Sony boss Sir Howard Stringer has said his company was targeted by hackers because it tried to protect its intellectual property (IP), Reuters reports.

Stringer was asked to step down by a shareholder in the wake of the hacking crisis that saw Sony lose the personal details of over 100 million users of its PSN and Qriocity services, but the Welsh-born CEO ignored the call.

When asked about the background to the massive data theft, he said:, “We believe that we first became the subject of attack because we tried to protect our IP, our content, in this case videogames.”

Sony lost kudos with the gaming community when it sued 21-year-old hacker George Hotz — aka geohot — who successfully hacked the PlayStation 3, allowing anyone to play homebrew games on the console, and generally mess about with its innards in a way that Sony found unpalatable.

Stringer may be right in suggesting the hacking community took exception to one of of its own being threatened with the full weight of the megacorp’s mighty legal arm. He also mentioned that companies other than Sony were the victims of digital japery, saying, “I think you see that cyber terrorism is now a global force, affecting many more companies than just Sony.

“If hackers can hack Citibank, the FBI and the CIA, and yesterday the video game company Electronic Arts, then it’s a negative situation that governments may have to resolve.”

Stringer was asked to step down as CEO so that Sony could make a fresh start, but didn’t respond directly to the request, so it doesn’t look like he plans on leaving any time soon.

What do you think? Did Sony deserve to be punished for picking on the little guy? Should hackers such as LulzSec, who purported to highlight vulnerabilities, be tarred with the same brush as the criminal operation that took Sony customers’ credit card details? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section, or on our Facebook page. 

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Sony’s online gaming service PlayStation Network is still offline in the wake of a massive security breach that saw hackers make off with over 100 million users’ personal info. With the service still not expected to get back online before the end of May, it seems that gamers are voting with their feet and trading in their PS3 consoles for cash, or for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console.

The stats come from an investigation conducted by videogames publication Edge, and suggests that UK retailers are experiencing a serious spike in PS3 trade-ins, a slump in sales for PSN points cards and more business heading the way of the Xbox 360 in the form of trades and game pre-orders.

One source explains, “In the first week of downtime we did not really see any major change in sales or trades. However from the second week onwards we have seen an increase of over 200 per cent on PS3 consoles being traded in, split almost 50/50 between those trading for cash and those taking a 360 instead.”

Now, ‘over 200 per cent’ increase sounds pretty drastic, but without knowing what the actual figures for trade-ins before the PSN outage were, it’s hard to get a sense of the scale of the problem. But anecdotally, it’s powerful evidence that gamers are severely fed up with the downtime — enough so that they’d switch to a rival console.

It seems like the most impatient gamers are those who play online shooters like Modern Warfare 2 or the totally-serious-war-game-except-there’s-a-zombie-mode Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Another source (though this one was from a Belgian retailer) said gamers were “bringing in PS3s together with all their games and they don’t want money, they want an Xbox 360. In every case it is because of Black Ops and or Modern Warfare 2.”

Another high street source said, “pre-orders have been cancelled and flipped over to 360 versions of games.”

Obviously this is a small sample, but if your comments are anything to go by, there are plenty of disgruntled PS3 gamers out there.

Meanwhile, Industry Gamers has got hold of a letter sent from Sony to its publishing partners and developers, which seems to indicate that Sony isn’t sharing any more info with its business partners on the outage than it is with the public, which is sure to aggravate companies who depend on PSN for business.

Will your console allegiances swing if PSN remains broken much longer? Are you a Sony fan through-and-through, or a gloating Xbox fanatic? Let us know in the comments or on our Facebook page, and be sure to vote in our poll on whether you’ll ever trust Sony again.

Also read With PlayStation Network still down, what else is there to do?

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Recent PS3 news:
Sometimes folks forget while Sony is international, it is also Japanese. While American companies love to “get in front of the message” Japanese companies sometimes react more slowly, and deliberately to issues. When Kazuo Hirai took a deep, slow, long bow at the start of the Sony “apology” press conference, he was acting as a member of a culture, and not just a the chief of Sony’s PlayStation games unit.
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A senior exec at Sony has given Nintendo’s 3DS a severe verbal beatdown, calling the glasses-free 3D console a “babysitting tool”.

Jack Tretton, the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, went medieval on Mario in an interview with Fortune, claiming the 3DS would be an embarrassing accessory for the trendy modern gadabout. “No self-respecting twenty-something is going to be sitting on an airplane with one of those,” he raged. “He’s too old for that.”

Ouch. There’s no love lost between Sony and Nintendo — these latest comments draw on a rich history of bickering, along the lines that Nintendo’s offerings are childish and underpowered, while PlayStation devices are more appealing to hardcore gamers, and are crammed with handfuls of high-powered hardware.

Tretton said Nintendo’s DS family of handhelds offered a “Game Boy experience”, but if he was fishing for a smackdown, perhaps his words were poorly chosen, because now all we can think about are the happy hours we spent playing Tetris on otherwise joyless camping trips.

Tretton didn’t stop at handhelds either, laying into the Wii: “I mean, you’ve gotta be kidding me. Why would I buy a gaming system without a hard drive in it? How does this thing scale?”

Yes, we’re sure that’s what every one of its 85 million owners said when they first saw it: “How does this thing scale?”

But he might have a point — Sony’s ‘hardware overload’ approach does tend to give its products more longevity, with the PS2 racking up over 10 years on sale. And as Fortune notes, Final Fantasy XIII was released on a single Blu-ray disc for the PS3, but had to be spread across three DVDs for the Xbox 360 version.

On the other hand, all the high-spec tech inside the PS3 made it incredibly pricey at launch — something which undoubtedly contributed to its initially lacklustre sales.

Still, Sony doesn’t look to be abandoning its everything-under-the-sun approach to its consoles. Speaking of the upcoming NGP handheld, which is due out later in the year (although it’ll probably be delayed), Tretton had the following to say:

“With the NGP, we asked, what is it that is lacking? We looked at every technology out there, every [bell and] whistle, and how can we make those flexible as possible for consumers to experience.”

The NGP certainly packs a tonne of tech — with a massive hi-res touchscreen, two cameras, two analogue sticks and a touch-sensitive trackpad around the back, it’s housing more hardware than Optimus Prime. But that’ll probably make it more expensive and bulkier than the 3DS, and of course it’s arriving on the scene considerably later.

As for us, we’ve barely stopped playing our 3DS since it arrived, and yes — we’ve used it on a plane. No, we don’t have any self respect.

How do you feel? Do you prefer your gaming hardware simple and cheap? Or would you rather pay a little extra for a tricked-out console? Is Tretton right when he says Nintendo is for kiddies? Let us know in the grownup comments, or on our mature Facebook page.

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Blimey. While we were all distracted by the rumoured it’s-so-real-but-they-just-won’t-confirm-it Sony PlayStation Phone, games industry publication MCV is reporting that the next iteration of the Sony PSP (that’s PlayStation Portable don’cha know) the PSP 2 will be officially unveiled at a press conference in Tokyo on 27 January.

MCV says games publishers were informed last year of Sony’s plans, and that some of Sony’s biggest developers are already toiling away on titles for the new console. That means when it does become official, there should be some games for Sony to show off as well.

We’re not sure yet what the PSP 2 will have inside it, but considering how smart phones have taken off recently, we’d hope for a few mobile-esque features, such as 3G connectivity and Web browsing.

We’d also like to see some seriously meaty hardware, to keep the PSP ahead of the curve when it comes to mobile gaming — you’d be surprised at the kind of gaming kicks devices such as the iPhone 4 are capable of.

The PSP 2, if and when it becomes official, will also be up against Nintendo’s 3DS console, which we’ve already previewed. The 3DS offers 3D gaming without the need for wearing dorky glasses, and we like the look of it very much.

What do you think? Is this too little, too late from Sony? Or do you love your PSP and can’t wait to see what it comes up with next? The comments section and our Facebook wall are the place to vent that spleen. 

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Playstation root constitutes piracy, argues company – letting slip it has sold 41m consoles – but law precedent set last summer may be on the hackers’ side

Photo by artwork_rebel on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Sony is suing a group of hackers who worked out how to break the Playstation 3′s firmware system so that it could be made to run any applications.

The hack could have allowed any sort of program or game – including pirated ones – to run on the console. Sony argues in its lawsuit that that constitutes computer fraud and copyright infringement – and accuses those involved of “distributing software, tools and instructions … that circumvent the technological protection measures in the PS3 system and facilitate the counterfeiting of video games.”

But one of the hackers caught up in the controversy, George Hotz, told the BBC that he was “comfortable” that Sony’s action would fail. “I’m a firm believer in digital rights,” he said. “I would expect a company that prides itself on intellectual property to be well-versed in the provisions of the law, so I am disappointed in Sony’s current action.”

Hotz, 21, said he had consulted a lawyer and that he felt confident that the action had no basis.

Hotz’s role was to figure out how to break the firmware and, apparently, to demonstrate it on YouTube and discuss it on Twitter.

His defence will probably rest on recent cases which have shown that “jailbreaking” items for “fair use” is legitimate under US law. A landmark case last July allowed such jailbreaking – which gives people full access to the file system of the device – under “fair use”, for personal use, criticism or satire. That, for instance, allows people to jailbreak Apple’s iPhone and use it on other networks.

Hotz has previously “jailbroken” – broken the security on – Apple’s iPhone. He is named along with more than 100 people who belong to a hacking group called Fail0verflow (of which he is not himself a member). That group demonstrated last December that they had worked out how to break through the PS3′s security system, using what they called “simple algebra”.

Legitimate games and movies will only play on the PS3 because the discs provide a password or signature “key” to the encryption system, which recognises them as authorised products. But with the key – essentially a long sequence of numbers – Fail0verflow coders would be able to compile their own custom firmware and then build applications that could run on any system.

However, they did not actually reveal the key at the presentation, at the Chaos Communications hackers conference in Berlin.

Even so, Sony is going after them. The court filing, in the Northern District of California, seeks restitution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Sony says it has sold “over 41m PS3 systems worldwide since its launch” – a data point that may be found useful.

For an action to succeed under the DMCA, any protection system doesn’t have to be uncrackable, or state-of-the-art; all that’s required is for the company employing it to show that they have made an effort, and that it is non-trivial to crack.

It will be interesting to see how Hotz’s defence and that for the Fail0verflow team plays out: Hotz, being in the US, might have a trickier time of it if he did distribute tools that are shown to break the DMCA. By contrast the Fail0verflow team may have it easier, since they demonstrated the existence of a weakness, but did not actively pursue it. But DMCA lawsuits are notoriously complex.

A couple of areas look less solid for Sony: its claims that the Hotz and the rest broke the Playstation Network’s terms of service agreement, that they interfered with the experience of other PSN members, and that they were trespassing on Sony’s “right” to own the PS3.

You can see the document in the embed below:

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PlayStation

Sony

Hacking

Intellectual property

Games

Charles Arthur

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Sony’s new music-streaming service, Music Unlimited, works on your PlayStation 3, Sony Bravia TV or any PC — but unlike rivals Last.fm and Spotify, it doesn’t have a free option.

Music Unlimited has 6 million tracks at launch, from all four major labels and some indies. There are two payment plans: basic, which costs £3.99 per month, is like an ad-free radio channel, but you can skip tracks and customise the kind of music you want. It’s basically Last.fm, but costs you money instead of having ads.

The £9.99 per month premium option is like Spotify — you can listen to whatever you like and make playlists. There’s no mobile option at launch, but Sony says the service will be coming to Android (not iPhone, natch) and Sony’s more capable media players. It also promises the number of tracks will grow.

Like Last.fm, the service has like and dislike options so it learns your taste over time and offers you a more personal recommendation. Usefully, it’ll sync your preferences across all the platforms you can use it on, so if you like something you hear on your TV, that should be reflected in the music its channels play you on your Android phone. Like Spotify, it can play your existing MP3s.

There’s no question Spotify is a better use of a tenner a month — until Sony adds the Android option. Then having your music synced between your phone and PS3 or Bravia TV could make this tempting. We think the lack of an iPhone option or a free version severely limits the number of people who’ll be interested, however. A 30-day free trial just isn’t enough to build up any loyalty.

The service is an expansion of Sony’s hideously named Qriocity entertainment platform, where you have one ID across all your PS3, PC and Bravia equipment. It already has a movie-streaming service called Video on Demand.

Note: Last.fm is owned by CBS Interactive Music Group, which is ultimately owned by the same company as CNET UK.

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It looks like a Sony Russia rep messed up big time. A Tweet on the SCEE Russia Twitter feed pretty much confirmed Mass Effect 3, according to internet translations.

Speculation has been rife since BioWare revealed that teaser trailer for its as-yet-unnamed new game – which is set to be officially revealed via the SpikeTV Awards in the US on Dec 11 at 8pm PST. But it seems Sony Russia has beat them to it.

According to Ripten, the crazy Russian symbols in the post (pictured) translated to: “Company #BioWare Award for #VideoGameAwards showed a teaser, in which we can see the first footage #MassEffect 3″.

The snapshot on this page is of the post before the whole account was snappily killed off, which does nothing but raise even more eyebrows. It must have been important for such a critical response.

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NPD’s video game sales data lockdown has meant we’ve had to wait a little longer than usual to get hold of some of September’s US hardware and software numbers, but industry analyst Michael Pachter’s just thrown us a PS3 flavoured bone.

According to the Wedbush man, Sony’s system shifted 312,000 units in the States last month, down 37 per cent year-over-year.

That’s comfortably ahead of Wii’s 254,000 sales (down 45 per cent year-over-year), but well short of Xbox 360, which moved 484,000 units (up 37 per cent year-over-year) to top home console sales for a fourth successive month.

Sony was more willing to chat publicly about PS Move post-NPD last night, noting its satisfaction with the new motion controller’s “extremely” strong start in the US, and 1.5 million sales in Europe during its launch month.

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In the course of human history, there comes a time when gamers start thinking ahead to the next generation of consoles.  Many people argue that all three consoles are winners in this generation.  However, Sony was in a position to defeat Microsoft and Nintendo and did not do so.  Here are five things Sony can do with the PS4 to ensure they come out on top, when the PS4 eventually appears years down the line.

1.  Innovate, don’t duplicate!

Innovation: Sony told us over and over again that Playstation Home would revolutionize how gamers played with each other.  That revolution lasted about 10 minutes inside Home until you realized there was NOTHING to do and the entire experience was one big ball of suck.

The sad thing about Sony’s best innovation is that it isn’t theirs. Blu-ray has been a saving grace for Sony allowing for more content and higher quality movies to be played on their gaming console.  I can’t give them credit for the invention but sticking that invention in each of their consoles is exactly the innovation they need to win the next generation.

Duplication: Microsoft gave us achievements and Sony duplicated it with the emptier feeling trophy system.  Now this may sound a little…how do I put it? off balanced, but achievements are the Los Angeles Lakers and trophies are the Los Angeles Clippers.  Their purpose is the same, they are both appreciated additions to the games entertainment value, but one is clearly superior to the other.

Remember that console you were soooo excited to purchase so you could use awesome motion controls and really feel immersed in the game?  The Woo…I mean, WII! Remember 6 months later when the novelty wore out and you clicked the “Confirm Auction” button on eBay?  Well guess what!?!  Sony has duplicated the Wii and brought us Playstation Move!  Even though Playstation Move will be have more accurate controls than those offered by the Wii, it’s just another novel idea that will end up chatting with your other unused peripherals…namely Donkey Konga bongos and the “Now free with the purchase of anything in Best Buy” DJ Hero turntable.

2. Better Launch Titles

Sony had a tough time getting out of the blocks with the PS3.  When Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII is one of the top three titles at launch, you have yourself a mighty big problem.  Of the 21 launch titles on the PS3, 17 were already available for the Xbox 360!  Resistance was the one bright spot and let’s be honest…it wasn’t that great.

Just to help Sony out, here are a few ideas for great launch titles for the PS4:

God of War V

Uncharted 4

Kevin Butler presents: The Adventures of Sax Guy and Old-Spice Man

3. Do NOT invest anymore time or money into 3D Gaming

Six months ago, I might have argued in the other direction with 3D gaming.  Avatar was filling seats with its hot Blue Man Group sci-fi action, and James Cameron did the 3D world proud. Bad news: every other movie released in 3D was not done nearly as well as Avatar and 4 seizures and 10 migraines later, I’m done with it. There are plenty of ways to push gaming into the future, but please Sony, don’t try and make 3D gaming one of those ways! My carpet hates vomit.

4.  Charge for PSN accounts to make it better

Forget about Playstation Plus, charge an annual fee for all users and use that money to make your network better.  Xbox Live is so much better than the Playstation Network, I tickle my elbows when people claim otherwise. Examples?

While Microsoft and their 8-person party chat is calling me from their satellite phone high atop Mount Kilimanjaro, Sony and their no-cross game chat system is yelling at me through a flamboyant male cheerleaders megaphone.

When I open my drawer of video games to grab an “oldie but goodie” to enjoy for an hour or so, I cringe when I reach for a PS3 game.  Why?  Because I know that if I grab a game I haven’t played in over 2 months, I will encounter a 150+MB update that will waste half of the time I had to play.  So I reach for an Xbox game instead.  Oh sure, my Xbox games have updates too, but they NEVER take more than 10 seconds to complete.

5.  Pray that Nintendo throws in the towel

Sony, you may want to send Mr. Cobb into the dreams of Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata and plant an idea in his brain to turn Nintendo into a dog food company.  A dog food consisting of primarily shredded mini-game themed video game discs.

Honestly, I don’t see Nintendo striking gold twice.  They’re enjoying the spoils of their gimmick for now, but when the time comes to move on to the next round of the console wars, Sony can give themselves a great shot at being number one if they “StumbleUpon” SarcasticGamer.com and read this article.

Unless of course Nokia makes an N-Gage Console…Then they can only hope for 2nd place.

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