So Lee wrote “FBStalker,” a Python script he and Werrett debuted Thursday at the Hack in the Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur. In its current form, FBStalker runs in the Chrome browser on OS X, entering queries into Facebook’s Graph Search and pulling data. They used FBStalker in the attack against the man in Hong Kong.
Even if a person’s profile is locked down to strangers, their friends’ open profiles can be examined, giving an indication, for example, who the person may be close with. FBStalker uses Graph Search to find photos in which two people are tagged in, comments on profiles and more.
Tag Archives: facebook
A Storm of Servers: How the Leap Second Led Facebook to DCIM
Last July 1, that scenario became real as the “Leap Second” bug caused many Linux servers to get stuck in a loop, endlessly checking the date and time. At the Internet’s busiest data centers, power usage almost instantly spiked by megawatts, stress-testing the facility’s power load and the user’s capacity planning.
via A Storm of Servers: How the Leap Second Led Facebook to DCIM.
What was happening? The additional second caused particular problems for Linux systems that use the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to synchronize their systems with atomic clocks. The leap second caused these systems to believe that time had “expired,” triggering a loop condition in which the system endlessly sought to check the date, spiking CPU usage and power draw.
Facebook just raked in $333 million in quarterly profit
In its second quarter of earnings in 2013, Facebook walked away with $333 million in profit (and $1.8 billion in revenue), according to its latest 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Investors clearly like Facebook’s latest numbers—the stock has soared 17 percent in after-hours trading. (By comparison, Facebook lost $157 million in the same quarter in 2012.)
via What mobile problem? Facebook just raked in $333 million in quarterly profit | Ars Technica.
Review: Facebook Home
It’s not simply the case that Zuckerberg is sneaky in his promotion of sharing and creepy in his ambivalence about privacy. Rather, he is a true believer. Privacy lowers the value of the social graph. If one sincerely believes in the merits of the graph, then one should be suspicious of privacy, because privacy is selfish.
Facebook Saves Datacenter Costs with Frigid Arctic Wind
The constant, biting wind may have stunted the growth of Lulea’s tourism industry, but it has proven a big factor in luring big IT facilities into the area. Datacenters in Lulea are just as difficult to power and cool as any other concentrated mass of IT equipment, but their owners can slash the cost of cooling all those servers and storage units simply by opening a window: the temperature in Lulea hasn’t stayed at or above 86 degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours since 1961 (PDF), and the average temperature is a bracing 29.6 Fahrenheit.
via Facebook Saves Datacenter Costs with Frigid Arctic Wind.
Facebook’s first data center DRENCHED by ACTUAL CLOUD
Facebook’s first data center ran into problems of a distinctly ironic nature when a literal cloud formed in the IT room and started to rain on servers.
via Facebook’s first data center DRENCHED by ACTUAL CLOUD • The Register.
How Facebook Built Natural Language into Graph Search
The engineers used a weighted context-free grammar (WCFG) to represent Graph Search’s query language. Think of a tree, with the root or base as the “Start” of a particular query. Facebook calls this the “parse tree,” and the various “limbs” branching from the root include verbs, objects, etc. The “leaves” at the top are the terminal symbols, or entities such as users, cities, employers, groups, and the phrases that link those entities together. It’s perhaps easier to diagram than explain:
Wolfram Alpha Drills Deep into Facebook Data
At this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas, Wolfram Alpha creator Stephen Wolfram offered up some interesting details about his computational engine. Wolfram Alpha contains more than 10 trillion pieces of data cultivated from primary sources, along with tens of thousands of algorithms and equations. Solving complex math problems is one of the system’s key abilities.
via Wolfram Alpha Drills Deep into Facebook Data.
More information from Data Science of the Facebook World
Some of this is rather depressingly stereotypical. And most of it isn’t terribly surprising to anyone who’s known a reasonable diversity of people of different ages. But what to me is remarkable is how we can see everything laid out in such quantitative detail in the pictures above—kind of a signature of people’s thinking as they go through life.
Facebook vs. Salesforce: An Identity Smackdown?
If an alternative did take root, his money would be on Salesforce to prevail. “There’s credibility for Salesforce being an enterprise identity provider,” Shaw says. “They have a legitimate claim for being an identity provider because so many people use salesforce.com. It’s hard not to run into an enterprise that’s not using Salesforce to some degree. Even small companies.
via Facebook vs. Salesforce: An Identity Smackdown? — Dark Reading.
As player numbers crater, EA will shut SimCity Social, other Facebook games
Similarly, The Sims Social rocketed to over 65 million monthly players just after its launch in 2011, only to drop to just over five million monthly players today, according to AppData. SimCity Social seems to have peaked at 10 million monthly players and has managed to hold on to just over one million of them less than a year after its launch.
via As player numbers crater, EA will shut SimCity Social, other Facebook games | Ars Technica.