Google's cloud business reported operating loss of $5.61 billion in 2020. It brought in $13.06 billion in revenue for the year. It's the first time the company revealed the operating income metric for its cloud business. CNBC reports: Alphabet's latest push to show it's serious about its cloud unit comes as it tries to diversify revenue, which primarily comes from advertising, a business that showed vulnerability in 2020 -- particularly in the second quarter. Google Cloud includes infrastructure and data analytics platforms, collaboration tools, and "other services for enterprise customers."

The company's past attempts to bolster its cloud unit under CEO Diane Greene, who left in 2018, failed to capture much market share. But, since former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian came to Google to lead its cloud efforts in 2019, the company has gone on hiring and acquisition sprees.

Amazon announced on Tuesday that AWS CEO Andy Jassy will replace Jeff Bezos as CEO during the third quarter of this year. Bezos will transition to executive chair of Amazon's board. In a statement, Bezos said: I'm excited to announce that this Q3 I'll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence. This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. The question I was asked most frequently at that time was, "What's the internet?" Blessedly, I haven't had to explain that in a long while. Today, we employ 1.3 million talented, dedicated people, serve hundreds of millions of customers and businesses, and are widely recognized as one of the most successful companies in the world. How did that happen? Invention. Invention is the root of our success. We've done crazy things together, and then made them normal. We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime's insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more. If you get it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. And that yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive.

On Tuesday, a test flight of SpaceX's Starship, a huge next-generation spacecraft that Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of the private rocket company, dreams of one day sending to Mars, came to an explosive end. From a report: That brief flight, to an altitude of about 6 miles and then back to a landing pad, appeared to again demonstrate how the mammoth rocket would tip over on its side as it descended in a controlled belly flop back toward a landing. But when the prototype fired its engines to right itself back to a vertical orientation, it appeared that one engine did not properly ignite, and Starship hit the ground at an angle, disintegrating in a fireball, leaving a cloud of smoke rising over the test site, which is in Boca Chica, Tex., near Brownsville. The end was similar to the last test flight in December which also ended in an explosion at landing, although the particular cause of the rocket failing to slow down enough may have been different.

This time, however, SpaceX at least had the permission of government regulators. Last week, SpaceX and the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates rocket launches, seemed to be in a strange regulatory standoff. SpaceX had filled the propellant tanks of this prototype of Starship -- its ninth one -- and looked ready to launch. But then the rocket stayed on the ground when no approval from the F.A.A. arrived. Mr. Musk expressed frustration on Twitter, describing the part of the F.A.A. that oversees SpaceX as "fundamentally broken." Mr. Musk wrote, "Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars." Late on Monday, the F.A.A. gave permission for Tuesday's launch, but then added that the December launch had occurred without the agency's approval. SpaceX had requested a waiver to conduct that flight even though it posed a greater danger to the public than allowed by regulations. The F.A.A. denied the request. SpaceX defied the ruling and launched anyway.

Google signed a six-year deal with Ford Motor that will bring Android technology to the automaker's cars and cloud services to its factory floor, in a triumph for the internet giant over rival Microsoft. From a report: Google Cloud Platform will be Ford's "preferred cloud provider" and the partners will form an innovation team called Team Upshift to jointly work on future projects, the companies said Monday in a statement. Ford dashboard infotainment screens will be powered by an Android operating system starting in 2023 and the automaker will adopt Google's artificial intelligence and data-analytics technology. The companies did not disclose the value of their deal, but Google will receive revenue from cloud services as well as a Google apps and services licensing fee for every Ford and Lincoln vehicle sold starting in 2023. Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer of Google Cloud, is trying to sell the Alphabet company's computing and storage services through broad strategic partnerships. Fresh off a multiyear alliance with Deutsche Bank announced in December, Google has snagged Ford, a longtime Microsoft client. Google will need to continue accumulating these types of customer wins to catch cloud market leaders Amazon.com and Microsoft.

New transparency figures released by Amazon show the company responded to a record number of government data demands in the last six months of 2020. From a report: The new figures land in the company's bi-annual transparency report published to Amazon's website over the weekend. Amazon said it processed 27,664 government demands for user data in the last six months of 2020, up from 3,222 data demands in the first six months of the year, an increase of close to 800%. That user data includes shopping searches and data from its Echo, Fire, and Ring devices. The new report presents the data differently from previous transparency disclosures. Amazon now breaks down the top requesting countries. U.S. authorities historically made up the bulk of the overall data demands Amazon receives, but this latest report shows Germany with 42% of all requests, followed by Spain with 18%, and Italy and the U.S. with 11% share each. But the report also removes the breakdown by legal process, and now only differentiates between the requests it gets for user's content and for non-content. Amazon said it handed over user content data in 52 cases. For its Amazon Web Services cloud business, which it reports separately, Amazon said it processed 523 data demands, with 75% of all requests made by U.S. authorities, and Amazon turned over user's content in 15 cases.

"Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of the now-defunct CentOS Linux distribution, has founded a new startup company called Ctrl IQ, which will serve in part as a sponsoring company for the upcoming Rocky Linux distribution," Ars Technica reports: Kurtzer co-founded CentOS Linux in 2004 with mentor Rocky McGaugh, and it operated independently for 10 years until being acquired by Red Hat in 2014. When Red Hat killed off CentOS Linux in a highly controversial December 2020 announcement, Kurtzer immediately announced his intention to recreate CentOS with a new distribution named after his deceased mentor.

The Rocky Linux concept got immediate, positive community reaction — but there's an awful lot of work and expense that goes into creating and maintaining a Linux distribution. The CentOS Linux project itself made that clear when it went for the Red Hat acquisition in 2014; without its own source of funding, the odds of Rocky Linux becoming a complete 1:1 replacement — serving the same massive volume of users that CentOS did — seemed dicey at best.
In a statement Ctrl IQ notes the Rocky Linux community was already "in the thousands of people driving the foundation of the organization..."

And as for Gregory Kurtzer, he was "originally basing Ctrl IQ's stack on CentOS, but he needed to pivot, as did most of the community to something else. Due to the alignment, Greg chose Rocky, and has been asked to help support it." Ars Technica adds: The company describes itself in its announcement as the suppliers of a "full technology stack integrating key capabilities of enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and high-performance computing..."

Wading through the buzzword bingo, Ctrl IQ's real business seems to be in supplying relatively turn-key infrastructure for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, capable of running distributed across multiple sites and/or cloud providers... Not all of Ctrl IQ's offerings are theoretical. Warewulf, also founded by Kurtzer, is currently developed and maintained by the US Department of Energy. Anyone can freely download and use Warewulf, but it's not difficult to imagine value added in consulting with one of its founders...

Ctrl IQ is one of three Tier 1 sponsors identified by the Rocky Linux project, along with Amazon Web Services (which provides core build infrastructure) and Mattermost, which is providing enterprise collaboration services...

Rocky Linux is generally expected to be widely available in Q2 2021, with a first-release candidate build expected on March 31.

Tech blogger Paul Thurrott writes: Firefox 85 now protects users against supercookies, which Mozilla says is "a type of tracker that can stay hidden in your browser and track you online, even after you clear cookies. By isolating supercookies, Firefox prevents them from tracking your web browsing from one site to the next." It also includes small improvements to bookmarks and password management.

Unfortunately, Mozilla has separately — and much more quietly — stopped work on Site Specific Browser (SSB) functionality... This feature allowed users to use Firefox to create apps on the local PC from Progressive Web Apps and other web apps, similar to the functionality provided in Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other Chromium-based web browsers. "The SSB feature has only ever been available through a hidden [preference] and has multiple known bugs," Mozilla's Dave Townsend explains in a Bugzilla issue tracker. "Additionally, user research found little to no perceived user benefit to the feature and so there is no intent to continue development on it at this time. As the feature is costing us time in terms of bug triage and keeping it around is sending the wrong signal that this is a supported feature, we are going to remove the feature from Firefox."
Thurrott's conclusion? "Mozilla is walking away from a key tenet of modern web apps and, in doing so, they are making themselves irrelevant."

"The domain name perl.com was stolen and now points to an IP address associated with malware campaigns," reports Bleeping Computer: Perl.com is a site owned by Tom Christiansen and has been used since 1997 to post news and articles about the Perl programming language. On January 27th, Perl programming author and Perl.com editor brian d foy tweeted that the perl.com domain was suddenly registered under another person. Intellectual property lawyer John Berryhill later replied to the tweet that the domain was stolen in September 2020 while at Network Solutions, transferred to a registrar in China on Christmas Day, and finally moved to the Key-Systems registrar on January 27th, 2020.

It wasn't until the last transfer that the IP addresses assigned to the domain were changed from 151.101.2.132 to the Google Cloud IP address 35.186.238[.]101...

On the 28th, d foy tweeted that they have set up perl.com temporarily at http://perldotcom.perl.org for users who wish to access the site until the domain is recovered...

d foy has told BleepingComputer that it is not believed that the domain owner's account was hacked and that they are currently working with Network solutions and Key-Systems to resolve the issue. "I do know from direct communication with the Network Solutions and Key Systems that they are working on this and that the perl.com domain is locked. Tom Christiansen, the rightful owner, is going through the recovery process with those registrars."

"Both registrars, along with a few others, reached out to me personally to offer help and guidance. We are confident that we will be able to recover the domain, but I do not have a timetable for that," d foy told BleepingComputer.

The IP address that perl.com is now hosted has a long history of being used in older malware campaigns and more recent ones.
"Anyone using a perl.com host for their CPAN mirror should use www.cpan.org instead," advises an announcement page today at Perl.org, which d foy tweeted "is now going to be the source for the latest http://Perl.com info."

On Thursday d foy tweeted that "There's no news on the recovery progress. Everyone who needs to be talking is talking to each other and it's just a process now."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Mediacom, a cable company with about 1.4 million Internet customers across 22 states, is telling heavy uploaders to reduce their data usage -- even when those users are well below their monthly data caps. Mediacom's fastest Internet plan offers gigabit download speeds and 50Mbps upload speeds with a monthly data cap of 6TB. But as Stop the Cap wrote in a detailed report on Wednesday, the ISP is "reach[ing] out to a growing number of its heavy uploaders and telling them to reduce usage or face a speed throttle or the possible closure of their account." Mediacom told Ars that it is contacting heavy uploaders "more frequently than before" because of increased usage triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The company said that heavy uploaders "may be under their total bandwidth usage allowance but still have a negative impact on Mediacom's network."

Mediacom's terms and conditions say the company charges $10 fees for each additional block of 50GB used by customers who exceed the data cap. But users may be warned about their usage long before they risk overage fees. One user in East Moline, Illinois, who described the predicament on a DSLReports forum in early January, said they paid for the 6TB plan "to make sure we wouldn't go over the cap" and had never used more than 4TB. Another gigabit user in Missouri named Cory told Stop the Cap that the 6TB monthly cap "is way more than I will ever use, but I still received a warning letter claiming I was uploading too much. I discovered I used about 900GB over the last two months, setting up a cloud backup of my computer. At most I can send files at around 50Mbps, which they claim is interfering with other customers in my neighborhood. I don't understand." Mediacom is blaming the pandemic for its hidden limits on uploaders. "When contacted by Ars, Mediacom pointed to cable-industry statistics showing 31.8 percent growth in downstream traffic and 51.1 percent growth in upstream traffic since the pandemic ramped up in March 2020," reports Ars.

Investigators probing a massive hack of the U.S. government and businesses say they have found concrete evidence the suspected Russian espionage operation went far beyond the compromise of the small software vendor publicly linked to the attack. From a report: Close to a third of the victims didn't run the SolarWinds software initially considered the main avenue of attack for the hackers, according to investigators and the government agency digging into the incident. The revelation is fueling concern that the episode exploited vulnerabilities in business software used daily by millions [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. Hackers linked to the attack have broken into these systems by exploiting known bugs in software products, by guessing online passwords and by capitalizing on a variety of issues in the way Microsoft cloud-based software is configured, investigators said.

Approximately 30% of both the private-sector and government victims linked to the campaign had no direct connection to SolarWinds, Brandon Wales, acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in an interview. The attackers "gained access to their targets in a variety of ways. This adversary has been creative," said Mr. Wales, whose agency, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is coordinating the government response. "It is absolutely correct that this campaign should not be thought of as the SolarWinds campaign." Corporate investigators are reaching the same conclusion. Last week, computer security company Malwarebytes said that a number of its Microsoft cloud email accounts were compromised by the same attackers who targeted SolarWinds, using what Malwarebytes called "another intrusion vector."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday said the company will make its office facilities available for COVID-19 vaccination clinics, as tech giants aim to speed up distribution efforts in the US. From a report: The company said it's partnering with the health care provider One Medical for the clinics, which will be opened "as needed" at Google buildings, parking lots and open spaces. For now, Google is targeting its campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the company is headquartered; Los Angeles; New York City; and Kirkland, Washington, outside of Seattle. [...] The company also said it will use artificial intelligence from its Google Cloud division to help health care providers and pharmacies with the logistics of vaccine distribution. That includes detecting changes in the temperature of vaccine doses, which must be stored in cool conditions. Google also said it's committing more than $150 million in free ads and other investments to public health agencies and nonprofits promoting vaccine education.

"Microsoft Corp. was wrapped into a massive cybersecurity attack late last year," reports MarketWatch, "but the unprecedented intrusion may actually end up being a positive for the company's bottom line."

UBS analyst Karl Keirstead, who has a buy rating and a $243 price target, said while Microsoft products were leveraged by hackers in the attack on SolarWinds Corp.'s Orion IT management software, because they are commonplace, "the broader cyber-security community are not pointing fingers at Microsoft."

Keirstead noted that the attack actually drove more customers into public cloud infrastructures like Azure, Amazon.com Inc.'s and Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud "given a view that cloud data centers are more secure and that constantly patching/updating on-premise software like Orion presents a security risk that can be transferred to Microsoft, Amazon or Google."

"Bottom line, we believe this cyber-security attack could be a modest net positive for Microsoft," Keirstead said.

After their house was vandalized, long-time Slashdot reader lsllll needs some help finding a battery-powered, wifi-enabled camera that can dump motion-detected videos to a local server: There are some nice cameras out there that'll work for nearly 5 months off a rechargeable battery. You can even pair them with a solar panel which would keep them constantly topped off. But none of them offer anything other than local storage (free on SD card) or in the cloud (subscription).

Obviously, being a programmer and a sysadmin, I realize that the effort to dump a video to a cloud service and opening a connection to a local FTP/SMB server require the same bandwidth, battery usage. So this decision to not support local FTP/SMB servers must be intentional and the way everything is going nowadays: juice the customers for as much money as you can after they've purchased your product.

The question is, are the any cameras out there that run on rechargeable batteries, support WiFi, and dump videos to a local server?
Share your suggestions in the comments!

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes at ZDNet: When Elastic, makers of the open-source search and analytic engine Elasticsearch, went after Amazon Web Services (AWS) by changing its license from the open-source Apache 2.0-license ALv2) to the non-open-source friendly Server Side Public License, I predicted "we'd soon see AWS-sponsored Elasticsearch and Kibana forks." The next day, AWS tweeted it "will launch new forks of both Elasticsearch and Kibana based on the latest Apache 2.0 licensed codebases." Well, that didn't take long!

In a blog post, AWS explained that since Elastic is no longer making its search and analytic engine Elasticsearch and its companion data visualization dashboard Kibana available as open source, AWS is taking action. "In order to ensure open source versions of both packages remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain an ALv2-licensed fork of open-source Elasticsearch and Kibana.... AWS brings years of experience working with these codebases, as well as making upstream code contributions to both Elasticsearch and Apache Lucene, the core search library that Elasticsearch is built on — with more than 230 Lucene contributions in 2020 alone... We're in this for the long haul, and will work in a way that fosters healthy and sustainable open source practices — including implementing shared project governance with a community of contributors..."

Yet another company, Logz.io, a cloud-monitoring company, and some partners have announced that it will launch a "true" open source distribution for Elasticsearch and Kibana.

Google released Chrome 88 this week — and besides improving its dark mode support, they removed support for both Adobe Flash and FTP.

PC World calls it "the end of two eras." The most noteworthy change in this update is what's not included. Chrome 88 lays Adobe Flash and the FTP protocol to rest. RIP circa-2000 Internet.

Neither comes as a surprise, though it's poetic that they're being buried together. Adobe halted Flash Player downloads at the end of 2020, making good on a promise made years before, and began blocking Flash content altogether a couple weeks later. Removing Flash from Chrome 88 is just Google's way of flushing the toilet.

On the other hand, FTP isn't dead, but it is now for Chrome users. The File Transport Protocol has helped users send files across the Internet for decades, but in an era of prolific cloud storage services and other sharing methods, its use has waned. Google started slowly disabling FTP support in Chrome 86, per ZDNet, and now you'll no longer be able to access FTP links in the browser. Look for standalone FTP software instead if you need it, such as FileZilla.

That's not all. Mac users should be aware that Chrome 88 drops support for OS X 10.10 (OS X Yosemite). Yosemite released in 2014 and received its last update in 2017...

But Google killing Flash and FTP might be the footnotes that hit old-school web users in the feels.
Chrome 88 will also block non-encrypted downloads originating from an encrypted page, the article reports. And the Verge notes Chrome also offers less intrusive website permission requests (as an experimental feature enabled from chrome://flags/#permission-chip ), while Bleeping Computer describes Chrome 88's new experimental feature for searching through all your open tabs.

And Chrome's blog points out some additional features under the hood: Chrome 88 will heavily throttle chained JavaScript timers for hidden pages in particular conditions. This will reduce CPU usage, which will also reduce battery usage. There are some edge cases where this will change behavior, but timers are often used where a different API would be more efficient, and more reliable.

A federal judge has denied Parler's request for a court order blocking Amazon from kicking the social media app off its platform, marking yet another setback in Parler's efforts to get back online. From a report: Judge Barbara Rothstein issued a ruling on Thursday saying that Parler had not met the legal requirements for a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction. That decision does not end the litigation, but it does mean that the court will not force Amazon Web Services to allow Parler back onto its cloud hosting platform. Amazon's move effectively kicked Parler off the public internet. Parler, the alternative social media platform favored by the far-right, had sued AWS earlier this month after AWS claimed Parler did not do enough to remove instances of incitement from its website.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The House Oversight and Reform Committee on Thursday asked the FBI to investigate the role Parler, a social media website and app popular with the American far right, played a role in the violence at the U.S. Capitol. Representative Carolyn Maloney, who chairs the panel, cited press reports that detailed violent threats on Parler against state elected officials for their role in certifying the election results before the Jan. 6 attack that left five dead. She also noted numerous Parler users have been arrested and charged with threatening violence against elected officials or for their role in participating in the attack.

Maloney asked the FBI to review Parler's role "as a potential facilitator of planning and incitement related to the violence, as a repository of key evidence posted by users on its site, and as a potential conduit for foreign governments who may be financing civil unrest in the United States." Maloney asked the FBI to review Parler's financing and its ties to Russia after she noted the company had re-emerged. Maloney cited Justice Department charges against a Texas man who used a Parler account to post threats regarding the riots that he would return to the Capitol on Jan. 19 "carrying weapons and massing in numbers so large that no army could match them." The Justice Department said the threats were viewed by other social media users tens of thousands of times. While Parler has reappeared online thanks to a cloud services company based in Russia, it doesn't appear to be hosted via Amazon Web Services anytime soon. According to NPR, a U.S. district judge sided with Amazon, arguing "that it is within Amazon's right to punish the company over its refusal [to remove posts that threatened public safety]." Slashdot reader fropenn first shared the story.

Scientists from a trio of universities have combined satellite imagery with deep learning to detect elephants from space. The goal is to help protect these endangered species from poachers or habitat destruction. Their study was published in the journal Ecology and Conservation. Interesting Engineering reports: The team's method proved comparable to human detection accuracy and could help solve a number of existing challenges, such as cross-border limits, and cloud coverage, among others. The team used Maxar WorldView-3 satellite imagery, which is capable of collecting more than one million acres (5,000 km2) imagery in one go in just a few minutes. This allows for fast repeat imaging when necessary, and minimizes the risk of double counting as it's so rapid.

Then the team leveraged deep learning to process the vast amount of imagery it collected from Maxar's WorldView-3 satellite. In a matter of hours, the team collected its relevant data. This process usually takes months when sorting out by hand. On top of speed, the deep learning algorithms also provided consistent results less prone to error, as well as false negatives and false positives. In order to develop this method, the team created a customized training dataset of over 1,000 elephants, and then fed it into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). After trials, the team concluded that its CNN can detect elephants in satellite imagery with as high an accuracy as human detection capabilities.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A suspected Chinese hacking group has been attacking the airline industry for the past few years with the goal of obtaining passenger data in order to track the movement of persons of interest. The intrusions have been linked to a threat actor that the cyber-security has been tracking under the name of Chimera. Believed to be operating in the interests of the Chinese state, the group's activities were first described in a report [PDF] and Black Hat presentation [PDF] from CyCraft in 2020. The initial report mentioned a series of coordinated attacks against the Taiwanese superconductor industry.

But in a new report published last week by NCC Group and its subsidiary Fox-IT, the two companies said the group's intrusions are broader than initially thought, having also targeted the airline industry. These attacks targeted semiconductor and airline companies in different geographical areas, and not just Asia, NCC and Fox-IT said. In the case of some victims, the hackers stayed hidden inside networks for up to three years before being discovered. "The goal of targeting some victims appears to be to obtain Passenger Name Records (PNR)," the two companies said. While the NCC and Fox-IT report didn't speculate why the hackers targeted the airline industry and why they stole passenger data, this is pretty obvious. In fact, it is very common for state-sponsored hacking groups to target airline companies, hotel chains, and telcos to obtain data they could use to track the movements and communications of persons of interest.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last month, Red Hat caused a lot of consternation in the enthusiast and small business Linux world when it announced the discontinuation of CentOS Linux. Long-standing tradition -- and ambiguity in Red Hat's posted terms -- led users to believe that CentOS 8 would be available until 2029, just like the RHEL 8 it was based on. Red Hat's early termination of CentOS 8 in 2021 cut eight of those 10 years away, leaving thousands of users stranded. Red Hat's December announcement of CentOS Stream -- which it initially billed as a "replacement" for CentOS Linux -- left many users confused about its role in the updated Red Hat ecosystem.

As of February 1, 2021, Red Hat will make RHEL available at no cost for small-production workloads -- with "small" defined as 16 systems or fewer. This access to no-cost production RHEL is by way of the newly expanded Red Hat Developer Subscription program, and it comes with no strings -- in Red Hat's words, "this isn't a sales program, and no sales representative will follow up." Red Hat is also expanding the availability of developer subscriptions to teams, as well as individual users. Moving forward, subscribing RHEL customers can add entire dev teams to the developer subscription program at no cost. This allows the entire team to use Red Hat Cloud Access for simplified deployment and maintenance of RHEL on well-known cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.