Could this be related to the fact that I'm using the 's3' builder versus the 'aws-s3'?
Intuitively, that seems unlikely: if anything, I'd expect calls made using the aws-s3 provider to be *more* AWS-specific than the more generic S3 API.
What we'd ideally like to find out is how the boto call is different from the call that jclouds is making. Are you able to capture some logging for that, and/or make successful calls using cURL?
Regards ap