Mozilla, Firefox join anti-SOPA strike
Mozilla, the open-source organization responsible for Firefox, joined other major technology companies today to protest anti-piracy legislation by blackening the browser's home page.
From 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET, Firefox's default home page -- essentially a search field for Google -- will change from its usual white background with the Firefox logo to a blacked-out version displaying a modified graphic emblazoned with "Stop Censorship."
Meanwhile, the English language versions of Mozilla's sites -- mozilla.com and mozilla.org -- will redirect visitors to an "action page" asking for their support in stopping what it called "Internet blacklist legislation." Read more...
Lightning strike in Dublin downs Amazon, Microsoft clouds
A lightning strike in Dublin on Sunday caused a power failure in data centers belonging to Amazon and Microsoft, causing the companies' cloud services to go offline.
lightning struck a transformer, sparking an explosion and fire which caused the power outage at 10:41 AM PDT, according to preliminary information, Amazon wrote on its Service Health Dashboard. Under normal circumstances, backup generators would seamlessly kick in, but the explosion also managed to knock out some of those generators.
By 1:56 PM PDT, power to the majority of network devices had been restored, allowing Amazon to focus on bringing EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances and EBS (Elastic Block Storage) volumes back online. But progress was slower than expected, Amazon said a couple of hours later. Read more...