As American regulators at the FTC crack down on mobile bill "cramming" scams, T-Mobile US has ring-fenced at least $43 million – to refund customers who were fraudulently charged for premium SMS services.…
Microsoft has lost the first round in its fight to prevent US authorities from seizing customer data stored in its overseas data centers.…
Today, we are pleased to inform you about some changes regarding Amazon Route 53, a highly available and scalable DNS service:
Domain Name Registration
You can now purchase a new domain name or transfer the management of your existing domain name to Route 53. When you purchase new domains via Route 53, the service will automatically configure a Hosted Zone for each domain and ensure the privacy of your WHOIS record at no additional charge. In addition, you benefit from AWS's consolidated billing to manage your domain name expenses alongside all of your other AWS resources. Route 53 offers a selection of more than 150 top-level domains (TLDs), including the major generic TLDs like .com, .net, .org, and .info, and country TLDs including .co.uk, .de, .tv, and .com.au. Getting started with Route 53 Domain Name Registration is easy. Please see the Route 53 documentation for more details.
Geographic Routing with Geo DNS
Route 53's Geo DNS support lets you balance load by directing requests to specific endpoints based on the geographic location from which the request originates. Geo DNS makes it possible to customize localized content, such as presenting detail pages in the right language or restricting distribution of content to only the markets you have licensed. Geo DNS also lets you balance load across endpoints in a predictable, easy-to-manage way, ensuring that each end-user location is consistently routed to the same endpoint. Geo DNS provides three levels of geographic granularity: continent, country, and state, and Geo DNS also provides a global record which is served in cases where an end user's location doesn't match any of the specific Geo DNS records you have created. You can also combine Geo DNS with other routing types, such as Latency Based Routing and DNS Failover, using Route 53's Alias feature in order to enable a variety of low-latency and fault-tolerant architectures To learn more, please see the Route 53 documentation.
Lower Prices for DNS Queries
Effective August 1, we are lowering Route 53 prices for both Standard Queries and Latency Based Routing Queries by 20%. As before, queries to Alias records that are mapped to Elastic Load Balancers, Amazon CloudFront distributions, and Amazon S3 website buckets are free. Full details are available on the Route 53 pricing page.
Starting today, all AWS customers can start optimizing their cloud resources by using four of AWS Trusted Advisor’s most popular best-practice recommendations on service limits and security configurations. Access to the four free checks does not expire, and you can access the remaining 33 checks and additional features by upgrading to Business or Enterprise-level Support.
AWS Trusted Advisor acts like your customized cloud expert, and it helps you provision your resources by following best practices. Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and finds opportunities to save money, improve system performance and reliability, or help close security gaps. Since 2013, customers have viewed over 1.7 million best-practice recommendations in AWS Trusted Advisor, and they have realized over $300 million in estimated cost reduction.
The four free checks, available in the AWS Management Console, help you build a more secure and responsive cloud environment: Security Groups - Specific Ports Unrestricted, Service Limits, IAM Use, and MFA on Root Account.
You can configure Trusted Advisor notifications to receive weekly email about any changes in their check results. You can also subscribe to Business and Enterprise-level support to access the full suite of Trusted Advisor best-practice checks, API access, and a host of other support features, such as phone and chat access to support personnel, architecture guidance, API access, and help with third-party software configuration.
View your AWS Trusted Advisor report right now from AWS Management Console at. For more information about AWS Trusted Advisor, visit http://ift.tt/RoZPgW.
It's not possible to hand over Iran's internet because it doesn't own it, a Washington DC court has been told in a mind-boggling submission to terrorism victims.…
If you're used to sending messages to Facebook friends, enjoy it while you can – Facebook plans to kill the feature on mobile clients and force users to download its Messenger app instead.…
The head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is demanding an explanation from Verizon over the carrier's decision to throttle LTE speeds for heavy users.…
You now have more control over what happens to the Amazon EC2 instances running in your Auto Scaling groups at each stage of their lifecycle, from launch through termination. This makes it easier to update and run software on your EC2 instances, and troubleshoot and fix problems.
Starting today, you can use new instance lifecycle action APIs to hold your newly launched instances in a pending state while you perform actions on them, such as installing software, before they are added to your Auto Scaling group and become in service. Similarly, when instances are terminating, you can temporarily stop the termination to investigate the cause or retrieve logs from an instance before it terminates.
While instances are running in your Auto Scaling group, you can use the new DetachInstances action, and manage them just like instances that are not members of an Auto Scaling group. Combined with the AttachInstances action, you can easily move instances into and out of groups.
You can also place instances into the new Standby state to troubleshoot or perform maintenance on them, then put them back into service once you are finished. When you place an instance in Standby, it will no longer receive new inbound connections from Elastic Load Balancers or count toward your group’s capacity until you put it back into service again.
You can access these new features using the Auto Scaling API and command-line tools. They will be available in the AWS SDKs soon. To learn more about Auto Scaling, please visit the Auto Scaling Developer Guide.
Starting today, you can enjoy flexible cache node placement for your ElastiCache for Memcached clusters. Until now, all the nodes in an ElastiCache for Memcached cluster had to be placed in a single Availability Zone. With the introduction of flexible cache node placement, you can create clusters with nodes in multiple availability zones. This will help improve the reliability of the cluster by allowing you to spread your cache nodes across availability zones.
To learn more please read our blog.
Microsoft has announced that it will be fine-tuning its virtual assistant Cortana in the first Windows Phone 8.1 update, which it will drop in the next few months.…
Apple's iWallet mobile money app could be the start of a more general trend that sees web giants such as Facebook pushing into the payment industry, according to online payment experts.…
Young property buyers see mobile coverage as a more important when it comes to choosing a location – rating it as more important than proximity to schools and transport or local crime rates, says a report commissioned by mobile survey company RootMetrics.…
Fixed wireless broadband provider Cirrus Communications has experienced a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack that incapacitated half its network.…
If you're used to sending messages to Facebook friends then enjoy it while you can – Facebook is killing the feature on mobile clients and forcing users to download its Messenger app instead.…
A DARPA-driven project based on OpenStack has been demonstrated in the US, with the bold claim that it will eventually lead to sub-second provisioning for connectivity between clouds.…
The Ethical Research Project has weighed into the argument over the ethics of Facebook's “creepy” social contagion research, doing the unthinkable: actually asking ordinary punters how they feel about being lab rats.…
