Facebook: How to Make the ENDS Justify the Means

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about making Facebook part of an ENDS system (see this post, ENDS page here). 

I am relentlessly pursuing this because no one appears to be able to successfully legally challenge the utter insanity contained in the FDA deeming regulations. 

This leaves the only rational challenge a technical or scientific one.

While the FDA is free to "deem" whatever laws into existence they choose there are technical and legal consequences where existing science and law requires consistency (for example PA tax law: "[a]ll taxes shall be uniform, upon the same class of subjects, within the territorial limits of the authority levying the tax, and shall be collected under general laws.", plug in air fresheners meet the definition of ENDS, etc.).

So we need to push the envelope and spread the pain of the FDA deeming regulations to other businesses who stand to lose great deal more than a few thousand lousy vape shops.

The FDA identifies any "software" used in an e-cigarette as an "component or part" of an ENDS system (see this video around 0:25s, all in the published regs).

Clearly Facebook supports the FDA mission on e-cigarettes as demonstrated by their bans on vaping ads and it's big and in every tax jurisdiction, so its reasonable to assume it will be unhappy following the FDA regulations.  Hence it will bitch.

Thus making Facebook's software into a "component or part" of an e-cigarette demonstrates the lunacy of the FDA regulations and will hopefully offer a legal entry point for lawsuits.

There is no requirement Facebook be cooperative or complicit in this as far as the FDA deeming regulations are concerned as far as I can see.

We do this by making the core function of Facebook (or iOS, or whatever) integral to an ENDS system (just as I did with the PrimusZ and the iPhone).  We simply pass a message through Facebook to fire the mod.

Once this occurs (and it need only occur once in a reasonably documented fashion), some interesting things result:

• Facebook can no longer have users under 21 years of age.

• Facebook cannot advertise.

• Facebook cannot give free samples (of their software, for example) away.

• Facebook is a "component or part" of an ENDS product by FDA definition.

Should a special exception be made for Facebook then the rigging of the game for everyone else is fully exposed.

Facebook ($500 Billion USD) is far larger than all of "big tobacco" combined (maybe $150 Billion USD).

(Ditto for Android, Apple, all the hardware used to route internet traffic, fiber, wires, etc. etc. etc.  Though Apple at $900 Billion USD is bigger than Facebook).

I would suppose this also works to allow states and localities to tax Facebook as an ENDS product.

The hardware part is now complete as you can see from the various videos I have been posting.  I now have a mod that accepts and sends MIDI commands via Bluetooth.

So the path on making virtually any kind of "software" application part of an FDA ENDS is pretty simple and, while there are obviously many variations, it all boils down to more or less this:

1) Modify the midi4.ino file on my GitHub to accept some MIDI commands, e.g., MIDI Note On/Off to fire the device.  This is trivial.

2) Grab any of a number of iOS or Android apps like musicIO that will route MIDI messages between, say, your Mac and your iOS device (probably equivalents in the Windows and Android world as well).  Again, this is trivial.

3) Set up some kind of software, either Facebook app (using node.js), or other tool, e.g., Sixth Sense, through which you can identify a particular kind of Facebook message (again, this only need be very, very crude).  On the server end monitoring Facebook (something Facebook cannot see) you trap this message and route it to the mod.

This is a bit more work but really not too hard to gin up a demonstration.