eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Today’s topics include Facebook’s announcement of professional quality streaming video service to take on the likes of Netflix and YouTube, the launch of a new Google website to help explain its GDPR data privacy controls; Oracle’s introduction of a flock of new cloud applications; and the results of the Hack the Air Force bug bounty program.
Facebook not only has its users’ complete attention for news, social networking, games, instant messaging, email, video streaming and a dozen other use cases, it now wants their time in front of ads as a television network.
The world’s largest social network has set the table for its own online television network. Earlier this year, Facebook reportedly—although it never confirmed this publicly—entered the market for discovering and buying content.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Facebook decided to pick up a canceled MTV show called “Loosely Exactly Nicole,” from Nicole Byer, creator of the popular “Girl Code” show.
On Aug. 10, Facebook launched a new section of the network called Watch, as a specific home for video content.
Google this week released a new site to help its customers and partners better understand the steps the company is taking to comply with the requirements of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
The statute goes into effect next May and requires any company that handles personal data belonging to EU residents to apply specific security and privacy controls to protect it. The GDPR also gives users more direct control over their data.
As one of the largest Internet and cloud companies in the world, Google has a lot at stake in ensuring that its services are compliant with GDPR.
Over the past several months the company has taken multiple measures to ensure that its services meet the standards. The effort covered almost all of its products including Google cloud services, Gmail and Search.
Oracle appears to be on a serious DevOps/agile development track, churning out new cloud-based apps on an increasingly fast scale as the company continues to make the transition to become more of a cloud-based vendor.
The database, data center hardware and software-as-a-service giant released a flotilla of new capabilities and enhancements to cloud apps in its Oracle Cloud Applications Release 13.
New features in the v13 release, announced last week, are designed to improve the all-important “user experience” in doing business online and to enable business users more functionality across an organization, including handling customer experience, finance, HR and supply-chain professionals.
Security researchers in May and June hacked the United States Air Force and got paid a total of $133,400 for their efforts. The Hack the Air Force bug bounty program enabled 272 hackers to take aim at a select list of public-facing USAF web assets to find and responsibly disclose vulnerabilities.
The Hack the Air Force bug bounty program was operated by HackerOne, which previously had run the Hack the Pentagon and Hack the Army bug bounty efforts.
The goal of a bug bounty program is to engage with third-party security researchers to discover security issues and then reward the researchers for their efforts.
With Hack the Air Force, a total of 207 vulnerabilities were discovered and privately reported over the program’s duration, which ran from May 30 until June 23.
As part of the program, the USAF paid out bug bounty rewards ranging from $100 to $5,000 depending on the severity and impact of the reported flaw. Details on the specific flaws are not being publicly disclosed at this time.