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Amazon Web Services outage subsides after unplugging services for hours
An AWS outage has affected access to many Amazon services, as well as platforms like Roku, Adobe and Flickr that rely on the servers.
‘Frontline’ documentary tackles Jeff Bezos and the ‘Amazon Empire’
Amazon is the subject of the latest Frontline documentary, which airs on PBS today at 9PM ET and is probably worth checking out if you have any interest in the tech giant. From the same team that was behind a 2018 Frontline examination of Facebook, Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos charts the rise of Bezos and his company from shipping books from a Washington garage in the mid-'90s through to its current status as a trillion-dollar colossus.
Popsugar’s celebrity look-alike app is leaking users’ photos
I can't think of a more fitting way to end 2018 than with another, final data leak. This one is from #Twinning tool, the popular new app from Popsugar that matches your selfie with your top five celebrity look-alikes. Turns out, while you were uploading your face and crossing your fingers for who you would or wouldn't be compared to, Popsugar was doing a poor job of protecting your images.
Amazon Web Services begins using more efficient ARM-based server chips
Amazon's cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is launching ARM-based servers for its EC2 cloud computing service, the company announced on Monday at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.
China reportedly carried out a 'hardware hack' on Apple and Amazon (updated)
Data center hardware used by Apple and Amazon may have been fitted with surveillance micro-chips by Chinese server company Super Micro, claims Bloomberg in a new report. Almost 30 US companies reportedly fell prey to the "attack," with the chips used to snatch intellectual property and trade secrets, according to Bloomberg's anonymous government and corporate sources. The report notes that no "consumer data is known to have been stolen."
Amazon AWS error exposes info on 31,000 GoDaddy servers
Data leaks are par for the course these days, and the latest company to be involved in one is GoDaddy. The company, which says it's the world's top domain name registrar with over 18 million customers, is the subject of a new report from cybersecurity firm UpGuard that was shared exclusively with Engadget. In June, cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery discovered files containing detailed server information stored in an unsecured S3 bucket -- a cloud storage service from Amazon Web Services. A look into the files revealed multiple versions of data for over 31,000 GoDaddy systems.
Alexa lost its voice... for real this time
Has Alexa been giving you the cold shoulder recently? You're far from the only one. Outages in Amazon's cloud services muted the voice assistant for many people on March 2nd, producing error messages when you spoke commands to Echo speakers and other Alexa-equipped devices. The issue didn't affect everyone (we successfully spoke to Alexa in Canada during the outage, for instance) and could sometimes be overcome by using the Alexa app, but you certainly didn't want to depend on the AI helper for anything important.
Classified US Army and NSA data was stored on an unprotected server
Earlier this month, researchers at UpGuard reported that US military intelligence gathering data had been stored on a misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 server that wasn't password protected and was publicly viewable. While the data in that leak appeared to consist entirely of collected public internet posts and news commentary, not private information, the team at UpGuard today reports another US government data leak, this time containing clearly classified information.
Amazon's latest toolkit helps you quickly create VR apps
Amazon probably isn't the first company you think of when it comes to augmented or virtual reality (with a few exceptions), but it's determined to change your mind. The internet giant has unveiled a developer service, Sumerian, that promises to simplify creating AR and VR apps -- and general 3D apps, for that matter. You can drag-and-drop objects to quickly create 3D scenes, produce animated AI-driven characters (powered by AWS cloud services, naturally) and script interactions between the user and other objects.
Pentagon left public intelligence gathering data on exposed server
Even intelligence gatherers aren't immune to making mistakes that leave data wide open. Researchers at UpGuard have revealed that the US military's Central Command and Pacific Command left "at least" 1.8 billion collected internet posts exposed on a misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 server. Some of the data goes as far back as 2009. There doesn't appear to be any private content in the mix, and it's not clear that malicious intruders accessed it before the Department of Defense locked things down on October 1st (after notification from UpGuard). However, the exposure still raises concerns about both the government's approach to security and the kind of information it's collecting.
Amazon wants Alexa to answer customer service calls
In the near future, Amazon's Alexa could be on the other end of your next call to tech support. With call centers expected to become a more than $15 billion industry in the next five years, the online retail giant has apparently identified another market that is ready for a shift in technology. According to a new report from The Information, Amazon is currently prepping a commercial version of Alexa developed specifically for fielding questions from phone calls and text messages.
Amazon outage breaks large parts of the internet
If your favorite website or internet service isn't accessible today, it's probably not just you. Amazon Web Services' S3 cloud storage is experiencing "high error rates" that have caused chaos among many of the sites that depend on AWS to work. Our own website is one of them, but the failure has also affected some or all of Giphy, Medium, Slack, Quora and a slew of other websites and apps you likely use. Some connected home devices aren't working correctly, either. Even Amazon's ability to report problems was broken for a while -- the AWS dashboard wasn't changing color because its issue was "related" to S3's problems.
Apple will power part of iCloud with Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform has reportedly scored another major client after getting Spotify in February: Apple. Cupertino has struck a multi-million dollar deal with its staunchest rival to move part of iCloud and its other cloud-based offerings to GCP, according to Financial Times and CRN. Sources say the company's using a combination of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft's Azure and its own data centers at the moment. Neither corporation has confirmed the info yet, but CRN's sources told the publication that the deal is worth between $400 and $600 million.
Netflix just finished moving all of its data over to Amazon
The closure of Netflix's last data center might not be news, but who's picking up the slack on the outside might be. The firm has revealed that it's now moved its entire online business to Amazon Web Services, the retailer's cloud computing division. In a blog post, Netflix VP Yury Izrailevsky reveals that Netflix began closing its homegrown data centers back in 2008 after a server issue brought the (then) DVD-rental business to its knees for three days. Since then, it's been slowly moving over to Amazon's world-renowned servers which offer far more power, scale and reliability.
Amazon's Snowball is a smart box for shipping tons of cloud data
It seems paradoxical that you'd have to ship cloud data, but plenty of companies do -- it's sometimes faster for them to send a courier than to wait days for a massive upload to finish. And Amazon knows it. The internet giant just revealed the Snowball, an odd but unassuming storage device that shuttles up to 50TB of data to Amazon Web Services the old-fashioned way. The box is not only tough enough to survive the bumps and jostles of a courier, but has everything it needs for power and networking. There's even an E Ink control panel on the side that doubles as an automatic shipping label.
Skype is the latest in a series of high-profile web outages (updated)
The last 24 hours have served as a reminder of just how precarious the strands that connect us to the internet can be. Skype is reporting that some its services have fallen over after a bug was found that's preventing users from being seen as visible, rendering them incapable of making any voice or video calls. The news comes just a few short hours after The Next Web reported that an Amazon Web Services location in Virginia broke down, forcing some of the world's most popular services, including Netflix, AirBnB and Viber, offline. The Amazon outage has been mostly fixed by now, and Skype is pledging to get its own issues shorted post-haste, but if any rival video call providers wanted to take advantage of the situation, now would be the time.
Amazon hopes to mend its image by backing a giant solar farm
Amazon has a reputation problem. While fellow tech giants like Apple and Yahoo are considered champions of clean energy, Greenpeace and other advocacy groups regularly knock Amazon for running its servers on dirty power (like coal) and saying little about its renewable energy plans. The company is about to burnish its image in a big way, however -- it just announced that it will support the construction of an 80MW solar farm in Virginia, the largest ever in the state. The eco-friendly plant will supply Amazon Web Services data centers (both present and future) on top of the local grid, so your favorite app or website might run on pollution-free computing when the farm is ready around October 2016.
Amazon's web services are smart enough to make predictions
You no longer have to run a tech giant (or work in a lab) to take advantage of learning computers. Amazon has launched a machine learning feature for Web Services that lets any developer use this computer intelligence to make predictions. Instead of having to sift through data yourself and spend ages fine-tuning algorithms, you let Amazon's servers comb through the info and create predictions largely on their own. This potentially saves you a ton of time, especially if you're running a small outfit that can't afford a lot of servers -- Amazon claims that it took 20 minutes to solve one problem that previously took 45 days.
Sony is reportedly using hacker methods to take its stolen data offline
Sony apparently isn't rolling over as hackers breach and pilfer its data. As a way to fight back, the company is using hacking methods of its own to combat illegal downloads of its property, according to Recode. The entertainment giant is harnessing Amazon Web Services (the backend that hosts Netflix, Instagram and many others) to launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on websites hosting the stolen assets, as Recode's sources tell it. Given how vocal the Guardians of Peace have been so far during their campaign against the outfit, we'll likely know just how accurate these reports are in short order. [Image credit: Shutterstock]
Healthcare.gov revamp promises simpler sign-ups
It's almost universally accepted that Healthcare.gov's launch was an absolute nightmare. The next iteration may very well not be, thanks to the new blood that's been working tirelessly on a redesign since last November. As Wired tells it, once the revamped site launches this November 15th, it will employ something that was missing the first go 'round at all levels: common sense. That means the site will use Amazon's cloud services as a back-end (just like Netflix and Instagram), which should help avoid the black-outs from overloaded servers version 1.0 suffered. What's more, the sign-in system has been vastly simplified. Instead of using a login requiring a special character like an underscore or a dollar sign, your email address acts as a username. A new option to sample plans without inputting any personal info will be implemented as well, and the entire process has been optimized for those scoping out plans on a mobile device. If you weren't among the initial 5.4 million insured under the Affordable Care Act, this fall might be the time to start a new application. [Image credit: Alex E. Proimos/Flickr]
