When we first conceived of our aerial fiber deployment solution, Bombyx (the Latin name for a silk moth), we imagined a robot weaving strands of fiber-optic cables over powerlines, helping human workers quickly connect communities even in very rural or remote locations. Now, after years of successful research, Bombyx is taking the next steps in its development. Meta will license the technology to Japanese robotics company, Hibot. Hibot will leverage their decades of robotic development experience to make this technology ready for deployment and will be developing it further with their partners ..read more

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  We’re rolling out MySQL Raft with the aim to eventually replace our current MySQL semisynchronous databases.  The biggest win of MySQL Raft was simplification of the operation and making MySQL servers take care of promotions and membership. This gave the provable safety of Raft and reduced significant operational pain. Making MySQL server a true distributed system also has opened up possibilities in downstream systems to leverage it. Some of these ideas are starting to take shape. At Meta, we run one of the largest deployments of MySQL in the world. The deployment powers the soci ..read more

We’re sharing our latest threat research and technical analysis into persistent malware campaigns targeting businesses across the internet, including threat indicators to help raise our industry’s collective defenses across the internet. These malware families – including Ducktail, NodeStealer and newer malware posing as ChatGPT and other similar tools– targeted people through malicious browser extensions, ads, and various social media platforms with an aim to run unauthorized ads from compromised business accounts across the internet. We’ve detected and disrupted these malware operations, in ..read more

What the research is:  Millisampler is one of Meta’s latest characterization tools and allows us to observe, characterize, and debug network performance at high-granularity timescales efficiently. This lightweight network traffic characterization tool for continual monitoring operates at fine, configurable timescales. It collects time series of ingress and egress traffic volumes, number of active flows, incoming ECN marks, and ingress and egress retransmissions. Additionally, Millisampler is also able to identify in-region traffic and cross-region traffic (longer RTT). Millisampler runs o ..read more

WhatsApp has launched a new cryptographic security feature to automatically verify a secured connection based on key transparency.  The feature requires no additional actions or steps from users and helps ensure that a conversation is secure.  Key transparency solutions help strengthen the guarantee that end-to-end encryption provides to private, personal messaging applications in a transparent manner available to all.  We have published an open-source library called Auditable Key Directory (AKD). This enables anyone to verify audit proofs of the directory’s correctness. This u ..read more

WhatsApp has launched a new security feature that further helps prevent attackers from using vectors like on-device malware. This security feature, called Device Verification, requires no action or additional steps from users and helps protect your account. This feature is part of our broader work to increase security for our users from the growing threat of malware. WhatsApp’s top priority is ensuring that users can communicate privately, simply, and securely. One of the strongest tools at our disposal is end-to-end encryption – meaning that nobody, not even WhatsApp, can read personal mess ..read more

We’re sharing how Meta delivers high-quality audio at scale with the xHE-AAC audio codec. xHE-AAC has already been deployed on Facebook and Instagram to provide enhanced audio for features like Reels and Stories.  At Meta, we serve every media use case imaginable for billions of people across the world — from short-form, user-generated content, such as Reels, to premium video on demand (VOD) and live broadcasts. Given this, we need a next-generation audio codec that supports a range of operating points with excellent compression efficiency and modern, system-level audio features.  ..read more

Buck2, our new open source, large-scale build system, is now available on GitHub. Buck2 is an extensible and performant build system written in Rust and designed to make your build experience faster and more efficient.  In our internal tests at Meta, we observed that Buck2 completed builds 2x as fast as Buck1. Buck2, Meta’s open source large-scale build system, is now publicly available via the Buck2 website and the Buck2 GitHub repository. While it shares some commonalities with other build systems (like Buck1 and Bazel), Buck2 is a from-scratch rewrite. Buck2 features a complete separ ..read more