More than 40 years ago, the FCC was worried about telephone companies using their power over communications to control the then-nascent (and competitive) data processing marketplace. The Bell System at that point was already banned from providing services that weren't common carriage communications services (or "incidental to" those communications services)... In a 1999 article in the Texas Law Review, Steve Bickerstaff pointed out that Computer 1 meant that no one could provide a "computer utility" service... Today, we'd call the "computer utility" something different -- we'd use the term "cloud computing." more»
The spam attacks which occurred this weekend and claimed to have come from Microsoft, are reported to have used Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers. Brian Krebs of Washington Post's Security Fix has investigated this issue -- from the report: "...to spammers and scammers accustomed to paying for all kinds of Web services with stolen credit cards, Amazon's service is another place to host their junk, said Suresh Ramasubramanian, head of anti-spam operations at Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based outfit that has listed all of Amazon's EC2 Internet space on its spam blacklists..." Also reported: "Anti-spam group Spamhaus also has flagged a large swath of Amazon's EC2 Internet address space on its "policy blocklist," which subscribers use to block e-mail from dynamic Internet addresses..." more»
Gartner says the confusion that surrounds the term "cloud computing" signifies its potential to change the IT market. Gartner defines cloud computing as scalable, IT-related capabilities provided as a service on the internet. "When organizations cross the threshold between the internet as a communications channel and the deliberate delivery of service over the internet, then we truly start to head for an economy based on consumption of everything from storage to computation to video to finance deduction management," said Daryl Plummer, a Gartner analyst. more»
Google's application-hosting service, "Google App Engine," suffered an outage on Tuesday, highlighting one of the downsides of the new cloud computing services, reports Nancy Gohring of IDG News Service. Between 9 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. PST and again later in the day, a significant percentage of users trying to access the service were unable to do so, according to a post on the Google App Engine forum. "This outage was the result of a bug in our datastore servers and was triggered by a particular class of queries," wrote a member of the App Engine Team who called himself "Pete." more»
Google sees all enterprise trends pointing toward cloud computing and it wants a piece of the action. Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Enterprise, speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in the US, said: "The next 10 years of innovations are going to be in the cloud. Enterprise software is not going away but there is a transition taking place." more»
The approach is growing in popularity, and Google, Microsoft and Amazon are among the many large companies working on ways to attract users to their offerings, with Google Apps, Microsoft's Live Mesh and Amazon S3 all signing up customers as they try to figure out what works and what can turn a profit... In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play... The issue was recently highlighted by reports that the Canadian government has a policy of not allowing public sector IT projects to use US-based hosting services because of concerns over data protection. more»
Around 350 attendees came from Russia in the east to Ireland in the west, as well as a few people from elsewhere around the globe, to attend Domain Pulse 2008 in Vienna on February 21 and 22. Day one's focus was internet governance. The future of the DNS was one of the key issues addressed by Michael Nelson of Georgetown University in Washington DC, with domain names becoming less important, but their numbers still increasing, as online access by a myriad of devices skyrockets connect -- everything from the television, refrigerator, washing machine, pets, sprinkler systems and cars. more»
A recent report released by the Discovery Institute estimates that by 2015, U.S. IP traffic could reach an annual total of one zettabyte (1021 bytes), or one million million billion bytes. From YouTube, IPTV, and high-definition images, to "cloud computing" and ubiquitous mobile cameras, 3D games, virtual worlds, and photorealistic telepresence, the new wave is swelling into an exaflood of Internet and IP traffic. more»
