Hasta La Gadget!

There are some 240 billion photos taking up precious space on Facebook’s servers, with another 350 million photos uploaded every day. Facebook has discovered that not all of these photos get looked at anymore. Many older photos and albums lay dormant because they get pushed aside by newer photos and albums. In order to handle all of these photos, Facebook is planning to launch a data facility specifically for storing older photos on the social network.

In total, Facebook is preparing to launch three new “cold storage” facilities at its data centers in Prineville, Oregon, in which the first one will open sometime this fall. However, unlike regular servers that are always powered on and ready to go, these servers will purposely be put on standby in order to open up their regular servers to more important tasks.

Essentially, these standby servers will be on in a way, but they won’t be fully operated unless there’s a request. For instance, if a user wants to look at some old photos on Facebook, the standby server that has these older photos stored on will wake up and operate until the user is no longer looking at those photos.

According to Facebook, 82% of its traffic goes toward just 8% of its photos. The company also says that its cold storage servers will have eight times the capacity of their traditional servers, and will be five times more energy efficient. Facebook’s Oregon datacenters used up approximately 71 million kilowatts of power in just nine month’s time, but they say that the cold storage facilities are expected to cost much less than normal servers.

[via The Oregonian]

Facebook planning “cold storage” data facility for old photos is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you’re an avid traveller, you might want to think about picking up a soon-to-go-on-sale Doodad pay-as-you-go SIM card: it offers flat-rate, 3G data, around the world, and will work in any unlocked GSM device. Neat. More »

Remember Republic Wireless? Those guys who promised to change the world of mobile with a $19 per month unlimited talk, text, and data plan? Remember how it sounded too good to be true? I dove in head first when it came out as a beta last year, and I can tell you from experience that it both is and isn’t. Republic is onto something, yes. But it’s getting there slowly. More »

Early last year when Google revealed that it would be combining its privacy policy across all its services, many people cried foul, stating that such a move allowed it to gather far too much information about its users. Google contended that the short, simpler privacy policy is something that users prefer, and that having one policy across multiple products and/or services is not uncommon. European regulators quickly jumped on the change, however, and after some back and forth, they still aren’t satisfied with how Google has handled the issue.

Earlier today, European regulators announced that they will proceed against the search engine giant over issues with its one-policy-to-rule-them all method. Although the single privacy policy is not against the law, it is being viewed as a high-risk practice, putting users’ private information in a vulnerable position. Initially, the French National Commission for Computing and Liberties, more commonly known as CNIL, was pulled in to decide whether the single privacy policy put EU users’ data at risk. That same watchdog will once again look into the issue, stating that Google failed to address the problems it had outlined.

Said CNIL, “Google did not provide any precise and effective answers. In this context, the EU data protection authorities are committed to act and continue their investigations. Therefore, they propose to set up a working group, led by the CNIL, in order to coordinate their reaction, which should take place before summer.”

Google disagrees, however. According to the company, it had responded to the CNIL in early January of this year with a series of actions it had taken to deal with the concerns. Said Google spokesman Al Verney, “We have engaged fully with CNIL throughout the process and will continues to do so.” He also pointed out that the privacy policy does not violate the law.

[via Reuters]

European regulators tell Google to get its privacy policy issues sorted is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This map, put together by China File, plots all of the publicly available suppliers who fuel Apple’s production lines. While the majority are found in Asia, it’s interesting to see that the rest of world represents, too. More »