elgan.com

While exploring Mayan ruins and lost cities in the jungles of Guatemala, I emerged from a dense forest one day in search of something truly elusive: a Wi-Fi network.

The year was 2006. I was with my wife and two sons on the trip of a lifetime, going from one Mayan site to another across five countries over six weeks. I wasn’t on vacation. I worked during the entire trip. At the time, I was writing a weekly opinion column for Computerworld, with consulting work on the side.

I decided as an experiment to tell neither my editor nor my clients that I would be traveling. I wanted to conduct an experiment — to see if they would even notice that I was abroad. (Spoiler: They didn’t.)

With a deadline imminent, I really needed that internet connection. After trudging through a forest from the village where we were staying to a small town rumored to have a hotel, I found it: a run-down building with “Hotel” hand-painted on it, with a metal table and two chairs beside the structure more or less in the dirt road. More importantly, I checked my phone and there it was: Wi-Fi! (In that place in those days, Wi-Fi was rare, but if you could find it, there was never a password involved.) I sat down, logged in, sent my column and breathed a sigh of relief.

Sweltering in the Central American humidity and swatting away mosquitos, I didn’t know at the time that I was living in the future.

Amazon’s working on a robot.

Details about Amazon's home robot project leaked recently. What we learned is that the project, code-named Vesta, is in the "late-prototype stage."

The robot will be "powered" by Amazon's Alexa voice assistant and will feature cameras, a screen and a small compartment for carrying things. It might also come with a camera on the end of a retractable pole for helping users find stuff under the bed.

The company has more than 800 employees working on it.

The publication Insider has seen an internal Vesta document and has spoken to six anonymous sources directly involved in the program.

The robot may cost more than $1,000. Amazon is reportedly considering rolling it out, so to speak, in a limited, invitation-only beta.

The robot is being developed in Amazon's Silicon Valley R&D organization, called Lab126, which also developed the Kindle line, Amazon Echo and other successful Amazon consumer products, plus the Fire Phone.

The Fire Phone was a horrible product and a bad idea. And the company is haunted by its failure.

Amazon staff are reportedly worried about its prospects for success. Sources complained about "shifting strategies and delayed launch dates" and wondered whether Vesta will be a hit.

They’re right to be nervous. Here’s why Amazon’s Vesta is very unlikely to be successful.

The rise of the cloud didn’t free us from concerns over who stores our data. Where matters, and major cloud providers and big data monopolies host a huge percentage of the world’s data. Thousands of organizations that store and manage personal, business and government data use big-name cloud providers. Smartphone platform companies house and process terabytes of the data that flows through mobile networks. Social networks house and control the data on billions of people worldwide — certainly the personal data of effectively all employees in your company.

And, that creates challenges, too. For example, cyber criminals and state-sponsored threat actors find data held in a central hub a tempting target. It’s time for a wider conversation among security specialists and industry leaders about how to better protect this data. Let’s take a look at the risks and challenges of a big data monopoly.