HP, Intel Corporation and Yahoo have announced today the creation of a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing. The HP, Intel and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed aims to provide a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before. The initiative will also support research of cloud applications and services. more»
Microsoft, one of the biggest rivals to open-source programming, has begun funding the Apache Software Foundation, one of open-source software's biggest supporters. "Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation. This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software," said Sam Ramji, a senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft. He announced the move Friday in a speech at the Open Source Convention, and noted Microsoft's support of Apache on the software company's Port 25 blog as well. more»
Google has recently indexed more than a trillion unique URLs on the Web -- a milestone that has awed Google search engineers who are seeing the Web grow by several billion individual pages every day, company officials wrote in a blog post: "We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!" However there is a caveat... more»
China reports that the number of its Internet users has reached close to 253 million, surpassing United States as the world's leading Internet market, despite heavy government controls. The estimate, based on a national survey, shows that the number of Internet users jumped more than 50 percent, or by about 90 million, during the past year, suggesting that China could soon have more than 300 million people using the Internet for everything from news to online shopping. China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) says that the share of the Chinese public using the Internet is still just 19.1 percent, leaving more space for rapid growth. more»
Eevery single U.S. Democratic challenger with more than $500k in cash on hand has announced their support for net neutrality, reports Matt Stoller of OpenLeft -- "This is a milestone for the fight for internet freedom." Also noted is that, with the exception of three individuals, there is no organized telecom or cable money going to any of these candidates. Included in the report are statements reacting to this news from Senator Byron Dorgan, Speaker Pelosi, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, Google public policy director Alan Davidson, and Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu... more»
A new nonprofit organization called the Open Web Foundation (OWF) launched today with a mission to be an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies. "The Open Web needs Open Data, Open Date needs Open Specifications," is one of the statements used in today's opening presentation. With backing from some of the biggest companies including Google, MySpace, Facebook, and Yahoo, the foundation plans to serve as a placeholder for "all the legal dirty work that needs to happen in order for data portability to become a reality." more»
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has thrown its weight behind cloud computing, signing a deal with HP to build out an ambitious cloud infrastructure, which will include storage and server capacity. The Web-based cloud model will enable U.S. armed forces personnel to configure and access a server on the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) network within 24 hours, according to the Agency, which oversees the U.S. military's battlefield command and control systems. more»
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»
Last month, privacy organizations wrote to Google CEO Eric Schmidt asking the company to link to its privacy policy from its home page. Organizations say including the privacy link on the Google's home page is good practice and mandated by California law. On late Thursday, Google quietly changed its stance by adding a privacy link to its home page and with explanations posted on its main corporate blog and its public policy blog. more»
In all the recent uproar (New York Times, "Google Told to Turn Over User Data of YouTube," Michael Helft, 4 July 2008) about the fact that Google has been forced to turn over a large pile of personally-identifiable information to Viacom as part of a copyright dispute (Opinion), there is a really interesting angle pointed out by Dan Brickley (co-creator of FOAF and general Semantic Web troublemaker)... more»
Computer security researchers from ETH Zurich, Google, and IBM have suggested that computer software would be more secure if it were labeled with an expiration date -- similar to perishable food product. Firefox 2 is considered to be the most secure browser since 83.3% of its users worldwide are running the current version. The issue of browser security matters more these days because more and more malware is targeting Web browser vulnerabilities. Remotely exploitable vulnerabilities have been on the rise since 2000 and accounted for 89.4% of vulnerabilities reported in 2007, according to the study, which claims that a "growing percentage of these remotely exploitable vulnerabilities are associated with Web browsers." more»
The majority of the Internets malware-infected websites are located on Chinese networks, finds a new report released today by StopBadware.org, the university-based research initiative aimed at protecting users from dangerous software. The report also identifies the 10 network blocks that contain the largest number of badware sites. Six of the 10 are located in China. 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»
In a letter, copy of which was obtained by Reuters yesterday, Google Inc. has told a senior U.S. Republican lawmaker concerned about privacy that the Internet search and advertising company supports a federal privacy law. 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»
