Vulnerabilities in the Cloud?
Researchers recently identified a security issue in Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) that allows a hacker to to locate and eavesdrop on targeted virtual machines anywhere in the cloud. The report--with the catchy title "Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Computer Clouds". According to a Computerworld article: The attack described in the report was conducted against Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) service. But the vulnerabilities that enable it are generic and would likely affect [...]
Once Begun is ONLY Half Done
Buddha teaches us that there are only two mistakes that can be made along the road to truth: not starting and not going all the way. In the brief history of Internet governance, few initiatives have been greeted with wider support than the recently signed Affirmation of Commitments between the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The praise is well deserved, but now it's time to remind ICANN of the problems that [...]
New Processors in Mobile Market Helps Handsets, Helps Software Developers
As featured on Slashdot, competition among processors that power mobile handsets is heating up. ARM--whose chips dominate the mobile phone market--announced its smallest, lowers power multicore chip yet. These chips are meant to compete against Intel's Atom processor (which powers many Netbooks) in the smartphone market. As users look to their iPhone, Blackberry, Android or Windows Mobile device to do more, processors need to keep up. Faster processors allow software developers to create more useful applications. It's a sort of [...]
This Week In Antitrust
Today, we're kicking off a new feature on the blog, a weekly round up of the tech industry's various antitrust cases and "potential" antitrust concerns. While last week's antitrust news was dominated by competition concerns outside the technology industry (health insurers and the BCS), there were a few notable stories coming out of the world tech competition.Amazon - Are Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target Pricing Like Predators? | WSJ BlogApparently, the American Booksellers Association (representing small and independent booksellers) has written [...]
“Hey, Pot… It’s the Kettle.”
This news story from last week just about speaks for itself, and little commentary is needed. (And no, it's not a leftover from April 1.) It feels like something that should be on SNL's "Really?!?!?! With Seth & Amy." I mean, China... Really?!Chinese Group Says Google Violating Copyrights
No Patent Troll Here — Rewarding Innovation Down Under Through Patents
Slashdot's recent discussion of how an Australian research/tech transfer agency enforced its patent rights against 14 of the world's largest tech companies has what everybody should view as a happy ending: reinvestment. Australia's CSIRO has "injected $150 million from the proceeds of its wi-fi technology to the once-defunct science and industry endowment fund, originally established by parliament in 1926" according to the Aussie news article. The article also has a great quote: It's very important that when you have a [...]