By Cynthia Herbert :: 7:12 PM
Amazon’s streaming video service, Amazon Instant Video
This outage is reminiscent of a problem with Netflix’s streaming video service that happened at the end of last year, which was due to a problem with Amazon’s cloud services. Amazon’s cloud provides the backbone and storage systems for Netflix video. During the Netflix outage, Amazon’s streaming video services were still functional.
The video service was down for a good portion of the evening last night. Amazon did send an e-mail to some subscribers, that read:
“We’re sorry for the trouble you had while trying to connect to Amazon Instant Video. If you try again, you should be able to connect without encountering further problems.”
Other than the terse message above, no other details have emerged from Amazon, including information about possible credits for service during the outage.
By Paul Thomson :: 4:40 PM
Intuit, the company behind personal financial software titles like Quicken and TurboTax, has been lobbying Congress for years against simplifying the tax return process.
News was released earlier this week that the company has spent at least $11 million to lobby the federal government away from adopting return-free filing options or more streamlined tax collection processes.
A return-free filing system is where the federal government prepares a tax return on your behalf with the information it already knows about your wages and other income that is reported to them each year. This removes the need for many individuals and families to hire a tax preparer or pay for tax return software solutions like TurboTax. Taxpayers are sent the prefilled return to review and approve, or they can make changes or amendments to the pre-filled return, or even reject it outright and file their own if they disagree with the government’s initial findings and assumptions.
Not all of the millions that Intuit spent over the past five years was directed to lobbying efforts against return-free filing specifically, but the company has publicly disclosed that it opposes allowing the government to prepare taxes for individuals, or allowing individuals to submit their taxes electronically, for free, to a government website without using tax preparation software as a middle man.
Intuit’s TurboTax software accounted for more than 35 percent of its total revenue in 2012. Nearly 25 million Americans used the software to file their taxes last year, and more than half of all individual electronically filed tax returns were filed with TurboTax software. Clearly, the company has a lot of skin in the game, and is working hard not to switch up the status quo in Washington with regards to tax filing.
By Cynthia Herbert :: 7:43 AM
Tomorrow is Easter Sunday – there’s still time to schedule a call from the Easter Bunny for your son or daughter.
Calls can be personalized with your child’s name, gender, and a message of your choosing. Your child can hear about painting Easter Eggs with the bunny, an adventure in the garden, or hear that Santa mentioned that they were a good girl or boy back at Christmas time.
You can select the day and time for the call. The service is free, but will only work through mid-day on Sunday.
[More information: Personalized call from the Easter Bunny.]
By Gilbert Falso :: 10:25 PM
Apple’s iMessage service on its iOS mobile operating system has a vulnerability that could crash the application if it receives a flood of messages, or a number of inordinately long messages in quick succession.
According to reports and tests, the app crashes under a sort of Denial of Service (DOS) attack. It was first discovered when a group of iOS developers received a rash of unwanted messages via Apple’s iMessage service. Their apps could not keep up with the influx of message data, and completely locked up. Several dozen developers were affected by the attack.
At this time, it does not appear that the attack was widespread, or that it will grow to affect most iMessage users. Apple has not yet publicly responded to the claims about the spam message issue.
By Cynthia Herbert :: 4:32 PM
If you’re a hard-core Gmail addict, you may have woken up to a jarring change in your inbox this morning. When you went to compose a new e-mail, it looked and worked totally different, didn’t it?
That’s Google hard at work for you – making the new Gmail compose feature a standard feature on most Gmail accounts. However, if you’ve tried out the new compose window and decided that you don’t like it, you can switch back, but it’s not very obvious.
In order to reset your account to use the old Gmail compose feature, you’ll need to click the Compose button, just like you were going to write a new email. Then, look at the bottom right of the compose window – you’ll see an arrow. Click that arrow, and a drop-down box will appear. Select “Temporarily switch back to old compose” from that list. See below for a screenshot.
You might have noticed the word “temporarily” in that phrase. Sources close to Google say that the old compose feature will not likely remain for long, and that the Gmail service will force the new compose window onto users soon, taking the old compose window away for good. No timetable for removal of the old compose has been given.