FBI seized US anonymisation server
The FBI carried out a midweek raid in New York to confiscate a server belonging to the European Counter Network (ECN), which was running a mixmaster service for sending out anonymised email. The details are revealed in an announcement by alternative providers Riseup Networks and May First/People Link, which run the data centre which hosted the seized server. The seizure is reported to be part of a US police investigation into repeated bomb threats at the University of Pittsburgh. The providers and activist groups associated with them have accused the police of adopting a sledgehammer approach, as their actions have also resulted in numerous civil rights projects hosted on the server being taken offline. Read more...
Amazon floats free Windows Server clouds
Amazon is giving Windows shops a taste of Microsoft's Windows server for free in the cloud.
The Amazon Web Service (AWS) Free Usage Tier now includes up to 750 hours of Windows Server 2008 R2 without having to pay the hard-to-catch cloud-fluffer anything.
Amazon is targeting developers – especially .NET heads – starting up anything that might turn into bigger paying customers once the devs' applications take off and grow.
Also available in the Free Usage Tier are another 750 free hours of Linux, along with S3, SimpleDB Elastic Block storage, and Elastic Load Balancer.
The amount of room available for free in Elastic Block Storage has also been boosted to 30GB and I/O requests doubled to two million. Read more...
IBM shines in strong Q2 server market
IBM's worldwide server revenue jumped a healthy 24.5 percent in the second quarter, putting it neck and neck with Hewlett-Packard for the top spot, IDC reported Tuesday.
Helped by a surge in mainframe sales, IBM's revenue climbed to just over US$4 billion in the quarter, giving it 30.5 percent of the overall market. HP's sales climbed a more modest 9.3 percent, to $3.9 billion, for 29.8 percent of the market. IBM crowed that it had recaptured the server crown, but IDC declared it "a statistical tie."
Server sales were strong overall, with worldwide revenue climbing 18 percent from a year earlier to $13.2 billion, IDC said. Unit shipments were 2.1 million, the second-highest total ever reported for a June quarter. The highest was in 2008, just before the economy went south. Read more...