The impairment doesn’t affect United Internet’s dividend policy or its guidance for the year, the company said. United Internet holds 8.3 percent in Rocket, a stake valued at about 278 million euros, according to Bloomberg data.

“The development of Rocket companies is advancing and many things already work well, but it naturally takes time,” United Internet Chief Executive Officer Ralph Dommermuth said in a phone interview. “While the share price could be more positive, I’m convinced that investments in Internet companies like Rocket will pay off in the medium and long-term.”

Drag on Stock

Shares of United Internet rose as much as 4.1 percent as the company reported first-quarter sales and profit from its operating results that beat estimates, after signing up 270,000 new customers.

The second quarter started “very well” when it comes to user gains and the company may potentially raise its customer development guidance if the trend continues in the coming months, Dommermuth said. The company, which competes with Deutsche Telekom AG and Vodafone Group Plc selling telephone and Internet access and services, is open to buying international web-hosting companies and possibly more city-owned telecommunications networks, he said.

United Internet’s results would have been better without the Rocket investment. Rocket shares have declined about 28 percent this year as the company faces pressure to prove its investments will pay off. The company, which helps guide a stable of startups such as HelloFresh, Westwing and Delivery Hero, showed little progress reducing losses at several of them last year.

Many of its companies were still in the growth phase and needed investments in 2015, CEO Oliver Samwer said earlier this year, vowing to show “significant” improvements in profitability this year and next.

Investment AB Kinnevik, the second-biggest shareholder in Rocket, will evaluate its stake once the holdings will mature in two to three years, CEO Lorenzo Grabau told Dagens Nyheter. The Samwers still are the biggest shareholder in Rocket.

By Stefan Nicola

Source: TheWHIR

From open source organizations like Joomla to the infrastructure advocacy of the i2Coalition to financial backers like Cheval Capital, the organizations that support hosting and cloud will be part of the big-picture education provided by the HostingCon Global sessions.

HostingCon has always been vendor-neutral, and the variety of perspectives shared in the educational sessions is one of the strengths which makes it the industry’s leading conference and trade show. Open source or proprietary; public or private; enterprise or government; one-stop shop or channel partner, expertise will be shared on the topics closest to every possible kind of hosting and cloud service provider.

Information about the educational sessions at HostingCon Global New Orleans 2016 is still filtering out, and plenty of details are already available to the website.

Source: TheWHIR

2. Court Orders Pirate Bay Domains to be Forfeited to the State

The Swedish Court of Appeal has ruled that The Pirate Bay will have its Swedish domains, ThePirateBay.se, and PirateBay.se, based on the grounds that the domains are tools used to infringe copyright, according to a report by Torrent Freak. It seems likely that there will be an appeal in this case, as The Pirate Bay co-founder and alleged owner of the domains Fredrik Neij has hinted.

3. Premium domains are confusing, but can be profitable for domain name registries

Premium domains can be confusing, but a premium strategy can payoff for a registry if done right, according to a report by Domain Name Wire, which notes that Rightside had a record month for premium domain sales last month, averaging about $550 per domain.

Source: TheWHIR

Digital has had data centers in London and Amsterdam, but Frankfurt is a new market the company has been eyeing for some time. Earlier this year it announced a land acquisition in Frankfurt where it plans to construct a three-building data center campus. Ownership of Telecity’s Lyonestrasse facility in Frankfurt and contracts with its tenants are likely to accelerate capacity take-up on the future campus as those existing customers look to expand in the market.

Related: How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last?

This Tuesday, Digital will join Dow Jones’s S&P 500, one of the most widely tracked stock market indexes, becoming the second company in the index focused solely on data center services. The other one is Equinix, which joined the index last year. Digital will replace Time Warner Cable, which is being acquired by Charter Communications.

Equinix’s blockbuster Telecity acquisition, which closed in January, radically changed data center market dynamics in Europe. By securing the deal, the Redwood City, California-based colocation provider instantly became the top data center provider in the region.

The acquisition disrupted an agreed-to but not yet closed merger between London-based Telecity and the Dutch data center provider Interxion, at the time two of Europe’s largest players. Had the merger gone through, it would have been nearly impossible for Equinix, or any other provider, to take the top spot in the European market in the future.

Digital, which historically focused on wholesale data center services, providing large chunks of data center capacity to the likes of Equinix (still one of its biggest customers), recently pivoted to a strategy that includes both wholesale and retail colocation services, competing more directly with Equinix. Last year it acquired Telx, one of Equinix’s biggest competitors in the US, in a deal that doubled its retail colo business.

Read more: Telx Acquisition Closed, Here’s Digital Realty’s Plan

Besides the acquisition of eight Equinix data centers by Digital, the companies also agreed on a binding option for Equinix to acquire a Digital facility in Paris, where Equinix leases and operates two data centers, for about $215 million. There’s no guarantee at this point that Equinix will exercise the option.

The portfolio Digital has agreed to buy contains about 213,000 square feet of data center space and 24.4MW of IT load total. About 650 customers are using the facilities, occupying 72 percent of available power, Digital said in a statement.

The portfolio also includes the potential to add another 15MW and close to 90,000 square feet of data center space in London and Amsterdam in the future.

Original article appeared here: Digital Realty Buys Eight Equinix Data Centers in Europe

Source: TheWHIR

Thanks to our sponsors, SoftLayer, Lenovo, Radware, Liquid Web, we are able to offer complimentary drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Our sponsors also come with prizes to giveaway to lucky attendees. Here’s what you could win (if you bring a business card):

If you’re in New York or surrounding area, I hope to see you on Thursday night! RSVP free today.

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: New Report Confirms Tech Firms Failing to Protect User Privacy Rights

“NTIA’s initial analysis only scratches the surface of this important area, but it is clear policymakers need to develop a better understanding of mistrust in the privacy and security of the Internet and the resulting chilling effects,” Rafi Goldberg, Policy Analyst, Office of Policy Analysis and Development said in a blog post describing the report. “In addition to being a problem of great concern to many Americans, privacy and security issues may reduce economic activity and hamper the free exchange of ideas online.”

Perhaps the most interesting finding was that 45 percent of online households reported that these concerns prevented them from conducting financial transactions or buying goods and services online. Even more troubling, these concerns also kept online users from posting on social networks or expressing opinions on controversial or political issues via the Internet. Thirty percent of respondents refrained from at least two of these activities, according to the report.

This last finding suggests that Internet-connected households are becoming savvier in terms of understanding that private services online are seldom private, and the importance of understanding who owns your data online, but reflects a self-censorship that could be dangerous. Last year a report by the Pew Research Center found that one-third of Americans have changed social media privacy settings, used social media less often, and avoided use of certain terms online in order to protect their information from surveillance.

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: Moving Away from AWS Cloud: Dropbox Isn’t an Anomaly, and Here’s Why

According to IDC’s press release, from a company size perspective, large and very large companies will be the primary driver of worldwide public cloud services with spending of more than $80 billion in 2019. However, small and medium businesses (SMBs) will remain a significant contributor to overall spending with more than 40 percent of the worldwide total throughout the forecast period coming from companies with fewer than 500 employees.

With all of this in mind – let’s start here: Distributed data centers and cloud service providers are not altogether new technologies – however, their widespread adoption over the past few years has certainly been noticed. As opposed to a single, centralized data center managing all known workloads, administrators are now utilizing WAN and cloud technologies to evolve beyond single points of operation.

As technology progresses, so does the data center. Currently, server, switching and storage resources have become less expensive and more attainable by more organizations. This has led to a distributed environment revolution. Organizations are taking advantage of this type environment by decentralizing their infrastructure to allow their data to be more agile and redundant.

Cloud-based data centers are an example of a distributed environment where a single organization can have multiple points of live data. Furthermore, one of the most dominant forms of cloud is still the hybrid architecture. Findings from a recent Gartner report say that 2016 will be the defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.

So – what are the benefits behind adopting this type of environment? Well, there are actually a few:

• IT administrators are able to create hot DR sites and replicate their vital data over a dedicated WAN link.
• Extra resources are just a few mouse-clicks away with the marriage of virtualization and cloud technologies. Engineers can spin up new VMs as needed to handle additional user loads.
• Large, bulky environments can be consolidated into smaller, more efficient datacenters where a single point of failure becomes a problem of the past.

Still, with distributed environments, there are challenges that must be addressed. Since every environment is truly unique, each infrastructure may have their own set of design questions to answer.

• Remember, when looking into a distributed environment, WAN link considerations must be made. In these situations, evaluate the type of load that’s going to be pushed down the pipe. Prior to deploying any production systems, relevant workload stress testing must occur to fully grasp the type of bandwidth requirements needed.
• Security will also be a challenge. In a distributed environment, access to the data and workloads must be carefully managed and monitored. Proper security best practices should always be applied to a given workload.
• Finally, resource management can sometimes be a difficult task to monitor as well. With distributed environments, an organization may potentially have several datacenter points. Each datacenter will have its own set of resources. Having a solid monitoring system will ensure that these resources are properly used and allocated as needed.

Maybe you’re not the size of a Netflix – yet. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t begin to leverage the power of the cloud. There are so many great servers to explore that almost every business across any vertical can find some type of benefit. When working with cloud, always take the time to plan out your deployments. Creating the right type of contracts and proper SLAs will help ensure that you maintain costs and keep the cloud environment aligned with the business.

Source: TheWHIR

Bangladesh Central Bank, Swift Blame Each Other Over Heist

A mystery group has stolen $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank, using “Bangladesh Bank’s Swift credentials to divert money from Bangladesh’s foreign-reserve account at the New York Fed to fraudulent bank accounts in the Philippines.” The whole thing is quite a mess, and has left everyone doing a lot of finger pointing.

How much is a security flaw worth? An inside look into Yahoo’s bug bounty program

Yahoo’s digital security team, dubbed the Paranoids, meet weekly to review reports from security researchers who claim to have found flaws in Yahoo’s platforms. They are the ones who decide “whether a hacker will get a cash prize as high as $15,000 – or just a box of Yahoo-branded swag.” Personally, I’d be OK with a band T-shirt that says The Paranoids.

And speaking of security…

Study: Number of Costly DoS-Related Data Center Outages Rising

Denial of Service, or DoS, is the most common form of cyberattacks on data centers, according to a new report by the Ponemon Institute. In 32 percent of the DoS attack incidents survey respondents reported, their data centers suffered a partial outage, while 17 percent suffered total outage.

Google proposes new set of female emojis to promote equality

While the most popular emojis are still the smiley face, sad face, and the heart, if you’ve ever scrolled through your emoji keyboard you’ve likely seen that the emojis representing women are a little bit…shallow. Google thought it was high time that changed. The new emojis reflect 13 different professions, including a software engineer and scientist.

Source: TheWHIR