AWS unveiled its plans to aid and accelerate the research of quantum computing at its Re:Invent conference on Monday.

The cloud giant announced three new services for testing, researching and experimenting with the technology.

The first of which was Amazon Bracket, a service that enables scientists, researchers, and developers to begin experimenting with computers from quantum hardware providers in a single place.

To go with Bracket is the AWS Centre for Quantum Computing which brings together quantum computing experts from Amazon, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and other academic research institutions to collaborate on the research and development of new quantum computing technologies.

And finally Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab, which is a program that connects customers with quantum computing experts and consulting partners to develop internal expertise aimed at identifying practical uses of quantum computing. The aim is to accelerate the development of quantum applications with meaningful impact.

There has been significant progress in quantum computing this year, particularly from IBM and Google, with both announcing large investments in the technology. The two made headlines in October after IBM discredited claims made by Google that its 53-qubit Sycamore processor had achieved “quantum supremacy”.

Quantum computing refers to extremely powerful machines capable of processing massive swathes of data due to a reliance on the theory of quantum mechanics in the way they are constructed. For example, Google suggested its processor was able to perform a complex mathematical problem in 200 seconds, while the world’s most-powerful supercomputer would need 10,000 years to complete.

Despite the work of IBM, Google and now AWS, quantum computing is not quite a mainstream technology just yet, but according to AWS evangelist Jeff Barr, that time is coming.

“I suspect that within 40 or 50 years, many applications will be powered in part using services that run on quantum computers,” he wrote in a blog post. “As such, it is best to think of them like a GPU or a math coprocessor. They will not be used in isolation, but will be an important part of a hybrid classical/quantum solution.”

Hackers have exploited Netflix’s data retention policies to reactivate cancelled customer subscriptions and steal their accounts.

Former subscribers say they noticed their accounts had been reinstated when they were charged a monthly fee, months after cancellation.

The hackers can log in to dormant accounts and reactivate them without knowing users bank details, according to the BBC.

This is due to the streaming service storing customer data, including billing information, for ten months after cancellation. This is to enable a speedy account recovery should a user wish to rejoin.

However, this is proving to be a benefit for hackers who just need an email address and password to reactivate an account.

Radio 4’s You and Yours programme spoke to Emily Keen who said she cancelled her subscription in April 2019 but was charged £11.99 by Netflix in September. She tried to log in to the account but found that email and password were no longer recognised as the hackers had changed her details and signed her up to the more expensive service option.

Keen contacted Netflix and was assured her card would be blocked and she would receive a full refund, but the streaming service went on to take two further payments in October and November.

Other users that have had their accounts mysteriously reactivated have hit out at the company on Twitter.

“Super disappointed with my @netflix customer service experience,” one user posted on the social media site. “Our account was hacked, supposed to have been deactivated, was reactivated by hacker, and continued to use our credit card. We were told to file chargeback and @netflix would not offer refund.”

Stolen Netflix login details have reportedly been found on sites like eBay, sold as “lifetime” accounts for as little as £3. The same issue was reported for Disney+ accounts just hours after the service launched in the US, with login details serfacing on hacking forums. 

Cloud Pro has approached Netflix for comment.

Microsoft and AT&T have integrated 5G with Azure to launch an edge computing service for enterprise customers.

The two companies signed a $2 billion deal in July, which involved the migration of AT&T data and workflows to Azure, and introduced plans to accelerate work on 5G and cloud computing.

The first joint announcement to come out of the deal, announced on 26 November, is a pilot launch of an edge computing service called Network Edge Compute, a virtualised 5G core that can deploy Azure services.

It’s available to certain customers, initially in Dallas, but will roll out to some in Los Angeles and Atlanta over the next year.

“With our 5G and edge computing, AT&T is collaborating uniquely with Microsoft to marry their cloud capabilities with our network to create lower latency between the device and the cloud that will unlock new, future scenarios for consumers and businesses,” said Mo Katibeh, EVP and chief marketing officer, AT&T Business.

“We’ve said all year developers and businesses will be the early 5G adopters and this puts both at the forefront of this revolution.”

The collaboration will see AT&T become a “public-cloud first” business, according to Microsoft. The telecoms giant’s migration is well underway and is set to be completed by 2024.

“We are helping AT&T light up a wide range of unique solutions powered by Microsoft’s cloud, both for its business and our mutual customers in a secure and trusted way,” said Corey Sanders, corporate VP of Microsoft Solutions.

“The collaboration reaches across AT&T, bringing the hyper-scale of Microsoft Azure together with AT&T’s network to innovate with 5G and edge computing across every industry.”

It’s also another big deal for Microsoft, which has made its public cloud strategy clear with a number of acquisitions for migration specialists. Most recently the tech giant snapped up Mover, which swiftly followed a deal to buy similarly named Movere.

AWS has enabled its voice control services to be available on lower-powered devices by offloading the majority of the work to the cloud.

Alexa Voice Services (AVS) is already widely used with its Echo smart speakers and other devices that can be connected to a network or the internet, such as lightbulbs and TVs.

Adding voice controls was costly as Alexa devices had a minimum requirement of at least 100 megabytes of on-device RAM and an ARM Cortex “A” class microprocessor to have enough processing power to handle voice commands. 

That’s no longer the case as the tech giant will use its cloud to handle most of the processing requirements with Alexa Voice Services for IoT, reducing the costs of voice control by up to 50%. The baseline requirement has now been reduced to 1MB of RAM and Arm Cortex M-class microcontrollers.

The move also means that retrieving, buffering and decoding on devices will also be offloaded to its cloud. As such, everything from light switches to thermostats can now be controlled entirely using voice with AVS for IoT.

“We now offload the vast majority of all of this to the cloud,” AWS IoT VP Dirk Didascalou told TechCrunch. “So the device can be ultra dumb. The only thing that the device still needs to do is wake word detection. That still needs to be covered on the device.

“It just opens up the what we call the real ambient intelligence and ambient computing space,” he said. “Because now you don’t need to identify where’s my hub – you just speak to your environment and your environment can interact with you. I think that’s a massive step towards this ambient intelligence via Alexa.”

The cloud giant made a number of IoT announcements aimed at simplifying IoT services for companies deploying large swathes of devices. It revealed added features to AWS IoT Greengrass, for example, which has been given capabilities for Docker. This extends AWS functions to connected devices, allowing businesses to perform data collection and analysis at the edge. The update is with Docker containers, which make it easier to move compute workloads to and from the edge.

Microsoft has been accused of ripping off the advertising of workplace collaboration giant Slack during a promotional video for its Teams platform.

The video in question, released as part of Microsoft’s ‘Unpack the art of teamwork‘ campaign on 13 November, featured rolling purple balls to symbolise how people collaborate across their organisation.

In a Tweet on Thursday, Slack poked fun at the technology giant by highlighting the video bared a striking resemblance to its own promotional material released earlier in the year, which also used rolling balls to demonstrate connected groups.

The first was an advert for Slack’s Frontiers conference published 24 April, which was also used as an intro for the event. In it, different coloured wooden balls are used to depict ways to work as they roll through a number of patterned grooves and tracks. In a second video, which went live 14 August, uses the same wooden balls as begins with a shot of them rolling over a hill. 

Slack posted a short video on Twitter that compared the shots, entitled ‘ok boomer’. 

This is the latest dig in a long-running spat between the two companies that are competing to be the number one workplace communication platform. 

Although the statistics favour Microsoft, Slack has shown plenty of gumption in calling out the tech giant. 

Microsoft has declined to comment on the advertising issue.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has previously criticised Microsoft for its tactic of bundling Teams into Office 365, calling the move “surprisingly unsportsmanlike”.

Microsoft recently revealed that Teams had surpassed 20 million daily active users, increasing by 7 million since July. Part of its success is down to the fact that its available as part of Microsoft Office 365. 

Slack has also seen its own growth, now boasting 12 million daily users as of October

Google has added Google Assistant capabilities into G Suite as part of a number of betas the cloud giant has unveiled at its Next 19 event.

Users will be able to use voice commands to carry out a number of functions across G Suite using voice commands. 

For example, in the Calendar app the Google Assistant can respond to commands asking it to check, add, change and delete entries and events; a potentially useful function for people looking to update their calendar while on the move.

In other areas of G Suite, the integration of the Google Assistant means users can use commands such as “Hey Google, join my next meeting” to be automatically dialled into a meeting, while the AI-powered virtual assistant can also be told to email meeting attendees if the user is running late. 

While the integration does not extend to the Hangouts Meet app yet, it does allow for the Asus Hangouts Meet hardware kit – a suite of hardware to provide ‘one-touch’ Hangouts Meet video conferencing – to work with user voice commands for joining or leaving a meeting, and to make a phone call through the hardware. 

Google also added smart and AI-powered features into Hangout Meet and Google Docs. 

Soon Hangouts Meet features will also be extended to Gmail, where users can start video chats without leaving the application. This is all part of an efficiency push within G Suite to streamline the user experience.

“Next year Gmail will enable you to jump on quick calls without scheduling one. We are calling it the meet experience in Gmail,” said Ulrike Gupta, a customer engineer at Google Cloud.

Last year the company added ‘Smart Compose’ to Gmail, where AI features offer up automated responses to complete sentences within a message. This is now available for Google Docs, in beta; according to Google, Smart Compose has already saved people from typing more than two billion characters each week.

By harnessing Google’s neural network-powered AI technology, Smart Compose will also be used to spot grammatical and spelling errors.

As it will use aggregate textual data at its beta stage, Smart Compose will learn a user’s style and common word use, effectively improving over time. However, some companies might not be comfortable with this data being collected and processed so may wish to opt-out of the beta. 

Smart Compose autocorrect functions will also tap into the power of Google Search to ensure that the words and phrases being used are up-to-date with the latest parlance. 

SAP, VMware and Microsoft Windows workloads can now be migrated to Google Cloud, the company announced at its Next 19 event in London.

The new capabilities will allow customers to migrate the workloads without having to change tools or use different functions – lifting them “as is” according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

“Our mission at Google Cloud is to enable organisations around the world to transform their business using digital technology,” he said during his keynote. “And to do so offering the best infrastructure, a digital transformation platform and industry-specific solutions to help you transform your organisation.”

The first announcement was for Google customers running VMware workloads on-premise. Kurian said that Google Cloud now allows them to move their VMware workloads to the cloud, using existing VMware tools, processes and operational practices. He said it allows workload migration while maintaining business continuity.

This is possible through the company’s acquisition of CloudSimple, an enterprise migration platform and former partner that Google absorbed on Monday. The firm is recognised worldwide as an expert in running VMware and has proven technology to move VMware workloads to the Google Cloud, Kurian said.

His second announcement was for the ‘SAP Cloud Acceleration Programme’, another service to move workloads to Google’s Cloud – again, due to a number of its partners already running SAP applications in its cloud. Kurian said this was because it lets them upgrade SAP systems without downtime.

The third announcement was for Microsoft Windows, where NetApp storage will be used for broader support for both Windows desktop and server applications to be moved to Google Cloud. NetApp is a hybrid cloud data service and management company which is conveniently led by Thomas Kurian’s twin brother George.

There were also new security features, announced by Google Cloud’s VP of engineering, security and trust, Suzanne Frey. The first of which is an External Key Manager, due to launch soon. It allows customers to integrate their own third-party encryption keys with the Google Cloud key management service. Customers can keep their encryption keys completely outside of Google’s infrastructure, either on their own premises or in a third-party key management service.

To go with this, Frey also announced Key Access Justification, which works with the External Key Manager and provides a reason each time a key is accessed – forcing Google to request to decrypt customer data.

“Using these services together, you can deny us any access to your data,” Frey said. “And as a result, you are the ultimate arbiter of access to your information.”

Vodafone has partnered with Google Cloud to build a big data platform as part of its digital transformation programme.

This is a customised data analytics platform called ‘Vodafone Neuron’ that the telecoms giant said will act as a brain and driver for AI and business intelligence for its global business.

Vodafone has been migrating its global data into Google’s public cloud to create this custom platform. The hope is that it provides data performance that lets disparate data from across the organisation be aggregated into a ‘data ocean’ – rather than multiple data lakes.

Once this is complete, the speed with which Vodafone will be able to run queries will enable it to gain real-time insights, providing new levels of agility, scalability and cost-effectiveness, the company said.

Google Cloud tools have been integrated into the ‘Neuron’ platform, which is in the process of rolling out to 11 countries. The insights from Neuron are being used to support a range of applications, such as Vodafone’s ‘Gigabit Networks’.

“Neuron serves as the foundation for Vodafone’s data ocean and the brains of our business as we transform ourselves into a digital tech company,” said Simon Harris, group head of big data delivery at Vodafone.

“Not only will we be able to gain real-time analytics capabilities across Vodafone products and services, but it will also allow us to arrive at insights faster, which can then be used to offer more personalised product offerings to customers and to raise the bar on service.”

The company recently announced an agreement to expand its Gigafast Broadband throughout the UK by building upon Openreach’s infrastructure – namely its fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network. A key part of the deal is that it’s tied to Openreach’s own expansion and provides the option for further expansion later on.

The Department of Transport has been working with Google Cloud to modernise its core technology to be a “cloud-first” organisation by 2020. 

The DfT announced that for the past two years, the two organisations have been working to reinventing internal service delivery and introduces new digital capabilities for DfT staff.

Prior to moving to the cloud, it was resource-intensive for DfT to maintain servers, manage backups and ensure the overall health of the IT systems, the organisation said. As a result, simple utilisation and querying tasks often required days to complete.

A part of the problem was that its data centres lacked the scalability to match DfT’s longer-term needs as it looked to undertake bigger and more complex data initiatives.

In an effort to build the capabilities it required, DfT and Google Cloud migrated a large proportion of the former’s applications to the public cloud. Over the course of 12 months, DfT said it has successfully completed the migration of hundreds of virtual machines to the Google Cloud Platform. According to the DfT, this has allowed it to decommission a large chunk of its on-premises infrastructure while improving the reliability, resilience and security of its systems.

Over 100TBs of application data has been migrated from an internal cluster into BigQuery, reducing data search time from up to five days down to mere seconds

The partnership with Google Cloud is helping the DfT to become a more digital and data-driven organisation, according to said Mark Lyons, the interim CIO for DfT. He said the capabilities the platform offers are helping it to use data better to support decision-making, policy-making, reporting and governance, as well as provide new digital services to engage with citizens on transport-related initiatives.

“We’ve been excited to go on this journey with Google Cloud,” said Lyons. “When you have finite resources, having a partner that understands the process of change and can direct your focus to the things that really matter is invaluable. We’ve invested in this as a long-term partnership and are excited for Google Cloud to remain our number one cloud platform provider.”

AWS has suggested the evaluation process for the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud computing contract contained “unmistakable bias”.

The cloud giant has said it intends to appeal the Department of Defence’s decision to award the contract to Microsoft.

The Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) contract is a ¢10 billion project to modernise the Pentagon’s IT systems. Major cloud computing companies such as IBM, Oracle, Google and AWS were involved in a controversial bidding process with Microsoft announced as the eventual winner in October.

This didn’t go down well with Amazon’s cloud computing arm which initially said it was “surprised” with the decision and is now challenging it.

“AWS is uniquely experienced and qualified to provide the critical technology the US military needs and remains committed to supporting the DoD’s modernisation efforts,” an AWS spokesperson said.

“We also believe it’s critical for our country that the government and its elected leaders administer procurements objectively and in a manner that is free from political influence. Numerous aspects of the JEDI evaluation process contained clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable bias and it’s important that these matters be examined and rectified.”

Donald Trump called his Pentagon Secretary James Mattis and directed him to “screw Amazon” out of a chance to bid on the JEDI contract, according to Mattis’ book ‘Holding The Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis‘. It was written by Guy Snodgrass, who served as a speechwriter for Mattis, and reports of the quote surfaced around the time Microsoft was awarded the JEDI contract.

Trump and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos have a famous disliking for one another and there was already a suggestion that this had influenced the DoD’s final decision. In July the president became “concerned” with how the bidding was going after complaints other cloud providers were being unfairly excluded – AWS was the favourite at the time.

Oracle is also taking legal action against the DoD’s final decision, however, its argument is actually against AWS. It claims that two DoD officials were offered jobs at Amazon while they worked on the JEDI contract and that another was a former AWS consultant.

US Defence Secretary Mark Esper rejected any suggestion of bias. According to Reuters, he told a news conference in Seoul: “I am confident it was conducted freely and fairly, without any type of outside influence.”

Esper removed himself from reviewing the deal in October as his son was employed by IBM.