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from the kiss-the-rest-of-your-privacy-goodbye dept.
Up in the sky, look! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a solar-powered internet drone!
Facebook has revealed that it has completed the first successful flight of it's Aquila drone, which it hopes will eventually be used to provide internet access to remote regions of the world. The company, which has been testing a one-fifth scale version of the drone for months, initially hoped to fly the full-sized aircraft for 30 minutes, but far exceeded that goal.
[...]
What exactly is Aquila? Just an unmanned, solar-powered, internet-providing drone from Facebook. Yasmeen Abutaleb shares the important background information:
Facebook...completed a successful test flight of a solar-powered drone that...will help it extend internet connectivity to every corner of the planet.
...
Aquila, Facebook's lightweight, high-altitude aircraft, flew at a few thousand feet for 96 minutes in Yuma, Arizona...The company ultimately hopes to have a fleet of Aquilas that can fly for at least three months at a time at 60,000 feet...and communicate with each other to deliver internet access.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @01:13PM
Good for you then. You will be quarantined in your little garden...
Good for you that you think that that nice little zen garden is better than nothing. Let me know what your owners want you to think about that when you got a minute to look up what they want you see online...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @01:21PM
Dry it up. Are you saying that nothing would be better than some level of internet service? I'm sure you're one of privileged ones that lives in a place with multiple providers available. Not everyone has that available to them. Try youtube on dialup, it's awesome.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @02:02PM
If you claim youtube is a necessity, I think *you* are the privileged one here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @02:03PM
You're funny!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @03:36PM
That's the problem. Facebook has successfully framed the question as "some internet is better than none" but the issue isn't about internet access at all. It is no more "internet" than television is. You will be told what you can see and when you can see it. That completely misses the most important aspects of the internet - freedom to assemble and freedom to learn.
You wouldn't consider TV a substitute for the internet, but that is what faceplant is going to give you.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday July 25 2016, @04:54PM
This fake internet may displace things like libraries with books.
Yes, that would be bad.