Rishi

"Who wants a tequila shot?" Randi Zuckerberg shouted over the thump of "Baby One More Time," Britney Spears' breakup anthem. It was nearly midnight on a rainy Wednesday in September, and more than a dozen friends gathered by Randi, the older sister of Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, were crowding a private room at the Midtown karaoke club Japas 38. "Yay!" cheered the crowd as their host hoisted a carafe of tequila in the air and circled the tables, pouring shots. The air smelled of stale beer and soy sauce.

After salt was licked, plastic cups drained and limes squeezed, she grabbed a microphone and belted out a rousing version of "I Will Survive." In August, Randi Zuckerberg, 29, quit her job at Facebook, where she had been among the first two dozen people hired. Most recently, she was the director of marketing. In its early days, Zuckerberg was a buoyant presence, representing her reticent brother to an eager press. Later, she earned attention (not always favorable ) singing at company functions with a band composed of colleagues.

And she came up with the idea for Facebook Live, the social network's video channel, which has featured interviews conducted by Facebook executives with Oprah Winfrey and President Barack Obama. Now Zuckerberg has started her own business, RtoZ Media, to help companies take advantage of social media. "This is the launch party of Randi Zuckerberg!" she said at the club, beaming.

Zuckerberg, who lives in a rented house in Palo Alto, has ambitions beyond the internet. "I want a talk show," she said two days earlier over drinks at the Mercer Hotel. She also wants to sing on Broadway. And she is interested in philanthropy: while in New York, she conducted live online interviews with participants of the Clinton Global Initiative and worked the red carpet at a UN gala.

Older women who are mentors, Zuckerberg said, have warned her that she must tone down her flamboyant persona, but she refuses to take heed. "This is a new world we live in, and it should be possible for a woman to be taken seriously and still do what she loves," she said. Three weeks after the karaoke night, she spoke at a conference sponsored by the New York Stock Exchange. She then traveled to Warsaw to talk to 2,000 telecom and media executives about social media. And the estate of Michael Jackson hired her to be the host of an online show on the pop star's Facebook page. "Every article written about me now refers to me as Randi Zuckerberg, Mark's sister," she said. "Maybe one day that won't be what people say about me."

Zuckerberg was born in 1982 and grew up in Dobbs Ferry, NY, a Hudson Valley town about 40 minutes from Manhattan. She is older than Mark by two years and has two younger sisters. Early on, her parents signed her up for piano lessons, but she longed to sing. She enrolled at Harvard in 1999 and studied psychology after being turned down by the music department, she said, because her piano skills were lacking. She continued to sing, using the stage name Randi Jayne. In 2002 her brother joined her at college.

Barely has Google+ —the search giant's answer to Facebook— gotten off the ground, that it received a most unexpected 'visit' from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Tech site CNET reported that at least three profiles bearing Zuckerberg's name had appeared on Google+, one labeled as "Fake Zuckerberg," and two as "Mark Zuckerberg."

As of Friday, it said that the "fake" Zuckerberg and one of the two "Mark Zuckerberg" profiles appeared to have been short-lived.

However, the "remaining" Zuckerberg profile appeared to be still up, with no posts.

"The second Mark Zuckerberg profile, put up shortly after the first was taken down, is harder to dismiss. The non-smiling profile picture--an apparent cell phone or a Webcam shot--is not easily found elsewhere. A TinEye search turned up only the Zuckerberg Google+ profile image," CNET reported.

CNET also quoted a Google spokesperson as saying that Google does not authenticate users at this time.

"As with many of our products, we rely on our users and the community to report any impersonations. We then review these reports and act accordingly. You can try to determine if someone is who they claim to be by viewing their profile, posts, etc. Or if you know them, you can contact them directly," it quoted the spokesperson as saying.

CNET also said that Facebook has not responded to its requests to verify the second Zuckerberg Google+ profile.

10:32 a.m. PDT: All right folks, we're in. The room is in a very interesting setup today, with a bunch of tables instead of the usual "auditorium" style. It's like a lunchroom...of computers.

10:37 a.m.: Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg just walked in, though he's in the back of the room. Not up front just yet.

10:40 a.m.: Zuckerberg says we're not going to talk about what you all think we're going to talk about.

10:41 a.m.: Zuckerberg: You may have heard we've been in lock-down mode. We've had a lot of product teams working on something, and we wanted to double down. So we had a 60-day waiting period where we worked on products.

10:42 a.m.: Now he's going over product launches so far this summer:
-relaunch of photos tool
-made improvements to chat to make it more stable
-focus on cleaning up quality
-changed games policy to keep spam at bay
-added Places
-added real identity to names

10:44 a.m.: Zuckerberg says the company will be bringing Places to other mobile platforms, now available only on Facebook's iPhone app.

Also mentions the recently introduced Questions product, which he says has been well-received.

10:45 a.m.: Zuckerberg says more releases are coming in the next month. But first, what's happening today:

"What we're trying to do is build a social platform. That's very different from building a social application."

Zuckerberg says the difference is that applications are for one use case. With a platform you can create a set of connections, and bring those between apps.

10:47 a.m.: Zuckerberg: It's challenging to build a platform and a system that helps you use your connections across all these different things. The key is giving people good controls that are simple, but powerful across multiple contexts.

The key to that is building a system where people have control of their information across all these different contexts.

Zuckerberg says we're going to learn about three different things today.

10:48 a.m.: 1. Make it so people can take their information over to another service and do it in a safe way. "People should be able to take it wherever they want, set who can see it."

Over a million sites are using Facebook Connect, Zuckerberg says.

10:49 a.m.: Zuckerberg says there is a new product, called Download Your Information.

10:50 a.m.: It's built off Facebook's Graph API. Pulls down your photos, videos, posts, and puts it in a Zip file.

10:51 a.m.: Another new product: An apps dashboard where you can see all the applications that have permissions, and change/revoke those permissions.

10:52 a.m.: Now up, David Recordon, who's been the product manager for "download your information."

10:53 a.m.: Recordon now explaining how it works. Says all that information gets put together in a Zip file. Your identity gets verified first though.

10:54 a.m.: Includes your profile information, events, wall posts. The feature is rolling out later today, Recordon says.

10:57 a.m.: Now up, Carl Sjogreen, a product manager at Facebook who is explaining this new dashboard and how it shows you an access log of what apps have looked at parts of your profile, and when that happened. "We think for individuals this is a pretty big win," he said.

10:59 a.m.: Now Zuckerberg is back to talk about the third new item, which is that staying connected with different social circles can be difficult--especially online. Talking about how they've been from different parts of your life: work, school, friends.

11:01 a.m.: Zuckerberg: Sometimes you don't want to post something to all of your friends. Do I want to bug my friends with some status update about a great jog to the people who don't care about my morning jog.

So far the answer has been map out who your friends are, but people haven't been doing it with all their friends.

Zuckerberg: If we can do this, we can unlock a huge amount of sharing that people haven't done because there aren't privacy settings to do this on such a huge scale.

11:02 a.m.: The naive solution, Zuckerberg says, is to do it with friend lists, or to map out who those people are with every wall post or event. You can do that work each time, but it's pretty brutal to do this every time, but not have sets of people defined for you.

11:03 a.m.: Zuckerberg says that another answer is just friend lists. People want to cut them into subgroups--that sounds good in theory, but almost no one wants to make lists. The most we've gotten is around 5 percent of people make a list, and even fewer of those people make more than one list.

11:06 a.m.: The next solution, Zuckerberg says, is to build an algorithmic solution. Something that can figure out those groups for you. Says they've already done this with news feeds and friend suggestions.

Within the company they have something called the coefficient. It's an index for each relationship, and can track all the interactions you've had with people, and can then filter who you should talk to based on those connections.

11:07 a.m.: Zuckerberg: But there are limits with algorithms. If they go wrong, they can really go wrong. It's almost worse when it goes right--you never want to get a list of exactly the people you're interacting with. Especially if a friend sees that list over your shoulder. "It's too close."

11:08 a.m.: Zuckerberg: There is no exact, precise definition of what someone is to you as a friend. Even if it were possible to figure that out with a perfect algorithmic solution, it would still not be what you want, because you wouldn't think of those people as friends unless you made those friend requests yourself.

11:11 a.m.: A third solution, Zuckerberg explains, is social solutions. Build a good interface so people can tag each other like what the company did with photos. This is what works.

11:13 a.m.: Zuckerberg: 95 percent of users have a photo of themselves that they let friends tag. And that's useful because the friends did the heavy lifting. So what we're trying to do to make that work with Groups.

Just like photos, groups have the property that not everyone has to set it up themselves. People will create a group and add people to it without the others having to do that work. So we think this is going to work well with all our users working together.

11:13 a.m.: Zuckerberg: Shared space, group chat, and e-mail lists--all in one product.

11:14 a.m.: Product manager Justin Shaffer, formerly of Hot Potato, is up now. He is the PM for this new Groups product.

11:15 a.m.: Shaffer: Each group can have any number of members. Works just like a user mailing list. Same thing with chat, you can just hop on that chat room and only those users will see it.

11:18 a.m.: Shared spaces show up in your left-hand navigation. Group chat lives alongside normal user chat. Includes a wiki too.

m.facebook.com getting Groups today.

Facebook Groups has its own API so third-party developers can create Group applications that live outside of Facebook.

11:21 a.m.: Facebook's VP of product, Chris Cox, is now up. Talking about how when the Web first started out, most designers came from the print world, which made some of the early Web pages have some of the same limitations as books. Cox says some of the same problems have cropped up with managing people's relationships online.

11:23 a.m.: Now talking about localizing Facebook, and how every time the site changes, those localized versions of Facebook get updated immediately because it's people doing the heavy lifting instead of machine translation.

11:24 a.m.: Cox says these new groups are like a space in the real world. Like a dinner table, locker room, or a bar. And like those places, each one has a particular group of people and level of discourse.

11:26 a.m.: Above: the team that made these new features.

Now getting into questions and answers.

11:27 a.m.: Q: Are groups replacing friends lists then?
A: Zuckerberg: No, there are still friends lists. We just felt like there was some work involved for those 5 percent of people who used it. But going forward, Groups is going to be the biggest way this is going to be used.

11:28 a.m.: Q: So to share with those people you're going to need to go to groups?
Zuckerberg: No, you can still share through the usual methods. This is going to be part of the normal Graph API and visit a site and see activity broken down by friends and groups now, too.

11:29 a.m.: Q: What happens when someone who is not authorized gets into a group?
A: Zuckerberg: When someone gets added to a group, everyone in a group sees that action. If someone's been added and nobody wants them there--you can see who added them to the group.

11:31 a.m.: Q: One way people have dealt with the lack of friends lists has been creating multiple FB accounts. Do you have anything set up to let people merge accounts?
A: Zuckerberg: Maybe in the future. This is really just an early step in that direction. This is a great groups product, and a way to add friends in different contexts. Like everything we do, this is just the first iteration.

We are keeping all the old groups around, we're not getting rid of friends lists, old accounts. In the future we'll begin to take more steps to help people share more.

11:32 a.m.: Q: There are companies, big brands--will they be able to make groups too?
A: Zuckerberg: For brands we have pages. This is meant for small groups of friends. Maybe 250 in size is kind of the max we see.

Groups tend to be small--families, classmates, friends.

11:34 a.m.: Q: Can you approve being added to a group? What if you're added to a group you don't want to be in?
Shaffer says: You can leave a group, and then nobody can re-add you unless you explicitly join.

11:37 a.m.: Q: How big can groups get?
A: As groups grow larger, we take away some of the functionality. With more than 250 users we reduce the notifications in the newsfeed and the group chat.

Q: What's going to happen with conversations between profiles?
Shaffer: One of the things we've done is limit the distribution of stories that show up in the feed. If a story is going on that looks like a directed message between two members, I'd see the message being posted. We have the ability to do with profile as well.

Zuckerberg: This is a big shift. There's a huge amount of stuff people want to share with all their friends--and that's what got Facebook to where it is today. Groups is a different approach by comparison.

11:38 a.m.: Q: People don't like to make lists. What if only 5 percent of people on the site create groups?
A: Zuckerberg: The math is simple. With 5-10 percent of people making groups, and the average group is 10-20 people, and people make a few groups. That's enough to get a massive amount of coverage on top of that. And there's some compounding on that too.

I could easily see this getting 80 percent coverage over time.

11:39 a.m.: Facebook's Andrew Bosworth says that people will want to make them just because they're fun.

11:41 a.m.: Q: Will there be information overload? And are these groups being made public?
A: Zuckerberg: We made it easy to turn off the flow of information. You can tweak the group notifications that show up in your news feed.

If you get added to 20-30 groups, but in reality only a couple you actually use, and those will be the ones that filter up to the top.

As for privacy: there are three settings--open, closed, and secret. The default is closed.

11:45 a.m.: Zuckerberg: For secret groups, content in the group and the membership of the group is secret. We think a lot of groups are simply going to be closed because that's how people want to use the product.

Q: On privacy, how many layers of security are needed to get that big information file?
A: Recordon says it first goes through an e-mail verification, then it requires your password, as well as checking to make sure you're using a machine you're typically on. There can also be a captcha on there.

Data you deleted from Facebook does not show up in this information bundle.

Zuckerberg adds: If you want to keep everything safe, you build up walls, but then there's no innovation. It's a balance we struggle with constantly. This is something we debated a lot internally. In practice, a lot of people may want to try to exploit this, and it's a question of how many people are going to want to download their information. It's more of a philosophical decision--people should be able to download their information.

11:45 a.m.: Q: Will you be able to invite a group to an event?
A: Yes.

11:46 a.m.: Shaffer: You can post an event to a group, and it adds everybody. There's also docs and a wiki.

11:47 a.m.: Q: Why add this on as an additional feature instead of making an older feature better?
Zuckerberg: This is an iteration. In a way we are building on top of it. Should we remove those old features? We just made it so we wouldn't need to delete 25 million people's work.

11:52 a.m.: Q: On exports--could another social network be able to access with your permission--your data?
A: Zuckerberg: At a high level we've built two different things. We have Connect, which makes you transfer information to that site. And a million sites are using that. That's our real effort to make that happen.

This product, on the other hand, is for you. Can you download that information and upload it to another site? Sure, but you could also just use Connect.

11:55 a.m.: Q: Is that information in an easy format?
A: Zuckerberg: We asked, should we include the actual videos, or just a link to Facebook? No, it should include the actual video, and it should have no connection to Facebook once you pull it down.

What's not included is your friends' information. We think this is a pretty good solution.

Q: What about landgrabs for group names?
Andrew Bosworth: I expect there to be a lot of groups named "family" and I don't expect that to be a problem. There's no technical limitation.

Zuckerberg: About e-mail namespace--there can be only one family@facebook.groups.com. For that, we're just doing first come, first served with a lot of protections to make sure nobody squats.

11:55 a.m.: So Groups is being rolled out throughout the day.

11:58 a.m.: And that's it, folks. To sum it up, there were three things announced today:

1. A new Groups product that lets you connect with other Facebook users and manage all that information in one space.
2. A way to download everything you've ever posted to Facebook (including photos and videos) in one big Zip file.
3. A dashboard where you can manage your connections with Facebook applications and see what data they're accessing, and when that happened. It will also come with controls to revoke access.

11:59 a.m.: All three are coming to you by the end of today (Pacific time). It's being rolled out to users in small groups over the next few hours.

11:59 a.m.: Thank you for joining us, and sorry we couldn't get to all your great comments and questions.

Facebook is on the verge of becoming the largest display advertiser in the United States, displacing Yahoo.

The social-networking site, which held off on running ads in its early days in order to avoid alienating its users, will grow its net U.S. display revenues by 80.9 percent this year to $2.19 billion, according to a new study by Internet research firm eMarketer. That will give the social-networking giant a 17.7 percent share of the display ad market this year, blowing past Yahoo, which will hold a 13.1 percent share.

"Facebook's supreme popularity--both in terms of numbers of people and amount of time they spend there--creates a plethora of display ad impressions, mainly for its unique form of banners," said David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst. "And that popularity is also boosting what advertisers will pay for its display ads."

Facebook is rapidly distancing itself from its major display ad rivals, according to the study. The second fastest growing ad-seller among the top five is Google, which should grow at a 34.4 percent clip this year, eMarketer says. Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL will all grow at less than 20 percent, all below the overall growth of the market, which the firm estimates will be 24.5 percent.

In 2012, eMarketer believes that Google will make up some of the lost ground. The firm says that Google's display ad revenue will climb 58.3 percent, while Facebook will grow a more modest 31.3 percent. eMarketer, though, cautions that the Facebook estimate for 2012 "is likely on the conservative side" and may be adjusted upward when the firm revises its social network ad revenue estimates in August.

Even with that slower growth, Facebook will extend its overall share of the display ad market in 2012 to 19.4 percent. Yahoo will slide to a 12.5 percent share while Google will account for 12.3 percent of total revenue, up from 9.3 percent this year, according to the study.

Facebook's leadership in display advertising comes just a year after the company took over managing the sale of the graphical ads on its site from Microsoft. The software giant took on the task when it invested $240 million in Facebook in 2007 and became the exclusive third-party advertising platform partner for Facebook.

A New York man's alleged contract and e-mails that supposedly gave him 50 percent ownership in Facebook are forgeries, according to a court filing by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg said in a filing today in U.S. District Court in Buffalo, N.Y., that he declared under oath that he did not sign a contract with Paul Ceglia regarding Facebook or write the alleged e-mails regarding the social-networking giant's creation. (Text of the filing is available below.)

"Zuckerberg and Ceglia never discussed Facebook and they never signed a contract concerning Facebook," the filing said. "The contract is a cut-and-paste job, the e-mails are complete fabrications, and this entire lawsuit is a fraud."

Electronics forensics experts were unable to find alleged e-mails supporting Ceglia's claim in Zuckerberg's Harvard account, finding instead e-mails that "contradict Ceglia's made-up story," the filing said. Zuckerberg requests the original contract, e-mails in native form, and inspection of all computers in Ceglia's possession as well as those in his parents' house.

Zuckerberg acknowledged in today's filing that he signed a contract to write code for a Ceglia project called StreetFax but said the contract was "doctored" to make it appear to be about Facebook development.

"Among other things, the column widths and margins are inconsistent, which indicates that the document has been altered and reproduced," the claim said. "Many words and sentences simply make no sense, and the document is riddled with internal inconsistencies and contradictions strongly indicative of fraud."

Ceglia's legal representatives in the matter said they were eager to make the contract and e-mails available to Zuckerberg and Facebook.

"Mr. Ceglia welcomes the opportunity to expedite discovery in this case and disagrees with the opinions within the filing, which have been made by those who have not examined the actual contract at issue in this case or any of the other relevant evidence," reads a statement from Ceglia's law firm, DLA Piper.

Ceglia, of Wellsville, N.Y., claimed in a lawsuit filed last year that he entered into a contract with Zuckerberg in 2003 to design and develop the Web site that would ultimately become Facebook--a company that now has an estimated value of $50 billion.

Ceglia said he hired Zuckerberg through a Craigslist ad to write code for a project called StreetFax and paid Zuckerberg $1,000 for coding work; he also allegedly invested $1,000 in Zuckerberg's The Face Book project, which gave him a 50 percent interest in the company as well as an additional 1 percent interest for every day after January 1, 2004, that The Face Book was delayed.

In a revised complaint filed in April, Ceglia cited more than a dozen e-mails purportedly between himself and Zuckerberg that detail discussions on design, development, business plans, and eventual contract disputes regarding The Face Book.

Last year, Ceglia produced a canceled check that he said proved he paid Zuckerberg $3,000 for some freelance software development work for a project called "The Face Book." Facebook initially said it believed the contract was a "likely" forgery. It has since become more forceful and said it considers it to be an outright fake.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are actually tools for the U.S. intelligence community.

Speaking to Russian news site RT in an interview published yesterday, Assange was especially critical of the world's top social network. He reportedly said that the information Facebook houses is a potential boon for the U.S. government if it tries to build up a dossier on users.

"Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented," Assange said in the interview, which was videotaped and published on the site. "Here we have the world's most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to U.S. intelligence."

If that's the case, it might surprise some that WikiLeaks has its very own Facebook page. In fact, last year, when WikiLeaks released a controversial batch of confidential documents--putting Assange on the run--Facebook refused to shut down that page. The company said at the time that the page did not "violate our content standards nor have we encountered any material posted on the page that violates our policies."

Facebook's response stood in stark contrast to the treatment of WikiLeaks by many other companies in the U.S. last year. Several firms, including PayPal, blocked the company's accounts.

But Assange didn't just stop at Facebook. He also told RT that in addition to the world's largest social network, Google and Yahoo "have built-in interfaces for U.S. intelligence."

"It's not a matter of serving a subpoena," he told RT. "They have an interface that they have developed for U.S. intelligence to use."

Surprisingly, Assange didn't mention Twitter, another major social network with which his organization has run into trouble.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Justice Department sent a court order to Twitter, requesting the social network deliver information from accounts of activists that allegedly had ties to WikiLeaks. In March, the Justice Department was granted access to those accounts following a judge's ruling in favor of the seizure. Last month, the Justice Department said that complaints over its desire to obtain Twitter information is "absurd," and its actions are quite common in criminal investigations.

However, the Justice Department didn't secure a search warrant for access to the information. Instead, it obtained a 2703(d) order, allowing investigators to secure online records that are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."

For U.S. intelligence, getting information from Facebook is much easier, Assange said in the interview. He reportedly told RT that the U.S. intelligence community's use of "legal and political pressure" on Facebook is enough for it get what it wants.

"Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them," Assange said, according to the RT interview.

For its part, Facebook disagrees with Assange's sentiment. In a written statement to CNET, a Facebook spokesman said that it does only what's legal--and nothing more.

"We don't respond to pressure, we respond to compulsory legal process," the spokesman told CNET. "There has never been a time we have been pressured to turn over data [and] we fight every time we believe the legal process is insufficient. The legal standards for compelling a company to turn over data are determined by the laws of the country, and we respect that standard."

Facebook has fixed a bug in the site's password reset feature that could have been exploited to expo

se passwords of a small number of users who also use Hotmail.

"We can access password of any facebook user who uses hotmail email address as their facebook account," Turkish security researcher Serkan Gencel, wrote in an e-mail to CNET this weekend. "If you have any hotmail account and if it is used as facebook account, we can change and send you your new password:)."

A Facebook spokesman released a statement today confirming the bug and saying it had been fixed.

"We were notified of this vulnerability by a Turkish security researcher via our white hat queue, and we worked to quickly resolve the problem," the statement said.

"When properly notified, we will quickly investigate all legitimate reports of security vulnerabilities and fix potential problems, and have adopted a responsible disclosure policy to encourage notifications," the statement said. "We encourage security researchers who identify security problems to embrace the practice of notifying Web site security teams of problems and giving them time to fix the problems before making any information public."

The company also thanked the researchers for "bringing this to our attention, and demonstrating the value of responsible disclosure."

The problem was covered on this Turkish news Web site.

Fans of the "Twilight" movies are falling prey to a scam that can end up hijacking their accounts and sending the scam on to unsuspecting friends.

Facebook updates are circulating that look like promotions of a game related to the upcoming teen vampire movie, "Twilight Breaking Dawn," according to this Sophos blog post.

The link leads to what looks like a Facebook page with a "play now" button that when clicked surreptitiously "likes" the link and spreads it on a visitor's Facebook account.

It doesn't stop there. A dialog box pops up asking for permission for a third-party application to access the victim's Facebook account to post messages and photos, Sophos said. And then the victim is asked to fill out a survey to "verify" their account. The scammer makes money off every survey completed. (This Sophos video shows how to clean up a computer after being scammed.)

It's unclear how widespread the scam is as a Facebook spokesman said the company does not comment on the volume of attacks or specific cases. However, he did tell CNET in an e-mail that: "We are currently tracking this scam and are working to shut down the spammy vectors + remediate any users who have been affected."

Facebook also offers these tips on its Security page:

The Department of Homeland Security plans to replace its color-coded, five-level system of terrorism alerts with a new two-tiered approach later this month and will issue some public alerts via Facebook and Twitter, according to a report.

The Associated Press reported today that it had obtained a confidential, departmental document outlining the plan, which, though not yet finalized, is set to go into effect by April 27.

According to the AP, the new plan will ditch the notoriously perplexing, green-to-red, low-to-severe-risk system put in place in 2002 with a two-level system that labels threats as either "elevated" or "imminent."

The department is hoping to make the system more usable and accessible. And it seems to be responding, in part, to recommendations such as those made in a report issued in 2009 by the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

At that time, hacker Jeff Moss, organizer of the Defcon hacking conference and a then-new appointee to the advisory council, told CNET's Elinor Mills that the council had suggested, among other things, that Homeland Security:

Moss said at the time:

In criticizing the current style of alert, Moss asked, "How does it give [civilians] any actionable information? How should we change our behavior based on it?"

The AP report suggests that the department is trying to address such questions. The news service said that in addition to cutting the number of levels and tapping social media for alerts "when appropriate," the department plans to make its warnings more specific and to issue them to more-specific audiences. If, for example, a plot was discovered to hide bombs inside backpacks at airports, instead of issuing a blanket alert, DHS would limit the warning to airports and ask travelers to be extra vigilant in reporting unattended baggage.

The AP said the new "elevated" threat level "would warn of a credible threat against the U.S. It probably would not specify timing or targets, but it could reveal terrorist trends that intelligence officials believe should be shared in order to prevent an attack." And it said the "imminent" level would be reserved for a "credible, specific, and impending terrorist threat or an ongoing attack against the U.S."

Related links
• Q&A: Defcon's Jeff Moss on cybersecurity, government's role
• Pentagon, State Department OK social-network use

Both levels of alert would be called off if no terrorist activity ensued: the elevated level would expire after no more than 30 days, the imminent level after no more than 7. Both, however, could be extended if necessary.

Any public warnings issued using Facebook, Twitter, or other such outlets would first be communicated to federal, state, and local officials. And some might not be issued to the public at all, if doing so would undermine efforts to head off any attacks, the AP reported.

Again, though, the plan could be modified before its implementation. Homeland Security spokeswoman Amy Kudwa told the AP, "The plan is not yet final, as we will continue to meet...with our partners to finalize a plan that meets everyone's needs."

In order to meet the extreme demands put on its servers, Facebook has designed its own servers and data-center setup. Now, with a project called the Open Compute Project, it's sharing those plans with partners and competitors alike in the hopes that it will help push the evolution of data-center design. Here are a few photos from today's event, held in Palo Alto, Calif. For more details on the project