Items tagged with AWS
Amazon has secured a lucrative contract dubbed 'WildandStormy' to supply its Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the United States National Security Agency (NSA), in a deal that could be worth as much as $10 billion when all is said and done. However, it might be premature for Amazon to celebrate the contract win—it's under legal dispute by Microsoft. If this situation sounds familiar, it's because Amazon and Microsoft already fought over a similarly massive contract to supply their respective cloud services to the government. Back in 2019, the US Department of Justice awarded Microsoft Azure for its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, with the JEDI contract having a ceiling of $10 billion...
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When it comes to development, if you want to make sure your program runs on all hardware with as many operating systems as possible, you need to do testing across all platforms. This can be an incredibly daunting task, but development can be cheaper and easier than ever with cloud-based solutions. Amazon is now offering AWS EC2 Mac instances for anyone to create and test Apple apps with ease. Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, is an easy and secure way to deploy “resizable compute capacity in the cloud.” There are many compute components with Amazon EC2, which now includes Apple hardware and software. Inside each Mac instance, you will get an actual Mac...
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Amazon has earned itself some well-deserved bragging rights for putting a stop to what ranks as the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack ever, and by quite a bit. According to data divulged by Amazon, it halted a DDoS attack that peaked with a "previously unseen volume" of 2.3 terabits per second in February 2020. The attempted attack leveraged a compromised Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAC). It also resulted in three days of "elevated threat during a single week" before it subsided. Amazon shared the details in its latest AWS Shield Threat Landscape report (PDF), in which it notes that the "largest known DDoS attacks are UDP reflection attacks." CLDAP...
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Amazon has announced a new product called AWS DeepComposer, which is the world's first machine learning-enabled musical keyboard. Amazon says that machine learning requires math, computer science, code, and infrastructure expertise, and while those are important topics, many find them boring. To help people learn about practical machine learning tasks, Amazon has unveiled the AWS DeepComposer. DeepComposer is a 32-key, 2-octave keyboard designed for devs to get hands-on with Generative AI using pre-trained models or their own. Amazon is allowing users to enter their email address to be notified when the device is available. Until then, there is a virtual AWS console keyboard. Essentially the...
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Go ahead and cue the inevitable 'What's in your wallet?' jokes. One potential answer to that question, by the way, is a hacker's fingers. Capital One says an "outside individual" gained unauthorized access and obtained various personal information linked to both existing credit card customers, and people who had applied for a credit card. "While I am grateful that the perpetrator has been caught, I am deeply sorry for what has happened," said Richard D. Fairbank, Chairman and CEO. "I sincerely apologize for the understandable worry this incident must be causing those affected and I am committed to making it right." Capital One blamed the breach on a "configuration vulnerability" that it "immediately...
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While we may all know Amazon for fast, two-day shipping on millions of products, Prime Video, and a host of other offline and online services, police departments are looking to the tech giant for a different reason. According to emails that were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) via a freedom of information request, the company is selling its Rekognition software to police departments across the United States. The Rekognition artificial intelligence (AI) system is capable of scanning faces in real-time and matching them against a database. In the case of police departments, this tool is being used to match people that may walk within range of...
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There is a brewing battle between companies that are vying for your dollars when it comes to making your home "smart". August is the latest company to strike a blow with the decision to give its Doorbell Cam and Doorbell Cam Pro users [limited] free cloud storage. August today announced the "Basic August Video Record" subscription, which gives Doorbell Cam users 24 hours of video recording storage for free. That footage can be viewed through the existing August smartphone app's activity feed. Now you won’t have to worry if you missed an alert sent to your smartphone if activity was detected (either through the motion sensors or when someone actually pressed the doorbell button). Instead,...
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After being temporarily knocked offline last week due to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, Amazon is dealing with another Alexa incident. While losing access to Alexa Voice Services for a few hours is annoying, what is currently happening to Amazon Echo users (and other devices that take advantage of Alexa) was downright puzzling and to some people, a little freaky. Amazon Echo devices have reportedly been laughing for absolutely no particular reason at all, which as you can imagine is unsettling to unsuspecting ears. This isn't a fluke that was relegated to just one person. Multiple people have confirmed that their Echos have "gone rogue" with fits of laughter as if they somehow had their...
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We sense a great disturbance in the [Alexa] force. Unfortunately for Amazon, Alexa voice services are down for a growing number of Echo users across the United States. Quite comically, Amazon's Super Bowl commercial revolved around the premise that Alexa had lost its voice, forcing stand-ins like Gordon Ramsey and Sir Anthony Hopkins to take over her duties. In this case, however, simply querying Alexa results in Echo devices displaying a red LED light ring, after which she responds, "Sorry, I'm have a little trouble understanding right now. Please try a little later." This was the response I heard when calling upon my own Echo Dot at 2:50pm EST. I had asked Alexa to answer a question for me...
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Wyze Labs may not be a name that you may have heard of before, but you may begin hearing more about the company in the coming weeks and months. The company first burst onto the scene back in October when it launched the original $20 WyzeCam Wi-Fi security camera; and now it's back just a few months later with the WyzeCam v2. Wyze Labs is based in Seattle, Washington, and was started by three former Amazon employees. The company's WyzeCam v2 builds on the strengths of its predecessor, which include 1080p video live streaming, night vision and two-way audio support. However, the second-generation model adds a new CMOS sensor which helps improve both daytime and nighttime viewing, and AI-based Motion...
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been firing on all cylinders lately. Last week, the company announced a new Secret Region for U.S. intelligence agencies, and this week it has announced a new camera that will help businesses leverage the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI). Meet AWS DeepLens, which is a deep learning camera that is capable of wireless running real-time computer vision models. At the heart of the DeepLens is an HD (1080p) video camera and an Intel Atom X5 processor that can process over 100 billion deep learning operations per second. The camera runs on Ubuntu 16.04 and is preloaded with the Greengrass Core. To help beginners get started with DeepLens, AWS has made available...
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has grown to be the leading player in on-demand cloud computing across the internet, and provides a sizable stream of revenue for the retail giant. AWS has a number of premier clients for its services including Google and even Comcast. However, AWS is furthering its reach into the lucrative government sector by expanding its GovCloud. The new AWS “Secret Region” will provide cloud services to U.S. intelligence agencies -- including the CIA -- at the “secret” security classification level. For inquiring minds, that is a step below the "top secret" designation. According to Amazon, the Secret Region will also be available to non-Intelligence...
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Sometimes it feels as though nothing is safe from the prying eyes (and digital crowbars) of dedicated hackers. Single sign-on provider OneLogin has found this out the hard way, as its systems were breached this week, potentially exposing customer data."We detected unauthorized access to OneLogin data in our US data region," OneLogin disclosed in a blog posting this week. "We have since blocked this unauthorized access, reported the matter to law enforcement, and are working with an independent security firm to determine how the unauthorized access happened and verify the extent of the impact of this incident."This initial notice was frustratingly lacking in detail, and customers were left to...
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As part of its commitment to achieving 100 percent renewable energy usage for its global footprint, Amazon this week announced that it has partnered with Community Energy to build and operate an 80 megawatt solar farm in Accomack County, Virginia. They'll call it Amazon Solar Farm U.S. East and expect it to generate around 170,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar power each year beginning in October 2016. That's enough energy to power around 15,000 U.S. homes in a year. Amazon said it will be the largest solar farm in Virginia, but rather than use the energy it harnesses to power households, it will all go into the electrical grids that supply both current and future Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud...
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EMC and VMware have pooled their resources to create Pivotal, a competitor to Amazon and its cloud services dominance, and according to the New York Times, Pivotal is now officially a company. Paul Maritz (pictured, inset), former CEO of VMware and a past executive at Microsoft will head the new company. Further details on senior leadership will emerge at Pivotal’s official launch on April 29th. Pivotal is taking on Amazon; if there was any doubt that Amazon needed a competition in the cloud services market, just note how much of the Internet disappears every time Amazon’s AWS experiences an outage. From Pivotal's teaser website The new company’s goals are summarized in a statement...
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Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is cloud storage at its most strighforward, offering a simple (hence the name) way for individuals and enterprises alike to stash files on Amazon’s massive data centers. Today, Amazon told customers in an email that prices are going down. “With this price change, all Amazon S3 standard storage customers will see a reduction in their storage costs,” said the Amazon S3 Team in the email. “For instance, if you store 50 TB of data on average, you’ll see a 12% reduction in costs. If you store 500 TB of data on average, you’ll see a 13.5% reduction in costs.” Although all regions--including multiple parts of the U.S....
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If you’re looking to cut your IT budget and simplify your operations, Amazon is as usual more than happy to oblige. The company announced the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Storage Gateway, a (beta) service that connects on-premises software applications to cloud storage. The service will also mirror your on-premises storage to Amazon’s EC2. AWS Storage Gateway features point-in-time snapshots of app data, disaster recovery, and access to EC2’s on-demand capabilities, as well. This video puts things in plain English (with drawings): A single AWS Storage Gateway supports up to a dozen volumes and a total of 12TB of storage, and users can opt to store data at several different georgraphic...
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The AT&T - T-Mobile merger may be off the table, but T-Mobile's parent company Deutsche Telekom is walking away from the deal with a smile on its face. The communications giant released the details of what AT&T agreed to pay for the privilege of bidding on its business, and it's an impressive set of benefits. AT&T's $3B (approximately €2.29B) payment will reportedly be used to pay down DT's debts in other areas. What T-Mobile is getting is a large package of AWS spectrum in 128 market areas, including 12 of the top 20 ((Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Phoenix, San Diego, Denver, Baltimore and Seattle). As a result, DT's population coverage...
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Spore is a critically-acclaimed game, but (at least by users) its DRM has been universally panned. Many of those who know anything about the SecuROM copy protection used in the game don't want it near their computers, unless they absolutely have to. And while Electronic Arts (EA) has "loosened things up" slightly, the DRM has spawned thousands of negative reviews at Amazon.com and protest creatures. And now, it has birthed a class action lawsuit (.PDF). The lawsuit was filed on Sept. 22nd by Melissa Thomas, represented by Alan Himmelfarb and Scott Kamber with KamberEdelson LLC. The lawsuit makes a number of statements, including: What purchasers are not told is that, included in the purchase,...
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NVIDIA has been hit with a securities fraud class action lawsuit over the defective GPUs which it admitted to in July. The complaint was filed by New York-based law firm Shalov Stone Bonner & Rocco. It alleges that NVIDIA knew about the flawed GPUs as early as November 8th, 2007 though no public announcement was made until July 2, 2008. After the announcement, NVIDIA stock dropped 30%. Since then manufacturers have issued BIOS updates to "fix" the issue, but all these have done is increase use of the fan to prevent the GPUs from overheating. The class action lawsuit is detailed on Shalov Stone Bonner & Rocco's website. Paragraph 23 of the complaint (.PDF) says: According to multiple public...
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Apple is certainly litigious over the use of the word "pod," and on Wednesday it received a taste of its own medicine, as it was sued over its "Mighty Mouse." No, it's not for the reason you might think, as its already licensed the name "Mighty Mouse" from CBS.Apple is facing a new lawsuit over its Mighty Mouse peripheral, reports say. The case was filed in Greenbelt, Maryland by a company called Man & Machine, which is accusing Apple of violating a trademark associated with its own Mighty Mouse device, an optical mouse designed to be waterproof and chemical-resistant for use in environments such as labs and hospitals. Crucially, M&M began selling its product in 2004, over a year...
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People and/or companies filing suit against Apple ought to get a volume discount these days.The latest lawsuit, filed by Stacie Somers in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Apple uses unfair business practices. Unfair could mean a lot of different things, but in this particular suit it refers to the iPod's inability to play Windows Media Audio files.“Further, Apple sells songs on the iTunes store with its own copy-protection technology, FairPlay, which is incompatible with music players other than the iPod.The suit contends iPod-owning consumers can only buy music from iTunes, an unlawful tie-in that violates U.S. antitrust laws. Apple could license...
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