I'm leaving Washington D.C. and am now en route to New York City on the Bolt Bus.
Thankfully, it has wifi on board, so I can spend some valuable time sending emails and going on ONTD before I get too nauseous and have to sleep for the rest of the trip.
I have 3 apartments to check out by Tuesday evening, so hopefully I'll have an apartment by Wednesday. Otherwise, I'll be back to the drawing board and looking for a place before Shruti leaves on the 9th. Then I can freak out about jobs, jobs and more jobs (oh and Grad School).
I miss my family like crazy, but going to the city will be good. I'll be too distracted by the plethora of things to think about it. I especially can't wait for the Tim Burton exhibit, and we're going to try and check out Next to Normal as well as a few other shows.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
It's my last day in Washington DC. I've been staying at my friend's apartment and sleeping on the ground out in the living room. It's actually ridiculously comfortable, though I can't wait to be up in New York sleeping in a bed.
It's supposed to snow up to 1/2 a foot tonight and the roads, I have been told, most definitely won't be cleared by tomorrow. This means Shruti and I will be lugging 3 giant rollers, 2 backpacks and a duffel bag in uncleared snowy roads about a mile to the nearest spot where cabs pick up.
So that'll be fun.
Yesterday I went to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and saw my grandpa.
I really miss home, but I think that once I get situated with an apartment and hopefully find a job, things will get better. And hopefully I'll get into grad school, and hopefully I'll find some theatre. Everything is so chaotic right now. I have 2 appointments for apartments and a few more potentials that I still haven't sent a date for. I'm going to try and check out two other places before Wednesday morning and make my decision then. Then I'll move into the apartment Friday or Saturday from the hotel and Shruti can stay in the room until she leaves early tuesday morning.
Pictures later, if I still have internet
It's supposed to snow up to 1/2 a foot tonight and the roads, I have been told, most definitely won't be cleared by tomorrow. This means Shruti and I will be lugging 3 giant rollers, 2 backpacks and a duffel bag in uncleared snowy roads about a mile to the nearest spot where cabs pick up.
So that'll be fun.
Yesterday I went to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and saw my grandpa.
I really miss home, but I think that once I get situated with an apartment and hopefully find a job, things will get better. And hopefully I'll get into grad school, and hopefully I'll find some theatre. Everything is so chaotic right now. I have 2 appointments for apartments and a few more potentials that I still haven't sent a date for. I'm going to try and check out two other places before Wednesday morning and make my decision then. Then I'll move into the apartment Friday or Saturday from the hotel and Shruti can stay in the room until she leaves early tuesday morning.
Pictures later, if I still have internet
Thursday, January 28, 2010
t- 10 hours until takeoff.
In less than 12 hours I will be on a plane, bound for Washington D.C. and eventually New York City.
I would say I'm panicking, but I think that I'm in denial. The only time that I've teared up was last night, saying goodbye to my Dad. I made him cry, which he never does, resulting in waterworks for me on the drive home. Other than that, I've been okay. I've said goodbye to everyone but my Mom and dog. My brother and sister went to sleep, and I won't wake them up when I leave since it will be 4:30 am and they have school.
I think I'll be okay until late tomorrow night, when I can't sleep because of jet lag. Then it'll probably hit me like a ton of bricks. But I'm going to be fine. It's all going to fine.
I still have to print out my bus pass, revise my resume, get together a list of theatres that will take me, plus the rules for equity. I have to put bows on all my bags and make sure my address is on all of them. Then I'll go and finish packing my boxes. Oh and at some point tonight I'm going to bleach my hair back to blonde.
I would say I'm panicking, but I think that I'm in denial. The only time that I've teared up was last night, saying goodbye to my Dad. I made him cry, which he never does, resulting in waterworks for me on the drive home. Other than that, I've been okay. I've said goodbye to everyone but my Mom and dog. My brother and sister went to sleep, and I won't wake them up when I leave since it will be 4:30 am and they have school.
I think I'll be okay until late tomorrow night, when I can't sleep because of jet lag. Then it'll probably hit me like a ton of bricks. But I'm going to be fine. It's all going to fine.
I still have to print out my bus pass, revise my resume, get together a list of theatres that will take me, plus the rules for equity. I have to put bows on all my bags and make sure my address is on all of them. Then I'll go and finish packing my boxes. Oh and at some point tonight I'm going to bleach my hair back to blonde.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
3 things
1. 2 1/2 days and i'm moving! i'm doing my (hopefully) last load of laundry at this very moment.
2.
3. My Goodbye Evening with the girls!
2.
3. My Goodbye Evening with the girls!
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
I've been packing, not doing nearly enough craigslist searching, or finding out about nonequity theatres. In other words, I'm lazy. Lucky for me, I'm going to try and redo all 30 of my costume renderings, and 12 of my set designs before I leave. Along with finally updating my resume, hopefully this will make me slightly more appealing to theatres in a place where everyone is more experienced than I am. I have some photos of the last few weeks in a bit, but for now:
Become a fan of my theatre group!
And follow us on twitter!
Thanks!
t-8 days and counting!
And follow us on twitter!
Thanks!
t-8 days and counting!
Monday, January 18, 2010
Sunday, January 17, 2010
3 things about the Golden Globes
1. Go away, Avatar. I'd rather watch Fern Gully
2. RDJ's acceptance speech? Brilliant.
3. My idol. Good God.
2. RDJ's acceptance speech? Brilliant.
3. My idol. Good God.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee
Facebook employees know better than most the value of privacy.
This past summer Facebook relocated from University Avenue in Palo Alto, CA — where several buildings fan out along the downtown strip — to a new central office in Stanford Research Park. A good friend and two-year veteran of Facebook invited me to check out the new space. When I arrived, a security guard handed me a non-disclosure contract to fill out, a requirement to enter the building. “Just making sure you’re not a Twitter spy,” he said. I can therefore not describe the tour my friend gave, though photos of the new space abound on the Internet. Afterwards, we went out for a drink at the Dutch Goose, a bar popular with techies and Stanford graduate students, where most of this conversation took place. Though forthcoming, my friend was anxious to preserve her anonymity; Facebook employees, after all, know better than most the value of privacy. As she is not permitted to divulge company secrets, and would like to remain employed, her name has been omitted from this interview. It provides an interesting snapshot of the inner workings and culture of Facebook in the summer of 2009.
Q: 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?
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 —
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: And the difference between them would be sizing, certain areas are zoomed –
Employee: Exactly. Different sizes for the news feed, your profile pic, enlargement.
Q: 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.
Q: And how many users are you up to now?
Employee: That I can disclose publicly? Two hundred to two hundred twenty million.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: Have you ever logged in to anyone’s account?
Employee: I know it has happened in the past, because at least two people have been fired for it that I know of.
Q: 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.
Q: Have you ever logged in to anyone’s account?
Employee: I have. For engineering reasons.
Q: 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.
Q: How about reading their messages?
Employee: Never individually like that. I would mostly just look at profiles.
Q: 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.
Q: So the master password is basically irrelevant.
Employee: Yeah.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: I would imagine they take this—
Employee: Pretty seriously. I don’t really fuck around, at all.
Q: They invented a Chief Officer position for it, Chris Kelly, right?
Employee: Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, correct. Running for Attorney General of California.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: Would you like to give your take on the last few rounds of fuck 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…
Q: Oh really?
Employee: Fuck yeah. Are you kidding me? We do eye-tracking to see where your eyes move while you browse Facebook.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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 fucking 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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?
Q: 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?”
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: When’s it coming out?
Employee: When it’s done. Next couple of months, ideally.
Q: So where do these geeks come from?
Employee: I would say at least 70% of Facebook engineers are from Harvard and Stanford.
Q: 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.
Q: Stanford engineers invented Silicon Valley.
Employee: They did.
Q: 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.
Q: 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 shit done. If you want to work at a bar, the ball game, a park, the roof, they don’t give a fuck. Just get your shit 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.
Q: 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.
Source
Gawker article on the interview
This past summer Facebook relocated from University Avenue in Palo Alto, CA — where several buildings fan out along the downtown strip — to a new central office in Stanford Research Park. A good friend and two-year veteran of Facebook invited me to check out the new space. When I arrived, a security guard handed me a non-disclosure contract to fill out, a requirement to enter the building. “Just making sure you’re not a Twitter spy,” he said. I can therefore not describe the tour my friend gave, though photos of the new space abound on the Internet. Afterwards, we went out for a drink at the Dutch Goose, a bar popular with techies and Stanford graduate students, where most of this conversation took place. Though forthcoming, my friend was anxious to preserve her anonymity; Facebook employees, after all, know better than most the value of privacy. As she is not permitted to divulge company secrets, and would like to remain employed, her name has been omitted from this interview. It provides an interesting snapshot of the inner workings and culture of Facebook in the summer of 2009.
Q: 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?
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 —
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: And the difference between them would be sizing, certain areas are zoomed –
Employee: Exactly. Different sizes for the news feed, your profile pic, enlargement.
Q: 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.
Q: And how many users are you up to now?
Employee: That I can disclose publicly? Two hundred to two hundred twenty million.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: Have you ever logged in to anyone’s account?
Employee: I know it has happened in the past, because at least two people have been fired for it that I know of.
Q: 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.
Q: Have you ever logged in to anyone’s account?
Employee: I have. For engineering reasons.
Q: 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.
Q: How about reading their messages?
Employee: Never individually like that. I would mostly just look at profiles.
Q: 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.
Q: So the master password is basically irrelevant.
Employee: Yeah.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: I would imagine they take this—
Employee: Pretty seriously. I don’t really fuck around, at all.
Q: They invented a Chief Officer position for it, Chris Kelly, right?
Employee: Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, correct. Running for Attorney General of California.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: Would you like to give your take on the last few rounds of fuck 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…
Q: Oh really?
Employee: Fuck yeah. Are you kidding me? We do eye-tracking to see where your eyes move while you browse Facebook.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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 fucking 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: 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?
Q: 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?”
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: When’s it coming out?
Employee: When it’s done. Next couple of months, ideally.
Q: So where do these geeks come from?
Employee: I would say at least 70% of Facebook engineers are from Harvard and Stanford.
Q: 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.
Q: Stanford engineers invented Silicon Valley.
Employee: They did.
Q: 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.
Q: 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 shit done. If you want to work at a bar, the ball game, a park, the roof, they don’t give a fuck. Just get your shit 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.
Q: 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.
Source
Gawker article on the interview
Thursday, January 14, 2010
10 things
1. Follow my blog with bloglovin
2. Passing Strange
Why didn't anyone tell me how awesome this musical is!? I'm stilling trying to find the Pretzal Man Monologue. It brought tears to my eyes.
3. Alice in Wonderland
I really want Tim Burton's Alice to be phenomenal, but I have my doubts. Just look at the soundtrack list.
4. Egg Houses!
This is the future.
And it looks awesome.
5. The Millenium Trilogy
I can't wait for the next one to be out in the States.
6. look at this house
just look at it.
7. Bath, England
Just look. It's like an Ad for something amazing. whatever this pic is selling, I'll buy it.
8. Six Feet Under
“You can’t take a picture of this. It’s already gone.”
I'm having a very Claire Season 5 moment, tbh.
9. choice is choice.
10. I don't know what show this is from, but I want a stage with sand on it.
And by the way, that's Alexander Skarsgard. Why, Hello...
8.
2. Passing Strange
Why didn't anyone tell me how awesome this musical is!? I'm stilling trying to find the Pretzal Man Monologue. It brought tears to my eyes.
3. Alice in Wonderland
I really want Tim Burton's Alice to be phenomenal, but I have my doubts. Just look at the soundtrack list.
4. Egg Houses!
This is the future.
And it looks awesome.
5. The Millenium Trilogy
I can't wait for the next one to be out in the States.
6. look at this house
just look at it.
7. Bath, England
Just look. It's like an Ad for something amazing. whatever this pic is selling, I'll buy it.
8. Six Feet Under
“You can’t take a picture of this. It’s already gone.”
I'm having a very Claire Season 5 moment, tbh.
9. choice is choice.
10. I don't know what show this is from, but I want a stage with sand on it.
And by the way, that's Alexander Skarsgard. Why, Hello...
8.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Another post? Say it Isn't So!
http://prop8trialtracker.com/
It's the third day of the trial, but if you haven't checked out the transcripts, you should. Nothing's quite as funny as the thought process of the Prop-8ers. "B'aww! We're being oppressed! B'aww! People keep saying 'Separation of Church and State' and that's offensive! Next thing you know everyone will be gay! WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?"
Long story short:
Pro-Prop 8:
Anti-Prop 8 (for repealing the Prop)
Yeah.
So.
It's the third day of the trial, but if you haven't checked out the transcripts, you should. Nothing's quite as funny as the thought process of the Prop-8ers. "B'aww! We're being oppressed! B'aww! People keep saying 'Separation of Church and State' and that's offensive! Next thing you know everyone will be gay! WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?"
Long story short:
Pro-Prop 8:
Anti-Prop 8 (for repealing the Prop)
Yeah.
So.
Earthquake Update: World Rushes to Haiti’s Aid
Photo: Getty Images
Updates:
The New York Times has a constantly updating blog on the situation in Haiti
CNN Updates
If you want to help:
Yele Haiti: Rapper Wyclef Jean has set up this earthquake relief effort. Born in Haiti, Jean has long been an advocate for the Caribbean country.
Text YELE to 501 501 and 5 dollars will go toward earthquake relief.
Doctors Without Borders: This French organization has been on the ground in Haiti for years and knows the country better than just about any other anyone else.
American Red Cross The venerable charity has people on the ground in Haiti. According to the official Red Cross Twitter feed, "You can text "HAITI" to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief efforts in#haiti."
Catholic Relief Services This faith-based non-profit is also working in Haiti.
edit: more organizations where you can donate
Action Against Hunger, 877-777-1420
Agape Flights, 941-584-8078
American Red Cross, 800-733-2767
American Jewish World Service, 212-792-2900
AmeriCares, 800-486-4357
Beyond Borders, 866-424-8403
CARE, 800-521-2273
CarmaFoundation
Catholic Relief Services, 800-736-3467
Childcare Worldwide, 800-553-2328
Concern Worldwide, 212-557-8000
Cross International, 800-391-8545
Direct Relief International, 805-964-4767
Doctors Without Borders, 888-392-0392
Feed My Starving Children, 763-504-2919
Food for the Poor, 800-427-9104
Friends of WFP, 866-929-1694
Haiti Children, 877-424-8454
Haiti Foundation Against Poverty
Haiti Marycare, 203-675-4770
Haitian Health Foundation, 860-886-4357
Hope for Haiti, 239-434-7183
International Medical Corps, 800-481-4462
International Rescue Committee, 877-733-8433
International Relief Teams, 619-284-7979
Lutheran World Relief, 800-597-5972
Medical Teams International, 800-959-4325
Meds and Food for Kids, 314-420-1634
Mennonite Central Committee, 888-563-4676
Mercy Corps, 888-256-1900
Operation Blessing, 800-730-2537
Operation USA, 800-678-7255
Oxfam, 800-776-9326
Partners in Health, 617-432-5298
Rural Haiti Project, 347-405-5552
The Salvation Army, 800-725-2769
Samaritan's Purse, 828-262-1980
Save the Children, 800-728-3843
UN Central Emergency Response Fund
UNICEF, 800-367-5437
World Concern, 800-755-5022
World Hope International, 888-466-4673
World Relief, 800-535-5433
World Vision, 888-511-6548
Step 1: Bought a ticket on Virgin America to New York via Washington D.C.
Step 2: Going to New York, alone.
Well, not ACTUALLY alone, my friend Shruti is going up there with me to help me find an apartment. But I won't really know anyone else. So that's exciting...right? Right?
Step 3: Get the hotel room aka a Pod.
It's the hip place to stay
and we got bunkbeds!
And hopefully I'll be busy. Busy trying to find a job, trying to find some theatre experience, trying to volunteer (I think I'm going to at the YWCA or some like-minded organizaton), and hopefully getting into grad school.
Here's hoping I find a place during the 10 days that Shruti is staying with me and that we're at the Pod hotel.
Get ready, Self.
t-16 days until Washington D.C.
t-19 days until New York City
Step 2: Going to New York, alone.
Well, not ACTUALLY alone, my friend Shruti is going up there with me to help me find an apartment. But I won't really know anyone else. So that's exciting...right? Right?
Step 3: Get the hotel room aka a Pod.
It's the hip place to stay
and we got bunkbeds!
And hopefully I'll be busy. Busy trying to find a job, trying to find some theatre experience, trying to volunteer (I think I'm going to at the YWCA or some like-minded organizaton), and hopefully getting into grad school.
Here's hoping I find a place during the 10 days that Shruti is staying with me and that we're at the Pod hotel.
Get ready, Self.
t-16 days until Washington D.C.
t-19 days until New York City
Monday, January 11, 2010
t-17 days
I need to upload my camera from yesterday. Brittany came down and we made pizza with friends, went bowling and then came back and hung out till 3 am.
I need to go threw my stuff and see what needs to be tossed, kept, etc. And I found out if I have a roommate today (But no apartment)! So cross your fingers.
We're also looking at staying at the Pod Hotels, which seem absolutely fantastic. Sort of like uber chic individual hostel rooms that average between about 70-100 bucks a night. So more than the average hostel, but with all our stuff that we're bringing this is the more reasonable option.
This picture sums up my weekend.
I need to go threw my stuff and see what needs to be tossed, kept, etc. And I found out if I have a roommate today (But no apartment)! So cross your fingers.
We're also looking at staying at the Pod Hotels, which seem absolutely fantastic. Sort of like uber chic individual hostel rooms that average between about 70-100 bucks a night. So more than the average hostel, but with all our stuff that we're bringing this is the more reasonable option.
This picture sums up my weekend.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
It's awkward telling people that I'm leaving on January 28th. I have the sneaking suspicion that up until the moment I tell them that I actually bought the ticket they don't believe me. Maybe they still don't believe me. I've gotten some strange reactions from people.
I've also started going through all the stuff I own and separating what I want to bring from what I need to bring and what I don't even have (winter coat, I'm looking at you!) I'm debating what decorations to bring, whether I'm going to try and vacuum seal a blanket and pillow. Since I'm visiting D.C. first, I'm going to try and limit the amount of luggage I bring to: two suitcases, a giant duffel bag that I can carry on my back like the bad ass I am, my backpacking pack and a side bag/purse. That's what I packed for my study abroad in London, and I'll have 2 packages that can be sent that includes dvds, books, and anything else once I have an actual place to live.
At least I'm starting to think about this, right? ...Right?
Oh boy.
I think I'm going to have a Wes Anderson evening and watch
The life I leave is exceedingly exciting.
P.S. I would sell my first born for a decent SLR.
I've also started going through all the stuff I own and separating what I want to bring from what I need to bring and what I don't even have (winter coat, I'm looking at you!) I'm debating what decorations to bring, whether I'm going to try and vacuum seal a blanket and pillow. Since I'm visiting D.C. first, I'm going to try and limit the amount of luggage I bring to: two suitcases, a giant duffel bag that I can carry on my back like the bad ass I am, my backpacking pack and a side bag/purse. That's what I packed for my study abroad in London, and I'll have 2 packages that can be sent that includes dvds, books, and anything else once I have an actual place to live.
At least I'm starting to think about this, right? ...Right?
Oh boy.
I think I'm going to have a Wes Anderson evening and watch
The life I leave is exceedingly exciting.
P.S. I would sell my first born for a decent SLR.
Friday, January 8, 2010
The Year in Review (Better late than Never)
JANUARY
The start of the New Year (2008) and I went to Napa with the girls.
It was fun, wine-tasting even moreso. Too bad I could only stay overnight and not the full weekend.
FEBRUARY
Spent the Month writing, taking film and history classes at the local comm college and going to San Francisco.
MARCH
Started my internship with Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) and spent time with the girls.
APRIL
A week in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico with my Dad, Stepmom, Brothers and Sister.
MAY
Bay to Breakers!
And The Cardboard Box Theatre Project's first show a box of strange opened to a full house.
JUNE
My brother graduated from middle school. Look at those awkward teenage years on either side of him.
In the wake of the Iran election protests, San Francisco and San Jose held rallies. I was able to go to one, despite my complete inability to read and understand Farsi outside of "Hi, How are you? I don't speak your language. Have a good day!"
JULY
Las Vegas for Clem's 23rd birthday/her going away party and The 4th of July. The following Monday she moved to Paris for a year.
JULY and AUGUST: Rome, and a Cruise of the Mediterranean Sea
We also celebrated my 23rd Birthday on the cruise.
AUGUST
Brittany's 23rd and a night out in San Francisco.
As well as dinners with friends.
SEPTEMBER
House party with the girls
And the month start out with monsoon weather.
While I had my first paying theatre gig as Stage Manager and Image Projectionist for Can't Thread a Moving Needle.
And spending time with the baby brother.
The closest we get to Fall.
OCTOBER
One of the reasons I love fall: Lovefest!
Gotta love Oktoberfest.
Still warm enough to go to the beach. But not warm enough to go in the water.
NOVEMBER
My Grandpa's 90th Birthday at The Bohemian Club
I spent the rest of the month working on Grad applications and Thanksgiving.
DECEMBER
Our two night Christmas Show Season's Greetings and third production by The Cardboard Box Theatre Project. Sold out both nights! I worked some set up/tech and helped with the door during the show.
I also finished up my grad applications and celebrated Christmas.
And here we are!
The start of the New Year (2008) and I went to Napa with the girls.
It was fun, wine-tasting even moreso. Too bad I could only stay overnight and not the full weekend.
FEBRUARY
Spent the Month writing, taking film and history classes at the local comm college and going to San Francisco.
MARCH
Started my internship with Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) and spent time with the girls.
APRIL
A week in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico with my Dad, Stepmom, Brothers and Sister.
MAY
Bay to Breakers!
And The Cardboard Box Theatre Project's first show a box of strange opened to a full house.
JUNE
My brother graduated from middle school. Look at those awkward teenage years on either side of him.
In the wake of the Iran election protests, San Francisco and San Jose held rallies. I was able to go to one, despite my complete inability to read and understand Farsi outside of "Hi, How are you? I don't speak your language. Have a good day!"
JULY
Las Vegas for Clem's 23rd birthday/her going away party and The 4th of July. The following Monday she moved to Paris for a year.
JULY and AUGUST: Rome, and a Cruise of the Mediterranean Sea
We also celebrated my 23rd Birthday on the cruise.
AUGUST
Brittany's 23rd and a night out in San Francisco.
As well as dinners with friends.
SEPTEMBER
House party with the girls
And the month start out with monsoon weather.
While I had my first paying theatre gig as Stage Manager and Image Projectionist for Can't Thread a Moving Needle.
And spending time with the baby brother.
The closest we get to Fall.
OCTOBER
One of the reasons I love fall: Lovefest!
Gotta love Oktoberfest.
Still warm enough to go to the beach. But not warm enough to go in the water.
NOVEMBER
My Grandpa's 90th Birthday at The Bohemian Club
I spent the rest of the month working on Grad applications and Thanksgiving.
DECEMBER
Our two night Christmas Show Season's Greetings and third production by The Cardboard Box Theatre Project. Sold out both nights! I worked some set up/tech and helped with the door during the show.
I also finished up my grad applications and celebrated Christmas.
And here we are!
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