Nintendo gets gamed by hackers
On the eve of the E3 video game trade show, Nintendo has admitted that its network is also vulnerable to hackers playing cybersecurity games.
Sony has yet to restore fully the PlayStation Network after it was crippled by hackers in April, but the virtual break-in at one of Nintendo’s US web servers seems much less serious.
From Twitter accounts and national news sites to Google’s email service, several widely used sites were reported to have been compromised this week in a spree of online cybersecurity breaches.
Update: On Monday, Congressman Anthony Weiner held a press conference at which he admitted that he sent a lewd photograph on Twitter and had lied about being hacked.
Incredible lightness of seeing
The latest LED-lit televisions offer amazing thinness and shimmering edge-to-edge pictures.
But despite their outer beauty, the Smart TV interfaces inside that link to web-connected apps and services could use a little plastic surgery. This week’s Personal Technology column in the FT’s Business Life section looks at the smarts of the Samsung D7000.
Sony closed a second online network for its gaming customers and said for the first time that hackers had stolen account information on thousands of payment cards.
The company disabled the Sony Online Entertainment system, which serves players of its EverQuest and other games played from personal computers.
More than 70m users of Sony’s online gaming network have had their names, e-mail addresses and passwords stolen by a hacker in one of the largest privacy breaches to date.
Sony announced on Tuesday that the information had been taken – six days after it closed the PlayStation Network – as it began e-mailing users of the free service with warnings to be on the lookout for scams.
MPAA, Sony, Google vs. little guys
This seems to be the week of the big media guys beating up the little guys and the little guys fighting back.
On Monday, the Motion Picture Association of America sued the new DVD streaming service Zediva. On Tuesday, Sony said its PlayStation Network had suffered outages as a result of attacks by the Anonymous group of hackers. On Wednesday, Google said it had removed an app for the Grooveshark music streaming service from the Android Market.
Sony makes most GDC game moves
The 2011 Game Developers Conference, one of the “majors” in global video game events, has just wrapped up here in San Francisco after five days of events and announcements surrounding new games, technologies and services.
Nintendo gave us a first look at the Wii at GDC five years ago, Bill Gates launched the original Xbox here in 2000 and Sony pushed out its Move motion controller last year. While there was nothing of the same magnitude this year and Microsoft appears to be ignoring GDC for big announcements these days, we still had a keynote from Nintendo’s chief Satoru Iwata and a flurry of news from Sony.
Music in the air
Time to throw out the 78s, LPs, CDs, cassettes and even your digital downloads? With so many services offering to stream your favourite songs over the internet and store playlists now, there seems no need for a permanent record collection.
After exploring cloud gaming last week, the Personal Technology column in the FT’s Business Life section this week looks at cloud music services, ahead of the inevitable entry of Google and Apple.
Sony’s smart and dumb game moves
There was one inexplicable omission in the features unveiled for Sony’s next-generation portable (NGP) device in Tokyo on Wednesday night and one bold and exciting move regarding the future of the PlayStation platform.
Nintendo beats Sony on glasses-free 3D
Nintendo was showing off its 3DS handheld game console at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, begging the question of where was Sony’s 3D PlayStation Portable.
Sony made a point at its news conference that it was bringing 3D to the smaller screen, with products like the Bloggie camcorder, but a gaming machine was notable in its absence.
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