HPA Tech Retreat’s long-time programmer, engineer and author Mark Schubin, opened the event with his annual “Technology Year in Review,” composed of all the interesting, obscure and wacky news items he’s aggregated over the previous year. One question he asks every year — have we finished the transition to HD? — had the same answer as every previous year: nope. Even as some companies are talking up 8K as the next TV resolution, the nation’s media infrastructure as a whole is still working on completing the evolution to HD. Continue reading HPA Tech Retreat: Technology Charges Forward… Into the Past

In an unprecedented move, Google revealed the details of how it developed and improved software-defined networking (SDN). In a paper presented at the ACM SIGCOMM 2015 conference in London, Google described the steps taken over a ten-year period, moving from third party vendor switches in 2004 to, a year later, building its own hardware and shuttling data among servers in its own data centers. The company is describing its network in part to share its experiences and seek assistance from the academic community. Continue reading Google Details Network Challenges, Seeks Academic Feedback

Cloud communications company Twilio provides developers with the tools they need to integrate texting, voice calls, photo messaging, and now videos into their applications. Video capabilities would make it easier to video chat with customer service representatives on service apps, for example, or interact with other players on gaming apps. Twilio’s video service is a more affordable and easier option for developers to incorporate communication functions into a variety of different software. Continue reading Twilio Helps Developers Integrate Video into Software and Apps

Popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay is back online following a two-month outage after police in Stockholm raided a data center and seized servers. Responding to complaints from Swedish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, authorities shut down numerous peer-to-peer and torrent-related services on December 9. Later that month, The Pirate Bay page returned, went through several iterations, and eventually replaced its pirate ship with a phoenix logo. A countdown clock indicated a February 1 return, and the site now appears to be live. Continue reading The Pirate Bay Returns After Being Shut Down by Authorities

In May, Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba filed for a public stock offering in the United States. However, this fast growing company still has a way to go before it will be able to compete with the American tech giants that currently control the multibillion-dollar cloud computing business. For now, Alibaba appears to be focusing on expanding in China, where it already has four data centers and handles up to $5.8 billion in commerce per day at its peak. Continue reading Alibaba Growing, But Not a Threat to Top Cloud Services Yet

A team of open source developers, including several former Google engineers, is working on software that will allow companies to ensure that their cloud computing systems will run even if a server or data center goes down. The software known as CockroachDB is based on Google’s Spanner system, which uses thousands of servers to run its online empire. CockroachDB will similarly replicate information across data centers, so online operations will not suffer from outages. Continue reading CockroachDB Cloud-Based Software Makes Websites Resilient

BitTorrent’s new file-syncing technology, BitTorrent Sync, can synchronize files between computers and mobile devices without copying data to a cloud server. The company is hoping that, in light of the National Security Agency’s controversial harvesting of information stored in data centers, people will be attracted to the new technology. The only way the NSA could gather this data would be by going directly to the source where the information is stored. Continue reading BitTorrent Sync Transfers Data Without Help From the Cloud

President Barack Obama spoke about the National Security Agency last week at the Department of Justice in Washington. The President touched on allowing technology companies to disclose information to the public about the kinds of data the government requests from them. However, he did not address issues such as secret government taps on data centers located overseas and encryption standards, two issues of particular interest to technology and phone companies. Continue reading Tech Companies Hopeful for Change in NSA Disclosure Policy

For years Google has been evasive about plans for its public cloud for computing and data storage. However, the company is soon to announce pricing, features, and performance guarantees for both startup and multinational companies. Google’s efforts are part of an escalating battle amongst technology companies to control government and corporate computing through public clouds. This battle includes such companies as Microsoft, IBM and Amazon. Continue reading Google to Announce Plan for Cloud Computing and Data Storage

Los Angeles is poised to unleash an ambitious city-led broadband project with plans to deliver fiber to all of its businesses and 3.5 million residents. The new fiber network, expected to cost $3 billion to $5 billion, would offer free Internet access of 2Mbps to 5Mbps, likely subsidized by advertising. Paid tiers would offer access up to a gigabit, and the network would power Wi-Fi hotspots in public areas. Phone service and television is not a requirement for bidders, but package offerings would not be a surprise. Continue reading LA Plans Fiber Network to Deliver Free Broadband and Wi-Fi

Western Digital’s HGST subsidiary announced yesterday it is shipping a helium-filled, 3.5-in hard disk drive that has been more than 10 years in the making. The company says the new drive offers 50 percent more capacity than current 4TB drives and uses 23 percent less power and is 38 percent lighter. While pricing has yet to be announced, the company says the drives will “command a premium” based on the lower total cost of ownership. HGST plans to sell the drives to server and storage array manufacturers. Continue reading Breakthrough: HGST to Ship Helium-Filled Hard Disk Drives

Verizon is planning to roll out a public beta of its Verizon Cloud “Infrastructure as a Service” platform and cloud-based object storage in the fourth quarter of this year. Verizon Cloud, which includes two primary components — Verizon Cloud Compute (the IaaS platform) and Verizon Cloud Storage (an object-based service) — will target enterprises, mid-size companies and development shops. The launch will initially involve a few hundred new users per month. Continue reading Verizon to Launch Public Beta of Cloud Platform This Year

Amazon’s Web Services went down on Sunday due to a technical issue at a North Virginia data center. The outage was caused by a problem with a single networking device, and reveals that many companies do not distribute their Web services in different locations for service redundancy. This comes as Amazon is bidding on a CIA contract to manage their data services, and competitors are critical of whether Amazon can manage the demands of government data. Continue reading Amazon Web Services: Outage During Bid for CIA Contract

About 25 percent of North American consumer Internet traffic is served by Google, more than that of Facebook, Netflix and Instagram combined, an increase from 6 percent three years ago. Estimates are that the majority of Google’s traffic is from YouTube — the rest involving searches, analytics, and advertising. To deal with the increase in Internet traffic, the company has data centers in the Americas, Europe and Asia, and has other distribution strategies. Continue reading Google Serves Quarter of Internet Traffic in North America

Apple, much like Google and Amazon, delivers Web services to hundreds of millions of people, from servers based in enormous data centers. Apple’s iCloud currently serves more than 250 million people, which is beginning to require new hardware and software that are more efficient than what is available in those data centers. Apple and Facebook, among others, have turned to flash-based options from Fusion-io. Continue reading Modern Data Centers Turn to Flash Solutions from Fusion-io