Cloud

How much do you hate ads? How much do ads piss you off? Well prepare to turn into an even bigger ball of hate-filled pissed-off-ness when you hear about Facebook's latest ventures in advertising. Few people would argue against the suggestion that Facebook has all but given up any pretence of being a social network and has become little more than a huge cog in a massive advertising machine. Claims have been made that ads are being made more relevant to users, but the truth of the matter is that users are being made more relevant to advertisers. And Facebook now has a whole new way to follow you around the web to make sure you are delivered even more better-targeted ads.

Facebook has been criticized for forcing users to reveal their real names -- information which is as valuable to advertisers as it is anything to do with security -- and there have long been concerns about privacy settings on the site. Users of Facebook may complain that their newsfeeds are cluttered with news and posts at the wrong time, but one of the biggest issues people have with the site is with ad delivery. Last week we learned that Facebook was on the verge of revealing something "more powerful than what Google can currently do" in terms of user tracking. Facebook has now launched Atlas, an ad platform that can track users as they move from desktop to mobile devices -- and it's sure to raise plenty of privacy hackles.

Most of us have hopefully managed to get off the sinking ship that was Windows XP. As much of a recent memory as that has become, a new end of life is rearing its head, and it's approaching fervently for those who haven't started planning for it. Microsoft's Windows Server 2003, a solid server operating system that's now about eleven and a half years old, is heading for complete extinction in just under 300 days. Microsoft has a fashionable countdown timer already ticking.

Seeing as we just finished our second server migration in a single week (a personal record so far), sharing some of the finer aspects of how we are streamlining these transitions seems like a timely fit. This braindump of sorts is a collection of best practices that we are routinely following for our own customers, and they seem to be serving us well so far.

According to an IDG survey commissioned by information management specialist CommVault, private cloud adoption can lead to better IT services, greater agility and reduced risk for businesses.

In order to help companies make the most of these advantages CommVault is introducing a Private Cloud Services Design product that means customers can build a service-centric approach for data management supporting the private cloud in approximately six weeks.

It's important for any business to establish an online presence, and this is certainly true in emerging markets. It's something recognized by Google, and the company is teaming up with Endurance International Group to help SMBs in Africa and Southeast Asia to launch online ventures.

Google's reputation online precedes it, but Endurance might not be a name that's overly familiar. The company provides hosting, and the new partnership with Google is set to benefit businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Indonesia and Malaysia.

People are slowly but surely coming round to the idea of SaaS (Software as a Service), and this is particularly true for businesses. Microsoft is making something of a success of pushing monthly or annual subscriptions for Office 365, but there's still a massive untapped market -- small businesses who are simply not in a position to make additional financial commitments each month. GoDaddy is helping to wipe out this obstacle by offering a package aimed at getting small businesses up and running online for just $1 per month; and the package includes Office 365.

As this is GoDaddy, it should come as no surprise that there is a web-focus to the package. For $1 a month, businesses can bag themselves a custom domain and take advantage of the Website Builder tool as well as site hosting. On top of this, there's round the clock support and $50 worth of Bing credit to help with online promotion. This is already a great value deal, but throwing Office 365 into the mix is going to be too much for many businesses to resist.

Seven years after its inception, online image editing service Aviary has been acquired by Adobe. The Photoshop stalwart is no stranger to the cloud, but this latest purchase seems to indicate that the company is looking to expand further in this arena. Pay a visit to the Aviary website and the Adobe branding is already in place -- there's also a new entry on the Aviary company timeline that has been updated to reflect the acquisition. The Adobe-branded Aviary website makes clear the thinking behind the move: "accelerating delivery of mobile apps that integrate with Adobe Creative Cloud".

It seems that the main reason for Adobe's interest in Aviary is the fact that the ornithologically-named firm has developed a number of mobile SDKs. Aviary is already a popular tool, and Adobe is understandably keen to monetize the popularity of cloud apps and mobile services: Aviary is a ready-made package that encompasses both of these ideas perfectly. An announcement by Adobe explains that "the acquisition accelerates Adobe's strategy to make Creative Cloud a vibrant platform for third-party apps, through a new Creative SDK".

There is plenty of competition in the cloud storage space, but, unfortunately, for the most part any massive changes are limited to paid plans. They get bigger, they get cheaper, but the free tier, which most users get first, remains largely as limiting as it has always been. Sure, we get a couple of extra gigs for free here and there, but it's all smoke after all, meant to lead us right to the money grabbers. (And who could blame providers for trying to make money?)

Now, Microsoft is doing something rather interesting, as it gives OneDrive users nearly twice as much storage in the free plan, bumping the limit from a so-so 15 GB to a respectable 30 GB. The reason? Well, it's a damn clever one -- the extra freebie is meant to help Apple users who are having trouble with iOS 8 upgrades due to low available storage. Because this is an oft-discussed issue, it is bound to generate some free advertising for Microsoft and OneDrive.

Twitpic will no longer close on 25 September as the photo sharing service has found a buyer. There's not yet any word on who is behind the acquisition, but the takeaway news is that photos should be safe as Twitpic will live to fight another day.

Just a couple of weeks ago, founder Noah Everett posted the news that Twitpic was to close following something of a legal tussle with Twitter. But things have taken a turn for the better. After users scrabbled to download their images to ensure they were safe, it now transpires that the service is not going anywhere.

Remember when floppy disks really were floppy? Or the joys of loading programs on a home computer from a C15 cassette? In just over 40 years storage technology has gone from these crude devices to cloud servers that put terrabytes of space in reach of anyone.

But where does the future lie? Hardware supplier Ebuyer has produced an infographic looking at the direction storage may take in the future.

The PaaSLane tool for assessing the cloud-readiness of applications has been available for two years and has helped many organizations transition their software smoothly. It's able to detect outdated architecture, weak security, platform issues and more.

Now Cloud Technology Partners has brought out a new release to allow Java and .Net developers to assess and optimize their source code for the cloud more quickly and efficiently.

Four major factors will bring about dramatic change in the data center market by the end of 2016, according to a new report released by Gartner.

The factors are: highly disruptive competition, big cloud provider dominance, economic warfare, and nationalism. All of these will occur with different intensities over different time frames but will have a significant impact on the market.

Given the hype surrounding it, it’s easy to believe that the cloud is increasingly the first choice when it comes to business systems.

Yet a new survey by IDC reveals that a majority of European IT departments have yet to fully embrace its benefits. When asked about their readiness to move to a cloud-based strategy levels of confidence were low.

In a fast-changing world there's demand for new applications to be delivered quickly and traditional development processes often can't keep pace.

Seattle-based startup Shippable has announced a new version of its platform that helps developers to innovate and deliver more quickly using open source Docker containers. Docker -- in case you didn't know -- isolates resources of the Linux kernel to allow independent software containers to run on one Linux platform without the need to launch virtual machines. Docker containers can be run on any Linux machine whether on site or in the cloud.

A warning has gone out to customers of Salesforce.com that the Dyreza trojan, previously targeted at banking sites, may be a risk to users of the CRM solution.

The malware uses social engineering techniques to get the victim to infect the system via email. Once installed it uses "browser hooking" to allow Dyreza to intercept content entered by the user into the web browser before that content is transmitted over the network to a web site. Critically this allows the interception to occur before the data is encrypted.

IBM has announced that SoftLayer will be the first cloud platform to offer customers bare metal service that provides monitoring and security down to the microchip level.

Working in combination with Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (TXT), the security platform will help businesses determine if a workload from a known location on SoftLayer infrastructure is running on trusted hardware.