Amazon, Apple Outages, More Patent Attacks: BYTE Newsbriefs

Search the recent Amazon outage or today's four-hour Apple outage online and you'll see hundreds of news and blog pieces. What is up with that?

It's old school, but speculation regarding hackers and data centers is a waste of so-called ink. A big outage is news when we know what caused it -- and if it truly demonstrates how well upcoming cloud services from Apple and Amazon will work. With recent outages, it is too soon to call.

BYTE did contact Apple about this morning's as yet unexplained Apple Store outage and we'll have comments in a later update. The Apple Store, by the way, is back up.

ALSO IN THE NEWS: Two days after Google bought Motorola Mobility and its 7,000 plus 4G and other patents, the patent wars rage on.

HTC is taking on Apple. The Taiwanese electronics giant officially claimed patent infringement against Apple today, alleging that some Apple Macs and iOS devices infringe on HTC Wifi processor communication order-line modulation technology patents. We'll watch.

Patent wars are bad news for buyers. Lawyers make money, and costs get passed along to you.

One of the patents HTC claims Apple is infringing.

And in product news, RIM announced a Sunday release for its new Bold and Torch smartphones. The new AR capability is worth checking out. Or are you, like BYTE's Craig Johnston, just completely disenchanted with recent RIM fumbles ?

We'll update BYTE Newsbriefs later today USA PT.

Based in Taos, NM, Eric Mack is BYTE's executive news editor at BYTE. Gina Smith, chief editor based in San Francisco, contributed to this piece. Email Eric at EricM@BYTE.com and Gina@BYTE.com.