New and noteworthy for 11/15/08

By Ben Gross
in

The world’s most super-designed data center – fit for a James Bond villain: Pingdom has a nice set of pictures and a write up of a bunker in Stockholm Sweden that ISP Bahnhof recently converted to a data center. One of the more interesting aspects is how much effort they put into designing the data center for the people who worked there in addition to the machines. There are simulated daylight, greenhouses and waterfalls as well as a giant fish tank.

A scientific formula for popularity on Digg, YouTube: CNET’s Webware blog covers the recent paper by Gabor Szabo and Bernardo Huberman from the Hewlett-Packard Social Computing lab. The authors modeled the number of views and various kinds of votes based on a healthy same of 7,146 YouTube videos in 2008 and 6 months of Digg entries in 2007. The resulting model was useful for predicting the long term popularity of an item basic on a number of statistical properties without knowledge of the content of the item.

Miley Cyrus Hacker Raided by FBI: Wired’s Threat Level blog covers the now familiar story of a young hacker exploiting a weakness in one social network site, in this case social engineering a MySpace employee, to acquire a password that was also used on another service with the desired content, in this case Gmail. One interesting detail is that the hacker attempted to sell the images to a number of celebrity sites and they refused to buy the images since they effectively considered them stolen property. The sites did of course begin to use the images without paying for them immediately upon their availability in other locations.

Published November 15, 2008