Who knew Marissa Mayer could be so far ahead of the curve? Her company Yahoo! bought Tumblr back in 2013 when the Purple Palace seemingly recognised that it was crucial to back the animated .gif rebirth.…
Apple – having tweaked how its Watch monitors a user's heart rate – has been forced to explain the change, after fitness freaks freaked out about the gizmo's irregular tracking function.…
Review The big news with Fedora 22, just delivered, is the Fedora project actually managed to stick pretty close to its proposed schedule.…
Security researchers speaking at the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam this week have demonstrated that users of hidden services on Tor are putting themselves at risk of being identified – if an attacker is willing to put in the time and resources.…
Netizens who have been scrambling to upload their photo libraries into Google's new cloud-hosted Photos service could find themselves sharing more than they wanted to with the Mountain View advertising giant.…
AWS CodeDeploy now supports deployment-specific environment variables.
CodeDeploy environment variables can be accessed by deployment scripts and provide contextual information associated with the deployment such as application name, deployment group name, lifecycle event name, and deployment ID. Common use cases for environment variables include varying the application server port or the logging level based on whether the script is running in the “Staging” or “Production” deployment group. Read our blog for a walkthrough on using environment variables.
To learn more about CodeDeploy, see the AWS CodeDeploy product page.
Apple has come up with a temporary workaround for iPhones plagued by incoming text messages that cause the gadgets to crash and restart – and it involves asking Siri for help.…
The VPN service Hola, which claims to have more than 9.7 million users, is now selling its access to users' machines as exit-nodes under the Luminati brand.…
Google I/O Android users will be able to store passwords in Google's native Smart Lock manager, in a security boon for the masses.…
Google I/O Google has unveiled a new Photos application that, it hopes, will mean that images from your past can be organized by computers so you don't have to.…
Google I/O For a developer event, this year's Google I/O conference in San Francisco sure spent a lot of time focusing on such consumer-oriented toys as personal assistants, photo apps, and budget VR. But there were actually a few legitimate developer tools on display, too.…
Google I/O Apple is winning the PR war with its Watch, but Google thinks an open platform, and some nifty Android Wear software, can give it the edge in the smartwatch world.…
Google I/O To many, Google's Cardboard VR headset is just a novel paper-and-plastic toy, but the Chocolate Factory is taking it seriously enough that it has given it a revamp and is pushing to have it more widely adopted.…
You can now deploy AWS Lambda function code by specifying the Amazon S3 bucket where your code is located. Previously, you needed to upload your function code as a ZIP through the AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, or AWS Lambda console. Now, you can also provide a S3 object location for Lambda to download your code when creating or updating your function.
Please visit our product page for more information about AWS Lambda. Visit our console to get started now.
Amazon SNS makes it easy and cost effective to send push notifications to Apple, Google, Fire OS, and Windows devices, as well as to Android devices in China with Baidu Cloud Push. With the support of Amazon SNS in the AWS SDK for Unity, you can now send push notifications directly to your games that are built on Unity.
To download the AWS SDK for Unity, visit our webpage.
Google I/O Google today showed off the latest build of Android, version M, at its annual developer conference Google I/O in San Francisco.…
Gameplay broadcaster Twitch has banned users from streaming racy live video from "adult only" games.…
Tom Wheeler, chairman of US internet watchdog the FCC, has asked the regulator's commissioners to offer broadband to poor Americans via the Lifeline program.…
When hackers swiped 32,500 patient records from Cottage Healthcare System, it was sued by its own customers for $4.1m – a bill that was settled by its insurance company.…
Amazon DynamoDB is enhancing security and visibility of Amazon DynamoDB API calls by adding support for AWS CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail is a service that delivers log files containing records of your AWS API calls. You can use these logs for security analysis, auditing and resource tracking. Starting today, you can receive logs for Amazon DynamoDB API calls, when you turn on AWS CloudTrail for AWS services from the AWS CloudTrail console. You can learn more about AWS CloudTrail from the AWS CloudTrail details page and our documentation page. If you have any questions or feedback, email us.
Having sidled into the cash-rich analytics party seven months back, Salesforce is now out and proud on the hype-heavy big data field.…
The ZuckerBorg collects so much data on its users that even visiting the site tags your ineffable soul for eternal tracking. But now a Harvard student's browser extension can now exploit the default location sharing setting to literally plot Facebook Messenger app users' movements on a map.…
Chinese tech giant Lenovo has been showing things it’s making and things it wants to make at Lenovo Tech World in Beijing.…
Tech Panel Cloud computing has gone mainstream. While a hard-core of naysayers still exists, the black-and-white negative viewpoint is a lot less common today than it was a year or two ago. Our research at Freeform Dynamics, including via The Register, says it’s now less about ‘whether’ to use cloud, and more a question of where to adopt it and how.…
Google I/O This year's Google I/O conference hasn't even formally kicked off, but attendees who arrived early to pick up their badges on Wednesday got their first look at the peculiarly formidable security at this year's event.…
Trick-cyclists in America have come out with research which could explain why the debate on climate change continues to rumble on, even though there is a solid consensus on the facts of the matter.…
The federal government has moved to mollify the fibre operators left out in the cold by previous national broadband network (NBN) policy, re-writing the rules that apply to new property developments.…
Microsoft's given itself a busy day, releasing the first technology preview of SQL Server 2016 and also letting us all know about updates to its StorSimple NAS boxen and Azure Media services.…
Ahead of the Windows 10 launch this summer, Microsoft has decided it's time for a little spring cleaning in the Windows Store, and it's tightening up its submission policies to make sure its store doesn't get into the same sorry state again.…
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has put forward rules to close a loophole used by robocallers and text-message spammers.…
President Obama has told the US Senate to get its act together over the spy-friendly Patriot Act, key provisions of which are due to expire at midnight on Sunday.…
Margins in the cloud are rubbish: when you're selling servers for cents, there's precious little left for the bottom line.…
The AWS Console mobile app now supports S3 object download. In addition, now EC2 volumes, EC2 security groups, and VPCs are on the app’s dashboard for easier access. Download the app from Amazon Appstore, Google Play, and iTunes to view and manage your resources on the go.
Amazon S3 customers can now use the app to generate and open a pre-signed URL for an S3 object. When viewing an object, tap “View in browser” to open a time-limited pre-signed URL. Your device’s browser will determine supported actions for the object based on the object’s content type and your device configuration.
EC2 volumes, EC2 security groups, and VPCs are now on the dashboard for easier access. Previously, these resource types were only accessible from an attached EC2 instance’s detail page. The app lets you create a snapshot of an EBS volume and modify EC2 security group rules.
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.
Version 3 of the AWS SDK for PHP is now generally available. Since launching the developer preview in October, we have added new features and architecture improvements, while maintaining much of the coding pattern with which users of the Version 2 are already familiar. Key features of the new version include:
As always, you can find us on GitHub, and we would love to hear your feedback and answer questions on the Issues page.
To find out more,
Visit the AWS PHP Development Blog
Read the Developer Guide
Check out the API reference
A US judge has given the green light to a class-action lawsuit that accuses Yahoo! of illegally violating email users' privacy by scanning the contents of their messages to deliver targeted advertising.…
The head of US TV giant CBS said he is open to a deal that would put the network's programming on Apple's TV boxes – if the price is right.…
Analysis Miscreants can crash iPhones and iPads, or apps on Macs, from afar by sending them specially crafted text messages, thanks to a bug in iOS and OS X.…
LG and Sony have joined 18 other device makers in the latest phase of Microsoft’s strategy to get Office and Skype as portable as possible.…
Incidences of identity fraud in the UK rose by more than 25 per cent in the first quarter of 2015, a new report has revealed.…
Browser-turned-OS-institution Mozilla has acknowledged that its $25 phone has failed.…
An “electrical fault” wiped out Belgium's air traffic control systems nationwide this morning, according to Belgocontrol, which is responsible for air navigation above Belgium and Luxembourg.…
A storm of accusations, claims, and furious counterclaims has hit the Ubuntu penguins, with a community cleaved of its head following allegations of unsavory behavior.…
Ofcom wants to hold onto the 60MHz of the 190MHz of spectrum it had announced would be for sale, and is floating the idea of scaling things back, citing a change in market conditions for the sale, slated for the end of this year or the beginning of next.…
Oculus Rift, the big dog in virtual reality headsets, has snapped up British startup Surreal Vision for an undisclosed sum.…
Australia's national broadband network continues apace* with nbnTM announcing that it's adding more than 12,000 premises per week to its serviceable footprint.…
Lobbying group USTelecom – AT&T, Verizon etc – has filed a petition against itself in an effort to prevent new net neutrality rules from taking effect.…
Nearly a year after Google announced it was adapting Android to act as a car operating system, the first vehicle using the software has gone on sale from South Korean carmaker Hyundai.…
The US Internal Revenue Service said on Tuesday that info including tax returns and income forms for some 100,000 people were illegally accessed this year.…
In what could prove to be an extraordinary David versus Goliath story, an independent musician may walk away with the highly coveted .music top-level domain, beating off competition from Google, Amazon, and the music industry itself.…
Cortana, Microsoft's personal digital assistant that will be built into Windows 10, will also be available on Android and iOS devices, the software giant announced on Tuesday, confirming rumors that have been swirling around since March.…
Skype has been called to appear before a court in Belgium after refusing to hand over customer data following a request for assistance in a criminal investigation.…
Forged nearly 20 years ago, the 802.11 wireless networking standard was responsible for cutting the cord and letting us roam. During that time, 802.11 has evolved as devices using it have both proliferated and got smaller – while the data they swallow has grown in quantity and in size.…
Charter Communications has confirmed plans to merge with Time Warner Cable in a cash and shares deal worth $78.7bn.…
John Hartson, Ray Parlour and Nigel Winterburn – a veritable array of ex-Arsenal players – have learned how to say 'Huawei'.…
O2 customers up and down the UK were left without access to the carrier's mobile service on Bank Holiday Monday, after its network buckled for five hours yesterday evening.…
BT's boss has taken the opportunity during a visit to Australia to heap praise on his company's domestic broadband rollout, and antipodeans are lapping it up, with the local network builder promising to share information about how to build “superfast broadband”.…
Comcast may have given up trying to acquire Time Warner Cable, but junior US telco Charter now looks set to swoop with a deal of its own.…
Despite having claimed the scalp of his predecessor and a former chair – and almost forced a government takeover of the company – the new CEO of .UK registry Nominet, Russell Haworth, will look into how his organization is structured.…
For decades, we’ve survived quite nicely using on-premise storage. According to industry research, though, that may be changing as cloud-based storage emerges. A Tata Communications survey last year found that within ten years enterprises will store 58 per cent of their data in the cloud, compared with 28 per cent today.…
Businesses and researchers around Swansea are going to get the chance to fool around with what will probably be copper's last hurrah, the VDSL-successor G.fast.…
Australia's government is moving ahead with its planned revamp of spectrum management, in the hope of replacing today's fragmented management of the RF spectrum with a single regime.…
Edward Snowden supporters were claiming victory for the privacy of millions of US citizens today, after the Obama administration seemingly decided not to seek a 90-day extension to allow g-men to collect bulk phone records.…
Microsoft wanted to buy cloud giant Salesforce.com for $55bn, it is reported.…
Brocade's second quarter fiscal 2015 revenue was $547m, up two per cent year-on-year and down five per cent sequentially, as is Brocade's seasonal pattern. Net income was $77m, monstrously better than the $14m loss it announced a year ago.…
Be afraid. The previous government’s “elite digital team” which so brilliantly borked most of Whitehall’s websites, and that failed to meet its own targets, may be put in charge of handling real money: your money.…
Vodafone India, country’s second-biggest mobile operator, has announced it will hold off offering zero-rated services amid a fierce political argument about the practice.…
VMware is beta testing a database-as-a-service offering running SQL Server 2008 R2 & 2012.…
Singapore's dominant telco, Singtel, has announced a pilot deployment of 10Gbps broadband to a select group next quarter, and says that it expects the blistering fast Internet service to be generally available by the later part of this year.…
Today, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) added support for roles in the policy simulator, enabling you to test the effects of your roles’ access control policies. You can now use the policy simulator to troubleshoot permissions and verify access for managed or inline policies attached to a role in your account. Additionally, you can use the policy simulator as a “playground” to help you author least privilege policies for your roles. The policy simulator helps you to author and validate your policies by enabling you to simulate a single policy or a combination of policies.
Amazon CloudFront’s invalidation feature, which allows you to remove an object from the CloudFront cache before it expires, now supports the * wildcard character. You can add a * wildcard character at the end of an invalidation path to remove all objects that match this path. In the past, when you wanted to invalidate multiple objects, you had to list every object path separately. Now, you can easily invalidate multiple objects using the * wildcard character.
ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade has surprised the internet community by announcing he will step down from the job after just three years in the post.…
Proximus, the Belgian mobile operator, is about to complete the process of removing its last 300 phone boxes. The last will be ceremonially felled on June 1 in Antwerp.…
An Austrian newspaper has published what it claims is evidence that Deutsche Telekom spied on Vienna for German spooks for the miserly sum of just €6,500 a year.…
Restricting smart watch and mobile phone use can be a low-cost policy to reduce educational inequalities. This is the conclusion of a report by Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy working at the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance (pdf) and Louisiana State University.…
Google will start displaying real-time tweets on its search pages after a deal was struck with Twitter.…
You can now generate XDCAM-compatible video and FLAC audio using Amazon Elastic Transcoder. XDCAM is popularly used both as a mezzanine format and as a format for archival purposes in professional video production workflows. FLAC is a lossless compression format typically used as an intermediate step in an audio processing workflow. You can try out these formats by using the newly available system presets.
Patrick Drahi's telecommunications firm Altice is set to make its first foray into the American telecommunications market after acquiring a controlling stake in Suddenlink for over $9bn.…
Chinese megacorp Tencent is pushing ahead with an edict from China's Communist Party to improve the country's internet connections by upping its investment in software-defined networking.…
BT’s monopoly in supplying Blighty’s national broadband scheme may have permanently locked out future competition – according to an independent report card on the £780m public purse project.…
China's premier Li Keqiang has decided the nation's internet connections need to get faster and cheaper.…
Telstra has come up with six reasons for Netflix's rating of it as the worst-performing broadband network in Australia.…
Survey Results It is increasingly common for users and business groups to drive their own adoption of cloud services. But even where IT is involved, as organisations ramp up their use of cloud, activity is often uncoordinated. Pulling the threads together across service silos to manage risks effectively can be a challenge. The right strategy and governance processes, a well-thought-out hybrid cloud architecture, appropriate monitoring and management tooling and suitable operational procedures are all important to success.…
Virgin Media has admitted to The Register that hundreds of its mobile customers were left without their handsets for weeks due to a "glitch" with its repair service.…
Vodafone has announced steady-as-she-goes results for the year to 31 March 2015, with group revenue up 10.1 per cent to £42.2bn, and the first increase in service revenue for ten quarters (albeit only 0.1 per cent) — all pretty much in line with what the company had forecast.…
Europe’s competition chief has OKed Orange’s plans to take over Jazztel in Spain, but only subject to a shitload large number of conditions.…
VMware has announced that its Horizon Air desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and application-delivery-as-a-service (AdaaS) offerings will shortly become available from its Japanese and Australian bit barns.…
Mark Zuckerberg's Internet-for-all-via-Facebook, Internet.org, has attracted yet more unwanted attention, with 67 digital rights groups signing an open letter accusing the outfit of violating 'net neutrality.…
Verizon has put the latest numbers on its fibre-versus-copper experience, and found that glass beats metal on all counts.…
Australia's Taxation Office has issued a guidance note titled “Providing taxi travel services through ride-sourcing and your tax obligations” that makes it clear Uber drivers need to register for, collect and pay the nation's goods and services tax (GST).…
AWS CloudFormation has expanded the set of supported AWS parameter types. Parameters allow you to create templates that are customized each time you create a stack. You can now use Availability Zone, EC2 Instance Id, Image Id, Security Group Name, Volume Id, and Route 53 Hosted Zone Id as parameter types in addition to the parameter types already supported. Read more here.
AWS CloudTrail integration with Amazon CloudWatch Logs is now available in Northern California region. With this integration, you can monitor for specific API activity and receive email notifications when those specific API calls are made.
AWS CloudFormation has expanded the set of supported AWS parameter types. Parameters allow you to create templates that are customized each time you create a stack. You can now use Availability Zone, EC2 Instance Id, Image Id, Security Group Name, Volume Id, and Route 53 Hosted Zone Id as parameter types in addition to the parameter types already supported. Read more here.
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.
Gartner’s latest report on Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) places just two vendors in the coveted top right “Leaders” segment of its “Magic Quadrant” chart.…
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has joined criticism of Facebook's Internet.org project, saying it runs "a real risk" of turning the few websites that Zuck & Co. select, "including, of course, Facebook itself", into a "ghetto" for poor internet users – instead of being a stepping stone to the full WWW.…
Amazon’s mighty cloud will exist in its own time zone for a 24-hour period next month.…
We’re excited to announce the AWS Pop-up Loft is coming to New York City! Located on 350 W. Broadway, our space in SoHo is a great place to grab a coffee, learn about AWS, or just get some work done.
Google has announced what it calls "a new class of compute": virtual machines (VM) that are predictable in price but not in operation.…
BT claimed on Monday that its planned gobble of EE was a good thing for competition in the UK – despite the fact that such market consolidation would make the former state monopoly more powerful.…
For those mobile operators wanting to block adverts and prevent them reaching subscribers' screens (all in the name of reducing bandwidth usage and saving customers’ money of course) Israeli tech company Shine can make that happen.…
You can now simplify the task of running a cost effective fleet of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances by targeting multiple instance types in a single Spot fleet request. Starting today, you can include up to 20 launch specifications using the new RequestSpotFleet action. Previously, each Spot Instance request could accept only one instance type with a single launch specification.
Including multiple instance types in your fleet request can help lower your operational costs and improve your application availability. For example, if your application typically runs on c4.xlarge compute-optimized instances, but also performs effectively on c3.2xlarge, m3.2xlarge, and c4.2xlarge instances, you can target a broader set of instance types to launch your fleet in the lowest-priced pools.
You can request a fleet of Spot Instances into EC2-Classic, your default VPC, or an individual VPC subnet, in all regions except the AWS GovCloud (US) region and on all instance types available as Spot Instances today. To get started, request a fleet using the AWS SDKs or Command-Line Tools.
To learn more, read our blog post and Getting Started with Spot Fleet in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.
The delayed national broadband network (NBN) satellite launch will happen in 2015, Airanespace reckons.…
Google is cutting prices on its Cloud hosted computing service.…
Google has sold its rights to all internet addresses ending in ".car" to a joint partnership of two other registry operators.…
You can now use AWS OpsWorks with Amazon EC2 instances running Windows Server (2012 R2). OpsWorks is a service that helps you automate operational tasks like software installation and configuration, code deployment, and service discovery using Chef. OpsWorks gives you the flexibility to define your application architecture and resource configuration and handles the provisioning and management of your AWS resources for you. Click here to learn more about OpsWorks.
Hold on to your hats, Barack Obama has arrived on Twitter in his formal position of President of the United States.…
Expansion-hungry Alibaba is set to increase the global reach of its cloudy biz Aliyun by opening a data centre in Europe, a senior hand has told El Reg.…
EE was the most moaned-about ISP for the final nine months of 2014, Blighty's communications watchdog Ofcom said this morning.…
Interview It was a rare surprise when Brian (BJ) Jenkins left his position as boss of EMC's Backup Recovery Systems division to become CEO of Barracuda. Barracuda?…
Microsoft announced the Azure Stack at its Ignite event earlier this month, for running something like Azure on-premises, but how does it differ from the existing Azure Pack, which kind-of does the same thing?…
Britain's communications watchdog wants BT to open up its fibre broadband network to rival telcos.…
OpenStack can run a fine private cloud, if you have lots of people to throw at the project and are willing to do lots of coding, according to Alan Waite, a research director at Gartner.…
Security Explorations hacker Adam Gowdiak says three partial Java sandbox security holes still exist in Google App Engine.…
Pandora has lost a legal decision that will see the company fork out more money to publishing house BMI to pay for its content.…
Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that as Turkey doesn’t have 4G yet, the country might as well wait a couple of years and go straight to 5G.…
The road to separation continues to be anything but smooth for Symantec’s security operation, particularly on the consumer front, as it again suffered from sales shrinkage, unlike the breakaway storage biz.…
Cloud is upsetting the back-up apple cart and CommVault, already suffering from this, aims to move its software faster to the cloud. Four product announcements are the start of this.…
In June 2011, authorities in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided premises suspected of having something to do with kino.to, a site that offered links to a Megaupload-style file lockers containing unlicensed copies of movies, music and TV shows.…
Google looks to have signed a deal with the Indian State of Telangana that will see the company splash down a colossal campus in Hyderabad.…
You can now scale AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments on a defined schedule. Previously, you could scale your Amazon EC2 instances managed by Elastic Beanstalk based on user-defined triggers such as CPU utilization or bandwidth usage. Now, you can also scale your Amazon EC2 instances based on user-defined times. Time-based scaling helps you more efficiently and easily plan for predictable load changes based on your traffic patterns. You can proactively scale your application in advance of expected traffic through time-based scaling instead of waiting for your scaling action to be triggered by metrics. This improves your customers’ experience and helps you optimize cost.
Please see our documentation for more information on this feature.
For more information on AWS Elastic Beanstalk:
• Product Page
• Documentation
• Supported Platforms
APIs are now supported for the Simple AD and AD Connector directories in AWS Directory Service, enabling you to programmatically create and configure these directories via the AWS CLI and SDKs. API actions performed via the AWS SDK and CLI or the AWS Directory Service Console can be recorded via AWS CloudTrail, and permissions for performing these actions can be controlled via an AWS IAM policy. The APIs can be used in all AWS regions in which AWS Directory Service is available.
To get started, download the latest AWS SDK or CLI or learn more about the new APIs in our developer guide.
We are concluding the Developer Preview for the AWS Mobile SDK for Unity and making it Generally Available. The AWS Mobile SDK for Unity makes it easier for you to take advantage of AWS services for your games built in Unity. Specifically, the AWS Mobile SDK for Unity supports Amazon DynamoDB for NoSQL database, Amazon S3 for storage, Amazon Cognito for user identity management and data synchronization, and Amazon Mobile Analytics for tracking user and device based analytics. The AWS Mobile SDK for Unity is compatible with Unity 4.0 and onwards, and supports both the Free and Unity Pro versions.
To download the AWS SDK for Unity, visit our webpage. For more information, read our blog.
You can now easily join your Amazon EC2 for Windows instances to a domain that you have configured with AWS Directory Service in two additional regions, including EU (Ireland) and US West (Oregon). You can join an instance to an existing, on-premises Active Directory, using AD Connector, or a stand-alone, Simple AD directory running in the AWS Cloud. Once you configure this new feature using the AWS Management Console or the EC2 API, you can choose which domain a new instance will join when it launches. For existing instances, you can use the EC2 API to seamlessly join them to a domain.
AWS Directory Service is a managed service that allows you to connect your AWS resources with an existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory or to set up a new, stand-alone directory in the AWS Cloud. Connecting to an on-premises directory is easy and once this connection is established, all users can access AWS resources and applications with their existing corporate credentials. You can also launch managed, Samba-based directories in a matter of minutes.
To get started, please see our blog, or learn more about AWS Directory Service by visiting our website.
Storage bits still prefer Microsoft over Amazon's cloud. So says a report by storage gateway start-up Nasuni.…
TalkTalk's share price dropped two per cent after it delivered its best ever quarterly financial results, for the end of 2014.…
Global e-commerce company Alibaba has set its sights on world domination, with its new chief executive outlining global expansion as the company's top priority.…
Feature Exactly a year ago today Adobe’s Creative Cloud servers went dark for a whole day, leaving some users unable to open their apps. Deadlines were missed, clients were let down, digital editions failed to appear and a generally crap time was had by all.…
Google has published some details of its efforts to comply with the Court of Justice of the European Union's “right to be forgotten” decision that compelled search engines to remove links if citizens ask them to do so.…
The AWS WW Public Sector team just launched the AWS Educate program on May 14th. With the dramatically increasing demand for cloud employees and individuals entering the workforce with relevant experience, AWS Educate provides an academic gateway for that next generation of IT and Cloud professionals. AWS Educate is Amazon's global initiative to provide students and educators with the resources needed to greatly accelerate cloud-related learning endeavors and to help power the entrepreneurs, workforce, and researchers of tomorrow. There is no cost to join and AWS Educate provides hands-on access to AWS technology, training resources, course content and collaboration forums.
Students and educators apply online at www.awseducate.com in order to access:
For more information, please contact us. Don't forget to refer your network and school to AWS Educate #awseducate.
If you use Windows, you can forget about installing Chrome extensions from sites other than Google's store, effective immediately – even if you're a web developer. And the same will soon be true for Mac users, too.…
Fujitsu has released a smartphone that it claims is the first in the world to use iris scanning to replace passwords or fingerprint readers.…
The Federal Communications Commission is reportedly ready to approve US telecom giant AT&T's proposed $49bn acquisition of DirecTV, despite concerns voiced by Netflix and other online media outfits.…
The MVNO beloved by Californians, FreedomPop, is courting beta testers in the UK. The service will offer 200MBs of data, 200 voice minutes, and 200 texts completely free each month via the FreedomPop app, or new international SIM.…
Chinese iPhone manufacturer Foxconn has joined Twitter, Qualcomm, Telefónica and others to swell Cyanogen’s round C funding to $110m.…
Analysis Tesco is rumoured to be selling off Tesco Mobile, its mobile phone network. The move comes as no surprise, with the company hauling back to its core businesses after dismal results, recently writing down assets to post a loss of £6.4m.…
Facebook has inked news-hosting deals with nine media outfits including the BBC and Buzzfeed, in a move to slurp ad revenue from publishers and keep netizens locked into its site for even longer.…
Google and Facebook are throwing people and money at the EU in an effort to ensure more laws go their way.…
A route-planning app that will enable lorries to avoid left-hand turns – manoeuvres responsible for the majority of road deaths among cyclists – is being piloted in a scheme funded by the government's Transport Systems Catapult.…
G2 Instances are now available in our EU (Frankfurt) region. G2 instances feature two sizes, the g2.2xlarge and g2.8xlarge. The g2.2xlarge is backed by a single high-performance NVIDIA GRID GPU, making it well suited for 3D visualizations or streaming graphics-intensive applications. The g2.8xlarge instance is backed by four high-performance NVIDIA GPUs, making it well suited for GPU compute workloads including large scale rendering, machine learning, transcoding, and other server-side workloads that require massive parallel processing power. With G2 instances, you can build high-performance DirectX, OpenGL, CUDA, and OpenCL applications and services without making expensive up-front capital investments.
G2 instances are also available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS regions. Customers can launch G2 instances using the AWS console, Amazon EC2 command line interface, AWS SDKs and third party libraries. To learn more about G2 instances, visit http://ift.tt/1G5sJd4. To get started immediately, visit the AWS Marketplace for GPU machine images from NVIDIA and other Marketplace sellers.
IoT World 2015 Samsung is offering prizes of up to US$90,000 to device devs who come up with good ways to tackle the record-setting drought in California – and who are willing to use the its brand-new Artik Internet of Things (IoT) platform to do so.…
Citrix has kicked off its Synergy shindig with a preview of its new Citrix Workspace Cloud, an application and desktop delivery tool it's billing as “a new control plane that merges the worlds of on-premises and cloud, allowing IT managers to create secure, mobile workspaces that include desktops, applications and data from whatever infrastructure source best meets their specific needs.”…
BUDGET 2015 The 2015 Federal Budget has set the date at which the government will drive the national broadband network (NBN not nbnTM) to a quiet country road, open the door, and drive off.…
Samsung has used the occasion of the Internet of Things World conference in San Francisco on Tuesday to unveil Artik, a new set of "building blocks" optimized for wearables and other connected devices.…
You can now scale Amazon EC2 instances managed by AWS OpsWorks using custom CloudWatch alarms, and you can now choose EBS block device settings for your instances.
You can already scale your load-based instances based on CPU utilization, memory utilization, or load. You can now set custom CloudWatch alarms as thresholds for scaling. For example, you can use ‘Disk Reads’ or ‘Network In’ as metrics to scale up or down your load-based instances. See the documentation for more details.
You can now set the EBS block device settings for instances managed by OpsWorks. You can change the size and type of your EBS root volume (e.g., General Purpose (SSD)) as well as attach available ephemeral volumes. See the documentation for more details.
For more information on AWS OpsWorks:
Microsoft has put out 13 bulletins to address a total of 48 CVE-listen vulnerabilities in various products.…
Microsoft's Skype Translator, which automatically converts some voice calls and IMs between languages, has been available to beta testers for some time, but Redmond has now opened it up as a Preview to the general public – provided they have the right operating system.…
Exclusive CSC has initiated legal action against Eric Pulier, formerly head of strategy for the company's Emerging Business group, over his actions as head of service.…
US mobile operators Sprint and Verizon will pay a combined $158m in fees to settle charges that they allowed advertisers to tack unwanted premium charges onto customers' bills.…
Mozilla has released the first version of its Firefox browser to include support for Encrypted Media Extensions, a controversial World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) spec that brings digital rights management (DRM) to HTML5's video tag.…
Rackspace is growing – just not fast enough for the Wall Street pack. Looks like it’s time to roll out the service troops to support rivals' clouds.…
Elon Musk has come out fighting online to defend his reputation after quotes in a new book about the space and electric car enthusiast made him look like a bit of a git.…
Rural English villages that almost nobody has heard of are set to receive broadband connections that are nearly fifty times faster than the national average.…
BT's plans to develop improved broadband infrastructure would be put at risk if Ofcom decided to force it to sell off its Openreach division, the company's chief executive has said.…
Microsoft's only just announced its new Nano server, but has been using it in production on Azure since late 2013.…
Shares of cloud hosting provider Rackspace were battered on Monday after the firm reported a lackluster forecast for the second quarter of its fiscal 2015.…
Amazon RDS and Amazon Redshift now allow you to encrypt your data using keys you manage through AWS Key Management Service (KMS) in the AWS GovCloud (US) region.
On a database instance running with Amazon RDS encryption, data stored at rest in the underlying storage is encrypted, as are its automated backups, read replicas, and snapshots. Encryption and decryption are handled transparently so you don’t have to modify your application to access your data. For more information about the use of AWS Key Management Service with Amazon RDS, see the Amazon RDS User's Guide. To learn more about AWS KMS, visit the AWS KMS overview page.
You can use KMS keys to encrypt Amazon Redshift clusters. For more information about the use of AWS Key Management Service with Amazon Redshift, go to Amazon Redshift Database Encryption.
AWS GovCloud (US) is an AWS region designed to allow U.S. government agencies at the federal, state and local level, along with contractors, educational institutions, enterprises and other U.S. customers to run regulated workloads in the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. Beyond the assurance programs applicable to all AWS regions, the AWS GovCloud (US) region allows you to adhere to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) regulations, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMPSM) requirements and the Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Security Model (CSM) Levels 3-5.
To get started in the AWS GovCloud (US) region, contact us today!
Australia's dominant carrier, Telstra, offers Netflix customers the slowest download speeds, the video-streamer says.…
Apple is now the top smartphone seller in China, topping foreign and domestic competitors alike in the Middle Kingdom, but overall Chinese handset sales fell for the first time in six years.…
You can now use Interleaved Sort Keys to quickly filter data without the need for indices or projections in Amazon Redshift. A table with interleaved keys arranges your data so each sort key column has equal importance. While Compound Sort Keys are more performant if you filter on the leading sort key columns, interleaved sort keys provide fast filtering no matter which sort key columns you specify in your WHERE clause. To create an interleaved sort, simply define your sort keys as INTERLEAVED in your CREATE TABLE statement.
The performance benefit of interleaved sorting increases with table size, and is most effective with highly selective queries that filter on multiple columns. For example, assume your table contains 1,000,000 blocks (1 TB per column) with an interleaved sort key of both customer ID and product ID. You will scan 1,000 blocks when you filter on a specific customer or a specific product, a 1000x increase in query speed compared to the unsorted case. If you filter on both customer and product, you will only need to scan a single block.
For more information, please see our AWS Blog Post on Interleaved Sorting and review our documentation on Best Practices for Designing Tables.
You can now access Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using VPC endpoints. Amazon VPC endpoints are easy to configure and provide reliable connectivity to Amazon S3 without requiring an internet gateway or a Network Address Translation (NAT) instance. With VPC endpoints, the data between the VPC and S3 is transferred within the Amazon network, helping protect your instances from internet traffic.
Amazon VPC endpoints for Amazon S3 provide two additional security controls to help limit access to S3 buckets. You can now require that requests to your S3 buckets originate from a VPC using a VPC endpoint. Additionally, you can control what buckets, requests, users, or groups are allowed through a specific VPC endpoint.
Amazon VPC endpoints for Amazon S3 is available in the US Standard, US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.
To learn more about Amazon VPC endpoints for S3, visit Using VPC Endpoints.
From Tuesday, Google is cutting user-submitted edits from its Maps feature after admitting that it can't prevent online tricksters from abusing the system.…
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says it will implement its net neutrality provisions despite objections from telcos.…
Analysis The appointment of backbench Tory heavyweight John Whittingdale MP to head the Ministry of Fun will throw the BBC’s senior management into a state of high anxiety, and have the Beeb's opponents grabbing their crotches in excitement.…
Czech company AeroMobil, which claims to have spotted a gap in the market for flying cars, managed to take its experimental prototype to an altitude of 300 metres before test pilot and inventor, Stefan Klein, "encountered an unexpected situation" and opened the vehicle's parachute.…
Comment It's not the end after all. End-point backup 'n' sharing biz Druva believes it can extend its end-point expertise to remote offices.…
A conference at Bristol university is set to reveal the current state of the art on Full Duplex technology, which allows for transmitting and receiving signals on the same frequency at the same time.…
Australia's treasurer* Joe Hockey has revealed that he and other money ministers from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have shared plans to have online retailers charging the appropriate consumption tax on intangibles and goods bought online, at the rate of the buyer's home nations.…
Australia's government has slapped the defibrillator on the Vertigan review of the National Broadband Network (NBN), and is asking for submissions about how subsidies for unprofitable services in remote areas should operate.…
In its relentless search for regulations that impose unnecessary compliance costs on industry, the federal government is considering scrapping untimed local telephone calls in Australia, again.…
Google's revealed that it has once again borked its own cloud with an update.…
Two men, who were indicted and arrested Stateside on Friday for allegedly breaching pic-hosting website Photobucket.com, face conspiracy and fraud charges.…
"You've come here at the absolute worst time," Jamie Siminoff tells us as we enter Ring's headquarters in Santa Monica.…
The long-delayed "Snooper's Charter" allowing increased interception of communications by the security services and the police is set to be introduced at last, Home Secretary Theresa May has suggested.…
Revenue soared by 45 per cent at Chinese e-commerce and tat bazaar giant Alibaba to 17.43bn yuan (£1.8bn) for its first quarter, compared with the same period last year.…
NetSuite, the ERP-as-a-service firm, is shifting its entire business – and therefore that of its customers - off Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) and onto Microsoft’s Azure.…
Given that the election results are nearly all in it's going to be some few femtoseconds before Polly Toynbee starts claiming that it's the right wing media that woefully misinformed the British public and that's why the forces of all that's good and proper didn't win.…
Science has published research conducted by two Facebook staff and one academic from the University of Michigan on “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook.”…
A hacker who had spent weeks pwning fellow Guild Wars 2 players got some stylised justice when the game creators made a spectacle of his banning and character destruction.…
Oracle's senior veep for cloud Peter Magnusson says the company has hired about 40 engineers from failed OpenStack startup Nebula.…
Transport's enfant terrible, Uber, has reportedly put in a bid to acquire Nokia's HERE mapping unit.…
Now that a US federal court has ruled that the NSA's mass wiretapping program exceeded its legal authority, leaders of the US Republican party are pushing to make it legal.…
AWS CodeDeploy is now available in the EU (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS regions.
AWS CodeDeploy is a service that automates code deployments to any instance, including Amazon EC2 instances and instances running on-premises. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for you to rapidly release new features, helps you avoid downtime during deployment, and handles the complexity of updating your applications. You can use AWS CodeDeploy to automate deployments, eliminating the need for error-prone manual operations, and the service scales with your infrastructure so you can easily deploy to one instance or thousands.
AWS CodeDeploy is also currently available in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) AWS regions. Please visit our product page for more information.
AT&T has apparently had a rethink regarding its policy of limiting data transfer speeds for heavy users who subscribe to its so-called unlimited data plans.…
Microsoft has included a surprise feature in its new Edge web browser for Windows 10, in the form of support for the ultra-optimizable Asm.js JavaScript dialect.…
The AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. KMS is a service that makes it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data and uses Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to protect the security of your keys. This capability is a critical requirement for running regulated workloads in the cloud.
With the availability of KMS, you are now able to encrypt data in your own applications and within the following AWS services using keys under your control:
In addition, AWS KMS is integrated with AWS CloudTrail to provide you with centralized logging of all key usage to help meet your regulatory and compliance needs.
AWS GovCloud (US) is an AWS region designed to allow U.S. government agencies at the federal, state and local level, along with contractors, educational institutions, enterprises and other U.S. customers to run regulated workloads in the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. Beyond the assurance programs applicable to all AWS regions, the AWS GovCloud (US) region allows you to adhere to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) regulations, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMPSM) requirements and the Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Security Model (CSM) Levels 3-5.
To get started in the AWS GovCloud (US) region, contact us today!
T-Mobile has taken up the cause of BlackBerry, agreeing to offer the fading firm's products in its mobile lineup, nearly two years after it dropped the Canadian's hardware from retail stores.…
Amazon SES now supports CloudTrail logging. CloudTrail is a service that can capture a subset of the API calls that you make from the Amazon SES console or from the Amazon SES API and deliver the log files to an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. All Amazon SES APIs except for the email-sending APIs (SendEmail and SendRawEmail) are supported. Using the information collected by CloudTrail, you can determine what request was made to Amazon SES, the source IP address from which the request was made, who made the request, when it was made, and so on.
To learn how to use CloudTrail to track Amazon SES API calls, go to the Amazon SES Developer Guide. For general information about CloudTrail, see the CloudTrail User Guide.
The first government-approved BitCoin exchange in the US has gone live.…
Gigantic scraper ad platform Google has set aside $150m (£98m) of its annual $66bn (£43bn) turnover (that is zero point zero zero two of its money) to tackle the weighty issue of diversity within its workforce.…
Antivirus ratings firms AV‐Comparatives, AV-Test, and Virus Bulletin have stripped another company of its rankings for trying to game their tests.…
The Australian Labor Party is considering whether it might be able to revive some kind of fibre-to-the-premises policy to take to the 2016 election.…
You won't have to worry about dodgy toolbars, rogue ActiveX controls, or buggy plugins when you use Microsoft Edge (née Project Spartan), Redmond's new web browser for Windows 10. But you can also forget about extending the browser in any way, at least at first.…
Google has announced the impending retirement of its PageSpeed Service web optimization tool, and potentially causing headaches for sites that don't account for the move.…
It wasn't that long ago that when you wanted decent software you went to a retail store like Staples and bought a cardboard box with a CD inside.…
Collision 2015 We should rent our Nest thermostats, Sonos speakers and August smartlocks, according to Jason Johnson, the CEO of internet-of-doorlocks upstart August.…
The Windows 10 Store will include traditional Windows desktop applications, thanks to Microsoft's Project Centennial (Project C).…
Apple is set to introduce DNA handling to iOS apps, allowing the data collected by sensors in Sir Jony's timepiece be fed to genetic researchers from willing subjects.…
3D printing posterchild MakerBot moved too fast with untested technology and that's why it was forced to cut 20 per cent of its staff, abolish three divisions and closed three shops.…
Analysis Europe’s digital single market proposals encapsulate many of the EU’s problems in one handy document. The intentions are noble, but the utopian “solutions” are clumsy and inept, leaving Eurocrats attempting to brute-force something that people don’t want onto a diverse and disparate collection of countries.…
Puppet Enterprise is getting a boost in its global sales footprint, with EMC deciding its customers need a bit of devops love and adding the automation suite to its hybrid clouds.…
The EU’s executive arm has officially launched its probe into the e-commerce sector to find out why Europeans aren’t buying across national borders much.…
Users of Apple's healthcare data app platform - intended to allow developers access to healthcare info collected via its wristy watch gizmo - could be left wide open to security exploits, infosec bods have warned.…
Sales rose 6.5 per cent to £699m during accounts-ware biz Sage's half-year results, despite the company's poor cloudy progress.…
The European Commission has finally unveiled its big Digital Single Market Strategy (DSM). Despite leak after leak over recent weeks, Digi Commissioners Andrus “The Robot” Ansip and Gunther H-Dot Oettinger took to the podium together (for the first time) with due pomp and ceremony on Wednesday.…
Google has opened up its Bigtable database – which, among other things powers the ad giant's search tech – to businesses handling vast amounts of data.…
The United States Federal Trade Commission is investigating Apple, again, following concerns that its to-be-relaunched Beats Music streaming service may gain an unfair advantage by exploiting the market dominance of Apple's iTunes store.…
Global digital content sales are on track to hit $154bn (£113bn) annually by 2019, up 60 per cent from 2014, according to recent analysis.…
The NSA has been using software to convert intercepted phone calls into transcripts stored in searchable databases, it is claimed. It is also entirely believable: Dragon Dictate isn't exactly top secret, is it?…
The UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has set up a new focus group to look at how today’s landline networks can be adapted to provide the backhaul for 5G. In other words, how to use today's cabling to link high-speed 5G phone masts to carrier networks and the wider internet.…
