Month: November 2013

One Million PS4’s Sold Within 24 Hours!

Apparrently, they have a winner! Who said the game console is dead?

Sony sells over 1 million PlayStation 4s

“Sony’s PlayStation 4 is off to a hot start. Consumers in North America bought more than 1 million PS4s within the first 24 hours of the new $399 home video game console going on sale Friday. That’s the fastest start for a PlayStation system so far.

Shuhei Yoshida, president of Worldwide studios for Sony Computer Entertainment, posted the news on Twitter Sunday.

As often happens when a mass release of a high-tech product occurs, a few consumers get a lemon. Some PS4 owners reported that their new console would not output video and had a flashing light, entertainment news site IGN.com reported.

‘A handful of people have reported issues with their PlayStation 4 systems,’ Sony said in a statement to IGN. ‘This is within our expectations for a new product introduction, and the vast majority of PS4 feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We are closely monitoring for additional reports, but we think these are isolated incidents and are on track for a great launch.’

And the highly publicized release of PS4 attracted the attention of some thieves. Two men were arrested in Bakersfield, Calif., after robbing a customer of a PS4 outside a store, Yahoo News reported. And in Hutchinson, Kan., thieves broke into a home and took a PS4 in the early morning hours Saturday.”

Yes, you read that right! The premiere new gaming console runs FreeBSD under the hood. Win!

Sony’s new PlayStation 4 and open source FreeBSD: The TRUTH

The Register – “Sony has confirmed that its newgasmic game console the PlayStation 4 – on sale today in the US – uses a modified version of the open-source FreeBSD operating system.

In a license page on Sony’s Japanese site the company lists the software used by the PEW-PEW-PEW machine, and Unix-derivative FreeBSD features prominently. The PS4’s Orbis OS is based on the tech.

Speculation had surged in June that Sony had loaded a modified version of FreeBSD 9 onto its console after images leaked online of the console’s development environment. Sony’s no stranger to the open-source world: it’s PlayStation 2 programming kits were Red Hat Linux machines, although it’s infamous for dropping Linux support for the PS3.

The confirmation is arguably another win for the open-source world, and lines up with game vendor Valve’s plan to bring a console into people’s living rooms running a Linux-powered SteamOS.

Besides the daemon-logo’d FreeBSD kernel and related components, other open-source software used by Sony’s entertainment box includes OpenSSL, Protocol Buffers, Webkit, jQuery, and Lua. The FreeBSD software license allows the OS’s source code to be used freely by anyone provided acknowledge of the project’s copyright is noted in the product’s documentation along with the distribution terms and conditions.

Nintendo also uses open-source software in its Wii U games console alongside its proprietary Internal Operating System. Microsoft, on the other hand, appears to prefer purely its own home-grown code – namely the Xbox OS that was written from scratch for the original Xbox and the Xbox 360. The upcoming Xbox One will use the Windows kernel, Microsoft said.”

I was listening to the radio this morning, and the DJ mentioned that it had just turned: 08:09:10 11/12/13 How cool is that! An alignment of time! Dewd! Now if the planets were aligned at the same time, that would be the Day of the Doctor (Dr. Who 50th Anniversary Special!)

Thought exercise: “What if web browsers were guns?”

This is just so cool!

Note the venerable, old Netscape browser logo! That sure brings back memories!

And, of course, whatever you do, you sure don’t want to use Internet Explorer! ‘Nuff said!

Will expensive dSLR cameras go the way of buggy-whips?

Smartphones Destroying High-End Camera Sales

Information Week – “Smartphone makers such as HTC, Nokia and Samsung have made it a point to build powerful cameras into their mobile devices. Many of today’s leading smartphones offer not only high megapixel counts, but astounding software that lets them shoot in a wide variety of different modes. The appeal of camera-equipped smartphones has led to a decline in point-and-shoot camera sales for some time. Now it appears that these uber-devices are impacting sales of high-end, professional cameras, too.

Research firm IDC predicts that shipments of what it calls ‘interchangeable-lens cameras’ (or dSLRs) will drop 9.1% from 19.1 million last year to 17.4 million this year. At the same time, Canon and Nikon, the leading dSLR makers, have been forced to lower forecasts for the year. Further, Tamron, a third-party maker of lenses, saw shipments slump by as much as 22% during the first three quarters, according to The Wall Street Journal.

‘We are seeing tough figures at the moment, but I don’t think this will last forever,” said Nikon Chief Financial Officer Junichi Itoh. ‘There still is potential demand, and I think China is the key.’

Tamron knows it is in trouble. ‘Smartphones pose a threat not just to compact cameras but entry-level dSLRs as well,’ said general manager Tsugio Tsuchiya. Nikon and counterpart Canon blamed the slower shipments on a weak global economy, but that’s not the only factor at play.

In July, Nokia announced the Lumia 1020, a smartphone that boasts a 41-megapixel PureView camera. The camera features lossless zoom and controls that often match those of dSLRs when it comes to adjusting the behavior of the camera. Nokia has made no secret of the fact that it wants its powerful smartphone cameras to set Lumia-branded smartphones apart from the competition.

Last month, Apple introduced the iPhone 5s with an 8-megapixel camera. Apple took pains to improve the camera with a wider aperture and more sensitive sensor. The same is true of the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4, LG G2 and other top smartphones. Many of these device manufacturers pitch their phones as replacements for stand-alone cameras.

The phone makers aren’t alone. The app economy has risen to support smartphone-based imaging. Consider Yahoo’s Flickr. It has revised both its Android and iOS apps in the past 12 months and offers customers 1 TB of online storage for free. Then there are apps such as Instagram that make editing and sharing picture fun and social. Social networking sites, including Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, all place a premium on posts that include images. All three have worked hard to make it easy to share images online from smartphones. Combine good cameras with appealing software and the easy portability of smartphones, and you have a recipe for disaster as far as dSLR makers are concerned.”

Adobe had a HUGE password leak recently. How do you know if YOUR password was compromised? Well, you now have an email address checker that can tell you, it is at: https://adobe.cynic.al

Find out if you have been owned!

Did your Adobe password leak? Now you and 150m others can check

The Guardian – “Nearly 150 million people have been affected by a loss of customer data by Adobe, over 20 times more than the company admitted in its initial statement last week.

Owing to the proliferation of Adobe products in use throughout the world, from the Flash browser plugin, to the Acrobat software used to create PDFs, to the AIR framework used to make software like Tweetdeck and the BBC iPlayer desktop application, many users have Adobe accounts which they have since forgotten about (including 50% of the Guardian technology desk).

Using https://adobe.cynic.al, a tool created by programmer @Hilare_Belloc, users can check if their email address was included in the 10GB database leaked last week. If it isn’t, then they are safe, but if it is, then they need to seriously check whether they reused the password anywhere else – because it is as good as revealed.

Encryption error

As well as allowing the data to be stolen in the first place, Adobe made two other serious errors when storing the data. Firstly, it encrypted all the passwords with the same key; secondly, the encryption used a method which renders the encrypted data insecure.

The method, called ECB mode, means that every identical password also looks identical when encrypted. So if the database shows 1.9 million people whose password, when encrypted, reads ‘EQ7fIpT7i/Q’, then researchers know that they all have the same password. From there, they can look at the password hints, which Adobe didn’t encrypt at all, to try and guess what the password might be.

In this example, the hints include ‘numbers’, ’12’, ‘654321’ and ‘123456’. That last one is most likely the password itself; and so the 1.9m who used 123456 as their password have had it compromised.

There is no simple way to reverse the encryption, but “brute force” attacks can sometimes figure out what the key used to encrypt them is. That would mean that attackers would have a colossal store of emails and passwords which they could test on other sites around the web.

So even if a user’s password is unique, and the hint means something only to them, they should still consider their data at risk.

‘Clearly those users who chose longer, more complex passwords will be less at risk than those who chose common dictionary words or the most commonly chosen passwords,’ says Graham Cluley, a security consultant. ‘[But] let’s not forget that the hackers gained access to Adobe’s systems and stole product source code as well as the database. It’s quite possible that they also stole the keys that Adobe was using on its database – and so could have already unlocked the information.’

‘If your Adobe password is compromised, that possibly won’t have a huge impact on your online life. But if that same password is being used elsewhere on the net (and sadly, we know that many people use the same password for multiple websites) then the consequences could be significant.’

Ultimately, the leak is just the latest reminder of the risks of re-using passwords. ‘I think it would be best for people [affected] to change their passwords – and, if they were re-using them, to learn the lesson never to re-use passwords again.

‘You should never use the same password on multiple websites.'”

Over on the right-side column… yeah, over there… you will see… “Subscribe to Our E-Mail Newsletter” and “Leave Dr. Bill a Voice Message.” Take advantage of enhanced communication, use the power of the InterWebs! Come on! You know you can do it!