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A little while ago (approx 2 weeks) I read a story online which claimed a person has downloaded a compiled 100m Facebook users’ personal data. I searched online and found this torrent on thepiratebay.org

I downloaded this torrent and to my surprise, its almost NOTHING personal. Just names and Facebook IDs. Anyway, I also found a BBC Story on the same topic which is pathetic! They sounded this as if Facebook is HACKED, which is not the case.

Anyway, anyone who does not want to download via other file-sharing services or torrents can download this from the following VPS locations

• Location 1
• Location 2 (monthly allocation of 1TB bandwidth consumed)

P.S. If, for some reasons, you cannot download this file, leave a comment with a valid email address in this post and I will get back to you with the valid link.

I have been experimenting with NAGIOS3 on Ubuntu (I will write a how-to-install on NAGIOS later) and it has served me very good in monitoring my 7 VPS from different providers in different part of the world. I have already recorded 3 hours of downtime from ThrustVPS which is a great deal for me. I now know which VPS has the best time and which ones have hiccups (e.g. my 2Host VPS gave me two unreachable notifications but the VPS was running and still reports the uptime as 4 days).

Since I use twitter more, even when Im on the road, notifications via email is a bit slow for me. Luckily I found a great tutorial online to do that.

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Life is really moving in the fast lane for me, and Im pretty sure for most of you readers too. I login to social-networking platforms after weeks and I cant recognize most of these faces (even though they are my friends). Its proven that Humans tend to recognize people by face more quickly then names and email addresses so whenever someone puts on a new face (uploads a new profile-picture), I have hard time getting to know them.

Well, I thought today, I have been developing in facebook application for so long now – Why not put online a few hours to fetch Facebook Friends data via API and keeping track of who did what? (status updates) and who changed his/her profile picture? So last night I was up, as usual, and I put together a small script in PHP that fetches my friends’s list, processes newcomers, checks for updates (pictures and statuses) and posts them into a database. Now I can track who updated his profile picture and what was their previous profile photo. Also, I can invest in another 1 hr to create high-level-summary everyday for ME

Do you do something of this sort? I’d love to hear your story

Facebook showing the same advertisement twice in the left-hand section (as seen in the image below). Someone’s getting ripped off.

Facebook is rolling out its redesign to some of its users and they are somewhat like this, claims Om Malik on gigaom.com. Here are some of the screen shots of the new sleek look

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Games.com say

Even though gaming on Facebook has been around for a while, 2009 was the year of the social gaming boom. Mafia Wars was the first game since Scrabulous to get a nod from mainstream media, and by the end of the year, you’d be hard pressed find anyone — even your Mom — who hasn’t at least heard of FarmVille.

Then there’s the fact that these games are basically cash cows, corralling millions of dollars for Zynga, Playdom, Playfish and CrowdStar (and the prediction that social gaming will be a 5 billion dollar industry in a several years), we’d say this whole social gaming thing has officially taken hold, and we can’t wait to see how these games change in 2010.

Out of the 500+ games on Facebook, five in particular held us captive this year. All of the games on this list launched in ’09 and have 10 million or more monthly active users. It’s equally mind-boggling to sit back and think of how many hours we’ve sunk into these games, not to mention (yup, it’s confession time) how much real-life cash we’ve paid to buy virtual items for these games.

You can read the entire article here. In my opinion, I never played any of these games except Mafia Wars, that too very rare. Farmville and Cafe World are two games that I have started playing in 2010