He filed for medical leave, a process in which he says he was repeatedly asked for a date he would return to work. His manager initially told him not to worry about it, but Facebook HR informed him after a couple of months that he had run out of vacation days and had to go on unpaid leave. Following his release, Esfahbod experienced crippling paranoia and fell into a deep depression he attributes to his bipolar II disorder. Esfahbod believes that may have been when the company’s Global Security Operations Center shut down his Facebook accounts to prevent infiltration. They also tried to convince him to become an informant and keep tabs on his activist friends once he left Iran.įacebook had learned of his detention from his wife and friends within two days of his arrest. The guards went through most of his devices and downloaded troves of private data from his social media accounts.
(Esfahbod did participate in Iran’s Green Movement to remove former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, but he says he is not currently an activist.) He was placed in solitary confinement for a week, save for two sessions of psychological torture and daily six-hour interrogations. And he described something strange: Not only did Facebook appear to fear Iran, but the Iranian authorities seemed wary of offending Facebook, too.Įsfahbod says the IRGC targeted him because of his friendships with activists who’ve been developing tools to circumvent internet censorship in Iran.
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After we saw it, we called Esfahbod up, and he told us the full story of his experience and why he eventually left Facebook. Unsurprisingly, it also made waves within Facebook, according to an internal document leaked as part of the Facebook Papers that was initially viewed by more than 5,500 employees. In the aftermath, Esfahbod went public with the story of his capture, which made international news. He was tortured and spent months afterward living in fear. Chinese) have way more than 128 characters.Esfahbod’s encounter with the IRGC threw his life into chaos. But there's lots of problems with this approach. A business could use them for their own special encoding, or a whole country could use them for non-latin characters in their language.
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a "byte")? Yep, but the 8th bit was used for code pages - that is, the other 128 characters (128 + 128 = 256 = maximum number you can make from 8 bits) where used for domain-specific purposes. But isn't it the case the computers tend to like groups of 8 bits (i.e. There were 128 characters in the original ASCII specification - and that's because 128 is the largest number that can be represented with 7 bits.
ASCII was (and still is) just a simple set of conversion rules to go from numbers to characters. Unicode was the solution to an increasingly important problem in the dawn of computing and the internet: How does my computer communicate with another computer on the other side of the world if that computer "speaks a different language"? One of the most popular "languages" in the early 1980s (especially in the USA) was ASCII - the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It's the organisation that handles the international standards for converting numbers into textual characters. Okay, now on to the long explanation: The long explanation starts with an international organisation called "Unicode".