Up Front: The price of cloud computing gets clearer

Monday's tech headlines

The Wall Street Journal

• A gang of so-called hackers who stole from phone companies and gave the proceeds to terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda and the Pakistanis who killed 170 people in Mumbai last year, has been broken up by a coalition of American, Italian and Philippine investigators. 12 million minutes (worth $55 million) were stolen from AT&T alone.

• William Bulkeley and Ben Worthen take a closer look at the EMC-NetApp-Data Domain triangle and find an East-Coast-West-Coast culture clash. The role of Biggie Smalls in this production will be played by EMC, with NetApp in the Tupac role and Data Domain as Faith Evans. We eagerly await the soundtrack -- but remind all parties that the only one who gained from that sadness was P.Diddy. (subscription only)

• Malware infections in online ads are on the rise as more ad sales are handled by middlemen and resellers. (subscription only)

The Register

• British citizens could, against all hope, be spared a national ID card after all, as newly appointed Home Secretary Alan Johnson seems to be more responsive than his predecessor to concerns about security and privacy.

• ZZZZZAP! (*poof*) A lightning strike Wednesday evening hit a portion of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), knocking the "instances" on the affected rack offline for 2-6 hours. The rack itself (and the servers on it) were unharmed, but it sounds as if the Power Distribution Unit was more or less done for. Customers were given the option to either launch a new server instance or wait out the outage.

All Things D

• Wait, the lawsuit between Toys 'R' Us and Amazon was still a going concern? The five-year battle has concluded with a settlement in the brick-and-mortar firm's favor -- though for a bit over half what it was asking from Amazon.

• Netscape-founder-turned-investor Marc Andreessen is up to something. He and investing cohort Ben Horowitz have a new $300 million venture-cap fund ready to roll -- a development that could, says Kara Swisher, indicate a thaw in the economic chill.

And elsewhere

• InventorSpot.com has some fun with the widely reported claim that Dell has made $3 million "from Twitter," posting a listicle of the "Top Five Giants Stealing Twitter's Golden Eggs."

• The Providence Journal has a short but interesting article on how Internet-based activities are changing how science is taught in Rhode island schools. The molecular workbench is a particularly fun way for you not to get anything useful done on a Monday morning.

• Dear San Jose Mercury-News: Please never use the words "explode" and "space mission" in a headline together again. Some of us get nervous. Thanks.