You honestly think that the lawyer in this case deserves to get over double the payout that the students received? Oh wait never mind, your a troll. No sane person would think that.
The lawyers pay in this case is beyond ridiculous. For the amount of work they do they are almost as overpaid as sports "professionals" who earn millions of dollars to play a fucking game.
Lawyers are legalized crooks, news at 11. The world would be a better place without them. The fact that we need specialized professions to be able to properly navigate the legal system is, well, downright stupid.
They can download all of the data, almost instantly, and store it offline or release it into Torrentland. Scraping takes time, and prolonged access to the account. Now they only need access for a few minutes and they have everything. Changing your account password won't help since they already have everything they need and can freely and safely browse it offline.
I can totally understand why they made this move, and overall it is probably a good thing (Makes getting away from FB when it comes crashing down a whole lot easier), but at the same time they are making it even easier for people to steal your data.
Chances are if they have the FB password they already have access to the users e-mail account. Lets face it, the average user uses one password for most of their online services. Why scrape when you can just download everything in one shot? If the download doesn't work (i.e the user was smart enough to use different passwords) then fall back to scraping the old fashioned way. You can even confirm access to the e-mail account before trying the download, meaning it would be risk free to try.
Your stupidity is astounding. A 2 second Google search shows that people do indeed care about hacking into Facebook accounts, so I'm guessing you just pulled that out of your ass because, well if you think it, it must be true!
Information is everything these days. It would also be easier for a spammer to break into your account and get one nice neat little download instead of scraping back years of data.
This tool is a download option for the average user. Its also a giant gaping security breach waiting to happen. Someone only needs to get into your account ONCE, and then they can browse years of data offline at their choosing. Just because you are too thick to see the security implications of this doesn't mean they aren't there.
There's not a lot of details it but they at least require you to click a link from an e-mail and reenter your password to get this (to avoid spambots harvesting everyone's data and careless use of public computers resulting in data leaks).
Anyone that can compromise your Facebook account can compromise your e-mail account. Most users would use the same password for both.
Fanboy alert! Cuz ya know, companies are really in the habit of getting evil looking patents and not bothering to use them. Well ok, some of them are, but Google isn't known for being a patent troll, they are known for being evil behind the scenes and telling all of the sheeple that they "Do no evil".
Facebook says the Prineville data center will be designed to a Gold-level standard under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program, a voluntary rating system for energy efficient buildings overseen by the US Green Building Council. The Prineville facility is expected to have a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.15. The PUE metric (PDF) compares a facility’s total power usage to the amount of power used by the IT equipment, revealing how much is lost in distribution and conversion. An average PUE of 2.0 indicates that the IT equipment uses about 50 percent of the power to the building.
The cool climate in Prineville will allow Facebook to operate without chillers, which are used to refrigerate water for data center cooling systems, but require a large amount of electricity to operate. With the growing focus on power costs, many data centers are designing chiller-less data centers that use cool fresh air instead of air conditoning. On hot days, the Prineville data center will use evaporative cooling instead of a chiller system.
“This process is highly energy efficient and minimizes water consumption by using outside air,” said Heiliger. Water conservation is also a growing focus for major data center projects, which in some cases can create capacity challenges for local water utilities.
A key function of data centers is providing an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to continuously provide power to servers. This is another area where Facebook is gaining energy savings. The Prineville data center will use a new, patent-pending UPS system that reduces electricity usage by as much as 12 percent. The new design foregoes traditional uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and power distribution units (PDUs) and adds a 12 volt battery to each server power supply.
The use of custom servers with on-board bateries was pioneered by Google, which last year revealed a custom server that integrates a 12 volt battery, which the company cited this design as a key factor in the exceptional energy efficiency data for its data centers.
Here’s how this approach saves power: Most data centers use AC power distribution in which a UPS system stands between the utility power grid and the data center equipment. If utility power is lost, the UPS system can tap a large bank of batteries (or in some cases, a flywheel) for “ride-through” power until the generator can be started. This approach requires that AC power from the grid be converted into DC power to charge the batteries, and then converted back to AC for the equipment. Each of those conversions includes a power loss, reducing the amount of electricity that reaches the servers.
Finally, the Facebook Prineville facility will also re-use excess heat expelled by servers, which will help heat office space in the building, a strategy also being implemented by Telehouse and IBM.
How Does Facebook Choose the Sites for Its Data Centers? Data center site selection is a complex process. A typical site search must consider the availability and cost of power, the cost and availability of land, fiber connectivity to the site, vulnerability to natural disasters, the capacity of local water and sewage systems, the local business environment, incentives from state and local governments, and many other variables.
Connectivity between data centers is also a consideration. Facebook has created two data center clusters on each coast, one in Silicon Valley and another in nothern Virginia. When the company decided to build its own data center, it conducted an in-depth site search in several Western states.
“After a rigorous review process of sites across the West Coast, Facebook concluded that Prineville offered the best package of resources – including a suitable climate for environmental cooling, renewable power resources, available land, talented regional workforce and supportive business environment,” said Tom Furlong, Director of Site Operations for Fac
Perhaps they got it up and running again, but here's page two in case it dies:
This chart provides a dramatic visualization of Facebook’s infrastructure growth. It documents the number of servers used to power Facebook’s operations.
“When Facebook first began with a small group of people using it and no photos or videos to display, the entire service could run on a single server,” said Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s vice president of technical operations.
Not so anymore. Technical presentations by Facebook staff suggest that as of June 2010 the company was running at least 60,000 servers in its data centers, up from 30,000 in 2009 and 10,000 back in April 2008.
There are companies with more servers (see Who Has the Most Web Servers? for details). But the growth curve shown on the chart doesn’t even include any of the servers that will populate the Oregon data center – which may be the first of multiple data centers Facebook builds to support its growth.
What kind of servers does Facebook use? Facebook doesn’t often discuss which server vendors it uses. In 2007 it was buying a lot of servers from Rackable (now SGI), and is also known to have purchased servers from Dell, which customizes servers for its largest cloud computing customers.
Facebook VP of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger has sometimes been critical of major server vendors’ ability to adapt their products to the needs of huge infrastructures like those at Facebook, which don’t need many of the features designed for complex enterprise computing requirements. “Internet scale” companies can achieve better economics with bare bones servers that are customized for specific workloads.
In a conference earlier this year, Heiliger identified multi-core server vendors Tilera and SeaMicro as “companies to watch” for their potential to provide increased computing horsepower in a compact energy footprint.
But reports that Facebook planned to begin using low-power processors from ARM - which power the iPhone and many other mobile devices - proved to be untrue. “Facebook continuously evaluates and helps develop new technologies we believe will improve the performance, efficiency or reliability of our infrastructure,” Heiliger said. “However, we have no plans to deploy ARM servers in our Prineville, Oregon data center.”
A look at the fully-packed server racks inside a Facebook data center facility.
What kind of software does Facebook Use? Facebook was developed from the ground up using open source software. The site is written primarily in the PHP programming language and uses a MySQL database infrastructure. To accelerate the site, the Facebook Engineering team developed a program called HipHop to transform PHP source code into C++ and gain performance benefits.
Facebook has one of the largest MySQL database clusters anywhere, and is the world’s largest users of memcached, an open source caching system. Memcached was an important enough part of Facebook’s infrastructure that CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a tech talk on its usage in 2009.
Facebook has built a framework that uses RPC (remote procedure calls) to tie together infrastructure services written in any language, running on any platform. Services used in Facebook’s infrastructure include Apache Hadoop, Apache Cassandra, Apache Hive, FlashCache, Scribe, Tornado, Cfengine and Varnish.
How much Does Facebook Spend on Its Data Centers? An analysis of Facebook’s spending with data center developers indicates that the company is now paying about $50 million a year to lease data center space, compared to about $20 million when we first analyzed its leases in May 2009.
The $50 million a year includes spending is for leases, and doesn’t include the cost of the Prineville project, which has been estimated at between $180 million and $215 million. It also doesn’t include Facebook’s inves
I managed to load the first page of the article before it got slashdotted:
With more than 500 million active users, Facebook is the busiest site on the Internet and has built an extensive infrastructure to support this rapid growth. The social networking site was launched in February 2004, initially out of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard University and using a single server. The company’s web servers and storage units are now housed in data centers around the country.
Each data center houses thousands of computer servers, which are networked together and linked to the outside world through fiber optic cables. Every time you share information on Facebook, the servers in these data centers receive the information and distribute it to your network of friends.
We’ve written a lot about Facebook’s infrastructure, and have compiled this information into a series of Frequently Asked Questions. Here’s the Facebook Data Center FAQ (or “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Facebook’s Data Centers”).
How Big is Facebook’s Internet Infrastructure? Facebook is currently the world’s most popular web site, with more than 690 billion page views each month, according to metrics from Google’s DoubleClick service. Facebook currently accounts for about 9.5 percent of all Internet traffic, slightly more than Google, according to HitWise.
Facebook requires massive storage infrastructure to house its enormous stockpile of photos, which grows steadily as users add 100 million new photos every day. People share more than 30 billion pieces of content on Facebook each month. In addition, the company’s infrastructure must support platform services for more than 1 million web sites and 550,000 applications using the Facebook Connect platform.
To support that huge activity, Facebook operates at least nine data centers on both coasts of the United States, and is in the process of building its first company-built data center in Oregon. Although more than 70 percent of Facebook’s audience is in other countries, none of the company’s data centers are located outside the United States.
For most of its history, Facebook has managed its infrastructure by leasing “wholesale” data center space from third-party landlords. Wholesale providers build the data center, including the raised-floor technical space and the power and cooling infrastructure, and then lease the completed facility. In the wholesale model, users can occupy their data center space in about five months, rather than the 12 months needed to build a major data center. This has allowed Facebook to scale rapidly to keep pace with the growth of its audience.
In January 2010 Facebook announced plans to build its own data centers, beginning with a facility in Prineville, Oregon. This typically requires a larger up-front investment in construction and equipment, but allows greater customization of power and cooling infrastructure.
Where are Facebook’s Data Centers Located?
Facebook currently leases space in about six different data centers in Silicon Valley, located in Santa Clara and San Jose, and at least one in San Francisco. The company has also leased space in three wholesale data center facilities in Ashburn, Virginia. Both Santa Clara and Ashburn are key data center hubs, where hundreds of fiber networks meet and connect, making them ideal for companies whose content is widely distributed.
Facebook’s first company-built data center is nearing completion in Prineville, Oregon. If Facebook’s growth continues at the current rate, it will likely require a larger network of company-built data centers, as seen with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and eBay.
How Big Are Facebook’s Server Farms?
A rendering of an aerial view of the Facebook data center in Princeville, Oregon.
As Facebook grows, its data center requirements are growing along with it. The new data center Oregon
True enough. Perhaps they should have appealed to the code team(s) of some of those free products and tried to become developers of the core products themselves? If you can write an add on that is good enough to be incorporated into the software, there's a good chance there would be room on the development team for you, at least in my books.
Use the same browser across all those machines and you will have the same functionality. Xmarks was only really good at syncing across browsers, which is a pretty niche market when you get down to it.
Chrome, FF and even IE have built in bookmark syncing.
Slashdot Mirror
Mid term elections... Obama is still President, but the Republicans now control the House, and the Dem's control the Senate by 1 seat.
Slashdot must keep up with its One Apple Story per day minimum, otherwise it would collapse in on itself for having actual news on the front page.
Because Slashdot has a giant hard on for anything to do with Apple and their lemmings.
Go iSheep go!
People are stupid. News at 11.
And when you need to pay a fortune for a "middleman" to have yours rights respected, is a sign something is terribly wrong with the system.
My thoughts exactly. Someone mod this up!
You honestly think that the lawyer in this case deserves to get over double the payout that the students received? Oh wait never mind, your a troll. No sane person would think that.
The lawyers pay in this case is beyond ridiculous. For the amount of work they do they are almost as overpaid as sports "professionals" who earn millions of dollars to play a fucking game.
Lawyers are legalized crooks, news at 11. The world would be a better place without them. The fact that we need specialized professions to be able to properly navigate the legal system is, well, downright stupid.
They can download all of the data, almost instantly, and store it offline or release it into Torrentland. Scraping takes time, and prolonged access to the account. Now they only need access for a few minutes and they have everything. Changing your account password won't help since they already have everything they need and can freely and safely browse it offline.
I can totally understand why they made this move, and overall it is probably a good thing (Makes getting away from FB when it comes crashing down a whole lot easier), but at the same time they are making it even easier for people to steal your data.
Chances are if they have the FB password they already have access to the users e-mail account. Lets face it, the average user uses one password for most of their online services. Why scrape when you can just download everything in one shot? If the download doesn't work (i.e the user was smart enough to use different passwords) then fall back to scraping the old fashioned way. You can even confirm access to the e-mail account before trying the download, meaning it would be risk free to try.
Your stupidity is astounding. A 2 second Google search shows that people do indeed care about hacking into Facebook accounts, so I'm guessing you just pulled that out of your ass because, well if you think it, it must be true!
Information is everything these days. It would also be easier for a spammer to break into your account and get one nice neat little download instead of scraping back years of data.
This tool is a download option for the average user. Its also a giant gaping security breach waiting to happen. Someone only needs to get into your account ONCE, and then they can browse years of data offline at their choosing. Just because you are too thick to see the security implications of this doesn't mean they aren't there.
There's not a lot of details it but they at least require you to click a link from an e-mail and reenter your password to get this (to avoid spambots harvesting everyone's data and careless use of public computers resulting in data leaks).
Anyone that can compromise your Facebook account can compromise your e-mail account. Most users would use the same password for both.
Try not being retarded before you flame me, kay?
So now hackers have even more reason to go after your Facebook account. All that data in one nice, neat little download? Hackers paradise.
"Where were you a few six months ago?"
Thank you for butchering the English language.
Fanboy alert! Cuz ya know, companies are really in the habit of getting evil looking patents and not bothering to use them. Well ok, some of them are, but Google isn't known for being a patent troll, they are known for being evil behind the scenes and telling all of the sheeple that they "Do no evil".
Obvious troll is obvious.
Last page.
Facebook says the Prineville data center will be designed to a Gold-level standard under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program, a voluntary rating system for energy efficient buildings overseen by the US Green Building Council. The Prineville facility is expected to have a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.15. The PUE metric (PDF) compares a facility’s total power usage to the amount of power used by the IT equipment, revealing how much is lost in distribution and conversion. An average PUE of 2.0 indicates that the IT equipment uses about 50 percent of the power to the building.
The cool climate in Prineville will allow Facebook to operate without chillers, which are used to refrigerate water for data center cooling systems, but require a large amount of electricity to operate. With the growing focus on power costs, many data centers are designing chiller-less data centers that use cool fresh air instead of air conditoning. On hot days, the Prineville data center will use evaporative cooling instead of a chiller system.
“This process is highly energy efficient and minimizes water consumption by using outside air,” said Heiliger. Water conservation is also a growing focus for major data center projects, which in some cases can create capacity challenges for local water utilities.
A key function of data centers is providing an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to continuously provide power to servers. This is another area where Facebook is gaining energy savings. The Prineville data center will use a new, patent-pending UPS system that reduces electricity usage by as much as 12 percent. The new design foregoes traditional uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and power distribution units (PDUs) and adds a 12 volt battery to each server power supply.
The use of custom servers with on-board bateries was pioneered by Google, which last year revealed a custom server that integrates a 12 volt battery, which the company cited this design as a key factor in the exceptional energy efficiency data for its data centers.
Here’s how this approach saves power: Most data centers use AC power distribution in which a UPS system stands between the utility power grid and the data center equipment. If utility power is lost, the UPS system can tap a large bank of batteries (or in some cases, a flywheel) for “ride-through” power until the generator can be started. This approach requires that AC power from the grid be converted into DC power to charge the batteries, and then converted back to AC for the equipment. Each of those conversions includes a power loss, reducing the amount of electricity that reaches the servers.
Finally, the Facebook Prineville facility will also re-use excess heat expelled by servers, which will help heat office space in the building, a strategy also being implemented by Telehouse and IBM.
How Does Facebook Choose the Sites for Its Data Centers?
Data center site selection is a complex process. A typical site search must consider the availability and cost of power, the cost and availability of land, fiber connectivity to the site, vulnerability to natural disasters, the capacity of local water and sewage systems, the local business environment, incentives from state and local governments, and many other variables.
Connectivity between data centers is also a consideration. Facebook has created two data center clusters on each coast, one in Silicon Valley and another in nothern Virginia. When the company decided to build its own data center, it conducted an in-depth site search in several Western states.
“After a rigorous review process of sites across the West Coast, Facebook concluded that Prineville offered the best package of resources – including a suitable climate for environmental cooling, renewable power resources, available land, talented regional workforce and supportive business environment,” said Tom Furlong, Director of Site Operations for Fac
Perhaps they got it up and running again, but here's page two in case it dies:
This chart provides a dramatic visualization of Facebook’s infrastructure growth. It documents the number of servers used to power Facebook’s operations.
“When Facebook first began with a small group of people using it and no photos or videos to display, the entire service could run on a single server,” said Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s vice president of technical operations.
Not so anymore. Technical presentations by Facebook staff suggest that as of June 2010 the company was running at least 60,000 servers in its data centers, up from 30,000 in 2009 and 10,000 back in April 2008.
There are companies with more servers (see Who Has the Most Web Servers? for details). But the growth curve shown on the chart doesn’t even include any of the servers that will populate the Oregon data center – which may be the first of multiple data centers Facebook builds to support its growth.
What kind of servers does Facebook use?
Facebook doesn’t often discuss which server vendors it uses. In 2007 it was buying a lot of servers from Rackable (now SGI), and is also known to have purchased servers from Dell, which customizes servers for its largest cloud computing customers.
Facebook VP of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger has sometimes been critical of major server vendors’ ability to adapt their products to the needs of huge infrastructures like those at Facebook, which don’t need many of the features designed for complex enterprise computing requirements. “Internet scale” companies can achieve better economics with bare bones servers that are customized for specific workloads.
In a conference earlier this year, Heiliger identified multi-core server vendors Tilera and SeaMicro as “companies to watch” for their potential to provide increased computing horsepower in a compact energy footprint.
But reports that Facebook planned to begin using low-power processors from ARM - which power the iPhone and many other mobile devices - proved to be untrue. “Facebook continuously evaluates and helps develop new technologies we believe will improve the performance, efficiency or reliability of our infrastructure,” Heiliger said. “However, we have no plans to deploy ARM servers in our Prineville, Oregon data center.”
A look at the fully-packed server racks inside a Facebook data center facility.
What kind of software does Facebook Use?
Facebook was developed from the ground up using open source software. The site is written primarily in the PHP programming language and uses a MySQL database infrastructure. To accelerate the site, the Facebook Engineering team developed a program called HipHop to transform PHP source code into C++ and gain performance benefits.
Facebook has one of the largest MySQL database clusters anywhere, and is the world’s largest users of memcached, an open source caching system. Memcached was an important enough part of Facebook’s infrastructure that CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a tech talk on its usage in 2009.
Facebook has built a framework that uses RPC (remote procedure calls) to tie together infrastructure services written in any language, running on any platform. Services used in Facebook’s infrastructure include Apache Hadoop, Apache Cassandra, Apache Hive, FlashCache, Scribe, Tornado, Cfengine and Varnish.
How much Does Facebook Spend on Its Data Centers?
An analysis of Facebook’s spending with data center developers indicates that the company is now paying about $50 million a year to lease data center space, compared to about $20 million when we first analyzed its leases in May 2009.
The $50 million a year includes spending is for leases, and doesn’t include the cost of the Prineville project, which has been estimated at between $180 million and $215 million. It also doesn’t include Facebook’s inves
I managed to load the first page of the article before it got slashdotted:
With more than 500 million active users, Facebook is the busiest site on the Internet and has built an extensive infrastructure to support this rapid growth. The social networking site was launched in February 2004, initially out of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard University and using a single server. The company’s web servers and storage units are now housed in data centers around the country.
Each data center houses thousands of computer servers, which are networked together and linked to the outside world through fiber optic cables. Every time you share information on Facebook, the servers in these data centers receive the information and distribute it to your network of friends.
We’ve written a lot about Facebook’s infrastructure, and have compiled this information into a series of Frequently Asked Questions. Here’s the Facebook Data Center FAQ (or “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Facebook’s Data Centers”).
How Big is Facebook’s Internet Infrastructure?
Facebook is currently the world’s most popular web site, with more than 690 billion page views each month, according to metrics from Google’s DoubleClick service. Facebook currently accounts for about 9.5 percent of all Internet traffic, slightly more than Google, according to HitWise.
Facebook requires massive storage infrastructure to house its enormous stockpile of photos, which grows steadily as users add 100 million new photos every day. People share more than 30 billion pieces of content on Facebook each month. In addition, the company’s infrastructure must support platform services for more than 1 million web sites and 550,000 applications using the Facebook Connect platform.
To support that huge activity, Facebook operates at least nine data centers on both coasts of the United States, and is in the process of building its first company-built data center in Oregon. Although more than 70 percent of Facebook’s audience is in other countries, none of the company’s data centers are located outside the United States.
For most of its history, Facebook has managed its infrastructure by leasing “wholesale” data center space from third-party landlords. Wholesale providers build the data center, including the raised-floor technical space and the power and cooling infrastructure, and then lease the completed facility. In the wholesale model, users can occupy their data center space in about five months, rather than the 12 months needed to build a major data center. This has allowed Facebook to scale rapidly to keep pace with the growth of its audience.
In January 2010 Facebook announced plans to build its own data centers, beginning with a facility in Prineville, Oregon. This typically requires a larger up-front investment in construction and equipment, but allows greater customization of power and cooling infrastructure.
Where are Facebook’s Data Centers Located?
Facebook currently leases space in about six different data centers in Silicon Valley, located in Santa Clara and San Jose, and at least one in San Francisco. The company has also leased space in three wholesale data center facilities in Ashburn, Virginia. Both Santa Clara and Ashburn are key data center hubs, where hundreds of fiber networks meet and connect, making them ideal for companies whose content is widely distributed.
Facebook’s first company-built data center is nearing completion in Prineville, Oregon. If Facebook’s growth continues at the current rate, it will likely require a larger network of company-built data centers, as seen with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and eBay.
How Big Are Facebook’s Server Farms?
A rendering of an aerial view of the Facebook data center in Princeville, Oregon.
As Facebook grows, its data center requirements are growing along with it. The new data center Oregon
Saying "Pun intended" makes you sound like a clown. Just sayin'.
That happens to a lot of people. They think that their choice in partner is completely unique and it turns out that they just like the average.
It works fine in Chrome 6. It would appear you are talking out your ass, and even got modded up for it! Learn you use your browser...
True enough. Perhaps they should have appealed to the code team(s) of some of those free products and tried to become developers of the core products themselves? If you can write an add on that is good enough to be incorporated into the software, there's a good chance there would be room on the development team for you, at least in my books.
Chrome, FF and IE are all capable of syncing your bookmarks. The only reason to use xmarks was to sync cross browser.
Easy to do if you put your mind to it, but it is a lot easier to bitch and complain on an internet message board instead isn't it?
Use the same browser across all those machines and you will have the same functionality. Xmarks was only really good at syncing across browsers, which is a pretty niche market when you get down to it. Chrome, FF and even IE have built in bookmark syncing.