Some Free Webhosts with MySQL, PHP, and More 01/20/2010
I have checked out some free site hosts, and in case you are looking for some I found three fairly acceptable ones: Zymic.com - They have volunteers that talk to you on IRC chat. I always like that in a "company" - I feel like I can trust them more. Three free MySQL databases, about 5GB file space, and 50GB bandwidth. Ad-free, free subdomain, and FTP allowed. Cons: They won't let PHP scripts communicate to remote servers. This means that some parts of Wordpress don't work, and quite a few of its plugins (like DISQUS). 000Webhost.com - Lots of features, only 1500MB file space though, 100GB bandwidth, free email accounts, Fantastico autoinstaller, and much more features. Cons: Only 1500 space, and occasionally you will see a text link to 000webhost.com on your site. Byethost.com - Great specs. This has many features too, 5500MB (~5GB) file space, 200GB bandwidth, 50 MySQL databases, Fantastico, and more. Cons: Any 404 page redirects to an ad page, and Web of Trust lists those 404 pages as "red"/dangerous. ~LaserWraith I admit that I don't find much use for Facebook, but many are addicted to it. A new interview by The Rumpus.net reveals some info about "the inside." Interviewer: On your servers, do you save everything ever entered into Facebook at any time, whether or not it’s been deleted, untagged, and so forth? Facebook Employee: That is essentially correct at this moment. The only reason we’re changing that is for performance reasons. When you make any sort of interaction on Facebook — upload a photo, click on somebody’s profile, update your status, change your profile information — Interviewer: When you say “click on somebody’s profile,” you mean you save our viewing history? Employee: That’s right. How do you think we know who your best friends are? But that’s public knowledge; we’ve explicitly stated that we record that. If you look in your type-ahead search, and you press “A,” or just one letter, a list of your best friends shows up. It’s no longer organized alphabetically, but by the person you interact with most, your “best friends,” or at least those whom we have concluded you are best friends with. Interviewer: In other words, the person you stalk the most. Employee: No, it’s more than just that. It’s also messages, file posts, photos you’re tagged in with them, as well as your viewing of their profile and all of that. Essentially, we judge how good of a friend they are to you. Interviewer: When did Facebook make this change? Employee: That was actually fairly recently, sometime in the last three months. But other than that, we definitely store snapshots, which is basically a picture of all the data on all of our servers. I want to say we do that every hour, of every day of every week of every month. Interviewer: So this is every viewable screen? Employee: It’s way more than that: it’s every viewable screen, with all the data behind every screen. So when we store your photos, we have six versions of your photos. We don’t store the original: we make six different versions on the photo uploader and upload those six versions. Interviewer: And the difference between them would be sizing, certain areas are zoomed – Employee: Exactly. Different sizes for the news feed, your profile pic, enlargement. Interviewer: And these reside on servers in your office? Employee: No, not in our office. Absolutely not. We have four data centers around the world. There’s one in Santa Clara, one in San Francisco, one in New York and one in London. And in each of those, there are approximately five to eight thousand servers. Each co-location of our servers has essentially the same data on it. Interviewer: And how many users are you up to now? Employee: That I can disclose publicly? Two hundred to two hundred twenty million. Interviewer: And actually? Employee: That’s just active users. As far as total accounts, including those that are potentially fake, disabled and whatnot, we’re over three hundred million. The two hundred twenty million are users who have logged on and done something with the site in the last thirty days. Interviewer: You said they’re changing the policy of keeping all information. Employee: No. They’re never changing that policy. We still keep all information. What I was referring to, is that if anything, we’re going to start deleting more photos for performance reasons. We are the largest photo distributor in the world. Interviewer: Really? Is that obvious? Employee: I don’t know the exact figures off the top of my head, but I want to say upwards of a trillion photos, and then think about six copies of each. This is the epitome of a needle in a haystack. When we need to load a webpage in half a second, we need to go and find upwards of a thousand photos — think about your newsfeed — in one get [snaps], and instantaneously. It’s hard to do. Interviewer: You’ve previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use. Employee: I’m not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I’m not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic. Interviewer: This was accessible by any Facebook employee? Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn’t as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look. I should also say that it was only available internally. If I were to log in from a high school or library, I couldn’t use it. You had to be in the Facebook office, using the Facebook ISP. Interviewer: Do you think Facebook employees ever abused the privilege of having universal access? Employee: I know it has happened in the past, because at least two people have been fired for it that I know of. Interviewer: What did they do? Employee: I know one of them went in and manipulated some other person’s data, changed their religious views or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he got reported, got found out, got fired. Interviewer: Have you ever logged in to anyone’s account? Employee: I have. For engineering reasons. Interviewer: Have you ever done it outside of professional reasons? Employee: I will say, when I first started working there, yes. I used it to view other people’s profiles which I didn’t have permission to visit. I never manipulated their data in any way; however, I did abuse the profile viewing permission at several initial points when I started at Facebook. Interviewer: How about reading their messages? Employee: Never individually like that. I would mostly just look at profiles. Interviewer: Would you suppose that Facebook employees might read people’s messages? Employee: See, the thing is — and I don’t know how much you know about it — it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand. Interviewer: So the master password is basically irrelevant. Employee: Yeah. Interviewer: It’s just for style. Employee: Right. But it’s no longer in use. Like I alluded to, we’ve cracked down on this lately, but it has been replaced by a pretty cool tool. If I visited your profile, for example, on our closed network, there’s a ‘switch login’ button. I literally just click it, explain why I’m logging in as you, click ‘OK,’ and I’m you. You can do it as long as you have an explanation, because you’d better be able to back it up. For example, if you’re investigating a compromised account, you have to actually be able to log into that account. Interviewer: Are your managers really on your ass about it every time you log in as someone else? Employee: No, but if it comes up, you’d better be able to justify it. Or you will be fired. Interviewer: I would imagine they take this— Employee: Pretty seriously. I don’t really **** around, at all. Interviewer: They invented a Chief Officer position for it, Chris Kelly, right? Employee: Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, correct. Running for Attorney General of California. Interviewer: Is that a standard position at Silicon Valley web companies? Employee: I think it’s becoming more of a standard officer position, especially with Web 2.0, 3.0, where the model is basically get as much information out there as you can. Obviously, someone needs to step back and make sure there is some information privacy here, or at least as much as we can put in place. Interviewer: Facebook was probably a big trendsetter in that regard, right? Employee: In my opinion, we’ve always provided the most nitty-gritty user privacy settings from the beginning. There’s no other site out there that’s this customizable. Interviewer: Would you like to give your take on the last few rounds of **** ups, Facebook Beacon, and the recent Terms of Service controversy? Employee: It’s really hard to judge exactly the way users are going to react. We just didn’t have a good enough beta-testing system in place. When you have a group of twenty engineers working on a project, they think it’s the most beautiful, immaculate thing in the world, and then they build it, and a project manager approves it. Initially, when that was the case, we just pushed it, and if users didn’t like it we pulled it back. That was just our philosophy, one of trial and error. Whereas now we’ve started running psychological analysis, starting to… Interviewer: Oh really? Employee: **** yeah. Are you kidding me? We do eye-tracking to see where your eyes move while you browse Facebook. Interviewer: What do you mean by “eye-tracking”? Employee: For example, when we want to introduce new features, like when we streamlined the browsing of photo albums, you know, where you can click ‘next’ above the photo, and the page stays the same except you get the next photo? We did tests on that, and actually found out it increased the number of page views by 77%, essentially because we were reducing 77% of the page load, and therefore it was loading faster, and thus generating more clicks. We not only reduced our bandwidth, and how much we have to pay for our Internet, but we made the site faster and increased the clicks-per-minute, which is what we’re truly interested in. Interviewer: So in what other ways do you track behavior, that isn’t necessarily obvious to users? Employee: We track everything. Every photo you view, every person you’re tagged with, every wall-post you make, and so forth. Interviewer: So maybe you know about this, maybe you don’t. There’s a paradox with international expansion, because obviously all internet companies aspire to a worldwide market, but as service enters countries without great infrastructure, such as 3rd-world countries, the companies have to provide the infrastructure and the countries don’t actually produce any (or much) ad revenue. Employee: I don’t know anything about that, actually. The one comment I would make about that, is that we’ve definitely tried to continue expanding to 3rd- world countries. Take Iran — well, Iran is not a 3rd world country — but when the Iranian elections came up, and then the disputes, we found out they were using Facebook as a tool to organize themselves and expose their qualms and discontent with the government. So publicly we translated the entire site into Farsi within 36 hours. It was our second right-to-left language, which was actually really difficult for us. Literally the entire site is flipped in a mirror. The fact that we did it in thirty-six hours — they hired twenty some-odd translators, and engineers worked around the clock to get it rolled out — was pretty ****ing phenomenal. We had at least three times as many user registrations per day the first day it was out, and it has been growing. So we’re definitely still serious about foreign outreach. And the thing is, we have such a gigantic market share in the larger sections of Europe, in Australia, in Mexico, in the States and Canada, and that’s where 99.9% of our ad revenue is and probably will be always — or at least will be the next five, ten years. So the fact that we’re breaching into these other markets mostly means just allowing family and friends to connect even more deeply, which is really our ultimate goal. Interviewer: What’s the creepiest Facebook interaction you have had? Employee: Well, the weirdest one I’ve ever seen was one I was able to investigate, one of the situations which required me to log into other accounts. This guy had emailed my friend at school a very very odd message, pertaining to the name ‘Caitlin,’ which is her name, and ‘poop.’ It was literally one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen: a two-page message about the name ‘Caitlin’ and its semantic relation to ‘poop.’ We found out that he had actually sent it to the first two hundred Caitlins he found on Facebook search. Interviewer: That’s weird. Employee: Really weird. Out of nowhere, no reasoning. He started sending it twenty times a day, to different Caitlins, for three weeks or so. Interviewer: What’s the most bizarre? Employee: I found a fake account created from Berkeley that used the profile picture and information from the brother of one of my very good friends. We looked up the guy who created the original profile, and he had never ever heard of him, never ever met him, obviously had never seen him. But this guy had evidently added him as a friend, and sadly he accepted it, but literally stole all of this guy’s information, created a fake account, and was communicating with himself from the fake account. He was writing on his wall and posting back to the “other person’s” wall. We found out the guy actually had about fifteen fake accounts that he created, stealing other users’ pictures and information to create the accounts, and was actually communicating back and forth with himself. Just to try to make himself appear cool, I guess? Interviewer: That’s a really sad display of humanity. Employee: Yeah. That is the most bizarre encounter that comes to mind. Those two are the big instances I’ve seen that made me say, “What the hell is going on?” Interviewer: So tell me about the engineers. Employee: They’re weird, and smart as balls. For example, this guy right now is single-handedly rewriting, essentially, the entire site. Our site is coded, I’d say, 90% in PHP. All the front end — everything you see — is generated via a language called PHP. He is creating HPHP, Hyper-PHP, which means he’s literally rewriting the entire language. There’s this distinction in coding between a scripted language and a compiled language. PHP is an example of a scripted language. The computer or browser reads the program like a script, from top to bottom, and executes it in that order: anything you declare at the bottom cannot be referenced at the top. But with a compiled language, the program you write is compiled into an executable file. It doesn’t have to read the program from beginning to end in order to execute commands. It’s much faster that way. So this engineer is converting the site from one that runs on a scripted language to one that runs on a compiled language. However, if you went to go talk to him about basketball, you would probably have the most awkward conversation you’d have with a human being in your entire life. You just can’t talk to these people on a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, talk about graph theory. Then he’d get it. And there’s a lot of people like that. But by golly, they can do their jobs. Interviewer: So what will be the net effect of running the site on Hyper PHP? Employee: We’re going to reduce our CPU usage on our servers by 80%, so practically, users will just see this as a faster site. Pages will load in one fifth of the time that they used to. Interviewer: When’s it coming out? Employee: When it’s done. Next couple of months, ideally. Interviewer: So where do these geeks come from? Employee: I would say at least 70% of Facebook engineers are from Harvard and Stanford. Interviewer: Wow. I know Zuckerberg went Harvard, what’s the Stanford connection? I mean other than just Palo Alto. Employee: I don’t think there’s any question that Stanford is the number one CS department in the world. Interviewer: Stanford engineers invented Silicon Valley. Employee: They did. Interviewer: How has the recent move affected the company? Employee: Facebook just moved offices to Stanford Research Park, which is where the original HP was started. Before it was kind of sprawled out. We had seven or eight offices downtown. Interviewer: Any changes in atmosphere after the move? Employee: It was just nice to have everyone in one office. Before, any meetings that happened were inconvenient for most people. I mean, engineering was split up into three offices. It was a pain. Now there’s more unity, more ease of communication. Everything feels more internal. It’s super-friendly. I think the coolest thing about the work environment is the trust. They don’t care what, where, how, when, as long as you get your **** done. If you want to work at a bar, the ball game, a park, the roof, they don’t give a ****. Just get your **** done. Hence I was able to ditch work, come have two pitchers with you, and I will literally be able to go back and get my work done. And it goes a long way. Because I know I can get these things done. I know I’m going to have to go back. And I may be there until ten or eleven tonight. Interviewer: I’m sorry we drank all these beers. Employee: It’s the trust deal. We’re able to do that. We don’t have to worry. We can put our personal lives first, as long as we get our work done. Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee ~LaserWraith Comodo Time Machine Review 01/11/2010
On BrightHub, I made a review of Comodo Time Machine: Comodo Time Machine Review This may help you decide whether or not to get CTM...as AFAIK Comodo hasn't released its features, etc. ~LaserWraith Two Fairly New Articles I Wrote 01/09/2010
Two BrightHub articles I recently wrote, and I forgot to mention it here. Even if you aren't interesting in them, it helps if you visit the pages. :)
Thanks ~LaserWraith Acronis Backup and Security 2010 01/03/2010
 Acronis has announced a new beta program, called Acronis Backup and Security 2010. Before, Acronis was more focused on backup software, and is fairly well-known for its Acronis True Image software. But now, it seems like they plan to move into the security realm (backup-ing is security-ish too, but I mean prevention/detection). We are pleased to announce our first Beta release of a brand new product offering, Acronis® Backup and Security 2010. This product bundles Acronis True Image Home 2010, the recently announced Acronis Online Backup and a brand new product - Acronis Internet Security 2010. Together they form the most complete PC protection product on the market, combining full-featured, high-performance Internet security capabilities with both local and online backup and recovery. Interesting, yes? Acronis Backup & Security 2010 is the first home PC protection solution to protect you from both internal threats causing data loss and external threats which can lead to security vulnerabilities. It combines three essential elements into one product:
This may be something worth checking out, once it has moved out of beta stage. The known issues are:
And probably more, as with any software (especially a beta). The installer is 350MB, which, in my opinion, is quite large. Download here. (Or go here and register.) ~LaserWraith Today's song...click here. Update on a New Site 01/03/2010
First, an update about my previous post on a new website and free hosts. I decided it wasn't worth it to make a new site — the first host I tried had too many limits (like PHP scripts can't connect other servers). The second had problems with FTP and permissions (chmod). The thing is, with both I had already partly set up my site. So it was taking quite a bit of time. Then I thought to myself, Was it worth it? Do I really need a new site? I'm not a big blogger (can't poor out long, nice articles like Raymond), and I don't really have much to offer compared to others. So is it worth it to set up a blog and forum, for reasons other than to test site plugins and things? I decided it wasn't, because of how much work it would take. But don't worry, I'll still keep this blog updated. :P Note: if you don't see the poll below, or if it is "messed up", go to my Polls page. ~LaserWraith Working/Testing A New Site 01/02/2010
No, I'm not moving (yet :P). But I have been trying out different webhosts (free ones), WordPress (a blogging system), Simple Machines Forums (the best), and others. I feel that this website maker (Weebly) is nice, but I wanted something I have more control over. It is hard to find a good, free host though. Zymic.com is an ok one. With 5GB of space and 50GB of bandwidth, you can't get much better than that for free. (Features here.) But there is one thing: PHP scripts are not allowed to communicate with remote servers. In other words, a lot of WordPress plugins don't work. 000Webhost.com, however, doesn't have this limitation (though there are some other features that are limited). ~LaserWraith GeekBuddy—Brought To You By Comodo 12/31/2009
 Comodo has announced a new (or is it?) service called GeekBuddy. GeekBuddy is the easiest way to get instant support with common problems which keep your computer from functioning at peak performance. Our next-generation computer support service combines expert hands-on support with an unbelievably low price. Our Expert Support Technicians are available 24/7 to help diagnose and fix computer related problems. From Virus removal to adding an email account, GeekBuddy can provide hands-on, expert support with the most challenging to the simplest of computer problems. There are two pricing options: one-time service, or unlimited home use (pay per year).  GeekBuddy Pricing (Click for larger picture) As you can see, one time use costs $19 while you can pay $49 per year for unlimited use. Now this reminds me of another service called livePCsupport, also by Comodo.  livePCsupport "happens" to have the same basic look of GeekBuddy, and the same pricing (and features). My guess is that Comodo changed around the livePCsupport website, changed the name, and reproduced it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to put down Comodo. It is just a bit of marketing, I think. If you have enough money to spend, and aren't computer-literate, this may be something you could use. ~LaserWraith A friend from Comodo Forums, eXPerience, told me to update my blog. I had taken a break because of Christmas and all the things that come with it. He also told me something I may want to post: Fix Windows 7’s 'Search programs and files' Incorrect Results ~LaserWraith Returnil Virtual System 2010 Home Lux is a completely new product that uses a combination of antivirus, antimalware and a virtual system to protect your computer from all types of viruses and other malicious threats. RVS 2010 uses an advanced anti-malware and virtualization technology. It clones (copies) your operating system and creates a virtual environment for your PC. Instead of loading the native operating system, a clone is loaded that allows you to run your applications and perform your online activities in an entirely isolated environment. In this manner, your actual operating system is never affected by viruses, Trojans, malware and other malicious threats. To return to the actual operating system environment, you just need to restart your PC. While working in the virtual environment, you have the option of saving documents and files so that your data will not be lost when the system is restarted. I found a promo for this. Download RVS 2010 from the given website above (it is the official site, so don't worry). Then use this key: S000030001A00000610KT2QMM Note: This key is the one that was used on Returnil's official Facebook Promotions fan page. So it isn't illegal. Get it while it lasts! ~LaserWraith | Subscribe!CategoriesAll Archives |
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