What Would Happen If Your Digital Life Was Destroyed? If you’d been following Mat Honan’s harrowing story this weekend, you’ve learned that the Wired writer was completely hacked by a pair of 19-year-olds who targeted him because he had a cool Twitter handle. Honan has updated his tale and posted it on Wired where he goes through the seemingly innocent processes used to eventually wipe out his laptop hard drive, erase his digital identity, and essentially break the trust we all place in the cloud.
Like most hacks, the methodology was mundane. The hackers essentially reset his iCloud password, giving them access to other accounts including Gmail (which they erased), his idevices (which they locked), and his laptop (which they wiped remotely). It was a series of dick moves generated by two kids who had little understanding of what they did and clearly panicked. Then they reached out to Honan to explain their actions. They told him “I honestly didn’t have any heat towards you before this. i just liked your username like I said before.”
Adobe's Creative Cloud is a Game Changer! Not a month ago, Boris and I were discussing the absurd prices Adobe charges for its products. How could this supposedly innovative technology company be so behind the times? We were genuinely considering launching a campaign against Adobe (an advertiser on our site no less) in the hope that with enough support, Adobe would consider reducing its prices, or indeed providing a reasonable subscription for them. Just moments ago I received an email from Adobe to inform me of the official arrival of its new subscription service, it’s called Creative Cloud and I’ve already paid for it. And to think I almost went ahead and ignored the email. Adobe has been listening all along and taken a huge but necessary gamble; it has completely revamped its pricing system. You can now get ALL of Adobe’s core products and more for $49.99 a month and upgrades are included – no need to ever purchase or pay extra to upgrade any individual product.
Comparison Let’s take a quick look at the comparison below. Microsoft Inks Its Biggest Cloud Deal Yet: 7.5M Students And Teachers In India. Microsoft has announced that it has signed its largest-ever cloud services deal, an agreement with the All India Council for Technical Education to deploy Microsoft’s Live@edu service to some 10,000 technical colleges in the country, covering 7.5 million users. The deal is significant not just for its size but also as a mark of how cloud services are developing in two big areas at the moment: education and emerging markets — and how Microsoft is staking out a claim to be a player in both. Under the terms of the deal, the AICTE, an association representing both technical colleges and institutions of technology, will use Live@edu, Microsoft’s hosting communication and collaboration service specially customized for the education sector, to offer collaboration services, email, web apps, IM and storage to 7 million students and half a million faculty members.
The deployment will take place over the next three months, Microsoft said in a statement. [photo: Microsoft in India, flickr] The Cloud Will Cure Cancer. Editor’s note: Mark Kaganovich is founder of SolveBio and a doctoral candidate in genetics at Stanford University. Follow him on Twitter @markkaganovich. Much ink has been spilled on the huge leaps in communications, social networking, and commerce that have resulted from impressive gains in IT and processing power over the last 30 years. However, relatively little has been said about how computing power is about to impact our lives in the biggest way yet: Health. Two things are happening in parallel: technology to collect biological data is taking off and computing is becoming massively scalable. The combination of the two is about to revolutionize health care. Understanding disease and how to treat it requires a deep knowledge of human biology and what goes wrong in diseased cells. New technology is changing research A major challenge thus far has been the difficulty in gaining access to clinical data.
Correlation in the cloud Cancer research = Big Bio [image from Moneyball] Why cloud storage is passé and collaboration is king — Cloud Computing News. 10 Ways Cloud Computing Will Disrupt our Businesses in 2012. Google, Apple and the war for the cloud. Apple and Google have been working hard to become the conduit through which you access all of your data. This process has involved replacing the desktop machine with ‘the cloud’ as a repository for all of your information. In the process, these companies are waging a war for you. Not just for your patronage for their services, or as a customer for their devices. No, they want you to pledge your data loyalty to them exclusively. They are looking to do this by helping you to embed your life so thoroughly into their respective systems that you become locked in, unwilling or unable to leave without a great expenditure of time, effort and money.
This war stands to get more intense as data lockin becomes a real metric by which observers and the companies themselves measure success. The Cloud The cloud is nothing new. The biggest reason for this is the shift from stationary to mobile computing. But a second, and overlapping, shift is underway. Enter the cloud. A gateway drug Google vs. Conclusion. How Spanning built a backup based on clouds — Cloud Computing News. 10 disruptive cloud companies we’re excited about. There is so much happening right now in emerging cloud computing — the entire economy is being disrupted by the trend. With publicly-traded giants like Amazon, Google, VMWare, Microsoft, Cisco and Salesforce lurching around with new and improved services that can help businesses with cost and efficiency gains, sometimes it’s easy to miss the hot players that are up-and-coming. We’ve assembled a list of ten private cloud companies that we think are particularly intriguing — they’re focused on massive opportunities and leading the disruption in the sector they’re targeting.
Any venture capitalist would be psyched to have invested early into this portfolio of ten. Frankly, there are hundreds of exciting companies that could have made this list — we’ve seen and like a lot of them — but as editors, we’ve forced ourselves to winnow it down to ten. Seven companies on the list improve the way things work in the enterprise. Three give consumers better services via the cloud. Box.net Dropbox Evernote. Cloud 101: What the heck do IaaS, PaaS and SaaS companies do? How can big data and smart analytics tools ignite growth for your company? Find out at DataBeat, May 19-20 in San Francisco, from top data scientists, analysts, investors, and entrepreneurs. Register now and save $200!
Anyone who who follows technology trends has undoubtedly heard the term “cloud service” thrown around a few gazillion times over the past few months. But if you don’t know the difference between terms such as PaaS, IaaS and SaaS, don’t fret — you’re far from alone. Let’s start at the beginning. When you break it down, any company offering an Internet-based approach to computing, storage and development can technically be called a cloud company. Not everyone is a CTO or an IT manager, so sometimes following the lingo behind cloud technology can be tough. Layers of the cloud A cloud computing company is any company that provides its services over the Internet. Here is a chart showing simplified explanations for the three main layers of cloud computing: Infographic: What Your Admin Should Know About Cloud Management - ReadWriteCloud.
Why computing isn’t going away, just hiding in the clouds — Cloud Computing News. Dropbox CEO: We’ll integrate with everything — Cloud Computing News. Apple iCloud Announcement Will Be Game Changer - Shawn Carolan - Voices. The forecast is certain. Tomorrow, Apple will rain features from the Cloud, and it’s a very big deal. The iPhone 5 will be the first device that relies on the Internet and server farms to complete its functionality rather than a PC. The company that popularized the personal computer in 1977 is officially telling us we no longer need one.
It’s the mark of a new age. The features will be awesome and the implications vast, of that I’m certain. But I don’t know the details. PC Free Apple’s recently announced iCloud offers a host of new features but the most underappreciated is device configuration in the Cloud. When configuration lives in the Cloud, modification to the configuration happens in the Cloud as well.
This marks a major change for mobile app developers to promote their wares. Assistant Sixteen months ago Apple acquired a technology company named Siri. The native integration of Siri into iOS could change the game in three ways. Clouds: The Most Useful Metaphor of All Time? - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology. In plays, poems, songs, and novels, clouds stand in for everything from bad philosophy to the many incarnations of a soul Ah, the cloud. It sounds dreamlike, ethereal. But of course, when we talk about "the cloud," we are not talking about mist-like data hanging out in the ether, but massive computer servers, powered by generators, cooled by air conditioners, and stored in warehouses. More mechanical than magical. Despite this gap between imagery and actuality, "the cloud" has succeeded in becoming the agreed-upon shorthand for modern data storage. Where did this name come from? And why has it stuck?
As far as it relates to computers, the term "cloud" dates back to early network design, when engineers would map out all the various components of their networks, but then loosely sketch the unknown networks (like the Internet) theirs was hooked into. What is it about clouds that has such sticking power? Because of this flexibility, they commonly appear in our books and music. Why ADP Is the Biggest Cloud Company You've Never Heard Of - Arik Hesseldahl - Enterprise. Take a look at your last paycheck. If you work in the U.S., there’s a one in six chance that somewhere on it, or on the stub, you’ll find the logo of a company you’ve probably never heard of, never given much thought to, but which plays a significant role in the day-to-day lives of many companies around the world.
It’s called ADP, and it’s a $10 billion (fiscal 2011 sales) outfit that processes the paychecks received last year by some 33 million people around the world — and which processed some $1.2 trillion in payments to workers in the U.S. And it does almost all of it in the cloud. Long before companies like Salesforce.com and Amazon popularized “the cloud” as the important technology force shaping business, before we even had the phrase “software as a service,” ADP was selling its clients on a service that in hindsight sounds very “cloudy.” “If you go back enough years, we were known as a ‘service bureau,’” says ADP’s CIO Mike Capone.
“It was all run off a mainframe.