Articles about Cloud

Two days ago, 3,000 important websites, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo as well as many top Internet Service Providers, turned on their IPv6 support and this time they left it turned on. Nothing happened. Or maybe I should say nothing bad happened, which is good, very good.

The world is quickly running out of new IPv4 addresses, with almost 3.7 billion issued. There are two workarounds: 1) complicate the Net further with cascading arrays of Network Address Translation (NAT) servers that slow things down, inhibit native inbound connections like VoIP, and defeat location services both good and bad, or; 2) move to IPv6 with 128-bit addresses (IPv4 is 32-bit) that would allow giving an IPv6 address not only to every person and device but to every sock in everyone’s sock drawer as well, allowing bidirectional communication with hundreds of billions of devices from pacemakers to doorbells. Editor: Yes, but what about the socks that disappear in clothes dryers?

Continue reading →

Microsoft's Office 365 cloud productivity suite gained even more momentum on Thursday, with both the Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration announcing they will move some 80,000 employees to the platform.

The deal is worth some $91 million over seven years, and is provided through Microsoft partner Computer Sciences Corp. Office 365 plays a central role in the SaaS deal, which will offer DOT and FAA employees email, instant messaging, calendaring and webconferencing tools in a multi-platform environment.

Continue reading →

New York City buzzed earlier this week when Salesforce announced it will acquire Buddy Media for $689 million. For those that have watched Mike Lazerow build the company from "a social media agency", as people jabbed in the early days, to a true social management platform, this outcome doesn’t come as a surprise. Buddy quickly grew as brands’ presence on social media shifted from experimental marketing budgets to a critical part of any chief marketing officer’s strategy. While Buddy originally (and wisely) hitched its wagon to Facebook as the network took off, they have since diversified outside the walls of Mark Zuckerberg’s castle and into other networks and platforms like Twitter, Google+ and more.

While this purchase may or may not come as a surprise to people, I have seen many folks scratching their heads and asking: "Why Salesforce?" Why not go, instead, with WPP (who’s an investor), Facebook, or another big agency holding company. The answer to this question lies in the difference of business fundamentals between agencies, Facebook, and Salesforce.

Continue reading →

We're hiring and taking on new freelancers and other writers. You could be among them. Paid and unpaid writing positions are available. Staff positions are paid BetaNews employees. Freelancers don't directly work for us but receive payment for their work. Unpaid writers typically receive compensation other ways, such as increasing their profile for personal or business gain.

BetaNews seeks a summer social media intern, staff writer and associate editor. These are paid, employee positions. We're also looking for new freelancers and other contributors. Writing is creative, rewarding and fulfilling work. Many of the best writers started out as news reporters. Few market sectors are as satisfying as technology. The pace of change makes for interesting topics, quelling the kind of boredom common to the other beats.

Continue reading →

For as long as Microsoft has offered a search engine, CEO Steve Ballmer or one of his minions has talked about the goal of providing answers to real questions rather than forcing people to use keywords. The success of social search service Quora or Yahoo Answers shows how much people simply want to ask. Bing and Google handle questions much better today than ever, but often the answers come unqualified and without the depth or authority of, say, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia. Apple tries with Siri on iPhone, with Wolfram Alpha behind it. But we all know that, for now, Siri sucks.

Today, Microsoft seized the answer search initiative, by incorporating Encyclopedia Britannica into Bing results. Sure Google places Wikipedia front and center, but Britannica is an undisputed, reliable authority -- well for anyone old enough to have owned a set of the books. Ask a question. "The answer provides a quick overview of the subject, a thumbnail image, and useful facts and figures making it easier than ever to get trusted content in search", Franco Salvetti, Bing principal development lead, explains. "We also pull in direct links to other trusted sources".

Continue reading →

Red Hat moved its hybrid cloud management software called CloudForms out of beta on Thursday, aiming to allow IT customers with considerable infrastructure to leverage it with public cloud resources to enable easy migration between the two.

The open-source software company first introduced CloudForms last May, then positioning it as an IaaS product. Since then, the company has begun contributing heavily to the OpenStack IaaS platform, and is now a platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation.

Continue reading →

Hidden away in the middle of the concourse walkway between South and West halls of the Los Angeles Convection center sits this little corner display booth. Most people pass it by not knowing how big it might be to the future of gaming but as soon as I see who is there I have to stop and ask questions.

Gaikai is a service that started just two years ago -- at first thought of as nothing more than phantom console level vapor it is one of the two companies to announce "Cloud Gaming"; PC gaming via virtualization. Its first demo shows off high-end games from producers / developers EA and Red Project for titles like Mass Effect 3 or The Witcher 2. Using a web page Java applet client it runs on any Windows, Mac, or even Linux machine.

Continue reading →

Microsoft beefed up its Windows Azure cloud platform Thursday, announcing a host of features that take it out of a primarily Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) role and place it into the realm of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The Redmond, Wash. company appears ready to take on IaaS heavyweights like Rackspace and Amazon Web Services, as well as new entrant Oracle, who announced its own cloud offering on Wednesday.

Microsoft doesn't "catch a new trend right with the first iteration but they keep at it and eventually strike the right tone and in more cases than not, get good enough", Forrester analyst James Staten says of the company's moves. "And often good enough wins".

Continue reading →

There are countless websites that feature hours of streaming video that you can watch whenever you have an Internet connection. But what about those times when you are not able to get online? If you are going on a trip and want to ensure that the children have something to watch on a laptop or tablet, Wondershare vDownloader is a tool that can be used to grab a load of videos in advance and load them onto the device of your choosing.

Saving videos from some websites is easy enough -- just right click a link and save the target file to your hard drive. With other sites things are a little more tricky, you may need to examine source code and determine the link needed to download a file. And then there are some sites that make it all but impossible to save a copy of a video you have come across. Whether you’re looking to make it quicker and easier to download videos, or you want to be able to save copies of those videos that are hard to get, Wondershare vDownloader is a valuable, and free, tool.

Continue reading →

Following on from the release of Firefox 13 FINAL, Mozilla has updated its developmental branches to versions 14 (Beta), 15 (Aurora) and 16 (Nightly/UX) respectively. After the relatively exciting new features in version 13, what’s coming next? How does integrated social networking tools, panel-based download manager and improvements in OS X Lion users sound for starters?

Get a head’s up on what’s coming and discover which build is best for your personal needs with our updated guide to what the future holds in store for Firefox.

Continue reading →

Oracle jumped head-first into the cloud Wednesday, announcing the immediate availability of its comprehensive cloud offering. Oracle's cloud service spent seven years in development, and is comprised of over 100 apps.

In an event announcing Oracle's cloud strategy, CEO Larry Ellison stressed that his company's efforts were a long time coming and that Oracle had no interest in being a "niche" provider. "Very few companies can cross the chasm from one technology to the next" like Oracle has, he told attendees.

Continue reading →

This morning when I logged into LinkedIn I was greeted with several front page references to the reported hacking of the site, and instructions for changing my password, which I did immediately. This is a good time to change all of your social media passwords, making sure you create a fresh password that is hard to guess and unique to each site. It is not unusual for malicious parties who grab a bunch of passwords from one site to try those same passwords on other sites.

Over 6.5 million account passwords showed up on a Russian forum in SHA-1 (hashed) format to prove that the hackers had indeed succeeded in penetrating LinkedIn. There is a good chance that if the hacker(s) achieved access to LinkedIn passwords then they also know the corresponding LinkedIn usernames, i.e. the matching email address of the account owner.

Continue reading →

Today's LinkedIn hack, exposing more than 6 million encrypted passwords, is more serious than it might appear and reveals one of the biggest security shortcomings social networks pose: Linked or shared data. Literally linked-in accounts expose information from others -- then there is the sheer amount of personal data hackers can siphon.

LinkedIn hasn't confirmed the hack, but is investigating. Meanwhile the stolen data already is available on the Internet. Cyber-security expert Robert David Graham says he has confirmed "this hack is real". The stolen data was published as password hashes. He created a SHA-1 hash of his password and found it in the dumped data. "The password I use for LinkedIn is in that list", he explains. "I use that password nowhere else. Furthermore, it's long/complex enough that I'm confident nobody else uses the same password.

Continue reading →

LinkedIn users are advised to change their passwords after it was revealed that more than 6.5 million encrypted passwords were posted to a Russian hacker website. The hackers are attempting to enlist help to crack the encryption, and 300,000 accounts are already compromised.

Security experts who have seen the data say the encryption appears weak and will likely be broken in short order. This means millions more will soon be at risk of having their accounts compromised. While the social network has yet to confirm the breach, it did say it was "looking into reports".

Continue reading →

Thanks to some smart lawyering or perhaps fears CEO Steve Ballmer will show up unannounced, Microsoft has negotiated envious patent fee payments from nearly all major Android licensees. So there's something fitting about the software giant giving a little something back to Android, by way of an exclusive app -- well for now -- on{X}. Or perhaps it's a Trojan Horse to undo Android phones, chopping up performance or draining battery life. Or maybe Microsoft sees Android users as easy beta testers, considering the more rigorous standards for getting into Apple's App Store than Google Play.

One thing is certain: Early on{X} users despise the app, which has some of the worst reviews you'll see at Google Play. As I post, the app has average rating of 1.8 stars out of five. Among the 244 reviewers, 178 give the app a single star. Ouch! I had planned to grab this one, which is available in beta, but skipped after seeing the scathing response.

Continue reading →