Researchers have devised an attack against a Microsoft-developed authentication scheme that makes it trivial to break the encryption used by hundreds of anonymity and security services, including the iPredator virtual private network offered to users of The Pirate Bay.
A hacking expert has launched a $200 password-cracking tool that makes it easy to decipher Internet traffic sent through a widely used method for securing businesses communications.
Moxie Marlinspike, one of the world's top encryption experts, unveiled the tool on Saturday during a presentation at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas.
Like most new technologies, cloud computing can bring significant changes to business processes, application architectures, technology infrastructure, and operating models, and all must be properly understood.
Having a well thought-out strategy can mean the difference between success and failure, so the first step in understanding the challenges cloud computing can incur is by taking the readiness assessment.
Several months ago, I wrote about the Four Ways SAP Is Embracing SoCloMo, i.e. the mashup of Social, Cloud and Mobile technology.
Predictably, one of the ways involved our cloud HR acquisition, SuccessFactors. But there were three other excellent efforts that show just far SAP's progressed beyond R/3.
The third beta version of iOS 6 has been handed out to developers running the new mobile OS as an over-the-air update this morning. The new versions of Xcode haven't quite made their way out into the world yet, but they should soon, giving iOS and Mac developers the option to test and build their apps on the upcoming operating system.
Amazon Web Services' prolonged down time over the weekend was caused by lightning, according to the company -- but was lengthened by software bugs in the cloud provider's infrastructure.
The bugs, disclosed by Amazon in an analysis of the failure, show how the size at which cloud providers operate can make them acutely vulnerable to failures in their software systems -- and acts as an object lesson of Google's statement that "at scale, everything breaks."
The adoption of cloud computing is rapidly gathering momentum, as more companies use this technology to store data and access applications online. However as cloud computing becomes more mainstream, security concerns are being raised.
A recent Robert Half survey of 150 CIOs and CTOs in Asia Pacific revealed that security was the most prevalent concern among the respondents when migrating their technology functions to the cloud.
Does the rest of the cloud computing world really need to clone Amazon Web Services in order to succeed?
Probably not, says Lew Moorman, the president of Rackspace, the San Antonio, Texas, company that plays second fiddle to Amazon in the cloud game. According to him, some customers want companies like his to clone all of Amazon’s Application Programming Interfaces, the coding standards that let a program interact with Amazon’s cloud. But he thinks it’s a bad idea that isn’t going to work out.
It's safe to say that you receive many solicitations from vendors of every stripe hawking their new cloud services: software, storage, apps, hosted this, managed that. "Simplify your life! Reduce your burden! It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!" Some of these services deliver as promised, within fairly strict boundaries, though some are not what they seem. Even more have a look and feel that can make you swoon, but once you start to peer under the covers, the specter of integrating the service with your infrastructure stares back at you and steals your soul.
After years of battling Linux as a competitive threat, Microsoft is now offering Linux-based operating systems on its Windows Azure cloud service.
The Linux services will go live on Azure at 4 a.m. EDT on Thursday. At that time, the Azure portal will offer a number of Linux distributions, including Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2, OpenSuse 12.01, CentOS 6.2 and Canonical Ubuntu 12.04. Azure users will be able to choose and deploy a Linux distribution from the Microsoft Windows Azure Image Gallery and be charged on an hourly pay-as-you-go basis.
