SONY hack launched from Amazon Cloud
Wow! Amazing Bloomberg report.
For three pennies an hour, hackers can rent Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)’s servers to wage cyber attacks such as the one that crippled Sony Corp. (6758)’s PlayStation Network and led to the second-largest online data breach in U.S. history.
A hacker used Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud, or EC2, service to attack Sony’s online entertainment systems last month, a person with knowledge of the matter said May 13. The intruder, who used a bogus name to set up an account that’s now disabled, didn’t hack into Amazon’s servers, the person said.
The incident helps illustrate the dilemma facing Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos: Amazon’s cloud-computing service is as cheap and convenient for hackers as it is for customers ranging from Netflix Inc. (NFLX) to Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY) Last month’s attack on Sony compromised more than 100 million customer accounts, the largest data breach in the U.S. since intruders stole credit and debit card numbers from Heartland Payment Systems in 2009.
“Anyone can go get an Amazon account and use it anonymously,” said Pete Malcolm, chief executive officer of Abiquo Inc., a Redwood City, California-based company that helps customers manage data internally and through cloud computing. “If they have computers in their back bedroom they are much easier to trace than if they are on Amazon’s Web Services.”
The Chromebook cometh
On June 15, Google launches its Chromebook netbooks. The Ubergizmo site has a useful preview of the Samsung version. Highlights include:
So far, so conventional. But now it diverges from the norm:
Citric and VMware deals which will allow people to access their organisations’ Windows applications remotely.
The most interesting revelation, however, had nothing to do with the hardware. Google announced a “Chromebooks for Business” deal which, for $28 per employee per month, organisations get:
There’s also going to be a comparable deal for education – at $20/student per month.
This could be really interesting – especially as many organisations (including major UK newspapers and universities) have already gone over to Google Apps (Gmail and Docs especially).
Amazon.co.uk will be selling it
The IMF immune system
Hmmm… I see that the IMF’s Articles of Association state that its officials “shall be immune from legal process with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity except when the Fund waives this immunity.”
Patience
1 picture = 1k words
I’m continually impressed by the creativity and ingenuity of the people who do the cover designs for high-end magazines like the Economist and the New Yorker. This one from the issue of the New Yorker following Bin Laden’s killing is, IMHO, a minor masterpiece.
Skype’s the limit
This morning’s Observer column.
“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money” is an aphorism frequently attributed to the late Everett Dirksen, the celebrated Republican senator from Illinois, who died in 1969.
While intensive research has failed to unearth documentary evidence for the source of the entire quotation, the phrase “a billion here, a billion there” was one of Dirksen’s mantras which he often deployed in castigating congressional profligacy with taxpayers’ money.
One wonders, therefore, what Dirksen would have made of the news that Microsoft was spending $8.5bn (around £5bn) of its shareholders’ money to buy Skype, the internet telephony venture, in an acquisition that has gobsmacked both the technology industry and Wall Street. It is, said the ArsTechnica analyst, “a deal that’s hard to understand” (translation: nuts).
The scepticism that greeted the announcement stemmed from various sources…
The ‘End of History’ Man redux
I’ve got far too many books to read at the moment, and so have been havering about whether to get Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
Fukuyama’s new book is dominated by the influence of another of his mentors, the conservative Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. Huntington is best known for his own cosmic soundbite – The Clash of Civilizations. But his main interest was in political order: how to achieve it and how to mess it up. Basically Huntington thought there are two things that could go wrong on the road to a well-ordered society. You could fail to get there because your society never gets beyond a condition of internecine conflict and incipient civil war. Or you could get there and find your society gets stuck in a rut and fails to adapt to new threats and challenges. Fukuyama takes this framework and applies it to the problem of democratic order. Why is it that some societies have gone down the democratic route to stability while others have remained stuck with autocracy? And will democracies be able to adapt to the new threats and challenges that they face?
Runciman provides a lucid and illuminating summary of Fukuyama’s argument, which I suppose might constitute an argument for not buying the book. Against that, he’s whetted my appetite for it. Damn.
Oh — and while I’m on the subject of understanding why some countries work and others do, there’s an interesting review by Pankaj Mishra of Anatol Lieven’s new book on Pakistan
Approaching his subject as a trained anthropologist would, Lieven describes how Pakistan, though nominally a modern nation state, is still largely governed by the “traditions of overriding loyalty to family, clan and religion”. There is hardly an institution in Pakistan that is immune to “the rules of behavior that these loyalties enjoin”. These persisting ties of patronage and kinship, which are reminiscent of pre-modern Europe, indicate that the work of creating impersonal modern institutions and turning Pakistanis into citizens of a nation state – a long and brutal process in Europe, as Eugen Weber and others have shown – has barely begun.
The other half: Paul Allen’s autobiography
From my Observer review.
They say you can never be too thin, or too rich. After reading Paul Allen’s memoir, I’m not so sure – especially about the rich bit. After founding Microsoft in 1975 with his friend and schoolmate Bill Gates, Allen spent eight frenzied years building it into the corporate colossus that it is today. But then two things happened: he became ill with Hodgkin’s lymphoma; and he decided that life was too short to endure the perpetual conflict that comes with working with Bill Gates. And so he quit in 1983 (having rebuffed Gates’s offer to buy his Microsoft stock at a knockdown price), held on to his shares and has spent the rest of his life with his money (his net worth was $1bn in 1990 and was 13 times that in 1996).
His memoir, like his life, divides neatly into two parts, of which the first is by far the most engaging. Allen and Gates were schoolmates at the exclusive private Lakeside school in Seattle. Because of the school’s eccentric decision to install a terminal that was linked to a General Electric mainframe computer in a distant office, the two boys had a unique opportunity to teach themselves programming, and in relatively short order acquired more experience and expertise than most undergraduates at the time (the mid-1960s)…
Wittgenstein’s grave
In Ascension Churchyard, Cambridge. People leave the strangest objects and messages on the grave of the great philosopher.
For example:
The ashes of my first wife, Carol, are buried in this loveliest of churchyards, and whenever I go there I always check Ludwig’s grave on the way out. Sometimes the messages are deeply poignant, and make one wonder what lies behind them. There’s a novel here, somewhere.