sorted by: recent | see :
popular
Content Tagged with asides + amazon
Changing Internet and Privacy Erosion
God, how I miss Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems co-founder & former CEO, and his off-the-cuff but often prescient quotes. Back in 1999, much to the chagrin of privacy advocates, he quipped, “You have zero privacy anyway… Get over it.” Recent developments only give credence to his flippant observation from almost a decade ago.
- There is legislation in front of the Senate that will pretty much require payment systems to report information on nearly every electronic transaction to the federal government. This is going to impact eBay, Amazon and Google, along with credit card companies. The requirement is buried in Senator Christopher Dodd’s 630-page Senate housing legislation
- The U.S. Congress has worked out a deal that gives phone companies immunity from participating in warrantless eavesdropping.
- Sweden recently passed a new law that allowed the Swedish government to eavesdrop on Internet traffic as it sees fit.
- France is banning illegal Internet downloaders, according to Times UK Online, following some other bans.
Breaking: Amazon Down! Anyone Know What’s Up?
Funnily enough reports are coming in saying that nothing wrong with Amazon Web Services’ S3 service is working just fine for everyone. Hey maybe they should use it sometime… okay just a bad joke on my part. Looks like the https version of the site is working.
A word from Amazon’s spokesperson:
The Amazon retail site was down for approximately 2 hours earlier today (beginning around 10:25) - and we’re bringing the site back up.
Amazon’s systems are very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems. We work to minimize any disruption and to get the site back as quickly as possible.
Amazon’s web services were not affected nor were our international sites.
Storage Space, The Final Frontier
Amazon Web Services Blog: Storage Space, The Final Frontier. Exciting and significant stuff. Create persistent volumes on S3 and mount them in your EC2 instances. Use them for file storage, EC2 backups, and of course data file space for your relational database. Together with the recently announced fixed IP addresses for EC2 instances, this stuff is becoming really hot.
Will you do 3 things for me?
Last evening, after a mind-numbing day of work, I dragged my feet towards my apartment. Shoulders slumping, the shirt having lost its crispness, eyes slightly blurred – I didn’t even notice when the clean blue California skies turned to an indescribable shade of indigo.
As I walked into my building, my doorman handed over a small package from Amazon.com. In the privacy of my apartment, I opened the package to find a little surprise: soundtrack of movie The Namesake, from someone I didn’t know, but he knew me.
“Om, I’ve always enjoyed your blog. Enjoy. Peace.” (Name withheld because I don’t have this person’s permission to reveal his name, but you know who you are and a big Texas-sized thanks!) This simple, yet gigantic act of generosity sent my spirits soaring, giving me a second wind (as furious pace of posting over last few hours might indicate).
That one line just brought back into focus what really is important – that is you, the reader. We can look at the stats all we want, and praying at the altar of page views, but in the end what really matters is – do we do the job right? Do we make you, the readers, happy?
And if we don’t, why don’t you help and shape the coverage of GigaOM – by answering these three questions:
- What is that one thing we do right?
- What is that one thing we shouldn’t even attempt?
- What is that one thing we should add to the mix, and start doing now?
Of course you can offer elaborate suggestions, but since we know you are busy, three answers will help us along just as well.
PS: Do you think focusing on personalities, and doing an early morning wrap of relevant readings from around the web is of help? As you might have noticed, we did take off The Daily, but nevertheless wanted to ask you folks anyway.