Sony has been fined by the U.K.’s data protection watchdog for the April 2011 data breach of the PlayStation Network which compromised the personal details of millions of users. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined the company close to $400,000 (£250,000) for the breach, describing it as “a serious breach of the [U.K.'s] Data Protection Act” (DPA).

The PlayStation Network hack compromised users’ names, addresses, email addresses, dates of birth and account passwords. Customers’ payment card details were also at risk, according to the ICO, which — having investigated the event — has concluded that the hack attack could have been prevented if Sony’s software had been up-to-date, while  ”technical developments” also meant passwords were not secure.

The ICO is empowered to levy a fine on companies if there is a serious breach of section 4(4) of the DPA which states:

(4)Subject to section 27(1), it shall be the duty of a data controller to comply with the data protection principles in relation to all personal data with respect to which he is the data controller.

Commenting on the fine, David Smith, Deputy Commissioner and Director of Data Protection, said Sony — a company that was processing card payments for its service — should simply have “known better”.

“If you are responsible for so many payment card details and log-in details then keeping that personal data secure has to be your priority. In this case that just didn’t happen, and when the database was targeted – albeit in a determined criminal attack – the security measures in place were simply not good enough,” he said in a statement. “There’s no disguising that this is a business that should have known better. It is a company that trades on its technical expertise, and there’s no doubt in my mind that they had access to both the technical knowledge and the resources to keep this information safe.”

Smith described the penalty on Sony as “substantial”, adding: “The case is one of the most serious ever reported to us. It directly affected a huge number of consumers, and at the very least put them at risk of identity theft.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Latest missive from the games console wars: Sony has announced cumulative sales of its PlayStation 3 reached 70 million units on November 4, a few days short of the machine’s sixth birthday. Microsoft’s rival Xbox 360 console achieved the 70 million cumulative sales milestone back in September, according to Microsoft’s FY12Q3 earnings, although the Xbox 360 is about a year older than the PS3 so has had longer to clock up sales.

The Nintendo Wii, also launched back in fall/winter of 2006, still leads the pack — achieving worldwide sales of 97.18 million units as of the end of September.

Sony has also announced that sales of the PlayStation Move controller — its answer to rivals’ gesture-based games peripherals such as Microsoft’s Kinect and Nintendo’s Wii Remote — passed 15 million unit sales globally on November 11. The Move controller launched back in September 2010 and is now supported by more than 400 titles, says Sony.

The cumulative number of software titles for PS3 has reached 3,590 with more than 595 million units sold worldwide. While the PlayStation Network, launched at the same time as the PS3, now operates in 59 countries and regions. Sony said the PSN gives PS3 owners access to 170,000 pieces of downloadable digital content including 57,000 game content.

The look and feel of the PS3 has evolved over the years, with a more streamlined design, a larger hard disk drive and new features added via software updates. Back in September Sony launched a version of the console that’s more than 50 percent smaller and lighter than the original PS3 — and a quarter smaller and a fifth lighter than the slim PS3 model launched back in 2009.

Sony’s release follows below

TOKYO, Nov. 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ – Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCE) today announced that the cumulative sales of the PlayStation®3 (PS3®) computer entertainment system reached a milestone of 70 million units^*1 worldwide as ofNovember 4, 2012 – less than six years after the platform launched in 2006. SCE also announced that sales of the PlayStation®Move motion controller surpassed 15 million units^*1 worldwide as of November 11, demonstrating continued growth and momentum of the PS3® platform.

The PS3® system has delivered high quality, award-winning entertainment experiences since its launch. Throughout its lifecycle, the PS3® system has continued to evolve with more streamlined design, larger Hard Disk Drive (HDD) capacity, and new features through software updates. In September 2012, SCE launched the new PS3® system, which has a reduced volume and weight of more than 50 percent compared to the original PS3® model, and of 25 percent and 20 percent respectively compared to the slim PS3 model launched in 2009. The new PS3® has been well received by consumers around the world.

Along with the introduction of PS3® in November 2006, SCE launched PlayStation®Network, which now operates in 59 countries and regions^*2 around the world. PlayStation Network supports free community-centric online gameplay, exclusive games from independent developers and major publishers, and a broad range of entertainment applications across movies, music, and sports. PS3 owners can access 170,000 downloadable digital content including 57,000 game content worldwide from PlayStation Network^*3. In October 2012, SCE redesigned PlayStation®Store for PS3®, offering a more streamlined and accessible store experience, including a stunning new user interface, simple search, and powerful content discovery. The new store is now available in Europe and North and Latin America with more countries and regions to follow.

PlayStation®Plus, the subscription service package on PlayStation®Store that offers exclusive benefits such as discounts on games or online storage for game saves, started to offer an “Instant Game Collection” in North America and Europe in July 2012. The Instant Game Collection enables PS Plus members to enjoy popular titles from third party developers and publishers as well as SCE Worldwide Studios at no extra cost. SCE has also enhanced the content offering for PS Plus members in Japan in November.

Introduced in September 2010, the PlayStation®Move motion controller that enables users to intuitively play games is now supported by a wide range of titles with more than 400 as of November 2012, including Sports Champions 2, LittleBigPlanet Karting (Sony Computer Entertainment). Additionally, this month marks the global launch of Wonderbook™, a new peripheral that delivers the next evolution of storytelling and a unique experience exclusively on PS3. Wonderbook^*4 uses the PlayStation®Eye camera to take augmented reality to spectacular new places, while drawing players into new worlds and allowing them to interact with stories as they tilt or rotate it, or simply turn the pages^*5.

PS3® has gained tremendous support from 3rd party developers and publishers worldwide. Cumulative number of software titles for PS3® reached 3,590 with more than 595 million units sold worldwide^*6. More exciting and attractive new titles are to be released from third party developers and publishers as well as SCE Worldwide Studios, including Assassin’s Creed III (Ubisoft Entertainment.), Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (Activision, Inc), PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale (Sony Computer Entertainment), towards the holiday season. In addition, software titles that support “cross platform feature” such as LittleBigPlanet 2: Cross Controller Pack, PlayStation, Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (Sony Computer Entertainment) are also expected to be released. With these titles, SCE will deliver a ground-breaking gaming experience by leveraging the capabilities of both PS3® and PlayStation®Vita.

SCE will continue to further expand the PS3® platform and create a world of computer entertainment that is only possible on PlayStation.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ever heard of Dropship? It’s an open-source project that “enables arbitrary, anonymous transfers of files between Dropbox accounts.” Dropbox hopes you haven’t; they tried to squelch it this week, and even accidentally reported that it was subject to a DMCA takedown notice, with predictably futile results. I’m mostly sympathetic: I’m a huge fan of their service, Dropship was a clear violation of their terms, and for obvious reasons they don’t want to turn into an anonymous peer-to-peer file-sharing service. Unfortunately, they accidentally built a system which enabled just that.

How about Sony’s PlayStation Network? Of course you have. It was so thoroughly hacked this week that Sony had to shut it down indefinitely. Did you also know that Sony’s PS3 firmware is effectively wide open, because they made a hilariously stupid security mistake? Did you know that that’s probably how PSN got hacked, and that it raised the spectre of the hacker(s) taking over every connected PlayStation 3 in the world and turning them into by far the biggest botnet in history? That probably wasn’t what Sony had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enabled just that.

How about the new Google Docs Android app? Came out this week, and it’s pretty great. Among its many features is the ability to take a picture of an image with text and have that text automatically OCRed and turned into a document. Can’t wait ’til they integrate Google Translate into that, too, and recapitulate last year’s hot app World Lens. But I bet book publishers are pretty unhappy. Not long ago, if you wanted to scan a book you had to actually build a scanner, or buy a copy and turn every page. Now would-be book pirates can just crowdsource 10 people to go to bookstores and take 20 pictures each, et voila: 400 scanned pages in Google Docs. Easier book piracy probably isn’t what Google had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enables just that.

This was also the week that people who keep remotely controllable Internet-enabled camera/microphone/GPSes on them at all times expressed outraged surprise when they learned their privacy is at risk. The panopticon probably isn’t what the mobile industry had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enables just that.

What do these all have in common? The unexpected results of connecting client devices to the cloud. (Yeah, I don’t really like the term either, but it’s better than the alternatives.) People talk about “moving to the cloud,” as if we haven’t already. The heavy lifting may happen on the server farms (when they’re up) but every connected computer, phone, and game console already serves as a computing cloud’s eye, ear, and tentacle.

Emergent properties. Unintended consequences. Get used to ‘em. My favourite Douglas Adams books are the Dirk Gently novels, in which the protagonist makes use of “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things” to solve crimes in hilariously unexpected ways. Now we’re literally building that interconnectedness into (nearly) all things. So we shouldn’t be too surprised to find ourselves moving into a Dirk Gently future, in which off-kilter left-field ricochet consequences happen at an ever-increasing rate. You can bet that those cited above are just the beginning — and that there’s a lot of money to be made in seeing them before they happen.

Photo credit: Aspex Design, Flickr

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Unfortunately for PlayStation Network and Qriocity services users, it looks like the widespread network outages will continue.

Since Sony’s PlayStation and music networks went down two days ago, there has been a fair amount of public speculation over the cause of the outage. (Largely due to Sony’s tight-lipped handling of public relations.) Many blamed vengeful gremlins loose in Sony’s server clusters and datacenters, while others immediately pointed the finger at Anonymous, the merry band of hackers that metastasized out of 4chan.

Thankfully, after 24+ hours of communication silence, Sony has updated its blog and ended the speculation. According to the electronics colossus, “an external intrusion” is responsible for the ongoing outages of the PlayStation Network and Qriocity. (It probably sounded like this at Sony headquarters. Or this.)

As to who these nefarious “intruders” are: It seems that Sony does not yet know who is responsible for the breach, or if it does, it is instead smartly spending its time sealing areas of vulnerability and trying to get the network back up and running. And though reports of PlayStation’s outage began heating up early Thursday morning, Sony reports that it in fact self-defensively shut down the Network sometime Wednesday evening.

According to the network’s blog, “An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services. In order to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward, we turned off PlayStation Network & Qriocity services on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th. Providing quality entertainment services to our customers and partners is our utmost priority. We are doing all we can to resolve this situation quickly, and we once again thank you for your patience. We will continue to update you promptly as we have additional information to share.”

So, when I said Sony has ended all speculation, I was really only half-correct. Sony is still not naming the party responsible for the breach, so the speculation will likely continue. (Can you hear the blogosphere cheering?) Anonymous has prior beef with Sony and has attacked the company before, so it’s not surprising many blamed them for the service disruption. (You can read more about Anon’s prior grievances with Sony in yesterday’s post.)

However, AnonOps (Anonymous Operations), the group’s mouthpiece and network through which members frequently communicate, has adamantly stated via its news wing that it was not responsible for the outage. Though, it seems that this particular announcement was made prior to Sony delivering the news that the problem was in fact due to hacking. So, Anonymous pointing to Sony’s incompetence as the cause of the outages is off base. Sort of.

More likely, as Anonymous makes mention of in the announcement, the hack was perpetrated by some offshoot of the group, which is either more angry at Sony than the majority, or is more eager to get its precious “lulz”. (While I have to admit that I sometimes find myself sympathetic to some of Anonymous’ philosophical stances, it’s hard not to use words like “fundamentalist” when referring to “factions” within the group, and draw structural comparisons between black hatters and terrorists. There are obviously important distinctions here, and line-blurring, but there it is.) Or, on the other hand, we might soon be learning of an as-yet-unknown hacker entity that is making a run at Anonymous for public notoriety. Gulp.

The PlayStation Network currently has over 70 million users and is Sony’s online medium for its PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles. Both the Network, and Sony’s Qriocity music service were targeted. As stated previously, in its most recent blog post, Network spokespeople make no mention of how long the outage will continue, but it’s likely that it may take several more days to sort out. And this is after Sony posted yesterday saying that the outage may last for a “full day or two” — and after Amazon’s web and cloud services suffered from their own major outage.

At this point, the outage has lasted for over 48 hours and has become quite a disaster for Sony. (Or a “kerfuffle”, if you prefer a softer word.) Now, if this were in fact the result of denial-of-service attacks, it’s hard to place the blame entirely on Sony. Few networks can defend against large-scale DDoS attacks, which is, sadly, the point. That being said, the company has known since Wednesday night that there was an intrusion, so I find it odd that it would wait for two days to inform its users — and remove a post from its EU blog early Thursday saying that the outage is a result of “targeted behaviour by an outside party”.

All in all, the company’s public relations strategy is, at the least, very confusing. While it’s true that millions of gamers are being inconvenienced and are being forced offline, sure, it’s certainly not the end of the world. But, both for the sake of the company — and its users — a higher frequency of communication and level of transparency has to be achieved. In today’s world, a company can’t allow its official Twitter streams (@Playstation has nearly 800K followers) to go without an update for 24 hours. Especially when 70 million people are affected.

So, for everyone’s sake, I hope the Network can get up and running before this turns into the longest widespread network outage (due to hacking) in recent memory. If it isn’t already.

We will update this post over the weekend as we learn more. Stay tuned.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sony’s PlayStation Network, its online service for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles, suffered from a major outage today, which remains ongoing. And, according to Sony’s blog, the interruption in service may last into the long weekend — for at least another “full day or two”. The Sony Network currently has more than 70 million registered users, many of whom have taken to Twitter and other social networks to express their frustration over the prolonged downtime. Millions of unhappy gamers a PlayStation outage makes.

Not to mention, the outage comes on the same day that Amazon’s cloud-based web services crashed, taking Reddit, Foursquare, and Quora with them. Unfortunately, it seems that today has become a fairly drastic example of the vulnerability of the cloud and the extent to which these outages can effect business-as-usual on the Web.

But, as per Sony’s downtime: At this point, the network has been out of commission for over 20 hours, and it has been 16 hours since Sony last posted updates to its blog or Twitter account. So, the root cause of the problem remains unclear. So far, the only update Sony has blasted out to its users is this message: “While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running. Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this matter. Please stay tuned to this space for more details, and we’ll update you again as soon as we can”.

The acknowledgement that there is a problem is admirable, but the company’s vague handling of public relations leaves something to be desired. Especially considering the fact that, several hours before, Sony released a statement through its EU blog, saying that the network outage may be a result of “targeted behaviour by an outside party”. However, that message has since been removed.

This message, along with the lack of updates or details regarding the outage has led to speculation across the Web that this was potentially the result of attacks by the infamous hacker consortium, Anonymous. Earlier this month, the “hactivist” group launched what it called “Operation: Sony”, in which it employed Denial of Service attacks to take down the parts of the PlayStation Network. The move was hotly debated within Anonymous and was met with criticism from gamers, because it marked the first time the group didn’t simply attack an organization’s main site — and because the coup had a very real effect on consumers — the very people Anonymous claims to support.

Since then, Anonymous has called for a near-term “cease fire” in relation to the PlayStation Network, and it has largely kept its word. In response to today’s outage, the group maintained its innocence on its Facebook page.

The Examiner.com reported that Anonymous’ original beef with the company began “with Sony’s court case against George Hotz, which has since been settled out of court”. Sony sued Hotz for jailbreaking the PS3 and posting the videos of his hack and links to the third party software on YouTube. This led to the creation of “Operation: Sony”. However, in relation to today’s network outage, Anonymous has not yet officially denied responsibility for the attack, nor has it taken credit for it.

Thus, it could be the case that members within Anonymous acted without consent from the majority, and therefore the band of hackers does not wish to take responsibility. Or, on the other hand, a more likely explanation is that Sony is taking advantage of Anonymous’ previous ill-will towards the company to distract users from the fact that the outage is actually an internal problem with the company’s servers.

Whatever the cause, there’s no doubt the outage has been a disaster in the making for Sony. Its Network has experienced several outages in recent weeks, which has become a cause for concern among the company’s faithful. And, what’s more, today’s outage is already far more widespread (and of a much longer duration) than its previous hiccups.

Sony may not be aware of the exact problem (maybe it’s a glitch in an update or Steam integration issues), but as we near 24 hours of a global outage that affects millions of people, you’d think the company would at least be able to determine if the problem were due to internal or external factors. Being more open about these things, even though it might involve enduring a black eye, would be smart for public relations — and good for business.

We will update as we learn more. Stay tuned.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch