"Whereas the standard example for a stored XSS vulnerability over an out-of-band channel is a web mailer like OWA using SMTP here this channel for the attack is kind of — err, let's put it this way — unusual: One has to write a book!"

"Here I’ll show how to use boto to start a server instance then how to send a file to the instance and execute a command on the remote server, and finally I’ll show how to terminate the instance." Looks like this

"An integrated interface to current and future infrastructural services offered by Amazon Web Services."

A pure Perl script to manipulate EC2 and S3. Saves having to install all that Java nonsense.

This looks like it could come in very handy indeed.

More on Amazon MP3's UK launch. "There’s some indie-sized holes in the catalogue at the time of writing - no Oasis apart from the spoken-word Wibbling Rivalry EP, no Arctic Monkeys, a single live track from Franz Ferdinand. Interestingly, the same artists that were missing from Nokia’s Comes With Music"

MP3 downloads come to Amazon UK. Finally.

"SimpleDB/dev provides a local SimpleDB server, so you can develop offline, without even currently having a SimpleDB account." More from the user group meet- an offline replica of the Amazon SimpleDB server. I don't seem to get on well with RDBMSes so I might well play with this.

"AppDrop is simply a remote installation of the App Engine SDK, with the user authentication and identification modified to use a local silo instead of Google Accounts" On github. So much for lockin?

I've been wondering if Simon Wardley would comment on App Engine, and he does. His comments on the SDK match what Tom and I have said: you can deploy to your own colo from the SDK. There's your exit strategy. (You do lose single sign on.)

"Amazon's services were like a breath of fresh air while so far, Google's has filled me a dread I dare not name." Michal Migurski compares the tabula rasa of EWS with Google's App Engine. Interesting.

One of these things is not like the other. It's the one that "had users file a bug on me to make Thunderbird’s new account dialog smaller, so they can get to the buttons."

Forum post on the fact that S3's down, as you can tell by the lack of user pictures on Twitter, and the lack of pretty much anything on tumblr, slideshare and (presumably) other web 2.0 sites.

If record labels are "prepared to keep copy restrictions on his label’s songs on iTunes for six months to a year while Amazon establishes itself", then where does that leave Europe? DRMed, evidently.

Erlang? Interesting. It does seem very lightweight; not so much a database as a toolkit for storing data and building tools around it.

The Amazon API/service computing juggernaut rumbles on with a RESTian database API. Not sure it makes sense for people already relying on RDBMSes, but it's certainly interesting.

I'm really not convinced by this. Beyond the UScentric network tech, there's the pay-for web feeds, the lack of a route for your own PDFs onto it, and the DRM. They might want this to be the iPod for books, but Sony's Reader won't play its Walkman.

"Top requests: Subversion." Interesting that it's a specific product, not generally "version control", and that it's that one in particular. Also interesting: .zip as download apparently passes unnoticed, and notes on using S3 for serving downloads.

New Amazon S3 pricing from June 1st. Includes a charge per HTTP request, but data transfer costs go down (significantly so for uploads). "This new price structure will result in an overall price reduction for the vast majority of our customers." they say.

Amazon stock the BluEye iPod addon. Just shy of £70. Not that I have a dock-connector iPod.