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Law enforcement agencies across the country reported brief outages of their 911 systems Monday night, and it was not immediately clear if there was a connection with a major Microsoft system outage. Law enforcement agencies around the country, from Nevada to Pennsylvania and Arizona to Minnesota, tweeted that their 911 systems were down beginning sometime after 7 p.m. ET. Multiple reports indicated outages throughout Delaware and Ohio as well. By 8:15 p.m., many of those departments reported that their services had come back online. Others were still recommending that people call local department numbers instead of the emergency line. The...

Science fiction is rapidly becoming fact as 59-year-old scientist Dr Peter Scott-Morgan tries to cheat death and battle muscle-wasting motor neurone disease by becoming a cyborg A scientist is taking a leaf out of sci-fi novels as he embarks on a mission to transform himself into a real-life human cyborg. In 2017, 59-year-old scientist Dr Peter Scott-Morgan was given the devastated news he had the muscle-wasting motor neurone disease – similar to that of Stephen Hawking. Instead of accepting the diagnosis as a death sentence, Peter wants to use it as the motivation to transform himself with hi-tech "upgrades". He...

Radioactive elements synthesized in massive stars are ejected into space via stellar winds and supernova explosions. Our Solar System moves through the interstellar medium and collects these extrasolar products. One such product is iron-60. Because it is not naturally produced on Earth, the presence of this radioactive isotope is a sensitive indicator of supernova explosions within the last few million years. Australian National University’s Dr. Anton Wallner and colleagues previously found traces of iron-60 at about 2.6 million years ago, and possibly another at around 6 million years ago, suggesting our planet had traveled through fallout clouds from nearby supernovae....

Late Wednesday, Microsoft (ticker: MSFT) reported financial results that handily beat Wall Street expectations. The company posted adjusted fiscal second-quarter earnings per share of $1.51, above the $1.32 Wall Street consensus. Revenue of $36.9 billion beat estimates of $35.7 billion. On Thursday, Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler reaffirmed his Outperform rating for Microsoft shares, citing the company’s stellar earnings report. He also raised his price target for the stock to $203 from $174. “This was again another strong quarter as Microsoft continues to deliver Commercial Cloud growth as well as growth in numerous other areas,” he wrote. “The cloud story continues...

Only up for five hours, but that's plenty of time for the wrong person to spot itUpdated An Amazon Web Services engineer published exchanges with customers and "system credentials including passwords, AWS key pairs, and private keys" to a public GitHub repository by accident.On 13 January, infosec biz UpGuard discovered a 954MB repository containing AWS resource templates – used to create cloud services – plus hostnames, and log files generated in the second half of 2019. There were also internal Amazon training resources marked "confidential." "Several documents contained access keys for various cloud services," UpGuard reported today. "There were multiple...

The White House faces a “very ugly” legal battle with Amazon over the handling of a massive contract to handle the Pentagon’s vast cloud computing needs, experts say, and top administration officials ultimately may have to reveal under oath whether President Trump personally interfered in the process. The fight is already shaping up as a battle of economic and political super heavyweights, with Mr. Trump making clear his lack of respect for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his business empire, which happens to include The Washington Post. The Defense Department last month awarded the 10-year, $10 billion military cloud computing...

Amazon and Microsoft are battling it out over a $10 billion opportunity to build the U.S. military its first “war cloud” computing system. But Amazon’s early hopes of a shock-and-awe victory may be slipping away. Formally called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure plan, or JEDI, the military’s computing project would store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the Pentagon to use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities. The Defense Department hopes to award the winner-take-all contract as soon as August. Oracle and IBM were eliminated at an earlier round of the contract competition.

1,060-hour image of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) captured by Amateur Astronomers Guillaume Doyen 12 avril 2019 label Astrophotographie / Astrophotography label English 1060 is the number of hours needed to capture this highly-resolved image (204 Megapixels) of the Large Magellanic Cloud. It might be the world's longest exposure image within the amateur astronomers community. In astrophotography, the amount of time you spend imaging a celestial object is inherently fundamental. The longer your camera's shutter is open, the more light you get, so that the darkest regions of the sky start to get clearer. Usually, amateur astronomers are familiar with...

Two third-party Facebook app developers were found to have stored user data on Amazon's servers in a way that allowed it to be downloaded by the public, according to a report from UpGuard, a cybersecurity firm. One of the companies stored 146 gigabytes of data containing more than 540 million records, including comments, likes, reactions and account names, on the Amazon servers, according to UpGuard. The number of users whose data was included is not yet clear. Another app is said to have stored unprotected Facebook passwords for 22,000 users. Chris Vickery, the director of cyber risk research at UpGuard,...

The bizarre phenomenon was pictured above Al Ain near the border with Oman Due to its rarity and strange appearance the holes are often attributed to UFOs Scientists quickly explained it is a 'fallstreak hole' or 'hole punch cloud' Fallstreak holes occur when water droplets quickly freeze and form ice crystals ======================================================================= UAE citizens were left baffled after a mysterious 'whirlpool hole' suddenly appeared in the sky above the city of Al Ain this weekend. The large circular patch of clear sky emerged inside the otherwise heavy cloud near the border with Oman, as if somebody had punched a hole...

Combined companies will offer endpoint security with built-in cloud backup. The data backup and storage company Carbonite has announced that it has acquired endpoint security provider Webroot for $618m. The deal will allow Carbonite to combine the strengths of both companies to provide customers with automated cloud security software that has emergency backup already built in.

Apple Inc will build a $1.375 billion data center in Waukee, Iowa, Apple and state officials said on Thursday, with $207.8 million in incentives approved by the Iowa Economic Development Authority and Waukee city council. Apple will purchase 2,000 acres (8.09 square km) of land in Waukee, about 20 miles (32 km) west of Des Moines, to build two data centers. The company will receive a $19.65 million investment tax credit for creating 50 jobs. Apple said the project will generate more than 550 jobs in construction and operations, but did not specify how many of those jobs would be...

“Collection #1" is the largest public data breach by volume, with 772,904,991 unique emails and 21,222,975 unique passwords exposed. ...12,000 separate files and 87GB of data had been uploaded to MEGA, a popular cloud service. The data was then posted to a popular hacking forum and appears to be an amalgamation of over 2,000 databases. The troubling thing is the databases contain “dehashed” passwords, which means the methods used to scramble those passwords into unreadable strings has been cracked, fully exposing the passwords. So what does this mean for the average person? According to Hunt, it means compromised email and...

ROBERT MUELLER’S BELTWAY COVER-UP By using the justice system as a political weapon, Mueller and his supporters in both parties are confirming what many Americans already believe: We are not all equal under one law. Past and present FBI officials who broke the law may be seen to have the largest stake in Mueller’s investigation continuing as long as possible. The inquiry has plenty of other constituencies as well. National security hawks are rightly worried that the abuses of foreign intelligence surveillance may jeopardize programs that are designed to keep Americans safe from terrorism. For the time being, Mueller’s probe...

From an office suite on the 26th floor of the iconic Frost Bank Tower in Austin, Texas, a little-known recruiting firm called Crossover is searching the globe for software engineers. Crossover is looking for anyone who can commit to a 40- or 50-hour workweek, but it has no interest in full-time employees. It wants contract workers who are willing to toil from their homes or even in local cafes. “The best people in the world aren’t in your Zip code,” says Andy Tryba, chief executive of Crossover, in a promotional YouTube video. Which, Tryba emphasizes, also means you don’t have...

LifeSite, a Christian pro-life news outlet, was allegedly blacklisted by its web host and given just 12 hours to find another host the website, or risk being offline. “LifeSite just received an email at 8:30 p.m. EST from our web-hosting company alerting us that they will be taking our website down within 12 hours, if not sooner,” claimed LifeSite in a statement, Saturday. “We received absolutely no forewarning whatsoever about this decision.” “Our web developer is scrambling right now to set up a possibly-needed temporary solution to keep the website live. However, we’re going to have to go through the...

Sweden’s Transport Agency moved all of its data to “the cloud”, apparently unaware that there is no cloud, only somebody else’s computer. In doing so, it exposed and leaked every conceivable top secret database: fighter pilots, SEAL team operators, police suspects, people under witness relocation. Names, photos, and home addresses: the list is just getting started. The responsible director has been found guilty in criminal court of the whole affair, and sentenced to the harshest sentence ever seen in Swedish government: she was docked half a month’s paycheck Many governments have had partial leaks in terms of method (Snowden) or...

KRON4 Chief Meteorologist Lawrence Karnow says the formation is known as a "fallstreak hole" or "hole punch cloud." The clouds form when there are water droplets that are colder than freezing but have yet to freeze, according to the National Weather Service. These "supercooled" water droplets need a "reason" to freeze, which usually comes in the form of ice crystals, the NWS explains. Planes passing through the cloud layer can bring these ice crystals.

Dive Brief: • Amazon is the latest big tech company to help graduate students with the skills that employers want, training some experts say private firms can most easily and effectively provide, according to the Los Angeles Times. • Amazon Web Services is partnering with a group of community colleges in the Los Angeles region to offer a 15-credit certification in the broadening field of cloud computing program. Planners expect the program will be expanded to a two-year degree program soon. • A pilot program was offered last year through a local high school and Santa Monica College, which helped...

Twilio, a San Francisco-based cloud communications platform company, has opened an office in Buckhead. According to company representatives, Twilio plans to add more than 50 employees at the new office in the next few years, including positions in sales, human resources and engineering. The Atlanta office will hold a recruiting event for some of these positions from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. July 10 at WeWork Terminus. “Incredible momentum in Twilio’s customer base is fueling our need to expand the company’s presence in new regions,” George Hu, Twilio’s chief operating officer, said in a statement. “Atlanta brings us closer to...