Amazon Web Services opens in Sydney; Israel/Palestine conflict spills onto social media

Welcome back to The Week in IT, where we take a look at the more curious tales coming out of information technology in the last seven days.

Amazon last week launched an Australian version of its Web Services (AWS) product, offering the services out of a Sydney data centre. The data centre will support the S3, EC2 and DynamoDB services, among many others.

Around 10,000 Australian customers have already made use of the AWS service, but have had to access it from data centres located in other countries, opening up a regulatory can of worms and potentially increasing latency.

Pricing of the Australian-based service seems to be in line with that of the Singapore AWS service, which is about 30% more than sourcing the service from the company’s US-based data centres.

Israel and Palestine

The long-running and bloody conflict between Israel and Palestine spilled out onto social media last week, with both sides turning to new media websites to win public support.

Last week’s social media exchange began in earnest when Israel Defence Forces (IDF) posted a video to YouTube of their assassination of Hamas military leader Ahmed Said Khalil al-Jabari, mere hours after the killing. The IDF also live-blogged the event and tweeted the video (note: the video embedded on that page and set to autoplay may be distressing for some readers).

The self-proclaimed official Twitter account of Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, responded with tweets of its own, including, among others: “Our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are (You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves)”.

Days later, members of hacker group Anonymous attacked Israeli government websites, saying: “For far too long, Anonymous has stood by with the rest of the world and watched in despair the barbaric, brutal and despicable treatment of the Palestinian people in the so-called ‘Occupied Territories’ by the Israel Defence Force.”

Members of Anonymous said Israel’s threat to block telecommunications and internet access on the Gaza Strip “crossed the line in the sand” and that if Israel did block access, it “will know the full and unbridled wrath of Anonymous”.

Anonymous members claimed more than 40 Israeli government and military websites had been taken down in three hours.

Several days later, the Israeli government said that in the previous four days it had “deflected 44 million cyberattacks on government websites. All the attacks were thwarted except for one, which targeted a specific website that was down for six or seven minutes.”

The conflict continues on the Gaza Strip and online.