Amazon and Microsoft drop cloud storage prices by up to 50%

Microsoft will continue to match Amazon's prices

Last April, Microsoft committed to matching Amazon's Web Services' (AWS') prices for compute, storage and bandwidth.

So when Amazon announced on Thursday it will drop its S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Elastic Block Store (EBS) prices by up to 22%, Microsoft followed suit the very next day.

"We are matching AWS' lowest prices (US East Region) for S3 and EBS, reducing prices by up to 20% and making the lower prices available in all regions worldwide," Microsoft posted in its official blog today.

Amazon S3 Storage price reduction chart.

For Microsoft's "Locally Redundant Disks/Page Blobs Storage," the company is reducing prices by up to 28%. It is also reducing the price of Azure Storage service by 50%.

Amazon's new prices take effect Feb. 1. Microsoft's price cuts begin March 13.

"We're also making the new prices effective worldwide, which means that Azure storage will be less expensive than AWS in many regions," Microsoft said.

Amazon said it dropped its prices for its S3 storage by 22% and its EBS standard volume storage and I/O operations by up to 50%.

Amazon's EBS price chart.

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Did Microsoft reach into your PC to stomp a botnet?

Report claims the company turned off botnet software on user's PCs. Is that their right?

Microsoft took down yet another botnet, but its method for doing so many not sit well with a lot of people, as the company removed software from their computers without their knowledge.

In October 2013, Microsoft targeted a Tor-based botnet malware called "Sefnit," which used the Tor network to anonymously perform click fraud. It was a fairly sizable network, with 3 million users per day, which hijacked user computers to click on ads that would make the Sefnit users money via a commission.

For those of you who don't know, Tor, the abbreviated name for The Onion Router, is free software designed to protect online anonymity. Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide volunteer network designed to hide a user's location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. While it's popular with hactivists and people genuinely concerned about privacy, it's also a haven for illegal activity, such as the Silk Road drug dealing website.

Microsoft went after the Tor software because it found some popular apps like Browser Protector and FileScout were bundled with a vulnerable version of Tor Browser & Sefnit components. It found infected PCs had v0.2.3.25 of Tor Browser, which did not self-update.

On October 27, 2013, Microsoft modified the antivirus signature database used by all of its security products to remove the Sefnit-added Tor client service from user PCs. The update was pushed through in the November Patch Tuesday update.

Microsoft estimates it got about 2 million copies of the malware, and there are another 2 million PCs to reach. A spokesperson for the company issued a statement that said "Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) has protections to remove the services started by the Sefnit malware, but it does not uninstall Tor, remove any Tor binaries, or prevent users from using Tor."

Now, I've busted out the pompoms for Microsoft's antivirus efforts in the past, and no way will I make an exception. But I have to say that in the case of Sefnit, this looks like a lose-lose situation. They can't leave it out there, but customers are bound to be unnerved by Microsoft removing a third-party product from their system, even if it is malicious.

Microsoft has already faced privacy issues around Kinect and Skype. This won't help. They are doing the right thing, but it won't help their image. I think this may call for more than just a blog post on their part.

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Android invades the enterprise

How three companies are coping -- even thriving -- amid the Android explosion.

As the little green robot known as Android wends its way into the enterprise, it's teaching useful lessons that are reshaping corporate attitudes toward the BYOD movement.

Analysts and CIOs say the multifaceted nature of the mobile operating system is forcing companies to make key decisions about what they will, and won't, control in bring-your-own-device programs -- and those decisions are in turn cascading across all operating systems and devices.

+ Also at NetworkWorld: 2014 Tech Industry Outlook +

While Google's operating system has far surpassed Apple's iOS in worldwide mobile market share -- Android had more than 79% of the smartphone market in the second quarter of 2013, while iOS fell to 13%, according to IDC -- Apple still dominates the enterprise. According to a June 2013 activation report from mobile software maker Good Technology, 75% of the mobile activations at Good's Fortune 500 clients were for iOS devices.

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Microsoft extends malware protection to XP foot-draggers

Even after support for XP ends in April anti-malware updates will continue for more than a year

Microsoft ends support for Windows XP in April, but it will keep updating anti-malware software for the operating system for more than a year afterwards.

Malware signature updates for System Center Endpoint Protection, Forefront Client Security, Forefront Endpoint Protection and Windows Intune – all used by businesses – will continue through July 14, 2015, the company’s Malware Protection Center blog says. Updates for the consumer product Security Essentials will also be extended.

The added support is meant to help customers finish their expected switch from XP to a supported operating system. One of the dangers of staying with XP after support ends is that any vulnerabilities discovered after April 8 won’t be patched.

Microsoft says the anti-malware protection isn’t as effective as patches and running an operating system that is more secure to begin with and then applying patches as soon as they become available.

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How time is spent on web development

How time is spent on web development
Dear reader,

Ok, the image above is pretty… and pretty hilarious as well. I must say that some of these time lines are true though. No, I don’t hate 100% IE, I still think it was the first browser that introduced the XmlHttpRequest as part of JScript in a very early version (maybe IE4) during the Netscape vs IE war. Somehow IE prevailed and also enabled the Ajaxian websites we see today. If you remember how bad it was to make a site work in Netscape, you’ll understand why I’m glad it died in 2002 :-p

That being said, the time lines are somehow accurate. Unfortunately web development with HTML rendering on a browser has many places where things can go wrong, and prototyping is just a smaller time, even if the prototype looks real and very cool and I’m referring to either a pure HTML prototype or a set of images created with a prototyping tool)

If you inherit an existing CSS and a certain master page or left navigation, things can get complicated if you don’t keep your styles pruned out, and if you use pure CSS, introducing new elements in an existing page can be a nightmare, the existing elements can shift easily.

If you add to that, that FF and IE have a different box and a different way to represent positioning (margin and padding), things can get messy for cross browser compatibility.

JavaScript also requires extra effort and strings without escaping quotes, for example single quotes can break anything injected on the JavaScript when the DOM is created on the document create event in the browser.

In the past few years, the outcome of JavaScript libraries such as JQuery, Dojo and GWT have made the life of developers easier.

I wonder if in a few years the world will move away from HTML/JavaScript and go to web sites developed with alternate means, ie Silverlight/Flex…how would the pie chart above look like?

Cheers!

PS. The subject of this blog post might not necessarily align with my employer or coworker’s opinion and it is given only as a comment. Oh, and I never swear…

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