Facebook is the most popular social networking website in the world. It has over 350 million active users, and as such, hosts a very large amount of personal data. However, most people don't realize how dangerous this can be, as an anonymous Facebook employee explained in a recent interview.

The interview, posted on The Rumpus, revealed how easy to access your data is to anybody at Facebook. The interview is quite lengthy, though it does reveal some rather worrying facts:

Rumpus: You've previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.

Employee: I'm not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user's user ID, and then the password. I'm not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,' more or less. It was pretty fantastic.

Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?

Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn't as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look.

The anonymous employee continued to state that not only could any Facebook employee access your data should they look in the right places, but in the past, several people had done just that. One employee was fired after having changes a person's listed religious belief on the site, and the employee in the interview has used their privileges to view other profiles.

Rumpus: Would you suppose that Facebook employees might read people's messages?

Employee: See, the thing is — and I don't know how much you know about it — it's all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That's what most people don't understand.

Rumpus: So the master password is basically irrelevant.

Employee: Yeah.

However, the managers at Facebook are strict; if an employee doesn't have a good excuse for logging in as another person, then they'll get into serious trouble. In fact, they even appointed a Chief Privacy Officer, just to ensure things stay as secure as they can be.

Lastly, the employee notes that the social networking site tracks every move that you make. Be it viewing a photo, writing a comment or just writing a wall post, it will be tracked. This is another lesson of how careful one should be when exposing personal data on the Internet, though it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anybody in this day and age. No company is perfect, though it's still interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes. We'll leave you with an excerpt about Facebook's stereotypical nerdy engineers.

Rumpus: So tell me about the engineers.

Employee: They're weird, and smart as balls. For example, this guy right now is single-handedly rewriting, essentially, the entire site. Our site is coded, I'd say, 90% in PHP. All the front end — everything you see — is generated via a language called PHP. He is creating HPHP, Hyper-PHP, which means he's literally rewriting the entire language. There's this distinction in coding between a scripted language and a compiled language. PHP is an example of a scripted language. The computer or browser reads the program like a script, from top to bottom, and executes it in that order: anything you declare at the bottom cannot be referenced at the top. But with a compiled language, the program you write is compiled into an executable file. It doesn't have to read the program from beginning to end in order to execute commands. It's much faster that way. So this engineer is converting the site from one that runs on a scripted language to one that runs on a compiled language. However, if you went to go talk to him about basketball, you would probably have the most awkward conversation you'd have with a human being in your entire life. You just can't talk to these people on a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, talk about graph theory. Then he'd get it. And there's a lot of people like that. But by golly, they can do their jobs.

With the recent release of the Nexus One, some have been rather critical of Google. It's a company that licenses its mobile OS software to other companies, but has now introduced a competitor to those exact phones. Microsoft is one such criticizer, stating Google's scheme is very difficult.

In an interview posted on Business Week, Microsoft's head of mobile development, Robbie Bach, stated, "Google's announcement sends a signal where they're going to place their commitment. That will create some opportunities for us and we'll pursue them." He noted the fears that Google will prioritize its own phone over other vendors offering Android based devices, continuing with, "Doing both (selling the Nexus One whilst offering its software to others) in the way they are trying to do both is actually very, very difficult."

Bach isn't the only one with this frame of mind. An analyst at the research firm Interpret LLC, Michael Gartenberg, said, "No one has ever succeeded in selling their own device while trying to license to partners simultaneously. As much as Google can say it's not a Google phone, the phone says Google on it. They're going to have to convince their licensees they're not in competition with them." Whether or not you're a fan of Google, the pair make a rather good point; it's hard on partners when a company offers a product that directly competes with other products packing software developed by the very same company. Bach predicted that some companies may even give up using Android and switch to another operating system. Regardless, the coming months (and even years) will be very interesting and exciting ones for the mobile industry.

An Italian consumer group is planning a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft over the pre-installation of Windows on computers. According to Reuters, the move comes after a new law was passed, allowing consumer associations to file suits for groups of consumers.

Filled by the Association for the Rights of Users and Consumers (ADUC) in Italy, the suit aims to obtain compensation for customers who bought PCs with Windows pre-installed who did not want to use the operating system. The new law permits the ADUC to obtain only compensation for the 2,000 customers – not punitive damages.

The ADUC has already won a pilot case in a Florence court, allowing many OEMs to give a refund. However, before customers can claim their compensation of €30-40, they must send their computers to the manufacturers headquarters to get the software removed. ADUC Chairman Vincenzo Donvito told Reuters that the system costs consumers money and they only do it to make a point. He also believes that the refund should be higher, as Windows costs between €150 and €250, despite OEMs typically paying $50 for each copy of Windows.

However, Microsoft do not seem worried. A Microsoft spokesperson told technology news site Ars Technica that "consumers are free to purchase PCs with a non-Microsoft operating system, or without any operating system. However, consumers benefit from the preinstallation of Windows on PCs. It provides the best user experience from the time a consumer first turns on the PC, and saves consumers the substantial effort and resources associated with having to install an operating system that functions properly."

The spokesperson added, "computer manufacturers are free to sell PCs pre-installed with another operating system or no operating system at all."

Fast Company is reporting that the Director of Marketing for Microsoft's Entertainment and Device Devision, Craig Belinson, has said that "Windows 7 is by far the fastest selling Operating System in history." While this news may not come as much of a surprise, it's always nice to hear how well Microsoft's latest pride and joy is doing.

Sadly, Belinson didn't provide any software sales numbers to back up his claim. Instead, he brought PC sales numbers, which directly correspond to Windows 7 sales (since PCs come with the OS installed). He states that during the week of Windows 7's launch, there was a 50% jump in PC sales when compared to the previous week. In addition, Black Friday saw a 63% bump from a year ago, and the holiday season, as a whole, saw a 50% increase in PC sales. Just as a side note, a poll on Lifehacker, which was done just weeks after Windows 7 was released, showed that 41% of readers had already begun using Windows 7 as their primary OS.

While it's great to see Windows 7 be the success that Vista, unfortunately, was not, it's also important to remember that being the fastest selling OS doesn't mean as much as it once did. Back in the days of Windows XP there were far fewer computers in the world and before XP, there were even less. Of course Windows 7 is the fastest selling OS, there are many more PCs in the world than there were when Vista, or any other Windows OS was released. This fact will continue to dictate the future trend of OS sales. As evident from Belinson's comments, the more PCs sold in the world, the more copies of Windows sold. Microsoft's next major OS release will most likely see even better numbers than Windows 7 did (assuming it's not another Vista, of course).

Search Engine Roundtable brings to attention a very sad and disturbing fact about Microsoft Bing. It's slow at indexing sites. In the Bing Forums, prathaban1 posted the following:

"I have submitted my website, www.kidandparent.in, to the Webmaster Console, using a sitemap.xml almost 6 weeks ago. It is a new website with unique content and Bing calculates about 14 Backlinks to it. However, just the homepage has been indexed so far (with help from Brett). G and Y have indexed almost 400 and 200 pages respectively. Any pointers on what I can do to get indexed by Bing?"

Brett Yount, who is the Program Manager at Bing Webmaster Center, responded:

"It is well known in the industry that MSNbot is fairly slow. I suggest reading our FAQs stickied at the top of the indexing forum to get some ideas of what to do."

But wait, it gets better. Here's the sticky from the "sites not in the index" section of the Bing Forum:

"if your site is not in the index, please do the following:

1. verify in our tools that your site is not blocked
2. run a site: query to verify there are no pages in the index
3. Copy the URL of the site query and post on this thread.

I will work with you to at least get your home page indexed. Deeper indexing will require good content and backlinks as described in the FAQ."

I ask you to please read number 3 again. Yes, that's correct. If your site doesn't show up in Bing's index after submitting it through the site, you can post your website's address in the forum, and someone will manually add it into the index for you. How can Microsoft expect Bing to compete with Google if it can't even handle the simple task of indexing a page within an acceptable time frame? Microsoft says they are serious about conquering the world of search, but problems like this one tend to take search domination out of the equation. It would be a good idea for Microsoft to straighten this out instead of just openly admitting to its users that everyone knows they're slow.