Amazon’s super-hyped Prime Day was successful, but the extra traffic shut down Amazon.com for a few hours. There are reports that data-center employees were scrambling to find unused servers and equipment to keep the site running.
Google is facing another massive fine ($5B) from the EU over their android operating system. Assuming the EU is successful after appeals, what are they going to do with all that money?
IBM is reporting improved financial performance and mainframe sales are at the center of this success.
Acquisitions
- Ajit Pai Finds a Spine, Sends Sinclair-Tribune Deal to Merger Purgatory
Current law prohibits any one company from reaching more than 39 percent of all U.S. TV households in a bid to protect competition and local reporting. Sinclair had petitioned the FCC to eliminate the ownership cap entirely, but the FCC lacks the authority to overturn federal law (that apparently wasn’t stopping the FCC from considering the move anyway).
In case that failed, Sinclair had a backup plan. Consumer advocates highlighted how Sinclair had hoped to offload numerous stations to either shell companies, subsidiaries, or allies, letting it limbo under the ownership cap.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/594b73/ajit-pai-sinclair-tribune-deal
Cloud
- Big Tech’s Growth Comes With a Big Bill
Apple, for instance, is expected to boost its R&D spending by 17% to $14 billion for this calendar year, outpacing the 10% revenue growth analysts expect for the same period. The iPhone maker’s R&D bill has been steadily climbing over the last several years as it seeks out new hit products to offset its slowing smartphone and tablet businesses. But Apple still underspends Google-parent Alphabet as well as Microsoft and Amazon in both whole dollars and in percent of revenue, leading Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein to note last week that the company may still be “underinvesting in innovation.”
Capital spending will also rise sharply—especially for companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google that have to keep building out network infrastructure to deliver their growing list of cloud-based services. Google’s capex bill alone is projected to surge more than 50% this year, while analysts expect increases of more than 30% for Microsoft and Amazon. And most projections for Amazon exclude the capital leases that the company also uses.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-techs-growth-comes-with-a-big-bill-1531819800?ns=prod/accounts-wsj
- DuckDuckGo slams Google following EU antitrust decision
The allegation came in a series of tweets from the DuckDuckGo Twitter account as a response to the fine. In them, the search engine claims that the company’s “anti-competitive search behavior isn’t limited to Android,” but it also exists in other products, like the Chrome browser as well. “Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they’d like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension,” the tweet said.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17595612/google-antitrust-eu-duckduckgo-chrome
Update: Google owns Duck.com, but it’ll give rival DuckDuckGo a shoutout anyhowBut after a new round of complaints this Friday, Google has relented. Google comms VP Rob Shilkin just quacked tweeted that a new landing page will give people an opportunity to click from Duck.com straight through to DuckDuckGo. Or to the Wikipedia page for ducks, because that’s only fair.
https://www.cnet.com/news/google-owns-duck-com-but-itll-give-rival-duckduckgo-a-shoutout-anyhow/
- Amazon’s EC2 gets faster processors, new high-memory instances
Not only can you now run EC2 inside a Snowball Edge device, but the company also announced a bunch of new EC2 instance types in the cloud. Thanks to these new instance types, developers now have access to a new instance type (Z1d) with custom Xeon processors that can run at up to 4.0 GHz, as well as new memory-optimized instances (R5) that run at up to 3.1 GHz and that feature up to 50 percent more CPU power and 60 percent more memory than their predecessors. There also are some bare metal variants of these instances, as well as an R5d version that features local NVMe storage.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/amazons-ec2-gets-faster-processors-new-high-memory-instances/
Security
- What Stays on Facebook and What Goes? The Social Network Cannot Answer
In exchanges with reporters and lawmakers over the past week, its leaders — including Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive — have been comically tripped up by some of the most basic questions the site faces. Mr. Zuckerberg, in an interview with the journalist Kara Swisher that was published Wednesday, argued that Facebook would not ban Holocaust denialism on the site because “there are things that different people get wrong.” He later explained there were many other ways that Holocaust deniers could be penalized by Facebook — yet lucidity remained elusive.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments fit a larger pattern. Presented with straightforward queries about real-world harm caused by misinformation on their service, Facebook’s executives express their pain, ask for patience, proclaim their unwavering commitment to political neutrality and insist they are as surprised as anyone that they are even in the position of having to come up with speech rules for billions of people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/technology/facebook-misinformation.html
Zuckerberg: I didn’t intend to defend Holocaust deniersEarlier today, Recode’s Kara Swisher released an extensive interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg covering the platform’s struggles during a long, scandal-ridden year. Nestled inside was an exchange where Swisher pressed the executive on why it allows some conspiracy theorists to be allowed to post on the platform, regardless of the truth of their statements — and he explicitly explained that these users, including Holocaust deniers, deserve a voice. This predictably kicked up a ruckus online, and Zuckerberg emailed a clarification to Recode reaffirming that he finds Holocaust deniers “deeply offensive” and didn’t intend to defend them. But he did state Facebook’s goal: Not to stop fake news, but prevent it from spreading.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/18/zuckerberg-i-didn-t-intend-to-defend-holocaust-deniers/
Datacenter/Hardware
- Internal documents show how Amazon scrambled to fix Prime Day glitches
The e-commerce giant also had to add servers manually to meet the traffic demand, indicating its auto-scaling feature may have failed to work properly leading up to the crash, according to external experts who reviewed the documents. “Currently out of capacity for scaling,” one of the updates said about the status of Amazon’s servers, roughly an hour after Prime Day’s launch. “Looking at scavenging hardware.”
A breakdown in an internal system called Sable, which Amazon uses to provide computation and storage services to its retail and digital businesses, caused a series of glitches across other services that depend on it, including Prime, authentication and video playback, the documents show.
- Mainframes the Unlikely Star of IBM’s Q2 Earnings
It was systems hardware that really stood out though: the company’s IBM Z line of mainframes was up 100 percent year-on-year, “reflecting high adoption rate of [the] z14 and strong demand for new workloads”, IBM revealed in a slideshow.
(The new IBM z14 single frame model mainframes can process 850 million encrypted transactions per day in the space of two floor tiles, and are a popular choice for data centers; it can deliver 100 percent encryption of application, cloud service and database data and allow open source machine learning to run on it.)
- Amazon denies it will challenge Cisco with switch sales
“Cisco and AWS have a longstanding customer and partner relationship, and during a recent call between Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and AWS CEO Andy Jassy, Andy confirmed that AWS is not actively building a commercial network switch,” a Cisco Systems Inc. spokesman told MarketWatch on Wednesday.
- Google builds its own subsea cable from the US to France
As Google notes, owning the cable means it can lay it exactly where it needs it to be to connect its data centers — without having to take into account the needs of other consortium partners. Owning the cable also means that Google owns all the bandwidth for the lifetime of the cable (usually 15 to 25 years).
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/google-builds-its-own-subsea-cable-from-the-us-to-france/
Other
- Google fined a record $5 billion by the EU for Android antitrust violations
Google has been hit with a record-breaking €4.3 billion ($5 billion) fine by EU regulators for breaking antitrust laws. The European Commission says Google has abused its Android market dominance in three key areas. Google has been bundling its search engine and Chrome apps into the operating system. Google has also blocked phone makers from creating devices that run forked versions of Android, and it “made payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators” to exclusively bundle the Google search app on handsets.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17580694/google-android-eu-fine-antitrust
Again I ask – what would the EU do with this money? How does this fine help the people and companies Google impacted? - IBM Rides Newer Businesses to Higher Revenue, Profit
The Armonk, N.Y., company’s profit rose 3.1% to $2.4 billion. Excluding special items, IBM had a profit of $3.08 a share. Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting an adjusted profit of $3.04 a share.
IBM shares, down 6% over the past year, rose 2.8% to $148.50 in after-hours trading on Wednesday.
Despite reporting higher revenue and profit in the latest quarter, IBM still faces challenges on several fronts. In its Cognitive Solutions segment, which includes services tied to the Watson supercomputer, sales fell 1% after adjusting for currency moves to $4.6 billion.
Photo by Jj Mendez on Unsplash
