Amazon’s cloud will be half way to 100% renewable power by end of next year

Amazon Web Services is marching toward powering its global cloud footprint completely with renewable energy, with plans to be half way to the goal by the end of next year.As of April 2015, the company was a quarter of the way to its goal of using 100% renewable energy. One of its 14 regions – in Oregon – already runs completely on green power. At the AWS re:Invent conference this week,  VP and Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton said the company is now 40% of the way to its goal and hopes to be 45% by the end of this year. By the end of next year it hopes to be half way there.+ MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Cool products at AWS re:Invent | A peek inside Amazon’s massive cloud, from global footprint to custom built silicon +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senators fail to stop new rules allowing US law-enforcement hacking

Three senators' efforts to stop a major expansion of U.S. law enforcement agencies' hacking powers has failed for now.Proposed changes to Rule 41, the search-and-seizure provision in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, will go into effect Thursday barring any last-minute action in Congress. The rules change will give U.S. law enforcement agencies the authority to cross jurisdictional lines and hack computers anywhere in the world during criminal investigations. Until now, the rules, in most cases, prohibited federal judges from issuing a search warrant outside their jurisdictions. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senators fail to stop new rules allowing US law-enforcement hacking

Three senators' efforts to stop a major expansion of U.S. law enforcement agencies' hacking powers has failed for now.Proposed changes to Rule 41, the search-and-seizure provision in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, will go into effect Thursday barring any last-minute action in Congress. The rules change will give U.S. law enforcement agencies the authority to cross jurisdictional lines and hack computers anywhere in the world during criminal investigations. Until now, the rules, in most cases, prohibited federal judges from issuing a search warrant outside their jurisdictions. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s in store for tech in 2017

Top tech predictions for 2017It's the time of year for tech predictions. We've rounded up a slew of ideas from industry watchers who track IT budgets, cybersecurity, hiring, infrastructure management, IoT, virtual reality and more. Here are their predictions, projections and prognostications.IT spending set to rise 2.9%Growth in software and IT services revenue will drive an increase in worldwide IT spending, which Gartner forecasts will climb 2.9% to $3.5 trillion in 2017. Software spending is projected to grow 6% in 2016, and it will grow another 7.2% in 2017 to total $357 billion, according to Gartner. IT services spending, which is on pace to grow 3.9% in 2016, will increase 4.8% in 2017 to reach $943 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s in store for tech in 2017

Top tech predictions for 2017It's the time of year for tech predictions. We've rounded up a slew of ideas from industry watchers who track IT budgets, cybersecurity, hiring, infrastructure management, IoT, virtual reality and more. Here are their predictions, projections and prognostications.IT spending set to rise 2.9%Growth in software and IT services revenue will drive an increase in worldwide IT spending, which Gartner forecasts will climb 2.9% to $3.5 trillion in 2017. Software spending is projected to grow 6% in 2016, and it will grow another 7.2% in 2017 to total $357 billion, according to Gartner. IT services spending, which is on pace to grow 3.9% in 2016, will increase 4.8% in 2017 to reach $943 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS launches FPGA-based cloud instances to accelerate complex applications

Amazon Web Services gave its cloud customers a set of new infrastructure capabilities aimed at making its compute offering faster for complex applications that benefit from hardware acceleration.The F1 instance type, which entered beta on Wednesday, lets companies deploy applications that are accelerated by field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). FPGAs allow users to program hardware to perform a particular task quicker than a general-purpose processor would be able to.AWS CEO Andy Jassy positioned the new instances as a way to democratize access to the hardware needed to optimize speed for particular applications. Several other public cloud providers have turned to specialized hardware like FPGAs to try and accelerate the speed of their offerings.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lenovo Drives HPC From The Middle Ground

While we all spend a lot of time talking about the massive supercomputers that cultivate new architectures, and precisely for that reason, it is the more modest cluster that makes use of these technologies many years hence that actually cultivates a healthy and vibrant HPC market.

Lenovo picked up a substantial HPC business when it acquired IBM’s System x server division two years ago and also licensed key software, such as the Platform Computing stack and the GPFS file system, to drive its own HPC agenda. The Sino-American system maker has been buoyed by higher volume manufacturing thanks to the …

Lenovo Drives HPC From The Middle Ground was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Security products among the most vulnerable software

Why do you spend the big bucks for security products? For protection, right? But many of the top security vendors utilize open-source or third-party components and libraries that are seemingly packed with vulnerabilities.While this is something you already know, a new report found that security products are some of the most vulnerable software. Flexera Software, which acquired Secunia in 2015, noted that between August and October of 2016, 46 products made it to the top 20 most vulnerable products. Eleven of those software products overflowing with vulnerabilities were security-related products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security products among the most vulnerable software

Why do you spend the big bucks for security products? For protection, right? But many of the top security vendors utilize open-source or third-party components and libraries that are seemingly packed with vulnerabilities.While this is something you already know, a new report found that security products are some of the most vulnerable software. Flexera Software, which acquired Secunia in 2015, noted that between August and October of 2016, 46 products made it to the top 20 most vulnerable products. Eleven of those software products overflowing with vulnerabilities were security-related products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Liveblog: Introduction to Managed Database Services on AWS

This is a liveblog of the AWS re:Invent session titled “Introduction to Managed Database Services on AWS” (DAT307). The speakers for the session are Steve Hunt, Alan Murray, and Robin Spira, all of FanDuel; and Darin Briskman, from AWS Database Services.

Briskman kicks off the session with a quick review of AWS’ managed database offerings. These fall into four categories, which Briskman reviewed so quickly I couldn’t capture. I think they were SQL, NoSQL, data warehousing, and something else. Why use managed databases? Because this allows AWS to take over the responsibility for OS maintenance, DB maintenance, high availability, scalability, etc. All you have to worry about it is the application that runs on the database.

What are the managed relational database services that AWS offers?

  • Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service): The oldest service, now supporting MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle
  • Amazon Aurora: MySQL-compatible (and now PostgreSQL-compatible per the announcement today) with greater scalability, better performance, transparent encryption, high availability, and integration with AWS Lambda

Relational databases are really helpful in many cases, but sometimes NoSQL databases would be more helpful. AWS also offers DynamoDB, which is a managed NoSQL database service. DynamoDB is always clustered, and Continue reading

Worth Reading: Social Media for Social Influence

A global conference of senior military and intelligence officials taking place in London this week reveals how governments increasingly view social media as “a new front in warfare” and a tool for the Armed Forces. The overriding theme of the event is the need to exploit social media as a source of intelligence on civilian populations and enemies; as well as a propaganda medium to influence public opinion. —Motherboard

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IDG Contributor Network: John Deere leads the way with IoT-driven precision farming

Did you know that one in seven people in the U.S. depends on food banks to survive?Or that one out of six children—roughly 100 million—in developing countries is underweight?Hunger is a global problem.Natural resources are limited. How do you grow more food on the same amount of land? Lower the cost of food production?Lane Arthur tackles this challenge every day for John Deere's Intelligent Solutions Group (ISG). Arthur is ISG’s director of digital solutions, and his team develops IoT and data driven solutions for farmers. Arthur is amazing! He has a Ph.D. in genetics and development from Columbia University in addition to a B.S. in biochemistry from the University of Georgia. He recently explained how IoT-based precision agriculture increases crop yields by optimizing land, seed and fertilizer usage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Liveblog: How News UK Centralized Cloud Governance

This is a liveblog of the AWS re:Invent session titled “How News UK Centralized Cloud Governance Using Policy Management” (DEV306). The speakers for the session are Joe Kinsella from CloudHealth Technologies and Iain Caldwell of News UK/News Corp EMEA.

Kinsella kicks things off by indicating that the session will attempt to tackle the burning question: how does one maintain the agility that brought you to the cloud in the beginning, but enforce the proper level of governance and control? Kinsella and Caldwell then spend a few minutes on introductions before diving into the content of the session.

Caldwell starts off the session content with a review of News Corp’s use of AWS. News UK is currently running 69% of their workloads in the public cloud, with an aim to hit 75% by July 2017. Before they started their journey to the public cloud, News Corp ran a “global application assessment”—and Caldwell believes that this was critical to the success News Corp/News UK has seen so far. News is using a wide variety of AWS services: EC2, S3, VPC, Direct Connect, Route 53, CloudFront, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, RDS, WorkSpaces, Storage Gateway.

When prompted by Kinsella, Caldwell indicates that EC2 instances were the Continue reading

A peek inside Amazon’s cloud – from global scale to custom hardware

Amazon Web Services brings on enough new server capacity every day to support the entire operations of Amazon the online retail giant when it was an $8.5 billion enterprise in 2005. Every day.That was just one of the insights that Amazon Web Services' Vice President and Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton shared during an opening night keynote at re:Invent, Amazon’s user conference for its IaaS cloud platform. Hamilton provided an internal glimpse of operations that run the company’s cloud business, from its global network of 14 regions down to the custom-made silicon that run its servers, in many cases revealing information that was not previously public.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

33% off Seagate Expansion 4TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0

The Seagate expansion desktop drive provides extra storage for your ever-growing collection of files. Instantly add space for more files, consolidate all of your files to a single location, or free up space on your computer's internal drive to help improve performance. Setup is straightforward; simply plug in the included power supply and USB cable, and you are ready to go. It is automatically recognized by the Windows operating system, so there is no software to install and nothing to configure. Saving files is easy too-just drag-and-drop. Take advantage of the fast data transfer speeds with the USB 3.0 interface by connecting to a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 port.  This drive receives 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon, where its typical list price of $199.99 has been reduced 33% to $99.99. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sanders launches new attack on offshore outsourcing

Former presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders will introduce legislation to discourage companies from relocating jobs offshore. The legislation would punish offshore decisions with loss of tax breaks and government contracts and impose an "outsourcing tax" on firms that proceed nonetheless.The proposal, announced this weekend, singles out United Technologies for its decision to close its Carrier Corp. manufacturing plant in Indianapolis and relocate operations to Mexico.[To comment on this story, go to Computerworld's Facebook page.]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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