live

After being down this morning, Microsoft's Xbox Live is back online, according to Microsoft's support team and its status page.

"Xbox LIVE should be back up and running. Thank you for your patience. Game on!" a member of the Xbox Support crew tweeted at about 1:30 p.m. PT.

CNET employees who are subscribers have confirmed that have been able to log on to their account, meaning they can access at least part of the service.

The gaming service was experiencing "difficulties" this morning, with users taking to Twitter to complain around 8:… Read more

Xbox Live users are unable to access the online-gaming service, Microsoft has confirmed.

The software company has taken to both its Twitter account and its Service Status page to inform users that Xbox Live is experiencing "difficulties." The Xbox Live Status page specifically says that users are currently unable to sign in to Xbox Live from their Xbox 360 or via Xbox.com.

"We are aware of the problem and are working to resolve the issue," Microsoft wrote on the Status page. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your … Read more

With Justin Yu still under the weather, The 404 Show once again experiments with Joe Kaminski filling in. We consider ourselves very lucky to have a guest with super-powers on our program. The first power is his knack for going on obscenely long tangents about the most meaningless of topics. The second is the ability to give spoiler-free movie reviews, more specifically of The Amazing Spiderman, which was just released.

Next it's off to a discussion on Android and the fact that only 10-percent of those devices have Ice Cream Sandwich running on them. What's even more confusing is that Jelly Bean (ICS' successor) was just released last week. It's arguably the most annoying Android reality, so we weigh its pros and cons.

Finally, we touch on EA's recent statement that the company will soon be distributing games 100-percent digitally. This shouldn't be much of a surprise, since EA already goes out of the way to combat used game sales (see EA Online Pass).

But perhaps the most exciting news of the day is the introduction of the official 404 trucker hat (pictured above). These bad boys will be available should you come and hang out with us at ComicCon 2012. All the info you need is here. We also highly recommend participating on CNET's ComicCon Twitter Contest for your chance to win a game console. … Read more

It happened a little later than the rumors predicted, but Sony has indeed gone shopping for a cloud gaming service. With its purchase of Gaikai, announced this morning, Sony has potentially disrupted the nascent cloud gaming market, and also added an interesting wrinkle to its own competitive fortunes across platforms.

A few thoughts on how this acquisition will affect the various players.

OnLive The other, arguably better-known cloud gaming service, OnLive was another rumored Sony target. Presumably Sony's done cloud shopping, but other suitors, namely Microsoft, could still be interested.

17 months ago, VentureBeat reported analyst valuations around $1.… Read more

School's out for summer, which means barbecues, swimming pools, and summer concert tours from many of your favorite bands. There's nothing quite like the experience of live music, so in this post, we've put together a list of five essential Android apps for concertgoers.

Find concerts Don't miss shows from your favorite bands because you didn't know they were in town. Gigbeat is a nice music listing app that can scan your Last.fm, Rdio, and Songkick accounts, to come up with a list of your favorite artists to track. You can also have it … Read more

First teased at CES 2012, Vizio's Google TV plans are now moving forward with the launch of the Co-Star Stream Player.

While we're still waiting for Google TV to fulfill its promise, the Co-Star makes the most of the platform's current capabilities by combining live TV and streaming services. Along with wired and wireless Internet connections for Web surfing using Google Chrome with Adobe Flash Player and HTML 5 support, apps, and streaming video and music services, the player can be connected to a cable or satellite TV box.… Read more

Each Tuesday, the newest episode of "Always On" will premiere at 11 a.m. Pacific time, 2 p.m. Eastern, with a live viewing party on the show page. I'll be there with pre-show and post-show commentary on video, and we can watch the first episode together in chat on the page. I'll give behind-the-scenes insights, if I have them, or we can groan at my bad jokes together, or you can give me make-up tips...whatever seems appropriate.

Over the years of doing Buzz Out Loud, I realized that the chat room was one of … Read more

Microsoft's update to the My Xbox Live app 1.5 brought along support for controlling an Xbox 360 straight from an iPhone. (The update was rolled out across all iOS platforms, but for whatever reason, this feature only works with an iPhone.) Here's how to get it to work.… Read more

Skype's got ads, Vizio's got PCs, and we got issues (a whole Newsstand full of 'em):

Time Inc. has had a change of heart with Apple and will now begin selling magazine subscriptions through iPad's Newsstand app. Previous apps for Time Inc. magazines, like Sports Illustrated, only allowed for one issue to be purchased at a time. It also gave print subscribers free access.

Last year, Time Inc. opposed how Apple handled subscriptions, such as taking a 30 percent cut of sales and not releasing data on subscribers. But since then, Apple has lets readers opt-in to … Read more