Uber, Now In A Court Battle With Google, Once Tried To Be Its Partner

John Krafcik, CEO of Waymo, shows off a customized Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid that will be used for Google's autonomous vehicle program on January 8, 2017 in Detroit, Michigan.

Bill Pugliano / Getty Images

Ex-Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick sought out meetings two years ago with Google cofounder Larry Page to discuss partnering with the company's autonomous vehicle program, now called Waymo, according to new court filings. The filings show how Uber, which is now facing a lawsuit from Waymo, attempted to discuss possible partnerships with Google before the two tech giants became bitter rivals.

According to court filings revealed Thursday, after Kalanick learned Google was considering launching an autonomous vehicle ridesharing service, he asked David Drummond, a senior vice president at Google who at the time was serving on Uber's board, to help set up a meeting with Page.

One email thread shows Kalanick told Drummond in late January that “it's time to have a chat with Larry directly.”

Another email from March 2015 shows that Kalanick was concerned Page had been avoiding him.

Uber's lawyers included the emails as part of a court filing about deposing Page.

The two companies have become rivals despite Google Ventures' $250 million investment in Uber. Drummond stepped down from Uber's board in August after reportedly being sidelined, underscoring the growing rivalry between the companies. Google's parent company Alphabet spun off the car program into a new company called Waymo in December. And in February, Waymo sued Uber, alleging that an ex-employee stole its trade secrets before joining Uber, and that the ride-hail giant is benefitting from that information. Uber has denied that any Waymo information crossed over into its systems.

“There is no substitute for these depositions, which would resolve some key unanswered questions. For instance: why, after Google learned of the alleged downloading of 14,000 files, did Mr. Page not alert Uber's then-CEO to that fact when they spoke?,” Uber said in a statement. “Simultaneously, Google was rejecting a partnership with Uber, choosing instead to compete. This—and the lack of evidence supporting Waymo's case—begs the obvious question: Was this lawsuit actually motivated by the downloading of the files, or was it an attempt to slow down a competitor?”

Waymo declined to comment on Uber's filing.

Earlier this year, Waymo partnered with Lyft, Uber's main US competitor in the ride-sharing business. Waymo also launched its first pilot program to put the public in its self-driving cars in Phoenix earlier this year.

Quelle: <a href="Uber, Now In A Court Battle With Google, Once Tried To Be Its Partner“>BuzzFeed

Amazon QuickSight now supports visualizing S3 Analytics data with 1-click

When S3 Analytics was released in Nov 2016, it gave customers the ability to analyze storage access patterns and transition the right data to the right storage class. Customers could also manually export the data to an S3 bucket to analyze using the business intelligence tool of their choice and gather deeper insights on usage and growth patterns. This helped customers reduce storage costs while optimizing performance based on usage patterns.
Quelle: aws.amazon.com

Twitter Just Fixed A Bug That Kept Trump From Showing Up In Twitter Searches For POTUS

Donald Trump is the 45th — and current — President of the United States, or POTUS, as the popular acronym goes. On January 20, when Trump was sworn into office, Trump and his social media team in the White House also gained control of the official @POTUS Twitter account from the Obama administration. And while Trump does most of his meaningful tweeting from his personal account, @POTUS is still considered the official presidential Twitter channel.

But for the last few weeks, if you searched Twitter looking for “POTUS,” you wouldn't find the 45th president at all. The same went for “@POTUS.” Trump, it appeared, was scrubbed from @POTUS Twitter search results altogether. The top result? Obama, followed by a number of novelty accounts including one that claims to be run by “rogue” White House staffers:

When BuzzFeed News contacted Twitter about this, the social network said only that the search result “was a bug and has since been resolved.”

Twitter declined to explain the nature of the bug but it appears a fix has been made. Now, when you search “POTUS” or “@POTUS,” Donald Trump appears in the search results.

Quelle: <a href="Twitter Just Fixed A Bug That Kept Trump From Showing Up In Twitter Searches For POTUS“>BuzzFeed

Use AWS WAF to Mitigate OWASP’s Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities

Today, AWS WAF released a new security whitepaper: Use AWS WAF to Mitigate OWASP’s Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities. This whitepaper describes how you can use AWS WAF, a web application firewall, to address the top application security flaws as named by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). Using AWS WAF, you can write rules to match patterns of exploitation attempts in HTTP/S requests and block requests from reaching your web servers. This whitepaper discusses manifestations of these security vulnerabilities, AWS WAF–based mitigation strategies, and other AWS services or solutions that can help address these threats.
Quelle: aws.amazon.com

AWS Config Tracks Changes to AWS CloudFormation Stacks

AWS Config now supports tracking changes to AWS CloudFormation stacks. A CloudFormation stack is a collection of AWS resources that you can manage as a single unit. With this release, you can now deep dive into the historical configuration of your CloudFormation stacks and review all changes that occurred to them. For example, you can now determine how your stack policies were changed or what updates were made to the resources within the stack. You can also receive Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notifications when those changes occur. In addition, you can run a new managed Config rule to check whether your CloudFormation stacks are sending event notifications to an Amazon SNS topic.
Quelle: aws.amazon.com