Hackers crack PlayStation 3 hardware, again Sony's hacking headaches continued today with claims that a new PlayStation jailbreak USB dongle is about to flood the market. According to Eurogamer's Digital Foundry blog, the threat of piracy is set to plague Sony again, as there is now a dongle available in Indonesia that allows users to bypass the console's security …
If you don't connect your console to the internet, and so never download system updates, does this stop you from installing games to your HDD, or does the required update come on the newer game disks? Is this the same with the xbox360?
I always assumed (because it rather annoyingly never actually tells me what the update is doing) that the updates were either non essential GUI tweaks or patches related to online play for games. I never even considered the anti-piracy angle. The reason I ask is that I've just bought a second 360 to put in the spare room to play games which, by virtue of breaking a 'no visible cables in the living room' rule, annoy the hell out of the other half, namely driving games that I use a wheel with. I had (and have) no intention of wiring that room, or console to the network but not being able to install games to the HDD would be most annoying as the 'new' console is a second hand Elite which makes more noise than is acceptable in polite society when running games from the DVD.
What's old is new again with reboots of classic devices for gaming and music coming out all the time. But that kitsch value comes at a cost, even if the tech is from the current era.
Audiophiles want digital music players that leave out cellular components in favor of sound-quality-maximizing gadgets – or at least that's what Sony appears to be betting on with the introduction of a $3,700 so-called Walkman this week.
Before you ask, no it can't play actual tapes, which means it's not really a Walkman at all but rather an Android 11 media player that can stream and play downloaded music via apps, much like your smartphone can probably do. But we won't talk about that because gold plating.
China's internet regulator has launched an investigation into the security regime protecting academic journal database China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), citing national security concerns.
In its announcement of the investigation, the China Cyberspace Administration (CAC) said:
Air raid sirens sounded for over an hour in parts of Jerusalem and southern Israel on Sunday evening – but bombs never fell, leading some to blame Iran for compromising the alarms.
While the perpetrator remains unclear, Israel's National Cyber Directorate did say in a tweet that it suspected a cyberattack because the air raid sirens activated were municipality-owned public address systems, not Israel Defense Force alarms as originally believed. Sirens also sounded in the Red Sea port town of Eilat.
Netizens on social media and Israeli news sites pointed the finger at Iran, though a diplomatic source interviewed by the Jerusalem Post said there was no certainty Tehran was behind the attack. The source also said Israel faces cyberattacks regularly, and downplayed the significance of the incident.
Sony on Friday launched a subsidiary dedicated to optical communications – in space.
The new company, Sony Space Communications Corporation (SSCC) plans to develop small optical communication devices that connect satellites in low Earth orbit using a laser beam, and provide the resulting connection as a service.
These small devices can provide high speed communication more effectively than radio, because they do not need a large antenna, high power output or complicated licenses, said Sony in a canned statement.
After at least six years of peddling pilfered personal information, the infamous stolen-data market RaidForums has been shut down following the arrest of suspected founder and admin Diogo Santos Coelho in the UK earlier this year.
Coelho, 21, who allegedly used the mistaken moniker "Omnipotent" among others, according to the US indictment unsealed on Monday in the Eastern District of Virginia, is currently awaiting the outcome of UK legal proceedings to extradite him to the United States.
The six-count US indictment [PDF] charges Coelho with conspiracy, access device fraud, and aggravated identity theft following from his alleged activities as the chief administrator of RaidForums, an online market for compromised or stolen databases containing personal and financial information.
Never mind what enterprise programmers are trained to do, a self-defined set of hackers has its own programming language zeitgeist, one that apparently changes with the wind, at least according to the relatively small set surveyed.
Members of Europe's Chaos Computer Club, which calls itself "Europe's largest association of hackers" were part of a pool for German researchers to poll. The goal of the study was to discover what tools and languages hackers prefer, a mission that sparked some unexpected results.
The researchers were interested in understanding what languages self-described hackers use, and also asked about OS and IDE choice, whether or not an individual considered their choice important for hacking and how much experience they had as a programmer and hacker.
Analysis The Lapsus$ cyber-crime gang, believed to be based in Brazil, until recently was best known for attacks on that country's Ministry of Health and Portuguese media outlets SIC Noticias and Expresso.
However, the gang is climbing up the ladder, swinging at larger targets in the tech industry. Over the past few weeks, those have included Nvidia, Samsung, and Argentine online marketplace operator Mercado Libre. Now, Lapsus$ is suspected of attacking game developer Ubisoft.
Lapsus$ in February compromised Nvidia, stealing a terabyte of data that included proprietary information and employee credentials, and dumping some of the data online. The crew also demanded the GPU giant remove limits on crypto-coin mining from its graphics cards, and open-source its drivers.
Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) and the Japanese space agency have conducted an experiment to transmit data from the stratosphere to space and declared the results promising as a complete file was delivered at 446 megabits per second.
Data networking is hard in space, because distances and latency are substantial and radiation can impact transmissions. Those challenges have led to efforts like the Interplanetary networking SIG and its delay-tolerant networking (DTN) tech that makes internet standards work despite the challenges of space.
DTN also addresses the problem of network nodes disappearing over the horizon – and therefore beyond the reach of radio or optical signals – by (as its name implies) not getting grumpy if packets take a while to reach their intended destinations.
Retired Microsoft engineer, Dave Plummer, offered a blast from the past last week with a look back at the infamous Sony Windows "rootkit" scandal.
The Apple iPhones of at least nine US State Department officials were compromised by an unidentified entity using NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, according to a report published Friday by Reuters.
NSO Group in an email to The Register said it has blocked an unnamed customers' access to its system upon receiving an inquiry about the incident but has yet to confirm whether its software was involved.
"Once the inquiry was received, and before any investigation under our compliance policy, we have decided to immediately terminate relevant customers’ access to the system, due to the severity of the allegations," an NSO spokesperson told The Register in an email. "To this point, we haven’t received any information nor the phone numbers, nor any indication that NSO’s tools were used in this case."
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