Soni PSN hacking: Services return this week, The hacker still unknown

Two weeks since after Sony's PlayStation Network was hacked Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment, addressed the issue in a press conference in Tokyo tonight.

Though they still don't know who orchestrated the intrusion on the PSN servers in San Diego, Calif., they were "very sophisticated," Hirai said. It's still not entirely clear what kind of data they got their hands on, but he reiterated that they don't believe credit card data to have been taken, and added that the company has received no complaints of ID theft or credit card fraud yet.

Most services will be restored "within the week," Hirai said. The first PSN services to come back online will be online game play for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable, the ability to play downloaded movies from PSN, and unexpired movie rentals through PSN and Qriocity and chat functionalities.

"We are aiming to restore full services including the PlayStation Store and purchasing features within the month," said Hirai.

The breach took place between April 17 ad 19, but Sony didn't tell its 77 million customers until April 26 that their personal information, including names, addresses, e-mail addresses, birthdays, PlayStation Network and Qriocity passwords, and user names, as well as online user handles, had been obtained illegally by an "unauthorized person."

The company launched an investigation in conjunction with several security firms into the intrusion on its network and shut down PSN and Qriocity while it rebuilt the security system.

Only 10 million of the 70 million PSN accounts had credit cards attached to them, Hirai said.

One of the chief complaints from customers is how long Sony took to inform them of the breach. Besides being sued by at least one person, Sony has also attracted the interest of the U.S. House of Representatives, the government of the city of Taipei, Taiwan, and the British and Canadian privacy authorities. All of them demanded answers from Sony about why it took so long to tell customers of the breach as well as how Sony would compensate them.

The company today explained how it would try to make it up to customers. Sony will provide free identity theft protection service, and "will consider" helping customers who have to be issued new credit cards. Sony will also be offering free selected downloads, as well as 30 days of free PlayStation Plus service. Music Unlimited subscribers will also get free service for 30 days.

Sony also says it is also making some changes to enhance its security. It will create a new position of Chief Security Information Officer for Sony Computer Entertainment, and in addition to that is accelerating its already-planned move of data servers from San Diego to a different location with more enhanced system security, adding automated software monitoring and configuration management, enhancing data encryption, and implementing more firewalls, Hirai said.

Once the system comes back online customers will be forced to download a software update that will require everyone to change their PSN and Qriocity passwords.

Though it is not believed to be involved in the attack that brought PSN down last week, Hirai did mention the company's past brushes with the Internet hacker group Anonymous.

"We've also received attacks from the Internet group Anonymous, who in addition to taking the personal information of Sony top management, also publicized information about their families, their names and schools, on the Internet and called for sit-in protests across the world," said Hirai. "These kinds of sequential attacks on the company may not be limited to Sony. And in addition to our own initiatives, we will work with law enforcement and related agencies to combat illegal intrusions and the safety of a networked society."

"Again we like to offer our deepest and sincere apologies for potentially compromising customer data as well as causing great concern and making services unavailable for an extended period of time," he added.

Hirai's profile has been raised of late. Besides tonight's PSN press conference, he also introduced Sony's new tablets at a media event earlier this week. Hirai has risen up through the ranks and recently was mentioned by current Chairman and CEO of Sony Howard Stringer as his possible replacement when he retires.

Source

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Coolest Gadgets and Games that Will Be Released a Few Months Ahead

3 + Months Away

Technology:

 
Android 2.4

The next release of Android's mobile OS is due in summer and is to also be called Gingerbread, confusingly. Faster processing speeds are promised and it should also be more compatible with the tablet optimised Honeycomb OS.

Game:

 
Resident Evil:Mercenaries

The Mercenaries, that zombie massacre style mini game you unlock at the end of Resident Evil 4 and 5, is getting its own full-scale release, in 3D. Coming to the 3DS this summer it will be a spectacle of gore.

6 + Months Away

Technology: 

 
Sony NGP

 
With no UMDs, far more advanced controls and longer battery life, the Sony NGP, or PSP2 if you will. should be released by Christmas. By that time will the 3DS have already won next-gen handled war?

Game:

 
Anarchy Reigns

 
This multi-player brawler, due to hit PlayStation and Xbox 360 this Autumn, places you right in the middle of a death match pit uourself against online combatants, each wielding big pointy weapons and hungry for your guts.

9 + Months Away

Technology:

 
iPad 3

 
Do you think to buy iPad 2? Well by February next year it'll be old hat, and you'll be mooning over the new iPad 3 with more storage and a higher-res screen. What a fickle person you are, guys.

Game:

 
Crusader Kings 2

Indulge your inner dictator with this epic strategy game that requires you to keep control of Euroupe over 400 years-hopefully this is not played in real-time. Heavily character driven, your choices may resut in bitter feuds, much like in real life.

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10 Hottest Technologies Latest Days

It is a snapshot of the products igniting the tech world at this moment in time. Much of the gear has just landed or will touch down shortly. But all of it is blowing us away. Hottest 10 Hi-Tech Technologies is all about the products that are the most talked about and anticipated by most all peoples. This list is the most explosive ever.

10. HTC Flyer

HTC is Android's BFF. It was there at the birth Google's mobile OS and the first to overlay it with a more user-friendly interface in the form of sense UI. It's since won favour with critics and consumers alike-three of the five top-selling UK mobiles were HTC's last month-so it's only logical that it's now serving up a Honeycomb tablet. This seven-inch wunderkind wraps an aluminium unibody around a 1024x600-pixel screen and nippy 1.5 GHz processor. Making it useful for more than just browsing and consuming is the smart stylus, which utilises HTC's new Scribe Technology to make time-stamped notes.

9 & 8. LG Optimus 3D and Samsung Galaxy S II

 
A saturated market had started to leave us wondering where phones could go next, but this brace of dualcore devices from South Korean tech giants point to the smartphone's second coming. LG's effort produces 3DS-style, glasses-free 3D on its massive 4.3-inch display. It can capture and process 3D stills and video too, through twin five-meg cameras.
The Galaxy S II has no gimmicks as imressive as that, but its dualcore processor and full gigabyte of RAM should make downloads, apps, games and HD video unprecedentedly fast and smooth. It's also only 8.49 mm thick and very light to boot. Both mobile use Android, and lay down the gauntlet to Apple. Can iPhone 5 possibly measure up to these super-mobiles?

7. Sony HDR-TD10

Sony realises that the initial success of 3D relies heavily on early adopters making their own eye-popping content. Hence the Bloggie 3D and this, the best-looking 3D camcoder to date (not with standing the fact that Sony appears to have ripped Wall-E's head off in order to build it). Whereas some other 3D cams reduce the resolution by forcing both images through the same sensor and don't allow zooming, the TD10 has two independent HP sensors and a 10x optical zoom. It'll store up to five hours of 1920x1080 3D footage ready to be viewed on the 3.5-inch Xtra Fine LCD display without the need for specs, or on your new 3D TV. You can also watch 3D footage back in full-HD 2D, shoul you be in the shameful situation of lacking a state-of-the-art telly.

6. Motorola Xoom

 
With Android 3.0 Honeycomb on board, the Xoom makes the first Galaxy Tab and other early Android tablets look a bit Fisher Price. Its crisp, 10.1-inch, widescreen display has a higher resolution than the iPad 2 and provides ample room for myriad apps and self-updating widgets, such as Google Books and the revamped Gmail for mobile. The 1GHz dualcore processor and tabbed web browser give the kind of polished performance it needs to take on iPad 2. Your communication needs are taken care of thanks to Wi-Fi, optional 3G and two cameras-a rear-mounted five-meg/720p HD one and an impressive two-meg/VGA, front-facing webcam. Add Falsh support-it should be here by the time you read this-and you have both a killer Android and the first real iPad rival.

5. Samsung BD-D7500
 

Following in the footsteps of the DVD players they've superseded. Blu-ray decks have largely been unappetising slabs of black designed to squat under your telly like malevolent metal turds. Not so the wall-mountable, ineffably lovely, very boringly named BD-D7500. The slimmest 3D BD deck money can buy is just 28 mm deep and can upscale 2D to 3D as well as upscaling non-HD materials to 1080p. It also allows you to wirelessly download thousands of movies if you've shelled out for a six-quid lovefilm subscription, as well as DLNA for streaming your own music and movies. Don't hate it for being beautiful.

4. Sony NGP

This is higher up the Hotness Index than arch-rival Nintindo's 3DS because it bypasses gimmicks such as 3D and goes all out for heavyweight specs. The dual joypads finally allow proper control in a games. While a touchscreen and gyroscope give game developers plenty of other options. The quadcore processor allows for, at the very least, PS2-quality games, while the five-inch, 960x544 widescreen should serve as a crystal-clear window onto virtual worlds. Of course it also higher up the Hottest 10 because it won't be out till Christmas. Remember the immutable law of the tech world:perceived hotness is in inverse proportion to the amount of time spent actually using stuff.

3. RIM BlackBerry Playbox

RIM is taking on Apple and the Android brigade with its own OS and the off-putting tagline of "The world's first professional-grade tablet". RIM's punting the Playboox to its traditional business market then, you might think, but twin HD cameras, access to 7 Digital's excellent music store, superb video on the multi-touch, high-res, 1024x600 screen, a web browser with support for flash 10.1 and "hard core gaming" are not the stuff of dry accountancy seminars. With a 1GHz dualcore processor and 1GB of RAM, N Wi-Fi and the promise of 4G access (where avalaible, ie: not here) this thing shoul really fly..

2. Apple iPad 2

And in a lowly conference centre in Cupertino, the new iPad was born unto us. And yea, Apple's saviour who is called Steve Jobs did see fit to bless it with a faster dualcore CPU and the miracle of "nine times faster graphics"-have faith, brothers-HD video recording and cameras both on the front and yea, unto the back. "And lo, "The Jobs proclaimed, "it shalt be 33 per cent thinner, up to 15 per cent lighter, have a slick new OS and shall retain the same teh-hour battery life and price as my last tablet testament."

1. Motorola Atrix 4G

And so, after much heated debate, this year's hottest gadget is a phone. No, a media server. Oh hang on, no, it's a laptop.

Winning nine awards on its unveiling at CES 2011, this leek Android smartphone boasts the same dualcore Nvidia Tegra 2 processor as Moto's Xoom (#6), 1 GB of a RAM and a four-inch, 960x540 screen. Despite that, it's lighter than the iPhone 4 at 135 g.

That's impressive, if not exceptional-witness the Samsung Galaxy S-but the USP that's grabbed the world's tech heads' attention is its unprecendented versatility and potential to transform a product category, The Atrix, which will be launched exclusively on Orange, can be hooked up to ahost of peripherals via its multimedia dock. Three USBs let you add a keyboard and mouse, while an HDMI output lets you use your TV as a screen, turning the Atrix into a media computer and mini set-top box.

Add Motorola's Lapdock and it becomes an 11.6-inch laptop with eight hours of battery life. We're so excited about it all thet we've run out of room to talk about the 1080p camera, the 4G-readiness, the 16 GB of storage, and the fingerprint scanner.

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Sony Just Got Serious with Next Generation Portable

Sony has taken its sweet time coming up with the NGP (Next Generation Portable) follow-up to its venerable PlayStation Portable. The PSP's last refresh came in 2007 and mu8ch has changed since for mobile gamers.

Above all, smartphones have gobbled up the casual gaming market faster than you can say, "Angry Birds". Perhaps aware of this, arch-rival Nintendo has its 3DS ready to go-see p32-and the NGP won't be on shelves till the end of the year at the earliest. Too late?

That remains to be seen, but what's not in doubt is that the NGP is a serious piece of kit. It's powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, capable of clocking up unpredented handheld speeds of 1.5GHz. Up front there's a spanky, five-inch OLED touchscreen this allow you to touch, grab, push and pull objects across the NGP's screen.

SPECIFICATIONS:

PROCESSOR Quard-core ARM Cortex A9 up to 1.5 GHz
SCREEN 5-inch, 960x544, OLED touchscreen
CONTROLS Two analogue sticks, one joypad, three-axis gyroscope, three-axis accelerometer, three-axis electronic compass, four front buttons, two shoulder buttons, capacitive touchscreen, touch-sensitive panel or rear
CAMERAS Front and rear (spec not confirmed yet)
CONNECTIVITY 3G, N-Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, A-GPS
SIZE/WEIGHT 182x84x18.6mm/weight unconfirmed

Add twin thumbsticks, cameras front and back, three motion sensors, a gyroscope, accelerometer, a compas and a plethora of buttons and you have even more controllability than the famously tactile experience Nintendo offers with the 3DS.

To accommodate all that, the NGP is more than seven inches wide-that's two inches bigger than the 3DS-and nearly an inch thick. To make that feel as unbulky as possible the chassis has what Sony dubs a "super oval design", making the NGP feel more confortable in your hands than its dimensions might suggest.

with all that power and control, the NGP is tooled up to play some of PlayStation's most technically demanding games, and Sony has aspirations of the new portable platform playing selected PS3 titles on the move.

Games will be supported by LiveArea, an interactive platform that allows to share with so much power the NGP is tooled up to play demanding playstation titles achievements with friends and the world in general. Even cooler is the pre-installed Near service, which allows users to find fellow NGP players nearby (see what did there), then communicate via 3G or Wi-Fi. And even cooler than that is the news that Sony's clunky UMD storage system, used and abused on the PSP, has been killed off. God riddance. The NGP will also have full access to PS Suite. The games library developed for Android phones.

The leitmotif of mobile gamling in the last few years has been greater simplicity. But NGP takes a very different tack. This is a serious, high-specced handheld console, designed for those who demand a lot more than hurling furious birds at pigs in glass houses. Let's hope such people still exist by the year's end.

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