An ongoing goal here at SiliconANGLE is to update you bi-weekly on the stories and trends from the consumer storage world. What better way to start your week than to get caught up on the stories that directly affect you, the consumer? Hot in the news right now is the release of Sony’s PlayStation 4 now on sale in stores, and Microsoft’s Xbox One hitting shelves this week. Throwing its hat into the crowded gaming console ring for the holidays is Ouya’s new limited edition all-white case for its Android-powered console.

Ouya doubled the system’s internal storage to 16GB, housing more games and media. Pre-orders for the limited edition console are set at a $129.99 ($30 more than the 8GB model), and if you order before December 8th, you should have it in time to wrap and place under the Christmas tree. Will its price point allow Ouya to steal the bottom of the PlayStation and Xbox market?

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Snowden made me do it: Brazil government considering local cloud storage requirement

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As consumer storage interests increase for entertainment and mobile purposes, the matter of privacy becomes all the more pertinent. Earlier this year Edward Snowden revealed a few dirty little secrets about the NSA and its spying on the American public’s personal lives. Because of those revelations, Brazil is now considering enacting laws to require in-country storage of any data generated by Brazilian citizens and companies.

Across the pond, the European Union is currently deliberating its own modification to data protection rules and regulations as it deliberates further restrictions on the transfer of personal data of EU citizens to any country that lacks adequate data protection safeguards, unless pre-approved by the citizen’s member state.

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Amazon to world: we can make computing cheaper

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If you thought that Amazon’s current plan for computing was massive, you might want to think one or two orders of magnitude bigger. As reported by the NYTimes blog, in a startling talk last week at AWS re:Invent, James Hamilton, vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services who oversees the internal engineering of Amazon’s global computing system described how Amazon is developing ways to make its computer run cheaper and more efficiently than the standard commercial products. By building its own specialized computers, data storage systems, networking systems, power substations and optical transmissions systems, AWS is reducing the costs of computing and changing, well, everything everywhere.

Watch our exclusive interview with Hamilton on theCUBE at last week’s AWS: re:Invent 2013 conference.

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Get back “Other” storage space on your iOS devices

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Are you all of the sudden running low on storage space on your iPhone or iPad? Before you start to delete apps or music, you might want to examine the “Other” portion of your storage color bar in iTunes. There is a good chance there are a slew of hidden files that are doing nothing more than taking up space on your iOS device. “Other” basically consists of data on your iOS device that isn’t apps, photos, music or videos. This can include: Safari cache, Siri cache, reminders, notes, stocks, weather data, email, text messages and iMessages, as well as cache data for all of the other apps on your iOS device. Moral of the story, clear your iOS cache and “Other” returns significant storage GB.