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Facebook Secretly Explored Building Bird-Size Drones To Ferry Data To People With Bad Internet Connections (businessinsider.com) 88

Facebook recently explored building bird-size drones loaded with data to help improve people's internet connections. From a report: The Menlo Park, California-headquartered technology giant worked on a far-out project, called Catalina, in recent years that aimed to build tiny fixed-wing aircraft capable of ferrying media to communities to augment slow internet connections like 2G, Business Insider has learned. The efforts illustrate how Facebook has been exploring out-of-the-box concepts in its attempts to connect people around the world to the internet for the first time and grow Facebook's user base. And it shows that even amid Facebook's public retreat in June from building 747-size "Aquila" drones to provide internet connectivity to emerging markets, the company was also considering other, even less conventional aerial methods of providing connectivity solutions. Development of Catalina began in late 2017 or earlier, a source said, and work on it continued past June. Also in the story: Facebook has pursued some additional low-tech connectivity efforts. "Street Feet" was an internal effort that paid people in emerging markets to physically approach random people on the street and persuade them to sign up for Facebook.
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Facebook Secretly Explored Building Bird-Size Drones To Ferry Data To People With Bad Internet Connections

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  • Further evidence that people with lots of money and no common sense are a problem.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      Why would you want to do something sensible and robust like having hammy's create a shortwave mesh network when you can just waste time, energy, and materials by throwing drones at something? C'mon man, you gotta think like a millennial here!
    • Some areas are tough for Sneaker-Net. And with Drones we can have dozens of communication transfers a day vs. 1 or 2 with Sneaker-Net.

  • by Errol backfiring ( 1280012 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @10:43AM (#58353594) Journal
    Is this the next release of the standard "IP over Avian Carrier"?
  • by Anonymous Coward

    RFC 1149 -- https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149

    A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

  • Media = Ads (Score:4, Insightful)

    by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @10:54AM (#58353652) Homepage

    And by media, they mean advertisements.

  • What's the end goal here? I could see this for something like a compressed version of Wikipedia and similar websites, but FaceBook?

    "Your message to your uncle was sent via RFC 1149. You can expect a reply no earlier than two weeks from now."

  • April 1st is Monday. I think /. 8 bit server is suffering from the Y2K bug.
    • April 1st is Monday. I think /. 8 bit server is suffering from the Y2K bug.

      Yeah, my first thought was, "wait is this an April Fools joke?"

      As incompetent as Facebook are, I wouldn't be surprised if this were released too early.

  • A couple days early for these stories, no?

  • Why don't we have carrier pigeons with USB sicks? Are drones that much more reliable and affordable to maintain?

    • Why don't we have carrier pigeons with USB sicks? Are drones that much more reliable and affordable to maintain?

      A carrier pigeon might panic if it see's a cat and swallow the USB stick. What we need is Golden Eagles trained to act like carrier pigeons.

  • They must be trying to implement that. It's too early for April Fool's Day.
    • IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC) was initially described in RFC 1149, released on April 1, 1990. Waitzman described an improvement of his protocol in RFC 2549, IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service (1 April 1999). Later, in RFC 6214—released on 1 April 2011, and 13 years after the introduction of IPv6—Carpenter and Hinden published Adaptation of RFC 1149 for IPv6.
  • by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @11:32AM (#58353838)

    Are we talking hummingbird or albatross ?

    Or swallow?

  • A station wagon full of magtapes still have the largest bandwidth

  • by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @11:44AM (#58353918) Journal
    I think in the case of Facebook the real headline should read:

    Facebook Secretly Explored Building Bird-Size Drones To Ferry Personal Data From People With Bad Internet Connections

    Amirite?

    • by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      I think in the case of Facebook the real headline should read: Facebook Secretly Explored Building Bird-Size Drones To Ferry Personal Data From People With Bad Internet Connections

      . Amirite?

      No, I think you're wrong in an instructive way.

      What plausible mechanism can you imagine by which these drones would carry data away from people? Occam's razor strongly suggests that what you describe wouldn't happen in this case. Which suggests you should re-evaluate your knee jerk.

      • I think you should re-evaluate your sense of humor, specificall your disappointingly sad complete lack of one, and perhaps also your insufferable pedantry. You're a buzzkill. Party pooper. Sad sack. Droll to the point where even an Englishman would think you're too dry and humourless. Sheesh.
  • by BringsApples ( 3418089 ) on Friday March 29, 2019 @11:58AM (#58353980)

    Facebook has pursued some additional low-tech connectivity efforts. "Street Feet" was an internal effort that paid people in emerging markets to physically approach random people on the street and persuade them to sign up for Facebook.

    This would have totally backfired. There was a start-up where I live, like 10 years ago. They had a series of what appeared to be small moving trucks that had been modified to show scrolling advertisements on all sides. Needless to say it was eventually banned by a city ordnance, but before that happened, people would cut the trucks off, brake-check them and just generally give them shit on the road. I imagine that if Facebook hired people to advertise to the general public like that, probably the same, or worse, would happen to them.

    • In the USA those would have never been legal. Unless the ads didn't have any blue or red elements.

      No red lights on non emergency vehicles except the brake lights, no blue lights on non-emergency vehicles.

      • It's in America. There were no lights on the sides, just a 3-sides, rolling sections that would display a different advert each, so there could be 12 different adverts per truck. I found this [youtube.com] video that shows what I'm talking about, although it only shows it from the rear.

  • they need to stop being so awful. Anyone still using facebook after all the crap they've been recently found to be doing is intellectually challenged.

  • the sensationalism and editorializing of a mundane 'news' item

    many if not most companies have an R&D division/aspect in which they explore future possibilities; the fact that it isn't announced to the public in detail is not the same as it being done 'in secret'

    clickbait journalism requires falsehood and misdirection.... the very opposite of the journalist's creedo

    ".... oooooo, let's call it "secret" so it appears full of controversy and we'll get the views to justify the ads...." of course t
  • Headlines are usually full of crap. There's nothing in TFA about this being any kind of a secret. Now, maybe they didn't call up Business Insider ahead of time to tell them about it, that's not the same thing as a secret.
  • First drone delivers "REQ".
    Returns back with "ACK1".
    Files again with "ACK2".

    And - voila! Connection established!

    • Too efficient: drones values are general purpose.

      First send drone that only does REQ. The drone that returns only does ACK1. Then send send drone that only does ACK2.

      Data is encoded by drones that represent the hex values #0 to #F.

Were there fewer fools, knaves would starve. - Anonymous

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