Snapchat | Mark Cathey's Tech Site

Facebook loves to share how much it likes open source, and the social network has followed through on that note with a status update on its activities this year.

Here’s a rundown, by the numbers:

• Launched 63 new projects since January 2014
Total active Github portfolio stands at exactly

• 200 for projects spread across Facebook, Instagram and Parse

• Facebook’s open source projects have seen 13,000 total commits, an increase of 45 percent from the second half of 2013.

• Projects collectively have netted 20,000 forks and 95,000 followers.

• Facebook’s total open source library stands at approximately 9.9 million lines of code.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company highlighted a number of its more popular projects in a blog post on Friday, putting user interface Javascript library React and iOS/OS X animation engine Pop in the spotlight.

The latter has played a large role in a pair of other Facebook projects with which end users might be more familiar.

That would be the first two projects rolled out from Facebook’s Creative Labs department: digital news reader app Paper and Snapchat-competitor Slingshot.

Facebook engineers revealed Pop “spawned a host of extensions and integrations, including the iOS version of our very own Slingshot.” Pop has also grown to become Facebook’s second most popular open source project ever.

Looking forward, Facebook is following through on some of the products it unveiled to developers at F8 in San Francisco back in April. One product making its way out the door today in beta access is Display Node, Facebook’s open source asynchronous UI framework.

Source: ZD Net

Hackers appear to have posted account info for 4.6 million users of quickie social-sharing app Snapchat, making usernames and at least partial phone numbers available for download.
The data were posted to the website SnapchatDB.info. By late Wednesday morning, that site had been suspended.

The hack was seemingly intended to urge Snapchat to tighten its security measures. The anonymous hackers said they used an exploit created by recent changes to the app, which lets users share photos or short videos that disappear after a few seconds.

“Our motivation behind the release was to raise the public awareness around the issue, and also put public pressure on Snapchat to get this exploit fixed. It is understandable that tech startups have limited resources but security and privacy should not be a secondary goal. Security matters as much as user experience does,” the hackers said in a statement to Techcrunch.

In the statement, the hackers said they blurred the last two digits of the phone numbers they posted but were still considering whether to post more with the full number visible.

By Wednesday afternoon, developers had used the data to set up a whether their accounts had been compromised.

Snapchat did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Last week, — a group of “white hat” hackers, meaning they don’t exploit the security gaps they find — published what they said was code that would enable such a hack. The SnapchatDB group said Snapchat implemented “very minor obstacles” after that.

“We know nothing about SnapchatDB, but it was a matter of time til something like that happened,” Gibson Security wrote Wednesday on its Twitter account. “Also the exploit works still with minor fixes.”

Snapchat appeared to minimize the potential damage from such a hack, claiming that it would require a “huge set of phone numbers, like every number in an area code,” to match usernames to numbers.

“Over the past year we’ve implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do. We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse,” the post read. “Happy Snapping!”

Source: CNN