VMware will hate this: Amazon slashes cloud prices up to 28 percent

OH MY GOD, Amazon’s having a FIRE… sale . This is bad for business! 20th Century Fox Television Last week, VMware’s top executives displayed just how worried they are about the competitive threat posed by Amazon’s cloud computing service. With customers able to spin up virtual machines in Amazon data centers, VMware is concerned fewer people will buy its virtualization tools. According to CRN , VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told service partners at the company’s Partner Exchange Conference that if “a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever.” VMware COO Carl Eschenbach jumped on the Amazon theme, saying, “I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books.” Given VMware’s view of Amazon, Gelsinger and Eschenbach won’t like the latest news from the “bookseller,” which also happens to be a large IT services provider. Amazon today announced price reductions of up to 27.7 percent for Elastic Compute Cloud Reserved Instances running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Reserved instances requiring up-front payments already provide discounts over “on-demand instances,” which can be spun up and down at will. Using reserved instances requires a little more advance planning to make sure you get the most bang for your buck—although customers who buy more than they need can sell excess capacity on Amazon’s Reserved Instance Marketplace . Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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VMware will hate this: Amazon slashes cloud prices up to 28 percent

Trigger word: e-mail monitoring gets easy in Office 365, Exchange

I’m in ur email, watching ur filez. Diana Dee Sophia Exchange 2013 and Office 365 include a new feature that can peek into e-mail messages and enclosed documents, then flag them, forward them, or block them entirely based on what it finds. This sort of data loss prevention technology has become increasingly common in corporate mail systems. But its inclusion as a feature in Office 365’s cloud service makes it a lot more accessible to organizations that haven’t had the budget or expertise to monitor the e-mail lives of their employees. As we showed in our review of the new Office server platforms , the data loss prevention feature of Microsoft’s new messaging platforms can detect things like credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other content that has no business travelling by e-mail.  Because of how simple it is to configure rules for Microsoft’s DLP and security features, administrators will also have the power to do other sorts of snooping into what’s coming and going from users’ mailboxes. Unfortunately, depending on the mix of mail servers in your organization—or which Exchange instances you happen to hit in the O365 Azure cloud—they may not work all the time. And they won’t help defeat someone determined to steal data via e-mail. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Trigger word: e-mail monitoring gets easy in Office 365, Exchange

Sodium-air battery shows potential

Pete Slater With battery technology being critical for so many things, interest in building better batteries just keeps on growing. The recent Tesla Model S testing debacle, explosive laptop batteries , and Boeing battery problems give us hints at how close to the edge engineers operate batteries. Volume, weight, and energy are key. Minimize the first two and maximize the last to obtain energy storage nirvana. Lithium-ion batteries rule the roost at the moment, but as capacities are already on the order of 200Wh/kg, we’re pushing up against their limits—basic chemical reactions provide a fixed amount of energy. The search for alternatives is being pursued by a rapidly growing field of eyebrow-less engineers (just kidding; battery mishaps don’t happen that often ). A recent publication on a sodium-air battery shows promise, but it also demonstrates what a huge amount of work still needs to be done. The key to a battery is a simple chemical reaction that, at its heart, is the exchange of an electron. During the exchange, a certain amount of energy is released, usually in the form of heat. That’s why, when you drop some sodium metal in water, the energy released is enough to cause explosions. The role of the battery is to intercept that electron and release its energy in the form of useful work. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sodium-air battery shows potential

Adobe releases third security update this month for Flash Player

Adobe has released an emergency security update for its widely used Flash media player to patch a vulnerability being actively exploited on the Internet. The company is advising Windows and Mac users to install it in the next 72 hours. An advisory the software company issued on Tuesday said only that affected Flash flaws “are being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks designed to trick the user into clicking a link which directs to a website serving malicious Flash (SWF) content.” It identified the bugs as CVE-2013-0643 and CVE-2013-0648 as indexed in the common vulnerabilities and exposures database . The advisory added the exploits targeted the Firefox browser. A spokeswoman said no other attack details are available. Adobe’s advisory assigns a priority rating of 1 to Flash versions that run on Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X computers. The rating is reserved for “vulnerabilities being targeted, or which have a higher risk of being targeted, by exploit(s) in the wild.” The priority for Linux users carries a rating of 3, which is used to designate “vulnerabilities in a product that has historically not been a target for attackers.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Adobe releases third security update this month for Flash Player

Internet Explorer 10 finally released for Windows 7

Four months after Microsoft released Internet Explorer 10 with and for Windows 8, Redmond has finally released a version of the company’s newest browser for its 700 million Windows 7 users in 95 other languages too. The new browser will be available as an optional update immediately. Anyone with the release preview installed will have it sent as an “important” update. That’s significant because Windows Update will, in its default configuration, install it silently and automatically. Over coming months, Microsoft will classify Internet Explorer 10 as “important” in more and more markets to ensure it is installed automatically as widely as possible. This marks a significant change from Microsoft’s past practices. Traditionally, the company has released new browsers only as optional updates, and further, as interactive updates that required clicking through a EULA before installation actually took place. In late 2011, the company changed this policy, converting Internet Explorer 9 to an automatic (“important”) update. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Internet Explorer 10 finally released for Windows 7

The Pirate Bay leaves Sweden for friendlier waters

The Swedish Pirate Party has stopped hosting the notorious website The Pirate Bay, according to TorrentFreak. While no one knows where the site is actually run from, Web-hosting services have been provided through the Swedish Pirate Party for a few years now. Now, the site’s hosting will be taken care of by the Pirate Parties in Norway and Sweden. TPB is being forced to move because the Swedish Pirate Party is under pressure from Rights Alliance, a Swedish anti-piracy group representing large music and movie interests. Rights Alliance threatened legal action against the Pirate Party if the group didn’t stop hosting the site by tomorrow. Spain in particular could turn out to be a safe haven for the piracy-driven website, since judges in that country have found simply linking to other infringing sites is not a basis for copyright liability. The sports-streaming site Rojadirecta, for example, was exonerated after legal action against it was initiated in Spain. (That didn’t stop it from having its domain name grabbed by a US agency, before being given back last summer.) Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The Pirate Bay leaves Sweden for friendlier waters

Earthquakes’ booms big enough to be detected from orbit

Artist’s impression of GOCE satellite. European Space Agency Last year, we reported on some mysterious booms in a small Wisconsin town that turned out to be small earthquakes. While it was an unusual story, it’s actually not that uncommon of an occurrence. Early in the summer of 2001, folks in Spokane, Washington started reporting similar booms. The sounds continued, off and on, for about five months. The mystery didn’t last long, as the earthquakes responsible were picked up by seismometers in the area. (A particularly loud one that took place exactly one month after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York did rattle some nerves, however.) In total, 105 earthquakes were detected, with a couple as large as magnitude 4.0. For most of them, there wasn’t good enough seismometer coverage to really pinpoint locations, but some temporary units deployed around the city in July located a number of events pretty precisely: the earthquakes were centered directly beneath the city itself. While a dangerously large earthquake is pretty unlikely in Wisconsin, the possibility can’t be ignored in Washington. The 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand was only a magnitude 6.3, but the damage was extensive because the epicenter was so close to the city. In L’Aquila, Italy, a swarm of small earthquakes in 2009 was followed by a deadly magnitude 6.3. (The poor public communication of risk during that swarm netted six seismologists manslaughter convictions .) Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Earthquakes’ booms big enough to be detected from orbit

Reports: Microsoft planning to unveil Xbox successor at April event

With Sony jump-starting the next-generation console hype train with its PlayStation 4 reveal this week , it seems Microsoft might not be willing to wait for June’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) to unveil its follow-up to the Xbox. Computer & Video Games is reporting that Microsoft is planning a “one-off media event” to show off its new system in early April, based on information from unnamed sources inside and outside of Microsoft. VG247 has corroborated CVG’s information , saying it has “also received word of the April event,” and National Alliance Securities analyst Mike Hickey has previously said he expected Microsoft to announce its console successor in April. Internet sleuths on gaming forum NeoGAF have noted that the company that helped organize Microsoft’s E3 2012 media briefing registered the domain XboxEvent.com just yesterday , suggesting that, um, an Xbox event might be in the works. Practically the entire professional game industry will be gathered together in San Francisco at the end of March for the Game Developers Conference, which would also seem like a natural time for Microsoft to reveal its next-gen plans to an interested audience. Then again, Microsoft could use GDC as a sort of pre-tease tease, letting slip certain small, developer-centric details before a fuller April event. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Reports: Microsoft planning to unveil Xbox successor at April event

Google shows the world its official Android 4.2.2 changelog

When Android 4.2.2 quietly debuted last week , most users were left guessing about what exactly had been included in the software update. Helpful community sites like AndroidPolice had put together a thorough listing of some of the new features in Android 4.2.2, but any official listing of updates had yet to be made. Today, Google published its official changelog for its Android 4.2.2 update, as well as everything else that comes as a part of the Jelly Bean package. Many of the bullet points marked as “new” actually identify features that have been included in Android 4.2 since its initial launch and have since been  thoroughly  discussed. However, the changelog does include some of the minor features not previously touched on, like networking changes that were made to improve Wi-Fi Direct support and faster captive portal detection. Updates also include minor features, like the fact that TalkBack can now be accessed right from the power menu. You can also view the entirety of the Google Cards updates that have been made in Android 4.2. If you’re curious, you can view the official changelog at Google’s official Android site, then try out some of the features you may not have known existed on your Android 4.2 device. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Google shows the world its official Android 4.2.2 changelog

Cellular data traffic keeps doubling every year

Florence Ion Worldwide mobile data traffic doubled over the past year and is expected to continue growing at a similar rate due to expanding smartphone sales and video traffic, telecom equipment maker Ericsson said in research released today. By the end of 2012, global data traffic on mobile networks (not including Wi-Fi) hit around 1,300 petabytes per month, twice as much as in the previous year, Ericsson said. Ericsson The chart shows an approximate doubling each year for the past few years. We’ve asked Ericsson for the raw data behind the report and will provide that if we get it. Ericsson’s measurements come from “a large base of commercial networks that together cover all regions of the world,” the report states. “They form a representative base for calculating world total traffic in mobile networks.” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cellular data traffic keeps doubling every year