What exactly did this entail? I haven't read all the court documents, but at least in the initial/amended complaint the plaintiffs didn't make this argument, probably because it's totally irrelevant to the charge of whether they "intentionally eavesdropped" or not. Either they were eavesdropping or not. Whether they were using it for advertising purposes might be relevant in armchair discussions about meta is evil or not, but shouldn't be relevant when it comes to the eavesdropping charge.
>They knew, or should have known, that they needed to check if it was legal to use it
What do you think this should look like?
Institutions that handle sensitive data that is subject to access regulations generally have a compliance process that must be followed prior to accessing and using that data, and a compliance department staffed with experts who review and approve/deny access requests.
But Facebook would rather move fast, break things, pay some fines, and reap the benefits of their illegal behavior.
The answer is that per the original story, it was not defaulting to three milliseconds. It was defaulting to 0, and the 3ms was just how long it took the system to check for a response with a 0 timeout:
> Some experimentation established that on this particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.
This is a very different scenario, as it's not clear there should be a poll() there at all (or more likely select() given the age of the story) to match the original, but if there was, the select would have a timeout of 0, not 3ms, and would just happen to be unable to distinguish between 0 and up to 3ms.
"10 years ago we couldn't send an email 500 miles, but these days we can't send it 500 miles because it just routes internally."
Too bad, I think that would have been more interesting to read.
If you've ever tried to use AI to help with this kind of analysis, you might find this to be more inevitable than it is funny.
It's really, really, really good at confidently jumping to hasty conclusions and confirmation bias. Which perhaps shouldn't be surprising when you consider that it was largely trained on the Internet's proverbial global comments section.
But if the alternative is doing calculations by hand (writing code manually) there is a higher chance of making mistakes.
Just like calculations are double checked while building bridges unit tests and code reviews should catch bugs introduced by LLM written code.
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