HP shares surged by more than 7 percent, or $1.69, today to $25.10, mainly on a positive report on the state of its personal computer business from the market research firms Gartner and IDC.

As I noted yesterday, HP saw its share of the global market grow fractionally, according to the reckoning of Gartner, at the expense of Dell, Acer and Asus, while China-based rival Lenovo grew even more. IDC saw similar results, and both research houses were surprised to see the overall market grow in the first quarter of the year where a market decline had been expected.

That was enough to give HP shares a long-awaited jolt. So far in 2012, HP shares have fallen a little less than 3 percent, but that comes on top of the ridiculous 40 percent drop they suffered during 2011.

Much of that decline was suffered on Aug. 19, 2011, a day after the company, under then-CEO Léo Apotheker, missed its quarterly forecasts, spent $12 billion to acquire the British software firm Autonomy and floated an ill-advised plan to spin off the very PC operations that gave investors a rare moment to cheer. Looking back now, it does make for some irony, no?

To be sure, HP’s share price has had a better than average week. On days when the Dow was mostly in the red, HP has been one of the few stocks on the board showing green all week.

And frankly an uptick in the PC business, while welcome indeed, isn’t exactly going to fix HP in any fundamental way. At least not yet. PC sales were 31 percent of overall sales in 2011, and declined slightly over the prior year. And while that made HP’s Personal Systems Group the biggest business unit at HP last year — and now combined with printers it’s even bigger — profits both in PCs and in printers are seriously under attack.

The hope lies in the enterprise and in services, and maybe in the cloud. Profit margins in the enterprise business and in the services group were roughly twice what they were in PCs. HP also made a big announcement on the cloud computing front earlier this week that would seem to put it on course to compete with the likes of Amazon in providing computing capacity in a similar for-hire fashion as the Web retailer does with its Web Services unit.

It’s hard to know how profitable that business is for Amazon because it doesn’t disclose its operational size and profit margins and lumps that operation into its $1.4 billion category labeled “other.” However it’s worth noting — as HP surely has — that Amazon’s “other” category grew by 73 percent in 2011 and nearly tripled in size from 2009. There may be a real light at the end of that tunnel yet, but there’s lot’s of work to do.

Amazon has not returned calls or emails seeking comment, but we have confirmed independently that Charlotte, N.C.-based Yap has been acquired by Amazon.

Reports of the acquisition surfaced earlier today after CLT, a Charlotte-based blog, connected a couple of obscure dots. First, it tracked down an SEC filing that shows that as of Sept. 8, Yap was acquired by Yarmuth Dion. Then, it discovered that Yarmouth Dion has the same mailing address as Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

Media reports immediately jumped to the conclusion that Amazon was interested in the company’s speech recognition technology so it could compete with Siri, the voice-controlled assistant found on Apple’s newest iPhone.

And, from what we dug up, that sounds about right.

Most recently, Yap’s servers were being used by Sprint and others to convert voicemails to text. It was being shipped on a majority of Sprint’s Android handsets. Yap also had an iPhone app.

On Oct. 20, Yap voicemail was discontinued.

But the company, founded by brothers Igor and Victor Jablokov, started out in a different direction. Four years ago, the company was eager to build technology that allowed people to interact with Web services using speech recognition. The company, which raised about $10 million, presented at the TechCrunch40 event in 2007.

At the time, the idea was a little far-fetched.

Wireless networks weren’t very fast, not many people owned smartphones and distribution was tough because of the lack of app stores. With many of those problems resolved, we heard the 50-employee company was beginning to return to its roots. Now, it works for Amazon.

We can hear it now:

– “Yap, what are this season’s most popular boots?”

– “Yap, buy me the first Harry Potter novel.”

– “Yap, what’s the new hit song from Justin Bieber?”

WikiLeaks, the site infamous for exposing America’s diplomatic dirty laundry, has confirmed via its Twitter feed that it is no longer hosting its files on Amazon’s servers.

No comment from Amazon on this, although I have a call in to the company.

The move comes as Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut–who was a onetime vice-presidential nominee and who is also chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee–had called for Amazon to cut its ties to WikiLeaks.

Lieberman issued a brief statement calling on other companies not to work with WikiLeaks, and pledged to “ask Amazon about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks.”

That could mean he intends to hold hearings, and given the intensity of the vitriol about WikiLeaks coming out of official Washington in the last few days, that would only be a start.

But the answers aren’t going to be all that satisfying, as Talking Points Memo explains, since anyone can upload something to Amazon’s Web Services without any prescreening, which is pretty much the case on any Web service these days. The ostensible reason for the eviction was some violation of Amazon’s terms of service.

This all looks to have been a useless exercise on Lieberman’s part. As Ryan Tate of Valleywag points out, other Amazon customers and partners include some of the news organizations that have been participating with WikiLeaks in the release of the cables. Its news stories, including its own series on the leaks, have been published on the Kindle. Did Lieberman bust Kindle’s chops over that? No.

What’s interesting is that WikiLeaks moved its files to Amazon in the wake of what it said was a distributed denial of service attack on November 28. WikiLeaks claims it came under another more intense attack yesterday. No word on who carried it out.

And something tells me it won’t be the last time.

But, in the end, does it make a difference? Because once something is released on so massive a scale, you might as well order an errant glob of toothpaste back into the tube as try to intimidate or legislate it out of existence.

If these cables detailing the unvarnished opinions of American diplomats around the world were to be such closely guarded secrets, then the more apt question for the inevitable hearings that Lieberman’s Committee will no doubt call concern why they were so readily accessible to a young Army soldier with a computer and a Flash drive, as has been alleged against Bradley Manning.

Here’s Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes’s Memo on the AOL spinoff, which was approved by the media giant’s board last night and announced this morning.

BoomTown reported a lot of the deep details of the new structure of the online unit, which sweeps aside the previous one and includes a new venture unit.

Here’s the memo:

May 28, 2009

To: Time Warner Colleagues

From: Jeff Bewkes

Subject: Time Warner Announces Plan to Separate AOL

As you know, we’ve been working with AOL’s new management to move that company into the next phase of its evolution. To that end, we’ve been discussing the optimal ownership structure to enable AOL to fully realize its potential as a global Web services company. This morning, we announced that our Board of Directors has authorized management to proceed with plans for the complete legal and structural separation of AOL from Time Warner. Following the proposed transaction, which we aim to complete around the end of the year, AOL would be an independent, publicly traded company.

We believe that a separation will place both Time Warner and AOL in the best position to succeed, with greater operational and strategic flexibility. As an independent company, AOL should be a stronger competitor that is better able to deliver new and innovative products and services. At the same time, the separation will be another important step in the process we began last year of refocusing Time Warner to an even greater degree on our core content businesses.

For additional details about the proposed transaction, please click here to read the press release. I know you will have questions about this separation and how it may affect you and our company. We will provide more information as it becomes available over the coming months.

In the meantime, I’d like to thank the management and employees of AOL for the many contributions they have made, and continue to make, to our company. I’d also like to thank all Time Warner employees for your hard work and dedication. We’re making great progress toward our goals of building Time Warner into the world’s leading content company and improving our stockholders’ returns. With your continued support, I’m confident we have a bright future.