Amazon server problems disrupt HootSuite, Reddit, Quora, Foursquare

Several popular Internet services are experiencing disruptions this morning due to problems with Amazon Web Services.According to Amazon’s service dashboard, the company is working to resolve problems with its servers in Northern Virginia.P roblems with HootSuite, Reddit, Foursquare, Quora, commenting system Livefyre have all been traced to AWS problems, TheNextWeb reported.The outages are frustrating for those who depend on the services, but it is kind of fun to see the “technical problems” pages some of these startups have designed.The Twittersphere...

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Obama brings political message to Facebook, Silicon Valley

President Obama begins his West Coast tour today in Silicon Valley, where strong support brought big dollars and Internet talent to his last election and where he hopes to re-create that energy this time around.First stop: Facebook, where he will share the stage with CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a town hall discussion on his plan for reducing the deficit.Pretty wonky stuff for this high-tech crowd, but he’ll be received warmly by a business community that likes his tech-friendly ideas to blanket the...

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Google enables site blocking

In a blog post Thursday, Google announced that it will enable Web-site blocking on its search engine.It works like this. Say you do a Google search for something, click on the top result and then find that it’s not a site you want to visit. If you return to Google, there will be a new option next to the “Cached” link to block all results from that domain name. Click that link, and you’ll get a confirmation. If you change your mind about a site, you can manage your blocked sites in your Search Settings.The blog post notes that sometimes users will...

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