Google: Western democracies seek to censor political content
Western democracies, which are not typically associated with censorship, have demanded that Google take down certain political videos, blog posts, and other content, the company said Sunday.
The company as on previous occasions has been asked to take down political speech in many countries, Google said.
"It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," said Dorothy Chou, Google’s senior policy analyst in a blog post…
European data security and cloud computing
Grazed from Backup Technology. Author: Editorial Staff.
Does your off-site data centre have to be within commuting distance? Perhaps not. Should it at least be in the same country? According to Megan Richards, a European Commission director and acting deputy director general of Information Society and Media, “it shouldn’t matter where data is held as long as our [EC] rules apply”.
Since 1995 there has been a directive, rather than a piece of legislature, for EU countries regarding off-site data storage. Currently, individual states can implement the directive as and how they wish, making off-shore data storage very risky for any company with sensitive data…
SUSE, OpenStack and Open Source
SUSE supports the notion that cloud computing and open source software are perfect companions for organizations that look to the use of cloud computing to lower their overall costs of IT infrastructure, offer freedom to deploy its workloads wherever appropriate, and avoid being locked into a single vendors hardware or software products.
Pete Chadwick and Doug Jarvis of SUSE stopped by quite a while ago to discuss cloud application stacks and why the company is so heavily involved with the OpenStack community. The story behind the story was that SUSE wanted to address the then-recent move by Citrix, another OpenStack member, to submit its own stack of technologies for a cloud computing environment…
BYOD exposes the perils of cloud storage
The dangers of using consumer cloud storage systems became clearer earlier this month, when a hacker claimed that he accessed presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Dropbox storage and email accounts using an easily cracked password.
The apparent hack of Romney’s accounts came on the heels of IBM’s rollout of a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy that bans the use of Dropbox due to concerns that hackers could easily access sensitive information stored there.
Such examples make it clear that it’s risky to keep corporate data on consumer-oriented cloud storage systems, say IT executives and analysts…
10 innovators changing the game for Internet infrastructure
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey
The world of information technology is always changing. But over the last six years it has started to change more rapidly with the genesis of cloud providers, the growth in the number of giant webscale companies, and the widespread use of virtualization in enterprise environments. A new era is upon us.
In the next five years a new way of thinking about, constructing and operating IT will emerge. Data centers are no longer the size of mini-marts but instead are mega-marts like Rob Roy’s 2.2 million square foot Switch data center in Las Vegas. Servers are no longer the unit of computing, but instead are being taken completely apart or are a mere component in the new data-center sized computer, a trend being pushed by Frank Frankovsky at Facebook and at the Open Compute Foundation…
Ex-Facebookers launch MemSQL to make your database fly
With Facebook engineers, it appears the high-performance database apple doesn’t far fall from the tree. On Monday, former Facebookers Eric Frenkiel and Nikita Shamgunov (who also spent six years as a senior engineer on Microsoft SQL Server) launched a startup called MemSQL that seeks to speed relational databases by taking a page out of the Facebook playbook. The company has raised a $5 million in venture capital thus far from First Round Capital, IA Ventures, NEA, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Paul Buchheit, Ashton Kutcher, Max Levchin and Aaron Levie.
As its name implies, MemSQL achieves its fast performance in part by keeping data in memory, but it doesn’t use memcached like Facebook does to keep its massive MySQL deployment up to speed. Rather, MemSQL takes a lesson learned from HipHop — Facebook’s tool for converting PHP code into faster C++ — and converts SQL to C++…
Sybex Announces New Book on Microsoft Private Cloud Computing
Sybex, an imprint of Wiley, announces Microsoft Private Cloud Computing (Sybex/Wiley; 978-1-1182-5147-8; July 2012). Written by a team of expert authors who are Microsoft MVPs and leaders in their respective fields, this unique book is an essential resource for IT administrators who are responsible for implementing and managing a cloud infrastructure. Readers will quickly learn how cloud computing offers significant cost savings while also providing new levels of speed and agility…
Cloud Computing: Raining Down Profits
Cloud-computing is a type of technology that has become increasingly prevalent in businesses everywhere. Cloud-computing allows businesses to use applications without actually installing them, which helps companies reduce operating costs. Recently, a study sponsored by enterprise software giant SAP (NYSE: SAP) showed that cloud-computing could save U.S. businesses as much as $625 billion over five years. Moreover, this study also showed that existing cloud-computing companies such as Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), Fusion-IO (NYSE: FIO) and F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) are projected to grow revenues by an average of $20 billion per year for the next five years. There are significant opportunities in the cloud-computing business, a business which is still relatively untapped, and one company is in a prime position to gain from these opportunities: NetSuite Inc.
Four Reasons Private Cloud Adoption Initiatives Fail
While it may make sense to get a private cloud up and running as fast as technologically possible, technology is just a small consideration compared with user needs and business culture demands. When organizations go pell-mell at their cloud deployments, disappointment inevitably waits around the corner.
"There are some large companies that can get a cloud up and running fast, and some have done that and then are disappointed that the company doesn’t adopt it or users don’t adopt it or costs actually go up, not down, and provisioning takes longer, not less time," said Jay Seaton, chief marketing officer at GlassHouse Technologies. "And so a lot of what we’re seeing is if a cloud is set up without the right objectives or without the right configurations and all of the pieces that go behind that, then bad things happen and people are disappointed."…
CERN says EU data protection laws are hindering cloud adoption
Researchers at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva are being held back from adopting cloud computing on any significant scale due to the delay in establishing a European regulatory framework for data protection.
Speaking at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London this week, Bob Jones, head of CERN openlab, said that the European Commission’s failure to push through clear guidelines for data protection in the cloud was hindering uptake within the scientific community
"We are working with high-tech companies, industrial companies and European agencies, and the key point is the regulatory framework is creating a barrier," said Jones…