Amazon has posted an essay-length explanation of the cloud outage that took offline some of the Web's most popular services last week. In summary, it appears that human error during an system upgrade meant a redundant backup network for the Elastic Block Service (EBS) accidentally took up the entire network traffic in the U.S. East Region, overloading it, and jamming up the system.
Verizon will put a peel-off sticker on the screen of cellphones it sells, warning that the user's location may be tracked. The sticker also advises users to be careful which apps they install if they wish to avoid location information being shared with third parties.
Sony PlayStation Network users are reporting fraud on their credit cards -- everything from a flight booked in Germany to purchases in Japanese grocery stores.
In a surprise move, virtualization and cloud infrastructure specialist VMware has purchased online presentations tool SlideRocket. VMware purchased e-mail collaboration suite Zimbra earlier this year and this latest acquisition indicates VMware is staking a claim in the productivity cloud marketplace.
The folks behind Dropbox have not been having an easy time recently. First it was suggested their PC client might be insecure, then changes in their terms and conditions raised security concerns.
The outage of Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service has shone a light on the number of Websites that use the service, which allows companies to hire computing power inexpensively on Amazon's systems.
Would you object if a police officer stopped you for speeding, then took your phone and cloned all its data--including photos, videos, e-mails, and recent GPS locations?
Now that the public beta has begun, I've had a little time to evaluate Office 365, and it's been an interesting experience. I run a small business and am already a Google Apps for Business user, so am I tempted to make the switch?
Google offshoot AdMob has been busy looking into what people use tablets for. It questioned around 1500 people, with the majority likely to be iPad users, bearing in mind Apple's current dominant position. The results make interesting reading and challenge popular assumptions.
Blink and you'll miss it. Microsoft has demonstrated Internet Explorer 10 at the MIX11 show in Las Vegas. For around 30 seconds of the 90-minute talk, they mentioned that some of the demos were running on an ARM computer.
It's been over two weeks since the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) system was turned on for .com domain names. This is an end stage for a process that will one day let surfers be 100 percent confident they're accessing the site they think they are, and have not been diverted by hackers.
A number of hack attacks recently have made many question the fundamental security of the Internet -- hack attacks that have brought into question a system that until now was considered be bullet-proof. However, with appropriate good timing, two new security schemes are coming to the rescue.
Facebook is a wonder of our age. With more than half a billion users, the fact it serves detailed and personalized pages to every user--within a second or two of them asking for it--is mind-blowing.
The fundamental security of the Dropbox cloud storage service has been called into question by a researcher.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published research showing that the SSL certificate system that underpins Web security is far from trustworthy.