The following month, Hotz was hired at Facebook.

Hacker's New Day Job

Reportedly, Hotz began work at Facebook as a software engineer in May 2011 and his first day was May 9.  A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed the hire but did not provide any other details regarding Hotz' position or duties.

The news was reported by TechUnwrapped and others over the weekend, citing an interview with Chronic-Dev Team member Joshua Hill (aka "P0sixninja on Twitter). The Chronic-Dev Team, for those unaware, is a group of developers who work to release software for jailbreaking iPhones and other iOS devices.

In a video interview (see embed below), Hill discussed the upcoming jailbreakers' convention known as MyGreatFest, During the chat, Hill also mentioned that he recently challenged Hotz to find an exploit for the iPad 2, but Hotz turned him down due to his current employment at Facebook, as well as his desire to escape the limelight after his legal troubles with Sony.

Additional confirmation came from Gabe Rivera, founder of the tech news aggregator Techmeme. He did a little sleuthing of his own and discovered that Hotz had announced his employment at Facebook via his Facebook profile. According to this post (viewable by Hotz' Facebook friends and network only), he began in May and revealed the news to friends in June.

Facebook has yet to officially confirm Hotz' role with the company, only his hire, but speculation has it that he may be involved with Facebook's mobile efforts, specifically its upcoming iPad app. The New York Times reported earlier this month that the iPad app, in development for nearly a year, may only be weeks away from release.

LulzSec claims to have broken into the Sony Pictures website and compromised over a million users' accounts.

The group claims to have accomplished this via "a very simple SQL injection, one of the most primitive and common vulnerabilities, as we should all know by now." Indeed.

Although Sony has yet to issue a statement about the break-in, Lulzsec has posted a sample of the data in order to substantiate its claim.

The news is the latest in a series of disasters the Japanese company has faced this year, reflected in the double-digit percentage loss of revenue it posted last week. Sony's Playstation Network was hacked in April, exposing the personal data of some 70 million customers. The network announced that all systems were back online this week, just in time for hackers to strike a different Sony subsidiary apparently.

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.

Details of the settlement were not released, but according to Sony, the two parties reached an "agreement in principle" on March 31. As part of the settlement, Hotz agreed to a permanent injunction against publishing any further code.

Sony's statement declares the settlement a "win" for anti-piracy efforts, but in it Hotz repeats what he has long claimed about his jailbreaking project: "It was never my intention to cause any users trouble or to make piracy easier."

With an out-of-court settlement rather than a trial, these issues of whether or not DMCA regulations cover gaming consoles appear unsettled.

While Sony might paint this as a win, the company did come under fire for what Electronista calls a "scorched earth attitude" to the lawsuit, in which the company's pretrial demands included gaining access to the records of anyone who had viewed or commented on the jailbreak video on YouTube. Sony also requested that Twitter provide the identities of those who revealed the hack.

While Sony's statement doesn't really exonerate Hotz from a connection to piracy, it does make it clear that he isn't involved in the recent attacks by Anonymous on various Sony websites.

For his part, Hotz has updated his blog, Geohot Got Sued, to announce that "As of 4/11/11, I am joining the SONY boycott. I will never purchase another SONY product. I encourage you to do the same."

In Network World's Security Strategies Alert newsletter, Mohamed Hassan details his discovery of StarLogger keyloggers on several different Samsung laptops.

Keyloggers record every keystroke on a computer's keyboard and email them to a recipient. This keylogger was hidden and pre-loaded on the computers he tested, making it a significant step beyond the "Sony BMG rootkit fiasco" from 2005. There, keyloggers were loaded onto users' computers from music CDs with the ostensible goal of limiting illegal music use.

After using a commercial security program, Hassan found the keylogger in the c:\windows\SL directory of his laptop.

Hassan decribes how the Starlogger program works:

"This key logger is completely undetectable and starts up whenever your computer starts up. See everything being typed: emails, messages, documents, web pages, usernames, passwords, and more. StarLogger can email its results at specified intervals to any email address undetected so you don't even have to be at the computer."

The newsletter's editor Mich Kabay says they contacted three PR reps at Samsung but, after a week of waiting, have yet to receive a response. Will this trigger a class-action lawsuit, as he thinks? I wouldn't bet against it.

UPDATED: I might bet against it now. GFI, the makers of the product Hassan used to test his computer, said a bug in that product misidentified a folder, according to a statement quoted by Computerworld.

"'Our findings indicate that the person mentioned in the article used a security program called VIPRE that mistook a folder created by Microsoft's Live Application for a key logging software, during a virus scan,' the company said. 'The confusion arose because VIPRE mistook Microsoft's Live Application multi-language support folder, 'SL' folder, as StarLogger,' Samsung said."

It was right that GFI owned up and cannot have been easy.

"This is war," he says in the first post, arguing that Sony has declared war on hackers. Indeed, Hotz has been in the middle of a heated fight with Sony over the his release of a jailbreak for the Playstation 3. Sony claims that this violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as the Computer Fraud Abuse Act, and that the jailbreak released by Hotz would enable users to play pirated video games on their consoles.

That last argument is an important part of Hotz's legal defense, as he contends that the Playstation should be viewed no differently than a mobile phone, which under DMCA regulations, is legal to jailbreak. However, the DMCA regulations do not mention gaming consoles specifically, which has left room for Sony's legal efforts against the jailbreaking. Those efforts have included a restraining order against Hotz, forcing him to take down all mention of the jailbreak from the Web.

Hotz notes that battling Sony has been costly. "Sony has five lawyers, I have two." He started a fundraising effort via the blog over the weekend, which has been so successful that he's already closed the "first round of donations." "Things are looking up money wise," Hotz writes, saying he expects to be able to hire more lawyers.

Clearly Geohot is not going down without a fight.

Membership will start at $3.99 a month, with a $9.99 per month subscription that will give you on-demand access to the Music Unlimited catalog and with the ability to suggest music you might like based on the songs you already own or listen to. The service boasts more than 6 million songs, giving Sony Music Entertainment and its partners in the endeavor - Universal Music Group, EMI Music and Warner Music Group Corp - the ability to sell directly to customers.

Streaming Subscription Service (But Not for iOS)

These features of the new service all point to the current landscape of the music business - the increasing popularity of subscription services (such as MOG, Rhaposdy, and Rdio), for example, and the continuing struggles of the record industry to adapt to (declining) digital music sales.

But the launch of Music Unlimited also comes on the heels of Apple's announcement this week of its new subscription service, and the news that Apple would start to charge a 30% commission for purchases made within an iOS app. The news comes as Apple tries to gain more control over content bought and sold via apps on its platform, something that made Sony's proposed Reader app run afoul of the new rules and fail to be accepted into the store.

There were rumors earlier this week that Sony was planning on removing its music from iTunes in response to Apple, although Sony Network Entertainment COO Brandon insists that's not the case. Nonetheless, it's also noteworthy that Sony's new service isn't available on mobile devices - interesting since streaming-on-the-go is part of the benefits of streaming your music.

"Lemme guess, you sank my battleship?" read the tweet from @TheKevinButler, who then retweeted the code that'd been directed to the account by @exiva.

That account, Travis La Marr's according to his Twitter profile, gave the code with a message to Sony: "come at me."

While the legalities around jailbreaking and intellectual property are one thing, Sony has added more fuel to the fire, arguably, with what Wired describes as "aggressive pretrial discovery demands." Sony has demanded that Google turn over the IP addresses of those who have viewed or commented on the jailbreak video on YouTube. It has also demanded that Twitter provide the identities of those who revealed the hack.

Sony has been granted a temporary restraining order against Hotz, who's removed his information about the hack from the Web. For its part, Sony appears to have deleted the tweet containing the code. But as the company may be realizing with its failure to shut down Hotz, it's not so easy to delete information from the Internet.

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.

However, not all PlayStation games will work on all Android devices - there are a few caveats that apply. But Android support may only be the beginning.

To start, the PlayStation titles offered will be the older, original PlayStation One (PS One Classics), not the more popular PlayStation Portable (PSP) titles. However, newer games developed using the tools Sony provides will also be delivered by PlayStation Suite, or the "PS Suite," as Sony is calling it for short.

Not all Android devices will be able to run the PlayStation games, unfortunately. Sony says the games will require the use of Android 2.3, code-named "Gingerbread," the latest release of the Google mobile operating system, or higher. Presumably, that means "Honeycomb" will be supported as well, the newest tablet-only release of Android.

In addition, games will only run on devices that meet the requirements set forth by the new "PlayStation Certified" licensing program for hardware manufacturers. The program will offer both developer support and logo licensing to its participants.

PlayStationStore: An App Store for Games

The PlayStation games will be distributed through an app store, the PlayStationStore, where games can be directly downloaded to any supported Android device. There's no word on when exactly this store will launch, only that it will arrive "within this calendar year."

We'll likely hear more about Sony's plans at Mobile World Congress, the mobile industry event taking place next month in Barcelona. That's also when Sony plans to officially unveil its PlayStation phone, too -  a Sony Ericsson handset (Xperia Play) that runs Google's Android OS. Despite the phone's still "unofficial" nature, it has made an appearance in a number of photos, videos and Engadget even got its hands on one for an early review. In other words, it definitely exists.

And yes, it runs Sony PlayStation games, too, via an app called PlayStation Pocket, which Engadget said looked like a tool for managing downloaded games on Android devices.

On the record, however, Sony only confirmed that, in addition to Android, the games will run on its next-generation portable gaming device, code-named NGP, also announced at the press event.

Beyond Android?

An interesting side note to this story is the fact that Android may not end up as the only mobile platform where PlayStation games are supported. Engadget, which attended the press conference in Tokyo, said that Sonly was referring to the PlayStation Suite a "hardware-neutral" development framework that would make games portable to "all sorts of handhelds." What does that mean for porting Sony games beyond Android?

While Sony gave no official mention of its plans to extend beyond Android, it's entirely possible. With a framework in place, its only a matter of creating software development kits (SDKs) for other mobile operating systems. Of course, that's no small matter. And we certainly won't hold our breath waiting for PlayStation games on Apple's iOS, either. Games are some of the most popular applications on Apple's platform, and are often sold for premium prices. Would Apple really let Sony encroach on its bread-and-butter? Doubtful.

Source, Photos: Engadget

Whether or not that length of time is what's contributed to rampant piracy of digital music, there's no doubt that early releases of songs on the radio do tend to find themselves available for download illegally shortly thereafter.

The practice of hyping music before release was part of a strategy of having songs hit the number one position on the chart upon release, and The Guardian says that industry insiders believe this new "on air, on sale" policy will make it easier for songs to climb the charts as excitement grows, rather than simply appear on the charts on release day, only to fall off immediately afterwards.

Sony and Universal will start this new policy in the U.K. It's not clear at this time if other record labels - or labels in other countries - will follow suit.

Of course, nor is it clear that the lack of "instant gratification" in getting new songs is really the impetus behind music piracy.

According to a report by Andrew Wallenstein at PaidContent tonight, Sony is experimenting with the following, when you buy one of three new movies on iTunes:

"A search button allows you to input a word, and any mention of it in the script will be retrieved along with a link to the exact moment in the movie in which the line was uttered. A 'clip & share' function lets the viewer take select scenes and post them to social networks. There's also a playlist with songs from the film, which are linked to to places on iTunes where those songs can be purchased."

I cannot imagine watching a Resident Evil movie, but perhaps one of my Facebook friends will shoot a clipping of the best part into my Newsfeed and change my mind.

May all old media industries find inspiration in these experimental new features and come up with ways to make their products exciting enough to purchase in a digital world filled with free content.

Today a public relations representative sent us a statement on behalf of Sony that suggests the company may be pulling out of the race to the bottom.

Image from Sony's e-book website

Amazon announced the Kindle Wi-Fi, which has a 6" display, will retail for $139 in August, making it the cheapest e-reader yet. The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that a lesser-known manufacturer is coming out with a 5" screen e-reader for $99 later this year. Sony's least-expensive e-reader, the 5" screen Sony Reader Pocket Edition, was $149.99 at the time of this post.

So does this mean Sony won't lower the price of the Sony Reader anytime soon? It would seem so, but the company isn't ready to box itself in.

"Nothing to announce at this time regarding a price move," said Leanne Drown of Racepoint Group, which represents Sony. "The quote reflects broader thinking around strategy moving forward."

Sony's sales of floppies worldwide ended in March of this year. Sales in Japan will end next year exactly a year later. Most worldwide manufacturers of floppies already put the kibosh on the little devils.

I wonder what we'll do, a decade hence, when we unearth a mysteriously-labeled floppy and find no way to read it? Maybe some things are better left as mysteries.

For users who don't own an e-reader yet but are looking into getting one, the question right now is to either wait for the iPad and go with a regular LCD screen for reading books, or to choose a more traditional (and cheaper) e-reader like the Kindle or Sony Reader that feature electronic ink. While some users don't mind the blacklit LCD screens of their phones to read, others can't fathom reading any long-form content on these screens.

Fighting Off the iPad

For Sony, Amazon, B&N and others who are currently betting on electronic ink for their devices, one of the best ways to distinguish themselves from Apple is to offer more content over their free wireless connections and to play up the advantages of eInk. In this context, adding a newspaper like the New York Times (which is also a favorite of Steve Jobs and features heavily in Apple's iPad ads and other promotional material) makes a lot of sense. For the newspapers, getting on more devices and selling more subscriptions is simply good business. Sony charges up to $14.99 per month for these subscriptions.

Given that all of these papers could sell their own apps and subscriptions on the iPad as well - and that some of them will be available for free - the availability of newspapers may not be a deciding factor for a lot of potential iPad and e-reader buyers. Hopefully, however, we will also see a lot of innovative newspaper and magazine apps on the iPad. Chances are that these new apps will make today's traditional e-readers seem rather quaint in comparison. The availability of these apps could easily sway a lot of potential e-reader buyers to get an iPad instead.

What is your experience? Do you think e-books and newspapers just look better on eInk? Or are you waiting for the innovative newspaper apps on the iPad that will include video and other interactive content?