Facebook on the hunt for London-based engineering team

Facebook on the hunt for London-based engineering team

Facebook is on the hunt for 22 new recruits to make up its new London-based engineering team. 

Based in Covent Garden, the Facebook team is to focus on key areas such as mobile and platform.

The team will be led by software engineer Philip Su and has so far advertised for 22 jobs including positions in sales, monetisation, developer relations, software engineering, datacentre design and operations, platform product marketing, recruitment and growth, engagement and mobile.

Philip Su, who recently relocated to London, made the job hunt announcement via a note on Facebook’s engineering page. 

Explaining why Facebook had chosen London as its first engineering centre outside the US Su said: “London is a perfect fit for Facebook engineering — it’s a global hub, and it has a vibrant local startup community with lots of great technical talent. 

"Our team in London will start small, focusing on building a core of great engineers, and then grow over time and eventually focus on building products in key areas like mobile and platform."

"We are a culture of builders, and the environment we plan to create in London will reflect that. Despite the size of our service — 900 million users and growing — we still push new code to the site every day. 

"We eliminate unnecessary process and give all our engineers the opportunity to work on the things that matter most. 

"Our engineers in London — like those in Menlo Park, New York, and Seattle — will be able to pursue great ideas and ship products quickly.”

The social networking giant’s international expansion comes at a time when its member growth in the US has slowed to 0.86% compared to nearly 66% for Japan, 54% for Brazil and 20% for India, according to a report from site monitor Pingdom.

Facebook’s London Team, which "builds awesome stuff fast" according to their Facebook page, receive perks such as paid leave for new parents, free meals and snack and gym membership.

Facebook is set to present its first results as a public company this week.

Yahoo fixes password-pilfering bug, explains who's at risk

Yahoo said it has fixed the flaw that allowed hackers to steal more than 450,000 passwords from one of its many services.

The company also provided more information about whose passwords had been pilfered.

"We have...now fixed this vulnerability, deployed additional security measures for affected Yahoo! users, enhanced our underlying security controls and are in the process of notifying affected users," the company announced in a post to its blog early Friday.

Yahoo has offered no specific information about the attack, how it was carried out or even when. Itconfirmed the attack Thursday.

The hacker group D33Ds Company took responsibility for the breach, saying it had exploited a basic SQL injection vulnerability in a Yahoo service to steal the usernames and passwords associated with 453,000 accounts. The group published the passwords and email addresses on the Web.

Yahoo also confirmed that the stolen account credentials belonged to registered users of its Yahoo Contributor Network, which was previously known as Associated Content.

Yahoo Contributor Network is a platform that generates high-volume, low-cost content by letting writers photographers, and others share their work with Yahoo members and earn money based on the traffic their content generates. Users who contribute to the network are required to sign in using a Yahoo, Google or Facebook ID.

Associated Content, which was founded in 2005, was bought by Yahoo for just over $100 million in May 2010. Yahoo renamed the service in late 2011, when it also launched Yahoo Voices, a portal where users access content posted by the Yahoo Contributor Network.

According to Yahoo, only people who registered as providers with Associated Content before the 2010 acquisition were affected by the password theft. "[The] compromised file was a standalone file that was not used to grant access to Yahoo! systems and services," Yahoo maintained.

Just under a third of the stolen passwords were linked to accounts registered to a yahoo.com email address, security company Rapid7 said Thursday. Significant chunks of the file, however, were composed of Gmail (23.6% of all accounts) and Hotmail (12.2%) addresses.

All users with older Associated Content accounts, no matter the email address used, should immediately change the passwords for those email accounts as well as any identical or similar passwords used to secure other online services or websites, security experts have said.

Rapid7 security researcher Marcus Carey said yesterday that the file published by D33Ds included 123 government email accounts -- ones ending with ".gov" -- and 235 military-related addresses (ending with ".mil"). Among the government email accounts, Carey found several associated with the FBI, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Security experts have been scathing in their criticism of Yahoo, in large part because the passwords were stored in plain-text, making the hackers' job of exploiting the stolen accounts a breeze.

Yesterday, Mark Bower, a data protection expert and executive at Voltage Security, said, "It's utter negligence to store passwords in the clear."

Also on Thursday, Rob Rachwald, director of security strategy at Imperva, took Yahoo to the woodshed. "To add insult to injury, the passwords were stored in clear text and not hashed (encoded)," Rachwald wrote in a blog post. "One would think the recent LinkedIn breach would have encouraged change, but no. Rather, this episode will only inspire hackers worldwide."

The LinkedIn breach Rachwald referenced came to light last month, and involved approximately 6.5 million encrypted passwords belonging to members of the networking service.

In its Friday blog, Yahoo again apologized to users affected by the password theft.

India leads world in junk emails:

India has become the top spam-spewing 

nation on the planet, suggests a report.

Compiled by security firm Sophos, the report ranks nations by the amount of junk mail routed through computers in each country.

India has leapt to the top of the spam chart in less than a year, rapidly overtaking the US, said Sophos.

About 10% of all junk mail sent across the web came from or passed through computers in India, said the firm.

India's rapid rise up the chart of spam producers has been helped by the rapid growth of the web in the country, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

The inexperience of the many first-time net users in India had led many to fall victim to hi-tech criminals, he said.

"The latest stats show that, as more first-time internet users get online in growing economies, they are not taking measures to block the malware infections that turn their PCs into spam-spewing zombies," he added.

Social networks

About 80% of all junk email is thought to be routed through PCs hijacked by hi-tech criminals who use computer viruses to seize control of the machines. Once a machine is under their control they use them to send out mail on their behalf, typically relaying it from another nation.

Sophos estimates that about 9.3% of all junk mail travels through Indian computers. In second place is the US (8.3%) and South Korea (5.7%) is third.

India's rise up the rankings was also helped by the ongoing shift away from traditional email by spammers. More and more of them, said Sophos, were using social networks as the route to spread their junk messages.

Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest were all being hit with increasing regularity by spammers, said Sophos.

Facebook's App Center aims to make discovering third-party

Facebook's App Center aims to make discovering third-party apps easier:-

Facebook has built a new application discovery tool to help its users find third-party mobile and Web applications that integrate with the popular social network. The Facebook App Center, which launched this evening with approximately 600 application listings, is accessible through Facebook’s website and mobile applications.

The main App Center landing page on the Facebook website displays personalized app recommendations and a list of the apps that are popular among the user’s friends. A list of application categories in the sidebar can be used to navigate into different sections of the App Center. There is also a toggle button that can be used to filter for Web or mobile applications.

Although the Facebook App Center looks like a conventional application storefront, it doesn’t directly sell any software. Its purpose, at least for now, is solely to help users find Facebook-enabled applications. For mobile applications, it will direct the user to their platform’s built-in application store–Google Play on Android devices and Apple’s App Store on iOS devices. For Web applications, it will help the user connect their Facebook account to the third-party website.

Clicking on an application in the App Center on the Facebook website will take the user to its profile page, which displays a rating, screenshots, and other relevant information. Where applicable, the page will also have a Send to Mobile button that can be used to easily install the application on a mobile device. The button sends a push notification to the user’s phone, which the user can click through to see the desired application in their platform’s built-in app store.

According to a Facebook representative who contacted us about the launch, there are over 4,500 separate applications in existence that integrate with the Facebook timeline. Facebook gaming remains a popular pastime, with a reported 230 million users playing every month. The company also says that, as of May, seven of the top ten highest grossing iOS apps integrate with Facebook.

The company also took the opportunity to highlight the role it has played in driving mobile application sales. It has released statistics indicating that Facebook sent users to the Apple App Store 83 million times in May alone, and sent iOS users into installed applications 134 million times during the same month.

The App Center is rolling out immediately in the United States and will be made available to users in other countries over the next few weeks. It is intended to replace the Facebook website’s existing Apps and Games interface.