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Amazon Web Services has finally received certification under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, which the company said will lower the cost of implementing its cloud services among government organizations and agencies in the U.S.FedRAMP is a mandatory government-wide program that standardizes security assessment, authorization, and monitoring for cloud products and services. As part of the program, Amazon has been granted two so-called Agency Authorities to Operate (ATOs) by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, it said.One ATO covers the GovCloud "region" of AWS infrastructure, and the other the U.S. East/West regions of its cloud infrastructure. Within those boundaries, agencies can use Amazon's EC2 compute cloud, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Block Store (EBS). They can also use its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which allows IT staff to create an isolated section of Amazon's cloud where they can launch resources in a virtual network defined by themselves, including public subnets, private subnets, and hardware VPN access.In a recent interview, Stephen Schmidt, chief information security officer at Amazon Web Services, talked about how he looked forward to getting a FedRAMP certification.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A boutique system builder has bucked the industry trend of slumping PC sales by continuing to focus on selling Windows 7 machines. Auburn, Wash.-based Puget Systems grew sales 20% in 2012, said Jon Bach, president of the independent PC seller, by specializing in high-performance, buit-to-order PCs—primarily desktops. Puget’s performance is in stark contrast to the global PC market, which contracted 6% in the fourth quarter of last year, and plummeted 14% in the first quarter of 2013, according to research firm IDC. Puget also went against the grain by selling significantly more Windows 7 PCs than ones equipped with the new Windows 8. That was not a strategy of its own choosing, however, as customers select the operating system for their custom-built machines. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

From Nikon: Nikon COOLPIX P7700 firmware v1.2 is now available for download. Modifications enabled with this firmware upgradeWhen shooting with shooting mode set to M (manual) with Flash, and the ISO sensitivity set to Auto, ISO 80-200, ISO 80-400, or ISO 80-800, ISO sensitivity was sometimes not locked at ISO 80 and a different ISO sensitivity was sometimes applied. This issue has been resolved.Download Nikon COOLPIX P7700 Firmware 1.2 - Windows | Macintosh Installation Instructions (PDF) - Windows | Macintosh B&H carries the Nikon COOLPIX P7700.

Vodafone's revenue dropped 4.2 percent for its fiscal year to March 31, because of tough economic conditions, particularly in Southern Europe.The operator's group revenue dropped to £44.4 billion (US$67.8 billion) for the year ended March 31, and net profit fell sharply from £7 billion to £673 million.Behind those numbers are Vodafone's problems in Southern Europe where revenue was down by 16 percent. The effects of "severe macroeconomic weakness were intensified by strong competition," according to Vodafone said. Revenue rose 2.7 percent in Northern and Central Europe but fell 2.9 percent in Africa, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.Operators today struggling to balance falling revenue from voice and messaging services with growth in revenue from data. In Vodafone's case, revenue from the first two decreased by £3.8 billion, while data revenue grew by just £469 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Nokia Lumia 920 is first ever smartphone to feature built-in optical image stabilisation. The Lumia 920 also has an 8.7 megapixel sensor, 26mm fixed lens with fast f/2.0 aperture and 1080p video. Read our Nokia Lumia 920 review to find out if it can replace a compact camera, even in low-light... Read the review »

The images Mark Fischer makes for his Aguasonic Acoustics project are visually mesmerizing, like something you might find in a black-light room at the back of a smokeshop. These images, however, weren't created to enhance your high. They're animal sounds ...

The Pentagon's decision to grant Apple the security clearance required for iOS 6 devices to go head-to-head with BlackBerry 10 and certain Samsung Galaxy S4 devices on secure military networks could have with a cascading effect that spills over into the private sector. BlackBerry 10 and the Samsung Galaxy S4 received security clearance from the Pentagon earlier this month. The Pentagon has not approved Android in general, or even the Samsung Galaxy S4 in its default state. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is authorized only as long as it uses Samsung’s Knox security software. The Pentagon has cleared iOS 6 devices for use on secure military networks. The Pentagon uses approximately 600,000 mobile devices. The vast majority of those are BlackBerry, because BlackBerry established itself early on as a secure, manageable mobile platform. Now, BlackBerry will have to fight with Apple and Samsung to maintain that dominance. The United States Air Force is eager to jump on the iOS bandwagon. Following in the footsteps of many commercial airlines, the USAF plans to replace bulky flight manuals and flight plans with iPads. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mageia has long been what you might call a “best-kept secret” of the Linux world, consistently residing among the top five distributions in DistroWatch's page-hit rankings despite minimal marketing and hoopla. The distro has only been around since it was forked from Mandriva Linux back in 2010, of course, but after several weeks' delay  the Mageia project on Sunday finally launched the third major version of the free and open source operating system. Mageia Linux 2 made its debut just about a year ago. Now, Mageia 3 is here, “all grown up and ready to go dancing,” as it was put in the project's weekend announcement. Mageia 3 is dedicated to the late “Eugeni Dodonov, our friend, our colleague and a great inspiration,” the team added. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Welcome to the wacky world of tech patents—a place where you’ll find not just the crazy-sounding ideas that inhabit any category of patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), but some ideas that seem so minute or so obvious that you wonder how they ever qualified as patentworthy. Once issued, however, a patent isn’t just a shield. It’s a weapon that companies and individuals can use against their competitors. “Patent trolls” are infamous for acquiring patents and then making the business of filing lawsuits against alleged infringers their core competency. The technology sector is hardly alone in taking patent-holding to extreme levels of judivial enforcement. But some of the most bizarre tech patents we found suggest that we may need a new idea for protecting ideas—one that can more easily weed out the lawyers and the loonies. The 'Interactive Web' patent 1998 To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A devastating tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma on Monday, May 20, 2013. It was reportedly over 2 miles wide at one point, and covered 20 miles during the 40 minutes it was on the ground. The National Weather Service has classified it as at least an EF-4 tornado with winds of at least 166 miles per hour. NBC affiliate station WMC-TV had a helicopter camera in the sky capturing the whole thing, and released the time-lapse video above showing the storm traveling across the land before finally disappearing back into the clouds. The 2013 Oklahoma City tornado as it passed through south Oklahoma City. Photograph by Ks0stm The tornado was also extremely well documented by cameras and gutsy storm chasers (and ordinary folk) on the ground. Here are some of the videos that were uploaded to the web just hours after the storm struck: One family even had its camera rolling as it emerged from their storm shelter and surveyed the destruction: Photo galleries of the tornado and its aftermath can be found on The Denver Post’s Plog and The Atlantic’s InFocus. USA Today has published a list of relief organizations you can donate to if you’d like to help the victims of this disaster.