On its peak day this holiday shopping season, Amazon sold an astonishing 26.5 million items at a rate of 306 items per second. And the honor of being the “#1 best-selling, most gifted, and most wished for product” goes to Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD. The release is chock full of wins for Amazon but take a look at the below image: More »
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Amazon Sets Holiday Shopping Records Despite Making Half Of What It Made Last Year
Social engineering scams involve a mix of technical skills and psychological manipulation. Chris Cardinal discovered someone running such a scam on Amazon using his account: the scammer contacted Amazon pretending to be Chris, supplying his billing address (this is often easy to guess by digging into things like public phone books, credit reports, or domain registration records). Then the scammer secured the order numbers of items Chris recently bought on Amazon. In a separate transaction, the scammer reported that the items were never delivered and requested replacement items to be sent to a remailer/freight forwarder in Portland. The scam hinged on the fact that Gmail addresses are “dot-blind” (foo@gmail.com is the same as f.oo@gmail.com), but Amazon treats them as separate addresses. This let the scammer run support chats and other Amazon transactions that weren’t immediately apparent to Chris. Others have reported on this scam, but word hasn’t gotten around at Amazon yet, and when Chris talked to Amazon reps to alert them to the con, they kept insisting that his computer or email had been hacked, not understanding that the con artist was attacking a vulnerability in Amazon’s own systems. A little bit of sniffing finds this thread where users at a social engineering forum are offering to buy order numbers. Why? Because as it turns out, once you have the order number, everything else is apparently simple. If you’ve used Amazon.com at all, you’ll notice something very quickly: they require your password. For pretty much anything. Want to change an address? Password. Add a billing method? Password. Check your order history? Password. Amazon is essentially very secure as a web property. But as you can see from my chat transcript above, the CSR team falls like dominoes with just a few simple data points and a little bit of authoritative prying. Two-for-one: Amazon.com’s Socially Engineered Replacement Order Scam ( via Hacker News )
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Amazon Replacement Order Scam: anatomy of a social engineering con in action
Nerval’s Lobster writes “Netflix has released Hystrix, a library designed for managing interactions between distributed systems, complete with ‘fallback’ options for when those systems inevitably fail. The code for Hystrix—which Netflix tested on its own systems—can be downloaded at Github, with documentation available here, in addition to a getting-started guide and operations examples, among others. Hystrix evolved out of Netflix’s need to manage an increasing rate of calls to its APIs, and resulted in (according to the company) a ‘dramatic improvement in uptime and resilience has been achieved through its use.’ The Netflix API receives more than 1 billion incoming calls per day, which translates into several billion outgoing calls (averaging a ratio of 1:6) to dozens of underlying systems, with peaks of over 100,000 dependency requests per second. That’s according to Netflix engineer Ben Christensen, who described the incredible loads on the company’s infrastructure in a February blog posting. The vast majority of those calls serve the discovery user interfaces (UIs) of the more than 800 different devices supported by Netflix.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Netflix Gives Data Center Tools To Fail
Netflix isn’t sinking , but it’s certainly not the soaring brand it once was and has endured its fair share of struggles over the last several years. But, if you think Reed Hastings is shaking in his boots over encroaching competition you’d be wrong. The CEO says that Amazon will pose a legitimate threat to its streaming video dominance, but that day is still a long way off. He claims that the Kindle purveyor is losing between $500 million and $1 billion a year as it builds its empire and secures licensing rights. Of course, Hasting’s comments during an interview with Dow Jones are largely speculative; based on the value of deals in which the two have competed directly. Then again, there seemed to be some implicit admission of the costs and struggles associated with competing in the subscription video sphere during its Q3 earnings report . The company lowered its forecast for the next quarter, saying it could lose as much as $490 million. Filed under: Amazon Netflix CEO claims Amazon losing up to $1 billion a year in streaming video war originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink | AllThingsD | Email this | Comments
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Netflix CEO claims Amazon losing up to $1 billion a year in streaming video war
You may have noticed that retailers like Amazon are charging tax, in compliance with state laws, on not just the price of goods, but on the “shipping and handling” fees they charge. An anonymous reader writes “By coincidence I noticed this myself the other night, and ended up ordering something from a supplier in Arizona, rather than Amazon, to avoid the sales tax. Now here is an article about it in the Los Angeles Times.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Amazon Charges Sales Tax On "Shipping and Handling"
After having seen its mug plastered all over the internet in the days leading up to its release, actually playing with LG and Google’s new Nexus 4 seemed a bit anti-climactic. I mean, when you’ve seen a device like that cracked open and posed for your pleasure , it felt like there wasn’t much I didn’t already know about the thing. Oh how wrong I was. The first thing I noticed when I picked up the Nexus 4 is how remarkably sturdy it feels. Despite being an LG device, the Nexus 4 doesn’t really feel like one — it’s far more solid and slab-like than the plasticky handsets that the company has churned out in the past. This may sound weird, but I once I picked it up and got a feeling for its heft, I couldn’t resist the urge to tap the thing on the table a few times just to see how it held up (the answer: quite nicely). Turning the thing over reveals the funky patterned finish that reflects light we’ve seen before, and it catches and reflects light in some interesting ways. To be honest, it seems a bit too flashy for a Nexus device (previous Nexus phones were largely free of visual flair), but that’s just me picking nits. I get the feeling that Nexus aficionados will either love or hate the way the Nexus 4 looks, and for now I’m caught right in the middle. Speaking of looks, the Nexus 4 (as you’ve probably already heard) runs Android 4.2 , which doesn’t too far from the aesthetic seen in Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean. You can check out a more detailed list of tweaks and additions here, but one change threw me for a bit of a loop — the app launcher now sports five columns of apps instead of the customary four. Meanwhile, the Nexus 4’s display represents a big step forward from the one seen in its predecessor. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Galaxy Nexus to bits, but the Pentile sub-pixel configuration meant icons and text didn’t appear as smooth as I would’ve like. Thankfully, the Nexus 4’s 4.7-inch 720p IPS panel rendered colors brightly and accurately, but I think my eyes have grown accustomed to the way colors pop on AMOLED panels. That’s all well and good, but how does the thing run? Well, it’s always tough to judge a phone’s performance after only playing with it for a few moments, but the whole thing — from swiping through pages of widgets and apps to scrolling through long lists of emails — was as snappy as you would expect from a top-tier Nexus handset. Of course, we’ve got LG’s Optimus G to thank for that since both devices share the same 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor and 2GB of RAM. To trot out a well-worn Android cliche, the experience was downright buttery, and I’m really looking forward to really putting this thing through its paces. I’ll refrain from making sweeping judgments for now, but the Nexus 4 managed to make a strong impression during the few brief moments we shared together. Expect a deeper dive into Google’s newest Nexus phone later this week after I’ve had some serious playtime, but in the meantime enjoy the rest of these photos.
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Hands-On With LG And Google’s First Smartphone Collaboration, The Nexus 4
Amazon has just released its earnings for the third quarter of the year and it looks like it’s slightly off analysts’ expectations. The company reported $13.18 billion in revenue (a growth of 27 percent) and an operating loss of $28 million, with net income standing at a loss of $274 million. As Amazon notes, though, a chunk of that, some $169 million, comes from losses resulting from its investment in LivingSocial — it says the figure is “primarily attributable to its impairment charge of certain assets, including goodwill.” Expectedly, the company still isn’t offering any specific numbers for device sales, noting only that the Kindle Fire HD is the number one selling product across Amazon worldwide, and that the next two bestselling products worldwide are the Kindle Paperwhite and the $69 Kindle. As for its outlook for the next quarter, the company is expecting net sales of between $20.25 billion and $22.75 billion, and operating income of anywhere from a loss of $490 million to a profit of $310 million. You can find the company’s full breakdown of all the numbers at the link below. Continue reading Amazon Q3 2012 earnings: $13.18 billion revenue, net loss of $274 million Filed under: Tablets , Internet , Amazon Amazon Q3 2012 earnings: $13.18 billion revenue, net loss of $274 million originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink | Amazon | Email this | Comments
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Amazon Q3 2012 earnings: $13.18 billion revenue, net loss of $274 million
This is CHAMP: Boeing’s new missile otherwise known as the Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project. It automatically disables PCs and other electronic devices as it soars through the skies, using a burst of powerful radio waves—and it was successfully tested last week . More »
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Boeing’s New Missile Remotely Disables Computers as It Flies By
Several readers have sent word of a significant Amazon EBS outage. Quoting: “Amazon Web Services has confirmed that its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service is experiencing degraded service, leading sites across the Internet to experience downtime, including Reddit, Imgur and many others. AWS confirmed on its status page at 2:11 p.m. ET that it is experiencing ‘degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes.’ It says the issue is restricted to a single Availability Zone within the US-East-1 Region, which is in Northern Virginia. AWS later reported that its Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and its Elastic Beanstalk application plaform also experienced failures on Monday afternoon.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Amazon EBS Failure Brings Down Reddit, Imgur, Others
