F.B. Purity is a browser extension / add-on that lets you clean up and customise Facebook. It filters out the junk you don’t want to see, leaving behind the stories and page elements you do wish to see. The list of story types that FBP hides is customizable to your taste.
Tag Archives: facebook
Why Facebook is stockpiling Blu-ray discs
Facebook is now experimenting with a storage prototype that uses racks of Blu-ray discs instead of hard drives. The discs are held in groups of 12 in locked cartridges and are extracted by a robotic arm whenever they’re needed.
One rack contains 10,000 discs, and is capable of storing a petabyte of data, or one million gigabytes.
via Why Facebook is stockpiling Blu-ray discs – Aug. 21, 2014.
‘What’s Oculus Rift?’ And Other Questions About Facebook’s New Foray Into Virtual Reality
But if Oculus is so great, then why do people seem so surprised that Facebook has acquired it?
Partly it’s that Oculus, despite its popularity among gamers and its buy-in from the tech community, is still a small start-up. (It got its start on Kickstarter, where, in a 2012 campaign that sought $250,000 in funding, it raised more than $2 million. It remains one of Kickstarter’s most successful campaigns.) And, furthermore, Oculus has been focused on what many have seen as a niche technology for a niche demographic—hard-core gamers
A Close Look at the NSA’s Most Powerful Internet Attack Tool
Rather than go through the bureaucratic fight to move the attack logic into “system low” (and co-located on the wiretap), the NSA sought to work around it in the case of QUANTUMHAND. Instead of targeting just any web connection for exploitation, it targeted persistent “push” connections from Facebook, where a user’s browser would leave an idle connection open, waiting for a command from the server.
This way, even the slow, broken, classified architecture could exploit Facebook users. Sadly for NSA and GCHQ (and FSB, and DGSE, and every other spy agency), Facebook turned on encryption a few months ago, which should thwart this attack.
via A Close Look at the NSA’s Most Powerful Internet Attack Tool | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.
The biggest limitation on QUANTUM is location: The attacker must be able to see a request which identifies the target. Since the same techniques can work on a Wi-Fi network, a $50 Raspberry Pi, located in a Foggy Bottom Starbucks, can provide any country, big and small, with a little window of QUANTUM exploitation. A foreign government can perform the QUANTUM attack NSA-style wherever your traffic passes through their country.
WhatsApp, Bought by Facebook for $19 Billion, Promotes a Radical Anti-Corporate Message
The eye-popping price tag—about one-tenth the entire value of Facebook—is the shocker that’s drawn much media notice. But there’s another element to the story that is astounding: Koum and Acton have published a manifesto that radically critiques the foundation of modern capitalism—advertising—and denounces materialism. Facebook’s business model, of course, depends upon both.
Will Koum and Acton become part of the Borg they so eloquently decried? The first rule of Fight Club was “You do not talk about fight club.” The second rule was “You do not talk about fight club.” Now that Koum and Acton are billionaires and über-players on the tech scene, will they continue to spread their anti-consumerism, tech-is-for-the-people gospel? Will they change Facebook, or will Facebook change them?
Facebook’s so uncool, but it’s morphing into a different beast
Facebook, on the other hand, has become the link with older family, or even older siblings who have gone to university. To prevent overgrazing as others beasts have occupied its terrain, Facebook has to feed off somewhere else. It has thereby evolved into a very different animal.
via Facebook’s so uncool, but it’s morphing into a different beast.
What happens to the posts you don’t publish?
This paternalistic view isn’t abstract. Facebook studies this because the more its engineers understand about self-censorship, the more precisely they can fine-tune their system to minimize self-censorship’s prevalence. This goal—designing Facebook to decrease self-censorship—is explicit in the paper.
So Facebook considers your thoughtful discretion about what to post as bad, because it withholds value from Facebook and from other users. Facebook monitors those unposted thoughts to better understand them, in order to build a system that minimizes this deliberate behavior.
via Facebook self-censorship: What happens to the posts you don’t publish?.
Snapchat Spurned $3 Billion Acquisition Offer from Facebook
In June, Snapchat raised $60 million from investors including Institutional Venture Partners; that round valued the company at $800 million.
Three months later, Snapchat said its usage had nearly doubled, to 350 million messages or “snaps” per day, up from 200 million in June.
via Snapchat Spurned $3 Billion Acquisition Offer from Facebook – Digits – WSJ.
Cisco-threatening open switch coming from Facebook, Intel, and Broadcom
The network project would similarly provide an alternative to vendors like Cisco, Arista Networks, and Dell’s Force 10 division. The Open Compute Project promises a “specification and a reference box for an open, OS-agnostic top-of-rack switch.” Whether that reference box will be based on an amalgam of submitted specifications or just one of them isn’t clear yet, and no release date has been set.
via Cisco-threatening open switch coming from Facebook, Intel, and Broadcom | Ars Technica.
In response to today’s Facebook announcement, Cisco said in a statement to Ars, “It’s important to acknowledge that the largest web-scale companies driving OCP have the skills, resources, and specialized traffic patterns that justify considering this approach carefully. However, most IT departments won’t relish taking on the additional operational cost, skills and expertise that are required to integrate their own technology.
Facebook Considers Vast Increase in Data Collection
The social network may start collecting data on minute user interactions with its content, such as how long a user’s cursor hovers over a certain part of its website, or whether a user’s newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone, Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin said Tuesday during an interview.
via Facebook Considers Vast Increase in Data Collection – Digits – WSJ.
As the head of analytics, Mr. Rudin is preparing the company’s infrastructure for a massive increase in the volume of its data.