Amazon

Amazon has very strict policies in place regarding how users can sign-up to their site and begin making purchases. But what would you do if you needed to change the email address of your account that contained your name, address, credit/debit card details?

What Amazon allowed was for an account holder to call in and change the email address as long as the caller could be identified by name, email address and mailing address. It’s these details that can be easily obtained online.

A 25-year-old Russian hacker has been arrested for allegedly orchestrating two DDoS (Denial-of-Service) attacks on Amazon.com and eBay in 2008.

"Cyber bandit" Dmitry Olegovich Zubakha was indicted in 2011, but he was just arrested in Cyprus on Wednesday. Zubakha was arrested on an international warrant and is currently in custody pending extradition to the United States.

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."

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.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison appears to have a healthy respect for Amazon Web Services. Why? It’s one of the few rivals he didn’t rant about.

And if imitation is flattery, it’s quite possible that Ellison is an AWS fan. Consider the following quote from Oracle’s cloud powwow.

Amazon Appstore for Android developers should consider obfuscating their code if they are concerned about their applications being reverse engineered, the company said yesterday.

Obfuscating the code modifies the source and machine code to be difficult for a human to understand if the app gets decompiled, according to Amazon.

In the mid-1990s, I ran across what looked like an incredible story: A teenager, dubbed the Whiz Kid, was selling a ton of computers from his parents' home. Newspapers told the story complete with images of the teenager talking on his cell phone—which, at the time, was a big deal.

Maybe you're a Dropbox devotee. Or perhaps you really like streaming Sherlock on Netflix. For that, you can thank the cloud.

In fact, it's safe to say that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become synonymous with cloud computing; it's the platform on which some of the Internet's most popular sites and services are built. But just as cloud computing is used as a simplistic catchall term for a variety of online services, the same can be said for AWS—there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than you might think.

How many servers does Amazon use to keep its EC2 platform afloat? 445,000. That is, according to Huan Liu, a researcher with Accenture Technology Labs, who came up with this number after a little bit of digging and number crunching. 

His analysis found that Amazon's main cluster of servers, 322,000 of them, are located in Northern Virginia. Outside of the US however, Amazon has a relatively small footprint. For example in Brazil, there are only 1600 EC2 servers. 

Amazon helped start the “NoSQL” movement. And now it’s giving the cause another shot in the arm.

NoSQL is a widespread effort to build a new kind of database for “unstructured” information — the sort of information that comes spilling off the internet with each passing second. Five years ago, Amazon introduced a NoSQL database service called SimpleDB, and now, it’s offering what you might think of as Amazon NoSQL Mark II. It’s called DynamoDB.