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1. Sony CEO Stringer Apologizes for Data Breach
1. Sony CEO Stringer Apologizes for Data Breach
Sony Corp. Chief Executive Howard Stringer apologized for a massive data breach of the company's online game networks—the first public remarks by the top executive as Sony works to reassure its customers following the theft of personal data from more than 100 million online accounts.
"I know this has been a frustrating time for all of you," Mr. Stringer said in a blog post addressed to Sony customers late Thursday evening. "Let me assure you that the resources of this company have been focused on investigating the entire nature and impact of the cyber-attack we've all experienced and on fixing it."
The intrusion, which occurred last month, resulting in the theft of names, email addresses and possibly credit card information from its PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment gaming services. Sony took down the PlayStation Network over two weeks ago to investigate the intrusion and secure the network from future attacks.
On Thursday, Sony also revealed details of a plan to provide its customers with free identity theft prevention services for 12 months. Sony said the prevention service, provided through a company called Debix Inc., will alert Sony customers to unauthorized use of their personal information and a $1 million insurance policy if they become the victims of identity theft.
Sony executives have come under increasing pressure, including inquiries from legislators and government privacy officials, to provide a fuller accounting of the data theft and the amount of time it took for Sony to notify its customers. Members of Congress, the New York State attorney general and German privacy officials have asked for information from the company on the topic.
In his post, Mr. Stringer said he knows that some people believe the company should have notified it customers earlier about the intrusion, calling it a "fair question." Sony has said the attack on its network occurred between April 17 and 19, but the company didn't reveal the complete extent of the customer data that was stolen until April 26.
Mr. Stringer, echoing previous comments made by other Sony executives, said it took time for the company to figure out the full extent of the damage.
"I wish we could have gotten the answers we needed sooner, but forensic analysis is a complex, time-consuming process," Mr. Stringer said. "Hackers, after all, do their best to cover their tracks, and it took some time for our experts to find those tracks and begin to identify what personal information had—or had not—been taken."
Until the release of the letter, Mr. Stringer had remained surprisingly quiet on the problem, leaving the public handling to his trusted lieutenant and heir apparent, Kazuo Hirai, head of the company's videogames division. In March, Sony promoted Mr. Hirai and identified him as the frontrunner eventually to succeed Mr. Stringer, citing his deep understanding of integrating hardware, software and online services in a single product.
Since the network outage situation first emerged, Sony officials said Mr. Stringer was letting Mr. Hirai take the lead because Mr. Hirai is better versed in both the videogame and online services businesses than Mr. Stringer.
And yet Mr. Stringer remains the most prominent global public face of the company. In his post, he said Sony is still investigating the break-in and is working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and "other law enforcement agencies around the world to apprehend those responsible." He said the company is upgrading its security systems so that "if attacks like this happen again, our defenses will be even stronger."
Sony hasn't yet disclosed the cost of the data breach on the company, including the investigation, which has involved hiring several outside forensic, security and law firms.
In early Tokyo stock trading Friday morning, Sony's stock was down more than 4%.
A big priority for the company now is to get the PlayStation Network up and running to avoid further damage to its relationship with customers, who rely on the service to play multiplayer games against each other over the Internet.
A Sony spokesman on Thursday said in a blog post that the company is in the final stages of testing its new security system, though he didn't say when its online gaming services would be available again to customers. Mr. Stringer suggested the company will meet its goal of bringing its game services back online by the end of the week.
"In the coming days, we will restore service to the networks and welcome you back to the fun," he said.
In other news.............
Privacy Concerns Stall Growth of Location Apps
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2. Password management firm faces possible hack
2. Password management firm faces possible hack
Irregular network activity caused cloud-based password management solution LastPass to issue a security notification this week. In addition to the security notice, LastPass is requiring users to change their master passwords as a precaution.
On its blog, LastPass notes that it noticed some strange network activity in several places in its system. Because the root cause for the traffic couldn’t be ascertained, LastPass is assuming the worst.
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From its blog: "…We’re going to be paranoid and assume the worst: that the data we stored in the database was somehow accessed. We know roughly the amount of data transferred and that it’s big enough to have transferred people’s email addresses, the server salt and their salted password hashes from the database. We also know that the amount of data taken isn’t remotely enough to have pulled many users encrypted data blobs."
LastPass notes that the potential threat in this case is brute-force password attacks, likely using dictionary-based key generators. For that reason, LastPass says users who have strong, non-dictionary based passwords or pass phrases should be fine.
Understanding that not all users have a strict password, however, LastPass is requiring everyone to change their master password.
An unfortunate side effect of all this password changing, however, is overloading the LastPass infrastructure. In an update to its blog, LastPass posted this:
"Record traffic, plus a rush of people to make password changes is more than we can currently handle. We’re switching tactics — if you’ve made the password change already we’ll handle you normally."
What this means is that LastPass users who have not already changed their passwords will be logged into offline mode. LastPass will work as usual, but the syncing of new passwords won’t be available.
Understanding the real threat
Operating under LastPass’s worst-case assumption that email addresses, server salt and salted password hashes were lifted from the LastPass database, there is little reason to think that users face any substantial risk.
Although crackers may now be able to use brute-force methods to crack the passwords for some users, LastPass is taking major steps to prevent access to user accounts from nefarious sources.
First, the company is requiring that users change their master password. Because of the site’s server load, this process could take days. However, all users will be required to change their passwords before they can access their accounts.
Second, LastPass will be verifying that users are who they say they are, by requiring email validation or by having users enter the password change form via an IP block used in the past. In other words, if a request is coming from an IP range thousands of miles away from the last place a user logged in, the user won’t gain access without going through another verification layer.
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3. Telstra hits first with Motorola Xoom and Atrix
3. Telstra hits first with Motorola Xoom and Atrix
Telstra will be the first telco in Australia to offer the Motorola Xoom tablet - the first device worldwide to run the designed-for-tablets Android 3.0 OS - and the Atrix Android smartphone, billed as the most powerful smartphone in the world, with its dual 1GHz processors.
Telstra will launch the Atrix on 7 June and willhave an exclusive on it until the end of July. It has no exclusivity on the Xoom, which will go on sale on 24 May, but Motorola has yet to announce any other channels to market.
Both devices will sell for $840 outright. The Xoom will be available on a range of 24 month contract plans with a mobile repayment option that reduces the device price to $60 on $29 and $49 plans and to $360 on a $79 plan. It will also be available with prepaid services, but not details have yet been announced.
According to Andrew Volard, director of Telstra Mobile Products, "By harnessing the computing power traditionally reserved for a PC, Atrix makes it possible for customers to enjoy graphic-intensive games and HD video - plus fast mobile web browsing and multitasking…It is the first smartphone to seriously blur the line between phone and computer.
The Atrix is billed as "launching a new era of mobile computing." According to Motorola it is "designed to become a customer's primary digital hub to create, edit and enjoy documents, media and content."
Blurring the computer phone distinction it is less a phone than a pocket sized computer that, depending on which external docking accessories it iscoupled with fulfils different functions. These range from a basic dock ($59) that charges the phone and puts it into bedside alarm clock mode to a 'Lapdock' ($449) that looks like a laptop computer but is in
reality merely a screen and keyboard for the Atrix - with additional batteries.
There is car dock ($69), an HD Multimedia Dock ($129) with three USB ports and an HDMI port and an infra red remote control and a bluetooth keyboard ($79) that can also be used with the Xoom.
While not a computer in the sense that it is an Android device, the Atrix runs a full version (3.6) of the Firefox browser, not the Android mobile version, with support for Adobe Flash Player.
Full function Firefox
Support for Firefox, and a range of other functions, are enabled by Motorola's Webtop application that, according to Motorola "changes mobile computing forever by unleashing the power of the smartphone like never before...While using the Webtop application customers can run their Android applications in a window, browse their favourite websites with a full Firefox desktop browser, edit documents, send instant messages and make phone calls, all at the same time…Users can surf the web, view social networks and use HTML5 web-based
applications and supported cloud computing services."
For the corporate market the Atrix " allows people to easily work with corporate email, documents and media….Business people with an existing Citrix account will benefit from the integrated Citrix Receiver application that provides secure, high performance access to virtual desktops as well as Windows, web and office applications hosted on Citrix XenDesktop." Added security is provided by fingerprint recognition technology.
The Atrix has a 4.00 screen with scratch resistant Corning Gorilla Glass and "one of the highest resolutions available on any phone today," 5MP and 2MP cameras, 16GB of on board memory and the capacity for a 32GB microSD card.
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4. YouTube Jokes
4. YouTube Jokes
PROVIDENCE, RI—According to a study released this week by Brown University's Department of Modern Culture and Media, it now takes only four minutes for a new cultural touchstone to transform from an amusing novelty into an intensely annoying thing people never want to see or hear again.
"The American populace experienced a genuine sense of enjoyment when initially exposed to phenomena as diverse as the Double Rainbow video, the actor Jon Heder, and the phrase 'Stay thirsty, my friends,'" lead researcher Irene Levinson said. "But what's remarkable is that these exact same things were rejected with an almost violent revulsion less than 240 seconds later."
"The results are the same for everything from TV news bloopers to professional ad campaigns, with only a handful of exceptions," Levinson added. "For example, it takes, on average, less than 90 seconds to go from feeling delight to active enmity for anything that involves talking infants."
According to researchers, the unprecedented exposure afforded by the Internet is responsible for the speed with which such phenomena shift from eliciting joyous chuckles to provoking blind, undiluted rage.
"The average web user receives a dozen links and reads 60 mentions of a new meme or sensation within the first 45 seconds of being online," said Salvador Calder, a media studies professor. "During this period of peak popularity, individuals seem to derive a great level of satisfaction from endlessly repeating an entity's signature component, be it a contrived Kazakh accent or the words 'epic fail.'"
"However," Calder continued, "at roughly the 91-second mark, when the phenomenon has been remixed, set to a dance beat, and Auto-Tuned, that original sense of pleasure begins its inevitable, precipitous decline."
Calder's data indicate that between the second and third minute, the phenomenon is typically signed to a movie, book, or record deal, the news of which tends to trigger a "harsh and immediate reassessment" among most individuals as to whether the thing was ever legitimately amusing in the first place.
"A wide-scale backlash is initiated shortly after four minutes," Calder said. "This is usually the point when one is no longer able to turn on a TV or engage in a normal conversation without hearing someone make a clumsy reference to the now painfully stale entity."
"It's precisely at this moment when the subject starts to experience an unshakable and overwhelming desire to punch anyone making further allusion to the phenomenon right in the face," Calder added.
The study confirmed that 98.7 percent of attempts to capitalize on the public's annoyance with the phenomenon through mockery and spoofs also backfired, serving only to compound and intensify people's fury instead.
Using data collected over the past four decades, the research team determined that it used to take considerably longer for a cultural phenomenon to evolve from an entertaining diversion into the most reviled thing on the planet. In a particularly telling example, the study showed how the phrase "Yo quiero Taco Bell" sustained itself as an acceptable interjection for four years during the pre-broadband era. They then compared this to a modern-day equivalent, "Release the Kraken," which last year was angrily snuffed after only two days due to the "excruciating levels of irritation" that it inflicted on the population.
Researchers predict the time lag between novelty and utter hatred is likely to narrow further as technological advancements continue to increase and expand social connectedness online.
"We project that by 2018, the gap between liking something new and wishing yourself dead rather than hearing it again will be down to 60 seconds," Levinson said. "And by 2023, enjoyment and abhorrence will occur simultaneously, the two emotions effectively canceling each other out and leaving one feeling nothing whatsoever."
"I can't f**king wait," he added.
"The American populace experienced a genuine sense of enjoyment when initially exposed to phenomena as diverse as the Double Rainbow video, the actor Jon Heder, and the phrase 'Stay thirsty, my friends,'" lead researcher Irene Levinson said. "But what's remarkable is that these exact same things were rejected with an almost violent revulsion less than 240 seconds later."
"The results are the same for everything from TV news bloopers to professional ad campaigns, with only a handful of exceptions," Levinson added. "For example, it takes, on average, less than 90 seconds to go from feeling delight to active enmity for anything that involves talking infants."
According to researchers, the unprecedented exposure afforded by the Internet is responsible for the speed with which such phenomena shift from eliciting joyous chuckles to provoking blind, undiluted rage.
"The average web user receives a dozen links and reads 60 mentions of a new meme or sensation within the first 45 seconds of being online," said Salvador Calder, a media studies professor. "During this period of peak popularity, individuals seem to derive a great level of satisfaction from endlessly repeating an entity's signature component, be it a contrived Kazakh accent or the words 'epic fail.'"
"However," Calder continued, "at roughly the 91-second mark, when the phenomenon has been remixed, set to a dance beat, and Auto-Tuned, that original sense of pleasure begins its inevitable, precipitous decline."
Calder's data indicate that between the second and third minute, the phenomenon is typically signed to a movie, book, or record deal, the news of which tends to trigger a "harsh and immediate reassessment" among most individuals as to whether the thing was ever legitimately amusing in the first place.
"A wide-scale backlash is initiated shortly after four minutes," Calder said. "This is usually the point when one is no longer able to turn on a TV or engage in a normal conversation without hearing someone make a clumsy reference to the now painfully stale entity."
"It's precisely at this moment when the subject starts to experience an unshakable and overwhelming desire to punch anyone making further allusion to the phenomenon right in the face," Calder added.
The study confirmed that 98.7 percent of attempts to capitalize on the public's annoyance with the phenomenon through mockery and spoofs also backfired, serving only to compound and intensify people's fury instead.
Using data collected over the past four decades, the research team determined that it used to take considerably longer for a cultural phenomenon to evolve from an entertaining diversion into the most reviled thing on the planet. In a particularly telling example, the study showed how the phrase "Yo quiero Taco Bell" sustained itself as an acceptable interjection for four years during the pre-broadband era. They then compared this to a modern-day equivalent, "Release the Kraken," which last year was angrily snuffed after only two days due to the "excruciating levels of irritation" that it inflicted on the population.
Researchers predict the time lag between novelty and utter hatred is likely to narrow further as technological advancements continue to increase and expand social connectedness online.
"We project that by 2018, the gap between liking something new and wishing yourself dead rather than hearing it again will be down to 60 seconds," Levinson said. "And by 2023, enjoyment and abhorrence will occur simultaneously, the two emotions effectively canceling each other out and leaving one feeling nothing whatsoever."
"I can't f**king wait," he added.
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5. Digital Life
5. Digital Life
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