Reports about Sony’s upcoming tablet(s) are quite literally all over the place. Some techies are reporting that as many as six different variants of the Sony S1 tablet have been passed through FCC channels in the final steps before launch, suggesting that, on the day they are finally released, buyers will have a host of configuration choices for the device. It has also been released that along with the FCC check came certification of the device to run on AT&Ts mobile network, although both parties are being extremely tight-lipped about anything like that.

Of course, the story does not stop with the S1. Paired to launch at the same time is Sony’s sister tabled the S2, which features a fairly radical design that is unlike any tablet on the market thus far. The S2 will feature a two 5.5 inch screen format, with both appearing on the same face of the tablet with a small break between them. This break is hinged, allowing the device to be closed against the screens for safe transport. The size of the tablet makes it small enough to slip in a coat pocket when closed, making it almost more like some mobile phones than tablets currently on the market. This design is in stark contrast to the S1, which features a traditional single, 9.4 inch screen with a body that bends back straight against the device in the back, propping it up slightly. Both devices will run on the Google Android system, and Amazon may be setting aside special room in their tablet store for them both.

These new reports on the upcoming launch of the Sony tablets come at the same time Verizon fumbles its way into leaking news about its own new tablet, which may in fact be the Motorola Xoom 4G. The leak was made through a new video advertisement for the company’s expanding 4G services, and while it was taken down shortly after the mistake was notice, it has reappeared on YouTube here. Verizon is not saying anything about the tablet in spite of the leak, but the Xoom 4G is rumored to be in the final testing phases to work out minor tweaks. Still, the company will offer no schedule for release, and it is unclear what role the original Xoom might play after it walks into the market.

While the full field of tablets that will eventually flood into the market this fall is yet to be known, the Sony tablets are certainly poised to be strong contenders. Time will tell exactly what role the mysterious Xoom 4G will play in the mix, but Verizon’s lasting support for Motorola will surely help the tablet out. Those planning to buy a new device ought best to wait a few months – the rank are about to fill out.

Despite having successfully orchestrated a major hack on Sony just a few days ago, they announced Friday that they had successfully infiltrated the Atlanta chapter of Infragard. For those not in the know, Infragard is an FBI affiliate. The hackers then uploaded Infragard’s user database to the internet, compromising security for the company and its affiliates. An associated company’s use of botnets was exposed as well, claims the group, and they are claiming that the documents they exposed also reveal an attempt by someone involved to pay LulzSec not to expose the breach.

LulzSec actually took complete control of Infragard’s Atlanta Chapter website, defacing it. One of their main reports was that while there were not many logins (around 180), all of them were affiliated with the FBI in one way or another.

Ironically, Infragard is a private-public partnership between the FBI and US businesses. Their business is “designed to protect IT systems from hacker attacks and other intrusions.” It would appear they are going to have to rethink their security protocols.

LulzSec really seems to be driving home the intense need for appropriate security measures to be taken by companies who are holding extremely valuable personal information for clients. One “weak link” can expose literally thousands of networks to a security breach, as was well demonstrated by their exposure of Karim Hijaz’s indiscretions when it came to his password. It must be understood that reusing passwords in several different places is frowned upon by both the FBI and Infragard handbooks and, indeed, by any person or organization concerned about security.

The attack on Infragard exposed Hijazi’s repeated use of his Infragard password in other places, including accounts of his personal business as well as his personal e-mail. Hacking one system gave them access to all of the major information Hijazi was privy to, compromising not only his own security, but that of the FBI, Infragard, his personal business, all of this clients as well as his personal activities. Particularly interesting to note is the fact that Hijazi’s personal business, “Unveillance” is a whitehat company that specializes in data breaches and botnets. LulzSec reported on their website that Karim was contacted personally by them and told all that they had done and that he purportedly offered them money in exchange for eliminating his competitors by illegal hacking means and for their silence. Supposedly they even discussed plans for him to give them insider information regarding his botnet information.

Hijazi issued a public statement shortly thereafter and is quoted here:

Over the last two weeks, my company, Unveillance, has been the target of a sophisticated group of hackers now identified as “LulzSec.” During this two week period, I was personally contacted by several members of this group who made threats against me and my company to try to obtain money as well as to force me into revealing sensitive data about my botnet intelligence that would have put many other businesses, government agencies and individuals at risk of massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

In spite of these threats, I refused to pay off LulzSec or to supply them with access to this sensitive botnet information. Had we agreed to provide this data to them, LulzSec would have been able to grow the size and scope of their DDoS attack and fraud capabilities.

While this author cannot vouch one way or the other for the truth of Hijazi’s or LulzSec’ claims, she can provide the last response LulzSec regarding Hijazi’s claims:

Karim compromised his entire company and the personal lives of his colleagues, then attempted to silence us with promises of financial gain and mutual benefits … [he] used the same password for all of his online accounts and all accounts linked to a company he owns. Then he tried to bargain with hackers so his company wouldn’t crumble.

Regardless of whose claims are the complete truth, one thing is for certain: LulzSec is not playing around. Companies holding vitally sensitive information would do well to make sure their security protocols are truly secure, for their own sakes as well as the sakes of the clients who trust them.

As a side note, as this article was being written, it has come out that Lulzsec has hacked Nintendo as well, though Nintendo claims that no user information has been compromised. We will update this article as more information becomes available.

It may surprise some, then, that after all of the media attention surrounding this major breach of security, that the group called “Lulzsec” is claiming to have attacked the servers yet again and say that they have walked away with unencrypted security information. According to examples of their hacking as provided on Twitter (when challenged for proof of their claims) it looks as though they did indeed hack Sony networks and web sites, including Sony Music Belgium, Sony Music Netherlands and Sony Pictures. Lulzsec wrote, on the site of Pastebin, the following:

“We recently broke into SonyPictures.com and compromised over 1,000,000 users’ personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts. Among other things, we also compromised all admin details of Sony Pictures (including passwords) along with 75,000 ‘music codes’ and 3.5 million ‘music coupons’.”

The sobering claim from Lulzsec is that the group says that not only did it gain access to SonyPictures.com with a single SQL injection, but, “What’s worse is that every bit of data we took wasn’t encrypted. Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plaintext, which means it’s just a matter of taking it,” (as posted online). “This is disgraceful and insecure: they were asking for it. “

While it’s probable that the general public would not agree that Sony was asking to have its customers private information compromised, it’s hard to disagree on the point about nothing being encrypted. After such an unprecedented and well publicized attack in April, one can’t help but wonder how “industry standard” doesn’t require the encryption of sensitive information. Employee and admin passwords can well be looked upon as the gateway to everything else and with customers around the world, one would think that Sony would have a vested interest in protecting their private information. That certainly seemed to be the case when considering their swift response to previous hackings.

After careful consideration, most would agree that Beth Givens, director of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has a good point. She suggests that Sony has resorted to using industry standards for security. “If that’s true,” she says, “then perhaps it is time to re-evaluate and even go beyond such standards.” Sony’s clients all over the world can’t help but agree. In the meantime, they should change their passwords and be on the lookout for suspicious activities on their accounts and be careful not to fall for fishing scams that appear to be from Sony.

On April 20, Sony’s PSN was hacked and taken down. A week or so later, after Sony finished reassuring its customers that everything was under control and the network would be up and running soon, Online Entertainment went down as well. After the PSN outage, Sony told the public that user information had been taken, but wasn’t clear whether credit card information had been taken as well. After SOE went out, they confirmed that possibly hundreds of thousands of non US credit card information had been grabbed.

So, now we’re three weeks later. Last weekend, Sony began restoring the network. Right now, if you’re in the US or Europe, you can use the services, but not do anything that requires a credit card. Sony says that the full service will be restored by the end of May. Yay, right?

Sony told the public that it’s done everything possible to ensure the security of the network in the future. But, you have to do your part as a user. There are new regulations in place for password creation. The passwords must be at least 8 characters long, must have at least one letter and one number, cannot have the same consecutive letter or number three times in a row, I.E. 111, and must not be a dictionary word. These steps are fabulous, and ones you should be taking any time you create a password. But one would hope that Sony has done its part as well, and made the back end far more secure than it has been up to this point.

There are those who aren’t so sure Sony has done its part. The Japanese government is not allowing the service to be restored because of ongoing security concerns. They are not sure the measures Sony has taken are effective enough against the countermeasures during the hack. It must be galling for Sony that its home country doesn’t trust it to be secure.

We’re reasonably used to cloud services going down. It’s sort of par for the course. But a three week outage is extreme. I’m not sure how much money Sony has lost, but it must be astronomical. Its share price has dropped by 9% since the beginning of this problem. And what about future opinion? It remains to be seen if people are as willing to trust the service with their info as easily as they once were. Have users found an alternative to the service during the outage that they now prefer?

What are your thoughts? If you previously used the PSN, what did you do during the outage? Did you go to another service or wait? Will you go back to PSN? Have Sony’s troubles affected your opinion of the company at all?

Sony scrambled to give its customers something like an explanation after PSN went down. It was not very successful. It tried to relate just enough info to ease its customers without going into too much detail. In fact, it spent the day before the suspension of Sony Online Entertainment telling its customers that everything was under control and would be back up soon. Oh, and by the way, members could have a month’s service free for their trouble.

LastPass is a utility for storing passwords. You only have to remember a master password, and it remembers all the rest. If you’re not good at creating secure, I.E. non dictionary passwords, it can create them for you. It has support for all of the major browsers, and most of the mobile platforms as well.

When LastPass saw a potential problem, the company explained to its customers exactly what was going on. There was a post up before anything bad happened. Service wasn’t even interrupted when customers were notified that there was a potential problem.

Let’s talk about Sony and security for a moment shall we? When the company discovered that PSN was hacked, Sony released the information that customer names, numbers and addresses had been taken, but couldn’t be sure whether or not credit card info was stolen. When Sony Online Entertainment was hacked, the company told customers that thousands of credit card numbers were taken as well.

LastPass was much more aware of security, it seems, than Sony. The company let customers know that there may have been a hacking incident before it was certain that there had been one. Someone noticed increased traffic on a database and didn’t know why, so the company played it safe. They recommended that customers change their master password just in case the database was hacked.

LastPass has shown itself both in terms of openness with its customers and in its business practices to really care about the security of the information it’s been given. Sony, on the other hand, has shown that it has trouble dealing with this kind of security issue. Granted, LastPass is in the security field, but considering the amount of your info and money Sony has, the company should be more aware of potential risks and be more prepared for them, don’t you think?

Are you a user of LastPass? Are you on PSN? What are your views on the way the two companies have dealt with their security issues? What could either company have done better in your view in terms both of relations with their customers and in terms of security? Am I being unfair to Sony?

Yesterday Sony revealed additional information, and boy does it look back. Information about the situation are provided to all customers of the service in an email.

The email speaks of an “illegal and unauthorized intrusion” in which certain “service user account information” were stolen by the attackers.

The important part follows with a list of information that have been stolen. This includes:

name, address (city, state/province, zip or postal code), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity passwords and login, and handle/PSN online ID.

Please note that the email address, login and passwords have been stolen. This is likely going to turn ugly considering that many users on the web use the same email and password combination on a lot of sites.

If you are a customer of PSN or Qriocity you need to immediately change your passwords on site where you may have used the same password, and on your email account.

Sony furthermore says that it is possible that profile data may have also been obtained by the attackers, which would include purchase history and billing address. Even worse, they cannot eliminate the possibility that created card data was taken as well.

That’s the worst case scenario, and there is not lot that users of the network can do at this time, but to actively monitor their credit card bills to check for unauthorized payments.

To protect against possible identity theft or other financial loss, we encourage you to remain vigilant to review your account statements and to monitor your credit or similar types of reports.

The data stolen could also be used in custom attacks as the attackers could use the user’s name and other information to make requests look legit.

Sony asks all users to change their PSN passwords as soon as the service goes online again.

A frequently asked questions section has been uploaded to the Playstation website which contains further information and support phone numbers.

To paraphrase: PSN users need to change their web account passwords immediately, especially if they are identical to their PSN password. They also need to change the password of their email accounts if identical, and need to monitor their credit card statements and account statements to make sure that no unauthorized payments are made from the accounts.

Since the hack has been first noticed on April 17, it is advised to look at your account statements for April to see if you find any unauthorized payments.

Sony is still investigating the issue at this point in time. The hack is a marketing fiasco for Sony, and more than a nuisance for customers of the service who now have to fear that their data gets abused by the hacker.

With 70 million users, the data alone could be worth a fortune on the black market. Spammers would love to get their hands on email addresses, names and countries for instance to send out personalized spam to those users.

Microsoft are also taking Apple to court over the name “App Store” claiming that it’s a generic term and they should be able to use it for the Windows Store should they want to.

These are two examples of the madness that’s been going on in the last couple of days with tech companies and litigation.  Sony are effectively saying, “our product isn’t secure enough and you’re to blame for that, not us” and Microsoft, frankly, are perfectly correct in their assumption of generality.

Let’s take the Microsoft / Apple case first.  There are a great many terms in the world that fall into this generalisation category.  UK technology firm Psion famously sued over the term “Netbook” a couple of years ago because they had released a computer previously with that name back in 1999.  They lost, and rightly so.  A netbook is a net enabled book-sized thing.

The fact that Apple have popularised the App Store concept means, as they can expect, that every other technology company will jump onto the bandwagon.  The company couldn’t possibly claim to hold onto exclusive use of such a ‘foggy’ trademark name in such a broad market.  Not in the way they can with a specific product name such as iPod.

Apple on the other hand have sued other companies for using the letter i at the beginning of their product names.  This has even included products that were around for years before the first iPod appeared.  Is this right and should it be allowed?

This brings me back to Sony who are using their corporate size and money to push responsibility for their security problem onto a party of hackers, because hackers can be seen as an easy target.  The group responsible for the hack, fail0verflow, have said that ”We have never condoned, supported, approved of or encouraged videogame piracy.  We have not published any encryption or signing keys. We have not published any Sony code, or code derived from Sony’s code.”

They also claim they only broke the code so that people could run their own legitimate code on the console if they wanted to.  But what is a crime?  Surely it would be a crime if they took Sony’s code and used it in their own products.  Is simply finding out what Sony’s code is a crime?  Many people would think not.

Now I’m not going to get into any guessing game over who is right or wrong as  fail0verflow will have to prove their claims but it still boils down to the fact that Sony’s security simply wasn’t good enough.  There is security in other products that’s never been cracked and other companies have means of patching security holes as and when they appear.  Who’s fault is this?  Is this the fault of a group of hackers?

The litigation situation with large technology companies is getting out of hand, especially when there are so many thousands of products on the market that are all so similiar to one another and that all do the same thing.  Xerox, if it wanted to, could probably take Microsoft, Apple and Linux to court for copying their first windowing GUI way back in the 1980′s.  They’d definitely lose though because GUIs are now generic and everywhere, even on your phone.  Microsoft couldn’t sue Apple or the Linux community either for using windows on their desktops because windows on a computer have now become a generic thing.  Such lawsuits would be laughable.

So come on guys, put your hands up and admit to your own problems and don’t try to cling onto pointless patents anymore.

The guys over at Stuff We Like have posted a video demonstration of Google TV that was recorded at Comic Con 2010. It shows a demo of Google TV by two Google engineers.

Google TV combines the TV, DVR recordings and the Internet in a seamless experience. It comes as a set top box, and will also be included in some TVs directly.

One of the strongest features of Google TV is its search capabilities that allows the user to find channels, individual shows and recordings faster.

Google TV comes with a built-in Chrome web browser, which supports everything that the computer version does. If it works in the normal Chrome browser, it will work on Google TV as well.

This opens a slew of new options that most set top boxes and TVs do not offer, like playing Flash games, accessing websites like Facebook, watching Youtube videos, or checking life stats or chatting with your buddies while watching the latest game of your favorite team.

This compatibility with the web also means that Google TV will offer to multimedia contents like music, photos, favorite games and everything that is available on the Internet these days.

Google TV runs on the Android platform, and will integrated Google Chrome and Adobe’s Flash Player. The idea is to provide manufacturers with a flexible operating system that they can not only add to their TVs, but also Blu-Ray players, DVD players, gaming systems and other set top boxes.

Since it is based on Android, Google TV is able to run any Android app, providing that it does not rely on phone hardware to run.

All Google TV devices will come with a remote that makes use of a QWERTY keyboard, and it is furthermore possible to use an Android phone as a remote as well. It is likely that different types of input devices will become available eventually, from bare bones systems to full keyboards.

Engadget posted some of the hardware stats a while ago:

Google’s laid out a series of baseline hardware specifications for the Google TV platform, which every piece of gear will share. The heart of the system is the Intel Atom CE4100, which launched at IDF last year. It’s an Atom-based SoC with some additional silicon for decoding dual 1080p video stream, MPEG-4 support, and 3D graphics capabilities. That’s joined by some custom DSPs, and things like WiFi, HDMI, and Bluetooth are all required.

Sony seems to be the first TV manufacturer to bring out a Google TV later this year. It will be interesting to see how effective this is in real life, how much it costs, and when it will become available in other countries than the US. (more information: Stuff We Like, Download Squad, Engadget official site)

The reason for Google is that they are only number two in the search engine market in China. Baidu is first there and offering music downloads as well albeit without a similar deal. The reason why the Music Industry agreed to the deal is simple: Money. The majority of Chinese do not pay for music but download it from the Internet. And so it was decided that sharing some advertising revenue with Google is better than fighting illegal music downloads.

Google is restricting file downloads to Chinese users according to Mashable who were the first to publish the story. The search interface on the other hand is available for everyone.

Definitely an interesting progression especially for Chinese users who can now download music legally while everyone else in the world cannot.

There have not been many releases on Blu-Ray disks though except for movies. Blu-Ray disks can have a region protection which means that it can be that a movie won’t play on a Blu-Ray player if the disk and the player have been purchased in different regions.

The world is divided into three regions: Region A spans across most of Asia, region B includes Europe, Africa and Australia while region C includes North- and South-America and Japan.

Not all Blu-Ray movies are region encoded though. The decision is made by the motion picture studio releasing the movie.

The Blu-Ray Region Code Remover removes the region code of Blu-Ray disk rips on a computer’s hard drive so that these rips can be played regardless of the user’s region. It furthermore supports removing of region code from Blu-ray titles and Java-enabled titles. It can also remove Prohibited User Operations for a better user experience.

The software program requires Windows XP or Windows Vista and the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0.

Figures for the first quarter of 2008 have just been released and Blu-Ray standalone player sales dropped by 40% between January and February and rose by only 2% in March. Analysts had predicted that the winning format would see a strong surge in hardware sales but this is not happening.

The price of the Blu-Ray player cannot possibly be the reason for the sharp drop. The players were as expensive when Blu-Ray was still competing with HD-DVD and the prices have not changed a lot since then. One possible reason could be that the customers who wanted to purchase a Blu-Ray player have already done so and that the others simply do not want to pay that much money for a movie player.

Add to that the Internet update problematic and horror stories that some early Blu-Ray players will not be able to play new movies because of technology updates and you pretty much got it summed up.

Would not it be funny if no format would win the war ? That Blu-Ray would not win either because most consumers don’t need it ? That another company would come up with a better format, without DRM, for a lesser price ? I would love to see that. How about you ?

If you purchase a new notebook – and it does not really matter from which manufacturer you make the purchase – you notice lots of software, many call it crapware, that is preinstalled on that notebook. You get demo or trial versions of software, lots of unnecessary applications from the manufacturer and much more that slow down the computer. Many companies love to add a Norton or Symantec trial to the computer for instance.

Sony obviously thought that some customers would like the crapware removed but instead of offering this as a configuration option that is free of charge they charge $50 for it. Yes that is right. Those who add the crapware ask the customer to pay $50 for its removal. That’s a nice business model don’t you think ?

If you feel desperate you could try to use the software PC Decrapifier instead which removes quite a few applications that are usually installed on new notebooks and computers.

I’m not a huge fan of Sony and have still hopes but it looks pretty sad for the HD DVD supporters. Those consumers who have bought a HD DVD player will face a huge problem much like the Betamax users faced back in the days when VHS did win that race. It occured to me that the consumer is always loosing in this kind of wars.

If you pick the wrong player you will have to purchase another one to be able to view high definition videos, if you pick the right player you contributed to a monopoly, and it’s Sony this time – it will be awful, it’s a Sony after all.

Reports are all over the Internet (here, here or here for instance) and from the date of the news we can see that it is not really a “new” problem but one that exists for several years. If you own a Sony laptop and want to buy a separate battery you have to pay roughly three to four times the price if you buy a original Sony battery instead of a generic one.

If you make the decision to buy the generic battery you might be in for a nasty surprise. Sony is not allowing generic batteries in many of their notebooks by using software and hardware protections. The software protection is simply a file called ISBMgr.exe which prevents the usage of another battery not manufactured by Sony. Some users were able to use the battery by removing that program from their computer. (ISBMgr.exe is apparently run at system startup, use msconfig or autoruns to disable it.)

One user described the error message that he received when he booted his Sony notebook with the generic battery:

I got an error message saying the battery either wasn’t properly inserted or wasn’t a genuine Sony, and that the notebook would go into hibernation and the battery must be removed

The hardware protection on the other hand cannot be disabled which means that if you have a notebook with that hardware protection you will not be able to use a generic battery. The It’s a Sony slogan becomes a whole new meaning, don’t you think ?

If it’s not about preventing the music from being spread, what is it about then ? That’s the question. My thoughts are that someone sold DRM to the CEOs and Executives and that they, with their limited technical understanding thought that it would prevent music piracy. In the end, only the consumers who purchase music are screwed, as you can see in this fine example.

Sony decided to close down their Connect music store that tried to push once again a proprietary format. They miserably failed and that is probably the main reason for the closure. The problem for consumers however is that the music that they purchased from that store had DRM in it.

Don’t worry, the music will play just fine after the store closes down, that is, unless you happen to change your computer hardware. Because at this point, it will stop playing. Ain’t that great ? You bought music thinking that you could enjoy it for the rest of your life only to find out that it won’t play if you change computer hardware or use a new computer.

I’m not sure how you see this but I think that this is absolutely unacceptable. If they want to use DRM they have to make sure that music will play even if they decided to close down their store or change their policy or whatever. My advice: Don’t buy music with DRM ever.

Closing lines are from the Download Squad article, very fitting I think:

DRM does not prevent piracy. DRM merely shafts loyal, paying customers who choose to legitimately obtain their media online

Two studios, Paramount and Universal are still backing up HD DVD and press releases suggest that they have no intention to change their stance in the near future. Movie fans are still facing the problem that a choice can’t be made if they wanted to watch movies from all studios unless they would purchase a more expensive dual player that would play Blu-Ray and HD DVD movies.

Many Blu-Ray and HD DVD movies are currently offered at Amazon for 50% off and player prices have been reduced as well. You can purchase a HD DVD player for $149.99 and get five HD DVDs free as a bonus which is an attractive offer.

My stance on this matter remains unchanged. I will boycott both formats and won’t purchase a remaining format as well if there should be a winning format in the near future. I do so mainly because of DRM and all the crap that is loaded into those players. I also have no intention to update my player’s firmware regularly because the manufacturer published a new firmware to fix some security holes.

That’s not what I want and I’m pretty confident that this is something that most consumers do not want as well – if they would know that is.

To be honest; I do not care if that is the end, if the war will go on another decade or if everyone will come to their senses and produce one format for all movies. I can understand that companies want to push a format that they have created. What I can’t understand is that movie companies like Warner did not pressure the format creators to create one format which would be the best for the customers.

Now we have two formats and everything seems to be utterly complicated. Playstation 3 owners want Blu-Ray to win, the guys who bought a HD-DVD drive for their Xbox 360 want that format to win and everyone can’t play movies that are released exclusively for the other format.

It’s all about money of course and the company whose format is going to win will make most of it for a long time to come. Do they care about the viewers, the customers ? I don’t think so. Besides the obvious fact that many customers who already bought a new player will not be able to view all movies they are also confusing everyone who has not made a decision yet.

My opinion is that we will see players who are supporting both formats. They will cost more but are in my opinion the only reasonable way to please those who buy the players. I for one will use DVD as long as possible and boycott this insane war. I would change my mind if they would release a player that is fast, without all the copy protection and DRM and play both formats without problems. This will never happen I know but hope is still there.

Only Blue-Ray movies that sell for under $30 can be chosen right in the store where customers make the purchases. All stores hold a minimum of two systems for the price and it remains to be seen if many will have much larger quantities and if Sony decides to count those free movies to Novembers Blue-Ray sales.

I still would not buy a PS3 even with that crazy amount of Blue-Rays that they throw at you but I suppose this will be a mighty successful campaign for both Sony and Walmart.

Many customers will probably buy the package and sell or return the Blue-Ray movies to drop the price of the PS3 system. I guess it is a good bargain but you should not just calculate the price of the Blue-Ray movies and subtract it from the price of the PS3 unless you did plan to buy all those movies anyway.

The service itself is completely free and no advertisement will be send in any way to the cell phone number of the recipient. The system behind the service utilized the fact that many cell phone provider accept sms that are send by email which is exactly what Textmemos is doing.

New sms are processed every fifteen minutes and send out to the cell phone providers. All messages are send one hour in advance of the time detailed to avoid late delivery.

My cell phone provider is unfortunately not in the list but I have a friend who is using this service quite often. It works very well. This is nice if you forget birthdays often for instance or other important events.

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Textmemos
via MakeUseOf

The manipulation was discovered using the highly acclaimed Wikiscanner which is a searchable database for all Wikipedia edits that have been made.

One has to ask if this was the doings of an individual or sanctioned by Sony and I would guess that it was done by an individual. By using a IP assigned to Sony however Sony is to blaim, again. Real Manipulation looks different and is not done from company computers at all.

You hire someone far away or use your home computer with dynamic IPs or proxies to manipulate which is much harder to spot. This time it was just the blunder of one single employee which happened to fall back on Sony because he was using their network to manipulate the entry.

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Wikiscanner proof