'Facebook gave me an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the process it uses to deploy new functionality. I watched first-hand as the company's release engineers rolled out the new "timeline" feature for brand pages'. Hiphop, BitTorrent, 1.5GB binaries, and IRC!

Good HN discussion

'Lundberg said that his organization was sorry for the mistake and has now adopted a new system whereby blocked sites have to now be approved by two employees instead of one, although why that was not the case already for such a serious process is up for debate. The other question is how at the flick of a switch do 8,000 sites suddenly get added to a blacklist – for whatever reason – without any kind of oversight. Denmark’s IT-Political Association is critical and has called for ISPs to cease cooperation with the voluntary scheme which operates without any kind of judicial review. “Today’s story shows that the police are not able to secure against manual errors that could escalate into something that actually works as a ‘kill switch’ for the Internet,” the group said in a statement.'

HBase and Haystack; all data LZO-compressed; very interesting approach to testing -- they 'shadow the real production workload into the test cluster to test before going into production'. This catches a 'high percentage' of issues before production. nice

'The [Dutch] councils are working with a specialist Amsterdam research firm, using the type of computer software previously deployed only in counterterrorism, monitoring [LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter] traffic for keywords and cross-referencing any suspicious information with digital lists of social welfare recipients.

Among the giveaway terms, apparently, are “holiday” and “new car”. If the automated software finds a match between one of these terms and a person claiming social welfare payments, the information is passed on to investigators to gather real-life evidence.' With a 30% false positive rate, apparently -- let's hope those investigations aren't too intrusive!

"The Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse in the Dublin ArchDiocese clearly states that the Papal Nuncio, the Diplomatic representative of the Vatican, refused to reply to investigators. Now the Cloynes Report has found that the Vatican's Ambassador intervened to undermine the efforts to protect children as recently as 1996. This is not acceptable. The Irish Government has the power to expel diplomats. If we are to take the reports' findings seriously, we must expel the Papal Nuncio."

nicely detailed summary

Scribe logs events, "ptail" (parallel tail presumably) tails logs from Scribe stores, Puma batch-aggregates, writes to HBase.  Java and Thrift on the backend, PHP in front

'if you Liked a story on a website by pressing the Like button, you’re not only sharing the content on your wall but you’re also automatically subscribing and giving permission for future newsfeed updates to site owners. This happens every time and anywhere you Like something.' ugh, spammy, Facebook

jesus. Not only do they coin the cramp-inducing neologism "twolicy", they then have the temerity to suggest that people should "donate" their Facebook status so that FG can spam their social group. awful

good inside account of the "wo0dh3ad" hack

'we've built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you've ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information. If you want a copy of the information you've put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download.' excellent

join this group to add your voice

'The troubled councilor, Dimitar Kerin, has defended himself by saying he was not the only one in the City Hall watering virtual egg plants. He said he had reached only Level 40, whereas Daniela Zhelyazkova, a councilor from the rightist Democrats for Strong Bulgaria party, was already at Level 46.'

GDC post-mortem; Facebook takes over the games industry. 'the three primary designers of the Civilization franchise (Sid [Meier], Brian, and myself [Soren Johnson]) are all now making social/online games.' -- wow

wow. fascinating results from social-network cluster analysis of Facebook, splitting up the entire USA into 7 clusters

"Justin Mason likes this"

+1

lots of gory details on FB's innards via Dare Obasanjo

more on the new async HTTP server from FriendFeed/Facebook, in Python. looks lovely

'an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google's webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking (epoll) infrastructure.'

FB add a (working!) "Fax This Photo" feature, only visible to TechCrunch IP ranges -- and TC fall for it, pushing an unverified story to live, after waiting only 24 minutes for a verification. nice one FB

'The platform API remains fundamentally broken and gives users no way to prevent applications from accessing their photos. Facebook would be best served by fixing this instead of dismissing users’ concern for privacy as “misleading rumors.”'

'A UK firm that turns mobile messages into text faces questions over its privacy standards, technology and finances following a BBC investigation' .. 'claims to the BBC suggest that the majority of messages have been heard and transcribed by call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines.' 'The fact that messages appear to have been read by workers outside of the European Union raises questions about the firm's data protection policy.'