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Let's not forget that this is the same Daily Fail that has a mind-staggering list of things that cause cancer...so many in fact that there's at least one group on Facebook that keeps count: here.

The thought they put into Civ4 in regards to modding was brilliant. But I must say that Civ:Rev DS has been the greatest Civ experience I have had since first popping in the Civ cart on my SNES. But needless to say I am excited.

What makes Facebook so good is that it's all tied to people - even the fake accounts need to seem to be people.

Like this one?

There is no such thing as gravity, only Intelligent Falling, whereby Angels grab your ankles and pull you back down to the ground.

Angels? I was under the impression that it was all done by gnomes. Everyone knows that Angels don't really exist and were made up by the gnomes as cover.

From here:

Does Facebook Chat support SSL?
No. At this time, Facebook Chat does not support SSL.

Does Facebook Chat use plaintext authentication?
No. Facebook Chat uses DIGEST-MD5 during authentication.

Are my Chat messages encrypted?
No. However, authentication information is secured using DIGEST-MD5

I logged in with Pidgin.

Its weird everyone logs in with the username "bckwrds". Really - http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php

Too bad SSL / TLS isn't supported.

Facebook's site specifically requests you let them know in advance if you're going to introduce 100,000 users or more so they can free up servers to handle the extra load. So apparently the external client does put a noticeable load on their servers. I wasn't able to log in yesterday when they announced it due to demand. A "few percent" of 400 million still nets you between 1 and 4 million people.

Google should first target those groups on Facebook that think any day now Facebook is going to start "charging" a monthly fee to use the service.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=26810775786
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=445591600322
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=292810587737

Google should first target those groups on Facebook that think any day now Facebook is going to start "charging" a monthly fee to use the service.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=26810775786
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=445591600322
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=292810587737

Google should first target those groups on Facebook that think any day now Facebook is going to start "charging" a monthly fee to use the service.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=26810775786
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=445591600322
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=292810587737

And today we have entire web sites dedicated to precious snowflakes.

I think Facebook's Thrift is worth mentioning during this discussion, as well as the other items listed under their 'open source projects'.

They tend to work with the Apache Software Foundation:

http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php

I would imagine the licensing for this will be similar.

And it is probably best described as an implementation; if they start adding language features not present in other PHP interpreters, then it becomes a fork (lots of languages have multiple implementations, for instance, C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, etc.).

Try the "Lite" version. It's much faster, and doesn't have that annoying chat bar.

The BBC are indeed head and shoulders the best broadcaster in the world. I'm happy to pay the license fee and I just hope the damn Tories don't try and cut it back.

I even joined a facebook group.

While it is relatively easy for the President to get millions of followers

Indeed... Even Sarah Palin — a private citizen, with one book to her name (and a lousy one at that, according to the enlightened people) — has 224,248 Facebook fans at the time of this writing.

andy zebrowitz

Also, compare the characters from this wikipedia entry to what I presume is a screenshot from Final Fantasy 2. You can see the similarities to several of the character designs, namely the top guy in red and the 3rd slot guy in blue.

This definitely is not Final Fantasy 4j/2us.

I still haven't seen any posts about using age-enhancement software. This has been around for 15 years at least, I remember seeing the age-progression morph video with a disclaimer "this image was produced by digitally applying common aging patterns to the source picture" - later shortened to "what they may look like now using age-progression" and often "thanks to blah laboratories for providing age-enhancement techniques."

Wouldn't the FBI want to use such a thing, and maybe add some "died from lack of dialysis" marks here and there, instead of Photoshopping something together???

There's a fucking app on FaceBook to do this!!! AgeMe For free!! Google search for "age progression" leads to several free sites where you could do it as well. FBI doesn't want the public to know? Contact the authors and ask them to do a special job under NDA.

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Iceland a geologically unstable land with an high rate of volcanoes because traversed by a fault line and thus subject to seismicity?

Right, someone could object that also some other place as well filled with important datacenters and nodes has far more seismicity or happens to be under water level in times of sea level rise, but still.

Although geografic spreading like in Akamai make a non-problem of this, at least for big data providers who can afford them: how do we confront the problem of nodes like AMS-IX and other Internet Exchange Points of NAPs potentially vulnerable, and not only to the force of nature?

Would the Net Transit survive a Big One, and then be useful as emergency service too and for communications, the reason it was initially made for, or would it miserably fail by the falling of one of its major nodes? So then does it really make sense to concentrate too many resources in the same place other than from an economic point of view?

They're all bad. Verizon? Check out verizarape.com. ATT? It's got it's own facebook hate group. Do you hate sprint? I hate Sprint was created for you. T-Mobile? They've got you covered. And there are even youtube videos.

Among the high quality comments you will find on these websites are things like this gem: "[carrier] had reeeeeally been bothering me lately! They think they're so cool, but if I could, I would DESTROY [carrier]!!" So now you know everything you know.

Seriously though, the 'best' carrier depends on your needs and your area. In this story you will have posts from people who say "X carrier has horrible coverage" and others who say the same carrier has awesome coverage. It really depends on where you live.

They're all bad. Verizon? Check out verizarape.com. ATT? It's got it's own facebook hate group. Do you hate sprint? I hate Sprint was created for you. T-Mobile? They've got you covered. And there are even youtube videos.

Among the high quality comments you will find on these websites are things like this gem: "[carrier] had reeeeeally been bothering me lately! They think they're so cool, but if I could, I would DESTROY [carrier]!!" So now you know everything you know.

Seriously though, the 'best' carrier depends on your needs and your area. In this story you will have posts from people who say "X carrier has horrible coverage" and others who say the same carrier has awesome coverage. It really depends on where you live.

A misconfigured proxy server (or web application with a front-end proxy that doesn't setup the Cache-Control header properly, for that matter) will store the cookies that were sent by the application server, and send copies of the same cookies along to the next requestor.

So, you go to the page http://facebook.com/profile (for example, I'm not a fb user), your browser sends your cookie because you logged in yesterday, the application server sends the cookie back in the response. Then I come along, not logged in, go to http://facebook.com/profile, my browser sends no cookie. The request is intercepted by the proxy server, never forwarded to facebook, and the proxy gives me your profile page and your cookie. Then I'm in on your account. When I go to change your password or change your status to "dolphin fucker", it goes via a POST request, so the proxy doesn't intercept, but my browser is now sending your cookie, so it works.

A misconfigured proxy server (or web application with a front-end proxy that doesn't setup the Cache-Control header properly, for that matter) will store the cookies that were sent by the application server, and send copies of the same cookies along to the next requestor.

So, you go to the page http://facebook.com/profile (for example, I'm not a fb user), your browser sends your cookie because you logged in yesterday, the application server sends the cookie back in the response. Then I come along, not logged in, go to http://facebook.com/profile, my browser sends no cookie. The request is intercepted by the proxy server, never forwarded to facebook, and the proxy gives me your profile page and your cookie. Then I'm in on your account. When I go to change your password or change your status to "dolphin fucker", it goes via a POST request, so the proxy doesn't intercept, but my browser is now sending your cookie, so it works.

http://www.facebook.com/zuck

Get the word out to non-slashdot reading folks.. this is too ridiculous for this company not to have it spread all over the internet. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wellesley-Hills-MA/FrameChannel/103020166321?v=wall http://twitter.com/FrameChannel

andy zebrowitz

I can't wait for Civilization Network to be available on Facebook so we can split the difference here:

http://www.facebook.com/civnetwork?v=info

-=Steve=-

Get rid of Mafia War, farm town, etc. postings

Ivor Nardon
tell em ur hearin voices theyl put u on section 2 ! ur out in a few weeks blag em ur takin the meds no more jail !

I'll add to this comment, FTA:

Back-end services that require the performance are implemente in C++.

And most of these 30k servers may be "running" PHP, but goodness their code is not all PHP. Facebook leverages a large amount of open source software and it's definitely not all PHP. MySQL isn't PHP, MemcacheD isn't PHP, Cassandra & Hive are written in Java, Thrift and Scribe are built in C++.

This guy's whole premise is completely under-researched, to tell people at Facebook that they're missing a 10:1 performance opportunity b/c of PHP is pretty ridiculous.

• Neil Ridley (the A&R man)
• Neill Ridley (the ragefactor man)

First, a few helpful links:

• Facebook architecture overview
• Facebook architecture presentation by Aditya Agarwal
• Amdahl's law
• Facebook uses many Hadoop nodes
• Facebook has 2nd largest Hadoop cluster

Amdahl's law says that if Facebook were to switch from PHP to C++, the best possible improvement in the overall processing time is proportional to the total time spent in PHP now. If PHP processing accounts for 90% of the time and they reduce that to zero, they'd have a 10x speedup. However, if it accounts for 10% of the time and they reduce it to zero, they'd have about a 10% speedup.

So, the question is: How much time (overall) is spent in PHP processing? My guess is not very much. As other posters have pointed out, there are disk accesses and MySQL. And quite a bit is cached in Memcached.

The original article is slashdotted now, so I'm not sure if it says what those 30k servers are doing, but Facebook has more than just PHP running. Perhaps a thousand of those servers are running Hadoop, probably calculating the social network.

From an architectural perspective, it probably does not make sense for them to optimize for processing speed (i.e., switch PHP to C++) if their performance is acceptable. That's because they face larger risks: modifiability and time to market pressures. They may worry that switching to a statically typed language (such as C++, but Java would be similar) would make new feature development slower. If they could have both, great, but these two quality attributes often trade off against each other. A design with better performance may hinder modifiability, and vice versa.

I don't mean to start a language war -- I'm speaking broadly about the idea that dynamically typed languages (PHP, Smalltalk, Ruby, Python, ...) yield programs that are faster to write and modify compared to statically typed languages (C, C++, Java). You may disagree with that generalization, but you may agree that others think it is true, and are therefore acting rationally if they choose a dynamic language when they want modifiability.

Disclaimers: I knew Aditya in school but haven't spoken to him about Facebook; I am writing a book on software architecture.

Actually, Facebook uses APC to compile and optimize the code in the shared memory so it doesn't have to be compiled over and over again.

There are other libraries for caching PHP functions on many different levels as well, and they're open source, for the most part. Some real bright minds from Facebook and other large PHP applications have contributed to them.

Bottom line: PHP is quite powerful and efficient when built and extended properly.

> But I'm sure somebody would still get pissed at call it deceptive business practices. It's a free market, and they can charge anything they like. This is a total non-story.

One of the free market axioms is that consumers have full information about the goods they're buying. You'll have to forgive me by trying to make it closer to true by making sure that people know about a gigantic fee buried under a huge pile of legalese before they find out about Verizon's customer service.

Also, you might know that there's more than one person who doesn't believe in imaginary property these days.

But wait! My bad. I guess I should have noticed the 'successfultroll' tag on your comment. No cake for you.

Don't trust that one. A few days ago, on the day Mark Zuckerberg published a bunch of pictures, I could check out his whole friends list through http://facebook.com/friends/?id=zuck even though the list was hidden from his profile. Right now, the same query forwards to the profile page, but that might be some kind of temporary fluke or an admin perk.
What would you want to hide your friends list for, though? Being able to quickly search through A's (whom you are friends with on facebook) friends for B's (whom A introduced you to a few hours before) first name is one of my favourite aspects of facebook.

GP wrote: "you can no longer have your Profile Pic show up for friends only". The GP was correct. From the new privacy policy:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings.

This has got to be one of the Douche bags on the Mafia Wars forums... I can only imagine the guy behind this or fueling the fire is this douche bag, who is trying to make his own application to compete against Zynga... He claims that he and his "partner" are going to make a "bug free" game. Here is the guy: http://www.facebook.com/richard.ressler?ref=profile and his page claiming to be developing an app that will compete against the behemoth Zynga has created: http://www.facebook.com/pages/ATTN-Mafia-Wars-Player-Do-you-want-a-New-and-Better-Game-to-Play/191500816946?ref=mf

This has got to be one of the Douche bags on the Mafia Wars forums... I can only imagine the guy behind this or fueling the fire is this douche bag, who is trying to make his own application to compete against Zynga... He claims that he and his "partner" are going to make a "bug free" game. Here is the guy: http://www.facebook.com/richard.ressler?ref=profile and his page claiming to be developing an app that will compete against the behemoth Zynga has created: http://www.facebook.com/pages/ATTN-Mafia-Wars-Player-Do-you-want-a-New-and-Better-Game-to-Play/191500816946?ref=mf

From the Fake Steve website : "On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees." Also every other site has managed to correctly report the date. You might want to check little facts like that before assigning blame.

You mean the same company that is lies about having 24x7 support and provides _no_ support for their customers so the customers are forced to ask for help on their Facebook page? http://www.facebook.com/pages/Neugent-Technologies/102525558788#/photo.php?pid=2957333&id=102525558788&fbid=189239928788

You take the average gain of the last 30 seconds of a program before it goes to commercial, and don't allow the commercials to be any louder than that.

If I can make karaoke and techno music automatically crossfade with my meager skills(link below)

http://www.facebook.com/v/203775860215

Then surely a TV station or broadcast network could make commercials stay at the same gain as the programming.

I think you have a point, but I keep hearing a lot of "The broadcaster can never make it work. The advertiser screws the whole thing up with audio compression!"...Well, if there is no legal way for the broadcaster to air the ultra compressed unholy demon ad, then they will have to call the advertiser and say "I'm sorry, we cannot legally air your ad". I suspect that the advertiser would respond by creating a version that the network CAN legally air.

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You take the average gain of the last 30 seconds of a program before it goes to commercial, and don't allow the commercials to be any louder than that.

If I can make karaoke and techno music automatically crossfade with my meager skills(link below)

http://www.facebook.com/v/203775860215

Then surely a TV station or broadcast network could make commercials stay at the same gain as the programming.

I could have answered you with "If only you could see from my camera!", but instead, I'll probably show you some pics -- attack ships on fire at the shoulder of Orion, C-beams glittering through the darkness near the Tannhauser gate, and much more.. wait, you've already seen them? Google image search? Damn, I want more privacy, father!

Somebody totally needs to make a Flicker feed for Roy. Afterall he's already on Facebook

Yup, I believe it's zuck as well. Same statement, different walls.

My mistake, munging the URL reveals his friends, as pointed out in another comment here: http://www.facebook.com/friends/?id=zuck

http://www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg For those wondering, I set most of my content on my personal Facebook page to be open so people could see it. I set some of my content to be more private, but I didn't see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear :)

Reply to myself again. It looks like the frien hiding is possible, but it reqwuires removing them from your profile entirely, but it is still possible for anybody to see the list using a URL like http://www.facebook.com/friends/?id=zuck. Thanks to gleffler for this info.

This scandal must have had a big effect on Mark's social life because I went to http://www.facebook.com/friends/?id=markzuckerberg and it plainly told me: "Mark has no friends."