Josh Wieder

Fast Company - The Vatican has selected EMC to source roughly 2.8 Petabytes of storage for a project to digitize the Vatican library, home to over 1 million books. Business Week - Skype service in China is actively monitored for certain key phrases that are offensive to the state. When a user inputs these phrases, the conversation is forwarded to Chinese intelligence. Skype is currently owned by Microsoft, and in China is partnered with TOM Online to provide service in the region (like India, China requires foreign entities to be minority stake holders with a domestic corporation in order to do business). Microsoft has not responded to requests to clarify the surveillance features in Skype beyond saying that they adhere to Chinese law when operating there. No word yet on whether American users are monitored as well (at this point, I would be more shocked if they were not) - the Chinese program bears striking similarity to the NSA program that became public shortly after 9/11, ...

EMC purchased iWave Software last week. iWave designs storage automation applications - their IT Automator looks a lot like Eucalyptus or Cloudstack, and provides the same sort of functionality (a pretty GUI for private Clouds). Whether its been configuring vSphere, chatting with their account executives from Boston to South Carolina, studying for their certifications or cutting my fingers on the rails to their cabinets EMC and I have grown close over the years. They have been the undertow shaping the currents of our industry for some time now. I'm very interested to see whether the plans for iWave will extend beyond VMAX . iWave's IT Automator