A site devoted mostly to everything related to Information Technology under the sun - among other things.

Showing posts with label Cloud Computing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cloud Computing. Show all posts

Monday, December 15, 2025

Weaponized GPS

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a69606477/porsche-russia-reportedly-left-unable-to-drive-satellite-connection-may-be-at-fault/

No surprises here; there are currently medical and industrial equipments in Iran, sourced from European Union, that are inoperative since they are denied access to European servers due to blanket sanctions against Iran, which include IT.

In Venezuela, due to US sanctions, certain banking and digital services have been affected as well.

I think it is clear that reliance on foreigners for IT could be a grave strategic mistake; further, that China's very expensive effort to indegenize IT has been the correct policy all along.

I also think that providers of Cloud Computing, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, even though they have global data centers for servicing their clients, are sources of cyber-security threats for their clients, specially those clients that are not domiciled in North America or in EU.

Cloud Computing can and will be weaponized, just as US Dollar, Siemens industrial equipment, Motorola pagers, Software updates, spare parts for civil Aviation, and , presently, GPS have been weaponized.

I feel sorry for the Cloud Computing vendors since, in my opinion, they did not create their products with the expectation of them being used by their governments as geopolitical weapons.

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Microsoft Restores Services to EU-Sanctioned Indian Refiner

From Russia Today 

"Microsoft has resumed providing critical digital services to Indian refiner Nayara Energy after the latter sued the US tech giant in the Delhi High Court.

Nayara, a company partly owned by Russia’s Rosneft, told the court on Monday that Microsoft had restricted its access to data, proprietary tools, and products on account of European Union sanctions.

“Microsoft is committed to supporting all its customers in India and worldwide, and has restored services for Nayara Energy,” the company said in a statement on Wednesday. “We are engaged in ongoing discussions with the European Union towards service continuity for the organization.”

The refiner said on Wednesday that its services had been restored. “Nayara Energy confirms that all Microsoft services critical to its operations have been fully restored, with no disruption to business continuity and data integrity remaining fully intact,” it said in a statement. “We acknowledge the prompt intervention of the Honorable Delhi High Court in facilitating the resolution of this matter. The petition was disposed of by the High Court in favour of Nayara Energy.”

The court granted the company the liberty to approach it again should similar grievances arise, according to the report.

Nayara had requested an interim injunction and the resumption of Microsoft’s services to protect its rights and ensure uninterrupted access to critical digital infrastructure. The company said in a statement on Tuesday that Microsoft’s decision set a “dangerous precedent for corporate overreach and raises serious concerns regarding its implications on India’s energy ecosystem.”

The refiner has meanwhile begun migrating to domestic digital service providers to ensure business continuity, according to a report in the Mint newspaper. It had initiated the legal action to obtain urgent relief while pursuing broader strategic transitions to alternative service providers, the report added.

Earlier this month, the EU imposed sanctions on the Vadinar refinery, which is controlled by Nayara, an Indo-Russian joint venture in which Rosneft holds a 49% stake.

The sanctions specifically target the oil sector and include a ban on importing refined petroleum products made from Russian crude. This marked the first time an Indian refiner has been subject to such measures."

My take on this is that one's access to one's own data and be-spoke applications that are hosted in a distributed Cloud Service, be it deployed on an offering from Amazon or Microsoft or Google or Oracle or any other NATO-domiciled entity could be denied at a moment's notice.

I think it advisable for businesses domiciled in non-NATO states to go back to the on-premises model.

You cannot run your business on the whims of foreigners and their electoral cycles.

This is reminiscent of such things as the weaponization of USD, SWIFT, WTO, Maritime insurance, GPS and Civil Aviation, which, in turn, led to the expansion and consolidation of BRICS, establishment of non-USD financial settlement infrastructures, bilateral and multilateral trading blocks, adoption of BeiDou/GLONASS, and such things as Sukhoi Superjet 100 etc.


I must say, the Euro-Americans are impressive in taking a wrecking ball to structures and relationships that they have spent hundreds of billions of USD over many decades to build. Clearly, they consider themselves to be the proverbial "Indispensable Man" - who is presently resting peacefully in a cemetery somewhere on this planet.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Amazon Echo tells you what to wear

From Grauniad of the UK -

The real question being: why does one need to take 'selfies'?

I want my fridge to tell me what I should eat. My hoover to tell me where the most dust is to be found in my flat. My kettle to choose for me whether I should have tea or coffee.

I want my life run by Amazon.com.

___________________________

https://lnkd.in/eMW3QwE?


Amazon unveils Echo Look, a selfie camera to help you choose what to wear
www.theguardian.com
Hands-free, voice-powered smart selfie camera takes photos and videos on command while its virtual assistant Alexa gives fashion advice

Monday, April 10, 2017

Azure AD Connect

Evidently, to support Active Directory in Azure – for security and access control requirements – one  has to obtain, install, and configure the Azure AD Connect software on a Windows server (could be a VM) on one’s premises.

See please below the 2 technical notes:



This step requires someone that has global AD Admin. Rights – someone from IT Network Infrastructure.

This tool then acts as a proxy between the site-specific AD and the Azure AD.

Azure AD does not support multiple forests, there is no concept of Forests in Azure AD. It is completely flat.

I also read that the Azure AD Connect does not support LDAP.

While I think setting up a Web application within Azure is not overly complex, I think a full turn-key implementation is more complex as the functionality of the on premise IT Infrastructure needs to be investigated, mapped, and connected to Azure’s capabilities.

In case of multi-site organizations with many sites within the United States and also many sites externally in UK, Germany, Singapore, Angola – each with its own AD Forest – one has 2 choices available to oneself; either leverage Federation or flatten the organization into one Azure AD tenant.

AD Connect is pretty great if you use it for what it was designed for and it supports many different topologies. If it does not fit the customers requirements for some reason then,  "yes", federation using ADFS to Azure is another option.

More Reading:


https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/connect/active-directory-aadconnect

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/connect/active-directory-aadconnect-topologies


Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Friday, June 3, 2016

What is Cloud Foundry?


Answer:  Cloud Foundry is an open source cloud platform as a service (PaaS) on which developers can build, deploy, run and scale applications on public and private cloud models. VMware originally created Cloud Foundry and it is now part of Pivotal Software.

 



Also please take a look here for information on how Cloud Foundry works.


You may also be interested in this link and this link.


There are various flavors of CF, including HDP, HPE Stackato, and Pivotal.

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Building Service Fabric Apps


Building Service Fabric Apps with VS2015

https://redmondmag.com/articles/2016/01/01/azure-service-fabric.aspx

Architecting Hybrid Cloud Environments

This paper focuses on understanding the different design approaches for architecting hybrid cloud environments.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Rapyuta


Rapyuta is an online "brain" that describes objects robots have encountered and also carries out complicated computation on behalf of those robots.  European scientists that created it hope it will make robots cheaper as they will not need all their processing power on-board.

The Rapyuta database is part of the Robo Earth project that began in 2011 with the hope of standardising the way robots perceive the human world.

Check out the BBC report @ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21714191 and the Rapyuta home page @ http://rapyuta.org/rapyuta-the-roboearth-cloud-engine.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

BigHouse Simulator

BigHouse is a simulation infrastructure for data center systems to help understand issues such as performance, power management, and fault tolerance.   Freely available @ http://www.eecs.umich.edu/BigHouse/ 

The paper is @ http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~twenisch/papers/ispass12.pdf 

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

TonidaPlug2

TonidoPlug is a tiny, low power, low cost home and small-business server that allows you to access your applications, files, photos, music and media from anywhere via a web browser or mobile applications. You can effortlessly access and share your TonidoPlug's files through native iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry or Windows 7 mobile applications.

http://www.tonidoplug.com/tonido_plug.html

Really neat!

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Big Data Glossary

  1. Apache Hadoop (http://hadoop.apache.org ) - an open source distributed computing platform which includes the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and an implementation of MapReduce.
  2. Apache HBase (http://hbase.apache.org ) - open source distributed storage for big data (e.g. over a billion rows and a million columns) on clusters of commodity hardware.
  3. Apache Hive (http://hive.apache.org) - a data warehouse solution that provides ETL and access to files and query execution.
  4. Cassandra (http://cassandra.apache.org) - a distributed database developed at Facebook (www.facebook.com) owned by DataSax (www.stax.com), now integrated with Hadoop to provide an analytic platform for big data.
  5. Cloudera (www.cloudera.com) - a participant in Hadoop with a commercial distribution bundle that includes the source code and other features in one package.
  6. Greenplum (www.greenplum.com) - a division of EMC (www.emc.com) that provides an analytic platform, a data computing appliance, a database and other products for big data analysis.
  7. Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS, http://hadoop.apache.org/hdfs) - the file system used by Hadoop for distributed data storage.
  8. Hortonworks (www.hortonworks.com) - a commercial open source platform based on Hadoop for storing, processing, and analyzing big data.
  9. MapReduce (www.mapreduce.org) - technology developed by Google (www.google.com) and used by Hadoop for its parallel processing. It is the core technology behind the big data engines. In the "map" step, input data is distributed to multiple nodes for computation, and in the "reduce" step, the results are collected to produce the answer to the initial question.
  10. MongoDB (www.mongodb.org) - a high-performance, open source, NoSQL database written in C++.
  11. NoSQL (www.nosql.org) - a group of non-relational, distributed, open source, scalable databases designed for Web-scale use. Over 100 such products are listed on www.nonsql-database.org, including Apache HBase, Cassandra, Amazon SimpleDB, MongoDB.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Internet & Cloud for Astronomy

I really liked this paper since it uses software engineering and a species of (Internet/Cloud)-based services to render its results.

Look at page 3:

"We created a workflow, i.e. an automatic data retrieval and analysis system to search for cE galaxies in large data collections provided by the Virtual Observatory (VO, (12)). It comprised the following steps. (i) Identify nearby galaxy clusters at redshifts z < 0.055 using the Vizier Service (13) at the Centre de Donn´ees Astronomiques de Strasbourg. Without this condition our potential candidate cE galaxies would have been too faint for spectroscopic follow-up. (ii)

Once the sources were identified, gather more precise measurements using other VO services including the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED, (14)). (iii) Use the IVOA Simple Image access Protocol to find and fetch the HST images of selected galaxy clusters from the Hubble Legacy Archive (HLA, (15)). (iv) For each image, run the SExtractor source identification software (16) to obtain half-light radii, total luminosities and approximate light profiles for all galaxies in each frame. (v) Apply color corrections to homogenize the results for all photometric bands and use the surface brightness – half-light radius criteria to find cE candidates. (vi) Finally, query NED, Vizier and a database of Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (17) to find additional information for candidate objects, such as published redshifts and integrated photometry."

A Population of Compact Elliptical Galaxies Detected with the Virtual Observatory


Tuesday, October 4, 2011

OpenStack

OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds.

Find it @ http://www.openstack.org/

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Cloud Computing, Utility Computing, and Public Utilities

There is a concern that if one has selected the wrong cloud provider, one could find oneself in an emergency when that provider has exited the business, has failed, or has gone out of business.

The situation in such cases could get even worse if litigation is involved and one’s data or applications are impounded by court rulings or access to them has been restricted.

I have come to the conclusion that in order to address these concerns, cloud providers ought to conform – as much as possible – to the business model of regulated public utilities.

Either that, or non-profit organizations.

HP, Microsoft, and other technology vendors will make their money not by offering cloud services but by supplying the Cloud Utilities with Software, Hardware, and Network Connectivity.

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I had been a senior software developer working for HP and GM. I am interested in intelligent and scientific computing. I am passionate about computers as enablers for human imagination. The contents of this site are not in any way, shape, or form endorsed, approved, or otherwise authorized by HP, its subsidiaries, or its officers and shareholders.

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