Sony faces class action lawsuit for PSN fiasco

Go figure: the recent PSN data breach has prompted a class action suit against Sony. Filed in a California district court by the Rothken law firm, the 22-page complaint accuses Sony of failing to adequately secure the sensitive information of its users. The company revealed Wednesday that it stored the contact information, age, location, and usernames/passwords of some 77 million PSN accounts in an unencrypted state. Hackers gained access to this data during a security breach that has left PSN offline since last week.

The filing asserts that some PSN users have begun to experience losses from fraudulent use of credit card information swiped in the breach, but we're not sure how accurate that is. Many users have reported that their financial accounts have been fraudulently charged in recent days, but Sony has repeatedly stated that there is no evidence to suggest credit card numbers were taken. Furthermore, the company kept credit information encrypted on its servers, so we don't know what to make of users' claims just yet. Feel free to chime in if you've been affected.

According to the filing, Sony's negligence violates the Payment Card Industry Standard, a regulation that protects consumers from having their credit card and transaction information stored without the proper security requirements. The suit blames Sony for not informing customers that their data was being stored by insecure methods. It also accuses the company of taking an unreasonably long time to announce the data breach in an official capacity, leaving users with insufficient time to cancel credit cards and change passwords.

"Sonys breach of its customers' trust is staggering," said Rothken co-counsel J.R. Parker. "Sony promised its customers that their information would be kept private. One would think that a large multinational corporation like Sony has strong protective measures in place to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of personal information, including credit card information. Apparently, Sony doesn't." The firm seeks compensation for the time and money users spent for credit monitoring and replacement -- not to mention a new pair of underwear.

*Comic via VG Cats

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/43564-sony-faces-class-action-lawsuit-for-psn-fiasco.html

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Weekend Open Forum: The most 'evil' tech company?

It's been a lousy few months for Sony with all the PS3 hacking controversy, followed by a lawsuit that triggered a backlash from a group of gamers. Then the recent security breach on the PlayStation Network, which resulted in some sensitive user data being compromised and forced the company to take the service down.

Apple for its part was recently met with intense criticism after a report emerged last week claiming iPhones are quietly recording users' locations and saving the data to unencrypted files. It didn't take long for Google and other mobile players to start being scrutinized as well.

We hear stories like these all the time in the tech industry, sometimes unwarranted or blown out of proportion, and sometimes you just have to stop and wonder: "What were they thinking?"

In the spirit of those awful moments we ask you: which is in your opinion the most 'evil' tech company? In the poll below we've included a few that sprung to mind due to recent controversies, from anti-competitive business practices to privacy issues, peddling unfinished or buggy products, DRM-ridden software or simply a lack of tact when dealing with customers. You can check up to three and of course use the comments for the ones we missed.

Which is the most 'evil' tech company?survey software

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/43558-weekend-open-forum-the-most-evil-tech-company.html

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SocialCam will only settle for replacing your video camera

The video sharing app market is exploding right now. Partially as a result of cameras getting better in integrated devices like iPhones and Android devices and, as Justin.TV?s Micheal Seibel pointed out to me, the puzzling closure of casual camcorder company Flip.

People are turning to their phones to shoot video more than ever before. SocialCam was designed specifically to cater to those people that use their smartphones like a camcorder. The app is simple and minimally featured for now, aimed at replacing the camera app entirely for shooting video.

If this were a year ago, that would probably be enough to warrant it?s existence on the App Store or Android Market. But now people don?t just want to shoot video, they want to share it instantly with friends on Facebook and Twitter and wherever else they post stuff.

That?s why it?s imperative that any app that shoots video on a mobile device make it as easy to share it as it is to shoot it.

We covered SocialCam?s launch previously on TNW but I had the chance to talk to Seibold a bit about what sets SocialCam apart from the competition.

For Justin.TV the motivation to build an app that made it incredibly easy to share video after it was shot came from analyzing the stats of their live streaming app. They found that people used the app more to share video after it was shot than to broadcast live. So, like The Kinks, they decided to give the people what they want.

With SocialCam, you pop open the app to be greeted by a large shoot button that lets you grab video quickly. You also see your feed of videos, either yours or those of your friends. In a unique move, SocialCam shows you not just a single preview frame of video but a preview split into four quadrants that sample various frames in the video.

This wasn?t a random decision but one reached after considerable trial and error including one unfortunate version that just grabbed the first frame of the video for a preview. There were a lot of fairly uninteresting thumbnails in those feeds.

In fact, those four frames are carefully grabbed by code written into SocialCam that seeks out faces in the video, prioritizing those moments with people, presumably your friends, in them. This leads to a stream of videos that give you a far better idea of what?s contained within and that are more enticing for you to tap on and watch.

An extensive suite of sharing options rounds out the SocialCam video flow. Facebook and Twitter are there but also less common options like Posterous, Tumblr and, surprisingly, Dropbox. The Dropbox option is used to store a full res version of the videos you shoot in the cloud. SocialCam actually produces three resolutions of the video that it can use appropriately to share via the various services.

The app is also incredibly fast. The video begins uploading to Justin.TV?s servers the moment that you begin shooting it. This allows you to finish the clip and begin sharing it nearly instantaneously. Seibel says that this behavior is the result of the considerable experience that  Justin.TV has in this area, having shared over 60 million hours of video through their network.

Although you currently log in to SocialCam via your Facebook account, Seibel says that he feels that ?logging in at all is silly? and that they?re currently developing a way for people to use the app without logging in at all.

I must confess this intruques me deeply as I hate logging in to anything on my phone, it?s annoying. No details on how this process will work yet but Seibel said he?ll share details when he can.

Justin.TV has a massive barrier to overcome if it hopes to replace it?s biggest competitors, which Seibel considers to be ?the standard camera app? and ?still photos?. But Justin.TV has the 30 million users of their video network to leverage and with more people looking to the devices that they already have in their pockets for easy ways to shoot and share video, the opportunity is there.

You can grab SocialCam on the App Store or Android Market free.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/04/29/socialcam-will-only-settle-for-replacing-your-video-camera/

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Blog - Waves 'n' Whorls

Blog - Waves 'n' Whorls

A Royal Wedding Scam

Updated 18:50 EST with comment from Google.

The royal wedding came off without a hitch. Unfortunately, the same can't be said about online searches for news and images related to the event. Google Image searches for "royal wedding coverage" yesterday?which Google said was the number one U.S. search term for a time?led users to a number of websites doling out malicious software.  

At one point, clicking one of the images under "royal wedding coverage" led users to a common scam?bogus warnings of a computer infection. The embedded video, produced by researchers at StopBadware, shows how a common search could trick  users into "purchasing" what is really a nonexistent security solution?and a related blog post provides a detailed analysis of how it all worked.


This particular scam has defied all industry efforts to defeat it in the past several years. While its main aim is to steal money and credit card numbers (the scammers, many of whom are based in Eastern Europe, have found it very profitable), it is often accompanied by less visible attacks that aim to do things like install password-stealing programs via security holes in the user's computer.

When I clicked the image identified by the group?of Princess Diana?the security scam vomited across my screen, defying not only Google but the up-to-date ESET antivirus protection on Technology Review's computers. (Indeed, StopBadware's analysis today found that most security products could not detect this attack.)

This scam program surfaces in many contexts, including links spreading on social-networking sites and through advertisements. In these cases it is hosted on malicious websites (or hacked pages of legitimate websites) that users land on through the "poisoned" search results. Malware scammers often hack into legitimate websites and add a page full of "bait"?lists of terms that people might be searching for. Then they link that hacked page with hundreds or thousands of other hacked pages?or with new pages of their own creation. This strategy can sometimes fool search engines.

Google responded to a question about the royal search incident with this statement:  "Google can respond quickly to new threats like these because utilizing popular search terms and events to lure users into visiting malicious web pages is not new. We've looked at these issues closely and work hard to protect our users from malware. We actively work to detect and flag sites that serve malware, keeping on top of the latest trends and watching for popular search terms. To do this, we have manual and automated processes in place to enforce our policies. We're always exploring new ways to identify and eliminate malicious sites from our index."

Have you been hit by this ubiquitous scam?  If so, please add to the comment string and briefly explain what happened. I may get in touch with you to find out more.

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=699ea78b692099f188a6f719bc918aa2

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Blog - Waves 'n' Whorls

Learn to love what you eat with Foodia

Max Haines-Stiles didn?t start out trying to create the Facebook of food. Foodia actually grew out of a desire to help educate people about the health and sustainability benefits of good food. Sort of a ?guide to what?s on your market?s shelves?.

Somewhere in the 6 months of development the project evolved to feature foods on their own pages with a custom built health score, a wall where people can leave comments about that food and tags that highlight that food?s environmental aspects.

What resulted is a cross between Yelp and Facebook that allows people to search for their favorite foods, read about them and create lists of food you love.

So let?s say you?re heading out to shop and you know you want to bring home some cheese, perhaps some Gouda. But do you want goat, Dutch, Wisconson or smoked? Are any of the brands out there sustainable? Which of these, in general, is healthiest for you? That?s when you turn to Foodia.

When you punch in Gouda you?ll be presented with a list of that type of cheese to check out. You can then click through the list reading their profiles. You?ll get a health score that is divined by a custom-built algorithm, eco hightlights and reviews from other Foodia users.

Although the health score is designed to give people an idea of each item?s nutritional criteria it?s not supposed to be a ?be-all-end-all? definition of whether a food is healthy for everyone. Instead, they want to encourage people to look at the food?s highlights, whether it?s composed of conventional ingredients, if it?s imported, organic, seasonal or if it has compostable packaging.

Max was careful to emphasize that they?re not trying to make editorial comments on what food is or isn?t healthy for an individual. Instead, they?re looking to be a consumer tool that will help a person determine whether or not a food is good for them personally.

Anyone from foodies to just people that want good ingredients should be able to turn to Foodia to help them find good foods.

Foodia is in it?s early stages, with a team of four people from both startup and health backgrounds. They?re currently in the process of building, along with the help of users, a huge database of good food. They launched three weeks ago and so far have a database of over 500 reviews of foods and are adding more by the day.

The team is building Foodia because they felt that there was not enough focus in the health community on the food that people eat. They want to help people look past the $30 billion spent by the food industry every year on trying to influence your food purchases. This will allow people to start eating better at the ingredient level and as a result, be more healthy.

Currently Foodia exists as a website and database with a built-in list component that you can use to build shopping lists or simply lists of favorite foods. You can share individual foods or lists of foods you like with your Facebook friends or email them to yourself for shopping trips.

The next step beyond continuing to build their food database is the ability to localize the data so that you can see where exactly to buy the foods you like. This will mostly likely come along with a mobile app that you can use to help you make food decisions right in the store.

Foodia?s eventual goal is to be a place that you can go to get information about all foods, either at the ingredient level, pre-packaged or even restaurant meals. Nearly 50% of the food that we consume is in out-of-the-home or takeout meals. They know that they?re missing out on a lot of what people eat if they don?t include those types of foods.

If you love food and love telling people about the foods you like, or even if you just want to find food that you can learn to love, head over to Foodia to start browsing and contributing now.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/04/29/learn-to-love-what-you-eat-with-foodia/

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Microsoft goes after iOS developers with new WP7 toolkit

TNW Quick Hit:

Are you a developer who knows iOS like the back of your hand? Microsoft wants you to come and develop for its Windows Phone 7 platform, and to make that possible has released a slew of new tools and resources to help with the conversion process.

The company is nigh desperate to continue the development momentum that it has managed to foster thus far in the life of WP7.

Today the company released a package of tools, advice, and other bits of help that iOS developers can use to make the hop from their preferred, and well-versed development environment, to WP7. Chief among the resources is an API mapping tool that will allow people to find equivalent WP7 API calls by looking up an iOS call that they are accustomed to. This is how Microsoft described it:

With this tool, iPhone developers can grab their apps, pick out the iOS API calls, and quickly look up the equivalent classes, methods and notification events in WP7. A developer can search a given iOS API call and find the equivalent WP7 along with C# sample codes and API documentations for both platforms.

If you are a developer, you can find the API mapping tool here with the other provided resources.

This move by Microsoft has to be put into context. The company understands that the number of apps, and the rapidity with which they are developed, is the pulse, the monitor of health that the press will use to judge the platform, as sales of handsets are too opaque to track perfectly. Currently there are over 15,000 apps that have been developed for WP7.

This package is by no means groundbreaking, but it might help sustain momentum, and even get a developer or two to try out WP7 on a weekend, just for kicks. But we have to ask, where is the package for developers who best know Android?

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/04/29/microsoft-goes-after-ios-developers-with-new-wp7-toolkit/

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Are Social Bookmarks Still Delicious?