Which hopefully sweetened this painful blow:

Pentagon Cancels $10 Billion JEDI Cloud Contract That Amazon and Microsoft Were Fighting Over

After years of legal battles over this particular cloud contract between Amazon and Microsoft, ultimately—like all things in the cloud native world—even the Pentagon realized this particular project had become outdated even before it had begun.  With technology, data, and infrastructure demands constantly evolving for large-scale organizations, such a project is a continuously moving target.  It isn’t all bad news though, as a new project is being planned, with Microsoft and Amazon currently the only viable vendors to solicit for the project.  Let’s see how Andy Jassy weathers this first major Amazon storm.

An Israeli Tech Story That Isn’t an IPO

NSO found themselves in the eye of the storm recently when a major controversy around their Pegasus project exploded after the likes of world-renowned whistleblower Edward Snowden called for the ban of their alleged spyware. Amnesty International, including their technology arm Amnesty Tech, and Forbidden Stories gained access to a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers and began a months-long inquiry and report into understanding the importance behind these numbers. Turns out Pegasus has allegedly been sold to terrorist organizations, mafia, and authoritarian regimes to target journalists, activists, and any other persona non-grata, those of whom can afford to purchase the costly spyware, of course.  AWS made the move to shut down NSO’s account, at the height of the story breaking—adding fuel to the fire (Albeit they do use other infrastructure as well—Digital Ocean, Linode, and OVH among them.). It remains to be seen how this will play out.  Certainly worthwhile to track the #Pegasus and #PegasusProject hashtags on Twitter.