Amazon’s success with EC2 and S3 is making them bleed money, as investors start to get nervous we’ll debate if the cloud’s price race to the bottom can lead to anything but awful.

Linus tells it like it is, we bust some Android FUD, and more!

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed | Torrent Feed

Become a supporter on Patreon:

Show Notes:

Amazon apparently set to launch Square-competitor in August as it develops biometric payment solutions

Amazon could be preparing to launch its own mobile credit card reading hardware in the coming weeks, according to internal Staples documents hinting at such a launch that we’ve obtained. According to the documents, Staples stores will prepare next month to stock a new product called the “Amazon Card Reader” alongside existing card readers from Square, PayPal, and Staples’ own in-house brand. The small hardware, which will likely connect to smartphones to process payments, will cost $9.99, according to the Staples internal sales systems…

An exact launch date for the product is unconfirmed, but Staples has asked its stores to wait until Tuesday, August 12th to put up new signage related to the Amazon Card Reader, so it’s possible that the release is scheduled for that week.

• Amazon may be going after Square with a credit card reader of its own | The Verge

Amazon’s Cloud Is Growing So Fast It’s Scaring Shareholders

Yesterday Amazon said that while its cloud business grew by 90 percent last year, it was significantly less profitable. Amazon’s AWS cloud business makes up the majority of a balance sheet item it labels as “other” (along with its credit card and advertising revenue) and that revenue from that line of business grew by 38 percent. Last quarter, revenue grew by 60 percent. In other words, Amazon is piling on customers faster than it’s adding dollars to its bottom line.

The company’s chief financial officer, Tom Szkutak, blamed the drop on “substantial” price reductions the company has made to products such as its core EC2, storage and database services. “They ranged from 28 percent to 51 percent depending on the service,” he said on a conference call with analysts.

The thing is that even as Amazon’s business matures to the size of a company like VMware, its worrying to investors to see profitability slipping. That’s pretty much the meta-narrative of Amazon as a whole, though, which says it could lose as much as $810 million in the current quarter. The company is taking losses to invest in the future, and Amazon’s 10 percent stock drop today shows that some investors are uncomfortable with that.

Amazon.com Inc. missed analysts’ estimates for a second straight quarter, sending the shares tumbling 11 percent.

Trend Micro backs off Google Play malware claims

In a recent press release, Trend Micro made a fairly bold claim about malware running rampant in the Google Play Store. The release, dated July 15, 2014, began as follows:

Google Play populated with fake apps, with more than half carrying malware

Potentially evil doppelgangers for the most popular apps are inundating the Google Play store, with many carrying malware, according to a new blog post and report by Trend Micro, a global developer of cyber security solutions.

In the report more than 77 percent of the top 50 apps on the Google Play store have repackaged or fake apps associated with them.

It turns out that Trend Micro is guilty of a little over-eager language that obfuscated the nature of some of these threats. While there are indeed fake versions of many popular Android apps available for download, Trend failed to mention in their initial promotion for the report that the apps in question were posted outside the Play Store, and had to be installed manually in what’s commonly known as a side-load. This requires users to download the app in a browser, ignore a standard security warning about APK files, and disable a security option in Android’s main settings menu.

• Trend Micro caught lying about Android security

Linus Torvalds: “GCC 4.9.0 Seems To Be Terminally Broken” – Slashdot

A critique from Linus Torvalds of GCC 4.9.0. after a random panic was discovered in a load balance function in Linux 3.16-rc6. in an email to the Linux kernel mailing list outlining two separate but possibly related bugs, Linus describes the compiler as “terminally broken,” and worse (“pure and utter sh*t,” only with no asterisk).

• A slice:

“Lookie here, your compiler does some absolutely insane things with the spilling, including spilling a *constant. For chrissake, that compiler shouldn’t have been allowed to graduate from kindergarten. We’re talking “sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby” level retardation levels here …. Anyway, this is not a kernel bug. This is your compiler creating completely broken code. We may need to add a warning to make sure nobody compiles with gcc-4.9.0, and the Debian people should probably downgrate their shiny new compiler.”*