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.

Google Hypothesis Generator

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/02/googles-new-ai-generates-hypotheses-for-researchers/

What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change

Google: 2 Books

"Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away" by Professor Rebecca Goldstein.  The book review may be found @ http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303775504579395281102610124

and

"How Google Works" by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg.  The book review may be found @ http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-how-google-works-by-eric-schmidt-and-jonathan-rosenberg-1412371982

Go Programming Language

Go is an open source project developed by a team at Google.  See the example of Fibonacci Closure below:

package main
// fib returns a function that returns
// successive Fibonacci numbers.
func fib() func() int {
 a, b := 0, 1
 return func() int {
  a, b = b, a+b
  return a
 }
}


func main() {
 f := fib()
 // Function calls are evaluated left-to-right.
 println(f(), f(), f(), f(), f())
}

Go is garbage collected and supports a concurrency model derived from "Communicating Sequential Processes," which is a message-passing model.

Go is available @ http://golang.org/#

There are 2 books on it:

David Chisnall's "The Go Programming Language Phrasebook"

and

Mark Summerfield's "Programming in Go: Creating Applications for the 21st Century"

Version 1.0 of the language was released in late March 2012 and binary distributions are available for Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows. The language is open source and BSD-licensed.

MapReduce, Chubby and Hadoop

Interesting article from the KM World Magazine:

http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/News/News-Analysis/MapReduce2c-Chubby-and-Hadoop-70841.aspx

Free Google Sketching Tool

http://sketchup.google.com/

What is Google Up To?

Six years ago, Google Search Appliance (GSA) was introduced with a price less than $2,500.

The number of GSA sold has not been disclosed but is estimated in the range from 20,000 to as many as 60,000 units.

Enterprise users want something that “works just like Google.”

GSA is now complemented by a wider range of Google components.

Each component has search DNA, but those complements add important capabilities to Google’s enterprise search lineup.

Google has rolled-out Google Commerce Search (GCS). The GCS focuses on the retail side of a company’s business.

Take a look at http://www.google.com/commercesearch/#utm_source=en-ha-na-us-commerce-skws&utm_medium=ha&utm_campaign=commerce-skws .

For $50,000 a year—a price that varies by number of stocking units or items for sale—one could get a cloud-based e-commerce system (separate from GSA).

The benefits of the product include seamless scaling to handle peak traffic, special product promotion functions, and advanced reporting and analysis, among others.

Like Google’s industrial strength e-mail service, built on Gmail and the Postini systems, GCS is a cloud play.

Moreover, Google has been steadily publishing a number of integration and application programming interface (API) activity.

On the integration front, Google continues to add partners.

Among the partners available to assist organizations are Appirio, Atlassian and Manymoon.

A full lineup of partners is available at http://code.google.com/googleapps/campfire.html.

The APIs themselves now number in the hundreds, but a comprehensive list is lacking.

For the enterprise sector, there is a secure data connector, a provisioning API, a code block to implement a single sign-on and an e-mail migration API.

There are three ways to keep track of Google’s APIs. I have signed up for the Google Apps Developer Blog, which often yields some tasty code McNuggets.

One can track postings and content in Google Apps at this URL, http://code.google.com/ .

Google also posts some useful information on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/googledevelopers .

Google Version 2.0, described the method by which Google can deliver most if not all of the GSA’s functions via the cloud.

It is very likely that by the end of 2010, an enterprise will be able to “hook” together various functions, including some of the third-party indexing features of the GSA with Google’s cloud services.

Instead of integrating Microsoft Exchange content with business intelligence data from Cognos (acquired by IBM), to name two supported third-party systems, an enterprise will have more integration options that essentially “snap in.”

And until Google productizes those code components, an authorized Google integrator like Adhere Solutions (http://www.adheresolutions.com/ ) can mesh various Google components today.

Google Apps Marketplace

The Google Apps Marketplace offers products and services designed for Google users, including installable apps that integrate directly with Google Apps. Find it @ http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/

There is a related video channel @ http://www.youtube.com/appsmarketplace and a developer Web Log @ http://www.googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/ .