Ancestry.com, the publicly traded family genealogy site, was purchased today by Permira for $1.6 billion. Permira is a European private equity firm. Ancestry.com first went public in 2009 and has more than two million paid subscribers. Ancestry.com headquarters will remain in Provo, Utah and the executives will remain the same. Ancestry.com is the largest online family history resource in the world. Permira now has the majority control of the company, but they will partner with Spectrum Equity. Spectrum Equity is a venture capital firm that has backed Ancestry.com from the beginning. Tim Sullivan, President and CEO of Ancestry.com said that “We’re excited that Permira shares our commitment to keep investing in our technology and product experience to make family history easy and accessible for more and more families around the world.”
Amazon Cloud goes down…again
Amazon’s cloud computing platform suffered an outage for several hours today and knocked several popular websites offline. Foursquare spokeswoman Erin Gleason said that there services were down for about two hours. Turntable.fm, a music sharing website reported that it was down and dealing with some Amazon issues, but half an hour after the report the site was back up and running. The websites Heroku and Flipboard also suffered outages reportedly due to problems with Amazon. Eight of Amazon’s web services were reporting errors due to outages in Northern Virginia. The problems began just before 11 am and by 2 pm many of the problems had been repaired. Amazon was still reporting trouble with their database service Elastic Compute Cloud, and Elastic Beanstock, a service that helps developers launch new software more quickly. This is the fifth time that Amazon has suffered a big outage in a year. Amazon has not yet made a statement about what caused today’s outages.
ISP Copyright Alert System almost ready
The Copyright Alert System (CAS), designed to police illegal downloading will be ready for launch in a matter of weeks, according to the Center for Copyright Information (CCI). The Copyright Alert System is designed to provide a standardized approach for warning users who share copyrighted files on peer to peer networks. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, Cablevision, and other Internet service providers will send a succession of warnings to users who illegally share copyrighted files. For users who continue to illegally share files there will be consequences. The consequences for continued sharing of copyrighted files will vary with each Internet service provider. Some proposed consequences, or mitigation measures, include a slowdown of internet speed or being sent to an educational page. The educational webpage and a tutorial is reportedly part of AT&T’s list of consequences for users who receive a fifth and sixth warning. In order for the user to regain access to the Internet they will have to complete the tutorial. There have been rumors that after a certain number of warnings that Internet service will be revoked, but that is not the case. The alerts are simply meant to educate people on any illegal activity associated with their accounts, and to educate them on how to access digital content in a legal manner.