There Are Facebook’s 7 Favorite Hacks Of 2015
Facebook is known for its in-house hacks. The healthy hacking culture of Facebook has produced ideas such as like button, tagging, rainbow over the profile picture, Facebook Messanger etc. Here are the 7 most famous in-house hacks of Facebook in 2015.

React+Oculus: Real-time coding for virtual reality

This is one of the most interesting hacks, it enables a developer to code in real time while wearing the Oculus headset. React+Oculus was developed by two Facebook engineers during an infrastructure hackathon.
According to the product manager Chris Marra, the team used Facebook’s React library to replace the DOM renderer with a custom version that utilizesthree.js. As a result, while wearing the Oculus Rift headset, a user will see a dot that contains a window with components rendered in virtual reality. These selectors can be used to edit objects users are seeing, in real time.

On-Board Optics

This in-house hack helps make server hardware switches cooler and helps in maintaining the internet congestion on the server. Using on-board optics, the Facebook team was able to run a 300GB-per-second link over multi-mode fiber.

Celebrate pride

Recently you have noticed rainbow colored profile pictures on Facebook. These rainbow colored profile pictures were invented to show pride and support some cause over the internet. This idea of celebrating pride was invented by two interns at the Facebook. In just 72 hours, the duo leveraged Facebook’s existing code to create the tool. The filter was such a success that more than 26 million people updated their profile pictures with it on the weekend after its launch. Celebrate pride was used mostly to support social causes, sports team or some major step taken in this world.

Stetho

Stetho was created as a debugging platform. It also has the privilege of being the first open sourced Android project by Facebook. This tool, which works as an extension, can be used to examine network traffic, view hierarchy, query SQLite databases etc. There are also other open source projects by Facebook which are available to the world.

Boomerang

Boomerang became an instant hit when it was ported over to Instagram. It’s more like a continuous mode sports pictures. With one touch, a user can take a series of pictures. These series of pictures can then be combined together to create an animated GIF like file.

Warp Speed Data Transfer

To curb the hustle of slow transfer of files between two databases, two Facebook engineers created Warp speed Data transfer. Those two engineers created an embeddable library and command line tool that will transfer files at more than 500GB per second. Later this hack was made open sourced, and the company says it’s adding new features to it regularly — including, most recently, encryption.

Securing email communication from Facebook

Every event and action taken by a user over Facebook involve users’ privacy. The communications taking place within the social network should also be private. Keeping these things in view, a team of engineers created a way for users to add OpenPGP public keys right to their profile, allowing them to receive encrypted email notifications.
If you are also aware of some of the unknown hacks by Facebook, do share with us in the comments below.
Congress Gives NASA $55 Million To Build A Space Habitat On Mars by 2018
We might have started dreaming of turning Mars into a living habitat just like it was done in Martian movie and the same dream NASA is harbouring for years. But, we still do not know how we are going to survive the journey and how we are going to pitch the first peg of our tent.
The space vehicle which drives the astronauts into space is not larger than a pickup truck and it takes at least six months to reach the Mars. Also, astronauts should need their own space. Even if this space vehicle capsule will be linking to a habitation module in space, then at the moment no one has the idea that how the space module is going to look like and how astronauts are going to live once they get to the Mars.
Well, these things which provide ample support to this debatable topic do not seem available, but NASA has been given sufficient fund to build a habitat by 2018. At this point of time, NASA is totally blank as to what the habitat would look like and how it would function. Shielding astronauts from space radiation while also maintaining light weight will be one of the major challenges.
Looking at the futuristic challenges, NASA is already in talks with bigger companies like Boeing and Bigelow Aerospace on potential habitats in space. But looking at the deadline ahead, NASA could be forced to really speed things up now to comply with Congress’s wishes.
At least for the moment, we just need to use our imaginations and draw references from movies to guess what habitats on Mars are going to look like because NASA’s International Space Station director told it’s far too early to release any mock-ups.
So what is your view on how habitat is going to look like on Mars? Is it really possible?
Image: NASA
Google: New Linux Bug Is Not A Big Deal For Android
As reported by Adrian Ludwig, Android’s lead security engineer, Google has taken the recent Linux zero-day issue seriously. However, according to Perception Point, the company which reported the problem, this current vulnerability has an effect over around 66 percent of all the Android devices including phones and tablets.
Though the Perception point was aware of the problem, it was not reported to the Google by them. But according to Google, fortunately, because of the upstream work of the Linux team, Google was ready with a patch.
Ludwig writes:
“We have prepared a patch, which has been released to open source and provided to partners today. This patch will be required on all devices with a security patch level of March 1, 2016 or greater. We believe that no Nexus devices are vulnerable to exploitation by 3rd party applications.
Further, devices with Android 5.0 and above are protected, as the Android SELinux policy prevents third party applications from reaching the affected code. Also, many devices running Android 4.4 and earlier do not contain the vulnerable code introduced in Linux kernel 3.8, as those newer kernel versions not common on older Android devices.”
According to Google, the claims made were not of so much of importance and it is also not going to affect many devices. All the operating systems have some issues but before making a hype out of that is not advisable until the reported problem is a real one.
Facebook Becomes 4th Most Valuable Company In The World, Beats Exxon
Faceook has surpassed the oil company Exxon Mobil to become the fourth most valuable company in the world by market capitalization.
According to recent market trends, there are two reasons which have been attributed to this rise:
  • Surge in the market value of the world’s largest social networking company due to increasing income as more and more Facebook users are joining this social networking site and,
  • Declining in the market price of the oil and layoffs in the oil giant Exxon
The four tech giants which top the list are: Alphabet (Google), Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook.
After Facebook had gone online in the share markets, many investors at the Wallstreet had raised a finger about the capability of Facebook over making money from the internet users. Unlike other top three companies, Facebook mainly relies on its website.
However, ever since then, Facebook has not looked backward and now, it is seen as the rare fast-growing technology company that is capable of beating Wall Street predictions in terms of revenue growth.
Apple, the number one the list for the last 13 years, was not able to gain the first position. We also have another interesting article about the history of Apple which explains how Apple has evolved above the time. Despite its more than $200 billion cash pile, investors still are not convinced enough that Apple has a bright future ahead.
For the same reason, Apple lost its title as the world’s most valuable company to…..Google. Google, which has recently come up with a new name and organizational structure, is being seen as the company with several potential products in the pipeline.
Next PostNewer Posts Previous PostOlder Posts Home