Free Republic

Amazon and Microsoft are quickly becoming the king and queen of cloud computing. Here's another case in point: the two of them just won a huge contract with the FAA, led by IT consultant CSC. This contract will consolidate the FCC's data centers, moving data to both Amazon's cloud Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft's cloud, Azure. CSC says the contract is worth $108 million out of the gate, and because its a long-term contract, could be worth as much as $1 billion over the next 10 years. The FAA isn't getting rid of its data centers altogether to run...

The stunning leak of nude and intimate photos of scores of celebrities may reach far wider than was previously known, involving the breach of almost 600 online storage accounts, according to unsealed federal court documents. The "Celebgate" hack resulted in the posting on Aug. 31 of almost 500 purported photos of Hollywood stars, models and other celebrities — including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst, Kaley Cuoco and U.S. soccer star Hope Solo — to the Wild West-like Internet forum 4chan, from which they quickly spread. Apple Inc. confirmed the next day that the photos were obtained through a "targeted...

The huge shape floating above homes and businesses sparked widespread panic as people took to social media to find out if the end of the world was coming. Many in the city of Tyumen in south central Russia believed it was the beginning of a nuclear war. Photos of the ominous mushroom cloud quickly went viral in Russia. Alexander Bogdanov posted a photo on Instagram saying: "World War III has begun. "I photographed it from my window." Another, Oleg Alexeeva, tweeted: "Oh, God save us. What have they done?!!!" While MyraYer posted: "Crazy b******s!!! This is the end." The huge...

CoreOS and Joyent's SmartOS/Triton have worked to redefine, in radically different ways, what an OS needs to be to run applications at scale in the cloud.Now another candidate is set to join the ranks of maverick cloud OSes: OSv, open source, hypervisor-optimized, and "designed to run an application stack without getting in the way.">OSv runs existing Linux applications, but is not itself Linux; it's entirely new and written from the ground up in C/C++. It can run on a slew of hypervisors and virtual machine systems, or in cloud environments like Amazon EC2 or Google Compute Engine. The company claims significant...

The new Hello Barbie, showed off at the New York Toy Fair on Saturday, will actually be able to listen to kids’ words and change its own language to adapt to their preferences, BBC reports. Tell Barbie you like dancing, and she’ll mention dancing in a later conversation, for example. A speech-recognition company called ToyTalk is programming Barbie’s speaking and listening capabilities. The necklace on the doll will feature both the microphone and the speaker that help enable the conversations. Hello Barbie will retail for $74.99 when it launches, likely in time for the holiday season. The doll requires a...

Stars Passing Close to the Sunby Paul Gilster on January 2, 2015 Every time I mention stellar distances I’m forced to remind myself that the cosmos is anything but static. Barnard’s Star, for instance, is roughly six light years away, a red dwarf that was the target of the original Daedalus starship designers back in the 1970s. But that distance is changing. If we were a species with a longer lifetime, we could wait about eight thousand years, at which time Barnard’s Star would close to less than four light years. No star shows a larger proper motion relative to...

After security researcher Jeffrey Paul upgraded the operating system on his MacBook Pro last week, he discovered that several of his personal files had found a new home — on the cloud. The computer had saved the files, which Paul thought resided only on his own encrypted hard drive, to a remote server that Apple controls. “This is unacceptable,” thundered Paul, an American based in Berlin, on his personal blog a few days later. “Apple has taken local files on my computer not stored in iCloud and silently and without my permission uploaded them to their servers — across all...

RoboBrain marks the dawn of cloud robotics Posted by: Emily Smith August 25, 2014 in Tech RoboBrain is the new attempt of artificial intelligence researchers to create a cloud-based database that would help out existing and future robots. In theory, RoboBrain is supposed to be a massive database of all the information robots have been taught so far and offers the possibility of increasing that knowledge as well. The main idea behind RoboBrain is that the cumulative knowledge robots have been able to gather should be collected in the same place, namely cloud storage, and made available to every robot...

It wasn't long ago that cloud storage companies such as Box and Dropbox were among the hottest startups in Silicon Valley, blessed with vast amounts of venture capital and poised to go public in blockbuster IPOs. But now, thanks to a price war launched by Google, Amazon and other tech giants, almost anyone with a laptop or tablet can get cloud storage for less than the price of a latte. That means Box and Dropbox, which sell software for businesses and consumers to store and use files on the Internet rather than a machine, are confronting a precarious future: They...

On Sunday May 19th, storm chasers captured a low precipitation (LP) supercell near Newcastle, Wyoming. A supercell is a thunderstorm that is associated with a mesocyclone, which is a deep, persistently rotating updraft. Supercell thunderstorms can persist for many hours and are responsible for nearly all of the significant tornadoes produced in the U.S.

The US cloud industry faces up to €25.8 billion in lost revenues following revelations about US-led snooping on EU citizens. “The surveillance revelations will cost the US cloud computing industry USD 22 to 35 billion in lost revenues over the next three year,” said EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding on Sunday (19 January) at the Digital Life Design Conference in Munich. …

The crew of the USS Dewey have honored the dying wish of a Pearl Harbor survivor by allowing him on board the latest version of the destroyer he served on in the Second World War. Electrician’s Mate Second Bud Cloud was due to begin hospice care, when his friend Jennie Haskamp reached out to the Dewey's crew and asked if he could see the ship in San Diego. But when they arrived at the dock, the sailors carried the 90-year-old veteran on board and attentively listened as he shared his memories from the war.

The NSA's activities are a massive blow for US computer businesses "It's an ill bird," runs the adage, "that fouls its own nest." Cue the US National Security Agency (NSA), which, we now know, has been busily doing this for quite a while. As the Edward Snowden revelations tumbled out, the scale of the fouling slowly began to dawn on us. Outside of the United States, for example, people suddenly began to have doubts about the wisdom of entrusting their confidential data to cloud services operated by American companies on American soil. As Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president responsible...

U.S. technology companies warn they could lose between $21.5 billion to $35 billion in global cloud computing contracts over the next three years due to negative fallout from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) spying programs on Internet users, including emails. A new report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, estimates that U.S. cloud computing companies could lose 10% to 20% of the cloud computing market to European or Asian companies due to U.S. spying. That means major players including Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) could be hurt.... Some tech companies...

Microsoft Windows 10 might become a cloud based operating system (OS) according to a leaked road-map. The road-map shows that Microsoft will no longer release service packs but instead will release major updates every year which also increases the version number of the OS. The next major improvement should be Windows 9, this should bring back the Aero interface in a new form. This should also be a version in which Microsoft will merge its ARM CPU based Windows RT platform with Windows Phone. This version of Windows could also be the last version of Windows as we know it....

Summary: Revelations of the U.S. government's spying programs could have a massive impact on the U.S. cloud industry, which stands to lose vast sums over the next three years as a result — compounded by other countries bankrolling efforts to combat U.S. market leadership. The U.S.' dominance in the cloud space may soon be challenged by rival countries, particularly those in the European Union, as the global surveillance scandal threatens to wipe up to $35 billion off the U.S. cloud slate. A new report by non-profit group the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation claims that Europeans are attempting to nudge...

UPDATE: Why Govt. Source leaked PRISMAdditional information is being reported that confirms what most of us have always suspected. NSA is collecting all our email data, tracking our movements, our photographs, our documents, etc. Also factor in the fact that a court recently ruled that Obama is free to collect our DNA without being found guilty of any crime. National Security Agency (NSA) building designed for massive data collection in Utah:WaPo reports the following:The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection...

Adobe . . . has made a bold move to abandon their customers . . . and force them into a subscription sales model which some of us might remember from the 1950s door-to-door book and encyclopedia sales women who sold my mom a set. Only now . . . Adobe abandoned all their customers. From now on . . . you don't get rent to own. You only get to rent . . . What do you think?

Explanation: Globular star cluster 47 Tucanae is a jewel of the southern sky. Also known as NGC 104, it roams the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy along with around 200 other globular star clusters. The second brightest globular cluster (after Omega Centauri) as seen from planet Earth, it lies about 13,000 light-years away and can be spotted naked-eye near the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) in the constellation of the Toucan. Of course, the SMC is some 210,000 light-years distant, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way and not physically close to 47 Tuc. Stars on the outskirts of the...

Curious why there are those with an online business, who believe that handing over their entire back office infrastructure to one company, aka "going cloud" may not be the wisest of ideas. Just ask all those websites that use Amazon's cloud service today, who suddenly went dark when the Amazon cloud crashed. From the NYT: Amazon’s data centers in Northern Virginia crashed Monday afternoon, taking with it a number of popular Web sites, from Someecards, the quirky e-card company, to mobile applications like Flipboard and Foursquare. Amazon reported having problems with the data centers in Northern Virginia. Those problems appear...