An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Late January, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a notice of proposed rulemaking for establishing new requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers (IaaS) . The proposal boils down to a 'Know Your Customer' regime for companies operating cloud services, with the goal of countering the activities of "foreign malicious actors." Yet, despite an overseas focus, Americans won't be able to avoid the proposal's requirements, which covers CDNs, virtual private servers, proxies, and domain name resolution services, among others. [...] Under the proposed rule, Customer Identification Programs (CIPs) operated by IaaS providers must collect information from both existing and prospective customers, i.e. those at the application stage of opening an account. The bare minimum includes the following data: a customer's name, address, the means and source of payment for each customer's account, email addresses and telephone numbers, and IP addresses used for access or administration of the account. What qualifies as an IaaS is surprisingly broad: "Any product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or "trial" offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications. The consumer typically does not manage or control most of the underlying hardware but has control over the operating systems, storage, and any deployed applications. The term is inclusive of "managed" products or services, in which the provider is responsible for some aspects of system configuration or maintenance, and "unmanaged" products or services, in which the provider is only responsible for ensuring that the product is available to the consumer." And it doesn't stop there. The term IaaS includes all 'virtualized' products and services where the computing resources of a physical machine are shared, such as Virtual Private Servers (VPS). It even covers 'baremetal' servers allocated to a single person. The definition also extends to any service where the consumer does not manage or control the underlying hardware but contracts with a third party for access. "This definition would capture services such as content delivery networks, proxy services, and domain name resolution services," the proposal reads. The proposed rule, National Emergency with Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities, will stop accepting comments from interested parties on April 30, 2024.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cet article a été réalisé en collaboration avec OVHcloud

Elle est partout : dans nos mails, dans nos smartphones, dans notre vie quotidienne numérique. Et pourtant, vous ne la voyez pas. Qui ? L'intelligence artificielle bien sûr !

Cet article a été réalisé en collaboration avec OVHcloud

Il s’agit d’un contenu créé par des rédacteurs indépendants au sein de l’entité Humanoid xp. L’équipe éditoriale de Numerama n’a pas participé à sa création. Nous nous engageons auprès de nos lecteurs pour que ces contenus soient intéressants, qualitatifs et correspondent à leurs intérêts.

En savoir plus

Cet article a été réalisé en collaboration avec OVHcloud

L’IA est partout ou presque : dans nos mails, dans nos smartphones, dans notre vie quotidienne numérique. Et c’est justement quand elle est invisible qu’elle est le plus pratique.

Cet article a été réalisé en collaboration avec OVHcloud

Il s’agit d’un contenu créé par des rédacteurs indépendants au sein de l’entité Humanoid xp. L’équipe éditoriale de Numerama n’a pas participé à sa création. Nous nous engageons auprès de nos lecteurs pour que ces contenus soient intéressants, qualitatifs et correspondent à leurs intérêts.

En savoir plus

At Amazon's annual cloud conference in 2016, the company captured the crowd's attention by driving an 18-wheeler onstage. Andy Jassy, now Amazon's CEO, called it the Snowmobile, and said the company would be using the truck to help customers speedily transfer data to Amazon Web Services facilities. Less than eight years later, the semi is out of commission. From a report: As of March, AWS had removed Snowmobile from its website, and the Amazon unit has stopped offering the service, CNBC has confirmed. The webpage devoted to AWS' "Snow family" of products now directs users to its other data transport services, including the Snowball Edge, a 50-pound suitcase-sized device that can be equipped with fast solid-state drives, and the smaller Snowcone. An AWS spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company has introduced more cost-effective options for moving data. Clients had to deal with power, cooling, networking, parking and security when they used the Snowmobile service, the spokesperson said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Datacenter power issues in Ireland may be coming to a head amid reports from customers that Amazon is restricting resources users can spin up in that nation, even directing them to other AWS regions across Europe instead. From a report: Energy consumed by datacenters is a growing concern, especially in places such as Ireland where there are clusters of facilities around Dublin that already account for a significant share of the country's energy supply. This may be leading to restrictions on how much infrastructure can be used, given the power requirements. AWS users have informed The Register that there are sometimes limits on the resources that they can access in its Ireland bit barn, home to Amazon's eu-west-1 region, especially with power-hungry instances that make use of GPUs to accelerate workloads such as AI. "You cannot spin up GPU nodes in AWS Dublin as those locations are maxed out power-wise. There is reserved capacity for EC2 just in case," one source told us. "If you have a problem with that, AWS Europe will point you at spare capacity in Sweden and other parts of the EU." We asked AWS about these issues, but when it finally responded the company was somewhat evasive. "Ireland remains core to our global infrastructure strategy, and we will continue to work with customers to understand their needs, and help them to scale and grow their business," a spokesperson told us. Ireland's power grid operator, EirGrid, was likewise less than direct when we asked if they were limiting the amount of power datacenters could consume.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tobias Mann reports via The Register: Cloud server provider Vultr has rapidly revised its terms-of-service after netizens raised the alarm over broad clauses that demanded the "perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free" rights to customer "content." The red tape was updated in January, as captured by the Internet Archive, and this month users were asked to agree to the changes by a pop-up that appeared when using their web-based Vultr control panel. That prompted folks to look through the terms, and there they found clauses granting the US outfit a "worldwide license ... to use, reproduce, process, adapt ... modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit, and distribute" user content. It turned out these demands have been in place since before the January update; customers have only just noticed them now. Given Vultr hosts servers and storage in the cloud for its subscribers, some feared the biz was giving itself way too much ownership over their stuff, all in this age of AI training data being put up for sale by platforms. In response to online outcry, largely stemming from Reddit, Vultr in the past few hours rewrote its ToS to delete those asserted content rights. CEO J.J. Kardwell told The Register earlier today it's a case of standard legal boilerplate being taken out of context. The clauses were supposed to apply to customer forum posts, rather than private server content, and while, yes, the terms make more sense with that in mind, one might argue the legalese was overly broad in any case. "We do not use user data," Kardwell stressed to us. "We never have, and we never will. We take privacy and security very seriously. It's at the core of what we do globally." [...] According to Kardwell, the content clauses are entirely separate to user data deployed in its cloud, and are more aimed at one's use of the Vultr website, emphasizing the last line of the relevant fine print: "... for purposes of providing the services to you." He also pointed out that the wording has been that way for some time, and added the prompt asking users to agree to an updated ToS was actually spurred by unrelated Microsoft licensing changes. In light of the controversy, Vultr vowed to remove the above section to "simplify and further clarify" its ToS, and has indeed done so. In a separate statement, the biz told The Register the removal will be followed by a full review and update to its terms of service. "It's clearly causing confusion for some portion of users. We recognize that the average user doesn't have a law degree," Kardwell added. "We're very focused on being responsive to the community and the concerns people have and we believe the strongest thing we can do to demonstrate that there is no bad intent here is to remove it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon plans to spend almost $150 billion in the coming 15 years on data centers, giving the cloud-computing giant the firepower to handle an expected explosion in demand for artificial intelligence applications and other digital services. From a report: The spending spree is a show of force as the company looks to maintain its grip on the cloud services market, where it holds about twice the share of No. 2 player Microsoft. Sales growth at Amazon Web Services slowed to a record low last year as business customers cut costs and delayed modernization projects. Now spending is starting to pick up again, and Amazon is keen to secure land and electricity for its power-hungry facilities. "We're expanding capacity quite significantly," said Kevin Miller, an AWS vice president who oversees the company's data centers. "I think that just gives us the ability to get closer to customers." Over the past two years, according to a Bloomberg tally, Amazon has committed to spending $148 billion to build and operate data centers around the world. The company plans to expand existing server farm hubs in northern Virginia and Oregon as well as push into new precincts, including Mississippi, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

couchslug shares a report from ITPro: A European cloud trade body has called for an investigation into Broadcom amid concerns over changes it has made to VMware licensing structures. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) consortium called on regulatory and legislative bodies across Europe to investigate the changes Broadcom has made to the VMware operating model, which it says will "decimate" the region's cloud infrastructure. "CISPE calls upon regulators, legislators and courts across Europe to swiftly scrutinize the actions of Broadcom in unilaterally canceling license terms for essential virtualization software," the trade body said in a statement. Since acquiring VMware in November 2023, Broadcom has embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of software licensing at the firm, which has drawn widespread criticism from customers. Broadcom stated it would continue to support customers under a perpetual licensing agreement for the period defined in the contract, but following this customers would need to exchange any remaining licenses for subscription-based products. This has left both cloud service vendors and customers in limbo, according to CISPE, without any solid information on how, when, or if they will be able to license VMware products essential for their operations from April 2024. Moreover, even if they are able to relicense the VMware software, a number of customers reported dramatic price hikes of as much as 12 times. CISPE's characterisation of the move was far less charitable, arguing Broadcom is using VMware's market dominance, controlling almost 45% of the virtualization market, to charge exorbitant rents from cloud providers. Several CISPE members admitted that without the ability to license VMware products they will be unable to operate and will go bankrupt, with some stating that over 75% of their revenue depends on VMware virtualization tech. Members added that they often received termination notices late, if at all, with short notice periods that spanned just a few weeks. In addition, CISPE also complained about the decision to remove hundreds of products without any notice, and re-bundle the outstanding products under new prohibitive contract terms, despite there being no changes to the products themselves. Francisco Mingorance, secretary general of CISPE, said the changes will hurt both European customers and cloud service providers by increasing costs and reducing choice. At a time when our members are moving to support the requirements for switching and portability between cloud services outlined in the Data Act, Broadcom is holding the sector to ransom by leveraging VMware's dominance of the virtualization sector to enforce unfair license terms and extract unfair rents from European cloud customers," Mingorance said. CISPE noted that for some cloud sector applications that require certifications by software or service providers, VMware products are the only viable option. As such, the association called for Broadcom to be recognized as a designated gatekeeper under the terms of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that came into force on March 7, 2024. Mingorance argued Broadcom's moves will only further restrict an already limited set of options for cloud providers in Europe, warning that Broadcom has a dangerous degree of control over the region's digital ecosystems. "As well as inflicting financial damage on the European digital economy, these actions will decimate Europe's independent cloud infrastructure sector and further reduce the diversity of choice for customers," he explained. "Dominant software providers, in any sector from productivity software to virtualization, must not be allowed to wield life or death power over Europe's digital ecosystems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has eliminated egress fees for customers removing data from its Azure cloud, joining Amazon Web Services and Google in this move. The decision comes as the European Data Act's provisions targeting lock-in terms are set to take effect in 2025. Microsoft adds: Azure already offers the first 100GB/month of egressed data for free to all customers in all Azure regions around the world. If you need to egress more than 100GB/month, please follow these steps to claim your credit. Contact Azure Support for details on how to start the data transfer-out process. Please comply with the instructions to be eligible for the credit. Azure Support will apply the credit when the data transfer process is complete and all Azure subscriptions associated to the account have been canceled. The exemption on data transfer out to the internet fees also aligns with the European Data Act and is accessible to all Azure customers globally and from any Azure region.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon's cloud services division is halting fees it has long charged customers that switch to a rival provider -- following in the steps of Google, which recently announced it was ending the practice. From a report: Amazon Web Services will no longer charge customers who want to extract all of their data from the company's servers and move them to another service, AWS Vice President Robert Kennedy said in a blog post on Tuesday. "Beginning today, customers globally are now entitled to free data transfers out to the internet if they want to move to another IT provider," Kennedy said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Apple faces a proposed class action lawsuit alleging the company holds an illegal monopoly over digital storage for its customers," reports the Hill: The suit, filed Friday, claims "surgical" restraints prevent customers from effectively using any service except its iCloud storage system. iCloud is the only service that can host certain data from the company's phones, tablets and computers, including application data and device settings. Plaintiffs allege the practice has "unlawfully 'tied'" the devices and iCloud together... "As a result of this restraint, would-be cloud competitors are unable to offer Apple's device holders a full-service cloud-storage solution, or even a pale comparison." The suit argues that there are "no technological or security justifications for this limitation on consumer choice," according to PC Magazine. The class action's web site is arguing that "Consumers may have paid higher prices than they allegedly would have in a competitive market."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet's Google Cloud on Monday ramped up its criticism of Microsoft's cloud computing practices, saying its rival is seeking a monopoly that would harm the development of emerging technologies such as generative AI. From a report: "We worry about Microsoft wanting to flex their decade-long practices where they had a lot of monopoly on the on-premise software before and now they are trying to push that into cloud now," Google Cloud Vice President Amit Zavery said in an interview. "So they are creating this whole walled garden, which is completely controlled and owned by Microsoft, and customers who want to do any of this stuff, you have to go to Microsoft only," he said. "If Microsoft cloud doesn't remain open, we will have issues and long-term problems, even in next generation technologies like AI as well, because Microsoft is forcing customers to go to Azure in many ways," Zavery said, referring to Microsoft's cloud computing platform. He urged antitrust regulators to act. "I think regulators need to provide some kind of guidance as well as maybe regulations which prevent the way Microsoft is building the Azure cloud business, not allow your on-premise monopoly to bring it into the cloud monopoly," Zavery said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.