The European Commission has claimed the credit for getting Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft to agree on a code of conduct which will address "illegal online hate speech", despite the companies already following practices demanded by EU bureaucrats.…
As predicted by The Register, Intel has created an x86-powered reference platform for home gateways that makes the box you use for broadband services an Atom-powered target for virtual machines delivered by carriers.…
Microsoft is offering unintentional discounts to Azure users.…
The Indian state of Goa wants to attract Google to the region for its Project Loon balloon broadband trials.…
nbnTMchair Ziggy Switkowski has penned an article for Fairfax saying the “NBN leakers” aren't whistleblowers, but partisan ideologues.…
FIRST LOOK VIDEO Moving data into and out of clouds is expensive and slow. Which is why Amazon Web Services (AWS) started rolling a Snowball, a box packing up to 50 terabytes of data.…
Analysis When America's comms watchdog the FCC passed its net neutrality rules despite an onslaught of criticism from telcos, the world rejoiced.…
The US state of Oregon says it will charge Comcast tens of millions of dollars in taxes after revoking a tax break the cable giant had claimed on its broadband service.…
Verizon has reached a deal that will end the six-week strike by many of its network technicians.…
The sysadmin-activist at the center of a bizarre legal battle over a smart meter network in Seattle, Washington, says he never expected a simple records request to turn into a lawsuit.…
Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Enhanced Monitoring, which gives you near-real time access to a set of 56 system metrics and per process metrics for your instance.
Telecoms provider Kcom stemmed its declining revenue for the first time in eight years, reporting growth of 0.4 per cent to £349.2m for the full year 2015/16.…
Something for the Weekend, Sir? It’s sunny outside, which can mean only one thing: I am about to go on holiday to a place where it will be pissing down with rain and sleet for the next fortnight.…
Australia's dominant carrier, Telstra, has revealed that a botched fix for a DNS service is the reason for a week-long outage that has taken some of its broadband customers offline.…
Microsoft and Facebook have decided to fund a submarine cable together.…
A new budget proposal would effectively bar the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from enforcing its net neutrality provisions.…
Today we are announcing three new enhancements to Amazon Route 53’s domain name registration service.
You can now export your ElastiCache for Redis snapshots to an Amazon S3 bucket of your choice. Please note that you need to use an authorized Amazon S3 bucket in the same region as your cluster. For more details, please refer to Jeff Barr’s blog and the ElastiCache documentation.
AWS Config is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. AWS Config is a fully managed service that gives you an inventory of your AWS resources, notifies you when the configurations of your resources change, and lets you audit the history of the configurations for those resources to enable security and governance.
Mobile operator Three is pushing ahead with plans to block ads on its network in the UK during a one-day trial next month.…
Fresh from its embarrassing data loss incident in North America, Salesforce has announced it will start to run some of it software in Amazon Web Services.…
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has fined a Florida chap and a Chinese business over cellphone jamming boxes.…
In the fight to end Big Cable's $20bn annual windfall from rented set-top boxes in America, the industry has hit on a novel strategy: use its opponents' own arguments against them.…
A team of German scientists has managed to establish a 6Gbps wireless link over a distance of 37 kilometers using newly developed antennas and receivers.…
You can now get up to 60% higher query throughput (as measured by standard benchmarks TPC-DS, 3TB) in Amazon Redshift as a result of improved memory allocation, which reduces the number of queries spilled to disk. This new improvement is available in version 1.0.1056 and above. Combined with the I/O and commit logic enhancement released in version 1.0.1012, it delivers up to 2 times faster performance for complex queries that spill to disk, and queries like SELECT INTO TEMP TABLE that create temporary tables.
The Australian Labor Party's (ALP's) senator Stephen Conroy has formalised his claim of parliamentary privilege over documents seized in last week's Australian Federal Police raid of his office and the homes of two of his staffers.…
UNION ALL performance improvement: Business analytics often involves time-series data, which is data generated or aggregated daily, weekly, monthly or at other intervals. By storing time-series data in separate tables—one table for each time interval—and using a UNION ALL view over those tables, you can avoid potentially costly table updates. Amazon Redshift now runs UNION ALL queries up to 10 times faster if they involve joins, and up to 2 times faster if they don’t involve any joins. This performance improvement is automatic and requires no action on your part and is available in version 1.0.1057 and above. For more information about UNION ALL views and time-series tables, see Using Time-Series Tables in the Amazon Redshift Database Developer Guide.
On day one of its SIGNAL Developer Conference in San Francisco, cloudy comms firm Twilio has announced a new marketplace for add-ons to its API and a new SIM-card-as-a-service offering to let IoT devices communicate via T‑Mobile.…
You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to create MPEG-DASH streams. MPEG-DASH is a standard for HTTP based adaptive bitrate streaming of video. With Elastic Transcoder support for MPEG-DASH, you can now reach a wide range of DASH-compatible devices (from desktop to mobile and OTT) with fewer output renditions created using the same easy workflows that Elastic Transcoder supports for HLS and Smooth Streaming. This enables you to simplify your video processing workflows and helps improve cost efficiency.
Instance Console Screenshot provides an on-demand screenshot of the instance console, conveying valuable debug information. This capability is particularly useful when diagnosing instances that have become unreachable via RDP (Windows) or SSH (Linux) due to in-progress software updates, VM Import issues, or other blocking system events. Screenshots can be viewed in the AWS console or accessed via the AWS API or CLI, with both Linux and Windows instances supported.
Promo Working in IT and the public sector? The Cloud for UK Public Sector roadshow could be just the ticket for you.…
The revelations by rogue NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden in 2013 caused indignant EU politicians to open a dialogue with the US government to update the data transfer regime to safeguard personal data. The Privacy Shield is the culmination of those discussions.…
This Quick Start deploys a standardized environment that helps organizations with workloads that fall in scope for Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) compliance. The Quick Start includes AWS CloudFormation templates that automate the deployment, relying on the requirements of PCI DSS version 3.1. The Quick Start also includes a security controls reference, which maps security controls to the reference architecture, and a deployment guide, which provides step-by-step instructions for deploying and configuring the environment.
Analysis Telco lobbying group US Telecom has fired another broadside at their erstwhile friendly regulator, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), saying the billions telcos make each month isn't enough.…
You can now use SSL/TLS certificates provisioned from AWS Certificate Manager with your AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments by selecting a certificate from the Elastic Beanstalk console. This helps you easily secure network communications between your Elastic Beanstalk applications and end users.
Australia's dominant carrier, Telstra, is enduring more customer fury after extended outages stretched across its ADSL, NBN, and mobile networks.…
The Australian Federal Police's (AFP's) raid on Australian parliamentarians and their staffers over leaked documents on delays to the National Broadband Network (NBN) leaked-documents raid had more fallout over the weekend, with the AFP criticised for allowing an nbnTM staffer to photograph documents seized in Thursday night's raid, and the communications minister acknowledging he knew about the investigation.…
From next month Three customers are advised to be more selective when sending pics of their food, cats or drunken escapades - as the mobile operator is more than doubling its pricing. Or, you know, you could just use an OTT app.…
An average-looking chap in a suit in hotel lobby takes out his phone and makes a call. “Hi. You ok?" he asks. “ I got a notification that you’re at 60."…
Australian Federal Police (AFP) has confirmed it raided the office of Labor senator Stephen Conroy and the home of a staffer of opposition communications minister Jason Claire over leaked documents pertaining to Australia's NationalB Network (NBN).…
Republican congressmen are increasing their efforts to delay transition of a critical piece of internet infrastructure from the US government to a non-profit organization based in California.…
We are pleased to announce that the AWS Schema Conversion Tool now supports SSL connections. SSL support is for both source and target engines including PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and any MySQL compatible engine including Amazon’s next generation cloud database, Aurora. This release builds upon the existing conversion rules adding support for conversion of Oracle Synonyms to PostgreSQL schema search paths.
Google is “very serious” about enterprise cloud – according to Google’s head of enterprise cloud.…
Promo Want to know more about Extreme Networks? You have a great opportunity on May 26 to meet key executives, researchers and customers in London, at the software-driven networking solutions vendor’s latest Extreme Forum.…
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has searched the offices of Senator Stephen Conroy, the former Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.…
UK digital minister Ed Vaizey has denied government plans for a universal service obligation of 10Mps are a "damp squib" but admitted the government will keep the target "under review".…
Sysadmin Blog Canadian internet providers are frequently bemoaned as terrible. Americans get lots of media play about getting the sharp end of the stick from their providers, but many Canadians look longingly at the internet packages south of the border and wonder: what's the holdup in Canada?…
Google I/O 2016 Google's I/O developer conference isn't just about code – the Chocolate Factory has many schemes and attendees have been drawn to a large balloon hovering in a corner of the conference venue.…
Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) can now automatically scale container-based applications by dynamically growing and shrinking the number of tasks run by an Amazon ECS service.
Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) can now automatically scale container-based applications by dynamically growing and shrinking the number of tasks run by an Amazon ECS service.
Starting today, you can share your Amazon Aurora snapshots with another AWS account, or make your snapshots publicly available. You can privately share your database snapshots with up to 20 AWS accounts by selecting "Share Snapshots" on the RDS console and choosing the "Private" option. You can also make your snapshot available to all AWS users by selecting the "Public" option. Access to the publically or privately shared snapshots can be revoked by you at any time. Recipient of a shared snapshot can copy it to their account, or restore it directly to an Aurora cluster.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale Elasticsearch on AWS. You can now add up to 20 data nodes and 5 dedicated master nodes to your Amazon Elasticsearch domains. The previous limit was a total instance count of 10 including both data nodes and dedicated master nodes. This effectively increases the maximum amount of data you can store in an Amazon Elasticsearch domain from 12 TB to 24 TB with i2.2xl instances and from 4 TB to 8 TB for EBS-backed domains. For more information, see Creating and Configuring Amazon ES Domains and Amazon Elasticsearch Service Limits in the Amazon Elasticsearch Service Developer Guide.
Amazon Kinesis Firehose, the easiest way to load streaming data into AWS, now supports configurable retry duration for ingesting data into Amazon Redshift. You can now configure your Firehose delivery streams to retry the Redshift COPY for any time period up to a maximum of 7200 seconds. If the Redshift COPY command fails for any reason, Amazon Kinesis Firehose re-tries the command for the duration of the retry period you specify.
Google’s free distribution of Android damaged Oracle’s business – according to Oracle.…
We are excited to announce Amazon EC2 X1 instances. X1 instances extend the elasticity, simplicity, and cost savings of the AWS cloud to enterprise-grade applications with large dataset requirements. X1 instances are ideal for running in-memory databases like SAP HANA, big data processing engines like Apache Spark or Presto, and high performance computing (HPC) applications. X1 instances are certified by SAP to run production environments of the next-generation Business Suite S/4HANA, Business Suite on HANA (SoH), Business Warehouse on HANA (BW), and Data Mart Solutions on HANA on the AWS cloud.
Embattled UK web hosting company 123-Reg has wobbled again.…
Interview A year on from when Gartner asserted that OpenStack was a “science project”, The Register talked to the National Computing Infrastructure's Andrew Howard to see where one of Australia's biggest OpenStack deployments is at.…
Starting today, you can use tags to manage and track your Amazon WorkSpaces. Tags let you categorize your Amazon WorkSpaces so you can easily identify their purpose and track costs accordingly. For example, you could use tags to identify all the Amazon WorkSpaces for a particular department, project, application, vendor, or use case. Once you have tagged your Amazon WorkSpaces, you can use the AWS Tag Editor console (starting in June 2016) to filter and search by specific tags, and obtain usage and cost details for particular tags by signing up to get your AWS account bill with tag key values included.
Salesforce.com has revealed that a bug in the firmware of its storage arrays was behind last week's data loss incident.…
The Iraqi government is repeatedly shutting down the country's entire internet to prevent students from cheating on their exams.…
Microsoft and SAP are renewing their decades-old business intelligence and data partnership for cloud.…
Just a few days after a counter-terrorism incident which involved precisely zero terrorists, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) has started to deploy 3,000 body-worn video (BWV) cameras to its coppers.…
Nokia Networks has applied the paddles to the chest of cable broadband, pumped in the volts, and sent it sprinting at 10 Gbps.…
Desktop-as-a-service in 2016 is about as mature as infrastructure-as-a-service was in 2008, so waiting until it matures is more sensible than diving in now.…
You can now provision SSL/TLS certificates from AWS Certificate Manager in nine additional Regions. In addition to US East (N.Virginia), AWS Certificate Manager is now available in US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and South America (Sao Paulo).
More than a month after promising to smooth over migration issues, ISP Frontier Communications is still being criticized for spotty service to former Verizon customers.…
The Chinese government could fragment the internet if it pursues new registration rules for online addresses, the US government has warned.…
Operator of the dot-com registry and two root servers, Verisign, has settled one of its two lawsuits against upstart .XYZ.…
Salesforce is working to cut its dependency on Oracle with a project called Sayonara.…
Customers of Lloyds have been unable to access online banking since 10am this morning,…
Communications providers Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone have called on Ofcom to dramatically reform BT's Openreach in a "10 point plan" published today.…
Google's decided the Chromium OS is its preferred operating system for running containers in its own cloud. And why wouldn't it – the company says it uses it for its own services.…
Salesforce.com's nasty outage and subsequent data loss haven't made a major impact on customers. CEO Marc Benioff has told The Register.…
AWS Config made available several improvements to customers of Config Rules. Customers now receive notifications about changes to tags on resources within minutes, enabling improved accuracy of the required-tags Config Rule. Customers also get a new managed rule that checks if Multi-factor authentication is enabled for IAM users with root credentials, and a new Java sample for this rule is now available in the Config Rules GitHub repository. Additionally, customers can now view their custom annotations for complaint or noncompliant changes on the Config Rules console, and receive finer grained status about rule invocation and evaluation timestamps on the Config Rules detail page.
We are excited to announce a new edge location in Seoul, Korea for Amazon CloudFront. This is the third edge location in Seoul, Korea and brings the total number of worldwide edge locations to 55. The new edge location helps improve performance and availability for end users of your application and supports Amazon CloudFront features at no additional cost.
Ofcom plans to open up an extra sub-band to Blighty's Wi-Fi users, allowing the transmission of large amounts of data as well faster download speeds.…
EU competition commish Margaret Vestager reckons the decision to smack down the proposed £10.5bn merger between O2 and Three this week was one it did "not take lightly".…
Salesforce.com's protracted outage earlier this week caused data loss.…
US telecoms giant Verizon is once again facing government scrutiny for a rollout of its network services in a major US city.…
Today, we are excited to announce EC2 Run Command document sharing. This new capability lets you collaborate with other users on developing new custom commands. Using EC2 Run Command, you can create custom commands (called Run Command documents), share documents with other AWS users, and find documents shared with you. You can share Run Command documents privately or publish them publicly for the AWS Community to use.
In the ultimate sign of online vanity, the billionaire chair of Hong Kong telecoms company PCCW, Richard Li, has bought his own internet address: .richardli. for $250,000…
Germany could soon roll back a law that holds Wi-Fi network owners liable for crimes that individual users commit online.…
AWS Application Discovery Service helps Systems Integrators quickly and reliably plan application migration projects by automatically identifying applications running in on-premises data centers, their associated dependencies, and their performance profile. Planning data center migrations can involve thousands of workloads that are often deeply interdependent. Application discovery and dependency mapping are important early first steps in the migration process, but difficult to perform at scale due to the lack of automated tools. AWS Application Discovery Service automatically collects configuration and usage data from servers, storage and networking equipment to develop a list of applications, how they perform, and how they are interdependent. This information is securely retained in an AWS Application Discovery Service database which you can export as a CSV or XML file into your preferred visualization tool or cloud migration solution to help reduce the complexity and time in planning your cloud migration.
Google has open-sourced the Thread networking protocol used in its Nest smart thermostat in an effort to win the ongoing internet of things standards war.…
In a major break from the past, Salesforce is turning to an outside supplier to run a portion of its cloud.…
You can now provision M4, C4, R3, I2, and D2 Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region. Dedicated Hosts are physical servers with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses, including Windows Server, SQL Server, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and can also help you meet compliance requirements. For more information on Dedicated Host availability and pricing, visit the Dedicated Hosts pricing page.
Analysis The pace of fibre broadband deployment in the UK remains a highly contentious issue. But the current lack of fibre isn't our biggest problem: it's the absence of any national strategy.…
Workers across the US have been tearing their hair out after the Salesforce NA14 instance suffered a Total Inability To Support Usual Performance around 11 hours ago.…
Starting today, you can use the Directory Service console and update the Domain Name Service (DNS) Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that are used by your AD Connector.
Hitachi has set up a Hitachi Insight Group (HIG) to focus its variegated and so far separate Internet of Things (IoT) efforts.…
Time Warner Cable (TWC) was hit with an outage Monday throughout New York City.…
Because Australia is now in an election campaign, various hopefuls are holding their breath in case (a) the NBN becomes A Serious Election Issue, and (b) the opposition Australian Labor Party (ALP) advances an alternative policy that brings fibre closer to the premises.…
Domain-name overseer ICANN has killed off the majority of Africa's new internet.…
Ofcom's move to open up BT's ducts and poles to competitors is the cornerstone of the regulator's strategy to break the country's reliance on the former state monopoly, but small fibre firms say they are not holding their breath.…
British Telecom has offered the UK government a familiar devil's bargain: protect us from competition and we'll spend an extra £6 billion on our broadband networks.…
Vodafone has put a half-billion-dollar offer to the Australian government for the 700 MHz spectrum it skipped in the government's 2013 spectrum auction.…
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has given its blessing to Charter's $78.7bn acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Bright House Networks.…
Recently, Oracle certified their suite of Siebel CRM Applications to operate on Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Today, we are releasing a tutorial for guiding you through the setup of Amazon RDS for Oracle as the database backend of your Siebel CRM Application.
In March 2015 IBM's Softlayer cloud operation announced it would start to offer bare metal servers running Big Blue's POWER8 chippery.…
The Australian Labor Party has hinted at its policy for the nation's national broadband network (NBN), with leader Bill Shorten promising “a first-rate fibre national broadband network” in his Budget in Reply speech.…
Sixty US congressman have sent a letter [PDF] to Tom Wheeler – chairman of America's internet mall cop, the FCC – urging him to "press pause" on plans to open the cable box market to competition.…
EC2 Auto Recovery, an Amazon EC2 feature designed to increase instance availability, is now available in Beijing (China). With Auto Recovery, you can automatically recover supported instances when a system impairment is detected. Auto Recovery keeps your existing instance running and automatically recovers your instance on new underlying hardware, if needed, so you do not generally need to migrate to a new instance.
+Comment Data warehouse and biz intelligence wrangler Teradata made a loss in its first quarter of 2016. It also recruited a new CEO to get the company motoring again.…
Alibaba’s cloud computing division Alicloud reported bumper growth of 138 per cent to $468m (£322m) for its full financial year 2016, as more paying customers flocked to the Middle Kingdom's AWS equivalent.…
EMC World's second day saw hyper-converged rackery put front and centre, with a stronger DSSD offering, Neutrino* nodes coming to the VxRack 1000 as well as a DSSD variant, and a hybrid cloud VXrack offering.…
The November 2017 OpenStack summit will take place in Sydney, Australia.…
America's internet mall cop the FCC has approved the proposed $17.7bn merger between Altice and US cable provider Cablevision.…
In December 2015, we released Enhanced Monitoring for Amazon RDS so customers could get deeper visibility into their Amazon RDS instances in real time. Enhanced Monitoring provides a comprehensive set of 56 system metrics and aggregated process information at granularity of up to 1 second. You can visualize the metrics on the RDS console and also integrate them with CloudWatch and third-party applications such as Datadog.
AWS Database Migration Service now supports Amazon Redshift as a migration target. This allows you to stream data to Amazon Redshift from any of the supported sources including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQL Server, enabling consolidation and easy analysis of data in the petabyte-scale data warehouse.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has announced it will be cracking down on dodgy fixed broadband price claims... from 31 October.…
In a troubling development today, IBM demonstrates once again that it just doesn't quite grasp this cloud computing thing at all.…
Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) won't get anywhere near completion before direct government funding for the project dries up, the 2016 Budget reveals.…
Last month, Verizon staff along with the Communication Workers of America (CWA) decided to go on strike as union and the US telco failed to agree on a new contract.…
AWS DevDay is a free full-day technical event on June 21 at the AMC Metreon 16 in San Francisco. New developers will learn about some of the hottest topics in cloud computing and experienced developers can dive deep on newer AWS services.
Amazon Web Services has extended use of a a new resource numbering scheme, after last year warning that without a new scheme it would “start to run low on IDs for certain EC2 and EBS resources within a year or so.”…
Telstra wants to become the Uber of Telstra.…
