A system designed to help keep us docile whilst extracting value from every facet of our dulled presence is both an extremely rough plot summary of the 1999 movie The Matrix and a description of Facebook. Just ask the organization's former chief security officer, Alex Stamos, who in a Twitter thread detailing a potential cause of Facebook's March 13 mega outage was able to draw a fairly clear line between his one time company's social networking platform and the machine conduct simulation of The Matrix movies. That is right, in Stamos's thread, Facebook plays the role of AI villain. Stamos, who allegedly left Facebook in August of last year following disagreements on how a business should respond to governmental manipulation of the stage, began the March 14 Twitter thread with a disclaimer that he's no particular knowledge of what knocked the system off-line for so long.
That, however, doesn't mean that he does not have ideas. Several reporters are asking me to get insight on the FB outage. He tweeted. I've none, other than that outages on massive distributed systems can occasionally follow this pattern:". That is when think took a turn for the interesting. With a string of Matrix GIFs acting as visual aides, Stamos walked curious readers through what he believes could have gone down. Basically, he speculatesit boiled down to some small error cascading into something much bigger. It is sort of intriguing, if you are into that kind of thing. Where it gets really intriguing, however, is the final tweet in the thread.
Humans win, but after having a significant cost. He writes. The system, today rebooted to its new incarnation, is secure for the time being. But exactly how long does the peace between person and machine grip? ." . Accompanying this last tweet is a screenshot from the final scene of The Matrix Revolutions, the 3rd movie in the trilogy. Stamos is obviously, if possibly inadvertently, equating a repressive machine driven simulation in The Matrix with the Facebook stage itself. And yeah, now that it is up and running, we may all return to mindlessly feeding our information to the machine, allowing it power in the procedure. Time will tell just how long the peace stays.
