Brendan McGarry / Bloomberg:
U.S. Air Force May Buy 18,000 Apple IPad 2s for Flight Crews — Feb. 10 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Air Force may buy as many as 18,000 iPad 2s in what would be one of the military’s biggest orders of computer tablets, accelerating Apple Inc.’s inroads into the federal government.

Erica Ogg / GigaOM:
Apple sues Samsung over autocorrect, other iOS patents — You may be familiar with the humor blog that aggregates examples of iPhone spelling correction malfunctions that cause (amusing) communication chaos called DamnYouAutoCorrect.com. Samsung lawyers are probably thinking something along those lines right now.

Gabe Donnini / Chitika Insights:
iOS passes Mac OS in Share of Web Traffic Propelled by Record Sales for Mobile and Tablet Devices — Apple sold a historic number of mobile devices in 2011. IDC reports that in 2011, Apple shipped 93.2 iPhone units and sold an impressive 40 million+ iPad units.

Miguel Helft / Fortune:
Ron Conway is a Silicon Valley startup’s best friend — The prolific angel investor has rarely met an Internet startup he didn’t like. When it comes to picking the next big thing, there’s a right way and a wrong way. And then there’s the Conway. — Ron Conway, with Coco, his rescue dog, photographed at their San Francisco home

Stephen Shankland / CNET:
W3C co-chair: Apple, Google power causing Open Web crisis — The dominance of Apple and Google mobile browsers is leading to a situation that’s even worse for Web programming than the former dominance of Internet Explorer, a standards group leader warned today.

John Paczkowski / AllThingsD:
Fire in the Hole! Amazon May Ship 9-Inch Kindle by Midyear. — There’s no question that Amazon’s going to sell a lot of Kindle Fires this year. And it might sell even more if it rolls out new and larger versions of the device. And according to some, that’s the plan.

Jack Purcher / Patently Apple:
Apple Working on Hot 3D Eye-Tracking Interface for Gaming & iPhone! — On Date, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals a hot 3D eye-tracking based interface that will be used for gaming, digital photography and videography …

Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:
Winning streak ends: Motorola Mobility fails to win 3G/UMTS-based injunction against Apple in Germany — Apple’s Mannheim jinx has been broken: this morning, Judge Andreas Voss of the Mannheim Regional Court announced that a Motorola Mobility lawsuit over a patent declared essential …

Matthew Panzarino / The Next Web:
Apple is rushing to finalize apps for onstage iPad 3 demos and commercials — Now that the beans have been, mostly, spilled with regards to the early March announcement of the iPad 3, more information is coming forward about Apple’s preparations for the event.

Roger Cheng / CNET:
Ethical-iPhone activists deliver petitions to Apple stores — Change.org member Sarah Ryan hand delivers a box filled with signatures to an Apple employee at the Grand Central Terminal store in Manhattan. — Activists hand delivered a quarter of a million petitions to Apple’s Grand Central …