televised interview on Sunday.
"Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money," she told 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley.
As is often the case with outages, users flocked to other social networks to complain and also revel in the Facebook outage. Instagram and Facebook quickly became the top trending topic on Twitter in the US, and dominated other locations around the world as well. Twitter even got in on the joke, with the company's official account tweeting, "Hello literally everyone," and CEO Jack Dorsey asking "how much?" in response to tweets suggesting Facebook's domain was for sale.
This isn't the first time Facebook has suffered from a lengthy outage. In 2019, Facebook's services suffered from a daylong outage that the company blamed on a "server configuration issue." In previous outages, the social network has also cited a DNS issue or a central software problem as causes.,
Read more: Funniest memes and jokes about Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram outage
CNET has contacted Facebook for additional comment and we'll update when we hear back.
CNET's Carrie Mihalcik and Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.
Facebook Suspends Rules to Allow Some Calls for Violence Against Russian Invaders
Facebook Suspends Rules to Allow Some Calls for Violence Against Russian Invaders
What's happening
Facebook's parent company Meta said it's temporarily allowing some violent content against Russian invaders, making an unusual exemption to its rules against hate speech.
Why it matters
The move is already escalating tensions between Meta and Russia. Roskomnadzor, the country's telecommunications agency, said Friday it's restricting Instagram, a photo-and-video service owned by Meta. Russia's Investigative Committee is opening a criminal investigation against Meta.
What's next
Russia might take more actions against Meta as it moves forward with the criminal case against the social media giant. The company also owns messaging app WhatsApp though no restrictions against that service have been announced.
Facebook parent company Meta is setting aside its rules and allowing some violent speech against Russian invaders, saying it views these remarks as political speech.
"As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as 'death to the Russian invaders.' We still won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians," Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a tweet Thursday.
The rare exemption to the company's rules against hate speech, which bars people from posting content targeting a group of people, including violent content, shows how the world's largest social network is moderating content about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The move, though, is already escalating tensions between Meta and the Russian government.
Russia's Investigative Committee said in a statement Friday that it's opened a criminal case against Meta for allegedly violating the criminal code of the Russian Federation that bars public calls for extremist activities and assistance in terrorist activities.
"As part of the criminal case, the necessary investigative measures are being carried out to give a legal evaluation to actions of Andy Stone and other employees of the American corporation," the committee, which reports to Russia President Vladimir Putin, said in the statement.
Facebook has been facing a greater number of calls to crack down more heavily on propaganda and misinformation. Last week, Russia said it was blocking the social network after Facebook started to make content from Russian state-controlled media tougher to find on its platform and tapped third party fact-checkers to debunk false claims. On Friday, Russia's telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, said in a statement that the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia demanded that the agency also restrict access to Meta-owned photo-and-video service Instagram. Roskomnadzor said the restrictions will take effect March 14 to allow users to transfer their photos and videos to other social networks and notify their followers and contacts.
Nick Clegg, who leads global affairs at Meta, said in a statement Friday that the company's policies are "focused on protecting people's rights to speech as an expression of self-defense in reaction to a military invasion of their country." He added that Meta is applying the exemption only in Ukraine and that it made the decision because of "extraordinary and unprecedented circumstances."
"We have no quarrel with the Russian people. There is no change at all in our policies on hate speech as far as the Russian people are concerned. We will not tolerate Russophobia or any kind of discrimination, harassment or violence towards Russians on our platform," Clegg said.
The Russian Embassy in the US also responded to Thursday's decision, saying Meta's actions were equivalent to a declaration of information war against Russia, according to a report by Russian state-operated news agency Novosti. In a post on Twitter, the embassy called on US authorities to "stop the extremist activities of Meta."
For years, Facebook has also grappled with criticism that its rules are enforced unevenly. The company created a semi-independent oversight board to weigh in on its toughest content moderation decisions.
Reuters, which first reported the policy change, said that in certain countries, including Russia, Ukraine and Poland, the social media giant is also allowing some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. The changes also apply to Instagram.
Citing internal emails, Reuters said that calls for death won't be allowed if they contain other targets or include "two indicators of credibility" such as the location or method of death. The posts must also be about the invasion of Ukraine. Calls for violence against Russian soldiers will also be allowed in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine, Reuters reported.
Also Thursday, Facebook and Twitter removed posts from Russia's embassy in the UK over false claims surrounding the bombing of a maternity hospital in the Ukraine city of Mariupol on Wednesday.
At least one child and two adults were killed at the hospital and another 17 were injured, Ukraine officials have said.
Meta didn't immediately answer questions about how long it expects the exemption will be in place or the number of posts that may be impacted.
Meta hasn't released data about how many Facebook and Instagram users are in Russia. App analytics firm Sensor Tower estimates that since 2014 Instagram has been installed 166 million times from Google Play and the Apple App Store in Russia. Facebook in Russia has an estimated 56.2 million installs. Sensor Tower says that based on that data, Russia is the fifth largest market for Instagram and the 20th largest market for Facebook.
NFTs explained: Why people spend millions of dollars on JPEGs
NFTs explained: Why people spend millions of dollars on JPEGs
Take a quick look at the image to the right. What, if anything, could convince you that image is worth $9 million?
Richerd/OpenSea
What you're looking at is an NFT, one of the first ever created. It's part of the CryptoPunks collection, a set of 10,000 NFTs released in 2017, a time when much of the world was still finding out what bitcoin is.
Most likely you've already rolled your eyes, either at the $9 million figure or at the very idea of NFTs themselves. The response to nonfungible tokens hasn't changed much since March when they first started exploding. The public at large has reflexively dismissed them as environmentally harmful scams. The bigger the sale, the more brazen the injustice.
Which brings us back to the above pixelated chap. Its owner is Richerd, an affable Canadian software developer. He started building cryptocurrency software around 2013, but eventually tired of it. After discovering NFTs earlier this year, Richerd bought CryptoPunk #6046 on March 31 for $86,000 in what he said was the biggest purchase he'd ever made in his life.
Richerd, who has over 80,000 followers on Twitter, last month claimed that his CryptoPunk was priceless to him and wasn't for sale no matter the price. The very next day his determination was tested when an offer came through for 2,500 ether, or $9.5 million. It was made not because Richerd's CryptoPunk is worth that amount -- similar NFTs now go for about $400,000 -- but rather because his bluff was very publicly being called. It was a challenge, but it was still a legitimate offer. If Richerd clicked "accept", 2,500 ether would have flowed into his wallet.
Richerd rejected the offer.
"Well, obviously, the day before I said 'I'm not selling it for any price,' so if I sell it for that price, I'd be going against my integrity," Richerd told me over a Zoom call. "On top of that, I've used this CryptoPunk as my profile pic, as my brand. Everyone knows that's me."
Not too long ago, Richerd's explanation would have sounded insane to me. How divorced from reality would someone need to be to offer eight figures on a picture that looks like a Fiverr job? How scandalously misguided would a person need to be to rebuff that offer? After I spent a few months researching and following NFTs, however, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest. In fact, it makes a whole lot of sense.
There are 10,000 NFTs in the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection. Here are three examples. The middle one is owned by Jimmy Fallon.
Yuga Labs
Bitcoin millionaires
Here is one quick fact that explains why NFTs are bought for the equivalent of a CEO's salary: Bitcoin is estimated to have made over 100,000 millionaires. It's no surprise that NFTs became a phenomenon in March. That's when bitcoin hit $60,000, up over 500% from just six months prior.
When you see a headline or a tweet about some preposterous sum being spent on an NFT, it's easy to become bewildered over how absurd that purchase would be for you. What's easy to forget is that very expensive things are almost exclusively bought by very rich people -- and very rich people spend a lot on status symbols.
Take Bored Ape Yacht Club, for example. It's a collection of 10,000 ape NFTs, all with different traits that make some rarer than others. Rare ones have sold over for over a million bucks, but common variants go for around $200,000. (At the time of launch back in April, BAYC developers sold the NFTs for $190 each.) BAYC, owned by the likes of Steph Curry and Jimmy Fallon, is what you'd call a "profile pic collection." The main purpose of the images is to be used as your display photo on Discord, where most NFT business goes down, or on Twitter, Instagram or wherever else.
To recap: $200,000 minimum for a profile picture.
In isolation, that's insane. But place it on a spectrum of how wealthy people spend money, and it becomes less staggering. You can right click and save a JPEG, so why spend money on it? Well, you can buy a nice house in a safe neighborhood almost anywhere in the world for $1 million, yet celebrities regularly snap up $20 million mansions. You can find a fashionable dress for under $500, yet brands like Chanel build their business on selling ones for 20 times that amount.
Up to 100,000 people became millionaires when that green line shot skyward.
coinmarketcap.com
We accept that rich folks buy extravagant items offline. Is it so inconceivable they would buy extravagant things online, too?
"In the real world, how do people flex their wealth?" said Alex Gedevani, an analyst at cryptocurrency research firm Delphi Digital. "It can be buying cars or watches. How scalable is that versus if I buy a CryptoPunk and use it as my profile picture?"
Obviously, status symbols aren't specific to the rich. All of us indulge in some way or another, be it buying a $20,000 new car when a $7,000 used vehicle will do, or buying a $30 T-shirt when Walmart sells basics for under $5. What most status symbols have in common is that they have a specific audience in mind. The banker sporting his Rolex and the chief executive stepping into her Bentley don't care that I think either of those purchases is excessive. They have a small but powerful group of people they're trying to influence. So, too, with NFTs.
In the case of Richerd, he runs his own business, Manifold, where he helps show digital artists like Beeple how they can use blockchain technology to make art that could only exist as NFTs. Being a part of the most sought-after NFT collection helps in those circles. And when he says his brand is built on his Punk, he's not exaggerating -- a group of investors even named their organization after him.
"Anybody who owns a CryptoPunk believes certain things," Richerd explained. "Either you've been in the community for a long time so you believe in what these are, or you've paid a lot of money to get in, which shows conviction.
"I want to show my conviction. This is one of those projects that makes you put your money where your mouth is."
A bit of trouble
NFTs are polarizing. There's a small group of people who believe in the underlying technology (tokens that prove ownership of a digital good), but there are many more who regard it as a hoax. Just as the second group struggles to see any value in NFTs, the first group can sometimes be defensive about the technology's imperfections.
And make no doubt about it, there are a lot of issues with NFTs.
First is the confounding inaccessibility. There's a reason software developers tend to do well in crypto and NFT trading: Setting up blockchain wallets and other required digital apparatus is difficult. Even just buying and selling can be perilous. Send money to the wrong wallet address by accident, and it's gone forever.
Then there are the fees. Imagine you're interested in dipping your toes into nonfungible waters and you have $1,000 you're willing to lose. If you're minting a new NFT during a public sale you'll usually spend between $120 and $400. Not too bad -- until you factor in the transaction fees. Most NFTs are built on the ethereum blockchain, which is notoriously inefficient. The more people using ethereum, be it through trading altcoins or buying NFTs, the higher the fees. At a good time you'll spend about $100 per transaction, though double or triple that amount is common. Suddenly that $1,000 doesn't go very far.
This is especially troublesome for NFTs, which are infamous for causing "gas wars." It's possible for 100,000 people to buy shiba inu coins at once, since there are a quadrillion in circulation. But when 10,000 people try to buy an NFT, it results in a massive spike in transaction costs as some users outbid each other to speed up their purchase. It may only last a minute or two, but a lot of damage can be done in that time. People spending over $10,000 on a transaction fee isn't rare. People losing $1,000 on a failed transaction isn't, either.
This is what it looks like when someone spends $4,000 on a failed transaction. It's rare, but not rare enough.
Etherscan screenshot by Daniel Van Boom
Ethereum's inefficiency also contributes to the other major criticism of NFTs, the massive amount of energy they consume. Note that this is something of a semantic issue: NFTs aren't bad for the environment as much as ethereum is. Other networks, like Solana, use a fraction of the power. Ethereum developers are expected to implement an upgrade next year that will make mining it consume 1% the energy it currently does. At this moment though, while no one can say precisely how much energy ethereum consumes, we know it's a lot. (Bitcoin, despite getting all the headlines, is even less efficient than ethereum, which is why almost nothing is built on its blockchain.)
And finally, there's the fact that most people trading NFTs are doing so to make a profit. Scams are everywhere, and prices are volatile. Most of the people who create, buy and sell NFTs are ignorant or uninterested in the technology. If there is a technological leap taking place, it's likely to be obscured by the dizzying price movements.
"I'd call it a bubble," Gedvani said, "because the amount of speculators that are entering the market is outpacing genuine creators."
But a bubble can pop and leave something better in its wake. Think of Pets.com. It had a peak valuation of $290 million in February 2000 but by November of that year, as the infamous dot-com bubble began to burst, it had already closed shop. It's used as a cautionary tale for speculative trading in bubbles. But the impulse to invest in Pets.com evidently ended up being justifiable. That particular venture was misguided, but the e-commerce trend it was flicking at was legitimate. Seven-figure pixel art may not be forever, but proof of digital ownership, which is what NFTs are really about, may be.
A big 2022
Where NFTs will end up is anyone's guess -- and anyone who claims to know is probably trying to sell you something. What we do know is that the amount of people buying NFTs is almost definitely about to grow.
It's estimated that around 250,000 people trade NFTs each month on OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace. In the short term, CoinBase will soon open its own NFT marketplace, for which 2 million users are on the waiting list. Robinhood has similar plans.
More importantly, giant companies that already make money outside of the crypto space want in. Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go, has just announced a game in which players can earn bitcoin. Twitter and the company formerly known as Facebook plan to integrate NFTs into their platforms, and Epic Games says it's open to doing so too. Envision a world where instead of buying skins in Fortnite, you buy an NFT for those skins that you own -- meaning you can trade it for outfits and weapons in other games, or sell it once you're done with it. (Epic said it won't integrate such a mechanic into Fortnite, but that may not stop competitors.)
Richerd reckons the flood of people soon to enter the NFT marketplace will create a broader diversity of digital products sold for different audiences. Your neighbor might not want to spend $200 -- much less $200,000 -- on a profile picture, but maybe they'll be willing to spend $10 on a one-of-a-kind skin, or on a product in Facebook's Metaverse. But though the space may change, he remains confident that CryptoPunk #6046 is safe for a while yet.
"Even if every NFT falls," he said, "CryptoPunks will be the last one."
