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16 May 2011 10:04

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Tech: Let’s not lay blame for the PlayStation Network hack at Amazon’s feet

  • Bloomberg’s piece about Amazon luring hackers to its popular cloud service, which thousands of perfectly normal sites use each day, and giving them an easy way to hack servers belies a real misunderstanding of how cloud services work — to put it simply, loaning out server space on an hourly basis has benefits that far outweigh the possibility that a couple of bad eggs might do something like this. And Amazon isn’t even the only player in the game. Do you guys know who Rackspace is? Because they’re just as formidable as Amazon in this space — but fortunately for them, aren’t better-known for selling copies of “Water for Elephants” to people in their underwear at 3 a.m. in the morning. Simply put, blaming Amazon for having an unregulated cloud space is irresponsible. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Mar 2011 11:10

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Tech: Fortunately they have backups: Google explains that Gmail hiccup

  • what Thousands of people lost access to their Gmail accounts recently. When they got back into the accounts, they were empty. Yikes. (This is our nightmare.)
  • why Google explains that a bug caused the issue, and that although they lost several copies of the data, they fortunately had a backup that was disconnected from the cloud. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Dec 2010 20:54

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Tech: Amazon Web Services, Wikileaks and censorship: A harbinger

  • Amazon’s quickly taken over the Web with its cloud computing services. If you’re reading this on our WordPress site, the image of the logo is from Amazon’s S3 service. If you’re reading this on Tumblr, the entire infrastructure scales thanks to Amazon’s cloud computing functionality. Ditto Twitter. Even more than shopping, cloud computing has become Amazon’s biggest gift to the Web. But the way they quickly booted Wikileaks off their site is just … wow. This is a very bad sign for the Web’s future growth.
  • What happened? In the wake of the huge DDoS attack it faced prior to its document release on Sunday, Wikileaks, which usually hosts its servers in this secret lair in Sweden, turned to Amazon’s EC2 services to ensure they’d stay online as the data broke. This was how they managed to stay online despite being the biggest story of the entire week.
  • Congressional pressure Eventually, certain members of Congress, namely Joe Lieberman, criticized Amazon for hosting the site and said Amazon and others should boycott Wikileaks. A day later, Amazon (who just recently pulled the free-speech card on a pedophilia book) complied. Wikileaks had a suitably withering response to Amazon’s actions.
  • The implications The problem here is obvious. Amazon created a service so widely used that they couldn’t control it if they tried. The New York Times (which has run multiple Wikileaks reports) even uses Amazon Web Services. This tool is only useful is Amazon is completely impartial to the content on it. This incident proves they’re not. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

11 Jun 2010 10:37

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Tech: Experts say we’ll be doing our computing in the cloud by 2020

  • 71%
    think we’ll be working on computers in the cloud
  • 27% think we’ll still be using PCs for most of everything we do
  • 2% think we’ll be using Amigas or running BeOS for some reason source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

11 Dec 2009 22:46

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Tech: Dear jerk from CNET: Way to be uninformed about Lala

  • Consider that Apple is now seeking help from a group that cast about the digital-music sector for years, swapped out business models multiple times (without ever finding a profitable one), and basically did little to distinguish themselves.
  • CNET scribe Greg Sandoval • Describing his skepticism on Lala, which Apple acquired last week. Sandoval’s take on the startup is beyond unfair – it’s straight-up uninformed. He wrote about the service as if the current version of the site – which sites such as Pitchfork and The Onion AV Club, and heck, we, regularly use – was nothing special. In our opinion, it reads as if he’s never actually used the service, which was struggling financially but had solid business deals in place. Why is Apple interested in Lala, like Google also was? Simple. Because it has a huge, passionate, cult audience – an audience bored by iTunes. (By the way, Sandoval totally missed Google’s Onebox setup, which TechCrunch was quite excited about.) Write about it when you know what you’re talking about, Greg. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

13 Oct 2009 09:31

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Tech: Daily Poll: Is T-Mobile doing enough for Sidekick customers?

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

25 Sep 2009 11:09

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Tech: Daily poll: Gmail and its large amounts of recent downtime

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

17 Sep 2009 10:26

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Tech, U.S.: Apps.Gov: The government hearts cloud computing, apparently

  • If you wanted the government to tell you using Facebook is smart, here you go. Apps.Gov is the U.S. government’s attempt to give a seal of approval to cloud computing – that nebulous internet thing that most people use on a daily basis without even realizing it. What’s amusing to us, beyond the useful productivity apps that the General Services Administration offers for purchase, is that they have a whole page devoted to social media. On this page, they tell you what you’ve already known for years if you have even a minor amount of technical knowledge: Wordpress, Facebook and YouTube (but surprisingly, not Twitter) are awesome! Thanks for the tips, brah. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

16 Jun 2009 12:22

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Tech: Opera’s world-changing thing, Unite, might actually change the world

Much credit to Opera: Unite actually sounds like a brilliant idea and might get them elusive market share. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

07 May 2009 09:32

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Biz, Tech: Protip: Want venture capital? Make a cloud computing startup.

  • Apparently, it’s the big thing for investors right now. Despite the lack of name recognition, there’s a heavy amount of interest in companies who are involved in cloud computing – i.e. using a huge cluster of servers to run powerful applications, rather than forcing those apps to run on home computers. Anonymous companies like Engine Yard and Elastra – who run services to keep those cloud computing apps afloat – are able to get tens of millions in investments in a down economy. Did someone hear the sound of a gold rush? source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
 
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