ANS-C01 history - AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty exam (ANS-C01) Updated: 2023

Pay a toll to the ferryman, cross the Xingu River, and you pass a stretch of the Trans-Amazonian Highway that feels as if it is paved with bad intentions. From Anapu to Belo Monte, the 86-mile road – a small portion of the nearly 2,500-mile highway – has passed by some of the most violent communities, disrupted waterways and degraded land in the Amazon.

For most of the two-and-a-half-hour drive, the hillsides on both sides of the road have almost more cows than trees. The land is so purged of foliage and wildlife that it is hard to believe this is a passage through the world’s biggest rainforest. It looks more like an endless ranch. The other side of the river is even worse, as this is the site of the biggest hydroelectric dam in the Amazon – a Mordor-esque rampart of concrete behind which lies a cemetery of thousands of white trees drowned by the reservoir.

This is where the perverse logic of growing the economy by running down nature reaches its grim apotheosis. And this is where the search for solutions to the Amazon’s degradation must focus, because it is on this road that the problems began. Fail to understand that and no matter how much money, labour or technology is thrown at the issue by governments, companies and civil society groups, it is unlikely to be effective. Like any fire, the conflagration needs to be put out at its source.

A potted history of the rainforest reveals why. For thousands of years, Indigenous people lived in the Amazon, not just in harmonious balance with what was already there but also actively planting trees that provided food and medicine, thus nurturing and strengthening the environment. By one estimate, 20% of the forest was planted by ancient civilisations. This started to change after the first European colonisers invaded five centuries ago, followed by prospectors and bandeirantes – fortune hunters who pushed into the forest in search of Indigenous people to enslave, and lost cities of gold. It was not until the 1970s that industrial-scale deforestation took hold, when Brazil’s military dictatorship built a road through the rainforest as a centrepiece of its nation-building ambitions. This opened the way for a wave of settlers who were encouraged to carve up and clear the land, regardless of existing Indigenous communities or any concern for nature.

Since then, the pattern has been repeated across ever-wider swathes of the Amazonian region. First, illegal prospectors and loggers invade, next road-builders open up, and then landgrabbers seize and burn, followed by ranchers and farmers, and finally politicians, who retrospectively legitimise all of the previous illegal activity. It is essentially colonialism, but from within the borders of a nation state for the benefit of a wealthy, often global, elite. On the ground, the result of the policy of violence is social and environmental chaos: ever more people, ever more destruction and ever more crime, but diminishing rates of economic return and increasing climatic impact. Today the rainforest is fast degrading towards what scientists call a “tipping point”, after which it irreversibly dries up because it is no longer capable of generating its own rain. That, of course, puts an even higher premium on agricultural produce and even more pressure on the land.

Breaking this vicious cycle is essential for global climate stability, the irrigation of regional crops and the long-term wellbeing of the Amazon’s human and non-human inhabitants. How to do that remains elusive. The first Lula government came closest. With Marina Silva as environment minister, it put in place policies that led to a more than 80% reduction in deforestation. Since then, however, successive governments have only made matters worse, culminating in the catastrophic administration of Jair Bolsonaro, when deforestation increased by 60% in just four years. Finding solutions is now more urgent than ever. Countless universities, NGOs and businesses have devoted themselves to this task. The new Lula government will host an Amazon summit later this year to address the challenge. Guardian contributor Dom Phillips was murdered last year while researching this subject for a book: How to Save the Amazon: Ask the People Who Know.

Step 1
Political and Indigenous leadership

But who to ask first and where to begin? After the Trans-Amazonian Highway, the next stop is Brasília, the centre of power in Brazil. Nationalist paranoia and market failure – rewarding those who destroy and penalising those who defend – have to be addressed in the search for any long-term solution. Political leadership must therefore be the starting point.

Lula’s current presidency appeared to present a great opportunity. After winning the election last year, the former trade union leader made an international pledge to cut deforestation to zero by 2030 and to halt the expansion of the agricultural frontier. He also created an Indigenous ministry, which gives more power than ever to the people who have the best record of maintaining a healthy forest. Efforts are under way to drive illegal miners from Indigenous territories. Most encouragingly, Lula reappointed the Amazon’s greatest champion, Marina Silva, as environment minister. She has declared protected status to public land the size of Spain through the creation of Indigenous territories and national reserves, and vowed to “fight for the Amazon”.

But the forces against her are mounting rapidly. Congress, which is dominated by the rural lobby, has moved to gut her ministry’s powers. The state-managed oil company Petrobras is also up in arms about the environment ministry’s refusal to approve an oil-drilling licence in the mouth of the Amazon. The construction industry wants Silva out of the way so it can build a new road through Amazonas. Most state governors in the Amazon are pro-mining and pro-ranching Bolsonarists. Faced with this resistance, Lula may once again be tempted to ditch his 21st-century climate concerns along with his troublesomely effective environment minister and go back to his 20th-century instincts to build more infrastructure and open more oilwells. If Silva goes, so does Brazil’s environmental credibility.

Step 2
Land reform

If Silva remains in power, however, there is no shortage of ambitious plans she could adopt. The Amazon Environmental Research Institute says 20m hectares (49m acres) of land could be better conserved through agrarian reforms, such as titling smallholders and compensating them for forest stewardship, while another 10m hectares could be saved by investing in sustainable agriculture. More ambitious still, the Science Panel for the Amazon, which aims to serve a similar role to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but for the rainforest, has proposed “arcs of restoration” that would help to regenerate degraded and cleared land. Such policies would be gamechangers.

Step 3
Hold foreign countries, businesses and consumers to account

To maintain the current positive course, international support needs to be ramped up, and fast. Foreign nations, businesses and consumers must accept their responsibility for much of the destruction of the Amazon, which has accelerated to sell more beef, soy and iron ore to Europe, China, the US and other industrialised markets. The global north also needs to compensate the global south, including Brazil, for climate damage and to pay for the carbon-reducing benefits of natural sinks such as the Amazon. Without this, there is no economic incentive or moral argument for Brazil to reduce deforestation. It seems that last point is finally being understood. At the Cop15 biodiversity summit in Montreal last December, rich nations promised between $20bn (£16bn) and $30bn a year for poorer, biodiverse countries like Brazil. A month earlier, the Cop27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh had seen a similarly groundbreaking pledge of “loss and damage” climate payments. One vehicle for acting early is the Amazon Fund, which has raised more than $1bn, mostly from Norway, which is being used for rainforest projects. More is needed. Encouragingly, President Biden recently asked the US Congress to make its first contribution of $500m to the fund and the UK prime minister Rishi Sunak pledged £80m. This money needs to flow quickly and be increased in the future. Foreign governments also need to crack down on deforestation-related trade. The EU recently enacted progressive legislation in this area. The US and particularly China – the main export market for soy and iron ore from the Amazon – should be encouraged to follow.

Step 4
Radically reform the beef industry

Beef needs to be the primary target as the industry accounts for about 80% of agriculture-related deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Cattle are used as occupying armies to consolidate land ownership in an extension of the nationalist mindset encouraged by the generals in the 1970s. The government still gives subsidies to ranchers. Looked at in terms of revenue for every hectare of forest destroyed, it is horrendously inefficient and provides relatively few jobs. The world’s biggest meatpacker, JBS, and rivals such as Marfrig need to be more transparent, efficient and accountable to the public as well as to their shareholders. The prices of their products should also include the indirect damage they do to the Amazon, and subsidies removed. Once these costs are forced on to the balance sheet, only the most productive ranches will remain. Carlos Nobre, Brazil’s most influential climate scientist, says consolidation of the beef industry was long overdue. “It’s possible to increase production of beef and reduce deforestation. It can be done. The technology exists. We can Improve them genetically. It’s a question of going to scale,” he says. “You can feed the world for ever using less and less land.”

Step 5
Build intelligent (rather than concrete) infrastructure

Technology offers other solutions. Instead of integrating the Amazon destructively with roads, as in the past, moves are under way to build a less intrusive and more sustainable communication and energy network. Brazil already boasts the world’s most sophisticated satellite system for monitoring biomes. One analytical platform, MapBiomas, is able to rapidly identify whether land changes from forest to cattle pasture, soy plantation, fruit orchard, mining site or other categories. This is now used by banks to determine whether land owners are entitled to loans or sanctioned for environmental violations. The next step, according to Tasso Azevedo, the founder of MapBiomas, is to provide solar panels and satellite internet access to remote communities so they can quickly denounce invasions of their land and pollution of their rivers in return for social benefits. “We need to think of technology as infrastructure. Internet in remote areas is now possible, which helps access to health and education,” he says.

Environmental defenders believe improved communications could help with enforcement, which is vital to end impunity, but public security institutions need to put more boots on the ground and helicopters in the air. “The population now has internet. They tell us what is happening. Now we need a rapid reaction squad,” says a local public prosecutor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We have to identify and support communities that are bases of vigilance and detection. This means building up the capacity of environment protection and indigenous affairs agencies, which were gutted during the Bolsonaro and Michel Temer administrations.”

Step 6
Create a bioeconomy

The market failure of Amazon destruction needs to be recognised. The World Bank – which has previously financed forest-clearing industries – recently issued a report showing that the economic losses caused by Amazon deforestation, estimated at $317bn, are seven times higher for Brazil than the gains from extractive industries, such as ranching, mining and logging for Brazil.

Forest dwellers need alternatives. This needs to be handled sensitively with regulations to ensure money flows do not cause more problems than they solve. Instead of making money from landgrabbing, illegal mining and destructive cattle ranching, people have to be persuaded they are better off with a standing forest. That can mean ecological stewardship payments for smallholders, subsidies for sustainable agriculture, stronger law enforcement to protect Indigenous territories and carbon credits for big landowners and traditional communities. The latter is essential but controversial as the carbon credit market is unregulated and open to abuse.

“Now we are seeing a new wave of carbon cowboys promising the earth to indigenous and traditional communities,” says Paulo Moutinho of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute. Lula’s government needs to build a system to ensure money is channelled towards projects that offer the maximum benefit to the climate and local communities, rather than open a new era of green colonialism.

The promised land at the end of this journey is a bioeconomy that grows in tandem with the forest, providing decent livelihoods to local communities, promoting agroforestry that rewards biodiversity, and punishing corporations that take more than they give. Such a system does not yet exist in any comprehensive form, but there are concrete examples at the grassroots and a raft of initiatives at a state, national and global level. In some ways, the bioeconomy is a 21st century attempt to achieve the balance that indigenous communities mastered long ago in growing the forest while providing livelihoods. The academic brothers Carlos and Ismael Nobre have sketched out how Brazil could become an “environmental powerhouse” by adopting what they call Amazon 4.0 – a economic model of new technology and advanced conservation thinking.

For idealists, the bioeconomy is the best potential vaccine to the virus of destructive neoliberal capitalism. But it could just as easily prove the latest greenwashing buzzword. The Pará state governor Helder Barbalho touts the bioeconomy as a way to pitch for international investment. His administration has just announced the creation of a bioeconomy park with 4.2m hectares devoted to carbon capture and will soon host a large bioeconomy conference in the state capital of Belém.

Forest residents remain suspicious of Barbalho’s motives, but he is at least willing to engage with Lula’s government. Lula has created a new government post, secretary for bioeconomy, with the challenging task of inventing a whole new economic system. The holder, Carina Pimenta, says she is wary of including carbon credits and prefers to direct government support and subsidies away from industrial monocultures and towards sustainable forest products and communities. “Brazil must define its own concept of the bioeconomy,” Pimenta says. “It must be based on what already works, such as extractive reserves.” These reserves are occupied by traditional riverine communities that harvest forest resources sustainably.

On the Trans-Amazonian Highway, there is a possibility of changing direction once you reach Altamira, a frontier town for ranching and mining. Switch here from car to boat, and after four or five hours on the Xingu and Iriri Rivers you finally get beyond the reservoir of the Belo Monte dam and can once again see the true wealth of the Amazon: dense forest, clear tributaries and abundant biodiversity. This is the territory of the Cantinas Network, a cooperative of sustainable producers who live in extractive reserves and provide an example of what the bioeconomy might look like. Now, with radio and basic internet, they pool resources, knowledge and harvests of brazil nuts, babaçu oil and other products so they can sell together at a better price. There is a vibrant local culture and strong commitment to maintaining the forest. The seed is here of an alternative way of existing with the forest that blends decent livelihoods, high technology and a healthy forest. But there is a long way to go before this can be any kind of model. Healthcare and education need to be improved, river transport electrified, and prices guaranteed. The state must also provide better protection against the constant threats of incursion by landgrabbers, loggers and illegal miners.

Step 7
Rethink the concept of national security

A change of outlook is essential. For hundreds of years, the function of the state has been to encourage extraction and open up new markets – an essentially colonial, destructive project. If that is to end, as the imminent approach of the Amazon tipping point suggests it must, then governments need a different set of priorities and a new way of thinking about national identity and security. That is true, too, of the police and military, which have neglected or been co-opted by environmental criminals. State power should be directed towards 21st-century threats to climate stability, the physical integrity of national biomes and the wellbeing of the population. For the moment, that is far from mainstream thinking. But as the economic and strategic threats of climate change become more apparent in the future, this argument should become more persuasive. Hopefully, there will still be a forest left by then.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has fined Amazon a cumulative $30.8 million over a series of privacy lapses regarding its Alexa assistant and Ring security cameras.

This comprises a $25 million penalty for breaching children's privacy laws by retaining their Alexa voice recordings for indefinite time periods and preventing parents from exercising their deletion rights.

"Amazon's history of misleading parents, keeping children's recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents' deletion requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profits," FTC's Samuel Levine said.

As part of the court order, the retail giant has been mandated to delete the collected information, including inactive child accounts, geolocation data, and voice recordings, and prohibited from gathering such data to train its algorithms. It's also required to disclose to customers its data retention practices.

Amazon has also agreed to fork out an additional $5.8 million in consumer refunds for breaching users' privacy by permitting any employee or contractor to gain broad and unfettered access to private videos recorded using Ring cameras.

"For example, one employee over several months viewed thousands of video recordings belonging to female users of Ring cameras that surveilled intimate spaces in their homes such as their bathrooms or bedrooms," the FTC noted. "The employee wasn't stopped until another employee discovered the misconduct."

The consumer protection authority, besides faulting Amazon for failing to adequately notify customers or obtain their consent before using the captured recordings for product improvement, called out the company for not implementing adequate security controls to protect Ring user accounts.

The "egregious" violations exposed users to credential stuffing and brute-force attacks, enabling miscreants to take control of the accounts and gain unauthorized access to video streams.

"Bad actors not only viewed some customers' videos but also used Ring cameras' two-way functionality to harass, threaten, and insult consumers—including elderly individuals and children—whose rooms were monitored by Ring cameras, and to change important device settings," it explained.

"Hackers taunted several children with racist slurs, sexually propositioned individuals, and threatened a family with physical harm if they didn't pay a ransom."

More than 55,000 U.S. customers are estimated to have had their accounts compromised between January 2019 and March 2020 as a result of these lax policies.

The proposed settlement further requires Amazon to purge all customer videos and facial data that it unlawfully obtained prior to 2018, and also take down any work products it derived from those videos.

While both settlements must be approved by a court to take effect, Amazon said "we take our responsibilities to our customers and their families very seriously" and that it's "consistently taken steps to protect customer privacy by providing clear privacy disclosures and customer controls, [...] and maintaining strict internal controls to protect customer data."

The development comes weeks after the FTC accused Meta of "repeatedly" violating its privacy promises and misleading parents about their ability to control with whom their children communicated through its Messenger Kids app between late 2017 and mid-2019.

The regulator is also seeking a blanket ban that would prohibit the company from profiting off of children's data. Meta has labeled the allegations as a "political stunt" and said it operates an "industry-leading privacy program."

WiFi just isn’t very good at going through buildings. It’s fine for the main living areas of an average home, but once we venture towards the periphery of our domains it starts to become less reliable.  For connected devices outside the core of a home, this presents a problem, and it’s one Amazon hope to solve with their Sidewalk product.

It’s a low-bandwidth networking system that uses capability already built into some Echo and Ring devices, plus a portion of the owner’s broadband connection to the Internet.  The idea is to provide basic connectivity over longer distances to compatible devices even when the WiFi network is not available, but of most interest and concern is that it will also expose itself to devices owned by other people. If your Internet connection goes down, then your Ring devices will still provide a basic version of their functionality via a local low-bandwidth wide-area wireless network provided by the Amazon devices owned by your neighbours.

The massive online retailer and IoT cloud provider would like to open up a portion of your home broadband connection via your home security devices over a wireless network to other similar devices owned by strangers. In the Amazon literature it is touted as providing all sorts of useful benefits to Ring and Echo owners, but it has obvious implications for both the privacy of your data should it be carried by other people’s devices, and for the security of your own network when devices you don’t own pass traffic over it. For the curious there’s a whitepaper offering more insights into the system, and aside from revealing that it uses 900 MHz FSK and LoRa as its RF layer there is not a lot information on how it works. As you might expect they have addressed the privacy and security issues through encryption, minimising the data transmitted, and constantly changing identifiers. To read the Amazon document at face value is to enter a world in which some confidence can be gained in the product.

The question on the lips of skeptical readers will no doubt be this: what could possibly go wrong? We would expect that the devices themselves and the radio portion of the network will be investigated thoroughly by those who make it their business to do such things, and while there is always the chance that somebody could discover a flaw in them it’s more probable that weaknesses could be found in the applications that sit atop the system. It’s something that has plagued Amazon’s IoT offerings before, such as last year when their Neighbors app was found to sit atop a far more garrulous API than expected, leading to a little more neighbourly information being shared than they bargained for. If Amazon’s blurb is to be believed then this system is to be opened up for third-party IoT device and app developers, and with each one of those the possibility of holes waiting to be discovered increases. We’ll keep you posted as they emerge.

Products such as Amazon Echo and Ring are incredible showcases of 21st century technology. They’re the living embodiment of an automated Jetsons future, and we’d be lying if we said we didn’t want a little slice of that future. But as you all know, the version of that future peddled by them and their competitors is a deeply flawed one in which the consumers who buy the products are largely unaware of how much data is created from them. From a purely technical perspective the idea of home security products that automatically form a low bandwidth network for use in case of main network failure is an exceptionally cool one, but when coupled with the monster data slurp of the Amazon behemoth it assumes a slightly more worrying set of possibilities. Is it possible to be George Jetson without Mr. Spacely gazing over your shoulder?

Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.

A group of Amazon employees plans to walk off the job next week to protest the company's climate initiatives, according to an internal email obtained by Insider. 

The action was organized after Amazon scrapped a key part of its climate pledge. 

The walkout, scheduled for May 31, is run by an affinity group called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. It is part of a broader walk-off of at least 1,000 employees that day to protest other issues, like Amazon's return to office policy and accurate layoffs, which was previously reported by the Washington Post.

In the email, the organizing group encourages employee participation in the walkout by pointing out five areas of concern over Amazon's climate initiatives. Here's what the email says:

• Emissions that are rising: Amazon's emissions have increased 40%(!!) since announcing the Climate Pledge.
• Deception in reporting: We're radically undercounting our emissions. Intentionally. That's deceiving us AND the public. 
• Partnering with Big Oil: AWS Al and machine learning are being used by Big Oil to greatly accelerate oil and gas discovery and extraction. Example: "production optimization, "wells, rigs and pipelines"
• Killing clean energy legislation that would have required our data centers to be 100% renewable by 2040
• Disproportionate harm to communities of color: "Amazon opens most of its warehouses in neighborhoods with a disproportionately high number of people of color." 

Amazon launched the Climate Pledge in 2019, committing to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. But the company's sustainability report last year showed that its carbon footprint increased by nearly 40% since it first began disclosing that number in 2019.

An investigation by Reveal last year found that Amazon vastly undercounts its carbon footprint by only reporting carbon emissions for its own Amazon-branded products, which account for roughly 1% of Amazon's online sales. Additionally, Amazon is among the companies benefiting from the lucrative cloud contracts purchased by Big Oil providers, while the company helped kill a bill in Oregon that would have required 100% renewable energy use by 2040. Amazon is also accused of building a large chunk of its warehouses, which can cause significant air pollution, in lower-income neighborhoods with a higher number of people of color.

Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser told Insider that the company has plans in place to curb emissions by 2040 through "working towards 100% renewable energy, transforming and decarbonizing our transportation network with electric vehicles and alternative fuels, using more sustainable building materials, and reducing packaging waste."

Glasser also disputed Reveal's report and said Amazon does not undercount its emissions. 

"Amazon regularly reports on its carbon footprint, and we follow guidance from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard, in addition to receiving independent third-party assurance from Ernst & Young and APEX according to the International Organization for Standardization's ISO 14064-3 verification," he said.

On the issue of working with Big Oil companies, Glasser said, "The energy industry should have access to the same technologies as other industries. We will continue to provide cloud services to companies in the energy industry to make their legacy businesses less carbon intensive and help them accelerate development of renewable energy businesses."

When asked about the Oregon bill, Glasser said, "A number of organizations, including Amazon, opposed HB2816 because the bill did not address the build-out of electric infrastructure that is needed to bring more clean energy to the grid." 

And in response to the majority of the company's warehouses being located in communities of color, he noted that Amazon's facilities are built in areas that are zoned for warehouses and the company weighs "a variety of factors before buying, building, or leasing" Amazon warehouses.

Read the full email here:

"I'm writing to you because something big is brewing, and I hope you'll consider taking part in it. I want so much to be working "for* the things I love, not contributing to things I know in my bones to be wrong. I am joining the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and Remote Advocacy walkout on May 31st at noon local time because Amazon's climate impact is going off the rails. Will you walk out with me?

I know it is hard to face, but our world and everything we love needs us. Scientists from over 200 countries this year told us that we have less than two years to reduce global emissions instead of increasing each year. If we don't act now, we're facing fatal, life-altering floods, heat waves, and more catastrophes. Even more people will die from food and water insecurity. Entire nations are drowning.

If you're undecided, I humbly ask: when is it time to take a stand for everything we love in this world? How many opportunities do you or I have in each of our lifetimes to put a significant check on power and have that really matter? If you pledge to walk out, no matter where you are in the world, you are adding decibels to a voice that leadership can't ignore. You will take part in changing leadership's calculus when they make major decisions that affect our lives and the world. We need your help. You as a single person really do matter. Because if I can get you onboard to pledge to walk out, that's how a movement begins.

Amazon is actively accelerating this crisis on our watch, through our work, and each one of us have the opportunity and responsibility to do something about:

• Emissions that are rising: Amazon's emissions have Increased 40%(!!) since announcing the Climate Pledge.
• Deception in reporting: We're radically undercounting our emissions. Intentionally. That's deceiving us AND the public. 
• Partnering with Big Oil: AWS Al and machine learning are being used by Big Oil to greatly accelerate oil and gas discovery and extraction. Example: "production optimization, "wells, rigs and pipelines"
• Killing clean energy legislation that would have required our data centers to be 100% renewable by 2040
• Disproportionate harm to communities of color: "Amazon opens most of its warehouses in neighborhoods with a disproportionately high number of people of color." 

I've only recently realized that the kind of large-scale change we all know the world needs, the kind of big changes that have happened throughout history, starts with single Individuals. It starts when I, and you, decide: ok, I'm going to step outside of myself for something bigger. I'm going to do something outside my comfort zone because staying inside actually limits the kind of person I want to be.

Whether you care more about climate or for flexibility in your work, at the end of the day, we have to put a check on leadership's shortsighted, unilateral decision-making. Otherwise, these kinds of Day 2 decisions will continue. Courage calls to courage everywhere: will you join me and pledge to walk out?"

E-commerce and streaming giant Amazon.com Inc. has been in discussion with wireless carriers about "offering low-cost or possibly free nationwide mobile phone service" to Prime subscribers in the US, reported Bloomberg on Friday citing people familiar with the situation.

According to the report, the company is negotiating with Verizon Communications Inc., T-Mobile US Inc., and Dish Network Corp. to get the lowest possible wholesale prices. People told Bloomberg that Amazon has asked the company to offer Prime members wireless plans for $10 a month or possibly for free and bolster loyalty among its biggest spending customers. 

The report said that the negotiations have been going on for 6 to 8 weeks and have also included AT&T Inc. at times, but the plan may take several more months to launch and could be scrapped. 

“We are always exploring adding even more benefits for Prime members, but don’t have plans to add wireless at this time,” Amazon spokesperson Maggie Sivon told Bloomberg. 

Amazon's Prime subscription in the US costs $139 per year and provides benefits such as fast free delivery, video streaming, and access to a vast music library of 100 million songs. However, The report noted that analysts have suggested that Prime membership growth has stalled in the country after Amazon raised the annual price from $119, indicating that consumers are finding the subscription less appealing amid high inflation.

As of March, approximately 167 million Amazon shoppers held Prime memberships, which remained unchanged from the previous year, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, the report noted. 

Also Read: How To Avoid Falling Into A Debt Trap. Here Are A Few Simple Tips

In the competitive landscape, Amazon faces rivalry from Walmart Inc., which offers its Walmart+ membership at $98 per year, the report said. Adding that Walmart+ is emerging as a more affordable alternative that provides similar perks to Prime, along with free grocery delivery for orders worth at least $35. In response, Amazon raised its free grocery delivery threshold from $35 to $150 in February.

An Amazon partnership in the wireless industry could have positive implications for wholesale revenue and contribute to an increased usage of recently expanded 5G networks, the report said. Adding that the entry of Amazon could also pose a challenge if Prime Wireless gains popularity and begins to erode the customer base of established carriers.

According to Bloomberg, Amazon has the potential to offer significantly lower prices compared to the big three national carriers. This could undermine the pricing power of carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile, whose unlimited plans start at $60 per month, and AT&T, which starts at $65 per month. The attractive pricing from Amazon may tempt subscribers to switch their services.

Amazon's Prime Wireless could disrupt the industry by offering attractive mobile service to its Prime members, potentially causing customers to switch from their current providers. The move aligns with Amazon's history of investing in new markets to drive Prime membership growth, even if it means taking a hit on costs. This development puts industry players, including Walmart, on high alert.

Mobile operators, who have invested heavily in 5G networks, may find it difficult to reject Amazon's entry into the wireless market, the report said. Despite a failed attempt with the Fire Phone in 2014, Amazon is determined to explore new opportunities in the wireless industry, including the upcoming Project Kuiper satellite-internet service.

Dish Network already is collaborating with Amazon's AWS division to leverage cloud computing for its wireless service. Dish is expected to launch its Boost Infinite wireless service on Amazon soon, as it aims to transform into a cloud-based wireless carrier competing against Verizon and AT&T. However, Dish faces financial challenges and is seeking new funding options.

According to the report, by adopting a reseller approach as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), Amazon can avoid the high costs of building its own network. While MVNOs have had mixed success in the past, there are examples like Google Fi, which operates on T-Mobile's network and has a customer base of around 2 million.

The report noted that wireless services are increasingly being bundled with broader service packages, as seen with cable companies like Charter Communications and Comcast offering wireless services alongside broadband as promotional offers.

A union organizer at Amazon who testified before a Senate committee has been terminated by the company, according to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

The union says Jennifer Bates is dealing with injuries she received while working at Amazon and that her termination comes shortly after reaching three years of service with the company.

RWDSU said Bates led the charge speaking out against workplace safety issues at Amazon, and what it calls failures by the company to treat workers with respect and their desire to unionize in Bessemer, Alabama, the first Amazon warehouse to file for a union election.

The union said Bates, who has also testified in Washington at a hearing on income inequality, recently took workers compensation leave at Amazon’s recommendation in order to tend to her injuries. When she returned to work, Amazon refused to make adjustments to her work schedule and work type despite repeated doctors’ letters and review by Amazon’s “Wellness Center,” according to RWDSU. Bates continued to deal with her injuries and was sent home by the company. After returning a second time, Bates learned her access to the AtoZ app was disabled. She has appealed her termination but has yet to hear back from the company.

Bates worked at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, where some workers organized the biggest unionization push at the company since it was founded in 1995. Amazon has a history of crushing unionizing efforts at its warehouses and its Whole Foods grocery stores.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment.

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In a report released today, David Barden from Bank of America Securities maintained a Buy rating on Amazon (AMZN – Research Report), with a price target of $139.00. The company’s shares closed last Friday at $124.25.

According to TipRanks, Barden is ranked #5430 out of 8320 analysts.

The word on The Street in general, suggests a Strong Buy analyst consensus rating for Amazon with a $135.30 average price target, which is an 8.89% upside from current levels. In a report released on June 2, J.P. Morgan also maintained a Buy rating on the stock with a $145.00 price target.

See the top stocks recommended by analysts >>

Based on Amazon’s latest earnings release for the quarter ending March 31, the company reported a quarterly revenue of $127.36 billion and a net profit of $3.17 billion. In comparison, last year the company earned a revenue of $116.44 billion and had a GAAP net loss of $3.84 billion

TipRanks has tracked 36,000 company insiders and found that a few of them are better than others when it comes to timing their transactions. See which 3 stocks are most likely to make moves following their insider activities.

Amazon.com, Inc. provides online retail shopping services and also generates revenue from cloud computing services. It operates through three business segments: North America, International, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The North America and International segments include retail sales of consumer products and subscriptions (like Amazon Prime membership fees). AWS generates revenue from the global sales of compute, storage, database, and other service offerings. Founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos in July 1994, the company is headquartered in Seattle, WA.

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WALL, N.J. and MADRID, Spain, June 05, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BIO-key International, Inc. (NASDAQ: BKYI), an innovative provider of Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Identity-Bound Biometric (IBB) solutions, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network member since 2022, today announced that it is helping customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) to move their IAM strategies to the cloud for greater availability, scalability, resiliency, and reduced overhead.

BIO-key offers advanced cybersecurity solutions, including multifactor authentication options for enhanced login security, to securely and flexibly manage identity for AWS customers and partners. BIO-key solutions include its PortalGuard^® Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) platform along with hardware such as fingerprint scanners, which support Identity-Bound Biometric authentication, and its FIDO-key^® security keys.

Alex Rocha, BIO-key’s Managing Director for EMEA elaborated on the relationship, "Our work with AWS plays a crucial role in executing our targeted strategy for the EMEA market. Through the AWS Partner Network we can effectively extend the scope of our sophisticated IAM solutions worldwide, specifically addressing clients who depend on cloud-based services. This relationship underscores our commitment to delivering high-quality, secure, and reliable identity and access management solutions for diverse customers and industries."

About BIO-key International, Inc. (www.BIO-key.com)
BIO-key is revolutionizing authentication and cybersecurity with biometric-centric, multi-factor identity and access management (IAM) software managing millions of users. Its cloud-based PortalGuard IAM solution provides cost-effective, easy-to-deploy, convenient, and secure access to devices, information, applications, and high-value transactions. BIO-key's patented software and hardware solutions, with industry-leading Identity-Bound Biometric (IBB) capabilities, enable large-scale Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) solutions, as well as customized on-premises solutions.

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BIO-key Safe Harbor Statement
All statements contained in this press release other than statements of historical facts are "forward-looking statements" as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (the "Act"). The words "estimate," "project," "intends," "expects," "anticipates," "believes" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are made based on management's beliefs, as well as assumptions made by, and information currently available to, management pursuant to the "safe-harbor" provisions of the Act. These statements are not guarantees of future performance or events and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause genuine results to differ materially from those included within or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, our history of losses and limited revenue; our ability to raise additional capital; our ability to protect our intellectual property; changes in business conditions; changes in our sales strategy and product development plans; changes in the marketplace; continued services of our executive management team; security breaches; competition in the biometric technology industry; market acceptance of biometric products generally and our products under development; our ability to execute and deliver on contracts in Africa; our ability to expand into Asia, Africa and other foreign markets; our ability to integrate the operations and personnel of Swivel Secure into our business; fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates; delays in the development of products and statements of assumption underlying any of the foregoing as well as other factors set forth under the caption "Risk Factors" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022 and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to disclose any revision to these forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

Investor Contacts:
William Jones, David Collins
Catalyst IR
BKYI@catalyst-ir.com
212-924-9800

Dish Network is reportedly in talks to sell its mobile phone service through Amazon.

Video Transcript

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- Well, "The Wall Street Journal" is reporting that Dish Network is in talks to sell its mobile phone service through Amazon. Their stock is surging on the news, up almost 10% right now. An announcement could reportedly come as soon as June, which is also when the company must meet new 5G coverage milestones or be fined by federal regulators. Dish Network's stock has been struggling, down over 50% year to date, as it loses market share in television to streamers and attempts to become a major player in the wireless business as well.