Sony Hacked Again 25 Million More Accounts Hacked

Hackers may have stolen the personal information of 24.6 million Sony Online Entertainment users.

More than 20,000 credit card and bank account numbers were also put at risk.

This in addition to the recent leak of over 70 million accounts from Sony’s PlayStation Network and Qriocity services.

Sony said that the compromised personal information includes customers’ names,
addresses, e-mail addresses, birth dates, gender, phone numbers, logins and hashed passwords.

Also at risk are the credit card numbers and expiration dates of 12,700 non-U.S. customers, plus 10,700 direct debit records from customers in Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Spain, containing bank-account numbers, customers’ names and addresses.

This information was stored in what Sony said was an “outdated database from 2007.”

Hackers may have had this information for more than two weeks now. The intrusion occurred April 16 and 17, Sony said.

 

As compensation for the Sony Online Entertainment leak, Sony said that it will give all of its customers 30 days of additional subscription time, plus an extra day for each day the servers remain down.

Related articles

• Sony Says 25 Million More Accounts Hacked (foxnews.com)
• Sony says 25 million more accounts hacked (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Sony says 25 million more accounts hacked (seattlepi.com)

Man liveblogs Osama Bin Laden operation unknowingly

A 33-year-old computer programmer, Sohaib Athar, who moved to the sleepy town of Abbottabad to escape the big city, became in his own words "the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.".
He did what any social-media addict would do: he began sending messages to the social networking site Twitter.

His first tweet was : "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)."

Nestled in the mountains around 60 miles (95 kilometers) northeast of the capital, Abbottabad is a quiet, leafy town featuring a military academy, the barracks for three army regiments and even its own golf course.

Soon the sole helicopter multiplied into several and gunfire and explosions rocked the air above the town, and Athar's tweets quickly garnered 14,000 followers as he unwittingly described the U.S. operation to kill one of the world's most wanted militants.

He tweeted."The few people online at this time of the night are saying one of the copters was not Pakistani,"

As the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden unfolded, Athar "liveblogged" what he was hearing in real time, describing windows rattling as bombs exploded.

Athar then said one of the aircraft appeared to have been shot down. Two more helicopters rushed in, he reported.

The aircraft might be a drone. The army was conducting door-to-door searches in the surrounding area. The sound of an airplane could be heard overhead.

Throughout the battle, he related the rumors swirling through town: it was a training accident. Somebody was killed.

Soon, however, the rumbling of international events far beyond the confines of this quiet upscale suburb began to dawn on Athar, and he realized what he might be witnessing.

"I think the helicopter crash in Abbottabad, Pakistan and the President Obama breaking news address are connected," he tweeted.

Eight hours and about 35 tweets later, the confirmation came: "Osama Bin Laden killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan," Athar reported. "There goes the neighborhood."

http://www.reallyvirtual.com/
http://twitpic.com/4s8nfq

Scan Your Music Library For Missing Songs

How do you make sure that no songs are missing in your library?
That every album is complete?

Applications to scan a library of songs for missing tracks are very rare.
One application that can be used for the job is Jaikoz Audio Tagger.
This is not freeware but the trial version is good enough to find out if songs are missing in your whole music library.

The trial version is limited in functionality, but that is not a problem, we only use the software to find missing tracks in a local music collection, and that feature does not appear to be limited.

After installation the first step is to load the music library into the program.
This is done with a click on File --> Open Folder. Just pick the root folder of your collection to add it to the software. The application scans all folders and files under that structure automatically, and information about the identified music appears in the program interface afterwards.

Select Action --> Auto Correct, or press Ctrl-1 on the keyboard after this first step. This will look up all songs and albums at the online music database MusicBrainz.
This can take quite some time, depending on the number of songs and files stored under the root folder.

Use Reports --> List Missing Songs For Albums in the final step to run a scan for missing songs. All albums that have been identified in the second step will be scanned for missing songs. This is done by comparing the information from the MusicBranz music database with the existing tracks on the computer.

A report is generated and displayed in a popup window. Here you find information about the albums, artists and song titles that are missing.

The report is available as a HTML or CSV version, which can be both saved to the local directory. With those information at hand, it is now possible to obtain the missing songs to complete the music library on your computer.

The application is available for Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh and Linux.

Sony Details PlayStation Network Revival

Within a week Sony will turn on most features of the PlayStation Network and offer its customers a selection of free downloads.

The PlayStation maker’s online service for its PlayStation 3 and PSP consoles will come back online this week following a massive security breach in which the personal information of over 70 million accounts, possibly including credit card numbers, was obtained by hackers.

Here's what's going to be coming back, as well as details on the new security measures that they hope will prevent events like this from happening again:

• Restoration of Online game-play across the PlayStation®3 (PS3) and PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) systems
  -This includes titles requiring online verification and downloaded games
• Access to Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity for PS3/PSP for existing subscribers
• Access to account management and password reset
• Access to download un-expired Movie Rentals on PS3, PSP and MediaGo
• PlayStation®Home
• Friends List
• Chat Functionality

• Added automated software monitoring and configuration management to help defend against new attacks
• Enhanced levels of data protection and encryption
• Enhanced ability to detect software intrusions within the network, unauthorized access and unusual activity patterns
• Implementation of additional firewalls

All PlayStation 3 owners will have to download a system update and change their passwords before they will be allowed to sign in to the service again; all password changes must take place on the PlayStation 3 console on which the password was originally registered. This, says Sony, is an additional security

Sony has issued a press release read it here.

Anonymous targets Iran with DoS attack

The hacker group Anonymous says its next target is Iran.

According to their latest online proclamation, members of the loosely organized group are planning  an attack designed to shut down Iranian Web sites beginning Sunday.

The "Operation Iran" seemed to already have begun late today with Web page defacements ostensibly targeted at Iranian hackers.
Anonymous left messages on several Web sites that had allegedly been previously attacked by the Iranian Cyber Army, including the site of a Canadian information systems firm and the site of a Ukrainian dancing group, according to an observer on an Anonymous Internet Relay Chat channel that members use to coordinate their operations.

"The people of Iran have the admiration of Anonymous, and the entire world," the statement says. "We can see that Iran still suffers at the hands of those in power. Your former government has seized control, and tries to silence you. People of Iran your rights belong to you."

Anonymous is known for its renegade cyberattacks in defense of perceived underdogs or to support freedom of expression or other anti-establishment causes.

Earlier this month, Anonymous targeted Sony in protest of the company's treatment of Sony PlayStation hacker George Hotz. Hotz and Sony have since settled the lawsuit Sony filed, and Anonymous has denied any involvement in a recent serious breach that exposed information of millions of Sony PlayStation Network customers.

In defense of WikiLeaks, the group targeted PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and other companies late last year that had stopped enabling WikiLeaks to receive contributions.

Other Anonymous targets have been: Broadcast Music Inc., the Church of Scientology; the governments of Egypt, Iran, and Sweden; the Westboro Baptist Church; conservative activist billionaires Charles and David Koch and their companies; as well as security firm HBGary Federal, which had reportedly been working with the FBI to identify the leaders of Anonymous.

But everyone knows there's no leaders

Live Stream Of Royal Wedding Breaks Internet Records

The marriage of Prince William to Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, was streamed live on the British royal family's YouTube channel, the first royal wedding to be covered in such a way.

Livestream, said the event broke its own records, with more than 330,000 viewers at one point.

On Twitter, nine of the top 10 trending topics were related to the royal wedding.

The BBC website, was struggling under the strain Friday morning, intermittently flashing an error message during the ceremony saying the site was experiencing "abnormal traffic".

The two hottest searches on Google were "Royal wedding coverage" and "Kate Middleton wedding dress", (where's pippa ? :) )which devoted the celebrated logo on its home page to the royal wedding and they mapped the royal procession route in 3D.

Palace officials hosted a live multimedia blog on the royal site, where visitors could congratulate the couple in an online wedding book and make donations to the Royal Wedding Charity Fund.

Fears that the global media event, expected to draw two billion viewers worldwide and many of them online could "break" the Internet proved unfounded.



 

How to Dismantle and Destroy a Hard Drive

There are a ton of reasons why you might want to physically destroy a hard drive rather than use disk wiping software:

higher confidence that the data is destroyed, a recourse if your drive has failed and no longer accessible, and sheer fun.

If the thermite method and other extreme physical disposal methods aren't for you, dismantling the drive to get to the platters is an alternative method.

The main process involves removing the screws around the outside of the drive, pulling out the screws holding the electronics, and then popping the cover off.

After removing the magnets, you can get to the platters, the heart of your hard drive.

First run the magnets over the platters to degauss them. Because that's not a guarantee that the data is unrecoverable, you should then physically destroy the platters, bend them or break them with a hammer or saw them into pieces.

And that will be the end of those discs and the data on them.

The video below shows how Google use a disk crushers and the destruction of old hard drives to prevent leakage of customer data.

PSN: Credit Card Details For Sale

This just keeps getting worse by the day, hackers responsible for the PSN breach last week are attempting to sell users' credit card details online.

They claim to have the details of 2.2m Sony PlayStation Network users, including Credit card security numbers.

They are hoping to sell the credit card list for upwards of $100,000.

Read more here

Mortgage, Loan Calculator 1.1 For iPhone

Mortgage/Loan Calculator 1.1 the latest update for iPhone, iPod touch and iPads is out

Mortgage/Loan Calculator is a new application on the market that offers more flexibility than the other similar apps being offered. This one boasts incredible ease of use coupled with powerful tools for homeowners.

 This new application offers incredibly easy to use features that include auto calculating of figures to determine savings of different loan, duration and payment scenarios, factoring in property tax and homeowner's insurance for a complete, comprehensive picture. 

Users are also able to email and save results, as well as compare a number of different loan options, side by side.

The app is intuitive and automatically does the work when numbers are entered in the input fields, users don't even have to press a "calculate" button for any of the figuring.

Users are able to very quickly and easily try a number of different scenarios with this application, to determine the impact on their mortgage of making pre-payments or extra ad-hoc payments. 
Also they can adjust loan duration periods and monthly payments to see what the financial outcome would be. Homeowners can then plan their loan strategies better by knowing how many extra payments would pay off their mortgage within a desired amount of time.
Or at least they know how much total interest they are paying over the life of the loan, or how much they could save by paying it off early.

To ensure that the figures are accurately comprehensive, the app allows users to factor in their property taxes and insurance to get a truly complete picture of their mortgage costs.

Mortgage/Loan Calculator 1.1 is available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Finance category. 

Speech to Text Recognition For Google Chrome

Chrome browser version 11 has a cool new feature:
speech input through HTML.

This means that you can now talk into your microphone and order commands on websites that support the new speech API.

Only limited to Google Translate at the moment and in the English language.

The use the speech feature first make sure that you have a microphone hooked to your computer and using Chrome 1
Next, go to Google Translate and change the “From” language from “Detect language” to “English”.

You should now see a microphone icon appearing at the lower-right corner of the input box.

Click the microphone icon and speak what you want translated. When you're done talking, Google will automatically translate the spoken words. You can even click on the “Listen” button to hear the translated words spoken back to you.

Other sites where you can test the new speech feature is Web2Voice and HTML5 demos.