Tag: facebook

Zstandard

We’re thrilled to announce Zstandard 1.0, a new compression algorithm and implementation designed to scale with modern hardware and compress smaller and faster. Zstandard combines recent compression breakthroughs, like Finite State Entropy, with a performance-first design — and then optimizes the implementation for the unique properties of modern CPUs. As a result, it improves upon the trade-offs made by other compression algorithms and has a wide range of applicability with very high decompression speed. Zstandard, available now under the BSD license, is designed to be used in nearly every lossless compression scenario, including many where current algorithms aren’t applicable.

FB Fake News Defeat

Some of the posts on the fake news sites’ pages went extremely viral many months after Facebook announced its crackdown. An Empire News story reporting that Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sustained serious injuries in prison received 240k likes, 43k shares, and 28k comments on its Facebook page. The incident was pure fiction, but still spread like wildfire on the platform. An even less believable post about a fatal gang war sparked by the “Blood” moon was shared 22k times from the Facebook page of Huzlers, another fake news site.

Facebook Lite

We rolled out Facebook Lite, our version of Facebook for Android built for emerging markets, in June of 2015. The app has hit 100M monthly active users. It’s the fastest-growing version of Facebook to reach 100M users in under 9 months. It has an APK that is less than 1 MB in size, meaning people can download it in seconds on slow connections.

To reach the APK size target, the Lite APK doesn’t have the product code and resources found in a typical Android app. The Lite client is a simple VM that provides various capabilities to interact with the OS (such as read a file, open the camera, create an SQLite database, and so on) and a rendering engine to drive the Android UI. Product code is written on the server and is expressed in terms of the capabilities the client has. Resources are sent down from the server as needed and cached. So it has infinite scalability for building additional product without bloating the APK.

Facebook for trafficking

Syrians are helped along their journeys by Arabic-language Facebook groups like “Smuggling Into the E.U.,” with 24k members, and “How to Emigrate to Europe,” with 39k. Migrants share photos and videos of their journeys taken on their smartphones. The groups are used widely by those traveling alone and with traffickers. In fact, the ease and autonomy the apps provide may be cutting into the smuggling business.

Inside a Facebook farm

EVERY MORNING, KIM Casipong strolls past barbed wire, 6 dogs, and a watchman in order to get to her job in a pink apartment building high above the slums in Lapu-Lapu City, Philippines. She is a pretty, milk-skinned, 17-year-old girl who loves the movie Frozen and whose favorite pastime is singing karaoke. She is on her way to do her part in bringing down Facebook.

Bloated web

Facebook has put everyone else on notice. Your content better load fast or you’re screwed. Publication websites have become an absolutely bloated mess. They range from beautiful (The Verge) to atrocious (Bloomberg) to unusable (Forbes). The common denominator: they’re all way too slow. Instant karma’s gonna get them

this is why i have javascript off by default, and only allowlist maybe 10 sites. it avoids all those stupid “widgets” that these sites love so much.

The price of efficiency for advertisers’ is the user experience of the reader. The problem for publishers, though, is that $ and cents — which come from advertisers — are a far more scarce resource than are page views, leaving publishers with a binary choice: provide a great user experience and go out of business, or muddle along with all of the baggage that relying on advertising networks entails

Dinosaur Marriage

This is why the deal makes so much sense, AOL provides the technology to target individuals instead of content, and Verizon the ability to track those individuals — at least the over 100m customers they already have — at arguably a deeper level than anyone else in digital advertising (for non-Verizon customers, AOL’s ad platform is still useful, albeit not as targeted; rates would be commensurately lower). The talk of this mashup joining Facebook and Google to form a “Big 3” of digital advertising is not unrealistic.

Facebook drones

such nice technology being wasted on selfies and baby pictures.

Facebook, one of the primary backers of the Internet.org initiative, which aims to bring affordable Internet access to the 5B people in the world who still lack connectivity, is in talks with a company that could help further that agenda. Facebook is buying Titan Aerospace, makers of near-orbital, solar-powered drones which can fly for 5 years without needing to land.