Sony Computer Entertainment has issued an update on last week’s “external intrusion” on its PlayStation Network, an attack that forced the network offline and may have exposed the personal information of millions of members.
On the company’s PlayStation.blog, senior director of corporate communications Patrick Seybold writes that the PlayStation maker will be “taking steps to make our services safer and more secure than ever before.”
That includes “a new system software update that will require all users to change their password once PlayStation Network is restored.” Presumably, that software update will come to both the PSP and PlayStation 3 within the week. Currently, PSN accounts are locked out of the system, making a change to personal information and passwords impossible.
For PSN account holders who may be concerned about the damage already done to their personal information or credit cards, Sony offers the following updates.
On the safety of your personal and financial information…
The entire credit card table was encrypted and we have no evidence that credit card data was taken. The personal data table, which is a separate data set, was not encrypted, but was, of course, behind a very sophisticated security system that was breached in a malicious attack.
On the credit card details that PlayStation Network and Qriocity do and do not store…
While all credit card information stored in our systems is encrypted and there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained. Keep in mind, however that your credit card security code (sometimes called a CVC or CSC number) has not been obtained because we never requested it from anyone who has joined the PlayStation Network or Qriocity, and is therefore not stored anywhere in our system.
X-Men: First Class has a new international trailer for you. The film stars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Jennifer Lawrence, Jason Flemyng, Kevin Bacon, January Jones, Lucas Till, Rose Byrne and Caleb Landry Jones. The movie comes out on the 3rd of June in the US.
Check out the international trailer below:
And here is a little tidbit to throw out, a full character breakdown obtained by MSN:
James McAvoy on Charles Xavier:
Charles has this connection to everybody because he can feel their experiences and see them. Their memories are his memories. But he wasn’t looking for Erik. He didn’t know Erik was there and he suddenly felt him. And perhaps he’s never connected to Erik in quite the same way he’s connected to other people. I think there’s a little bit of vying for who’s in charge, and there is a feeling between them from Magneto that, ‘you’ve got the brains, but I’m your trump card, pal,’ at every venture. ‘I’m the most dangerous dude in here, and you know that and I know that,’ and I think by the end of the film we come to an understanding about that as well. We do have completely different views as well, and what’s quite nice is that those scenes don’t come to a nice reconciliation at the end. They’re left, so the tension carries on through the movie.
Michael Fassbender on Magneto:
At the start of the movie we get introduced to Erik as a boy. We start in the concentration camps with him and it cuts to 20 years later and it’s the early 60s and it’s Erik as a grown man. He’s on a quest to get Sebastian Shaw, played by Kevin Bacon. Shaw had him in these concentration camps – and as we know the Nazis were doing lots of experimentation with all sorts of things like measuring skull size and brain size and running experiments on human beings, essentially. Shaw is trying to unleash this power in Magneto – he’s recognised that he can manipulate metal – and so we catch up with Erik on a quest to basically hunt Shaw down.
Jennifer Lawrence on Mystique:
Raven, or Mystique, is a shape shifter, and when she’s in her natural, blue, scaly, red hair form she also has superhuman agility. She’s young and she’s a normal teenager, really, just dealing with insecurities. She’s insecure about being a mutant and she slowly grows to really accept it and evolve herself. She’s been shape shifting for a long time, but she’s really just learning about her superhuman ability. She discovers that in the movie.
Lucas Till on Havok:
Alex Summers, whose super name is Havok, is Scott ‘Cyclops’ Summers’s younger brother. I can shoot plasma beams out of my entire body instead of just optic beams. Just like Scott can’t control his power without glasses or his visor on, historically Alex has never been able to control his power either. It’s always in outbursts of lack of control. In the comics he has a suit that kind of absorbs excess energy. But it was more like a meter that told him how much power he had, whereas in this one I have something that channels it because I can’t control it myself. It’s a chest piece that focuses the ray so I don’t blow it out everywhere.
Nicholas Hoult on Beast:
He’s a young scientist – a very clever guy – but a little bit shy and awkward around the girls and just socially awkward around the group. He’s a good guy, but it’s hard work for him. He’s a great scientist though and he comes up with all of these inventions that sometimes work and sometimes don’t, and then he tries out a serum from Mystique’s (pictured left) DNA to try and stop his feet from appearing apelike and massive, because he’s very self-conscious about it. Unfortunately that goes wrong and he becomes the Beast that we know from the other films and cartoons and comics. It’s fascinating to see the difference, when he becomes the Beast, between Hank and this very animalistic and scary-looking character.
Edi Gathegi on Darwin:
Darwin gets his nickname from Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution. My character is in a constant state of evolution. It’s called reactive adaptation – so whatever environment he’s in, in order to survive he will mutate. If he gets thrown in water, all of a sudden he might have gills. The lights go out, he’ll have 20-20 vision in the pitch black. He’s the coolest one! What I like about my character’s powers is that a lot of the X-Men have very cool powers, but with this one you actually see it happening and you see why it’s happening. In the right circumstances you see the thought behind the character and the need to create that evolution. There’s logic to it. And the possibilities are endless with good writing.
Caleb Landry on Banshee:
Banshee’s got a supersonic scream, and he learns how to fly in this movie. He learns how to melt objects. In the beginning all he really knows is how to break things – car doors I’m guessing, things like that. And he’s got selective hearing. In the comics it seems like they reinvent him over and over again. He’s always pretty smart, it seems like. He’s mostly good. The script definitely defines him more than the comics do, because I’ve got to do what the script says. I try to add as much as possible. I know there’s a love connection in the comics with Moira, so I try to look at her just a little bit differently, you know, when I can, so for any of the fans watching, they can notice that.
Zoe Kravitz on Tempest:
Angel Salvadore is a go-go dancer who can fly. I have a pair of tattooed wings on my back, which turn into insect wings, and I projectile vomit acid. I get to do that a few times. She starts out on the good side with Professor X and Magneto – they recruit her to be an X-Man, and then she switches to Sebastian Shaw’s (Kevin Bacon) side to be in Hellfire. I think it’s just a different approach to fighting for human equality. Someone compared the two different sides. In this film it’s Hellfire and the X-Men, but later it’s Xavier and Magneto and someone compared it to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. They’re really fighting for the same thing, but it’s different approaches for how to get there. I think she just believes that the aggressive side is the right side.
Jason Fleming on Azazel:
He’s a bad guy. Kevin Bacon’s got a team of freaky sidekicks, one of them being the fantastic January Jones, and one of them being the not so fantastic bright red Jason Flemyng, and also Alex Gonzalez who plays Riptide. And latterly in the film we recruit Zoe Kravitz as well. They’re just goons, but my skill, if I have any skill at all, is to make something out of what on paper isn’t too much. If I do a day and I’ve added a line or nicked a close up, I’m happy with myself. As the days progress, because it’s a long film, I’m sort of happy with how the part is developing. Matt (Vaughn, director) keeps coming up to me and saying, ‘Flemyng, all the second unit stuff I get back, you’re speaking. You haven’t got any lines – why are you speaking?!
Rose Byrne on Moira MacTaggart:
Moira works for the CIA. In the comics she’s a genetic, mutant expert scientist, and she was in the third film – Olivia Williams played her – but in this incarnation she works for the CIA and early on gets involved with Charles Xavier, discovering mutants. She knows that he’s an expert on genetic mutation, so she seeks him out and they become allies. She’s a real pioneer woman. It’s set in ’62 and she’s in the CIA so it’s very new for women to have that opportunity. She’s working in a pretty misogynistic place, so she’s got a lot of guts and she’s driven.
It seems like iPad 2 jailbreak is almost ready or at least in its final stages of development. iPad 2 is the only device that left not jailbroken yet. @Veeence is confirming that the iPad 2 jailbreak is almost ready. This is what he has tweeted:
Apparently an A5 (iPad2) jailbreak is almost developed. There’s no release plan tho. What you get when security researchers investigate…
Yahoo has sold its Delicious bookmarking site to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen in a move that likely signals a coming renaissance for the service, which Yahoo had decided no longer fit with its focus on media and communications properties. In a statement, Yahoo says that Hurley and Chen plan to “make the site even easier and more fun to save, share and discover the web’s ‘tastiest’ content.†Hurley, who stepped down as YouTube CEO in October, and Chen, who left YouTube in 2008, say they will run Delicious out of offices a few blocks from where they started YouTube in San Mateo and are “aggressively hiring.†The news come from the guys at moconews and here what they had to say about the acquisition:
Yahoo, which purchased Delicious five years ago, gave the site a major refresh in spring 2009, but traffic has fallen off over the last year as people have turned to social networks like Twitter and Facebook to share sites they find. In December, Yahoo said that it was looking for a “home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users.â€
Several parties had been said to be interested in Delicious, but there were no hints that Hurley and Chen were among them, and in fact a report in March said that Yahoo had sold Delicious to a rival bookmarking service for $5 million. Yahoo is not disclosing how much Hurley and Chen are paying for it. Yahoo purchased the company for a reported $15 million.
Here’s the full announcement:
San Francisco, CA., – April 27, 2011 – Delicious.com, the leading social bookmarking service, has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. Their vision for Delicious is to continue to provide the same great service users love and to make the site even easier and more fun to save, share, and discover the web’s “tastiest†content. Delicious will become part of AVOS, a new Internet company.
“We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,†said Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.â€
“We spoke with numerous parties interested in acquiring the site, and chose Chad and Steve based on their passion and unique vision for Delicious,†said John Matheny, SVP of Communications and Communities at Yahoo!.
The YouTube founders plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload. “We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,†said Chen.
Going back to their roots, Hurley and Chen located Delicious in downtown San Mateo, California, blocks away from where they started YouTube. They’re aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web.