Structure News: Apple's new cloud strategy: Let everybody sit together!

Your weekly tech news roundup, with a little bit of Structure. Where The Only Clouds We Hate Surround Hurricane Matthew October 7th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about Apple's plan to jumpstart its cloud computing group (again), another tough week for Yahoo, and another case of strange bedfellows in the cloud. BIG PICTURE For all its amazing accomplishments across the tech landscape, Apple remains somewhat of a running joke in cloud computing circles. iTunes remains a relic of another era, iMessage outages are far too common, and the default amount of iCloud storage is laughable compared to competitive products. So, eight years after Steve Jobs threw a fit at Apple's web teams following the disastrous launch of MobileMe, why are we still having this conversation? Apple is probably the best organization on the planet when it comes to hardware and software design, but it's missing an enormous opportunity to be a public cloud services player: just think how many iOS developers would consider running their applications on Apple services instead of Amazon Web Services or Azure if Apple had a competitive product, optimized for iOS workloads, maybe running on servers with customized ARM processors designed by Apple? Apple has the resources to make that happen. But first things first. Bloomberg reported this week that Apple plans to move all of its cloud-facing teams (iTunes, Maps, Siri, for example) into a single division that will reside in the same building. The report also indicates that Apple has a new infrastructure strategy called "Pie, "in which it is running several important workloads on its own Apple-made infrastructure. If Apple can get its cloud infrastructure story right, it could offer its developers the holy trinity of cloud services (software, infrastructure, and platform) at aggressive prices, backed by the growing revenue it gets from the consumer-facing cloud services it already operates, such as iTunes and Apple Music. Maybe it's not at AWS or Google scale just yet, but Apple is building datacenters and snapping up talent. Bloomberg's report indicated that employee collaboration and bug fixes were hampered by the old strategy of siloing these cloud groups, so maybe this is just the step Apple needs as it looks for new sources of growth after saturating the planet with iPhones. Apple doesn't need to be the best cloud computing company on the planet, but if it wants its iPhone customers and developers to spend more of their money with Apple on web services, instead of Google or AWS, it needs to get better. STRUCTURE NEWS STRUCTURE TICKETS GO UP IN PRICE MIDNIGHT FRIDAY We're getting all the pieces in place for the ninth annual Structure event, scheduled for November 8th and 9th in San Francisco, and if you're ready to buy a ticket, today is a good day. Early-bird prices will increase on Structure tickets as of midnight Pacific Time Friday evening, and since you're already planning to attend, you might as well save you (or your company) a little extra cash by getting your tickets here. Some great speakers are on tap for Structure 2016, including Urs Holzle of Google, Jay Parikh of Facebook, and Jason Forrester of Snaproute (pictured). A preliminary list of speakers is here, but we'll be adding more speakers and topics soon, so stay tuned. EXCLUSIVE: YAHOO CISO BOB LORD DISCUSSES HISTORIC BREACH, SECURITY CULTURE AT STRUCTURE SECURITY 2016 It can't have been easy for Yahoo CISO Bob Lord to appear at Structure Security last week and answer questions about the causes and timing of the massive security breach suffered by his company, but showing up is an important part of life. Lord doesn't break a lot of new ground in this video interview, which we believe is the first interview Yahoo has done about the breach since disclosing it, but I was struck by his determination to contribute something back to the security community once he's freed from legal constraints to discuss exactly what happened. INDUSTRY NEWS AT SALESFORCE'S BIG SHOW, THE PITCH IS MORE DREAM THAN REALITY SoMa traffic will start returning to normal this weekend after Salesforce.com's big annual show moves on, and The Information (subscription required, but you should really get it) takes a look back at Dreamforce announcements from past years and how they've panned out. Spoiler: results have been mixed, but if Marc Benioff buys Twitter next week that's all anybody will remember about Salesforce.com in 2016. SAMSUNG ACQUIRES VIV, A NEXT-GEN AI ASSISTANT BUILT BY THE CREATORS OF APPLES SIRI Android partners that rely on Google Android development are once again being forced to consider how they'd fare with Google as a direct competitor, and Samsung isn't taking any chances. Amid a big Google event this week to introduce new consumer products, Samsung announced that it had acquired some AI smarts in Viv, a younger sibling of Apple's Siri, according to Techcrunch. VMWARE WILL TEAM WITH FORMER NEMESIS AMAZON IN CLOUD PACT Changing tech cycles always make for fun pairings between companies that used to fight tooth and nail. VMware once considered AWS "a mortal enemy," but Fortune reports the two companies will soon share a stage to announce a partnership allowing VMware software to run better on AWS cloud services. YAHOO SAID TO HAVE AIDED U.S. EMAIL SERVICE BY ADAPTING SPAM FILTER The details of this one are still a little sketchy, but it's likely another black eye for Yahoo. The U.S. government seems to have convinced Yahoo to help it search for criminals using existing spam filters to scan incoming email traffic for certain data, according to the New York Times, and privacy advocates are up in arms. VENTURE CAPITALIST MARC ANDREESSEN EXPLAINS HOW AI WILL CHANGE THE WORLD Check out this Vox interview with Marc Andreessen about the rise of AI and how it will impact the future of tech product development. He thinks AI is the next big platform differentiator, the way iOS changed the world in 2007 or the web browser did so back in the 1990s. SAM ALTMAN'S MANIFEST DESTINY This piece is a little broader than I usually highlight, but this profile of Y Combinator President Sam Altman in The New Yorker is a must-read for its vivid description of modern Silicon Valley. No matter your outlook, you'll find something in here that resonates, from the awesome power of startups to reinvent the world for the better to the growing notion that a lot of these tech leaders are, um, different. QUOTE OF THE WEEK If you talk to the automakers, they all think that autonomy is a feature they're going to add to their cars. The Silicon Valley companies think it's a brand new architecture. It's a bottom-up reinvention of the fundamental assumptions about how these things work." -- Marc Andreessen, on the coming of AI, in Vox Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.

Tech leaders are coming to Structure 2016; are you?

Structure 2016 brings cloud visionaries to the stage. We're going to have the best lineup of speakers we've ever assembled at our flagship cloud computing event, Structure 2016, this November in San Francisco. They'll be announcing news, sharing insights and providing candid commentary on the issues of the day. If you need to be informed about the most important computing shift of our time, join us in five weeks at this essential cloud event. For a limited time only, get our "buddy pass" to attend Structure 2016 and bring a colleague for the price of of single ticket. You and your buddy will have a lot to discuss on the way home from two great days of learning at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center, November 8th and 9th. Put simply Structure was the most productive event I've presented at for years. I thoroughly enjoyed it and learnt an enormous amount from the best in the industry. I'd be honoured to participate in a future event. -- Geoff McGrath, CIO, McLaren Applied Technologies The attendees were outstanding - very high quality and engaged! Perhaps the best quality for an industry event that I have attended. -- Craig S. Nunes, Chief Marketing Officer, Datera Structure 2016 Speakers: Arlette Hart, CISO, FBI Barb Darrow, Senior Writer, Fortune Bob Worrall, SVP, Chief Information Officer, Juniper Bryan Cantrill, CTO, Joyent Cade Metz, Senior Staff Writer, WIRED David Reilly, CTO, Bank of America Guido Appenzeller, Chief Technology Strategy Officer, NSBU, VMware Jason Forrester, Founder & CEO, SnapRoute Jay Parikh, VP, Global Engineering and Infrastructure, Facebook Jeetu Patel,Chief Strategy Officer and SVP of Platform, Box John Donovan, Chief Strategy Officer and Group President, Technology and Operations, AT&T Mac Devine, VP and CTO of Emerging Technology and Advanced Innovation, IBM Cloud Division, IBM Mark Muehl, Senior Vice President of Product Engineering, Comcast Matt Wood, Product Strategy, Amazon Web Services Mayumi Hiramatsu, VP, Product Operations, Cisco Systems Nicole Hemsoth, Co-Founder, Co-Editor, The Next Platform Raejeanne Skillern, VP Data Center Group, GM Cloud Service Provider Business, Intel Rodney J. Rogers, CEO, Virtustream Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft Seth Bodnar, Chief Digital Officer, GE Transportation Sri Shivananda, SVP, CTO, PayPal Stacey Higginbotham, Editor, SKT Labs Steven Rosenbush, Editor, CIO Journal Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure, Google Vinod Khosla, Partner, Khosla Ventures And more... SPEAKERS MAC DEVINE IBM SCOTT GUTHRIE Microsoft ARLETTE HART Federal Bureau of Investigation URS HOLZLE Google RAEJEANNE SKILLERN Intel JAY PARIKH Facebook NOVEMBER 8-9, 2016 SAN FRANCISCO, CA REGISTER NOW Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.

Structure News: What we learned this week at Structure Security

Your weekly tech news roundup, with a little bit of Structure. Where Fog Computing Was All Too Real At Structure Security September 30th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about the highlights of Structure Security in San Francisco this week, the ongoing push to consolidate Google's cloud strategy, and why the vanguards of artificial intelligence continue to work closely together despite their differences. BIG PICTURE Information security is one of those jobs that will never be done. There will always be hackers that grow in sophistication each year, there will always be undiscovered bugs that can wreak havoc on consumers and businesses, and there will always be a slick-talking salesperson trying to sell magic security beans that wind up causing more problems than they solve. Over two days of conversations with some of the leading minds in the information security world during our first Structure Security conference, what is clear, however, is that tech companies that put security at the heart of their product development culture will have a better chance of avoiding disaster. It's sort of like wearing your seat belt: someday your car will crash, or someone will crash into you, but wearing your seat belt increases the chances that the most painful outcome of such a crash is the phone call with your insurance company. A few highlights stuck out for me: -- The talk by Nathaniel Gleicher of Ilumio on what tech companies can learn from experts in physical security was even better than I thought it would be after my preview earlier this month. -- Machine learning is the new hotness in security, as Stuart McClure of Cylance and our awesome panel of machine-learning security companies made clear. Jay Leek of Blackstone pointed out that machine learning could even erase the huge shortfall of qualified security professionals. -- Security practices in the internet of things are even scarier than we thought, as discussed by Dale Davis of Level3 and Andy Ellis of Akamai, both of whom worked with security journalist Brian Krebs on handling the largest DDoS attack in history. Scott Montgomery of Intel piled on by emphasizing the patching problem with relatively dumb connected devices. -- And Yahoo's Bob Lord weathered the storm created by the disclosure of the largest breach in history with class and aplomb when he could have easily decided to stay out of the public eye as insiders started to dish about Yahoo's security culture and others questioned its declaration that the breach was caused by a state-sponsored hacker. We'll have much more to say about Structure Security 2016, including the release of videos for each session over the next few weeks. Thanks to all the speakers, moderators, sponsors and attendees who made our two days in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge so interesting and informative. STRUCTURE NEWS IT'S ALMOST TIME FOR STRUCTURE 2016 Now that we've secured the internet, it's time to start getting ready for Structure 2016, our flagship cloud computing conference. Structure 2016 will be held November 8th and 9th at the UCSF Mission Bay conference center, and we've already confirmed a number of great speakers including representatives from the three titans of the public cloud (Matt Wood of Amazon Web Services, Scott Guthrie of Microsoft, and Urs Hlzle of Google), Arlette Hart of the FBI, John Donovan of AT&T, and Jay Parikh of Facebook (pictured). Tickets are on sale here. The early bird price lasts through the end of next week, so make sure you reserve your seat now. INDUSTRY NEWS GOOGLE COMBINES CLOUD, CORPORATE SOFTWARE OFFERINGS UNDER GREENE This week Google did what it probably should have done years ago and put all of its enterprise software products -- Google Cloud Platform, Google Apps (now known as G Suite) and a few other things -- under a single leader in Diane Greene. Bloomberg reports that the move is part of the sharpened focus on chasing enterprise computing dollars that arrived with Greene about a year ago. A MORE RESPONSIVE GOVERNMENT: A CONVERSATION WITH WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF DENIS MCDONOUGH The Obama Administration's senioritis is being channeled into improving the federal government's use of technology, which always seems to be at least five years behind what the private sector is using. David Kauffman of The U.S. Digital Service conducted an exit interview on Medium with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough on the progress so far and the challenges that remain. FACEBOOK, AMAZON, GOOGLE, IBM, AND MICROSOFT COME TOGETHER TO CREATE THE PARTNERSHIP ON AI I've always been impressed with the collegiality of the leading researchers in artificial intelligence, who work for companies that otherwise hate each other. The five companies in the headline created the Partnership On AI this week, which will preach collaboration and standards across the competitors, according to Techcrunch. MICROSOFT PUSHES ITS THREE PILLARS AT IGNITE: SECURITY, INTELLIGENCE, AND CLOUD Microsoft held its big Ignite conference in Atlanta this week, and Ars Technica reports that Scott Guthrie, coming soon to Structure 2016, laid out the company's priorities for the next few years. Guess what: they're all part of Microsoft's rebalancing toward cloud services under CEO Satya Nadella, and the company showed off several new products at the show. GOOGLE RUSHES IN WHERE AKAMAI FEARS TO TREAD, SHIELDS KREBS AFTER WORLDS WORST DDOS After Akamai decided it could no longer provide free DDoS mitigation services to journalist Brian Krebs in the face of an enormous botnet attack on his website, Google got him back up and running, The Register reports. It used its Project Shield service, normally provided to dissidents in autocratic regimes, to stem the worst DDoS attack yet seen on the internet, created by hijacked IP cameras. MARK ZUCKERBERG SHARES PICTURES FROM FACEBOOK'S COLD, COLD DATA CENTER For some reason, everybody likes data center porn. The Verge reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off a few new photos of the company's Swedish data center this week, which while interesting to our crowd, mostly reinforces the point that pictures of rows of servers are kind of boring. QUOTE OF THE WEEK To make computer systems more secure, a company often has to make its products slower and more difficult to use. It was a trade-off Yahoo's leadership was often unwilling to make." -- Nicole Perloth and Vindu Goel, The New York Times Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.

Legacy Structure speakers to return to stage

Structure is back. Will you be there? The countdown to Structure has officially begun. Will you be a part of it? Consistently reviewed as having high-caliber speakers and ample opportunities for networking, Structure 2016 will highlight everything you missed in 2016 and set you up for whats ahead in 2017. If youve attended Structure before, you know how valuable our legacy speakers are in blazing cloud insights for 2017. Check out a sneak peek to the agenda below and then grab your ticket before prices increase. Has Google gotten serious about public cloud? Urs Hlzle, Google How will Microsofts acquisition of LinkedIn shift and enhance the Microsoft offering? Scott Guthrie, Microsoft What will the new markets be in cloud for 2017? Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures Facebook has a big stake in VR, so how will its networks stand up to actual reality? Jay Parikh, Facebook Also speaking at Structure this November: The FBI Juniper Networks Joyent WIRED VMWare SnapRoute Box AT&T IBM Intel Comcast Virtustream GE Transportation Save $200 the Early Bird rate expires next Friday, October 7. SPEAKERS MAC DEVINE IBM SCOTT GUTHRIE Microsoft ARLETTE HART Federal Bureau of Investigation URS HLZLE Google VINOD KHOSLA Khosla Ventures JAY PARIKH Facebook NOVEMBER 8-9, 2016 SAN FRANCISCO, CA REGISTER NOW Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.

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Structure News: Yahoo sets a record that nobody wants to hold

Your weekly tech news roundup, with a little bit of Structure. Where Structure Security Is Less Than One Week Away September 23rd, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about the biggest security breach (that we know of, anyway) in internet history, five things we've learned while diving headfirst into security, and how Larry Ellison continues to be Larry Ellison. BIG PICTURE Nothing has gone right for Yahoo over the last decade. So, it's almost fitting that one of the last acts it takes as an independent company is to reveal what is probably the largest security breach in the history of the internet, based on the number of accounts affected. Yahoo disclosed Thursday that state-sponsored hackers, in its words, accessed the personal information of around 500 million accounts in late 2014. It's not clear why it took Yahoo so long to discover and acknowledge the breach, which was reported earlier this year by Motherboard, but the size of it is staggering. Fortunately, it doesn't appear that financial information was accessed, and Yahoo hashed its users passwords with bcrypt, but obviously this is not good. We're scheduled to have Yahoo CISO Bob Lord, author of the above-linked blog post, at Structure Security next week on the second day of the show, Wednesday September 28th. Hopefully he'll be able to shed a little more light on the nature of this breach and the actors behind it. The fallout from this breach will emerge over the next several weeks. Already some are wondering if the breach could damage the pending takeover of Yahoo by Verizon. Jokes about the advanced age of the average Yahoo user swirled around Twitter on Thursday, and that almost exacerbates the problem: if the stereotypes are accurate, the average Yahoo user probably reuses a lot of passwords (I re-use too many passwords) and might now be exposed to far greater harm. It's just another reminder that we need to find a new way to protect user security and identity management, because this whole protect-the-password-database thing obviously isn't working. What will it take for internet companies to get serious about user security? I'm not sure I want to know. STRUCTURE NEWS FIVE THINGS WE LEARNED PLANNING STRUCTURE SECURITY It has been a great experience planning our first security conference, Structure Security, which finally arrives next Tuesday and Wednesday at the Golden Gate Club in San Francisco. In dozens and dozens of conversations with our advisors and speakers, we've identified a few key themes that will be highlighted at the conference next week, and I expanded on those points in a post on our new site, Structure Events. It's going to be a great show next week out in the Presidio, where hundreds of the best information security and technology professionals will gather in one of San Francisco's most beautiful settings. If you haven't registered, secure a ticket to this awesome event here. INDUSTRY NEWS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE IS BOOMING. BUT WHY NOW? There's nothing Salesforce.com likes better than tweaking Oracle (more on that in a bit), so it's not surprising that it announced Sunday that it was adding artificial intelligence capabilities to its popular flagship product, according to The New York Times. We might be in an era of AI washing, to some extent, but the number of companies making important bets on AI technology cant be ignored. HOW CYBER SECURITY TEAMS CAN CONVINCE THE C-SUITE OF THEIR VALUE Security professionals are seen as getting in the way at a lot of tech (and non-tech) companies, putting unnecessary restrictions on when products can be shipped. In a partial preview of what I'll discuss with IBM's Diana Kelley at Structure Security, Harvard Business Review has a nice overview of how information security practitioners can get more support from the upper ranks of their company, authored by Alejandra Quevedo of Facebook. KREBSONSECURITY HIT WITH RECORD DDOS Brian Krebs is one of the most hard-working and influential journalists in the field of information security, which means he has made a few enemies over the years. Krebs' site was hit this week by what Akamai called the largest DDoS attack it had ever seen, according to a blog post from Krebs (link is to a mirrored site, because, well...). He later tweeted that Akamai was forced to take his site offline, and we'll try to get clarification from Akamai CSO Andy Ellis next week at Structure Security the scope of this attack. EXCLUSIVE: PROBE OF LEAKED U.S. NSA HACKING TOOLS EXAMINES OPERATIVES MISTAKE The fallout from the leak of hacking tools used by the NSA continues, and Reuters reports that government investigators believe a former employee or contractor left the tools exposed on an outside server. In an interesting twist to this saga, Reuters reports that the NSA discovered the tools had been exposed three years ago after being informed of an error by that employee, but didn't tell the companies whose software vulnerabilities were being exploited by those tools because it couldnt detect any use of them by foreign hacking groups against friendly assets. ARM RAISES BAR FOR SAFETY, DETERMINISM One of the sessions I'm looking forward to next week at Structure Security involves a discussion between representatives from Intel, Qualcomm, and ARM on how hardware security can improve, and ARM this week released a new core design for automotive applications with enhanced security. EETimes reports that the new Cortex core offers new sandboxes for executing code in a secure environment. ORACLE'S CLOUD STRATEGY: IS SIMPLE: WOO AND WIN THE LATECOMERS It was Oracle Week in downtown San Francisco this week, which means the usual mix of horrible traffic and grandiose statements. The Register breaks down Oracle's pitch to its customers, many of whom have been quite skeptical about this whole cloud thing and might respond to Oracle's hybrid cloud products and services. QUOTE OF THE WEEK Our second customer -- and they're also very serious about security -- they don't think Edward Snowden was a good employee. They would not rehire him." Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, in Forbes, being Larry Ellison Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.