HN user
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.
Whew. I was afraid no one else saw the humor in that headline.
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.
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)
Oh man, that headline made me laugh.
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.
That is the understatement of the century.
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.