Hasta La Gadget!

After nearly a year on the market, Amazon has finally blessed its Cloud Drive apps for Windows and Mac with a file syncing folder. Starting today, users can access their documents, music and photos across multiple computers — a feature that we’ve seen from the likes of Google Drive, Dropbox and SkyDrive for quite some time. While this feature is far from groundbreaking, it does manage to make Amazon’s service a respectable alternative to cloud storage’s reigning heavy hitters. Toss in its 5GB of free storage and Cloud Drive could become a worthy contender for those who are looking for a new or additional place to house their digital collections.

Filed under: Storage, Software, Amazon

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Via: The Verge

Source: Amazon

Will Vandevanter, of Help Net Security, made a rather disturbing discovery: thousands of Amazon S3 data “buckets” were improperly configured and left exposed to prying eyes. Vandevanter started his probe by generating URLs using the names of major companies and sites that use Amazon’s cloud storage service. In the end he uncovered 12,328 of the so-called buckets — 1,951 of which were visible to the public. Those folders were home to some 126 billion files that contain everything from personal data hosted by a social networking service, sales records, video game source code and even unencrypted backups of databases. By default, S3 accounts are set to private, which means these stores of potentially sensitive data had to be flipped to public manually — most likely by accident. Amazon has responded to the discovery by alerting users who might have inadvertently made their files publicly accessible. If you’ve got an S3 account of your own, now would be an excellent time to double check your own settings. And if you’re looking for more details of Vandevanter’s research, hit up the source link.

Filed under: Internet, Amazon

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Via: The Verge

Source: Help Net Security

In a world that’s becoming increasingly swamped with cloud storage options, it’s good to see a true, original gangster innovating like the pressure is on. In a matter of moments, Dropbox is going to launch a re-imagined desktop client — one that promises “more visibility into activity in one’s Dropbox, faster access to your files, and a brand new look and feel.” The changes here are fairly subtle, but they’re ones that power users are bound to appreciate. You’ll be able to accept invitations with less friction, see links or albums that people have shared with you, and keep tabs on what’s changed in your Dropbox. There’s also a newfangled way to share your stuff with a link, right from the Dropbox menu.

Over on the mobile side, notifications for shared folders will also show up on the latest versions of Dropbox’s iOS and Android apps (and on the web at dropbox.com/events). Keep an eye on the source link; the new download links should be live any minute.

Filed under: Storage, Internet

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Source: Dropbox

SugarSync 2.0 has been in the oven for awhile, having gone into beta last year, but it’s now fully baked. The finished version offers the promised extra-simple sharing and syncing, with drag-and-drop transfers to the cloud, contacts and Dropbox-style public links. A virtual drive and cloud search simply things, too. Both desktop and web apps get more of a consistent look, and the Android app has been given its promised overhaul both for the new features as well as to offer uploads and syncing from an SD card. Android, Mac and Windows users can update at their leisure; iOS users will have to wait a few weeks, although both new and old versions can coexist until everyone is on the same page.

Filed under: Cellphones, Storage, Internet, Software, Mobile

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Via: SugarSync Blog

Source: SugarSync, Google Play

Microsoft’s cloud storage service SkyDrive has hit a significant numerical landmark: over a billion Office documents are now hosted on it. To celebrate, Redmond has made is a little easier to edit files using Office Web Apps — you no longer need to sign in using a Microsoft account (unless the sharing party wants you to), so if you’ve got the right link, you can start tweaking with minimal fuss. A billion Office files sounds like a big number, but we’d really like the details of how many users that’s spread over. As many as DropBox? Who knows.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Microsoft

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Source: Microsoft