It seems that the US Air Force has taken a pretty big hit when it comes to the storage of the data related to internal investigations. The system that they have been using has had a glitch that resulted in the loss of around 12 years of data. Normally this would only be a big deal until the backup was restored, but… there was no back up of this data as a complete set. There might be subsets of this data in other systems scattered throughout the US Air Force systems, but even that is not for sure.

Apple is truly ramping up the PR machine and has even managed to get a few people in government to make some rather outrageous statements on the new phone and iOS 8. One of the new stories going around is about how the new iPhone and iOS8 are suddenly “NSA Proof” because they have added data encryption. The fallacy of this claim is almost beyond belief and shows once again that most in the technical press have absolutely no memory.

It is not often that we can write about a big company like Microsoft and say they are doing “the right thing”. This is even more true in light of the Snowden revelations that showed the close cooperation that Microsoft (and others) had with many data collection programs run by the NSA. Any trust that people had in Microsoft and their drive to protect their customer’s data vanished in an instant. Since those days Microsoft has been working very hard to rebuild consumer trust. They have put SSL and TLS encryption on their email service and have put a few privacy (pronounce that security if you are in government) features in place to help change the public opinion.

This morning as I was cursing through the internet news sites I noticed a trend. I saw multiple articles about the state of security all of them claiming that the bad guys a winning or lamenting about the increase in cyber-attacks. Both of these themes are very true, we are seeing an increase in the number of attacks per day (in 2012 it was roughly 1 per day) and the “bad guys” seem to be able to penetrate security with ease. So if this is the case, why do we see more and more efforts to move data and services into the cloud?

A team of Japanese researchers from Chuo University in Tokyo said they have solved one of the biggest problems that still limits the development of solid-state drives. Specifically, with currently available SSD technology it is not possible to directly write the data to the NAND chips over other data. Instead, data is written to the free part of the SSD drive, while old data is formatted. This way of operation eventually leads to fragmentation of data and reduces the performance and life-cycle of SSD drive.

Ericsson and Australian mobile operator Telstra announced that they have for the first time in a commercial mobile network reached the transmission speed of 450Mbps to the customer using technology LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) Carrier Aggregation.

Data storage service in the cloud SugarSync has updated its application for the Android operating system with several new features. The most important novelty in 4.1 version of the application is the ability to sync a folder with files for offline viewing. You can select the folders that will be stored on an external microSD card for later viewing on smart phones and tablets without the use of an Internet connection.

The Japanese company Rakuten, specializing in e-business, today announced that their $900 million acquisition is Viber, the popular mobile application for instant messaging and voice communication. Recently we wrote that Viber was for sale and that there are several Asian companies interested in it, however the main candidate was Chinese WeChat.

Nokia video showcase is trying to remind us that in today's modern world we must pay more attention to the protection of personal data, and also to convince us that they have just the right solution for us.

According to the New York Times and an analyst Chetan Sharma amount of mobile data traffic in the US market almost doubled compared to last year. Americans in 2013 spent an average of about 1.2 GB of traffic per month on their mobile devices. During the 2012 an average of 690 MB of data traffic was spent per month via mobile devices.