failure

iPhone Atlas has already covered a number of complaints from iPhone users about iPhone OS 2.2.1.

Frequently, faulty Wi-Fi connections were the source of these complaints. Recently, that problem has resurfaced, and one user is linking the Wi-Fi problems to heat generated by the iPhone and its battery.

A discussion in the Apple forum describes a problem in which some iPhones are randomly dropping Wi-Fi signals, then failing to reconnect to any network for a period of time.

Many people think that the problem is caused by the iPhone overheating, and some go so far as to place … Read more

On Saturday afternoon, my Hewlett-Packard notebook computer was working fine. On Sunday morning, the machine wouldn't start. The power would blink on and go off just as quickly.

If I held the power button in the on position, I could keep the power indicator and other of the machine's LEDs lit, but nothing would happen: no power-on self-test, no BIOS message, and definitely no Windows.

My first thought was that it was a power glitch. I unplugged the machine and tried starting it on battery power, but no go. I removed the battery and tried using just AC … Read more

Google tagged the Web as malware on Saturday and was rendered useless for about an hour. The search giant blamed the incident on human error.

Was the ruckus over Google's screw-up overblown? Possibly. But to many folks, Google is the window to the Internet. If folks can't google something, they are simply lost. That fact alone probably qualifies Google as a Web monoculture, although it may be a touch premature to make a definitive call. However, Google touches everything, and frankly that's a bit worrisome.

In security … Read more

Updates at 9:10 a.m., 9:45 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 10:40 a.m., 11:25 a.m., and 12:15 p.m. PST: Google's and StopBadware.org's numerous responses added. Rewrites have been made throughout to sum up the issue.

For about an hour on Saturday morning, Google listed every site on the Internet as malware.

After the initial problem was fixed, it took a couple of hours to iron out who actually was to blame--Google or a nonprofit known as StopBadware.org.

TechCrunch and CNET reported around 7 a.m. PST that … Read more

I've been seeing a lot of articles lately about Blu-ray's fuzzy future, how it's doomed, and how its success will be short-lived even if it does take off. Well, that may well end up being the case, but I gotta say, from where I'm sitting, there's a far greater probability that Blu-ray will do just fine--for a long time. And I'm not saying that because I'm a fanboy or a shill for Sony. I'm saying it because a lot of simple market factors point toward it doing just fine. Here are nine reasons why I'm right.

1. Digital downloads will not eliminate the need for discs anytime soon.

Let's address this first since this is the biggest factor that people cite when trumpeting Blu-ray's defeat. If you haven't noticed, here at CNET we spend a good amount of time covering new streaming video platforms and services and really enjoy testing these new products. Everything from Hulu to Netflix streaming video to Slingbox to Apple TV to Vudu all show promise. That said, all these products have some limiting factors, including lack of content selection, pricing hurdles, and most particularly, bandwidth issues, which affect video and audio quality. … Read more

I didn't attend the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last year, and so the exceptional keynote speech of Clay Shirky, a New York University new-media professor, writer, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies.

The keynote, "It's not information overload. It's filter failure," is an insightful exploration of Internet economics and an intelligent response to Nick Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" argument.

If you haven't watched it, you must. It does more to explain the dearth of effective information filters that we wade through today. It has application to open source (180,000-plus projects on SourceForge, but which are useful?), but far broader implications.

You can watch it here:

But here is where he lays out the crux of the problem, which I've transcribed:

The other problem that Gutenberg introduced into intellectual life was the problem of risk. If you owned a printing press, you could make money, if people bought your books, but you could lose money if people (didn't) buy your books. And since you had to print the books in advance, you were taking on all the risk of whether or not those books would sell....This is the problem of publishing.

The economic solution was pretty simple: make the publisher responsible for filtering for quality. There's no obvious reason that someone (who) is good at running a printing press also ought to be good at figuring out (which) books to print.

But the economic logic of print in advance, then sell it--high up-front cost and then recoup when you reach the people--that economic logic has come to mean that the word "publisher" has come to mean two things: people who decide what to publish and people who do the publishing.… Read more

File this one under the "ouch" category. Yahoo is shutting down its social-networking experiment, Yahoo Mash, after only a year in business.

An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton read, "Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available."

Mash didn't really offer anything new, other than the fact that instead of inviting friends you created profiles for them … Read more

Apple's MobileMe suite of Web services suffered another outage Monday that affected an unknown number of its users.

Of the included services, Mail was inaccessible for approximately two hours. Earlier in the day we had received scattered reports from users who were unable to access their mail. Those reports were later confirmed both through Apple's MobileMe status ticker and Twitter's real-time search tool. For those affected, all other aspects of MobileMe were reportedly up and running.

Monday's problems centered on a lack of access to Mail on three fronts: through the Web, on the iPhone, and … Read more

Nvidia's second quarter business update, released Wednesday, was mostly bad news for the company. But there's potentially bad news for consumers, too. Nvidia revealed plans to take a $150 million to $200 million charge to cover anticipated repair and return costs arising from a "weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebook systems."

The release goes on to explain that the cards aren't faulty on their own, but that the materials have demonstrated higher-than-normal failure rates in combination with other components in certain laptop … Read more