Cellphone Companies Will Share Your Location Data - Just Not With You  —  Cellphone companies hold onto your location information for years and routinely provide it to police and, in anonymized form, to outside companies.  As they note in their privacy policies, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T …

Could Instagram And Other Sites Avoid Going Down With Amazon's Ship?  —  When we heard about Instagram (and other sites) going down when Amazon Web Services' North Virginia hub was hit by a storm — not the first time AWS has gone down (April 2011 was another notable outage) we couldn't help but wonder: could it have been avoided?

Twitter Cuts Off LinkedIn — Who's Next?  —  Throughout Twitter's infancy, the company had a loose philosophy toward its APIs.  In the quest for a user base, developers were welcome to do much anything they wanted in integrating with Twitter, which often mean creating spin-offs that muddied Twitter's original intended experience.

waywire, Cory Booker's Personalized News Startup, Uses Video To Give Youth A Voice  —  “There's an oligarchy in the media and that needs to be broken up” Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker tells me.  So he's building #waywire, a news site that features original and syndicated video content …

ITC defers ruling on Motorola's Xbox ban  —  The International Trade Commission's six-member deciding panel deferred judgment today on a patent dispute between Google's Motorola Mobility and Microsoft, pushing the possibility of a ban on the Xbox 360 out of likelihood this year.

Microsoft's Parker to Replace PC-Maker Liaison Guggenheimer  —  Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) (MSFT) said Steven Guggenheimer, a vice president who oversees the software maker's relationships with computer makers, is leaving the position and will be replaced by Nick Parker.

Now on Identity  —  As of July 1, I'm moving from Google's Android team to our Identity group, to work on OAuth, OpenID, and that sort of stuff.  Back to being a full-time Web guy, for a while anyhow.  —  Why?  —  Several reasons.  First, it was made increasingly obvious …

Tumblr Introduces New Ad Product: Pinned Posts  —  Tumblr introduced a new ad product Thursday — one that enables users to pin their posts to the top of their followers' dashboards for 24 hours, thereby giving their content more exposure.  —  This is the fourth ad product Tumblr has rolled out since the beginning of the year.

South Carolina passes bill against municipal broadband  —  The anti-municipal broadband bill now awaits the governor's signature.  —  State of South Carolina  —  South Carolina has become the latest state in the union to pass a state-level bill that effectively makes it difficult …

Apple granted a preliminary injunction against Samsung Galaxy Nexus sales in U.S.  —  Apple has been granted a preliminary injunction on the sales of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in the U.S. by District Court Judge Lucy Koh, says Reuters legal reporter Dan Levine.

Hewlett-Packard To Shun ARM At Debut Of Microsoft Windows 8  —  Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) said it will hold off selling tablets based on ARM Holdings Plc technology when the next version of Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)'s Windows operating system debuts later this year.