Facebook Goes To 64 Bit User IDs 144
NewsCloud writes "Facebook has announced to developers that they are moving to a 64 bit user ID in November. At 32 bits, the current ID allows nearly 4.3 billion user accounts. Yet, despite having only 47 million users today, Facebook's move to 64 bits will allow it to have more than 18 quintillion (18,446,744,074,000,000,000) user accounts. Of course, there are currently only about 6.5 billion people in the world. Is Facebook setting their sights beyond Earth or just trying to avoid what happened when Slashdot ran out of space for comment IDs last year. Perhaps they are planning to implement personas."
Facebook? (Score:1, Funny)
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LOL. Our guys send out typo riddled notices all the time. They need more console love, an AIX terminal is very unforgiving of typos...oh crap I just brought a ton of sites down, I meant status, not stop!
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Reminds me of a Facebook group (Score:5, Funny)
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Obviously that group number wasn't computed using Excel.
No worries (Score:2, Funny)
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Network ID (Score:3, Informative)
For my user ID the network ID takes up the first 6 digits
Although I have heard that they stopped this practice and are just assigning IDs
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And why we are on the topic of ID's, why are Microsoft product ID's so damned long? They use letters, which gives them 35-base number set (including the digits, exclu
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They don't just contain a (known to the setup program) number but lots of data (which Product, what type of License, the actual ID and so on). In the early years of this millenium, several PDF documents on how to calculate your own XP CD key circulated everywhere on the interwebs, find yourself one of these for more detail.
Nope, they use 0-9 and some letters, excluding O (and a few others, haven't got e
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Plus it makes them look more important.
link to slashdot's comment id problem (Score:4, Informative)
You can get to the referenced article at:
http://meta.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/09/1534204 [slashdot.org]
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Facebook loners rejoice! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Facebook loners rejoice! (Score:5, Funny)
Population growth (Score:4, Funny)
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They have invented instant messaging.
CC.
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thank god (Score:5, Funny)
staphylococcus aureus #19392133943904 is in a relationship with staphylococcus caprae #93939394839483934
Re:thank god (Score:5, Funny)
Re:thank god (Score:5, Funny)
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News? (Score:5, Insightful)
So basically facebook changed there maximum users from a huge number to an even bigger number.
Are we going to post a news story everytime google adds to their storage system?
or microsoft adds another bloated line of code?
or everytime the telco's build a tower?
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Seriously, user ids?
Hi, 1985 is on the phone, they want their copy of C-Net BBS back.
It's funny. Laugh. (Score:5, Informative)
The difference being that the current (huge) number was not quite sufficient to register all human beings on the planet, so we have to wonder why they did this. 32-bit integers are kind of the default, so most people wouldn't worry about it. So why are they doing this?
If you look, this article is filed under "It's funny. Laugh." And it is, really. Either Facebook is doing this for no good reason, or someone actually has some justification for going to the time and expense to change their database in this way. And so... Are they really planning on registering more human beings that exist?
I realize it's not funny to you now, as you've had to have the joke explained to you...
If they suddenly went from 2 gigs of email to 5 exabytes, then yes.
Also, keep in mind that Slashdot did cover when Gmail was first released with that 2 gigs, which seemed impossibly huge, and was at least one or two orders of magnitude larger than their closest competitor.
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It's for their new sockpuppet policy. Either that, or they're just getting ready for our new robotic overlords.
If they suddenly went from 2 gigs of email to 5 exabytes, then yes.
Good point.
Can I borrow an exabyte for my MP3's? On second thought, forget MP3's, raw audio is fine.
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One they obviously aren't doing it to register people....userid's will be going to be used in promotions groups and other random social networking crap.
All it really translates into Facebook site is big and wants/plans to be bigger. Which is why I put the news?
Geeks get lost in the details but don't look at this big picture and that is why most geeks work for suits.
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Consider that with 2560 bits, you can store 64 40-bit integers, or 40 64-bit integers. You can recover all of the 40 bit numbers knowing their bit offset, even if you can address it directly. Many of those 40-bit i
It's not User IDs. (Score:3, Informative)
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Publicity, mainly.
For the price of under a gigabyte of disk, they have made themselves the talk of Slashdot and every other geek aggregation site, and mainstream tech reporters will then pick up on the trend, and report it in the newspapers and cable news networks. It's cheap advertising -- but it's a strategy that can only be used once, ever.
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~the people who come up with repetitive slashdot stories
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I seem to remember an article poking fun at the fact google's email space isn't "infinite" like some other services so if they doubled or tripled their limit I guess it would be on the front page.
Windows Vista articles?
articles about the irrational fear of wifi and the "dangers" of cell phone towers, I believe we've seen that too. so yes, t
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Are we going to post a news story everytime google adds to their storage system?
Answer: Why yes, I believe they will.
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Have so far.
or microsoft adds another bloated line of code?
God yes. Slashdot has flamebait stories about Microsoft when they don't do anything at all!
or everytime the telco's build a tower?
No, instead we'll get that one about how the US has crappy broadband another 4-6 times this week.
Re:News? (Score:5, Funny)
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Two-Faced (Score:5, Funny)
i for one. (Score:2, Funny)
Not just user IDs (Score:5, Interesting)
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Up until this point, all of our user IDs have been small enough that 32 bits is sufficient to store them all. In the not-so-distant future, we will begin using 64 bit object IDs in some places. So, the numbers will become to big to handle in some situations
Seems pretty clear:
1. User IDs are currently 32 bits.
2. They are changing some object IDs to 64 bits.
It does not say they are changing user IDs to 64 bits. It's implied but not stated. It's not actually clear that "user ID" means the ID of an account - it might just mean a user-visible ID (such as comments have on Slashdot).
Re:Not just user IDs (Score:4, Insightful)
No Reuse... (Score:2)
32 bit constraint kind of forces a big leap (Score:5, Informative)
If you think you might ever have more than 2^32 of something, you kind of have to go to 2^64. Yes. It's an obscene ammount of possibilities; but it's the next biggest size. You really don't have much of a choice here. You could implement 5-byte numbers, but it'd be a PiTA. No CPUs have native 5-byte ints. The progression has always been a doubling of int size.
If that doesn't make sense, you shouldn't be on Slashdot. Maybe you should be someplace else... like Facebook maybe?
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Ah, no, it isn't. Just as an example, right off the top of my head, they could go from 32 bits to 34 bits, giving them an extra 12,884,901,888 ids. Or 2 for every person on the planet.
Or they could round it off at a nice 40, for a healthy 1,099,511,627,776 -- roughly a trillion users.
There is absolutely no rule that says "need bigger than 32 bit -- must choose 64 bit".
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Yeah, I tend to be non-precise with language sometimes. "Always" is one of those things that people love to nail me for, because all you need is one counter-example and you get egg on your face. I've gone back and forth with people on this kind of stuff before: if I took the time to phrase everything that carefully, my posts wouldn't be ready until after the article expires. If I qualified every word and turn of phrase with possible exceptions, my posts would read like House Resolutions. Nobody, not ev
Spammers (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Spammers (Score:4, Funny)
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Overflow (Score:2)
Number of People (Score:5, Insightful)
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I can see a few reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
* 64-bit user IDs are easier to partition. They could be using the top N bits as a database ID.
* They may want to allocate the IDs randomly instead of sequentially. 64-bit IDs would involve fewer collisions.
* We don't know what their account churn rate is; if people sign up, forget, and create new accounts again frequently, they could have many more than 47 million dormant accounts sitting around.
A 32-bit ID really does get cramped when you have a large user base.
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Kudos to parent (Score:2)
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Reminds me of a company I worked for that did that, and where they were surprised when I showed them how to "hack" the system by sequentially trying every possible user id...
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If only if there was some sort of, I don't know, scheme for identifiers that has approximately 2^122 possible values, fits in 128 bits, has a standard notation and is supported by major databases as an 'auto increment' field.. With that many values, you could almost assume that using some sort of randomized value is bound to be unique - perhaps even universally unique. You could call it Globally Unique IDentifier (G
I guess they believed the hype (Score:4, Funny)
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I don't know why this was rated funny, when its true.
I don't know about you, but running through 24gb of tables in RAM as opposed to paged data is, in my book, an order of magnitude faster. 64 bit systems are massively faster than 32 bit systems.
I'm not talking about windows boxes, but database servers (which I'm sure Facebook have) DO see a major impact.
I know you thought you were being clever, and perhaps you were, to other not so bright and infor
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security? (Score:2)
but... (Score:2, Funny)
Ha ha, but seriously. (Score:5, Informative)
Don't Stuff ID's with Attributes (Score:2)
Duplicate Users (Score:2)
Not actually what they said (Score:2, Informative)
People make... (Score:2)
Finally (Score:2, Funny)
This is the dumbest article... (Score:3, Funny)
So they changed the column type of userId from INT32 to INT64. Who gives a fuck? It would be much less expensive for Slashdot to simply post SQL change logs than to have editors on the clock.
We need the ability to mod stories, so that the editors can more clearly see when they aren't doing their job.
Mark Zuckerberg is way past 32bit in his valuation (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
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Population growth (Score:2)
There is difference between user accounts and active user accounts. Number of active user accounts can not be larger than actual population of the world, if we consider maximum of one account per use
My guess: Security, segementation, multiple log in (Score:3, Interesting)
-It can make things easier to have your user groups organized according to geographic location, company issuing th id (e.g. local branch), etc.
-Multiple log ins. Who knows. maybe it is easier to associate internally several uids with each uid (could make things more static).
So let's say:
10 bit for segmentation
20 for checksumming
4 for multiple logins
leaves only 29 bit as payload
Or somebody was just dumb and wanted to make sure he is not fired until all applicaitons are switched
Re:My guess: Security, segementation, multiple log (Score:2)
Nah. Any web app that lets you see something you shouldn't see by guessing the ID is broken, period (not to say there aren't a lot of broken web apps). I gotta think Facebook's smarter than that. What if you already knew the ID (because someone used to be your friend) and they delist you? You have to check permissions at the server side.
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No doubt about that! However, if somebody tries to attack in that way it is easier to fend of, because you can allow for a checksum. Instead of making a DB query for each hit, you make a DB query only if the ID lies in the codespace. So certain DOS attacks are more difficult.
> (not to say there aren't a lot of broken web apps).
Hell yeah!
> I gotta think Facebook's smarter than that.
Maybe they are smart en
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D'oh! Excellent point. Can you tell I'm used to having front-line servers do rate limiting and authentication, and not used to talking straight HTTP to the masses?
IP goes to 128 bit addresses! (Score:2)
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Magic (Score:2)
UUIDs (Score:2)
Wtf? (Score:2)
How much did you get, to start spamming your own userbase with worthless news about Facebook?
What will be next - "Facebook upgrades hardware"?
like credit card security? (Score:2)
Reasonable Limits Aren't (Score:2)
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