This week on White Space, Max shares his takeaways from the recent HPE Discover show in London. We have focused on two announcements: the worldwide expansion of Cloud28+, a club of vendors that promote HPE’s distribution of OpenStack, previously limited to Europe; and the first outing of the Machine, a memory-driven architecture research project.

Sebastian reports that American software companies are apparently reluctant to give over their source code to the Chinese state. Meanwhile Russia plans to build its digital surveillance network with Chinese kit, and the UK has just passed its own set of surveillance laws, popularly known as the ‘Snooper’s Charter’.

AWS has launched a service called AWS Shield, promising free protection against 96 percent of DDoS attacks. Defending against more complex attacks will require an Advanced-level subscription. The product shouldn’t be confused with Google’s Project Shield, a service that offers free DDoS protection to non-profits and activists.

Channel Islands off the coast of UK lost connectivity last week, after a ship anchor cut at least four network cables in a single swing.

In our ‘news in brief’ section:

• Emerson Network Power has become Vertiv
• CyrusOne is building a new data center in Chicago
• Cologix might be up for sale
• BT has opened a shared data center for the government agencies of Northern Ireland
• There’s another government data center in West Bengal
• US army has broken ground on the new Cyber Command Headquarters
• Alibaba has brought its cloud to Australia