Amazon is used to send order confirmation Emails to its customers who purchase goods from Amazon.com. A couple of people reported that they get fake Amazon.com order confirmation Emails with url of malicious website. This is a new version of Email attack that i have ever seen. The text in Email looks like

Dear Customer, Your order has been sucessfully confirmed. For your reference, here’s a summary of your order: You just confirmed order #2341-23483720-38123 Status: CONFIRMED.

At the end of the e-mail follows a link to a malware site, labeled "ORDER INFORMATION".

A number of different domains have been seen used so far.

Source : http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=8344&rss

Amazon has launched a beta version of Kindle App for BlackBerry devices. With this App BlackBerry users will be able to get access to 400,000 Kindle books and if you are already having a Kindle account then you also get access to your Kindle books on to your BlackBerry device. With this App BlackBerry users can automatically synchronizes their last page read and annotations between devices with Whispersync.

Kindle App Supported BlackBerry Devices

Type amazon.com/kindlebb" into your BlackBerry browser to download Kindle BlackBerry App

Now it is possible for .Net Developers to create AWS Applications using .Net because Amazon has released a SDK for Microsoft .Net. AWS SDK allow developers to build solutions for AWS infrastructure services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon SimpleDB.

To get started with AWS SDK you must have .Net Framework 2.0 or later.

Features

The AWS .NET SDK features:

• AWS .NET Library – Build .NET applications on top of APIs that take the complexity out of coding directly against web services interfaces. The all-in-one library provides .NET developer-friendly APIs that hide much of the lower-level plumbing associated with programming for the AWS cloud, including authentication, request retries, and error handling.
• Code Samples – Practical examples in C# for how to use the libraries to build applications.
• Documentation – Learn more about how to use the libraries and code samples with online video tutorials and reference documentation.
• Visual Studio Support – Get started quickly with building solutions for the AWS cloud using Visual Studio Project Templates.

Supported Services

The AWS SDK for .NET supports the AWS infrastructure products, including:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
• Amazon SimpleDB
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
• Amazon CloudFront
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce
• Amazon CloudWatch
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Auto Scaling

Download AWS SDK for .Net

Amazon launched a new website called Amazon Wireless that offers cell phones and wireless plans.  Currently Amazon wireless website is in beta and Amazon is testing features and adding more and more feature to their website.

Amazon Wireless currently offers more than 130 phones from AT&T and Verizon Wireless as of now, these cell phones includes  wide range of smart phones  that fits into your budget. Amazon Wireless offers a number of options for shopping cell phones like carrier, phone feature, price, color, and brand. Amazon Wireless  shopping cart will guide you through each stage of the purchase process, where you will find familiar Amazon features like bestseller lists, detailed product descriptions, and customer reviews.

Amazon wireless service is only available in USA. All cell phones purchased via Amazon Wireless need to be purchased for a 22 year contract. Amazon Wireless also offering a free 2 day shipping for all phones.

AmazonWireless is owned and operated by Amazon.com. So You can use your  Amazon.com account on AmazonWireless, and you benefit from Amazon’s world-class service and security.

AWS Start-Up Challenge 2009

Amazon is looking for hottest and coolest startup or startup ideas for their AWS startup contest for year 2009. Developers and entrepreneurs from United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Israel are eligible for entering in AWS startup challenge contest. AWS startup challenge winner is going to win  $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits, mentoring sessions from AWS technical experts, and AWS Premium Support Gold for one year.

How to Enter in AWS Startup Challenge?

By filling this online application form before August  26, 2009 you can enter into AWS startup challenge. The judges will review all applications and choose 5 finalists based on the following criteria: originality and creativity of the idea, likelihood of long-term success and scalability, how well it addresses a need in the marketplace, implementation of payments functionality, quality of presentation, and implementation of AWS infrastructure services and/or other paid services.

In October, the finalists will be announced and Amazon is going to post a video of each finalist on AWS Website where the community can vote for their favorite start-up as they prepare for the final judging round.

New Bonus Award for 2009

The AWS Start-Up Challenge finalist with the most creative monetization model using Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS) or Simple Pay from Amazon Payments will receive $5,000 in cash and $5,000 in Amazon Payments credits. Also, all finalists using these payment services will receive $2,500 in Amazon Payments credits and will be included in various promotional activities.

See the Official Rules and Prizes for more information.

Uploading data from hard drive to any online backup service will take significant amount of time, to solve this problem Amazon has come up with solution called Import/Export Backup means Amazon S2 and S3 users can ship their hard drive to Amazon and Amazon will upload the data onto their servers. Uploading data to Amazon S3 servers is not a big issue if you have a high speed internet connection while some of these data sets would take weeks or months to upload. For example, it would take over 80 days to upload just 1TB of data over a T1 connection.

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Amazon announced that they are in the process of changing Amazon Associate referral program. Amazon will no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks.

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IBM and Amazon teamed up for providing pay-as-you-go IBM development and production versions of IBM Information Management database servers, IBM Lotus content management, and IBM WebSphere portal and middleware products, all running on Novell’s SUSE Linux on Amazon EC2. Developers can also use their existing licenses of IBM software with Amazon cloud computing platform.  IBM Passport Advantage Customers can install and run IBM Programs in the Amazon EC2 cloud environment using Program licenses obtained from IBM on a Processor Value Unit (PVU) basis.  The table below lists the number of PVU licenses required per IBM Program for each Amazon EC2 Instance Type currently available as of the table publish date. Charges for the Amazon Web Services EC2 service are separate and remain the responsibility of the customer.

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Web technology consultant and developer Brett O’Connor has released a complete article how BitTorrent users can setup a BitTorrent client over the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform. Amazon EC2 offers a powerful cloud computing platform mainly for Rich Internet Application developer and also Amazon EC2 is also offer a greater bandwidth and computing power as compare to other traditional hosting providers. This might be a good idea to move BitTorrent Client to Amazon EC2.

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The most popular property in the world in December was Google Sites, with 777.9 million visitors, followed by Microsoft Sites (647.9 million visitors), Yahoo! Sites (562.6 million visitors). Facebook.com, which has grown a dramatic 127-percent in the past year to 222 million visitors, now ranks as the top social networking site worldwide and the seventh most popular property in the world. 

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