Sounds to me like they are doing traffic shaping.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_shaping/

(Mods, if you're too young to remember this, then DON'T MOD)

Allright, you convinced me!!

To add to this, a system is only as secure as its weakest point. In this case, it happened to be the admin password. So even if the user (say Barack Obama) had a very strong (cryptic) password, his account could still be accessed by password resets by an admin.

He decided not to use other hacked accounts personally. Instead he posted a message to Digital Gangster offering access to any Twitter account by request.

That's where the 18-year old kid is at fault. He showed a lack of hacker ethics. Good hackers may discover an exploit, but they don't do harm.

I think its more serious than "lack of hacker ethics". A cracker with an admin access can potentially delete and wipe out entire twitter accounts of not only the high profile celebrities, but also any other accounts they can find, probably including other (twitter) admins.

I think they quarantine it (by default) instead of completely deleting it. Unless they have changed this recently.

Boot into dos and try "rmdir /windows" :)

Its completely arbitrary as to what the mod of the day thinks is 'notable' or not.

just like slashdot :)

You should talk with your study abroad program counselor. They will have a list of all international universities they do an exchange program with. If you go through them, you wont even have to pay for either tutions or lodging (staying). They can even provide you with list of students who went to other countries and you can talk to them for more details (culture, studies, etc).

all it needed was a valve!!

And they also use about 200 memcached servers to speed things up.

Source: http://frro.net/blog/2008/04/26/just-how-big-is-facebooks-infrastructure/

Here is a presentation which discusses how Facebook handles billions of photos. That should give an idea about how they handle massive load in other areas: http://www.flowgram.com/f/p.html#2qi3k8eicrfgkv

From hardware perspective, Facebook uses 10,000 web servers and 1800 database servers to handle the massive traffic.