Month: January 2020

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Amazon delivered its final quarterly earnings report for the 2019 fiscal year today, and investor response to a largely positive report describing big holiday sales and AWS performance drove the company's market cap above $1 trillion.

Amazon told investors that it achieved $87.4 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter of its fiscal-year 2019.

This quarter included the holiday shopping frenzy, and Amazon impressed investors with a 21 percent increase in sales compared to the same quarter last year. Amazon executives said that the company quadrupled same-day and one-day shipping over last year's figures, and it credited part of the holiday success to the company's ability to offer expedient shipping. Achieving those speedy deliveries brought Amazon's shipping expenditures in the quarter up to $12.9 billion, more than 40 percent more than last year.

Enlarge / The Dallas County Courthouse in Adel, Iowa. (credit: Stephen Matthew Milligan)

Prosecutors have dropped criminal charges against two security professionals who were arrested and jailed last September for breaking into an Iowa courthouse as part of a contract with Iowa’s judicial arm.

The dismissal, which was announced on Thursday, is a victory not only for Coalfire Labs, the security firm that employed the two penetration testers, but the security industry as a whole and the countless organizations that rely on it. Although employees Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn had written authorization to test the physical security of the Dallas County Courthouse in Iowa, the men spent more than 12 hours in jail on felony third-degree burglary charges. The charges were later lowered to misdemeanor trespass.

The case cast a menacing cloud over an age-old practice that’s crucial to securing buildings and the computers and networks inside of them. Penetration testers are hired to hack or break into sensitive systems or premises and then disclose the vulnerabilities and techniques that made the breaches possible. Owners and operators then use the information to improve security.

• 

  This is the first thing you see when you fire up the installer for the new Edge browser. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Before much longer, every new Windows PC is going to have a new default browser: it will still be named Microsoft Edge, but it's a completely different browser than the old version. Cue the jokes now about "the new browser everyone uses to download Chrome"—but we're not sure that so many people will actually bother downloading Chrome anymore.

The old Microsoft Edge was a completely in-house Microsoft design, proprietary from the ground up. It wasn't necessarily a bad browser, but it never really took off—by the time Edge became a thing, most of the people who cared about their browsers were so sick and tired of Internet Explorer they'd long since moved on to either Firefox or Chrome; and the people who didn't care much about their browsers frequently ended up finding the old Internet Explorer and setting it as their default when they discovered that "the big blue E" on their taskbar didn't work with legacy IE-only websites and apps.

The new Edge isn't entirely—or even mostly, so far—a Microsoft effort, though. Edge is now based on the open source Chromium browser, which is the underpinning of Google Chrome and several other, lesser-known browsers as well. It should seem immediately familiar to seasoned Chrome users—and it even allows installing extensions directly from Chrome's own Web store. It's not hard to imagine a lot of Chrome users simply not bothering to replace it when they see how familiar it is.