Ed Oswald

Amazon appeared to finally have the issues with its Web Services cloud platform under control, saying late Friday afternoon that all but its most "time consuming" volumes had been recovered and were back online. This seems to match up with reports that those websites that depended on Amazon's cloud were for the most part operating normally.

The partial failure which affected Amazon's cloud servers in its Northern Virginia facility, occurred early Thursday morning. Several popular websites including Foursquare, Reddit, and Quora were down for much of Thursday, and those issues extended into Friday as well.

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Samsung's relationship with Apple seemingly became even more strained on Friday as the company claimed that the Cupertino company's iPhone and iPad devices infringe on five of its patents. The increasingly bitter feud also presents an even bigger conundrum as Apple is one of the Korean electronics maker's biggest component customers.

While Apple filed its lawsuit last Friday in US court, Samsung has not as of yet countersued the company here. Instead, its retaliatory suits were filed in three international markets, including South Korea, Japan and Germany. According to reports, the technologies covered include that for transmission optimization and power conservation during use of HSPA technologies, WCDMA data transmission error reduction techniques, and PC tethering.

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As the outage of Sony's PlayStation Network entered into a third day without any end in sight -- and some reports indicate a cyberattack may be at fault -- at least one group is making sure that it is not blamed for the problem: Anonymous.

The group said that the mishap was due to internal issues with Sony's own servers, and those fingering Anonymous were "taking advantage of Anonymous' previous ill-will towards the company." A message to the company's PlayStation blog in Europe had said that Sony was investigating "the possibility of targeted behavior by an outside party," but since had been removed.

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Google on Thursday launched a beta of Google Offers, an online coupon site in the vein of Groupon and LivingSocial. The move had been widely expected since January, when reports first surfaced of the Mountain View, Calif. company's plans.

Like its competitors, the service aims to give users 50 percent off or more from participating local businesses. While the company is officially launching in Portland, Ore. first, the page offers the option to sign up for deals across New York City and San Francisco as well.

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While Nintendo may be gearing up to introduce the next-generation Wii as early as late 2012, it may have quite a bit of lead time on its competitors. Gaming site Kotaku says sources have told it that neither Microsoft nor Sony has plans to launch new consoles until as late as 2014.

If the companies do indeed follow these rumored plans, at that time the Xbox 360 would have had a life cycle of nine years, and the PlayStation 3 eight. It would be about twice as long as the traditional life cycle for a gaming console, which is typically around five years.

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A partial failure of Amazon's cloud server network brought down the websites of several popular services, including Quora, Reddit and Foursquare for several hours beginning around 4:41am Eastern Time Thursday. The issues were isolated to the company's data centers in Northern Virginia.

Amazon's AWS status page indicated that as of press time Thursday afternoon on the East Coast, issues were still ongoing, including "instance connectivity, latency and error rates." According to the company, the issue began when a unspecified "networking event" caused AWS servers to erroneously re-mirror a large amount of data.

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The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a lower court judgement that would force EchoStar to disable its DVR functionality in as many as eight million subscriber boxes, delivering what might be a fatal blow to the company's chances for victory in the case.

The panel of judges did however reject the lower courts ruling that Dish's workaround was "insufficient" to avoid infringement, giving the company some good news. Either way experts argue that the ruling likely means that the satellite television provider will be forced to enter into a costly settlement to prevent its customers from having their service interrupted.

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A team of researchers have discovered that iOS4 is secretly obtaining your location and recording it to a hidden file, raising obvious privacy concerns and questions as to why Apple would be storing such information. The researchers believe it is intentional, as the file is restored after backups and even when the user switches to a new device.

Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden of O'Reilly are presenting their findings at the Where 2.0 conference on Wednesday. They say the functionality appears new to iOS4, and they have attempted to contact Apple's security team on the issue but have not heard anything back.

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Google said Tuesday that it had begun to transcode all new videos on YouTube to the WebM codec, an open source effort supported by Mozilla, Opera, Adobe and others. The technology supports high-quality video using the HTML5 video tag, and is available for use under a royalty-free license.

The site has been at work transcoding YouTube videos in the catalog since Google first open-sourced the VP8 codec -- the basis for WebM -- in May of last year. Currently about 30 percent of all videos that make up about 99 percent of the views on YouTube have been transcoded, Google says.

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The relationship between Apple and Samsung looks to be taking a dramatic turn for the worse, as Apple sued the company over alleged copying of its iPhone and iPad devices in Samsung's own products. Specifically named was the Galaxy Tab tablet as well as the Nexus S, Epic 4G and Galaxy S 4G smartphones.

Apple filed the suit on April 15 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, and claims that the appearance and methods of operation of Samsung's devices directly violate patents held by Apple. Indeed, as of late the Korean electronics maker has mimicked Apple's popular products in its own efforts.

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Not more than a week after reports indicated developer UberMedia may be making moves to create its own Twitter-like short message service, Twitter may be preparing to play defense. The company is said to be in "advanced talks" to acquire UK-based TweetDeck for $50 million, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

UberMedia was said to be close to purchasing TweetDeck's assets. This was likely in an effort to either solidify its position as the largest third-party Twitter developer, or possibly to quickly bolster whatever competitor to the microblogging service it has been said to be working on.

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Yahoo's experiment with social news will end this week, but almost nobody noticed its demise. A message was posted to the Yahoo Buzz website back on April 4 stating the company's plans to close the site, but it wasn't until Monday morning that news sites picked up on the news.

"As of [April 21], you will be unable to access the Yahoo! Buzz site. This was a hard decision," the company wrote. "However this will help us focus on our core strengths and new innovations. We appreciate your patronage." The shift seems to further suggest that Internet users are increasingly moving away from the fad that was social news.

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Google over the weekend shut down its Google Video service, sending an e-mail to all users that had uploaded content to the service stating playback of hosted content will end on April 29. The move will affect only videos hosted by Google, not the popular video search engine.

The company launched the effort in 2005, aiming to make it similar in concept to YouTube. However, its value to Google came into question the following year when it acquired the company it aimed to compete with for $1.6 billion. Google Video has not accepted new uploads since 2009, when it decided to focus on the search side of things.

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The Obama administration on Friday asked the private sector to work on developing a standard for authentication, saying passwords are not secure enough and were not helping in preventing identity theft. The system could viably be used to not only verify identities online, but off as well it says.

Officials say the benefits of the President's so-called National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace are two-fold: as well as offering a more secure authentication process, it would also ensure ultra-sensitive information such as financial or health records would only be accessible by that person.

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Signaling that Microsoft is ready to move beyond one of its more forgettable releases, the next version of Internet Explorer that debuted at the MIX11 conference in Las Vegas earlier this week will not run on the Windows Vista operating system.

The move may be a surprise considering Vista as an operating system is a little over four years old. Support for Windows XP, launched in 2001, only ended with IE9 as the company claimed the operating system lacked the technologies necessary to operate the browser.

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