Virtual life has some very interesting benefits like if you are talking to someone and you wish to discontinue then just close the window. And we all know the magic of “delete”. This is something I always wanted to have in real life to delete some decisions, some days of life, some words spoken which may have hurt others….but our words always stay in the memories of other people.

Now I know that it is not very easy to delete things from the internet too. In fact, it is said that there is no such thing as “delete” on internet!

User photographs can still be found on many social networking sites even after people have deleted them, Cambridge University researchers have said.

They put photos on 16 popular websites – noting the web addresses(URL) where the images were stored – and deleted them. The team said it was able to find them on seven sites – including

Facebook – using the direct addresses, even after the photos appeared to have gone. Facebook says deleted photos are removed from its servers “immediately”.

To perform their experiment, the researchers uploaded photos to each of the sites, then deleted them, but kept a note of direct URLs to the photos from the sites’ content delivery networks. When they checked 30 days later, these links continued to work for seven of the sites even though a typical user might think the photos had been removed.

Why do “deleted” photos stick around so long? The problem relates to the way data is stored on large websites: While your personal computer only keeps one copy of a file, large-scale services like Facebook rely on what are called content delivery networks to manage data and distribution. It’s a complex system wherein data is copied to multiple intermediate devices, usually to speed up access to files when millions of people are trying to access the service simultaneously. (Yahoo! Tech is served by dozens of servers, for example.) But because changes aren’t reflected across the CDN immediately, ghost copies of files tend to linger for days or weeks.
n the case of Facebook, the company says data may hang around until the URL in question is reused, which is usually “after a short period of time.” Though obviously that time can vary considerably.
Of course, once a photo escapes from the walled garden of a social network like Facebook, the chances of deleting it permanently fall even further. facebook defends

Google’s caching system is remarkably efficient at archiving copies of web content, long after it’s removed from the web. Anyone who’s ever used Google Image Search can likely tell you a story about clicking on a thumbnail image, only to find that the image has been deleted from the website in question — yet the thumbnail remains on Google for months. And then there are services like the Wayback Machine, which copy entire websites for posterity, archiving data and pictures forever.

Courtesy -Yahoo tech news

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Computers, Miscellaneous, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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A research has confirmed what many parents and teachers already feared: social networking site Facebook is damaging students’ academic performance. 

As per a new research into the academic impact of Facebook, users of the site are likely to perform poorly in exams. The researchers discovered that the majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade compared with those who shun the site.

In order to reach their conclusion, researchers discovered how students who spend their time accumulating friends, chatting and “poking” others on the site may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work. “Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying,” The Times quoted Aryn Karpinski, a researcher in the education department at Ohio State University, as saying. “Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon,” the expert added.

In the study, Karpinski and a colleague questioned 219 US undergraduates and graduates about their study practices and general internet use, as well as their specific use of Facebook. They found that 65 per cent of Facebook users accessed their account daily, usually checking it several times to see if they had received new messages. The amount of time spent on Facebook at each log-in varied from just a few minutes to more than an hour.

The Ohio report shows that 68 per cent of students who used Facebook had a “significantly” lower grade point average than those who did not use the site. “It is the equivalent of the difference between getting an A and a B,” said Karpinski, who will present her findings this week to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

Technorati Tags: facebook, grades at school, social networking site