Update 2019: We’ve been busy working on some great training content around security, check out the Cloud Academy library to prepare on all-things cloud security.
A new player in the Cloud Computing market
Alibaba, the Chinese online retail giant, has announced plans to expand its Cloud Computing platform, Aliyun, to overseas markets. Mashable (and others) report that starting with a new data center in Silicon Valley, Aliyun is apparently ramping up to go head-to-head against AWS and Google in the red hot Cloud Computing market.
FREAK keeps getting bigger
By now, most of you are probably aware of the FREAK security hole affecting secure online connections using OpenSSL, Apple’s SSL and now, as it turns out, Microsoft’s SChannel as well. This decades-old flaw will allow man-in-the-middle attacks on any unpatched client (including just about any version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer). Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet offers a checklist of fixes currently available.
Do-it-yourself security encryption
ZDNet reports on Peerio, a new cloud storage and messaging platform, whose most significant feature is security. The Peerio team have created a brand new open source encryption tool that completely avoids both the potential weaknesses of the big data players (like Google and Dropbox) and the complexity of the 25-year-old PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) standard. The developers claim that being open source makes it next to impossible for Peerio to become a victim of backdoor vulnerabilities.
Breaking the Internet language barrier
MIT’s Technology Review reports on a significant problem facing Internet growth: “Just ten languages account for 80 percent of the content of the Internet.” Which means, for instance, that for the hundreds of millions of citizens of India who speak any of the 425 local languages, but not English or Chinese, the Internet is next to useless.
Without some kind of language bridge, Internet publishers trying to reach such markets are helpless to do anything about it. But the potential opportunity is just as big, as any business or social program that figures out how to break through the language barrier – through either a technological or logistical solution – stands to win big.
