The 7 Ugly Truths About Facebook Social Network

With nearly a billion users worldwide, Facebook (FB) is one of the hottest sites on the Internet and a defining force in online media. But since going public on May 17, the ever popular social network has started to show a few kinks in its digital armor. First the stock price tanked. Then its domestic user growth slowed. And of course privacy concerns and data security remain ongoing issues for the company as it expands globally.

But for all the hype surrounding Facebook, the fact remains that it is an imperfect company with its fair share of internal and external struggles, like any firm. Consider these seven little-known facts about the world's largest social network.

1. It has a problem with fake accounts

According to a regulatory filing released earlier this week, Facebook itself estimates that as many as 8.7 percent of its 955 million worldwide active accounts are in fact duplicates or fakes, accounting for some 83 million "users." Of these, about 46 million are duplicate accounts (which anyone who has a "work" and a "personal" Facebook account can understand), 23 million are user-misclassified accounts (such as profiles assigned to pets or businesses) and about 14 million are pages set up for spamming or other untoward uses.

The door to hell -,Burning Hole in Desert !

The burning hole in desert as a result of human error !




In the hot, expansive Karakum desert in Turkmenistan, near the 350 person village of Derweze, is a hole 328 feet wide that has been on fire. For 38 years it has constantly been active.

This hole is known as the Darvaza Gas Crater or the "Gates of Hells" by locals, the crater can be seen glowing for miles around. The hole is the outcome not of nature but of an industrial accident.

In 1971 a Soviet drilling rig accidentally punched into a massive underground natural gas cavern, causing the ground to collapse and the entire drilling rig to fall in. Having punctured a pocket of gas, poisonous fumes began leaking from the hole at an alarming rate.

To head off a potential environmental catastrophe, the Soviets set the hole alight. The crater hasn't stopped burning since. Though little information is available about the fate of the Soviet drilling rig, presumably it is still down there somewhere, on the other side of the "Gates of Hell."

National Security Agency (USA) wants to hire hackers !

Wearing a t-shirt and jeans, America's top spymaster -- National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander, also the head of the U.S. Cyber Command -- took the stage Friday at the nation's largest hacker convention to deliver a recruiting pitch.

"In this room, this room right here, is the talent our nation needs to secure cyberspace," Alexander told the standing-room-only audience at DefCon, a grassroots gathering in Las Vegas expected to draw a record 16,000 attendees this year. "We need great talent. We don't pay as high as everybody else, but we're fun to be around."

Alexander's appearance is a milestone for DefCon, a hacker mecca with an often-uneasy relationship with the feds. DefCon is the older, wilder and far less official sibling of BlackHat, a cybersecurity conference that wrapped up Thursday in Las Vegas.

New Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer brings free food concept to Yahoo !

How is new CEO Marissa Mayer going to revitalize Yahoo?

By making it more like Google, the company she just left.

According to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, Mayer has instituted a few changes already at Yahoo's Sunnyvale, CA, headquarters. Among them: establishing a weekly all-hands meeting on Friday afternoons, and making all the food in its URLs Cafe, which previously priced egg white muffin sandwiches at $3.65 and teriyaki chicken paninis at $5.31, free.

Of course, it's easy to say that all of this has been borrowed directly from Google, but these kinds of offerings have become standard at many Silicon Valley offices — the fact that Yahoo has, until now, lacked them has likely been a sore point for some of its engineers. Both Facebook and Twitter, for instance, serve up free snacks and daily catered meals to employees.