This is the second, and hopefully final, phase of bringing the PlayStation Network back online. The first, which was rolled out May 15, restored partial services including gameplay, account management and chat. The full restoration will bring full functionality back to the PlayStation Store, in-game commerce, and the ability to redeem vouchers. Is this the end of the saga that could be the most significant network hack ever?

Our enterprise editor, David Strom, took a look last week at Sony's actions surrounding the hack and gave tips on how corporate IT departments should handle breaches and breakdowns. The takeaway: Be proactive, be honest and work like hell to get the service up and running as securely as possible.

First, apologize early and get out in front of any breach. Reveal what was revealed, make amends, and offer something free to compensate the victims. Don't do a Steve Jobs and clam up. Whatever you do, do it within 24 hours of the event, and sooner if you can. While your corporate legal team will want to wait, convince them that waiting has its own costs and drawbacks. It took Sony three weeks to have this post on its own blog to explain anything.

Sony will offer users a "welcome back" package of services and premium content. If you are a PSN gamer, let us know in the comments what the apology package looks like and if you think Sony has done enough to win back your favor.

The dangerous thing about these attacks is that they're hosted on a google.com domain, which gives these nefarious pages an air of legitimacy. One form even had the researchers themselves stumped as to whether it was phishing or not!

While researching the many examples of Docs-hosted phishing sites, the F-Secure researchers came across this form (see below), which asks for your Google Voice number, email address and the secret PIN code on your account. It appears to be a phishing site, but oddly, at least one Google employee was found to have linked to the form on online Help forums.

This stumped the researchers, who then turned to Twitter to ask their followers what they thought. Tweets Mikko H. Hypponen, F-Secure's CRO:

"The consensus on Twitter seems to be that the weird page on google.com is a phishing site. The jury's still out though."

Writes one commenter on the original blog post: "I must say kudos to Google for anonymizing so well the form, there's no way to tell who made it." Uh-oh, Google.

As of now, it's still unknown whether this form is a phishing attack or a real form used by Google in the past. If you want to try to figure it out on your own, the F-Secure blog post provides a link to the form. We won't link to it ourselves, as a precaution.

Update: The following was just added to the F-Secure website:

Updated to add: We got contacted by a Google employee.

They informed us that, surprisingly, the questionable page is indeed the official Google form to request Google Voice account transfer. They also told us to remove all references to the form in this blog post. But I'm afraid we can't do that.

Image credits: F-Secure

According to the Playstation Network blog; "we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birth date, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained."

"While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility," Sony wrote. "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."

The hack shows that even the biggest vendors on the Web are vulnerable to security threats by a motivated hacker. Yet, this is a big black eye for Sony and there will probably be some significant consequences.

This goes way beyond a simple distributed denial of service attack or even a hack that just compromised connectivity. The fact that Sony cannot confirm if credit card information for 70 million accounts has been breached means that the attack was sophisticated enough to completely befuddle Sony's security team.

Sony says that the attack happened between April 17 and April 19. Since discovery, the company shutdown the network, engaged an outside security firm and attempted to strength the network by rebuilding the infrastructure with greater protection for personal information.

Historic Proportions

The depth of the breach and the amount of information taken ranks up there with some of the major data thefts in history. Last year two hackers infiltrated AT&T servers that held personal information on 120,000 iPads including government officials and celebrities. Gawker had a massive and embarrassing data breach in December, 2010 that exposed information on 1.25 million accounts. Just last week Wordpress suffered an attack that took down many of the popular websites on the Internet and exposed 18 million accounts personal information. In what could be the most similar type of attack, social gaming and entertainment network RockYou.com exposed account information for 32 million accounts in December, 2010.

Sony urges Playstation Network and Qriocity users to be vigilant in protecting in tracking and protecting their information. In its blog post it gives the numbers of credit card agencies and the Federal Trade Commission if users want to investigate the extent of their information leaked.

The Playstation blog, a space normally used for gaming updates, tips and anecdotes, has been updating the status of the network about once a day since the initial attack brought down the platform last week. It said April 25 that the company does not have a timeframe for when the service will again be available.

The company acknowledged the hack April 22 in a post stating that an "external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services. In order to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward, we turned off PlayStation Network & Qriocity services on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th."

Seybold wrote that the Playstation Network is "re-building our system to further strengthen our network infrastructure." That suggest that the intrusion is not a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack but a more sophisticated hook into the system.

International hacker group Anonymous, which has taken down websites large and small with DDoS attacks according to its political agenda, has denied responsibility for the attack. In a post on its message boards, Anonymous said "for once we didn't do it."

Note: Unedited from the original Anonymous message, typos and all.

Sony's Playstation Network, its online service for Playstation 3 and its Playstation Portable consoles, suffered from a major outage today; which is on going as of this writting. According to Son'ys blog, the interruption in service may last into the long weekend - for at least another "full day or two". Sony released a statement through its EU blog, saying that the network outage may be a result of "targeted behaviour by an outside party", brining in the possibility of cyberattacks. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the message has since been removed.

While it could be the case that other Anons have acted by themselves AnonOps wa not related to this incident and takes no responsiblity for it. A more likely explination is that Sony is taking advantage of Anonymous' previous ill-will towards the company to distract users from the fact the outage is accutally an internal problem with the companies servers.

Sony is incompetent.

Anonymous had originally been upset with Sony over its decision to sue hacker George Hotz after he jailbroke the Playstation 3. Sony and Hotz settled the case earlier this month.

The Playstation Network has upwards of 70 million members and has been around since 2006. It allows users to play multi-player games online, rent videos and games, watch Netflix movies, instant message and chat.

Correction: Qriocity is an online European music service, not the European version of PSN as previously reported.

The announcement should bring news of the phone's price, carrier partnership(s) and launch date.

In January, business news site Bloomberg confirmed the phone's existence and launch plans after a continuous series of leaks, photos and videos made their way around gadget blogs all across the Web. Despite Sony's silence on the matter, the phone was clearly in development for a 2011 launch. In fact, Engadget even went so far as to call the phone one of the "worst kept secrets" in the industry. Thanks to a number of hands-on reviews, tear downs, and extensive photos, there's already a lot that's known about this new, gaming-centric smartphone powered by Google's Android mobile operating system.

The phone will run Android 2.3 ("Gingerbread") and will include a slide-out game controller instead of a slide-out keyboard, as would normally ship on phones using this particular form factor. It also has a 5-megapixel camera,  microSD card slot, single-core processor that clocks from 122.88 MHz to 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM and an Adreno 205 GPU.

Android is Ready for Gaming, Says Sony

Most importantly, the Xperia Play will run Sony Playstation games. And it won't be the only phone that can, either -  Sony recently announced that it will offer a program to port the original PlayStation One (PS One Classic) games to other Android devices, as well as newer games developed using the toolkit Sony will provide. These games will be sold through Sony's app store on the phone - the PlayStation Store - where they can be directly downloaded to any supported Android device.

The new Facebook teaser for the phone is live now on Sony Ericsson's page, asking you to like the page in order to read the official announcement.

As for the commercial, it's a decidedly creepy shot of a back alley, black market  surgery where the lovable Android robot guy gets thumbs grafted onto his nubby arms. "Android is ready to play," says the ad. That may be true, but still...ick.

There was lots of activity in the digital lifestyle space in 2008, with new devices, services, and platforms being launched and some of our favorites from last year getting significant updates. One notable trend throughout the year was the way these products and services began to converge; not in the sense that they were becoming all-in-one devices, although some of that was happening, but rather by hardware, services, and content playing together nicely, often through open standards and platforms, with the Internet acting as a conduit. On that note, here are our picks of the 10 best digital lifestyle products of 2008.

• Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 International Products of 2008
• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
• Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008

1. The App Store

The real upgrade to the iPhone this year wasn't the iPhone 3G but the accompanying App Store. Launched just five months ago, the store now offers over 10,000 third-party apps, and Apple has seen over 300 million downloads. Part of that success can be attributed to the way in which the iPhone as a platform has galvanized developers; a second major factor is the simplicity of the App Store itself. As a result, lots of our other favorite digital lifestyle-related products and services wound up on the iPhone and iPod Touch, such as Pandora and Last.fm (digital music), Joost (Internet TV), Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter (social web), as well as location-based services, games, remotes (VLC Player and Sonos), and much, much more.

See also: The real surprise of the App Store isn't number of downloads or revenue

2. Netflix

When Netflix starting talking up plans to deliver its online streaming service, Watch Instantly, to "Internet-connected high-definition DVD players, Internet-connected game consoles, and dedicated Internet set-top boxes," we were a little skeptical, especially of the time frame. However, the company really delivered in 2008: Netflix streaming is now available on TiVo, the XBox 360, Internet-connected DVD players from LG and Samsung, along with the Roku Netflix Player set-top box.

3. Android

Our initial review of the first Google phone, T-Mobile's G1, was mixed, but the Android OS had us pretty excited. "Without a doubt, the Android operating system is spectacular," last100's Daniel Langendorf wrote at the time. "It's fast, with little or no lag time. It's responsive, fun to use, and full of promise." A few months on and we're still impressed. In particular, Android's mobile web browser is the best post-iPhone one yet. And likewise, the Android Market does a great job of copying the iPhone's App Store. Of course, the best thing about Android is that it's open source; as a result, we'll see it powering numerous new smartphones next year, along with other hardware, such as set-top boxes, MIDs, and GPS devices.

4. Nokia E71

In our extensive review, we described Nokia's E71 as our favorite smartphone yet. So, admittedly, this one is a very personal choice. The E71 is roughly the same size as the iPhone but has a completely different form-factor, omitting touch for a more traditional user interface and with enough room to pack in a compact but very usable QWERTY keyboard. Other pluses are the device's overall responsiveness, bundled applications, and a number of welcome improvements to the S60 line's user interface, along with decent web browsing and media playback, superb call quality, and extremely good battery life.

5. Hulu

Although online video site Hulu was available in private beta in 2007, it didn't launch publicly until March of this year. Our initial verdict was mixed, but since then the Fox and NBC joint venture has become the third biggest video destination in the U.S., according to Nielsen. Perhaps a testament to that success, a number of device makers have released set-top boxes marketed on their ability to put Hulu content on the TV, such as ZeeVee's recently announced PC-to-TV solution, the ZvBox, and the Neuros LINK. Now, if only Hulu would release an iPhone app or, like Netflix, form official partnerships with consumer electronics companies.

6. BBC iPlayer

Hulu could certainly learn a thing or two from the iPlayer, the BBC's TV catch-up service (UK only). Since its controversial Windows launch, when the public broadcaster was accused of getting too close to Microsoft, the iPlayer has added streaming for the Mac and Linux, a version for the iPhone and iPod Touch, numerous other portable media players, and support for the latest phones running Windows Mobile. There's also an iPlayer application for select Nokia phones and a browser-based version optimized for the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii.

7. PlayStation 3

Sony's PlayStation 3 wasn't launched in 2008, but it certainly came of age this year. The company has always pitched the PS3 as a device that goes far beyond gaming. Instead, like Microsoft's XBox 360, it's designed to be a trojan horse in the living room, delivering a range of non-gaming content and services through the television. On that front, Sony made significant progress in 2008 by winning the next-generation format war with Blu-ray, adding DVR functionality in the UK with PlayTV, launching a video download store in the U.S., adding support for DivX video, and, finally, rolling out its own virtual world called Home.

8. Songbird

After being in development for two years, the open-source desktop music player Songbird reached its 1.0 release this month. What sets Songbird apart from the likes of iTunes is the array of available plug-ins that extend the app's functionality. For example, mashTape, one of six default add-ons, let's you delve into artist info, discography, links, and news and scroll through Flickr photos and YouTube videos. Other add-on services that ship with the player out of the box are Last.fm, Concerts, and SHOUTcast radio. With these installed, you can sync your tracks to Last.fm's online service, check out upcoming concerts in the area, and stream music over the Internet using the player. As of publication, there are over 70 plug-ins available for Songbird.

See also: ReadWriteWeb's full Songbird review.

9. Wii Fit

Nintendo has long contended that "everyone's a gamer," and now the console giant wants everyone to get fit. Announced last year but released in 2008, the Wii Fit aims to improve the health of family members through the kind of active play first seen in Wii Sports. The "game" comes with a balance board that assists with aerobic, toning, and balancing activities. A neat feature is that household members can review each other's progress on a new Wii channel.

10. The Netbook

This isn't an individual product but a whole new product category that has really taken off in 2008. Initially targeted to the education market and those wanting a third machine, netbooks are resonating with a much broader market -- and not just because of their lower price point compared to more traditional, higher spec'ed sub-notebooks. Despite years of industry propaganda, consumers are wising up to the fact that they don't have to step on the processor upgrade treadmill. Instead, in an age when more and more of our applications and data reside in the cloud (on remote servers, rather than local computers), a machine with Internet connectivity and powerful enough to run a modern web browser (a netbook, in other words) is often all we need.