Amazon Web Services changes up Reserved Instances discounts

Eight social networks worth a closer look http://www.zdnet.com/eight-social-networks-worth-a-closer-look-7000036327/ CoreOS breaks with Docker http://www.zdnet.com/coreos-breaks-with-docker-7000036331/

Summary: Admittedly, a new pricing scheme for a particular Amazon Web Services function isn't quite as flashy as Cyber Monday, but it's still a potential game changer.

By Rachel King for Between the Lines | December 2, 2014 -- 19:46 GMT
Just because Cyber Monday is behind us doesn't mean Amazon is giving up on the crazy deals just yet.
Admittedly, a new pricing scheme for a particular Amazon Web Services function isn't quite as flashy, but it's still a potential game changer.
On Tuesday, AWS added what it referred to as "a simplification" to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Reserved Instance (RI) model.
AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr explained in a blog post that the changes are in response to "customer feedback with an analysis of purchasing patterns that goes back to when we first launched Reserved Instances in 2009."
Reserved Instances for the EC2 resizable cloud hosting services can be used to reserve capacity, making these customers eligible for a discount on instance usage versus those opting for On-Demand instances.
Up until now, that discount consisted of a lower effective hourly rate so long as customers paid upfront payment.
Now they no longer have to, necessarily speaking.
AWS is introducing a single type of Reserved Instance with three payment options: one upfront payment for the entire Reserved Instance term (one or three years), pay for a portion of the Reserved Instance upfront with installments for the rest over the course of the one or three year term, or nothing upfront except the commitment to pay over the course of a one year Reserved Instance term.
The last option still promises discounts up to roughly 30 percent versus current On-Demand instances, compared to up to 63 percent with a three year Reserved Instance term.
Topics: Cloud, Amazon, Data Centers, Data Management, E-Commerce
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
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U.S. attorney general urges changes to fight more Wall St. crime

By Aruna Viswanatha and Nate Raymond

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK Wed Sep 17, 2014 2:20pm EDT

United States Attorney General Eric Holder holds a news conference announcing updates in the Justice Department's investigation in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in Washington September 4 2014.

Credit: Reuters/Gary Cameron

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday called for changes that could help prosecutors build criminal cases against senior Wall Street executives, saying companies often insulated their leaders from responsibility for misconduct.

In a speech before New York University School of Law, Holder made some of his most extensive comments yet on how the department might better prosecute white-collar crime, proposing larger rewards for Wall Street whistleblowers and more FBI agents with forensic accounting expertise.

The Justice Department has faced years of criticism for bringing few marquee prosecutions against Wall Street executives for conduct that contributed to the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

It has reached multibillion-dollar settlements with top institutions, including JPMorgan Chase & Co, Bank of America Corp and Citigroup Inc, for misrepresenting the risks of shoddy mortgage bonds sold before the crisis, but no individuals have faced related charges.

At the speech, students passed around a flyer criticizing Holder's appearance as a "whitewash" and saying he had "provided impunity" to banks that solid toxic assets and that he had "refused to prosecute" them.

"When it comes to financial fraud, the department recognizes the inherent value of bringing enforcement actions against individuals, as opposed to simply the companies that employ them," Holder said.

But Holder said that in some instances prosecutors could not establish that high-ranking executives far removed from day-to-day operations knew about a particular scheme.

He pointed to how companies sometimes have blurred lines of authority that prevent responsibility for individual business decisions from sitting with a single person.

"We need not tolerate a system that permits top executives to enjoy all of the rewards of excessively risky activity while bearing none of the responsibility," he said, before an audience that included Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff.

Rakoff in the past has sharply criticized U.S. authorities for not pursuing more individuals in connection with cases against financial institutions.

Holder suggested lawmakers look to a requirement in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 that forces a single company executive to sign accounting forms and bear liability for any misrepresentations, and consider applying the same concept to other areas of corporate wrongdoing.

WHISTLEBLOWER REWARDS

Since the financial crisis, prosecutors have stepped up efforts to pursue bankers, traders and others in the industry for other types of financial fraud, including insider trading and the manipulation of interest rate benchmarks and foreign exchange rates.

Some of those efforts have been helped by cooperating witnesses inside major financial institutions, and more cases could come in the coming months.

But the law caps rewards for potential whistleblowers in cases that do not involve fraud against government programs and hurts the ability of prosecutors to get Wall Street executives to cooperate, Holder said in his speech.

"We should seek to better equip investigators to obtain this often elusive evidence," Holder said.

In one recent case in which a federal judge ordered Bank of America to pay $1.27 billion for fraud at its Countrywide unit, a whistleblower who served as the government's star witness is entitled to $1.6 million. Holder described that amount as a "paltry sum" for an industry in which the collective bonus pool stood above $26 billion last year and median executive pay was $15 million.

(Reporting by Aruna Viswanatha; Editing by Karey Van Hall, Chizu Nomiyama and Steve Orlofsky)

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