Facebook’s Master Password: Chuck Norris

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.

Hell yeah, that’s good news! But don’t worry, you could only use it inside Facebook’s local net­work and it was lim­ited to engi­neers. Any­way, pretty awseome?

This is not the only inter­est­ing story of what’s hap­pen­ing inside of Face­book. The Rum­pus inter­viewed a Face­book employee, who — what else — wants to stay anony­mous. Here are some key facts men­tioned in the con­ver­sa­tion, which I con­sider to be good to be aware of, when talk­ing about THE social network:

• EVERYTHING is stored, pro­to­colled and monitored.
• They run four data cen­ters. In Santa Clara, San Fran­cisco, New York and Lon­don. Each of them holds about five to eight thou­sand servers. They have essen­tially the same data on it.
• Cur­rent num­ber of active users: 200 to 220 mil­lions. All together (inac­tive, fake, etc.): over 300 million.
• There are 300 engi­neers work­ing the site. One engi­neer for about 1 mil­lion users. Accord­ing to founder Mark Zucker­berg this is the com­mon ratio they want to keep.
• Face­book is the largest photo dis­trib­u­tor in the world with stor­ing more than a tril­lion images, each of them saved in six dif­fer­ent versions.
• With the above men­tioned Mas­ter Pass­word, every­one who knew the pass­word was able to admin­is­trate every sin­gle pro­file. But that’s not even nec­es­sary. As every social net­work or web­site, the data is also stored in a database.
• They cre­ated a Chief Pri­vacy Offi­cer posi­tion, which is cur­rently held by Chris Kelly, run­ning for Attor­ney Gen­eral of California.
• To deve­l­ope new fea­tures, they started run­ning psy­cho­log­i­cal analy­sis, such as eye-tracking to see where your eyes move while brows­ing Facebook.
• Dur­ing the Iran­ian elec­tions, Face­book coded a trans­lated ver­sion in Farsi, their sec­ond right to left lan­guage ever, within 36 hours.
• One of the engi­neers is rewrit­ing the com­plete soft­ware from PHP to HPPHP. Hyper-PHP is a com­piled lan­guage (PHP is scripted) which will improve speed (about five times faster) and reduce the CPU load by 80%. This guy is cur­rently invent­ing this language.
• 70% of Face­book engi­neers (you should bet­ter call them ultra-geeks) are from Har­vard and Stanford.
• They don’t care what, where, how, when, you work, 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.

It’s just amaz­ing to get an inside view on how the largest social net­work world­wide oper­ates. Here is the com­plete story at The Rum­pus. By the way, don’t worry about your pri­vacy. It doesn’t mat­ter if it’s Google, Face­book, or your local ISP, the more you use the web, the more data you cre­ate. And the web never forgets.