Linked List: January 31, 2025

Friday, 31 January 2025

Perfect Headline: ‘Meta Warns That It Will Fire Leakers in Leaked Memo’ ★

Alex Heath, writing at The Verge:

Moments after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s all-hands comments to employees were widely leaked, a company executive warned in an internal memo that leakers will be fired.

“We take leaks seriously and will take action,” Meta’s chief information security officer, Guy Rosen, said in an internal memo I’ve seen. [...] Rosen goes on to say that Meta “will take appropriate action, including termination” if it identifies leakers and that “we recently terminated relationships with employees who leaked confidential company information inappropriately and exfiltrated sensitive documents.”

During today’s all-hands meeting, Zuckerberg told employees he would no longer be as transparent due to leaks. “We try to be really open and then everything I say leaks,” he said. “It sucks.”

Just about every well-run and successful company I’m aware of fires leakers. Or really it’s the opposite: it’s difficult to succeed as a company with no institutional trust between employees. But company cultures are infused by the personalities of their founders. Meta employees have no scruples surrounding the privacy of internal communications because, by definition, they’re the sort of people who never saw any problem with Meta’s complete lack of regard for such things. So they don’t hesitate to leak what they don’t like. Zuck gets no loyalty because he hired an entire company of people with no convictions other than “winning” or whatever it really is that Meta sees as its central tenet.

It’s not fear of getting fired that keeps employees at most companies from leaking. It’s that they find themselves aligned with the company’s mission. They feel like part of a team that they want to see succeed, and they naturally adopt an attitude of being a team player. Team players don’t leak the playbook because they don’t like the coach’s play-calling or how much playing time they’re getting. I’ve never gotten the sense that that sort of attitude exists at Meta.

This is a company that bought a popular VPN app (Onavo) and then used it to snoop on users’ encrypted SnapChat traffic. They used it to snoop on users to determine the popularity of WhatsApp before purchasing it. This wasn’t some rogue operation in a corner of the company — it was a core strategic asset that led directly to a $20 billion acquisition. Onavo was just flat-out spyware and Apple kicked it out of the App Store in 2018. For years — years — Meta paid users aged 13–35 up to $20 a month to install a “Facebook Research” app that let Meta study every single thing they did on their phones. An app like that couldn’t be distributed through the App Store, of course, so Meta distributed it by abusing the iOS “enterprise” developer program; when Apple pulled Meta’s enterprise certificate over the fiasco, its employees couldn’t use their own internal apps to buy food or take a company shuttle bus.

It would be a wonder if the sort of people who would do stuff like that — or go to work at a company that does things like that — were not incorrigible leakers of embarrassing information and communications. Zuck’s exasperation over the disloyalty of his own employees is like hiring a team of pickpockets and then complaining that sandwiches keep going missing from the gang’s hangout fridge.

The WSJ on Zuckerberg’s $25 Million Payoff to Trump ★

Annie Linskey and Rebecca Ballhaus, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

“It looks like a bribe and a signal to every company that corruption is the name of the game,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said in a statement. “After Meta pays to play, what does Mark Zuckerberg expect as a return on this investment?”

Serious talks about the suit, which had seen little activity since fall 2023, began after Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida to dine with him in November, according to the people familiar with the discussions. The dinner was one of several efforts by Zuckerberg and Meta to soften the relationship with Trump and the incoming administration. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Last year, Trump warned that Zuckerberg could go to prison if he tried to rig the election against him.

Toward the end of the November dinner, Trump raised the matter of the lawsuit, the people said. The president signaled that the litigation had to be resolved before Zuckerberg could be “brought into the tent,” one of the people said.

A good reminder that self respect has no price tag.

Weeks later, in early January, Zuckerberg returned to Mar-a-Lago for a full day of mediation. Trump was present for part of the session, though he stepped out at one point to be sentenced — appearing virtually — for covering up hush money paid to a porn star, one of the people said. He also golfed, reappearing in golf clothes and talking about the round he had just played, the person said.

Even when you own the golf course and drive your cart right onto the green like a jackass, an 18-hole round of golf still takes like three hours. I just love the idea of him leaving Zuckerberg sitting around for half a fucking day while he played a round of golf after his felony sentencing, before getting back to negotiating the price of the bribe to get “into the tent”.

One of These Lickspittle Tech Titans Is Not Like the Others ★

NBC News, “Meta Agrees to Pay $25 Million to Settle Trump Lawsuit”:

Meta said Wednesday it would pay $25 million to settle a four-year-old lawsuit from President Donald Trump over the social media company’s decision to suspend Trump’s accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, filed a notice of the settlement in federal court in San Francisco, where the lawsuit was pending. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone separately confirmed the terms: a $25 million payment from the company, with $22 million going toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library and the balance dedicated to legal fees and other plaintiffs in the case.

I really can’t wait to see that Trump Presidential Library.

LocalSend: Open Source Cross-Platform Alternative to AirDrop ★

Via David Smith on Mastodon, who writes:

The recent work I’ve been doing has required a lot of sharing files between testing devices (and my Mac). AirDrop should be the ideal tool for this but I’ve recently found it to be unreliable.

Instead I’ve been using LocalSend which is an open-source AirDrop alternative and it’s been working fantastically. The only real downside is that you have to open the app on both sides for the share to complete, but it has been 100% reliable so that’s a tradeoff I’ll happily make.

Somehow I’d never heard of LocalSend before, but I just gave it a quick test drive and it works like a charm. It’s got clients for Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, and Windows — and the Mac client is available both in the App Store and via the web. No middleman in the cloud — transfers are peer-to-peer, and the whole project is open source with an active community on GitHub.

When I dick around with my Android burner phone, I often find myself sorely missing AirDrop and Continuity. Sometimes I just want to move the contents of my clipboard from one device to the other — LocalSend makes that easier than anything else I’ve seen.

I’m not even sure Smith’s “downside” is really a downside. I understand why AirDrop works the way it does (always-on in the background), but I wouldn’t want LocalSend to work that way. I like the explicitness of opening it on both devices.

Just an outstanding project from developer Tien Do Nam. Free of charge, open source, and no ads — the only funding is via an in-app tip jar, which I just gladly dropped some bills in.