DailyTech - Facebook Source Code Leaked

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Internet Facebook Source Code Leaked
Tuan Nguyen (Blog) - August 13, 2007 10:00 PM

8 comment(s) - last by Polynikes.. on Aug 14 at 2:00 PM

Facebook officials say it's happened before

For an application developer, having your source code leaked can be a very dire thing. For popular online social network Facebook, part of its application source code was leaked, revealing some details into the how Facebook operates. Posted on a single blog site entitled Facebook Secrets, the source code that leaked appeared to be of the main user interface, and not of any deep mechanics of the website.

The source leak might reveal security holes of the social network. While it is fairly certain there have been attempts to hack Facebook, no one has successfully done so. Despite the leak, Facebook officials say the source code published was only a very small portion of the entire Facebook application and no details other than code responsible for homepage presentation was leaked.

“A small fraction of the code that displays Facebook web pages was exposed to a small number of users due to a single misconfigured web server that was fixed immediately. It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way. Because the code that was released only powers the Facebook user interface, it offers no useful insight into the inner workings of Facebook," said Brandee Barker, public relations chief, Facebook.

Without a doubt, the leak will create a lot of activity for Facebook in terms of watching out for security. According to Barker, a small but known problem in apache and the mod_php module will output back-end source code to the end user instead of the appropriate output code. Barker indicated this problem occurred previously but source code was never published until now.

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RE: I've seen the code, you can too

By SandmanWN on 8/14/2007 10:05:22 AM , Rating: 1

Well not exactly unique. Ive been running this ratio in about all the coding I've done for about the past 5 years. I helped design some coding for one of the largest ebay sellers in the world and they also used a similar ratio in their design. ColdFusion (one word btw) is a really powerful tool and plays nice with all sorts of other coding like .NET, PHP, etc. Probably due to its heavy base influence from Java. Now that Adobe has purchased CF through the Macromedia acquisition it has received some overhauls that are making CF almost too versatile to ignore. Sounds like a sales pitch but it has really has been so easy to learn and implement.

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"Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn." -- Seagate CEO Bill Watkins