Cloud Seen Driving Data Center Traffic; to Surge by 2015
Cloud is in. The cloud, a significant component that would rewrite the future of information technology and video/content delivery, is being seen by conglomerates as an important arena to log on to. With more companies getting on to this new computing services terrain, the cloud is turning out to be the fastest growing component of data center traffic.
Estimates are that the cloud will grow four-fold at 33 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to touch the 4.8 zettabytes mark annually, by 2015. It has been pointed out that cloud comprises 11 percent of data center traffic, and would be up by 33 percent of the total by 2015. Read more...
AT&T reports attempted customer data hack
AT&T today notified customers that there had been an "organized and systematic" attempt to hack into their personal account information.
The company sent out an email to customers informing them of an "attempt to obtain information on a number of AT&T customer accounts" but also emphasized that it did "not believe that the perpetrators of this attack obtained access" to users' online accounts. The company said that the perpetrators had tried using "auto script" technology to "determine whether AT&T telephone numbers were linked to online AT&T accounts." AT&T said it is now focusing its efforts on finding out who attempted the hack and what their intent was for gathering customer information. Read more...
Three questions that could put out Amazon’s Fire
A US congressman is pushing Amazon for details of its cloud-based browsing, Silk, specifically asking what data the company is gathering and how it intends to make use of it.
In an open letter (2-page PDF/263KB, short and to the point) Congressman Edward Markey asks Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos specifically what information is being collected by Silk, how Amazon intends to make use of it, and how the company will go about ensuring users have given explicit permission to have their behaviour monitored in this way.
That last point intimates that such permission should be explicitly requested, while Amazon was probably hoping that the usual user assent to unread Terms & Conditions would suffice. Read more...
Google will use Zagat’s (so you don’t have to)
Google bought Zagat Survey this week for an unknown amount between $50 million and $200 million. Zagat specializes in ratings for restaurants, hotels and travel destinations informed by the input of some 350,000 contributors.
The acquisition is Google's 104th. (The blog TechCrunch claims that the deal did not merit an FTC antitrust review, which happens automatically for any deal worth $66 million or more.)
Google offered Zagat competitor Yelp $500 million in December 2009, but the offer was rejected.
Silicon Valley companies often make acquisitions to gain access to talent, intellectual property or markets. But Google's Zagat buy is mostly about data and a winning methodology for maintaining it. Read more...
T-Mobile Javascript comment stripper breaks websites
Attempts by T-Mobile to speed up mobile data connections are breaking websites.
The bug intermittently affects mobile device users and PC users using tethered connections. It is caused by "optimisations" to the sites' Javascript code made on the fly, in attempt to optimise the amount of data received. Instead of stripping out comments, the optimisation – or more precisely, "pessimisation" – also strips out strings in the code itself.
MySociety first publicised the issue last week.
A developer told us the bug struck while his team was giving a demo to a potential investor. The team subsequently spent two days tracking down what had caused the issue.
"T-Mobile have managed to strip out bits of JavaScript code as well as comments. The jQuery library suffers, too. Worse than that, the script files are cached and won't get replaced when the user moves off 3G and back on to a decent ISP: in effect, T-Mobile has broken websites permanently," said the dev. Read more...
Preparing for the real costs of cloud computing
At a cloud computing conference in New York in June, a number of speakers pointed out that the cloud is moving past the hype stage and is beginning to deliver tangible benefits to organizations. These improvements include increased flexibility and agility.
But moving to the cloud can also mean added costs, some of which might be unexpected, according to IT executives whose organizations have implemented cloud services or are considering them.
While these types of costs don't necessarily prevent companies from getting real business value out of cloud computing initiatives, they will have an impact on the overall cost-benefit analysis of cloud services. Read more...
10 best practices to prevent data and privacy breaches
The antics of groups like Anonymous and LulzSec over the past few months have made data breaches seem inevitable. If information security vendors like HBGary and RSA Security aren't safe, what hope does an average SMB have? It is true that there is no silver bullet, and no impervious network security, but there are a variety of things IT admins can do to prevent network breaches and protect data and privacy better.
The Web safety and online identity protection experts at SafetyWeb.com and myID.com helped put together a list of 10 different data and privacy breach scenarios, along with suggestions and best practices to avoid them.
1. Data breach resulting from poor networking choices. Names like Cisco and Sun are synonymous with enterprise-level networking technologies used in large IT departments around the world. Small or medium businesses, however, generally lack the budget necessary for equipment like that. If an SMB has a network infrastructures at all, it may be built around networking hardware designed for consumer use. Some may forego the use of routers at all, plugging directly into the Internet. Business owners can improve network security and block most threats by using a quality router, like a Netgear or Buffalo brand router and making sure to change the router password from the default. Read more...
Microsoft looks to business tools for health care
Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, demonstrated some applications on Thursday that apply current technologies to problems facing the health care industry.
He spoke at the Pacific Health Summit in Seattle.
Technology developments aimed at businesses can help the medical field more than many people in health care may think, he said. For example, health care organizations often say that they have so much data, including patients' medical, billing and insurance information, that it will be a challenge for technology companies to build applications around the data, Mundie said. Read more...
Update: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo collaborate in search
In a rare display of collaboration, Google has joined forces with its search rivals Microsoft and Yahoo in a project intended to improve the Web crawling and indexing of structured data, which often originates in databases and loses its format when converted into HTML.
The three companies have launched a site called Schema.org, which contains a common set of HTML tags that they hope webmasters will use to mark up structured data on their sites.
"Schema.org aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages to help search engines better understand their websites," Google said in a blog post. Read more...
Microsoft SQL Server Replication Overview
Replication is a set of technologies for copying and distributing data and database objects from one database to another and then synchronizing between databases to maintain consistency. Using replication, you can distribute data to different locations and to remote or mobile users over local and wide area networks, dial-up connections, wireless connections and the Internet. This SQL Server Replication Overview will explain the terms and functions available through Microsoft SQL Server. Read more...
Update: Sony Ericsson online store, Sony BMG Japan hacked
Sony Ericsson Canada today confirmed that it was hit by a security breach that allowed about 2,000 customer records, including first name, last name, email addresses and the hash of encrypted passwords to be illegally accessed.
No additional personal or credit card information was compromised, the company said in a statement to the IDG News Service this afternoon.
Earlier today, The Hacker News (THN) had reported that it received a tip from a Lebanese hacker who had breached the site and accessed email addresses, passwords and names of thousands of users of Ericsson's Eshop online store in Canada. The information was then posted on Pastebin.com. Read more...
‘Project Triforce’: How Facebook Tested Its New Data Center
When Facebook built its first company-owned data center in Prineville, Oregon, designing and managing the facility was only part of the challenge. In a blog post Monday, the company explained how it had to stress-test its entire software infrastructure by commandeering a giant cluster of production servers on the other side of the country.
The Oregon data center marked a change of tack for Facebook, which had relied exclusively on two leased facilities in Northern California and Virginia. The Prineville data center was the first to be designed and built from scratch Read more...
World’s servers process 9.57ZB of data a year
Three years ago, the world's 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information.
Researchers at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, estimate that the total is equivalent to a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books stretching from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times.
By 2024, business servers worldwide will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, according to a report compiled by the scientists. Read more...
Despite Improvements, Data in the Cloud Remains Dirty
Few parts of our lives remain untouched by software in the cloud. From connecting with friends on Facebook to organizing your finances on Mint, these tools are becoming increasingly embedded into our professional and personal lives.
But the seemingly innocuous act of "liking" this article, for example, uses real power--power mostly derived from burning coal.
This was the conclusion of a new study released by Greenpeace this week. The report--part of Greenpeace's "Cool IT" campaign--found that while leading IT companies have made significant improvements in efficiencies throughout their data centers, they continue to derive their energy through carbon-emitting energy sources, primarily coal.
That's good news for small business, which now have the option to purchase cutting-edge cloud-based business applications from among an increasingly robust group of providers, all fighting to make their services cheaper and more user friendly. Read more...
In reversal, Yahoo will store user search data longer
In a move that is unlikely to win it any new friends in the privacy community, Yahoo has announced that it will retain consumer search data for a substantially longer period of time than it does today.
Starting sometime in mid-July, Yahoo will hold raw search log file data, including IP addresses, cookies and search-related information, for up to 18 months. It currently retains such data for 90 days.
Yahoo's chief trust officer, Anne Toth, said in a blog post that the change, announced on Friday, was designed to give consumers a more robust and personalized search experience while also bringing Yahoo into closer alignment with industry-wide data retention norms.
"We will hold raw search log files for 18 months and we will be closely examining what the right policy and time frame should be for other log file data," Toth wrote. "In announcing this change, we have gone back to the drawing board to ensure that our policies will support the innovative products we want to deliver for our consumers." Read more...