Sci-Tech

Are rainy days ahead for cloud computing?

Published

4 days ago

June 27, 2024

Sean McManus

8 minutes ago

By Sean McManus, Technology reporter

David Heinemeier Hansson saved his firm serious money by leaving the cloud

David Heinemeier Hansson David Heinemeier Hansson co-owner of software firm 37signalswearing a hoodie and coat — David Heinemeier Hansson saved his firm serious money by leaving the cloud

This year, software firm 37signals will see a profit boost of more than $1m (£790,000) from leaving the cloud.

“To be able to get that with such relatively modest changes to our business is astounding,” says co-owner and chief technology officer, David Heinemeier Hansson.

The US company has millions of users for its online project management and productivity software, including Basecamp and Hey.

Like many companies it outsourced data storage and computing to a third party firm, a so-called cloud services provider.

They own huge data centres, where they host data from other firms, which can be accessed over the internet.

In 2022, such services cost 37signals $3.2m.

“Seeing the bill on a weekly basis really radicalised me,” Mr Heinemeier Hansson says.

“I went: ‘Wait! What are we spending for a week of rentals?’ I could buy some really powerful computers just on one week’s worth of [cloud] spending.”

So, he did. Buying hardware and hosting it in a shared data centre costs $840,000 per year.

Although costs pushed Mr Heinemeier Hansson to act, other factors were also a concern.

The internet is engineered to be highly resilient.

“I saw the distributed design erode as more and more companies gravitated essentially to three owners of computers,” he says, referring to the three leading cloud providers.

If a major data centre goes down, large parts of the web can go offline.

The cloud was pitched, he says, as cheaper, easier, and faster. “The cloud was not able to make things easier to a point where we could measure any productivity gains,” he says, noting his operations team has always been about the same size.

Was using the cloud faster?

“Yes, but it didn’t matter,” says Mr Heinemeier Hansson.

“If you want to connect a hundred servers to the internet, you can do it in less than five minutes [in the cloud]. That’s incredible.

“But we do not need, nor do I believe the vast majority of companies need, a five-minute turnaround on a massive number of additional servers.”

He can have new servers delivered and racked in his data centre in a week, which is fast enough.

37signals does use the cloud for experimenting with new products. “We needed to have some big machines, but we only needed them for 20 minutes,” Mr Heinemeier Hansson says.

“The cloud is ideal for that. It would be wasteful to buy that computer and let it stay idle for 99.99% of the time.”

He still recommends the cloud to fledgling businesses. “When you have a speculative start-up and there’s great uncertainty as to whether you’re going to be around in 18 months, you should absolutely not spend your money buying computers,” he says. “You should rent them.”

Cloud computing has created huge businesses like AWS and Microsoft’s Azure

Getty Images ttendees walk through an expo hall at AWS re:Invent 2023, a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services — Cloud computing has created huge businesses like AWS and Microsoft’s Azure

37signals is not alone in bringing workloads back from the cloud, which is known as cloud repatriation.

Digital workspace company Citrix found that 94% of large US organisations it surveyed had worked on repatriating data or workloads from the cloud in the last three years.

The reasons cited included security concerns, unexpected costs, performance issues, compatibility problems and service downtime.

Plitch provides software that enables people to modify single-player games, including adjusting the difficulty.

It built its own private data centres and repatriated cloud workloads to them, saving an estimated 30% to 40% in costs after two years.

“A key factor in our decision was that we have highly proprietary R&D data and code that must remain strictly secure,” says Markus Schaal, managing director at the German firm.

“If our investments in features, patches, and games were leaked, it would be an advantage to our competitors. While the public cloud offers security features, we ultimately determined we needed outright control over our sensitive intellectual property.

“As our AI-assisted modelling tools advanced, we also required significantly more processing power that the cloud could not meet within budget.”

He adds: “We encountered occasional performance issues during heavy usage periods and limited customisation options through the cloud interface. Transitioning to a privately-owned infrastructure gave us full control over hardware purchasing, software installation, and networking optimized for our workloads.”

Mark Turner’s firm gives companies an alternative to the cloud

Pulsant Mark Turner, chief commercial officer at Pulsant in a formal pose wearing a smart jacket — Mark Turner’s firm gives companies an alternative to the cloud

Mark Turner, chief commercial officer at Pulsant, helps companies to migrate from the cloud to Pulsant’s colocation data centres across the UK.

In a colocation arrangement the client owns the IT hardware, but houses it with another firm, where it can be kept securely, at the right temperature and with power back-up.

“The cloud is going to continue to be the biggest part of IT infrastructure, but there is a good place for local, physical, secure infrastructure,” he says. “There is a repatriation going on of the things that should never have been in the cloud or that won’t work in the cloud.”

Some his biggest clients for repatriation are online software providers, where each additional customer puts more load on the server, increasing cloud costs.

One such client is LinkPool, which enables smart contracting using blockchain. It was developed in public cloud, initially using free credits. Business exploded, and the cloud bill reached $1m per month. Using colocation, costs shrunk by up to 85%.

“[The founder has] now got four racks in a data centre in the city where he lives and works, connected to the world. He goes up against his competitors and he can move his price point around because his cost is not going to move in line [with customer demand],” says Mr Turner.

“The change leaders in the IT industry are now the people who are not saying cloud first, but are saying cloud when it fits,” he adds. “Five years ago, the change disruptors were cloud first, cloud first, cloud first.”

More Technology of Business

Of course, not everyone is repatriating. Cloud computing will remain an enormous business, with AWS, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud Platform being the biggest players.

For firms like Expedia, they are essential.

It has used the cloud to consolidate 70 petabytes of travel data from its 21 brands.

Applications run in the cloud, too, except for legacy software that doesn’t work there yet.

“We are experts in travel,” says Rajesh Naidu, chief architect and senior vice president, Expedia. “[Cloud providers] are experts in running infrastructure. That’s one less thing for me to worry about while we focus on running our business.”

“One of the main things the cloud gives us is a global presence, the ability to deploy our solutions closer to the region that they need to be in,” he says.

“The other thing is the resiliency and the availability of the infrastructure. Cloud providers have designed and architected their infrastructure really well. We can ride on the coattails of their innovation.”

Expedia has a cloud centre of excellence, which saved about 10% on cloud costs last year.

“You’ve got to set policies because otherwise it’s easy for companies to run huge cloud costs,” Mr Naidu says. “You can turn things down when you don’t need them. If you consume [cloud resources] wisely, your bill won’t be a surprise at the end of the day.”

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Sci-Tech

My Doctor Misdiagnosed My Diabetes — and I’m Not Alone. What You Need to Know

Published

9 hours ago

July 1, 2024

Justin Eastzer

For the longest time, type 1 diabetes was known as a childhood disease. Even until recently, it was still called “juvenile diabetes.” I’m here to tell you that just because you’re an adult doesn’t mean you’ve escaped the wrath of this illness.

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I know this because it happened to me. At the age of 30, I was misdiagnosed with type 2 diabetes for over six months. It wasn’t until I started sharing my diagnosis on TikTok that I discovered the truth and that this could happen to someone my age.

Roughly 60% of diagnoses today occur in adults who are 20 years of age or older. This form of type 1 diabetes is called Latent Autoimmune Diabetes of Adults. On top of that, 90% of those diagnosed with type 1 have no family history.

Rates for people living with diabetes are expected to more than double to 1.3 billion by 2050. This will impact both people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Spreading awareness about symptoms and early screening for type 1 diabetes will help people get the correct diagnosis and treatment they need sooner.

lancet-type-2-diabetes-projection-2050 — Research published in The Lancet projects a steady increase in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in coming years.

The Lancet

There is a lack of awareness about diabetes, even within the medical community. Because of this, many people go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed with type 2 diabetes for months or even years. Here’s what you need to know.

The difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the pancreas no longer produces insulin, the hormone that regulates blood glucose, because the immune system attacks itself. Meanwhile, type 2 diabetes occurs due to insulin resistance, often due to lifestyle factors, and tends to be hereditary. As many as 11% of patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes might actually have LADA. There are a couple things we can all do to prevent others from going undiagnosed and feeling ill for as long as I did.

The first is to know the signs of type 1 diabetes. The tell-tale symptoms are excessive thirst and urination, extreme feeling of fatigue, blurred vision and weight loss. When I was diagnosed, I was experiencing all of these symptoms and had lost over 20 pounds. After months of misdiagnosis, I saw an endocrinologist who ordered blood tests, and within weeks, I had the correct type 1 diagnosis.

Had my glucose levels gone unchecked for longer, I could have gone into diabetic ketoacidosis or DKA, which can be deadly. Up to 30% of those diagnosed in the US are discovered at this stage.

Another way we can prevent loss of life or sickness is with early screening for indicators of type 1 diabetes. Two blood tests are used to aid in diagnosis: A c-peptide test, which measures how much insulin a person is making themselves, and an islet autoantibody test, which screens for markers of the autoimmune process associated with type 1 diabetes. With these results, people can prepare and seek out treatment to offset the disease and/or treat it.

New legislation could help

Recent legislation aims to bring early screening for type 1 diabetes to the forefront of preventative care.

Last month, a bipartisan bill called the Strengthening Collective Resources for Encouraging Education Needed for Type 1 Diabetes Act was introduced in the House of Representatives. The bill directs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct a national campaign to increase awareness and knowledge of type 1 detection, screening and management, and will allocate $5 million to the CDC to carry it out.

On my end, I will continue to share my story through articles like this one, videos on social media and interviews on my podcast, Diabetech. My hope is that no one will experience the long stretch of illness I experienced before getting the correct diagnosis and treatment needed.

Diabetes is a complex and complicated disease to manage. Devices like insulin pumps, smart insulin pens and continuous glucose monitors make living with the disease easier to manage, but they come with a steep learning curve.

I’m fortunate to be able to interview experts in the field on my podcast who help me and my audience stay informed on the latest tools and technology. I encourage anyone living with this disease to connect with me on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok to feel less alone and more in charge of your personal health.

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Sci-Tech

Midjourney is creating Donald Trump pictures when asked for images of ‘the president of the United States’

Published

11 hours ago

July 1, 2024

Pranav Dixit

Midjourney, a popular AI-powered image generator, is creating images of Donald Trump and Joe Biden despite saying that it would block users from doing so ahead of the upcoming US presidential election.

When Engadget prompted the service to create an image of “the president of the United States,” Midjourney generated four images in various styles of former president Donald Trump.

Midjourney created an image of Trump despite saying it wouldn't. — Midjourney

When asked to create an image of “the next president of the United States,” the tool generated four images of Trump as well.

Midjourney generated Donald Trump images despite saying it wouldn't. — Midjourney

When Engadget prompted Midjourney to create an image of “the current president of the United States,” the service generated three images of Trump and one image of former president Barack Obama.

Midjourney also created an image of former President Obama — Midjourney

The only time Midjourney refused to create an image of Trump or Biden was when it was asked to do so explicitly. “The Midjourney community voted to prevent using ‘Donald Trump’ and ‘Joe Biden’ during election season,” the service said in that instance. Other users on X were able to get Midjourney to generate Trump’s images too.

The tests show that Midjourney’s guardrails to prevent users from generating images of Trump and Biden ahead of the upcoming US presidential election aren’t enough — in fact, it’s really easy for people to get around them. Other chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini and Meta AI did not create images of Trump or Biden despite multiple prompts.

Midjourney did not respond to a request for comment from Engadget.

Midjourney was one the first AI-powered image generators to explicitly ban users from generating images of Trump and Biden. “I know it’s fun to make Trump pictures — I make Trump pictures,” the company’s CEO, David Holz, told users in a chat session on Discord, earlier this year. “However, probably better to just not — better to pull out a little bit during this election. We’ll see.” A month later, Holz reportedly told users that it was time to “put some foots down on election-related stuff for a bit” and admitted that “this moderation stuff is kind of hard.” The company’s existing content rules prohibit the creation of “misleading public figures” and “events portrayals” with the “potential to mislead.”

Last year, Midjourney was used to create a fake image of Pope Benedict wearing a puffy white Balenciaga jacket that went viral. It was also used to create fake images of Trump being arrested ahead of his arraignment at the Manhattan Criminal Court last year for his involvement in a hush money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Shortly afterwards, the company halted free trials of the service and, instead, required people to pay at least $10 a month to use it.

Last month, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a non-profit organization that aims to stop the spread of misinformation and hate speech online, found that Midjourney’s guardrails against generating misleading images of popular politicians including Trump and Biden failed 40% of its tests. The CCDH was able to use Midjourney to create an image of president Biden being arrested and Trump appearing next to a body double. The CCDH was also able to bypass Midjourney’s guardrails by using descriptions of each candidate’s physical appearance rather than their names to generate misleading images.

“Midjourney is far too easy to manipulate in practice – in some cases it’s completely evaded just by adding punctuation to slip through the net,” wrote CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed in a statement at the time. “Bad actors who want to subvert elections and sow division, confusion and chaos will have a field day, to the detriment of everyone who relies on healthy, functioning democracies.

Earlier this year, a coalition of 20 tech companies including OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon, Adobe and X signed an agreement to help prevent deepfakes in elections taking place in 2024 around the world by preventing their services from generating images and other media that would influence voters. Midjourney was absent from that list.

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Sci-Tech

July’s Lego Releases Are All Abuzz

Published

12 hours ago

July 1, 2024

James Whitbrook

After the Eye of Sauron heralded a busy start to the summer for Lego fans, you’re getting a bit of a break in July—with just six major releases bidding for your time and attention to beat the heat with large amounts of plastic bricks. And one of those is a book! But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few things keeping an eye out for.

Lego’s New UCS TIE Interceptor Was Worth the 24 Year Wait

The new transforming Bumblebee—Lego’s second Transformers set after Optimus Prime a few years ago—is definitely the highlight of the month, but we’ve got a few cool Disney sets, a very cool car, and an even cooler book celebrating 25 years of Lego Star Wars. Check out what’s coming for Lego releases in July below!

Lego Icons Transformers Bumblebee

Image for article titled July's Lego Releases Are All Abuzz — Image: Lego

Designed to be in scale with 2022’s fully transformable Optimus Prime, Bumblebee is ready to roll out with the Autobot leader as he transforms into both his robot mode and his classic, VW Beetle-inspired vehicle form. ($90, available here)

Lego Star Wars: The Force of Creativity

We’ve got to wait another month for more Lego Star Wars sets, but Lego’s keeping the galaxy far, far away and its celebrations of 25 years of brick-based Star Wars in our minds with this lavish 300+ page look back at the legacy of the Lego Star Wars line. Featuring interviews from Lego and Lucasfilm employees alike, it’s a sumptuous look back at one of the most important toy lines in modern history. (Launches July 20 – $150, available to pre-order here)

Lego Icons Lamborghini Countach 5000 Quattrovalvole

Bumbebee’s not the only fancy car releasing this month… sort of. The other big set of July is Icons’ latest roadster, a recreation of the iconic ‘80s Lamborghini sports car. ( $180, available here)

Lego Brickheadz Iron Man Mk 5

Marvel’s solitary July representation comes in the form of the latest Iron Man suit in its chibi-figurine Brickheadz line. This time it’s the Mk 5, aka the “Suitcase Suit” Tony uses in Iron Man 2 when Whiplash attacks him during the Monaco Grand Prix. ($10, available here)

Lego Disney Princess Sets for July 2024

Rounding out the July releases are a trio of Disney Princess sets—one suitably cool Frozen set in the form of the latest version of Elsa’s Ice Palace, and two Little Mermaid-themed sets, inspired by the live-action remake of the animated classic.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

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