Amazon EC2 Day 2: Assessing The Damage
The crash of Amazon’s cloud services for web sites, EC2, is now in its second day.
The service went down yesterday at 1:42am PT, shutting down the websites of a number of start-up companies, including Foursquare, Quora and Reddit.
When the Web Went Away
Swaths of the Web disappeared yesterday, revealing just how heavily many of its users have unwittingly come to rely on Amazon for more than just their shopping. The retailer also rents out servers to other companies building websites, and one of the huge warehouses full of those computers began to experience problems early on Thursday with widespread effects.
Amazon issue wreaks havoc on many sites
Major websites including Foursquare and Reddit crashed or suffered slowdowns Thursday after technical problems rattled Amazon.com’s widely used Web servers, frustrating millions of people who couldn’t access their favorite sites.
Segmenting customer databases helps improve email marketing campaigns
To get the most out of email marketing campaigns, businesses in New Zealand should make sure they consider who they are sending messages to.
Writing for Fresh Business Thinking, digital director of Blueleaf, Rob Smith said that it is important that firms don’t simply send communications to their full customer email address database.
"Just think for a second. Out of your few thousand people, are they really all meant to get the same message? Do they have the same characteristics, buying patterns or personalities? No they do not, far from it," he wrote.
Former Cisco engineer faces extradition to US over hacking charges
A one-time Cisco engineer who had sued his former employer, alleging it monopolised the business of servicing and maintaining Cisco equipment, has been charged by US authorities with hacking.
Peter Alfred-Adekeye, who left Cisco in 2005 to form two networking support companies, has been charged with 97 counts of intentionally accessing a protected computer system without authorisation for the purposes of commercial advantage, according to an arrest warrant. He faces 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted on the charges.
Google Sells Its Mighty Cloud
Google is out to sell the world, and more computing power than most of us can imagine.
The company just announced what it calls “Earth Builder,” a cloud-based mapping service that gives companies secure access to the search giant’s petabytes of geographic data, upon which they can lay their own proprietary information and make maps and global models for internal corporate consumption. The product will be available in the third quarter, though Google is sounding out companies now.
Companies should remember the basics for protecting contact data
Many companies are neglecting to remember the basics of data protection in practices of address verification and validating email addresses, according to deputy information commissioner David Smith.
Mr Smith spoke at the Infosecurity Europe Event to say that he thought companies around the world were spending too much time focusing on technical security and not enough on data.
He blamed staff awareness and training for the failings in this area, v3 reported.
Feds To Shutter 100 Data Centers In ‘Cloud First’ Push
The Obama administration plans to shut down 100 data centers this year, and hundreds more in coming years, as the "cloud-first" approach to federal IT projects begins to take form.
Cloud Security
A prototype system allows companies that use cloud computing services to confirm that their data is safe from others using the same service provider. It can detect with 80 percent accuracy the presence of unauthorized processing on the same server; the rate of false positives is 1 percent. The system will notice both attackers and inappropriate data sharing.