“Over the past decade Amazon Web Services (AWS) lured untold numbers of consumers and corporations onto its billowing cloud. The division earned its giant e-commerce parent $7.3bn in operating profits last year. It could soon be earning more. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, is going after a potentially more lucrative customer: the government. Amazon has outspent all technology firms on lobbying in the first quarter, and is building a second headquarters in Virginia, near the Pentagon.”
Amazon is eyeing billions in federal contracts, by The Economist, July 11, 2019

Y’know, even I thought I was kind of kidding when I’ve been saying that one day either Google or Amazon, particularly AWS, was going to own us all. Alas, I think we just got one day closer to that day.

“No wonder. Next month the Defence Department may award a cloud-computing contract worth $10bn. The Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) initiative aims to create a unified ‘war-fighter cloud’ to modernise the Pentagon’s existing networks and data centres. In April AWS and Microsoft edged out Oracle and IBM onto the final shortlist.”

JEDI. Really? And something else for Russia, N Korea, and Billy in his mom’s basement to hack into for fun and profit. Is there a forest I can live in somewhere?

Google seems to regrouping.

“Confronted last year with an employee backlash against its sale of artificial-intelligence software to America’s armed forces, Google backed off and withdrew from the JEDI tender.”

Retreat, hell, they’re just fighting in a different direction.

Oh well. Is it better to know these things? I wonder.