Google has rolled out five new functions aimed at beefing up the security, administration and sharing features of its Drive for Work cloud business suite and the equivalent education package.…
Microsoft is streamlining its service offerings for the forthcoming version of its Visual Studio IDE, cutting the prices of its high-end subscription levels in the process.…
While Google is trying to push Chromebooks upmarket with its flashy Pixel, its Chrome OS partners continue to target budget-conscious buyers with a new batch of devices priced at $250 and lower.…
Silicon Valley, or rather a small patch of it, finally has gigabit home broadband – and it's not Google Fiber. And there is a catch.…
The AWS Console mobile app now supports AWS CloudFormation stacks and lets users edit the min, max, and desired capacities of their Auto Scaling groups. Download the app from Amazon Appstore, Google Play, and iTunes to view your resources on the go.
AWS CloudFormation customers can use the app to view stack status and overview. To view your stacks, select CloudFormation Stacks after you sign in to the app. You can browse CloudFormation stacks and view status, overview, output, tags, parameters, events, and resources for each stack.
Auto Scaling customers can now change the number of instances in an existing Auto Scaling group by editing the min, max, and desired capacity configurations for a group.
The app features support for EC2, S3, Route 53, ELB, RDS, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation, DynamoDB, Auto Scaling, AWS OpsWorks, CloudWatch, and the Service Health Dashboard. The app lets you authenticate several identities, so you can easily switch between multiple accounts.
Let us know how you use the AWS Console app and tell us what features you’d like to see by using the feedback link in the app’s menu.
AWS Marketplace is an online store that helps customers find, buy, and immediately start using the software and services they need to build products and run their businesses.
Today we are announcing the availability of a new feature that will allow customers and software vendors to comment on a product review. Customers can now answer questions raised in reviews and software vendors can proactively respond when technical issues are identified in the reviews of their products.
To learn more, please visit:
AWS Marketplace
http://ift.tt/HUtztl
Pop stars including potty-mouthed rapper Jay-Z, non-smiler Kanye West and someone called Madonna have “launched” a music streaming service owned by the artists.…
You can now launch D2 instances, the latest generation of Amazon EC2 Dense-storage instances. D2 instances are designed for workloads that require high sequential read and write access to very large data sets, such as Hadoop distributed computing, massively parallel processing data warehousing, and log processing applications.
IBM has announced it will spend US$ billion over four years on a new internet of things business unit.…
Australia's dominant telco Telstra, which also operates an AU$2bn a year IT services arn, has struck a deal to resell IBM's SoftLayer cloud down under and is chatting about taking the arrangement global.…
With the GitHub distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack nearing its fifth day of bombardment, the code-sharing upstart said it is holding up well under fire.…
The governor of Indiana is quietly backtracking on a law that threatens to legalize discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people – after growing pressure from tech companies.…
On Sunday, as promised, Sony killed off its Music Unlimited song streaming service and now the replacement is in place: Spotify is slinging music to PlayStation users from the cloud.…
Office 365 files may load just a little faster in Australia today, after Microsoft announced it has flicked the switch for the local version of the service.…
Motorola Mobility has suffered another defeat at the hands of patent hoarder Intellectual Ventures, with a Delaware jury finding that Moto infringed a patent describing a way for handheld devices to connect to docking stations.…
Google developers looking to keep an eye on their cloud processes now have an app for Android, dubbed Cloud Console, that will allow remote monitoring of the Chocolate Factory's Cloud Platform.…
Microsoft has begun bundling basic mobile device management (MDM) capabilities with all commercial Office 365 subscriptions, as it said it would at last year's TechEd Europe conference.…
You can now use AWS OpsWorks with Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes that can store up to 16TB and process up to 20,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) or Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes that can store up to 16TB and process up to 10,000 IOPS.
These performance improvements make it even easier to run applications requiring high performance or high amounts of storage, such as large transactional databases, big data analytics, and log processing systems. Now you can run large-scale, high performance workloads on a single volume, without needing to stripe together several smaller volumes.
Read more about these new EBS volumes on our blog.
NFC payment tech for phones, aka bonking, is coming to an Android Vodamobe near you.…
Ofcom has set out its objectives for 2015/16, and they're broadly as outlined in the draft report.…
A board put together to double-check the work of a British government team set up to investigate Huawei has given the Chinese giant a clean bill of health.…
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has done something rather useful to its simple storage service (S3), namely making it possible to replicate data across regions.…
Google's Chromebooks are about to undergo a hefty overhaul that puts the Chocolate Factory's creepy, predictive search tech – Google Now – at the heart of the firm's OS.…
Microsoft has tentatively opened up its Windows 10 Technical Preview to more phones, after its initial list back in February had been extremely limited.…
Travelers are used to getting screwed over by hotel internet access.…
AWS Config now allows you to choose turning on Amazon SNS notifications for changes to your AWS resources. In addition, when notifications are subscribed to email, you also receive these notifications in an email-friendly format, allowing you to filter relevant messages.
Workplace chat app Slack, popular among West Coast startup hipsters among others, has been hacked, its makers said today.…
Apple Safari-using Brits, who claim they were tracked by Google's adbots without permission, can sue Google, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales has ruled.…
GitHub's servers are being hammered by web traffic from an army of unwitting cyber-foot-soldiers.…
The International Thermonouclear Experimental Reactor project is in hot water with the European Parliament for failing to manage EU funds properly.…
Don’t hold your breath for better mobile phone coverage. While Vodafone UK CEO Jeroen Hoencamp is hopeful that the government will do its bit as part of the not-spots agreement, Minister of Fun Ed Vaziey claims he’s already done it.…
It took a $70m golden hello to entice Ruth Porat – Google's new chief financial officer – away from her role at Morgan Stanley.…
Apple CEO Tim Cook has confirmed he is to hand over his relatively measly fortune to charity for the betterment of the planet – once he’s paid off his nephew’s college bill.…
Vodafone has struck back at BT’s claim that the Frontier Economics report on Openreach’s apparent profiteering is “ludicrous”, with Matthew Braovac, Vodafone's head of competition and regulatory affairs, writing to his BT opposite number asking for a justification of the claims.…
Microsoft has made a few changes to its Azure Backup service, including new features that allow independent software vendors to access the data stored in the Azure cloud.…
Google's botched another cloud patch.…
Optus has escaped a financial penalty imposed Australia's privacy boss and instead must review its internal security measures after it shipped hundreds of thousands of routers with open internet ports and default credentials, opened voice mails, and marked public scores of private phone numbers.…
The organizers of this year's RSA security conference have made at least one thing clear to exhibitors: no booth babes.…
Parallels is changing its branding again – partly – this time to help customers better distinguish between its virtualization software and service provider businesses.…
Resource Groups and Tag Editor now support the ability to search for resources by tag substring. AWS customers use tags to find and organize resources on a single console page using Resource Groups. The new substring search feature lets customers use Resource Groups when their environment uses a single tag key for multiple distinct values, such as “FooDB-Prod-01-jdoe”. For example, create a resource group for a production environment that displays resources with the substring “Prod” anywhere in the “Name” tag.
Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Yahoo! – and many, many others – have appealed to American politicians and g-men to rein in mass digital surveillance this May, and bring the intelligence community under some kind of oversight.…
Microsoft has doubled down on its support for the Node.js server-side JavaScript framework with a new set of tools that turn Visual Studio into a full-fledged Node.js IDE.…
Amazon hopes to knacker its opponents in the cloud world by offering endless online storage for a flat yearly fee.…
Facebook is being sued in the US by a UK biz, which claims Zuckerberg & Co stole its blueprints for data centers.…
Amazon Kinesis is a fully managed service for real-time processing of streaming data at massive scale. Amazon Kinesis can continuously capture and store terabytes of data per hour from hundreds of thousands of sources.
BT has labelled a report into its apparently inflated return on broadband investment as "ludicrous", as Vodafone calls on the government to tighten the regulations surrounding Openreach.…
Take a look at mobile standards like LTE and you'll notice that duplexing is difficult: it's either accomplished by separating uplink and downlink in time or frequency.…
Red Hat's shares are on the up after the Linux distro maker beat Wall Street's expectations in its fourth financial quarter, ended February 28.…
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has responded to critics in the media who claim the regulator dropped an investigation into Google after buckling under pressure from the White House and the powerful advertising giant.…
You can now use Amazon EMR clusters to process encrypted data stored in Amazon S3 that you previously encrypted using client-side encryption. This functionality has been added to the EMR File System (EMRFS), which Amazon EMR clusters use to read from and write to Amazon S3 securely, consistently, and with high performance. When writing to Amazon S3, EMRFS now supports encrypting those objects with Amazon S3 client-side encryption in addition to Amazon S3 server-side encryption
The US state of Tennessee is suing the FCC after the regulator said cities should be able to build their own municipal-owned broadband networks.…
You can now learn what devices your end users use to access content Amazon CloudFront is delivering. The new Devices Report shows you how many requests come from mobile, tablets, desktops, smart TVs and other types of devices during a specified time period. You can access the new Devices Report via the CloudFront section of the AWS Management Console by selecting Viewers under the Reports and Analytics section in the navigation pane and then clicking the Devices tab.
Google and the White House manage to hook up more than the majority of married couples, having met up once a week for the past five years.…
A law bill introduced in the US House of Representatives on Tuesday seeks to abolish the Patriot Act, ban Uncle Sam from forcing backdoors into technology, and safeguard whistleblowers like Edward Snowden.…
A hosted edition of LibreOffice is planned as a free and open alternative to Office 365 and Google Docs by year's end.…
Israel spied on the recent US-Iran nuclear talks, alleges America. And the US knows enough about it to say it publicly because the NSA is spying on Israel, along with everyone else.…
You can now launch C4 instances, the latest generation of Amazon EC2 Compute-optimized instances, in the EU (Germany) AWS region. C4 instances are ideal for compute-bound workloads, such as high-traffic front-end fleets, MMO gaming, media processing, transcoding, and High Performance Computing (HPC) applications.
C4 instances are available in five sizes, offering up to 36 vCPUs. C4 instances are based on Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (codename Haswell) processors that run at a base frequency of 2.9 GHz, and can deliver clock speeds as high as 3.5 GHz with Intel ® Turbo Boost. Each C4 instance type is EBS-optimized by default and at no additional cost. This feature provides 500 Mbps to 4,000 Mbps of dedicated throughput to EBS above and beyond the general purpose network throughput provided to the instance. C4 instances also provide Enhanced Networking for higher packet per second (PPS) performance, lower network jitter, and lower network latencies.
To learn more about C4 instances, please visit the Amazon EC2 Instance Types page.
Twitter has quietly extended its venture-capital appendage for the first time to invest in Cyanogen, a start-up challenging Google's Android.…
BT has tentatively returned to the mobile market it abandoned 13 years ago with a competitive SIM-only deal for its broadband customers.…
Europe’s digi-chief has spoken out about net neutrality rules emerging from America, and mobile networks favoring particular websites over others.…
GitHub has been ordered to hand over records on some of its users to taxi-booking app Uber after unsuccessfully challenging a subpoena.…
The idea that the planned fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) rollout of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) may have ended up meeting its cost targets has received a high-profile endorsement from emeritus professor Rod Tucker of the University of Melbourne.…
Amazon S3 now supports cross-region replication, a new feature that automatically replicates data across AWS regions. With cross-region replication, every object uploaded to an S3 bucket is automatically replicated to a destination bucket in a different AWS region that you choose. For example, you can use cross-region replication to provide lower-latency data access in different geographic regions. Cross-region replication can also help if you have a compliance requirement to store copies of data hundreds of miles apart. There is no additional charge for using cross-region replication. You pay Amazon S3’s usual charges for storage, requests, and inter-region data transfer for the replicated copy of data.
Cross-region replication is available in the US Standard, US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and South America (Sao Paulo) regions.
You can get started today by reading How to Set Up Cross-Region Replication in the Amazon S3 Developer Guide.
Amazon Elastic Transcoder has recently made changes to allow your jobs to run even faster. We have also made the job timing data and other useful information available to view in the job metadata. New timestamp information allows you to see how long each job spent queuing and transcoding. New fields on the job object and console display the input video resolution, duration, file size, and frame rate.
There are no additional charges for this improvement to performance or to see this job metadata. To learn more, please consult the Elastic Transcoder Developer Guide.
Cloud outfit Joyent has launched Triton, a new software and service offering that provides what Joyent describes as "container native infrastructure," where the Linux container – not a server or a VM – is the atomic unit of hosting.…
Google has revealed security biz MCS Holdings handed out unauthorized SSL certificates for some Google-owned websites.…
You can now deploy and manage multiple Docker containers in a single AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment. We introduced Docker support on Elastic Beanstalk in April 2014 and have since then introduced many different Docker based Elastic Beanstalk environments (i.e., Go, GlassFish, Python).
With this new feature, AWS Elastic Beanstalk will help you provision an Amazon EC2 Container Service cluster along with the rest of your infrastructure stack (e.g., Elastic Load Balancing, CloudWatch, etc). You can create a Dockerrun.aws.json file (specifies which container images are to be deployed, CPU and memory requirements, port mappings, and container links), upload the file, and Elastic Beanstalk will schedule your containers across a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances and also monitor the health of each container. This feature will allow you to easily deploy and scale containerized web applications and avoid the complexities of provisioning the underlying infrastructure.
Please see our documentation for more information on this feature.
For more information on AWS Elastic Beanstalk:
AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Docker 1.5, Ruby 2.2, and Node.js 0.12.0. You can now deploy your applications relying on these languages/frameworks on Elastic Beanstalk in all service regions using the AWS Management Console and the EB CLI v3.
Please see the walkthroughs to get started: Docker, Ruby, and Node.js
For more information on AWS Elastic Beanstalk:
The Amazon Linux AMI 2015.03 is now available in all EC2 regions.
This updated release includes the 3.14 kernel, Python 2.7 as the default, Python 3.4, Ruby 2.2, Docker 1.5, PHP 5.6, Puppet 3.7 and several other new features and package updates.
Please see our release notes for more information.
AWS Marketplace is an online store that helps customers find, buy, and immediately start using the software and services they need to build products and run their businesses. We are pleased to announce that more than 700 AWS Marketplace software products can now be launched in the Frankfurt (FRA) region.
With both hourly and annually priced options, customers can elect to pay-by-the-use or purchase annual subscriptions for steady state workloads. Monthly priced listings will be available in Frankfurt by May 1. With this release, customers can utilize Marketplace software in the FRA region, and in the process, benefit from improved performance and worry-free compliance with EU data privacy and sovereignty regulations.
To learn more, please visit:
Jeff Barr's blog
Facebook has been pressing on with its assimilation of the entirety of the web, as the New York Times reports that Mark Zuckerberg's social network has quietly been talking to media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook itself, thereby discouraging users from ever leaving.…
Microsoft is merging its Azure Websites, Mobile Services, and BizTalk Services into a single service: Azure App Service.…
The US Federal Trade Commission has put up the "help wanted" sign for a new office tasked with investigating American technology giants. El Reg hopes the new team has more backbone that the officials unwilling to pick a fight with Silicon Valley's out-of-control goliaths.…
Some $240m from the private sector will be spent on boosting science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs in America, President Obama said on Monday.…
Rents on mobile phone masts should drop dramatically, with a pricing model loosely based on that used for utilities, states a report from Deloitte, commissioned by several mobile network operators.…
Global bit barn operator Equinix has decided it wants more enterprise customers.…
Microsoft has released technology previews of new developer tools and an SDK for Windows 10, giving coders their first taste of what it's like to build Windows Universal Apps that run across PCs, phones, and tablets.…
Gameplay-streaming upstart Twitch says it has been hacked – and has reset its users' account passwords.…
Microsoft, still struggling to gain a foothold in the smartphone market, is pressing ahead with efforts to have its software bundled on Android devices from major manufacturers, with Samsung as its first partner.…
We're not quite sure why Nutanix would be working on its own hypervisor, but apparently it is, The Register has learned.…
The USA may have backed down before the Chocolate Factory, but Mississippi’s Attorney General Jim Hood says that an anti-trust investigation into Google is in the pipeline.…
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has complained that the end of the Google Glass Explorer program was misunderstood as being the end of the entire Glass concept, “which isn't true”.…
Fujitsu has opened a new data centre location in Western Singapore to feed the appetite for cloud services in Asia.…
BT Broadband is one of the most complained about ISPs, according to UK consumer body Which?, scoring particularly poorly in technical support and value for money.…
When I was a contractor building IT architectures, it was common to find that people had a rather old phone system and were looking to move to something newer. The question they asked was always: what shall we do to get something stable but future-proof?…
Juniper Networks and Mirantis are getting cozy in an arrangement designed to get better scalability out of OpenStack clouds.…
BT will launch its own 4G network when it returns to the mobile market within the next few days, it has been reported.…
We have made several improvements to the Amazon SNS console, including:
Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi confirmed it is allowing Microsoft to put Windows 10 on its Mi 4 handset.…
The streaming video market is going to have a blockbuster summer with new versions of both the Apple TV and the Roku expected.…
Cloud software company Apigee has filed IPO documents and plans to raise $86m on a total valuation of $700m.…
A programmer turned drug dealer turned government informant has been sentenced to five years in prison after being caught up in the Silk Road shutdown.…
Apple has released a follow-up to last week's security update after finding a pair of flaws that are still vulnerable on patched systems.…
Domain name, registration, web and mail hosting company GoDaddy is expected to be valued at $2.87bn (£1.92m) when it floats to become a PLC with the stock ticker GDDY.…
We are happy to announce the immediate availability of Amazon CloudWatch Logs in the US West (N. California) region.
Five pairs of nesting falcons have disrupted Vodafone customers' mobile phone signals in London and the south east – because the birds have set up shop on the carrier's masts.…
Google's decided its Compute Engine and App Engine users need to know if their cloudy rigs are full of … bugs, by dropping a log (analyser) into the cloud.…
Amazon Web Services has, as promised last year, revealed a colossal new virtual cloudy solid state disk with colossal IOPS.…
Chinese activist site Greatfire.org which masks censored traffic into the country is under a sustained distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that is racking up $30,000 a day in server costs.…
Google came far closer to being dragged into court by US watchdog the FTC than previously believed, according to a new report.…
Amazon has been granted a special "experimental airworthiness certificate" by the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) to test out new drones.…
You can now use Amazon Mobile Analytics for your JavaScript enabled apps. The newly released Amazon Mobile Analytics SDK for JavaScript supports most JavaScript based frameworks such as PhoneGap, Appcelerator, and Intel XDK.
Amazon WorkDocs is now available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS region. This additional location will reduce latency for many users, and provide more flexibility in complying with regulatory requirements that govern where data must be stored.
Streaming music is now more popular than CDs, according to the Record Industry Ass. of America (RIAA).…
As of today, you can access over 85,000 Landsat 8 scenes on through our newest Public Data Set Landsat on AWS. The scenes are all available in the landsat-pds bucket the Amazon S3 US West (Oregon) region. By making Landsat data readily available near our flexible computing resources, we hope to accelerate innovation in climate research, humanitarian relief, and disaster preparedness efforts around the world. Because the imagery is available on AWS, researchers and software developers can use any of our on-demand services to perform analysis and create new products without needing to worry about storage or bandwidth costs.
Streaming music is now more popular than CD-based recordings, according to the Record Industry Ass. of America (RIAA).…
Day one of the 2015 Pwn2Own hacking contest in Vancouver, Canada saw big wins for contestants and headaches for software providers, after teams successfully cracked Adobe Flash and Reader, Windows, Internet Explorer, and Firefox.…
Microsoft’s Cortana voice-controlled digital assistant is being opened up so apps can use it for processing spoken commands, according to a presentation at the US giant's WinHEC event in Shenzhen, China.…
An international team of researchers have created a fine-scale genetic map of the UK, the first time such a map has been produced for any country in the world.…
AWS Syndicated Marketing is now available to APN Partners with new and expanded content.
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has extracted a $3.4m fee from Verizon for its failure to provide customers with emergency phone service last year.…
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has extracted a $3.4m fee from Verizon for its failure to provide customers with emergency phone service last year.…
Starting today, you can create Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes that can store up to 16 TB, and process up to 20,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). You can also create Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes that can store up to 16 TB, and process up to 10,000 IOPS. These volumes are designed for five 9s of availability and up to 320 megabytes per second of throughput when attached to EBS optimized instances.
These performance improvements make it even easier to run applications requiring high performance or high amounts of storage, such as large transactional databases, big data analytics, and log processing systems. Now you can run large-scale, high performance workloads on a single volume, without needing to stripe together several smaller volumes.
Larger and faster volumes are available now in all commercial AWS regions and in AWS GovCloud (US). To learn more please see the Amazon EBS details page.
Cisco issues regular blog posts pointing out that its unified communications products outsell Microsoft's, but it now looks like Redmond's decided not to take that lying down because it's announced one of the new things Lync will do now that it's become Skype For Business is offer more “room systems”.…
Apple is possibly looking to develop its own augmented reality headset.…
More than 20,000 rare two-character domains have been put onto the open market today by domain registry Rightside.…
Health insurance firm Premera Blue Cross has admitted that it has become the latest victim of data theft after hackers targeted its IT department's servers in what's been dubbed a "sophisticated attack".…
In a turn of events that should shock nobody, the operators of one of the largest darknet drug markets have apparently run off with user funds.…
The SCO vs. IBM case has once again thrust up an undead limb up from deep beneath the soil.…
Apple's future bit barns look to be built around white box servers from Taiwan, according to a Digitimes report.…
The CIO of the United States has floated a plan to make HTTPS the standard for all .gov websites.…
Gigabit internet speeds over your existing internet connection are looking good for early 2016.…
Apple has pushed out an largish update for security flaws in its Safari browser.…
The Chinese government is clamping down on cloud services provided by some of the world's biggest tech companies because they are being used to evade the Great Firewall.…
ServiceMesh, a cloud policy company acquired by CSC in 2013, has been named as the source of a bribe allegedly paid to a former Australian bank executive.…
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports major version PostgreSQL 9.4.1. PostgreSQL 9.4.1 includes support for the JSONB datatype, which allows you to manage schemas more flexibly. JSONB items are stored in a decomposed binary format that speeds query operations. You can launch a new Amazon RDS database instance running PostgreSQL 9.4.1 with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Learn more about what’s new in PostgreSQL 9.4. To learn more about PostgreSQL 9.4.1, read the PostgreSQL 9.4.1 release notes. To learn more about Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, see the Amazon RDS User’s Guide.
Sony has formally launched its subscription-based TV service for the Playstation console.…
Think servers, you think Hewlett-Packard – the world’s number-one by market share.…
A North Korea network outage last December came in retaliation for the Sony hack, a US lawmaker claims.…
Blighty's intelligence agencies have held out the begging bowl to Parliament for a handout of £111m before April.…
If you are a small company, it takes a certain amount of time and effort to maintain a phone system. This is not a huge problem as the system sits in the corner and gets on with its job most of the time; you have to fiddle with it only to set up new extensions or change the names on items when people leave or join.…
IBM has revealed one of the first things it plans to do with Twitter's firehose of data: let you point it at its cloudy Bluemix analytics service to find stuff out.…
Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 will launch in "summer" this year.…
Adobe has reported better-than-expected earnings for the first quarter of 2015 ahead of what it called are strong financial figures.…
Apple TV users might be getting new channels, and Cupertino some more money, according to insiders in the firm.…
We here at The Reg have come across Rubrik, an early-stage Californian storage startup still in stealth.…
Sat navs are officially dead. The UK's Office for National Statistics has dropped them from its basket of goods used to calculate inflation - a sad end to a once-leading tech product.…
Google is cleaning up its app store to limit the amount of malware and age-inappropriate content.…
An effort to tightly knit together graphics chips, processors and other hardware to boost things like video search on your desktop has taken a step forward.…
You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to create professional content that meets NTSC or PAL standards, package videos in an FLV or MPG container, and create animated GIF outputs. To support these new outputs, we have added additional options for color space conversions, MPEG-2 video, MP2 audio, and interlacing. Trying out these new features is as easy as selecting one of the new system presets when creating a transcoding job.
The Electoral Commission has spotted two things: 18-24 year olds don’t vote and 18-24 year olds have smartphones. You'll never guess what's coming next.…
Ericsson, which has just laid off 2,200 people Sweden and which plans more cost cutting around the world has already started spending the savings by buying the IT business services part of Chinese outfit Sunrise Technology.…
Cuba says it is further loosening its grip on the nation's internet access with the launch of its first public Wi-Fi hotspot.…
Verizon enterprise has opened its cloud in Australia, or least half of its cloud.…
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced it's pausing before making a decision over the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable (TWC) and AT&T's gobbling of DirecTV, citing legal issues.…
HP is to showcase a new dating service for its reseller partners looking to sell cloud services with Service Providers looking for a route to market.…
Amazon EC2 Container Service is now available in the EU (Ireland) region.
The Competition and Markets Authority has written to telcos and media groups asking for their thoughts as it weighs up the implications of BT swallowing EE.…
HP’s sickly Enterprise Services (ES) unit continues to show signs of recovery after putting pen to paper on a “mega” six-year managed services deal with Dutch logistics biz TNT.…
In 1985 most commercial internet users were US government contractors, but all of that was set to slowly change after Symbolics became the first company to register a dot-com domain name.…
The BBC is suffering a major outage, after its websites – including News and the public service broadcaster's iPlayer system – buckled in the past hour.…
Amazon CloudFront now gives you a new way to secure your private content: CloudFront signed HTTP cookies. In the past, you could control who is able to access your CloudFront content by adding a custom signature to each object URL. Now you can get that same degree of control by including the signature in an HTTP cookie instead. This lets you restrict access to multiple objects (e.g., whole site authentication) or to a single object without needing to change URLs.
Signed HTTP cookies make it easy to restrict viewer access to your streaming media content. For example, if your media content is in HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) format, you can use Amazon Elastic Transcoder or your media server to generate the playlist and media segments. You then write your web application to authenticate each user and to send a Set-Cookie header that sets a cookie on the user's device. When a user requests a restricted object, the browser forwards the signed cookie in the request, and CloudFront checks the cookie attributes to determine whether to allow or restrict access to the HLS stream. CloudFront checks for this cookie when the player requests the playlist and when the player requests each segment, which ensures that the end-to-end stream is secured.
There are no additional charges for using private content with Amazon CloudFront. To learn more, see the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide. We will also be showing a demo of this functionality in our next CloudFront office hours on Thursday, March 26th. You can sign-up for this office hours session here.
UK regulator Ofcom has announced a wide-ranging review of digital communications, looking at infrastructure and competition.…
Microsoft is putting Cortana onto Android and iOS, as it takes the battle of digital assistants to its enemies' lairs.…
In an excerpt from a book co-written by Fast Company executive editor Rick Tetzeli, Apple CEO Tim Cook is said to have offered the dying Steve Jobs a slice of his liver.…
China's Alibaba and SAIC Motor Corp have decided the country needs to get its cars connected to the Internet, and have inked a $US160 million deal to get the ball wheels rolling.…
Want to know if you can get fibre to the home instead of the node? It'll cost at least $300 just to put the question, under a new “Technology Choice Policy” published by NBN Co.…
Amazon CloudFront now gives you a new way to secure your private content: CloudFront signed HTTP cookies. In the past, you could control who is able to access your CloudFront content by adding a custom signature to each object URL. Now you can get that same degree of control by including the signature in an HTTP cookie instead. This lets you restrict access to multiple objects (e.g., whole site authentication) or to a single object without needing to change URLs.
Signed HTTP cookies make it easy to restrict viewer access to your streaming media content. For example, if your media content is in HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) format, you can use Amazon Elastic Transcoder or your media server to generate the playlist and media segments. You then write your web application to authenticate each user and to send a Set-Cookie header that sets a cookie on the user's device. When a user requests a restricted object, the browser forwards the signed cookie in the request, and CloudFront checks the cookie attributes to determine whether to allow or restrict access to the HLS stream. CloudFront checks for this cookie when the player requests the playlist and when the player requests each segment, which ensures that the end-to-end stream is secured.
There are no additional charges for using private content with Amazon CloudFront. To learn more, see the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide. We will also be showing a demo of this functionality in our next CloudFront office hours on Thursday, March 26th. You can sign-up for this office hours session here.
AWS Identity and Access Management adds policy validation and formatting
We have introduced two new capabilities in the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) console that makes it easier for you to author your IAM policies. To help you find and correct errors in your policies, we added a new Validate Policy button to the IAM console. This button returns a detailed JSON syntax error message that refers to the line number where the error occurs. In addition, the console now gives you the option to use JSON formatting for your IAM policies to make them easier to read and understand.
Get started by signing in to the IAM console. To learn more, visit the AWS Security Blog.
You can now run and manage Ruby 2.2 applications with AWS OpsWorks. Ruby 2.2 includes a few performance improvements such as updates to the Garbage Collector. Read the release notes here.
Ruby 2.2 will now appear as a choice for your new Rails App Server and Custom layers. For existing layers, you can select Ruby 2.2 on the settings page of the layer and your instances will be updated on the next deployment. Please see the documentation for this feature to learn more.
For more information on AWS OpsWorks:
• Product Page
• Documentation
We are pleased to announce that ElastiCache for Redis now supports engine version 2.8.19. Customers can now launch new clusters with Redis 2.8.19, as well as upgrade existing ones to the new engine version.
To learn more, we encourage you to read Jeff Barr’s blog. For the full list of improvements in Redis 2.8.19 click here. You can easily launch an ElastiCache for Redis cluster with engine version 2.8.19 via a few clicks on the AWS Management Console.
Sincerely,
The Amazon ElastiCache Team
We are excited to announce support for looking up API activity in CloudTrail. Using the CloudTrail console, AWS SDKs, or AWS CLI, you can look up API activity related to creating, deleting, and updating AWS resources in your account. You can use this feature to troubleshoot operational issues or security incidents and take immediate actions such as following up with the user or open a trouble ticket to do deeper analysis.
This feature is available immediately in the following regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Europe (Germany), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and South America (Brazil). You can look up API activity that was made to create, delete, or update AWS resources in your AWS account. You can look up API activity that was captured for your account in the last 7 days for 28 AWS services including Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon EEBS, Amazon VPC, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). For a list of supported services, refer the CloudTrail documentation.
If you have already turned on CloudTrail for your account, you do not need to take any other action. Simply go to the CloudTrail console, and the API activity related to creating, deleting, and updating AWS resources will be automatically available to you. If you haven’t turned on CloudTrail for your AWS account, turn it on now from the CloudTrail console. Once you login to the CloudTrail console, you will see the API activity history arranged in reverse chronological order with the most recent events listed at the top. You can filter the API activity to troubleshoot operational issues or security incidents. The five filters supported are: Time range, Event name, User name, Resource type, and Resource name. You can drill down into each event and review it in detail or navigate to a specific AWS service console and view additional details about a resource referenced in the event.
There are no additional charges for looking up API activity. For more information about this feature, go to CloudTrail documentation.
You can now export EC2 instances you previously imported using VM Import in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. To export an instance, you can use the ec2-create-instance-export-task command. The export command captures the parameters necessary (instance ID, S3 bucket to hold the exported image, name of the exported image, VMDK, OVA or VHD format) to properly export the instance to your chosen format. The exported file is saved in an S3 bucket that you previously created.
AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated AWS Region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. The AWS GovCloud (US) framework adheres to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) regulations as well as the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMPSM) requirements. To find out more or request access, contact us today.
We are excited to announce the availability of two new features for Amazon CloudSearch: domain metrics through Amazon CloudWatch and index field statistics.
You can now use Amazon CloudSearch domain metrics to make scaling decisions, troubleshoot issues, and better manage your search clusters. Amazon CloudSearch publishes the following four metrics into Amazon CloudWatch:
You can start using these metrics today, at no additional cost and in all regions where Amazon CloudSearch is available. If you set alarms on the metrics, you will be billed at standard CloudWatch rates. To learn more about Amazon CloudSearch domain metrics, see Monitoring an Amazon CloudSearch Domain with Amazon CloudWatch in the Amazon CloudSearch Developer Guide.
In addition, you can now get aggregate field statistics along with the search results. With field statistics, you can perform charting and analytics without additional post-processing. This feature gives you functionality similar to the Apache Solr Stats component. Field statistics are available only for facet-enabled numeric fields. You can get the following statistics: count, min, max, mean, missing, stddev, sum, and sumOfSquares. To learn more about index field statistics, see Getting Statistics for Numeric Fields in Amazon CloudSearch in the Amazon CloudSearch Developer Guide.
Amazon CloudSearch is a fully managed service that makes it easy to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application. To get started, open the AWS Management Console and begin your 30-day free trial. To learn more about recently released features, see the Amazon CloudSearch Developer Guide. Share your thoughts on these and any additional features you'd like to see in the CloudSearch forum. We appreciate your feedback, and we use it to help us prioritize upcoming features.
US regulators have finally detailed how they'll enforce net neutrality among broadband carriers and service providers.…
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What is it with IBM and large Commonwealth countries with extreme climates and a big mining industry? Big Blue's SoftLayer cloud outfit has decided two such nations – Australia and Canada – both deserve their second bit barns.…
We are pleased to announce that ElastiCache for Redis now supports engine version 2.8.19. Customers can now launch new clusters with Redis 2.8.19, as well as upgrade existing ones to the new engine version.
To learn more, we encourage you to read Jeff Barr’s blog. For the full list of improvements in Redis 2.8.19 click here. You can easily launch an ElastiCache for Redis cluster with engine version 2.8.19 via a few clicks on the AWS Management Console.
Sincerely,
The Amazon ElastiCache Team
Google wants to take a chunk out of Amazon's Glacier storage business with a cloud-based archive service that can start retrieving data in three seconds.…
You can now run and manage Ruby 2.2 applications with AWS OpsWorks. Ruby 2.2 includes a few performance improvements such as updates to the Garbage Collector. Read the release notes here.
Ruby 2.2 will now appear as a choice for your new Rails App Server and Custom layers. For existing layers, you can select Ruby 2.2 on the settings page of the layer and your instances will be updated on the next deployment. Please see the documentation for this feature to learn more.
For more information on AWS OpsWorks:
• Product Page
• Documentation
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A pro-Islamic State social network was pulled offline hours after its launch.…
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The European Parliament took the EU’s executive arm to task on Tuesday for failing to give Google a good kicking resolve the ongoing investigation into Google’s alleged abuse of dominance in the search market.…
