Slashdot Mirror

I am a Facebook developer who runs a popular quiz application (myPersonality). Firstly, I don't understand why this article is picking on quizzes, since any application that you use will have access to your profile. Secondly, Facebook has a couple of good ways of preventing spam from any application. At the start, an application has to specifically ask for an "extended permission" to send you an e-mail. That means another box pops up and the user has to choose to receive e-mails from that application. Even after a user has given permission, applications never actually have access to your e-mail address - all they have is the ability to tell Facebook to send a specific user ID an e-mail on their behalf. This means that if you remove the application, it can no longer e-mail you as Facebook simply denies the request.

Finally, although an application is given access to your profile information (age, gender, etc. but not e-mail address or phone number), the Facebook developer terms state that it is not allowed to store it for longer than 24 hours from your last use. Although this doesn't stop applications from doing it, at least if you find out then you can report the application to Facebook and they will take action.

If you have a real computer, you should forget 7. And stick with a real man's operating system. On a real PC, one with sixteen cores and 8GB RAM and enough fans to lift the building. ACCEPT NOTHING LESS.

Bah. Vista is far superior. Windows 7 is for Mac-wannabes who want to "do" things with their computer, not just admire its AWESOME MIGHT as your CPU fan starts lifting your house into the air.

Windows 7 is CASTRATED APPEASEMENT to soy latte-sipping girly-men who wish they owned a Mac. We want a REAL operating system. An operating system that PERSONIFIES America's INDUSTRIAL MIGHT. That makes you feel AWE at the MAJESTY of the progress of its operation. VISTA is a monument to everything that makes us the country we are!

Like Chrysler, like Hummer, like Edsel - "Vista" is a name that will be remembered as the greatest operating system in Microsoft's history.

Just Say "No" To Seven -

SAVE VISTA!

Original blog post - Facebook group

We want ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE to join this group. So far we have nearly 30. TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS!

"I fully support this initiative. My computer business employs 200 people; the best possible thing for it is to make sure Vista continues and goes forward." - M. Shuttleworth, London

"I can't tell you how much Vista has done for my business. So many people depend on it." - S. Jobs, Cupertino

"Vista is the one thing that will keep people seeking out and using systems that are at the forefront of technology. It's been the best thing for all of us." - L. Torvalds, Portland.

"I'm ... I'm touched. *sob* I didn't think anyone cared. You guys. Developers! *sob*" - S. Ballmer, Seattle.

Have a Facebook group.

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=92813606083&h=zB8rW&u=6tzPt&ref=nf

Because with these paid workers, things make so much more sense.

They should go to Facebook, they have even added a special language option just for them. English (Pirate)

I don't know what the Swedish laws are, but here in the US, a judge is supposed to recuse themselves if there's an appearance of impropriety. Note that word: appearance. There doesn't have to be any actual impropriety, it just has to look bad. Frankly, I think we have empirical evidence (in the form of protests and mass sign-ups to the Pirate Party) which proves that his failure to recuse himself appears improper, even if he's being honest about having made an unbiased judgment.

Anyhow, I'd like to thank him for not recusing himself. With any luck, he just gave the Pirate Party a huge boost right before some important elections in Sweden in which Pirate Party members hope to get a few seats AND the victory will be snatched away from the MAFIAA soon enough.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

"On 18 March, 29-year-old blogger Alireza Mirsayafi died while in Tehran's Evin prison. According to an account by Hesam Firoozi, a physician also imprisoned in Evin, Mirsayafi had taken extra doses of his medication. Firoozi's account, as provided by the Human Rights Activists in Iran, notes that Mirsayafi suffered from serious depression. Firoozi was present during the initial stages of Mirsayafi's treatment inside the prison's medical clinic and reported that the prison doctors failed to provide proper care by not sending him immediately to a hospital to save his life."

Apparently this a problem everywhere:

Young men, persons with mental illness, alcohol and drug addicts, and people who are in custody, are amongst the most at-risk groups for suicide.605 Given the prevalence of all of these indicators concurrently among prisoners in the United States, it is not surprising that suicide attempts are a serious problem inside prison. A nationwide survey conducted by prison suicide expert Lindsey Hayes in 1995 found that suicide rates in state prison systems ranged from 18.6 per one hundred thousand all the way up to 53.7 per one hundred thousand.606 According to The 2001 Corrections Yearbook, the average suicide rate in prison was 0.26 per 1,000 prisoners, or twenty-six per 100,000, two-and-a-half times the rate of suicide in the U.S.population at large, which for 2000 was 10.6 per 100,000

Does that mean I hold Iran guiltless? Not at all. The guy should never have been in prison, and being in prison increased his suicide risk (assuming Iranian prisons boost the suicide rate like US jails do).

Compare all of the above with a site like plenty of fish, which while handling only about 1/40th the traffic is using less than 1/200th the number of servers to do so, because they've chosen a compiled architecture.

What is a "compiled architecture"? They're running on the CLR but end up facing the same problems as everyone else.

Both Amazon and Facebook have a service orientated architecture and developers get to write services using a variety of programming language and runtimes. So while Amazon tie the frontend together using a C++ app, they're not using that language exclusively.

If it's spending most of its time waiting on service responses, a well designed C++ app scales out about the same as PHP. A PHP app server will need scaling up first but savings in development and maintenance costs more than make up for it. Adding 20 machines to your frontend cluster is still cheaper than the cost of employing an additonal developer.

What are you not understanding?

Every time facebook comes up and people complain, I'm happy to point them in the bloat free direction. Although this also suffers from feature creep, the "like" madness has recently infected facebook mobile... :{

"Every few days I run into whole sections of core Facebook functionality that are just plain broken for hours"

What response did you get when you reported it to the Bug Reporting site?

The next step may be something that reads your GPS tracking info, evaluates how interesting your life is, and feeds this into your social networking profile.

try setting your dns to 4.2.2.3 and then going to https://facebook.com/

This has all the features of facebook I ever use...

http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=420

"419" scams and compromised accounts

If you believe your account has been hacked or compromised, please follow this link.

http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=420

"419" scams and compromised accounts

If you believe your account has been hacked or compromised, please follow this link.

Huh? Are you confused? Both companies made the stupid mistake of using a web scripting language to do backend heavy lifting. Twitter is fixing that with Scala. (leaving RoR on the frontend because its really good at web frontends) Facebook already fixed that with ERLANG, not PHP. (leaving PHP on the frontend because of the technical debt they've accumulated) http://www.facebook.com/eblog BTW, PHP is the worst language ever. That is a fact, not my opinion.

Well, I guess you can: many state laws specifically exclude the police.

They do, but with a metric shit-ton of conditions imposed, not a free-floating permission.

Best-case scenario, this is another pork project that will make some people very happy with the grants. Worst-case scenario, this is the replay (move-by-move) of the Bolshevik government's actions in Russia circa 1917. "First, we must control the telephone, telegraph, and the postal office" - Vladimir Lenin. Call me paranoid ("You're paranoid!"), but it's just a little unsettling to anyone who's studied history.

On a tangent, what's pretty amazing is the comparative lack of interest in this outside of /. Even Facebook, with 150+ million members, has only 3 groups set up (and these are folks who make a group on just about every topic) - http://www.facebook.com/srch.php?q=cybersecurity+2009&k=200000010

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=59502659200

not to mention inane urls like http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/home.php?ref=home

I think the O3 article and the parent have missed the real point. It's not the length of the URL's that's wasting bandwidth, it's how they're being used.

A lot of services append useless query parameter information (like "ref=logo" etc. in the Facebook example) to the end of every hyperlink instead of using built-in HTTP functionality like the HTTP-Referer client request headers to do the same job.

This causes proxy servers to retrieve multiple copies of the same pages unnecessarily, such as http://www.facebook.com/home.php and http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=logo, wasting internet bandwidth and disk space at the same time.

I think the O3 article and the parent have missed the real point. It's not the length of the URL's that's wasting bandwidth, it's how they're being used.

A lot of services append useless query parameter information (like "ref=logo" etc. in the Facebook example) to the end of every hyperlink instead of using built-in HTTP functionality like the HTTP-Referer client request headers to do the same job.

This causes proxy servers to retrieve multiple copies of the same pages unnecessarily, such as http://www.facebook.com/home.php and http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=logo, wasting internet bandwidth and disk space at the same time.

Just put a CHAS system in it. Cabin Heat Abatement System.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1505611584&ref=profile#/group.php?gid=130313645520

Join my group!

You lied to me...

I can't. :(

Brian has a Facebook group in his memory now.

Facebook already does offer encryption - https://www.facebook.com/. Sure, not everything works 100% perfectly, and it sometimes reverts to plain http, but with the use of enforced https through NoScript in Firefox, 98% of the stuff on Facebook can be made to work reliably over HTTPS.

Join my group!

They'll be hungry zombies, then. You'll find no BRAAAAAIINS on Teh Social Webz.[1][2]

1 myspace http://www.myspace.com/

[2] Facebook http://www.facebook.com/

If you can sue via facebook I will sue Jesus for religious discrimination, Christopher Columbus for genocide of the native Americans and King Charles II for usurping the British Republic.

If you can sue via facebook I will sue Jesus for religious discrimination, Christopher Columbus for genocide of the native Americans and King Charles II for usurping the British Republic.

If you can sue via facebook I will sue Jesus for religious discrimination, Christopher Columbus for genocide of the native Americans and King Charles II for usurping the British Republic.

The UK Government has announced today - to the Daily Telegraph initially - that it will completely remove the offending clause from the Coroners and Justice Bill.

In the report, Jack Straw's minions seem to underplay the impact of the Slashdot article and mass Facebook/NO2ID campaign. Is this because they are worried that this sort of campaign could be launched at any time to keep them honest?

And why should Russia waste its own law enforcement resources to please American corporations? Rather it tries to make Russia independent from foreign extortion such as dependency on proprietary software. You don't have to become a Stallmanist to understand that the current copyright system benefits US media corporations and works against the interests of artists.

I'd also like to point out that facebook groups are the new Internet petitions: completely meaningless.

Ha! Wrong - and to prove it, I've started a facebook group: NeutronCowboy is Wrong

I for one accuse that man of copyright infringement! Who is with me? Maybe if there are 3 or 4 or us we can get him kicked off the net!

--
Need a break? Try Fable Island

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2201005505

If you're on Facebook, there is a new group in support of the EC's case against Microsoft. -- Please join and invite your friends!

If you're on Facebook, there is a new group in support of the EC's case against Microsoft. -- Please join and invite your friends!

If you're on Facebook, there is a new group in support of the EC's case against Microsoft. -- Please join and invite your friends!

If you're on Facebook, there is a new group in support of the EC's case against Microsoft. -- Please join and invite your friends!

The reason something like Facebook works is that they can design a database schema to facilitate a complete experience that just kind of... works.... Across mini-feeds, status walls, applications, etc.

Doing that in a way that's completely decentralized requires standardization on interfaces and data that would be hard to do for a couple of reasons:
- Agreeing on the architecture; how many "really" RESTful interfaces are out there? Netflix has a great one, but Flickr doesn't.
- What's the syntax? JSON, XML, YAML, ... ?
- How about a data model? Will people want to go beyond syntax into being able to do queries like what SPARQL gives you?

But beyond the technological hurdles, there's the business angle. Social media isn't exactly rolling in revenue, it's rolling in VC funding at best. Why interoperate when can try to claim a monopoly position? Or aim to be the defacto standard?

So, in the end, I woudn't say we're moving backwards ... we're just progressing through the usual stages of how standards and openness has evolved online. We start with well-funded walled gardens (CompuServe, Prodigy, your local BBS, etc.) , people eventually get fed up and build out interoperable bridges that cross them (e.g. FIDOnet and NNTP in the old days of bulletin boards). Now we have to do the same for the web....

By accessing or using our web site at www.facebook.com or the mobile version thereof (together the "Site") or by posting a Share Button on your site, you (the "User") signify that you have read, understand and agree to be bound by these Terms of Use ("Terms of Use" or "Agreement"), whether or not you are a registered member of Facebook. We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete portions of these Terms of Use at any time without further notice. If we do this, we will post the changes to these Terms of Use on this page and will indicate at the top of this page the date these terms were last revised. Your continued use of the Service or the Site after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms of Use. If you do not agree to abide by these or any future Terms of Use, do not use or access (or continue to use or access) the Service or the Site. It is your responsibility to regularly check the Site to determine if there have been changes to these Terms of Use and to review such changes.

So you can sue them all you like, you will lose because their TOS covers them. Their back-peddeling is due to media (don't /.'ers hate the media?) pressure, not legal pressure.

So, clearly, they had some reason for wanting to make the change. I'm guessing that that reason, whatever it is, didn't just vanish.

The previous blog entry explains the reason: when you post your data it spills over to your friends accounts via inboxes etc. When you delete your account they don't want to have to hunt around all of your friends' and ex-friends' accounts to clean up all of that data, and they don't want to get in a legal mess by not cleaning it up.

I'm not sure I buy that completely: unless I use Facebook's messaging to send my email address say to a friend then it will only ever be stored against my record and deleting my record should clean it all up. And deleting all messages I created, and all notifications generated by my account should clean up the rest.

What with all the fallout, the Facebook team has decided to revert to the old ToS until they can finish re-writing what they think will be less offensive new terms. Here's the blog post: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54746167130

http://profile.ak.facebook.com/v224/628/60/s501905303_4113.jpg

I imagine macraig.homedns.org and vulcan tourist.info had pics too but you can't seem to keep them up. I like the cartoon image of you that you usually use though.

I joined the FB group protesting this: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=77069107432

and now at the top of my FB page there's a tl;dr explanation about the new TOS. I tried to follow their link to the FB blog http://blog.facebook.com/ but it doesn't work. F'in FB, FYYFFs.

I joined the FB group protesting this: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=77069107432

and now at the top of my FB page there's a tl;dr explanation about the new TOS. I tried to follow their link to the FB blog http://blog.facebook.com/ but it doesn't work. F'in FB, FYYFFs.

It appears, on the surface, that the old ToS is back in effect; the ToS page is dated September 23, 2008.

It does bring to mind a new question. If you delete content and thus revoke Facebook's omnipotent rights to your now-deleted content, how does Facebook ensure that the content is no longer used by those sub-licensors? I can appreciate the need to spell out that Facebook is going to make copies of posted content as part of serving up Web pages, spreading server load, backups, etc., but how about not going any farther than that?

Maybe if Facebook drops the terms that they claim the right to use posted content for other commercial purposes (in particular sub-licensing) I may consider giving it another try; but otherwise, forget it. The bright spot in all this is that it has (finally) awakened me to really read the ToS when setting up accounts on websites like this.