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The internet of things: a market landscape

Jon Collins — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 06:55:20 +0000

What can we expect the IoT landscape to look like, and how will its impact be felt? And is the attention being given by governments, manufacturers, and industry players merited, or is this just a fad? In this paper we look at the trends leading the growth of the internet of things, its components, and its characteristics. We examine the scale of the different opportunities and early examples of use cases. Finally, we look at potential inhibitors to adoption and potential challenges, notably around security, privacy, and system failure.

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Google files free speech challenge to FISA gag orders, renews criticism of Guardian

Jeff John Roberts — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:12:19 +0000

Google has asked a secret Washington court to declare that it has a right under the First Amendment to disclose the number of security letters it receives under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Such letters, which the government uses to obtain phone and internet data about foreign nationals, are currently subject to an automatic gag order that forbids companies from disclosing their very existence.

On Tuesday, Google said it is filing a petition to the secret court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The petition, embedded below, notes that the search giant has already received information from the FBI to publish the number of so-called National Security Letters it receives — these are similar to FISA letters but cover US citizens.

The Google petition comes as a brouhaha continues to rage over the revelation of secret government programs, such as PRISM, that collect meta-data on phone and internet users.

The controversy has not only let to questions about the expansion of government surveillance under the Patriot Act, but has also led the various tech companies ensnared in the dragnet to claim vociferously that they are standing up for their users. The nature of this advocacy has led to tension between some of the companies — Google and Twitter, for example, have suggested that alleged victories claimed by Microsoft and Facebook against the government are misleading.

In its filing, Google also repeated its criticism of the Guardian and Washington Post for misleading reporting — and says that the disclosure of the FISA requests are necessary to help it refute false accusation leveled by the media.

“Google reputation and business has been harmed by the false or misleading requests in the media, and Google’s users are concerned by the allegations,” the company wrote, several times singling out the Guardian and the Post.

If Google’s petition is successful, the company’s semi-annual Transparency Report will include two new categories that reveal: the number of FISA requests received; the number of accounts each request covers.

Here’s the filing:

Google 1st Amendment FISA

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Want cheap high-performance computing at scale like Google? Look to GPUs

Jordan Novet — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:37:35 +0000

Some startups pitch themselves as ways to extend certain impressive things Google can do to everyone, from real-time website updates to machine learning. One of Google’s next-generation projects is without doubt the so-called Google Brain, to make search and other products behave more intuitively based on information Google already knows about users. Now one researcher behind Google Brain is showing how other companies can do their own deep-learning computations at a non-Google price with GPUs and Infiniband interconnects.

As Wired noted Monday, researchers including Stanford professor Andrew Ng, who has done work on the Google Brain project — along with Google Fellow Jeff Dean, who will speak at our Structure conference in San Francisco on Wednesday — have published a paper showing how it is possible to use GPUs just as often as CPUs for this sort of heavy-duty work, particularly for quickly training neural networks. Such a system could cost $20,000, compared with the approximately $1 million price tag for Google’s project, according to the Wired article.

In the research, the cluster deployed 16 servers, each of which contained two quad-core processors, four Nvidia GPUs and an Infiniband adapter. The servers were connected by an Infiniband switch. “This particular server configuration was chosen to balance the number of GPUs with CPUs, which we have found to be important for large-scale deep learning,” the researchers wrote in a paper. The system is more efficient than a previous iteration:

With our system we have shown that we can comfortably train networks with well over 11 billion parameters—more than 6.5 times as large as the one reported in (Dean et al., 2012) (the largest previous network), and using fewer than 2% as many machines.

The research looks like another endorsement of the power of GPUs, a score for Nvidia and other GPU makers such as AMD. Nvidia GPUs already have gained traction inside the fastest supercomputers in existence, and now a trickle-down effect to more traditional data centers looks a bit more plausible. (Then again, the record-breaking Tianhe-2 supercomputer in China relies not on GPUs but a blend of Intel Xeon E5-2600 chips and Xeon Phi co-processors, according to a report from Data Center Knowledge, so the GPU campaign has a way to go.)

Of course, while the research gives further credence to the argument that high-performance computing on premise is not unrealistic, it comes as GPU-based cloud offerings are still available. Amazon Web Services has long since figured out that companies want to do high-performance computing with GPUs, and AWS’ Cluster GPU Instances incorporating Nvidia GPUshave gotten some known commercial use. Peer1, SGI and others also play here.

Interestingly, Google itself has not released a GPU option for its Cloud Platform, even though it calls on GPUs extensively for its Google Brain work. The researchers’ innovations could help Google develop a sound business model for selling GPU time as a service.

The research could also speed up other artificial-intelligence projects involving GPUs. Take robotic bees, for example, which are in need of a common brain to make sense of all the data the bees collect. Recognizing patterns more quickly with fewer machines at a lower price could help smart bees multiply.

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PRISM could foil the public-cloud campaign, and private clouds might lie in crosshairs

Jordan Novet — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:36:08 +0000

Just as a good share of consumers are concerned about their privacy after news broke about the National Security Agency’s PRISM program, some cloud-computing executives believe the news could hamper their industry as well.

In fact, government access to data in clouds could be blown wide open if the FBI gets its way in passing certain legislation. But that could be in the future. For now, actually, the workloads running on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds could be harder to get at than data inside higher-level consumer-cloud services and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.

SaaS customers concerned

Elad Yoran, CEO of cloud-security startup Vaultive, said he has fielded “dozens and dozens and dozens” of inquiries since the PRISM news hit about how companies using SaaS programs can protect their data.

“I don’t think there’s a company out there that will consider Google or Office 365 without asking themselves the question about unauthorized — from their perspective — disclosure to the government and whether they’re willing to take the risk that their data is sitting unencrypted in a database, out of their control,” Yoran said.

Yoran isn’t sure just how much the use of such services — or any public cloud, for that matter — will fall off and go back on premise, but it’s clear to him that companies are thinking about these issues now. He recommends the companies using SaaS applications keep their data encrypted when it’s in transit, at rest and in use.

The thing about SaaS is that companies sign up to run on them, and the SaaS providers — take Google with its email, for example — can just provide access in response to government requests without needing to consult with the customer. In fact, the PATRIOT Act specifically prohibits speaking up about these requests.

Why IaaS is different

Compare this with PaaS or IaaS, and the situation is different. Narrowing down to the virtual machine the data about an individual end-user federal agents want to learn about could be quite a task, if it is even possible. “In the Infrastructure-as-a-Service space it’s not possible,” said Jason Hoffman, chief technology officer at IaaS provider Joyent. “It couldn’t even provide a data feed on the backend that exposes people’s data. It just doesn’t work that way.” To put it another way, AWS doesn’t know what’s happening on its servers and doesn’t have access to those virtual machines any more than Hewlett-Packard knows how a customer is using its Moonshot servers.

There’s also a legal element to this. The third-party doctrine lets the government ask a SaaS company such as, say, Pinterest for information on end users, but when the SaaS app is running on hardware owned by an unrelated cloud provider, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), the government can’t get that same data directly through AWS.

Regardless of whether these data grabs can and do happen, the idea of it happening might be enough to scare off cloud customers and strengthen the story for on-premise infrastructure. As my colleague Derrick Harris noted earlier this week, in an increasingly cloudy business world that might not be the best thing for the economy.

While companies have been experimenting with development and testing work and some larger workloads on IaaS from AWS and other providers, complete dependence on public-cloud infrastructure is still way off, and the PRISM news puts more of a damper on the use of it, said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs.

“When I talk to customers about why they don’t use public cloud, … a lot of it is fear,” Kanies said. That fear often stems from uncertainty on legal and other implications of processing and storing data on shared infrastructure. And uncertainty on public cloud translates to staying on premise.

This argument applies not only to companies based in the United States; those based elsewhere surely will want to dodge the sort of data mining that U.S. intelligence agencies apparently conduct.

“Nearly every other country in the world is working hard to prevent its citizens’ data from being given to the NSA,” Kanies said. The European Union’s data-protection rules are a case in point, and the PRISM revelations will only fuel the fire on this front.

Altogether, Kanies said, “I would go so far as to say I would expect to see much lower adoption of public infrastructure owned by American companies. My guess is Europe is not going to trust American companies at all, regardless of whether it’s going to be hosted here or not.”

Kanies isn’t alone in expressing these sorts of sentiments. GigaOM Research Analyst David Linthicum in recent days predicted blowback on the international front, too:

The rise of cloud computing in the European Union will see the greatest impact on this scandal. The group is already suspicious of the U.S. government’s power to either monitor or outright seize their data. While there may not be any direct logical connection behind the perceived risk, the truth is people often make decisions, such as moving to the public cloud, based on feelings as much as facts.

Just another talking point

Then again, the news on PRISM might turn out to be nothing more than another proving point for public-cloud naysayers to exploit, bringing minimal actual impact.

Mark Thiele, executive vice president of data center technologies at colocation and cloud provider Switch, doubts the PRISM news will affect the total market opportunity of public-cloud use by any more than 3-5 percent. And that estimate might be generous.

“Those people that are convinced that the public cloud is the right place to do certain things in are going to continue to do it, and it’s (the PRISM program’s existence) not going to scare anyone away,” Thiele said. The difference in expenditures speaks for itself, and concerns about keeping data out of the government view won’t necessarily outweigh the financial and operational benefits of running in public or even hybrid clouds.

Private-cloud snooping

The gee-whiz factor that could throw off this whole equation is what the U.S. government might do to guarantee access to company data, including that which is kept on premise, in the future.

The FBI has thought about mandating forced access to encrypted data as part of an enhancement of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, the New York Times reported last month.

Should that come to pass, there’s a chance data kept behind a firewall in an on-premise data center would become much easier for the U.S. intelligence community to access, said Eva Galperin, a global policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“Depending on how the legislation is phrased, yes, it would be (possible),” Galperin said. “It would be tremendously dangerous. It would be the end of private internet communications.”

For now, it looks like the legislation might not go that far. Rather, an expansion of the act would ask companies for assistance in relinquishing data to the federal government or impose fines.

That climate could have long-term effects, not only on the growing shared-infrastructure camp but on others, too. Entrepreneurs could move abroad, so they don’t have to comply with such stringent regulations in the name of national security. They would rather build great products quickly than devote lots of staff time to compliance.

The political question in the end is whether national security outweigh economic and technological advancements.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Bruce Rolff.

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Bringing the Internet everywhere will need clean power

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:11:38 +0000

Google has long invested in some unusual ~~really weird~~ ways to get Internet access to remote places and its balloon-powered Internet access trial, dubbed Project Loon, is no exception. But Project Loon is also the latest example of how Google’s greater interests of getting everyone connected align with the unique requirements of clean power.

The balloons that will be used in Project Loon will be powered by 100-watt solar panels, and Google says that Project Loon will be completely charged with renewable sources. On the Project Loon website, it says:

Each unit’s electronics are powered by an array of solar panels that sits between the envelope and the hardware. In full sun, these panels produce 100 watts of power — enough to keep the unit running while also charging a battery for use at night. By moving with the wind and charging in the sun, Project Loon is able to power itself using only renewable energy sources.

This isn’t the first time that Google has turned to small, distributed clean power generation to connect up remote internet access. About five years ago, Google had a plan to build out floating data centers that could use wave power as an energy source. These data centers could be deployed to remote, or even conflict, zones to boost internet access in places that need it.

Many of the planned city-wide WiFi deployments of yesteryear, which used routers propped up on street lights and utility poles — Google was a big supporter of them– used solar panels as a constant power supply. MuniFi didn’t work out as expected, but the concept is the same as Google’s Project Loon.

Solar in particular has long been important to Google. Its headquarters had one of the first large corporate solar rooftops when it was built back in 2007, and it has invested in many solar panel projects that could power its data centers throughout the world.

Wind power is also a big interest of Google’s. Recently Google’s moonshot lab Google X acquired high-altitude wind startup Makani Power, which has built out kite-powered wind turbines that draw power from the wind hundreds of meters off the ground. Project Loon could also possibly be using micro wind generators that create power, as it hints at tapping into wind for power, but Makani’s turbines spin around a long tether (whereas Project Loon’s wireless routers float along on balloons).

Beyond distributed, micro clean power generation (think solar panels on roofs), Google is also interested in large centralized clean power (picture a huge solar or wind farm in the desert). Google has invested over a billion dollars into huge clean power projects like wind and solar farms in the deserts, and is using these types of farms to add clean power for its data centers in remote areas.

Small solar panels and micro wind turbines are also playing an important role in bringing internet access to developing areas in India and Africa where there’s no grid. People are using their cell phones for internet access, and are using solar panels to charge their cell phones.

At the end of the day, getting internet access to everyone on the globe — either by powering data centers, powering the routers themselves, or powering the smart devices that will connect to the internet — will require flexible power generation options. The centralized coal and natural gas plants that are providing grid power to much of the developed world won’t work in the remote locations that are not yet connected.

Because Google is so interested in this concept of connecting everyone, it’s doing these more unusual trials and introducing wacky services like Project Loon. While Project Loon might end up being just too loony to work, the clean power option it’s using isn’t wacky at all and will be the answer to bringing the internet to the ends of the earth.

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Google’s balloon-based internet dream: loon or loony?

Om Malik — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:26:22 +0000

I can’t even remember how many times in the past I have chuckled at the idea of a blimp/balloon-based internet. I guess it was because those ideas were promoted by companies that sounded a bit flim-flammy or sometimes, just plain nuts.

Google Internet Balloons, before the launch in New Zealand. Photo courtesy of Trey Ratcliff (under Creative Commons)

Of course, now we might have to take this whole balloon-based broadband thing seriously — Google is putting a lot of money, time and effort behind it. In a blog post, the company announced Project Loon:

Today we’re unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access. We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below. It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster. As a result, we hope balloons could become an option for connecting rural, remote, and underserved areas, and for helping with communications after natural disasters. The idea may sound a bit crazy—and that’s part of the reason we’re calling it Project Loon—but there’s solid science behind it. This is still highly experimental technology and we have a long way to go.

Google has launch its balloon-based Internet connectivity technology as a trial down in the Canterbury area of New Zealand. It kicked off the program by sending 30 balloons up in the air and 50 testers will be connecting to those balloons. They will launch more balloons in countries which have the same latitude as New Zealand.

This isn’t the first time Google has talked about balloon-based broadband. In 2008, there was talk that Google was looking to work with a company called Space Data Corp., and send balloons up in the air and provide connectivity in rural areas. SDC specialized in sending balloons to about 20 miles up in the air to provide connectivity to truckers and oil companies. It recently started experimenting with the idea of blimp-based broadband in Africa.

Google is obsessed with the idea of connecting more and more people to the Internet, especially in the developing world, and there isn’t a single technology that can get it done. So it has been toying with many ways to provide connectivity in areas that are un-connected. While I don’t have any doubts that Google’s mission to connect the world is driven by the profit motive, I still find the idea of pushing for seamless connectivity exciting. Seamless connectivity, as you know, has been a bit of a personal passion for me.

Looking at it from the outside, you can see that Google is putting two of its core strengths — algorithms and cloud computing infrastructure — to work on what has been a difficult problem to solve. Google admits the idea is crazy but highly experimental, which makes it all the more worthwhile to follow the project. I am also looking forward to sinking my teeth into understanding how this works (or not.)

P.S. Check out these awesome behind the scenes photos Trey Ratcliff took of the Google Loon project and shared them on his Google+ page.

This video below shows how Project Loon works.

Featured image courtesy Flickr user Pink_Sherbet_Photography.

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Tech companies working with the NSA are making a Faustian bargain

Mathew Ingram — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:00:17 +0000

As the fallout continues to rain down from recent reports about the NSA snooping on millions of phone calls and terabytes of web traffic, the spin campaign from both the government and the technology companies allegedly involved in the program has reached a fever pitch. First there were strenuous denials from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Facebook, followed by broad hints that they only co-operated because they were trying to make things easier on their users — and then leaked reports that some were essentially forced at gunpoint to do the NSA’s bidding.

Whatever the case may be, agreeing to turn over data to the government might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but the potential downside risks of that particular slippery slope are fairly overwhelming.

The popular response to the NSA revelations may lie somewhere between mild disinterest and outright apathy, according to surveys like the one done by the Pew Center — in part because we seem to have gotten used to the idea that tech companies are monitoring our every move. But being seen as co-operating with the spy agency is still a fairly huge risk for cloud-based services. Not only that, but co-operating in even a small way makes those companies look like easy targets for further government pressure.

Who co-operated and to what extent is unclear

At this point, the actual truth of what is involved in the NSA’s so-called PRISM program remains a rapidly shifting target. The documents first published by the Guardian and the Washington Post a week ago seemed pretty cut and dried in their description of a system that allowed the spy agency “direct access” to the servers of Google, Yahoo, Facebook and about half a dozen other companies — something the Post originally said was provided voluntarily and gave the NSA broad access to information about user behavior.

Almost immediately, however, the details started to blur: not only did those companies deny providing “direct access” to their servers, but some sources said the data was only provided under duress, because of secret court orders related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As the days went on, other reports quoted anonymous sources saying the whole system (the one those companies had denied any knowledge of) was just an attempt to automate the processing of those legitimate FISA requests.

One report quoted anonymous staffers at several of the companies saying they only agreed to co-operate with the NSA because they were afraid if they didn’t do so, the government would demand even more of their data and that wouldn’t be fair to users. And finally, on Friday, the New York Times reported — using some conveniently leaked documents — that Yahoo had tried to resist the NSA’s attempts to compel it to provide user data, but was ultimately unsuccessful and was ordered by the court to comply.

User trust is a precious commodity

So what we have now are a broad range of conflicting reports about who did what — including semantic debates about what the term “direct access” actually means, as well as how much access was provided voluntarily vs. how much was provided under duress. So far, the only company that seems to have emerged unscathed is Twitter, which reportedly fought the government’s attempts to enrol the company in the PRISM program and succeeded, a tale that has burnished Twitter’s claim to be the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party”).

That said, however, there seems to be little doubt that many companies co-operated with the NSA, and may have set up “lockbox” or “clean room”-style facilities for providing data — and there are even suggestions that this group could go far beyond just Google and Yahoo and Facebook, and could include hundreds of other technology providers that have co-operated to some extent with the spy agency and given the NSA details about their equipment and/or products that could help its surveillance program.

These companies may have convinced themselves that co-operation was inevitable, or that they needed to do something to help the government catch terrorists, or that by automating the legally legitimate FISA process they could save themselves a lot of trouble and expense, or some combination of all the above. But in reality, they have not only shown themselves to be weak — which will encourage the NSA to pressure them even further because they know they can win — but also fundamentally untrustworthy, and that could cause them a lot more problems with users than they ever contemplated.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Luis Louro, Shutterstock / Lightspring and Flickr user Thomas Leuthard

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If you believe the FCC (and I do), a new Nexus 7 is coming soon

Kevin C. Tofel — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:42:27 +0000

In the market for a 7-inch Android tablet? The Nexus 7 is now 11 months old and we’ve seen bits of evidence that appeared to signal an updated version of Google’s small slate. Now, it’s an even safer bet that an updated Nexus tablet will be announced soon. Why more certainty? The FCC has certified a new Asus tablet with mention of the Nexus branding — not a guarantee that such a device will go on sale, but a definite requirement and the best indicator yet.

Ironically, it wasn’t even a U.S. news outlet that spotted the FCC testing documents: Notebook Italia got the jump on us all in finding the data. Based on the FCC report, the 7-inch tablet under test uses a Qualcomm APQ-8064 chip, which sounds like the Snapdragon S600 used by the Galaxy S 4, HTC One and LG Optimus G Pro handsets. The tablet will have both a front and rear camera as well as a 15 wHr battery. Versions with Wi-Fi and LTE are likely.

There’s no indication of the screen resolution but the Snapdragon S600 is surely capable of driving a 1080p display: It does so for the trio of smartphones mentioned above. However, a panel with 1080p resolution would likely drive the cost up. I still think Google should offer a wider range of new Nexus 7 tablets: some at a lower price with the current 1280 x 800 resolution and higher-priced models with 1080p screens. Call them Nexus 7+ or Nexus 7 HD tablets.

Regardless of what the final product line update looks like, if you’re in the market for a Nexus 7, it may make sense to hold off. Even if you’d rather have the current model, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google offer it for a lower price as new models fit into the current price points of $199 to $249.

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Microsoft and other U.S. firms disclose security flaws to spies before customers, report claims

David Meyer — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 07:53:01 +0000

Imagine you’re a government customer of Microsoft’s, in some country that isn’t the U.S. You’re already anxious over the PRISM scandal and its implications for data processed in the firm’s cloud. Now this: according to a Bloomberg report on Friday, when Microsoft finds a vulnerability in its software it informs U.S. intelligence agencies before its own customers.

So, in theory, apart from having advance notice to patch their own systems, those agencies could exploit that zero-day vulnerability to hack into your data, before Microsoft gives you a chance to patch the flaw. And it’s not just Microsoft. According to the report, “thousands of [U.S.] technology, finance and manufacturing firms” are closely aligned with American national security agencies, passing them information such as vulnerability details and hardware and software specifications, and giving them access to overseas facilities and data.

In return, Bloomberg claims, the agencies give the companies information about foreign attacks on their systems. Google is cited as an example of this, with Sergey Brin allegedly having been invited to sit in on a secret intelligence briefing after an attack by Chinese hackers in 2010. Of course, the companies aren’t the only sources of useful flaws — security expert and activist Christopher Soghoian detailed late last year how some security researchers sell vulnerability information to governments for large sums of cash too. “This is the [U.S.] government buying a flaw without the intention of fixing it,” Soghoian explained in his Harvard University presentation. (Thanks to Jeff Ausloos for alerting me to that one.)

Backbone hacking

The Bloomberg report also notes claims recently made by NSA leaker Edward Snowden that the U.S. hacks network backbones in China and Hong King. Although the evidence for this “Blarney” program appears scantier than that for PRISM, the gist is that the scheme captures metadata from internet-connected devices such as computers and smartphones around the world, including OS version, Java software version and browser. Again, this would make it easier for the agencies to target and hack such devices.

On the domestic front, the piece also claims a security system called Einstein 3, which is meant to protect U.S. government systems, can “expose the private content of the emails under certain circumstances.”

Who’s the customer?

But it’s the claims about U.S. tech vendors and their apparently voluntary information exchange with the country’s spy agencies that will most bother governments and their public sector organizations around the world.

Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw seemingly confirmed this cooperation in the Bloomberg article, saying the early release of vulnerability information helps to give the U.S. government an “early start” in protecting its systems. Other “trusted partners” reportedly include Intel’s security business McAfee, which apparently acts as a consultant of sorts to spy agencies wanting to know more about network architectures around the world.

There’s no suggestion that any of this data-sharing is illegal – but for many governmental customers around the world it will suggest that their vendors have undisclosed interests that don’t align with their own. For some in the U.S. tech industry, these revelations may turn out to be as damaging as PRISM, if not more so.

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Swedes say no to Google Apps for government use

Jordan Novet — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 22:41:49 +0000

A division of the Swedish government has prohibited government offices from using Google Apps, according to a report Thursday from privacy blogger Simon Davies.

The ruling on the case involving the Swedish city of Salem, dating to a case originally considered in 2011 involving compliance with 1998 legislation, is binding to all municipal bodies and federal agencies, Davies wrote.

The news of clamping down on government employees’ use of document storage, spreadsheets, calendars, collaborative documents, email and other services, the Swedish government’s Data Inspection Board comes as a result of issues surrounding Google’s contract policies, Davies wrote.

Davies wondered if schools might end up becoming disillusioned with cloud applications, too.

It’s fair to view the news as the latest proof point in the resistance to relying on shared infrastructure certain United States companies run because the U.S. government can access data. The revelations on the PRISM program got that ball rolling again in recent days, sparking renewed curiosity about what the European Union will end up doing to protect citizens’ personal data, and this news arguably contributes to the sentiment.

On top of that, the news could heighten further the divide between U.S. cloud and European cloud and shows the need for more infrastructure catering to the needs of smaller populations — say, for the European Union.

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