Cisco will buy privately held net security firm OpenDNS for $635m in cash, to make good its cloud security portfolio, and boost the networking giant's "security everywhere" approach.…
Microsoft has released build 10158 of Windows 10 as part of its Windows Insider preview programme, with general manager Gabe Aul stating that “we don’t have any significant known issues for this build.”…
After 12 hours of negotiations, EU negotiators agreed at 3am on Tuesday to impose a low cap on mobile phone roaming charges for calls, texts and data.…
It's really cheap to spin up a single VM in a cloud like the one operated by Amazon Web Services (AWS).…
Microsoft is stepping away from the online display ads business and will hand off sales and management of ads on several of its prime online properties to AOL.…
AWS Lambda is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region.
Cost Explorer provides you with interactive graphical reports, designed to make it easier for you to view, understand, and control your AWS costs. The data behind these reports is updated daily, so that you can view the most up-to-date information about your costs.
You can now simplify the task of managing costs on AWS with Budgets. Starting today, you can define a monthly budget for your AWS costs—whether at an aggregate cost level (i.e., “all costs”) or further refined to include only those costs relating to specific cost dimensions or groups of cost dimensions, including Linked Account, Service, Tag, Availability Zone (“AZ”), Purchase Option (e.g., Reserved), and/or API Operation.
Video Next month, 100 US police departments will start deploying a new, ball-shaped camera that can be thrown into dangerous areas to scout out life-threatening situations.…
Blighty's communications watchdog declined this morning to comment on Sky's demands for an in-depth competition probe of BT's broadband biz.…
Despite the majority of Reg readers thinking that 5G can wait, there needs to be some planning as to how spectrum will be allocated if the same frequencies are to be made available globally.…
Comment With bad things possibly in the post for Microsoft’s Windows phone business, its commander Stephen Elop has been shown the door by Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella. As a hardened Elop detractor I literally cheered at the news.…
A bunch of Australian fixed telephony and broadband users are about to suffer under a regime of lower prices.…
The cloud storage market is a three-way race with the trailing pack choosing to occupy niches rather than challenge the leaders, according to the market scryers of Gartner.…
The ACCC has rubber-stamped the agreements needed to let nbnTM absorb Telstra's copper for fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) broadband.…
A group of university researchers claim to have developed a method to increase the data bandwidth of fiber optic cables by eliminating a barrier that has limited the maximum power at which optical signals can be sent.…
Delphi Automotive has contradicted a senior exec at the company by denying that one of its robo-cars had come close to being pranged by a Google self-driving vehicle.…
Comment Google appears to be "complying" with the so-called European "right to be forgotten" ruling in a way which has helped convicted criminals to give their reputations an unexpected boost.…
Comment Google appears to be "complying" with the so-called European "right to be forgotten" ruling in a way which has helped convicted criminals to give their reputations an unexpected boost.…
The hated Care.data programme is one of four government IT projects progressing so poorly its delivery has been deemed "unachievable", according to a government watchdog report.…
Before humanity's final battle against our erstwhile robotic minions, both man and tin can must stifle dissent from within. Man has been murdering itself since time inconceivable, but now two "uncrashable" self-driving cars have almost come to blows in California.…
Sir Mark Waller, the Intelligence Services Commissioner, has delivered his fourth annual report to the Prime Minister, revealing that GCHQ's internal monitoring system slurped up its own employees' privates to an unauthorised degree.…
+Poll The headlong rush into 5G is an unnecessary technology treadmill, or so the great and the good of the wireless world have concluded.…
There’s nothing like sweetening the bad news medicine, and that’s what Microsoft’s tried with its latest internal staff memo.…
You can now launch R3 instances, the latest generation of Amazon EC2 memory optimized instances in the South America (Sao Paulo) AWS region. R3 offers the best price point per GiB of RAM and high memory performance. R3 instances are recommended for In-memory analytics like SAP HANA, high performance databases including relational databases and NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, and MemcacheD/Redis applications. R3 instances support Hardware Virtualization (HVM) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) only.
R3 instances, powered by Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge processors, offer up to 32 vCPUs, 244 GiB of memory, and can deliver up to 150,000 4 KB random reads per second. R3 instances support Enhanced Networking for higher packet per second (PPS) performance, lower network jitter, and lower network latencies. Please refer to R3 technical documentation for additional reference. R3 instances are available in two instance sizes in South America (Sao Paulo) AWS region with following specification:
With an uncharacteristic lack of fanfare, Google has decided to hang around the kitchen at the code repository party.…
The Communications Alliance has told the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission it wants deployment rules to leave room for G.fast in the future.…
The Australian government has embarked on a mobile blackspot crackdown with funding released for the creation of 499 new mobile base stations to improve coverage in rural and remote areas.…
Satya Nadella, the man who succeeded Steve Ballmer as Microsoft's CEO and only the third chief exec in the company's history, believes the software giant is poised to achieve "magical things" in the coming years.…
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) boss Tom Wheeler is proposing new rules to the upcoming wireless spectrum auction that are designed to limit the ability for large telcos to snap up space meant for small carriers.…
T-Mobile users with iPhones are being beset by a mysterious issue that causes their handsets to randomly flash a blue screen and then reset itself.…
Comment ICANN is 17 years old. It's about to be given the keys to its dad's car. And we are all going to have to take a ride with it every day.…
Alexa is the cloud-based voice service that powers Amazon Echo, a new category of device designed around your voice. AWS Lambda is now integrated with the Alexa Skills Kit, a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation and code samples that make it fast and easy for you to create new voice-driven capabilities (or “skills”) for Alexa. You simply upload the Lambda function code for the new Alexa skill you are creating, and AWS Lambda does the rest, executing the code in response to Alexa voice interactions and automatically managing the compute resources on your behalf. No prior experience with speech recognition or natural language understanding is required—Amazon does all the work to hear, understand, and process the voice interactions.
Read the Alexa Skills Kit documentation for more details. Visit our console to get started with our Alexa Skills template.
Amazon is reaching out to developers in an effort to build a rival to voice assistant services like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana.…
At the annual Yahoo! shareholder's meeting, CEO Marissa Mayer unveiled her new strategy for making the struggling web portal popular again by buying its way into Oracle's Java upgrade software.…
BT is asking Ofcom to be freed from its obligation to provide ordinary PSTN/POTS voice telephone connections across the UK. The telecoms giant would prefer to provide only internet services, and let customers use them for voice calls.…
City on a Cloud Launches at the 2015 Government, Education and Nonprofits Symposium in Washington, D.C.
Through our City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge, we will recognize local and regional governments that are hubs of innovation and driving technology solutions to help improve citizens' lives. Visit our map of the "City on a Cloud" to learn what cities can do with cloud computing or see the solutions deployed by last year's winners at: http://ift.tt/1fXreMl. For details, please email the WW PS Marketing team at: aws-wwps-marketing@amazon.com.
Project management as a service vendor Clarizen will open a European datacentre this summer as it seeks to assure customers here that the US government will not rifle through their Gantt charts whenever they feel like it.…
Google tops the list of companies lobbying in Brussels, according to a report published on Wednesday by Transparency International (TI).…
The promise of IT service management is to deliver services that make sense to their business users. To do that, though, IT departments must be able to untangle their own internal resources.…
From the day I arrived in Australia, I’ve had a high-speed broadband connection. The owner of the ISP came over to my flat to set it up, attaching a point-to-point wireless link to my terrace, then aiming it at his offices.…
The most recent Akamai State of the Internet report has found Australia has the fastest mobile download speeds in the Asia Pacific region, peaking at an astonishing 149.3 Mbps.…
Red Hat Summit Docker wasn't the only firm blabbing away about containers this week. On Wednesday, top Linux vendor Red Hat unveiled two new offerings at its Red Hat Summit conference in Boston, and both had containers at their cores.…
DockerCon 2015 The themes of Docker's past conferences has been increasing adoption of the container tech, but the theme of this year's DockerCon was moving beyond experimentation and into production deployment.…
Redmond's plan to get its code running everywhere took another step forward on Wednesday when it released free versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Android phones.…
DockerCon 2015 Microsoft has doubled down on its support for Docker, further integrating the software container tech with Azure and Visual Studio Online and demoing the first-ever containerized application spanning both Windows and Linux systems.…
SQL Server, with Windows and Office, helped make Microsoft. The database sits in a $13bn business unit and while Microsoft’s server products grew 11 per cent – $1.7bn last year – that was driven primarily by sales of SQL Server.…
All of US carrier Verizon's services have been struck down by an outage across Delaware, New Jersey, and New York since 5:27am EDT.…
Sick of repeating the same information every time you need the authorities to help you out? So is the European Commission.…
Facebook has beefed up Instagram's search functions to pull the photo-sharing service into line with the rest of Mark Zuckerberg's siloed empire.…
At the end of last week, the GreenTouch telco energy-efficiency consortium told a presumably-glittering event in New York that its five-year project to design more energy-efficient telecommunications has been a success.…
Google side-project Sidewalk Labs is buying the companies running New York's LyncNYC project that offers public WiFi from payphones, in the hope of one day achieving World DominationTM.…
A trinity of network failures led to the grounding of all aircraft in New Zealand yesterday.…
The US Congress has had a second stab at trying to get Amazon its own internet extension in a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).…
The AWS CodeDeploy agent is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 and higher. This is in addition to Amazon Linux, Ubuntu Server, and Microsoft Windows Server operating systems that are currently supported. The CodeDeploy agent is also available as open source software here. Please see the documentation for more information on operating system support.
For more information on AWS CodeDeploy, please visit our product page to learn more.
A week before Apple launches its streaming music service, Google has sneaked out a free-to-use rival.…
You can now manage updates of the agent software running on instances managed by AWS OpsWorks. Previously, OpsWorks automatically updated a stack to the latest released agent. Now, you can control whether you want to automatically or manually update the agent version of your stack. This allows you to test new agents before rolling it out to your production stacks.
New stacks you create will have the latest agent version installed, but the default agent configuration will be manual update. Your existing stacks have been updated to reflect this configuration. You will see a notification in the management console with a link to the change log when new versions of the OpsWorks agent are made available.
Read more about the new features in our documentation. For more information about AWS OpsWorks, please visit our product page.
AWS Config is a fully managed service that gives you an inventory of your AWS resources, notifies you when the configurations of your resources change, and lets you audit the history of the configurations for those resources.
You can now set up AWS Config to record changes for specific resource types. You will only be charged for changes to resource types that are being recorded. Visit the Set Up page on the AWS Config console to start using this capability. By default, all supported resource types are recorded.
For more information about AWS Config, please visit:
AWS Config Console Page http://ift.tt/10WZFlN
AWS Config Documentation http://ift.tt/1GFkhzO
Quick Starts are automated reference deployments for key enterprise workloads on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Each Quick Start launches, configures, and runs the AWS compute, network, storage, and other services required to deploy a specific workload on AWS, using AWS best practices for security and availability.
Trend Micro Deep Security is a host-based security product that provides intrusion detection and prevention, anti-malware, host firewall, file and system integrity monitoring, and log inspection modules in a single agent running in the guest operating system.
This Quick Start describes the recommended deployment of Trend Micro Deep Security version 9.5 into an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) from the AWS Marketplace. In addition, the Quick Start includes sample code to show how you can use both the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) API and the Deep Security API to ensure that every instance running within your AWS environment is being protected.
To get started, use the following resources:
We are happy to announce support for searching your log events in the Amazon CloudWatch console. Also, you can now view log events across multiple log streams from a single log group in one place.
With this update, you can search for specific words or patterns in your logs to help you quickly find the information you need. For example, you can search for the word "Exception" in your application logs, HTTP 400 errors in your web request logs or a user name in your AWS CloudTrail logs. All of your log events can be searched no matter how old they are.
If you already have logs in Amazon CloudWatch Logs, you can get started immediately by clicking the "Search Events" button when viewing log streams in a log group in the CloudWatch console.
To get started with Amazon CloudWatch Logs, see Getting Started with CloudWatch Logs. To learn more about pricing for CloudWatch Logs, see Amazon CloudWatch pricing. To learn more about how CloudWatch can help you better understand and operate your systems and applications, see the Amazon CloudWatch product details.
ISC2 has announced the dates of its training courses for its new cloud security certification, created alongside Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), beginning with exam availability in PearsonVUE testing centres from 21 July.…
Germany's electricity, gas, telecoms, post and railway regulator, the Bundesnetzagentur, has raised €5.08bn in its latest spectrum auction - including flogging the 700MHz frequencies currently in use by TV channels.…
America's cable broadband lobby has decided it doesn't like proposals for unlicensed LTE, claiming that LTE-U rollouts will interfere with citizens' WiFi kit.…
Amazon Glacier now allows you to tag your Glacier vaults for easier resource and cost management. Tags are labels that you can define and associate with your vaults, and using tags adds filtering capabilities to operations such as AWS cost reports. For example, you can use tags to allocate Glacier costs and usage across multiple departments in your organization or by any other categorization. You can then identify the department with the most Glacier storage costs or view the storage growth of a particular cost center over a period of time. To do this, simply add “Department” or “Cost Center” tags to your vaults and use the AWS Cost Allocation Reports tool to view a breakdown of costs and usage by tag.
You can tag your vaults by using the Glacier Console or the Glacier APIs. To learn more about tagging your Glacier vaults, read the AWS blog and visit Tagging Your Amazon Glacier Vaults.
Uber's smartphone app will soon track and report back the whereabouts of its users even when they're not using the software, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) now fears.…
DockerCon 2015 For a while, it looked as though software containers were heading for the kind of standards squabble that has plagued the tech industry too often in its history.…
Version 3 of the AWS SDK for Python, also known as Boto3, is now stable and generally available. Feedback collected from preview users as well as long-time Boto users has been our guidepost along the development process, and we are excited to bring this new stable version to our Python customers. Boto3 comes with the following key features:
Today, we are announcing support for Dell NetVault Backup 10.0 with AWS Storage Gateway-Virtual Tape Library (VTL). You can now backup and archive directly to scalable, cost-effective, secure Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier storage using Gateway-VTL with NetVault Backup.
This support applies to new and existing gateways created or updated as of the December 16, 2014, AWS Storage Gateway maintenance update (see the NetVault Backup Compatibility Matrix). For the complete list of supported backup applications and to get started, see the AWS Storage Gateway-VTL User Guide.
Analysis Tech oligarchs aren’t supposed to say sorry. And no, Apple hasn’t formally apologized to the music community for demanding that it works for Apple for free, Apple still comes out of it with plenty of credit.…
Virgin Media has started work connecting customers to the fibre broadband infill it announced in February.…
Low-cost mobile virtual network operator Lebara is following the non-virtual operators in a step towards quad-play with a TV offering — and for the moment at least skipping broadband and fixed.…
Privacy International and Liberty failed today to convince the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) that GCHQ had unlawfully intercepted and snooped on UK-based human rights groups.…
An unspecified IT attack has left 1,400 passengers of Polish flag carrier LOT Polish Airlines stuck in Warsaw, after the company discovered it was unable to file flight plans for its departing aircraft.…
Despite Margrethe Vestager – the EU’s anti-trust supremo – railing against telco mergers earlier this month, French mega-company Altice has made a €10bn bid for the telco part of rival Bouygues.…
The Post Office has launched its own mobile phone service.…
The rotating restaurant at the top of the BT Tower will open for two weeks this year to celebrate its 50th anniversary.…
Telstra’s free wi-fi hotspots have gone dark ahead of a commercial launch of the service sometime later this year.…
A couple of Australian telco industry veterans reckon the Internet of Things needs an access network of its own, to meet the requirements of cheap, low-volume traffic.…
Following a working party meeting in San Diego, the ITU has announced the timeline for 5G standardisation.…
Microsoft has been forced to quietly edit a misleading blog post that seemed to suggest that anyone could get their mitts on Windows 10 for free – if they first installed a test version of Redmond's upcoming operating system for PCs.…
Twitter has began testing out new shopping features on the micro-blogging site and app as it seeks more ways to bolster its revenue.…
Google has said it will remove so-called revenge porn images from its search results, if the subjects of the images ask it to.…
From tomorrow it will be easier for consumers to switch from a crap broadband provider to, er, well, another — possibly slightly less crap — broadband provider.…
Google's endured a wobbly week in the cloud, suffering three brown-outs of varying severity.…
At a minute after midnight on Sunday, UTC time, .sucks domains will go on sale to anyone who wants one.…
Red Hat's sales jumped 14 per cent, year-on-year, in the quarter that ended May 31, thanks to contracts with government and cloud providers.…
You can now deregister task definitions that are no longer needed. Task definitions are a description of an application that contains one or more container definitions. You create new task definition revisions as you update your application. You can now deregister task definitions to remove outdated revisions. You can also sort task definitions from oldest to newest or newest to oldest, making it easy to find specific task definition revisions.
FCC commissioners embarked on a Reagan-quoting political bake-off today as the regulator sought to expand its discount telephone service for flat-broke families.…
You can now create MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle RDS database instances with up to 6TB of storage and SQL Server RDS database instances with up to 4TB of storage when using the Provisioned IOPS and General Purpose (SSD) storage types. Existing MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle RDS database instances can be scaled to these new database storage limits without any downtime.
Users of large transactional databases and data warehouses can now run even larger, higher performance workloads on a single database instance, without needing to shard the data across multiple RDS instances. The new storage limit doubles the available storage for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle databases on RDS, and quadruples the former limit for RDS SQL Server. SQL Server users can now also provision up to 20,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS), double the former limit of 10,000 IOPS.
Larger database sizes and SQL Server storage performance improvements are available now in all commercial AWS regions, with AWS GovCloud (US) availability coming soon.
Learn more by visiting the Storage for Amazon RDS documentation pages.
You can now choose to pay your AWS bill with Canadian dollars. If your credit card provider currently charges you expensive fees for converting currency, choosing to be billed in your preferred currency may help you to reduce these costs. You can compare our rates, which are displayed on the Account Settings page of the AWS Billing Console, with your credit card statements to determine if using our currency conversion service would benefit you.
To take advantage of this new feature, all you need to do is to specify you would like to be billed in Canadian dollars using the AWS Billing Console. Once you've specified your preferred payment currency, your future monthly invoices will be converted to this currency. We'll display Canadian dollars in the billing console, and you can always change your preferred currency at any time.
New York City authorities have thumped Verizon for apparently reneging on its promises to wire up the Big Apple with super-fast fiber internet.…
US carrier Sprint says the net neutrality rules that kicked in last week have forced it to stop throttling download hogs' mobile broadband connections.…
The FBI has told Congress not to worry about its shell-company-owned surveillance aircraft, which are decked out in the best surveillance tech, as they are engaged in an unclassified operation - which they were unwilling to talk about in a Congressional briefing.…
Twitter has acquired artificial intelligence start-up Whetlab, probably to assist with what it considers "barriers to consumption" by foisting machine-curated content on unsuspecting tweeters.…
Mountain View has announced "the biggest expansion of Google Trends since 2012" in a move set to thicken the already impenetrable walls of its media-baiting echo chamber.…
A judge will decide whether a fishing expedition by Google to uncover, and then request, documents protected by client-attorney privilege is legitimate, in the latest twist of the Mississippi Saga.…
More than 15 million households may not be getting their advertised broadband speeds, suggesting that providers are telling porky pies about how fast their services are.…
Microsoft's drip … drip … drip of information about Windows Server 2016 has revealed a couple more droplets of detail, and one big splash of news about Redmond's approach to the new OS.…
Code-sharing website GitHub is pursuing a new round of venture capital based on a US$2bn (£1.26bn) valuation.…
Investors had their knives out for Oracle once again on Wednesday after the database giant's fourth-quarter results missed analysts' estimates on both earnings and revenue.…
Quick Starts are automated reference deployments for key enterprise workloads on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Each Quick Start launches, configures, and runs the AWS compute, network, storage, and other services required to deploy a specific workload on AWS, using AWS best practices for security and availability.
Australia's Senate has voted on an "order for the production of documents" demanding access to "a complete and unredacted copy of the NBN Corporate Plan 2015-18," plus "a complete and unredacted copy" of the 2014-2017 plan and an unredacted copy of the NBN Co Strategic Review.…
Amazon CloudFront now lets you configure a Default TTL and a Maximum time-to-live (Max TTL) to specify how long CloudFront caches your objects in edge locations. These new settings enhance the control over cache duration that you already had with the Minimum TTL setting (Min TTL). You can learn more about how to set these granular caching rules here.
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has fined AT&T $100m (£63m) for unfairly limiting its "unlimited" mobile data plans.…
The AWS Partner Network (APN) is thrilled to announce the launch of the new APN Marketing & Commerce Competency. The APN Competency Program is designed to highlight APN Partners who have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in specialized solution areas and categories.
APN Marketing & Commerce Competency Partners have demonstrated technical capabilities and success in helping marketers and retail customers by delivering cloud-based marketing and commerce solutions.
Initial partners who have qualified for the Competency include:
Learn More
If you're a customer interested in learning more about Marketing & Commerce Partner Solutions, click here.
If you’re an APN Partner focused in helping marketers and retail customers by delivering cloud-based marketing and commerce solutions, click here to learn more.
Spending on Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-as-Service is rapidly increasing, but will still add up to less than 10 per cent of the overall infrastructure services market by 2018, research from analyst firm TechMarketView has concluded.…
You can now launch the t2.large, the newest Amazon EC2 burstable-performance instance size. The t2.large features 8 GiB of system memory and 2 vCPUs, making it well suited for workloads that require a consistent baseline of performance, the ability to burst, and more memory than is available in other T2 instances. With an On-Demand Instance price of $0.104 per hour, the t2.large is the lowest-cost Amazon EC2 instance for workloads that need 8 GiB of system memory. To learn more about Amazon EC2 T2 instances, visit the Amazon EC2 instance page.
Many applications such as web servers, developer environments and databases don’t need consistently high levels of CPU, but benefit significantly from having full access to very fast CPUs when they need them. T2 instances are engineered specifically for these use cases. T2 instances are backed by the latest Intel Xeon processors with clock speeds up to 3.3 GHz. They also work well with Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD-backed) volumes.
T2 instances can be purchased as On-Demand Instances and Reserved Instances. The t2.large is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (San Francisco), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Australia (Sydney), Brazil (Sao Paolo), China (Beijing), and GovCloud (US) regions.
It's the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta: the document that King John was forced to sign by English barons in 1215, and which has served as the cornerstone for many of the world's judicial systems ever since. And to commemorate it, the British Library has published its crowdsourced version for the digital world.…
It's the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta: the document that King John was forced to sign by English barons in 1215, and which has served as the cornerstone for many of the world's judicial systems ever since. And to commemorate it, the British Library has published its crowdsourced version for the digital world.…
Amazon looks to be exploring a new way to cut costs by turning you - or anyone willing to deliver parcels - into its drones.…
You can now run multiple Java applications on a single EC2 instance through an AWS Elastic Beanstalk Tomcat environment. Previously, you needed to create an environment for each Java application. Now, you can bundle multiple WAR files into a single ZIP file and deploy it to one Elastic Beanstalk environment. You can optimize the cost of operating several applications by letting each application share a load balancer. Please see our documentation for more information on this feature.
We had also added support for the new EC2 M4 instances to Elastic Beanstalk platforms in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney). To learn more about M4 instances, visit the Amazon EC2 Instances page.
For more information on AWS Elastic Beanstalk:
Twitter will automatically play videos, Vine vids, and animated GIFs.…
Action film star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is offering his voice to Google's Waze navigation app.…
Now you can run Amazon EC2 for Windows with SQL Server Enterprise Edition. You can select pre-configured Amazon Machine Images (AMI) and launch them on R3.2xlarge, R3.4xlarge, and R3.8xlarge instance types, in the US-East (Virginia), US-West (Oregon) and Europe (Ireland) regions.
Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition offers a number of new features including:
You can visit our web site to learn more about AMI packaged with SQL Server Enterprise Edition, the R3 Instance type and pricing. To get started, you can select and launch an EC2 for Windows AMI with SQL Server Enterprise Edition from within the AWS Management Console, or directly from the AWS Marketplace (Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition 2012 and 2014).
America's broadband watchdog the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has named its first net neutrality ombudsperson – and she'll be your first point of call when your ISP breaks the new rules.…
Apache Spark is now supported on Amazon EMR. Similar to Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark is an open-source, distributed processing system commonly used for big data workloads. Spark utilizes in-memory caching and optimized execution for fast performance, and it supports batch processing, streaming, machine learning, graph databases, and ad hoc queries. With support for Scala, Python, Java, and SQL (using the Spark SQL module), Amazon EMR makes it easy to develop Spark applications in many popular languages. Also, Spark includes several libraries to help build applications for machine learning (MLlib), stream processing (Spark Streaming), and graph processing (GraphX). You can install Spark alongside the other Hadoop applications available in Amazon EMR and leverage the EMR File System (EMRFS) to directly access data in Amazon S3.
You can create an Amazon EMR cluster with Apache Spark from the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDK by choosing AMI 3.8.0 and adding Spark as an application. Amazon EMR currently supports Spark version 1.3.1 and utilizes Hadoop YARN as the cluster manager. To submit applications to Spark on your Amazon EMR cluster, you can add Spark steps with the Step API or interact directly with the Spark API on your cluster’s master node. To learn more, visit the Apache Spark on Amazon EMR page. For instructions on how to launch an Amazon EMR cluster with Spark, click here.
Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge* has declared war on “oldmedia”, which he spells as one word. His Falconwing News service will pump out three-sentence “stories” scraped from real news sources and posted as images. Advertisers will be able to inject their ads into this stream.…
The independent music sector may opt-out of Apple Music – at least for its launch – because of the decision by the $731bn-valued giant to pay musicians and composers the big fat round sum of $0 for music streamed during the three-month trial period.…
Vodafone loves the price of 37.5p/minute. So much so that pretty much everything which is outside a standard bundle is going to cost exactly that.…
Google doesn’t always take the threat of anti-trust charges too seriously. After the Wall Street Journal implied that the FTC opted for less aggressive action against Google because of political pressure, Google responded with references to a laughing baby, and by personally attacking the newspaper’s owner.…
Apple is hiring journos for its latest Apple News venture, a move that will presumably mean it is bringing some of the mountains of breathless product announcement coverage in-house.…
Interview Ex-Reg man Ashlee Vance has written a warts-and-all bio of Elon Musk. We quizzed him on how he did it – and why.…
Pics Adobe has updated its Creative Cloud Suite for 2015, bringing enhancements and new features to 15 desktop applications and delivering tighter integration for its desktop and mobile users. Adobe has also let Android in on the mobile party with versions of Brush, Color, Ps Mix and Shape being made available to the platform for the first time.…
Germany has got the green light from the European Commission to push ahead with a publicly funded scheme to roll out next generation access (NGA) broadband networks.…
Facebook won't quit stalking people who aren't its users, so after months of wrangling, Belgium's Privacy Commissioner is pressing ahead with a lawsuit against The Social NetworkTM.…
You can now take advantage of the new Reserved Instances (RI) payment options on Amazon RDS. This simpler payment-based model consolidates reserved instances into one RI type, while introducing three payment options: No Upfront, Partial Upfront and All Upfront RIs, offering you more flexibility to decide on how you would like to pay for your Reserved Instances.
The No Upfront payment option does not require an upfront payment and provides a substantial discount (typically about 30%) compared to On-Demand. This option is offered with a one-year term. The Partial Upfront payment option balances the payments of an RI between upfront and hourly, and replaces the previous Heavy Utilization RI. You pay for a portion of the Reserved Instances upfront, and then pay for the remainder over the course of the one- or three-year term. This option provides a high discount (typically about 60% for a 3 year term) compared to On-Demand. The All Upfront payment option allows you to pay for the entire Reserved Instances term (one- or three-year) with one upfront payment and benefit from the largest discount (typically about 63% for a 3 year term) compared to On-Demand.
Amazon RDS supports these new payment options on all RDS supported engines including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQL Server, except for the SQL Server-License Included, in the following regions: US East (Northern Virginia), 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). Effective August 15th, 2015, RDS will no longer offer new Light and Medium Utilization RIs. If you already own RIs, the availability of these new payment options will not affect any RIs that you have already purchased. For more information on these new cost saving options, please visit the RDS pricing page.
Amazon Web Services has expanded its AWS Lambda programming model to support functions written in Java, the cloud kingpin said on Monday.…
The Node.js open source project and its fork, io.js, have decided to kiss and make up, with the aid and support of the Linux Foundation.…
Online password wallet service LastPass says it has suffered a data breach, and it is advising its users to change their master passwords.…
You can now send push notifications to Mac OS desktops. We have also added support for sending notifications to VoIP apps on Apple iOS devices. You can use this feature from the Amazon SNS console or APIs. To enable this feature, simply obtain a VoIP or Mac OS push certificate from Apple and assign it to new platform applications in SNS. For more information, please visit our FAQs.
Amazon SNS already supports sending push notifications to iOS, Android, Fire OS, and Windows devices. Additionally, using SNS, you can send SMS texts to mobile devices (US only), emails, and messages to SQS queues, HTTP endpoints or Lambda functions. To learn more, visit our webpage.
You can now develop your AWS Lambda function code using Java. AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events, such as S3 uploads and Kinesis updates, and automatically manages the compute resources for you. You can use your existing tools such as Eclipse to author your Java code and Maven for packaging your Java code, making it easy to integrate Lambda development into your existing development processes. You can use any Java libraries, as well as your own Java objects for processing data. You simply upload your Lambda Java artifact as a ZIP or JAR through the AWS CLI or AWS Lambda console to deploy your Java code as a Lambda function. AWS Lambda will run your code only when it’s needed and scales automatically, so there is no need to provision or continuously run servers. Read our documentation for more details. Visit our console to get started now.
Please visit our product page for more information about AWS Lambda.
France’s data protection watchdog has ordered Google to de-link outdated and irrelevant information from its Google.com domain within two weeks or face a fine, as the “right to be forgotten” issue once again comes to the fore.…
Telstra's continuing incumbency is an expensive luxury, according to the carrier's competitors, that sucks more than AU$3 billion into the carrier's maw each year.…
Under pressure to accelerate Taiwan's broadband deployment, Chunghwa Telecom has announced it will start rolling out G.fast.…
Google has confirmed plans to muscle in on the multi-billion dollar online gaming market, with the launch later this year of a dedicated YouTube app and website.…
The day of the sentient machines may be closer than we thought, after Google told a Canadian court that it couldn’t control its own search engine. The court rejected this, and other arguments, concluding Google in fact was fully in control of Google Search.…
German attorney general (Generalbundesanwalt) Harald Range has dropped the investigation into spying on the German Chancellor because the allegation could not be proved by “legally watertight means.”…
ISP Level 3's customers have been left without internet access since this morning, after the provider seems to have leaked routes to a Tier 1 transit provider in Malaysia.…
UK regulator Ofcom further turned up the heat on BT today, unveiling plans to cap wholesale prices the one-time national telco charges for leased telecoms lines.…
European governments cannot force mobile providers to pay for providing a minimum service to disadvantaged people, the European Court of Justice has ruled.…
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added bring-your-own-key (BYOK) encryption to its Simple Storage Service (S3).…
Starting today, you can attach or detach Elastic Load Balancing load balancers in an Auto Scaling group.
Around the turn of the new century some of the larger businesses started to look at the IT systems they had in place, and started to consider if they were strictly core to the business. Did they really need a data centre? While a brave few started to outsource some of their equipment, most decided that yes they did need a data centre.…
More detail has come to Vulture South's attention about second-tier ISP Exetel dumping customers without any explanation whatsoever.…
You can now launch M4 instances, the latest generation of Amazon EC2 General Purpose instances. M4 instances provide a balance of compute, memory, and network resources. They are well suited for a variety of workloads, such as web servers, databases, caching fleets, and enterprise applications. M4 instances are available in five sizes with up to 40 vCPUs and 160 GiB of system memory.
M4 instances are based on custom Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 Haswell processors that are optimized specifically for EC2. These processors run at a base frequency of 2.4 GHz and can deliver clock speeds as high as 3.0 GHz with Intel Turbo Boost. Intel Haswell processors include AVX2, which can provide significant performance improvement for workloads that take advantage of Intel AVX or Intel SSE.
M4 instances are EBS-optimized by default at no additional cost. EBS Optimization provides 450 Mbps to 4,000 Mbps of dedicated throughput to EBS depending on the instance type in addition to the network throughput provided to the instance. M4 also features Enhanced Networking. M4 instances with Enhanced Networking deliver up to four times the packet rate of instances without Enhanced Networking, while ensuring consistent latency, even when under high network I/O. Within Placement Groups, Enhanced Networking reduces average latencies between instances by 50 percent or more.
You can purchase M4 instances as On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, or Spot Instances. M4 instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS regions, with more regions coming soon.
To learn more about M4 instances, visit the Amazon EC2 Instances page.
M3 and C4 Lower Prices: Amazon EC2 M3 and C4 instance prices have been reduced by 5% for On-Demand Instances and 1 year Reserved Instances in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS regions. On-Demand Instance price reductions are effective June 1, 2015 and Reserved Instance price reductions will apply to purchases after June 11, 2015.
To learn more about the price drops, visit the Amazon EC2 pricing page.
You can now view the Docker and Amazon ECS agent version running on each Amazon ECS Container Instance and update the agent to the latest version using the Amazon ECS console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDK. To get started, see the documentation.
We have expanded AWS CloudFormation support for additional features of Amazon ElastiCache, AWS IAM, Amazon RDS and Amazon S3.
The US Court of Appeals for the DC circuits has denied a motion to halt the FCC's radical net neutrality rules, meaning they will officially kick in tomorrow.…
Breaking Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is leaving the San Francisco-headquartered social network.…
AWS CloudFormation now supports additional AWS services. You can now use CloudFormation to provision:
Following the cyber-attack during which dossiers on four million US government employees were stolen from Uncle Sam's servers, staggering out of the smoldering blast crater is Senator Richard Burr (R-NC). And he's not happy.…
Consumers experiencing consistently shonky broadband speeds will have the power to walk away from their contracts, new Ofcom chief exec Sharon White will announce today.…
As if being ankle deep in muddy field, surrounded by pretend hippies seemingly re-enacting highlights of the Battle of Waterloo was bad enough, attendees of the aptly named Download Festival will be subjected to a new police facial recognition system, and surveillance of their onsite location and expenditure via the debut of RFID wristbands.…
With World+Dog working to define their technologies into standards, build their 5G patent books ahead of the anticipated rush, and try and work out what 5G's use-case will be, Nokia has tapped Germany's University of Kaiserslautern to help its 5G research efforts along.…
Twitter has introduced a feature that allows users to share their block lists with others to help single out abusive users.…
Cisco's decided to Borg Microsoft and Amazon services into its Intercloud, in the latest round of Intercloud Fabric software releases.…
BT has told a US broadband conference it's confident that G.fast will do what it says on the box – so long as ongoing standards work bears fruit.…
Analysis Spotify has pulled in extra investment and put out figures showing a jump in paying customers - effectively puffing out its chest as hype-magnet Apple enters the music streaming market.…
Vid Ultra-high definition 8K videos are appearing on YouTube, despite the fact that few home broadband connections on the planet can stream them, and even fewer screens are capable of showing them in their full glory.…
Vid Ultra-high definition 8K videos are appearing on YouTube, despite the fact that few home broadband connections on the planet can stream them, and even fewer screens are capable of showing them in their full glory.…
We are excited to announce that AWS CloudTrail is now available in Beijing, China region. AWS customers can use CloudTrail to troubleshoot operational and security incidents, track changes to AWS resources and demonstrate compliance with internal or external policies. Customers can look up API calls in their AWS account and answer important questions such as Who made a particular API call, When was the API call made, What is the source IP address of the API call and Which resources were acted upon in the API call.
CloudTrail records API activity and delivers it to an S3 bucket, so log files are stored inexpensively and durably. Customers can specify their own S3 object expiration policies or life cycle configuration policies and move the log files to Glacier for longer term retention.
For more information, go to the AWS CloudTrail detail page for the Beijing, China region.
Australian internet service provider (ISP) Exetel is firing customers, with no explanation for its actions.…
Rules to protect the internet's neutrality in America will go into effect this Friday, causing a flurry of efforts of undermine it and some suspicious activity on the part of the cable companies.…
Amazon VPC Flow Logs is a new feature that allows you to log traffic flows at network interfaces in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). You can now create a Flow Log on a VPC, a subnet or an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) in your account. Once created, the Flow Log will capture accepted and rejected traffic flow information for all network interfaces in the selected resource.
Apple has revealed that its weird camera-mounted vans, seen roaming the California, are being used to gather images for a street mapping app.…
Programmers building Safari extensions will now have to bung Apple some dosh to avoid having their browser add-ons kicked off Cupertino's extensions gallery.…
Russians may have posed as ISIS in a high-profile hack against a French TV channel, according to French investigators and security firms.…
As expected, Vodafone has launched Connect, a consumer broadband service - and, as expected, the speeds are disappointing.…
The FBI has seized the computers of a Chicago man in connection with the "Fappening" hack of Apple's iCloud system, which saw celebrities' nude photographs published online, a recently unsealed warrant has revealed.…
Embattled "free" VPN provider Hola is facing criticism over its practice of turning its users into exit nodes in a paid-for anonymisation service which can easily be used for nefarious activities. Hola's software is also claimed to include "unpatchable" vulnerabilities allowing takeover of user machines.…
Music streaming biz Spotify has raised $115m (£75m) from an investor, part of the latest funding round which — according to reports — values the company at a staggering $8.5bn (£5.7bn).…
Advisors to the European Commission have found that consumers do grasp the principles of net neutrality and make choices based on it — even when they don’t really know how traffic management, which is key to net neutrality, works.…
Microsoft will soon drop Facebook integration from Windows and a number of its online products, following a change to Facebook's APIs that has been five years in the making.…
Google's getting more cozy with the world of SDN, opening up some of its network configuration models to give things a kick along.…
You can now launch Amazon Redshift clusters on second-generation Dense Storage (DS2) instances. DS2 has twice the memory and compute power of its Dense Storage predecessor, DS1 (formerly DW1), and the same storage capacity. DS2 also supports Enhanced Networking and provides 50% more disk throughput than DS1. On average, DS2 provides 50% better performance than DS1, but is priced the same as DS1. To move from DS1 to DS2, simply restore a DS2 cluster from a snapshot of a DS1 cluster of the same size.
Just days after it looked like the tech sector's love affair with satellite broadband was getting legs, Facebook has reportedly abandoned its spacefaring.…
A pair of technology industry pressure groups have sent a letter to President Obama asking his administration to back off demands that companies give government agencies the ability to decrypt all user data.…
VC-backed Mesosphere says its Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) is now generally available in a free Community Edition.…
The UK's competition watchdog has agreed to hasten a probe into BT's planned multi-billion pound merger with EE.…
The £1.2bn emergency services contract which The Register flagged up as an omnishambles six months ago has now, as we predicted, collapsed.…
Bitcoin extortionists DD4BC have begun targeting Scandinavian companies with complex DDoS attacks.…
WWDC 2015 Apple CEO Tim Cook closed out his WWDC keynote today with a typical "one more thing" non-surprise: a Spotify clone that just about everyone knew was coming.…
AWS CloudHSM provides dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS cloud, helping you meet corporate, contractual and regulatory compliance requirements for data security. CloudHSM is designed to enable you to maintain complete control over the use of encryption keys stored on CloudHSM appliances.
AWS CloudHSM is also available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions. Please visit our product page for more information.
Chinese cloud purveyor Aliyun, part of the Middle Kingdom's Alibaba Group, has signed up a raft of international partners to flog its services globally.…
Apple is looking to move from the 30 per cent margin it makes on sales of apps through iTunes, lowering its take to protect the strength of the Apple ecosystem.…
Verizon Ventures has invested in NFC technology company SimplyTapp. What makes this interesting is that SimplyTapp is a cloud-based service using Host Card Emulation (HCE) for the security element in Android phones.…
Glasgow-based cloud outfit Iomart has snapped up London-based IT consultancy biz SystemsUp for a cool £9m.…
Apple has reportedly all but abandoned its iTunes brand after 15 years of using the name for its music service.…
Analysis The US government has rewritten chunks of an obscure weapons trade pact between itself, Europe, Russia, and other nations – a pact that is now casting its shadow over today's computer security tools.…
Comment Reports that private clouds are dead are greatly exaggerated.…
Two former MySpace featurettes which became companies — Songkick, which alerts you to acts playing near you, and CrowdSurge which handles merchandise and ticket sales — have agreed to merge.…
The US Senate Judiciary Committee has recommended that the "Protecting American Talent and Entrepreneurship Act 6 of 2015" be accepted.…
Amnesty International UK has launched a campaign to get President Obama to drop the espionage charges against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.…
Rumours of all kinds of talks between Liberty Global, which owns Virgin Media in the UK and Vodafone, have been rumbling for months. Vodafone's now come out and confirmed those rumours are true.…
Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is the first major department to move to Google Apps, part of an apparent loosening of Microsoft's stranglehold on the government's software services.…
Apple and Google are helping terrorism by offering users encrypted communications, a senior FBI official has told the House Homeland Security Committee in Congress, and US law enforcement needs to stop them from doing it.…
Facebook's decided that folks in bandwidth-challenged parts of the world deserve a version of The Social NetworkTM that doesn't wipe out their download allowances, so has given the world Facebook Lite.…
We are happy to announce the immediate availability of Amazon CloudWatch Logs subscriptions.
With subscriptions, you can access a near-real time feed of the log events being delivered to your CloudWatch Logs log groups. The log events are delivered to an Amazon Kinesis stream that you provide so that you can perform your own custom processing. Log events delivered to the Kinesis stream remain stored and available in CloudWatch based on your log group retention settings.
With Amazon CloudWatch Logs subscriptions, standard Amazon CloudWatch charges apply, as well as charges associated with your Amazon Kinesis stream, including shard hours and Put requests.
With Amazon CloudWatch Logs subscriptions, standard Amazon CloudWatch charges apply, as well as charges associated with your Amazon Kinesis stream, including shard hours and Put requests.
To get started with Amazon CloudWatch Logs subscriptions, see the Amazon CloudWatch Logs Developer guide. To learn more about pricing, see Amazon CloudWatch pricing and Amazon Kinesis pricing. To learn more about how CloudWatch Logs can help you better understand and operate your systems and applications, see the Amazon CloudWatch product details.
Infosec 2015 Infosec, the annual IT security trade show, wheeled out the rock stars of the Infosec world for its 20th anniversary this week.…
T-Mobile US and Dish Networks are in talks about joining forces. Consolidation and quad-play are all the rage between mobile networks, and mobile networks and other networks.…
Rackspace Solve London Speaking at the Rackspace Solve event in London, the company's CTO John Engates said an increased focus on cloud management services rather than just infrastructure might extend to running applications on third-party clouds.…
Comment As strange shopping expeditions go, this has to rank alongside London Bridge being bought, dismantled, and then rebuilt in Arizona. The world’s biggest software company, Microsoft, has now spent half a billion dollars on mobile apps that are poor cousins of its own Exchange and Outlook software. Apps that, in some cases, don’t natively work with Microsoft’s server software.…
Norwegian telco Telenor has outlined plans for switching off 3G, which may be a model for other operators.…
