Cloud

I must disagree with colleague Mark Wilson, who last week asserted: "There is no reason for anyone to care about the iPhone 6", which as I write has 124 comments. I'm a big fan of provocative posts, because they engage the readership. But my feelings differ about commentaries that bluster without substance. Mark is absolutely wrong. There is every reason for everyone to care about the next iPhone.

Mark asserts that iPhone "used to be aspirational and high-end. Now the world and his dog has an Apple handset and it's turned from something special into a poor substitute for one of the countless alternatives...The iPhone is run-of-the-mill. It is predictable. It's just plain boring".  In many ways, I agree, but his boring assessment is every reason to "care about the iPhone 6".

Most of us prefer to stay with familiar consumer file syncing and sharing tools at work rather than use the alternatives provided by the IT department.

This is the finding of new research by global analyst company Ovum. The survey of 5,187 full-time employees shows that 89 percent are using consumer products and only nine percent are happy with the commercial tools on offer from their companies.

Since a cache of nude photos of celebrities appeared online, Apple has remained fairly tight-lipped about what may or may not have happened. Right from the start rumors were flying around that Apple's iCloud service may have been comprised or that Find My iPhone may have been to blame. The company said that it was "actively investigating" the suggestions but then things went quiet again. The FBI became involved, but it has been a frustrating 48 hours for anyone trying to find out what happened. Now Apple has issued a statement making it clear that a security attack did indeed take place.

Entitled Update to Celebrity Photo Investigation the statement reads:

As the market for storing and sharing files in the cloud has grown, Box has become one of the most popular solutions. As a result lots of other add-on products have grown up around it offering added security, compliance and more.

The latest to join the Box ecosystem is backup specialist eFolder with its Cloudfinder product, a multi-platform cloud-to-cloud backup service.

The ConnectWise system management platform is popular with managed services providers, with more than half of MSPs worldwide using it to enhance efficiency and control for their clients.

Now cloud backup company Zetta.net has announced that it's integrated its enterprise-grade cloud backup and disaster recovery platform with ConnectWise to allow MSPs to offer an extra layer of service.

In case you haven't heard of Yo, it's the latest breakout mobile app to go viral. Despite its single-feature capability, or perhaps because of it, the app struck a chord and rocketed to the top of Apple's App Store. Even Yo's own developers describe the app as "a fine line between stupid and genius".

While Yo was basking in the unexpected spotlight at the top of the apps chart, the next thing that happened was also unexpected. Yo got hacked. Three college students exploited a way into the app, snagged 300,000 Yo users and engaged in message spoofing. Yet Yo is hardly the first app, nor will it be the last, to get hacked.

Microsoft has announced service enhancements and a reduced price scheme for its Azure SQL database, as a result of customer feedback.

Microsoft has now promised to deliver a service-level agreement (SLA) of 99.99 percent availability, equivalent to a downtime of just 53 minutes per year.

The Internet is buzzing about celebrity nude photos pilfered from iCloud. The problem is bigger than Apple's security, if breached, which I doubt. Behavior is the larger concern, and how people adapt during the contextual cloud computing era. If your phone automatically syncs pictures or videos to any cloud service -- Google Photos, iCloud, OneDrive, or another -- you must assume that nothing is private.

That personal nude video you shoot on the HandyCam is very different from the one taken on Galaxy S5, iPhone 5s, or another device. I should be stating the obvious, but given pervasive attitudes about the Internet -- where people feel safe browsing in the sanctity of their domicile or WiFi coffee shop -- carelessness must be the presumption. These leaked celeb nudes, if real rather than Photoshopped, are good example. Simple rule: Don't shoot any photos or videos on a cloud-connected device you don't want everyone to see.

Drones tend to be associated with surveillance and crowd control, but Google is the latest firm to express an interest in using the unmanned machines as a delivery service. Facebook has previously talked about using drones to "deliver the internet to everyone", and Amazon has also toyed with the idea, but now the search giant wants a piece of the action. The company's development team, Google X, has been beavering away on a delivery system powered by drones, and details of how it works have now been released.

Unlike other drones that tend to take a quad-copter design, Google's take on the idea sees a merging of a plane with a helicopter. Fitted out with a single wing and four propellers which move into different positions when flying, the drones have a housing unit for packages in the center of the wing. The Atlantic has a great deal of background about the project and it looks as though rather than being used to ship things that shoppers have bought, it is more likely to be used to help in disaster areas where aid is needed.

Today Dropbox Pro users gain access to a raft of new features including automatically expiring shared links, password-protected sharing, and adjustable permissions. In recent times, Dropbox has moved away from being just a simple cloud storage platform into a cloud-based collaboration tool. Password-protected files sharing is the first line of security that's now available, but it has been bolstered by the ability to have the share automatically stop after a set period. This is something that is particularly useful for sensitive data, and is a helpful addition to the manual disabling of a shared link -- a set-it-and-forget-it option.

Catching up with other file collaborative tools, Dropbox Pro now also takes into account the fact that you might want to share files with others without giving them the option to edit those files. The new ability to add view-only permissions to files and folders has this covered so it is possible to share sensitive files without worrying about them being changed. For anyone using Dropbox on mobile devices, there is always the fear of losing a handset; a new remote wipe feature takes care of this.

OneDrive and Dropbox users with access to an iPhone or iPad rejoice: both iOS apps were just updated with major improvements with the release of Microsoft OneDrive 4.4 and Dropbox 3.3.

Both apps gain new features -- the ability to search within Word and PowerPoint documents in Dropbox, a brand new Photos view in OneDrive -- as well as a number of improvements and stability fixes.

Google’s Drive for Work storage product is seeing 1,800 new businesses sign up every week as enterprises continue to come around to the secure storage and collaboration option that it offers.

A blog post by Scott Johnston, director of product management at Google Drive, explained that the $10 (£6) per user per month package has been popular across a number of industries since it was launched just two months ago.

Click-bait articles are rife online. Countless websites ply a trade in leading headlines designed to lure readers in, giving as little away as possible as an encouragement to click through. A virtual prick-tease, if you will. Sometimes the click is worth it, but all too often the article -- particularly on tabloid-style newspapers, magazine websites and sites peddling listicles -- is pointless or misleading. A suggestive question, the promise of sex, inappropriate references to the iPhone 6, the implication of free money... the possibilities for click-bait are virtually endless. It -- understandably -- annoys a lot of people, and it has annoyed Facebook enough for the social network to take a stand.

You've no doubt noticed that your Facebook newsfeed has become clogged up with countless "one weird trick", "ten ways to give her the best orgasm ever", and "you'll never guess what!" headlines. Now Facebook is taking steps to limit the appearance of such articles so that what users see is more interesting and relevant. In a post on the Facebook blog, it has been announced that two key updates are to be made: "the first to reduce click-baiting headlines, and the second to help people see links shared on Facebook in the best format".

One of the difficulties with using virtual systems is that it's harder to measure performance. Now though data insights specialist CloudPhysics is launching a new Global Insights tool to allow VMware users to continuously benchmark their virtual infrastructure against global metrics.

This is part of enhancements to its SaaS solution which include interactive Daily Insights, that dynamically aggregate and expose operational hazards across the datacenter. The addition of Global Insights analysis across a massive range of data samples enables CloudPhysics users to instantly identify areas for improvement in their own environments, as well as specific actions for achieving better datacenter health, performance and efficiency.

Following on from Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's activity there have been increasing concerns about just how secure our data is, particularly if it's stored in the cloud. Indeed it's reckoned that the cloud industry faces losing billions of dollars in revenue to privacy concerns.

Yet some experts believe that storing data in the cloud is still safer than keeping it in-house. We spoke to Orlando Scott-Cowley, evangelist, strategist and technologist of email management specialist Mimecast to find out why.