Cloud storage providers like DropBox, Google Drive and others offer storage space for a premium amount in order to store your personal or official data. The data stored in the cloud is actually secured in a data center which might be located in a remote place.
On contrary to this storage technique, Space Monkey has come up with a new product, where the data center is placed in the hands of the user in reality. It offers to its users the facility to store more data than traditional cloud storage solutions for a low price.
Space Monkey deploys a hardware device in the user’s home and this facilitates almost 1TB of storage space to be used. The cost for storing 1TB of data is $10/month or $100/year, which is far less cheap than what the other traditional IP storage providers like DropBox offer to their users. (Dropbox offers 100GB for $10/month)
As per the press release, Space Monkey storage hardware offers 60 times more speedy access to data than what other cloud storage providers usually do. This may be due to the hardware’s presence in the house, rather than in a remote place and a more superior hardware interface allocated for access.
The working of Space Monkey’s storage hardware is as such- data is uploaded onto the hardware in an encrypted format and spread out to different drives on the network. This technique allows faster disaster recovery of data in the event of a catastrophe such as a fire. Redundant data copies are maintained in order to ensure that no data is lost.
User will be provided with a simple folder icon on his desktop and all that is added to the folder can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
Named as a Kickstarter, Space Monkey is said to be seeking funding for its cloud storage replacement and aims to make $100,000 within three months from now.
In the year 2012, Space Monkey promised to come up with a 1TB of cloud storage space for $100 in 2013 and so has shown up with its Kickstarter in 2Q 2013.
The company admits that the available hardware in your house will also play as a host for other users data and so your house can be treated as a micro data center in real time.
More details on the security feature and bandwidth requirements are awaited!
When the world’s largest particle accelerator is busy in smashing particle with the speed of light, the need for an IT strategy in order to understand the secrets of universe is surely needed. For this reason, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has opened a new data center to provide a cloud network for the scientists to interact and exchange the data generated, while conducting the experiments with the Large Hadron Collider. The data center is being built at the Franco Swiss Border and will be completed by early 2015.
Presently, CERN has a working data center located in Geneva, Switzerland. But the data center has the provision of getting 3.5 megawatts of power, whereas the requirement by CERN accelerator itself is around 120 megawatts.
For this reason, in early 2012 CERN researchers have requested for another data center to the Europe government. The grant was provided in 3Q 2012 and by January 2013 an additional data center came up in Budapest, Hungary which has another 2.7 megawatts of power in place.
“ Presently, the Budapest data center of CERN will have 5,000 servers and this count will add up to the existing 11,000 server count of Geneva Data center,” said Tim Bell, CERNs infrastructure Manager. He added that, by the year 2015 the count of 16,000 servers will pave way for 150,000 virtual servers, as they will be loaded onto the physical servers.
CERN is planning to move everything to an open compute platform by opting for Infrastructure-as-a-service cloud network medium, which is in lines with Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud. Thus, by this step; storage, computing and networking equipment work functions can be provisioned from a single point, which stands as a prime benefit of the openstack pools compute format. As a result, CPU usage, memory allocation and storage space demand will be provided by the virtual machines as per the demand.
This private cloud platform of CERN will be serving around 11,000 physicists across the globe. CERN started to use virtualized servers through KVM and Hyper V hypervisors. Presently, CERNs active directory setup has information of 44,000 users.
CERNs experiments will be producing Petabytes of data a second and the data will be filtered by 6000 servers into the storage media at 25GB per second. CERN has a built-in storage system named CASTOR and it includes a 95PB of tape media in its storage tier.
More details are awaited!
Mobile Computing has become a need than a fad nowadays and surfing web resources via mobile has increased by 32% in the last two years says Gartner. So, in order to keep an eye on what web surfers are searching on the internet, National Security Agency of America has asked big search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to monitor the activities of its users who are using their services.
Reacting on this tip-off from NSA, Google is in plans to make the user sign-in compulsory in future. So, in order to access Google services in future, the need to sign-in on the web page will be made compulsory to all the users located worldwide.
Although, the sign-in feature is already present on Google search page from almost 5 years, it was not mandatory to login. Users who logged in with their respective user names were served with the results, which were also saved in archives of the Google servers. The next time, the same user tries to access something similar to what he/she has done in the past, the Google search engine would come up something relevant to the previous search.
The internet juggernaut, will now on ask its users to login with their user names in order to track each and every query diverted to its servers. Moreover, the NSA has also asked the web search giant to keep a track of whatever its users were searching for and maintain a database in relation to it.
Google is in plans to maintain a monthly search data of each user who uses its search services. Already, Youtube, Gmail, G-Drive services are available to users only after an official login.
In coming days, Google will include its web search page, Google news and Google maps onto the above list. Subsequently, users should first specify their identity in order to utilize the services of Google in coming days.
Google servers will grasp the activity from your browsers and will save it in their database. Already, chrome has been doing this from the past 4 years or so, where user activity was tracked after every session. In coming days, other browsers will also have to update this feature of sending info to Google servers into their browsing tabs.
Every month, the search data of users will be accessed by software of NSA and if anything suspicious is found, a report will be generated by the National Security Agency on the user. From then on the user activity will be tracked more deeply for security purposes.
There is a high probability that, people searching for sensitive data details on white house, nuclear power plants and many such things will be pushed under scanner. If anything suspiciously alarming about their research is discovered, the agency will act immediately depending on the resources available on hand.
This may be a sincere stepping to curtail terrorist activities, who use Google chat and other services in order to plot a massacre.
Google is yet to confirm this issue further on an official note. But the sign-in rule will definitely come into affect by the end of this year.
Facebook internal chat servers were infected by Dorkbot malware on Sunday which was an attempt by the cyber criminals to harvest user passwords. When Bitdefender researchers discovered this fact and alerted the facebook officials, they quickly reacted and cleaned up their database. This prompt move by Facebook has surely averted a huge disaster as any further laid back attitude from the social media firm would have leaked out the user passwords and data to the world.
Bitdefender researchers found out that malware links were being circulated among facebook users in United States, India, Portugal, United Kingdom, Romania, Turkey and Germany. Although, the extent of infection was not figured out by BitDefender researchers, their count estimated more than 9000 malicious links to the malware in just 24 hours.
On Tuesday, the security software researcher firm alerted Facebook, which immediately reacted and cleared their few server sites of the infection.
“The infection was circulated on Facebook through a flaw in file sharing site MediaFire. From the infected computers, the malware sent links to the malicious application to the victim’s facebook friends via chat services”, said Bogdan Botezatu, Senior E-analyst for Bit Defender.
He added that all the links had a JPG extension and made the recipient believe that it was an image file sent from an authenticated sender. But as soon as the recipient clicked the link, the malware would have been dumped onto their PCs. Once in the PC, the victims browsing activity and password details would have been monitored by the malware and privacy factor would have been breached. When the virus took over the control of the PC, the system would have been used in distributed denial of service (DDNS) attacks.
Dorkbot keeps on updating itself and nullifies the antivirus updates to such an extent that the presence of the anti-virus becomes useless.
Going into the history, Dorkbot malware was invented in the year 2003 and its latest variant was identified in the wilderness of the web in 2011. From then on, there was no news about this malware. In 2011, Dorbot spread through notified instant messaging clients like Yahoo messenger, Xchat and so on. Botnet is the carrier of Dorkbot which is an Internet Chat relay protocol service.
So, BitDefenders alert and Facebook’s prompt action saved the day for the latter’s users. Otherwise, something grievous would have been faced by Facebook users.
Google has come up with an update to its Google + services, which facebook has missed till date. For all those who are using the third largest social networking platform this news from the internet and advertising juggernaut may appeal.
Google, which acquired Nik software in last September, will make use of the acquired company tools in order to automate the photo edit and sharing process on its cloud platform. With the help of the tool, Google can now automatically enhance the tonal distribution of the image, lighten the skin tone, sharpen some parts in an image.
So, Google datacenter will soon become dark rooms and will have the ability to fix the images in an automated way. Adding more to it is that they can pick the best ones and will highlight them in an automated way in order to add exuberance to memorabilia of its users.
This means that Google data centers will now on morph your images with your permission and change them a bit from usual. If you have the photos clicked in burst mode, then Google data center can also stitch those photos in such a way that they can be displayed as one image or as an animated GIF. This feature is titled as “auto awesome” and has the ability to create panaromas and HDR images.
Although, the new “auto awesome” feature looks really awesome, the storage of these photos can turn into a menace, since all the brushed up images need to be saved for future. With only 15GB of free storage space left in the G-Drive cloud, the new Google + update might not appeal to many users as the available space must be divided in among Gmail, Gdrive and Google + services.
Twitter, one of the leading social media platforms in the world has acquired Big Data Analytics Company named ‘Lucky Sort’ in order to get deeper insights into its user tweets. However, twitter has not yet disclosed on how it is planning to make use of the newly acquired company’s technology.
Instead, Lucky Sort CEO Noah Pepper has made it official that it will use the tweets in the form of data sets to summarize and visualize in placing advertisements on the site. Moreover, Lucky Sort will also be no longer be recognized as an individual product and will help its current customers in all possible way during the current transition. Likewise, the company will no longer accept other projects as it will focus fully on Twitter.
Almost 2/3rd of employees working in Lucky Sort’s office located in Portland, Oregon will be shifted to Twitter’s San Francisco Headquarters in order to join the social media portals revenue engineering department.
Noah has clearly stated in one of her tweets that her company will strive to turn twitters database into a useful intelligence for investors and operators by this year end.
Last week, twitter went for data center expansion and now it has plans to encash on the tweets generated by/from its users.
McAfee, one of the leading computer security software providers of America has offered a new tool named LiveSafe which is useful in protecting PCs from viruses, malware and other security risks. In today’s world, every household in has a PC, tablet or smart phones and securing all of them with a security software can become a big hassle, both physically and monetarily.
In order to make this task simple, McAfee has offered LiveSafe in order to secure all the devices with its centralized protection for pretty much all devices. So, you don’t have to use security software for different devices working with different OSes. Just use McAfee LiveSafe in order to secure everything and juggle with. Well, the only exception over here is that this software tool is not recommended for phones running on windows operating system and also on Chromebooks.
LiveSafe has a web based central interface and can be used as an antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-phishing protection and a two way firewall. Identity protection and parental controls will also be available on demand.
McAfee which is now a part of Intel will be using Intel’s anti theft technology and Intel identity protection technology that is used in CPUs. So, no matter what CPU your device houses, LiveSafe will work in accordance with it.
Coming to the main highlight of LiveSafe, it has a most interesting feature called as personal locker. Personal Locker is a cloud based account where the user can storage his sensitive information. When you desire to access the information from the cloud, you must provide voice, face and PIN authentication to access the account, which is a high level security. The authentication will work in windows 8, iOS and on android devices and the users will get a 1GB of storage with the account.
McAfee LiveSafe will be available for a years worth of protection on a subscription of $80 and can be used on unlimited number of windows, android, MAC, iOS and blackberry devices.
The security suite will be available as a preloaded option on all Dell Laptops from June 9th, 2013 for $20.
