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Sharing thoughts and ideas on business, security and photographySony PlayStation Network hacked, the mea culpa letter and some tidbits
Posted on April 29, 2011Update :
So now it turns out that Sony have been hacked again, this time it is the turn of Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), the publishing division responsible for maintaining Sony’s numerous online gaming titles, like EverQuest, EverQuest II, DC Universe Online and Free Realms. This affects 12,700 credit card numbers and 24.6 million accounts, including accounts in Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Spain.
Read more here : Source: http://www.lazygamer.net/#ixzz1LIYYzCK4
A copy of the press release can be see here : http://www.soe.com/securityupdate/
After the previous PR disaster Sony have been quicker to react this time around, their situation does however go from bad to worse. The Sony PSN is supposed to be coming back online shortly, along with a few “freebies” to say sorry to all their users. If you are still willing to trust Sony with your info there may be some goodies in there that interest you (the specific ones available to SA haven’t been announced yet), and 30 days free use of PSN+.
Out of interest, there are over 100 000 SA users of PSN : http://www.maxconsole.net/content.php?45820-Revealed-PSN-account-numbers-broken-down-by-country
Original post :
After days of hearing about the Playstation network breach on Sky News and on various sites, and reading about it on various hacking sites, that elusive mea-culpa email finally arrived from Sony.
It says a lot without really saying it. We might have lost your credit card details? Watch your statement?
This really isn’t good enough. Currently being out of the country for a few days, having to cancel a credit card and get another issued would be a real real pain, apart from being rather expensive. There is no talk of compensation for loss in the mail, but then I guess if you have managed to “lose” the details of millions of customers that could be a rather expensive exercise. My card replacement fee is in excess of R150. 7million x R150 = over R1 billion just for card replacement fees, before any fraud claims. Expensive mistake? Sony do claim that the database had an encrypted table of credit card details, with no CVS numbers or expiry dates, so perhaps the risk is not all that high of widespread abuse.
It shall be interesting to watch what happens from here on in, and see how the class action suites already being filed play out. Sony has already lost a lot of support and goodwill with the “OtherOS” fiasco and the GeoHot saga. Neither of which are really satisfactorily resolved.
Out of interest, it seems that when Sony first found out about the hack, it was more in the context of people being able to access paid for content without paying. Seems they had insecure methods of requesting that content, and the changing of a simple flag meant you didn’t need to pay. Hackers had produced custom firmware for the PS3 which allowed these changes to be made. It seems that there wasn’t a whole lot of security in the client/server requests. Read some of these here on IRC logs. No certainty on the validity, but sounds plausible enough.
Mocking of Sony abounds on the net (Source: tweet by @mxatone (Thomas Garnier) : http://img.clubic.com/04217086-photo-hack-psn.jpg):
Would you like to download some credit card details?
For those of you who didn’t get the mail (lucky you), here it is :
This is an email from Sony Computer Entertainment Australia Pty Ltd. If you can’t see the images in this email, please click here (link removed)
Valued PlayStation Network/Qriocity Customer:
We have discovered that between April 17 and April 19, 2011, certain PlayStation Network and Qriocity service user account information was compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into our network. In response to this intrusion, we have:
- Temporarily turned off PlayStation Network and Qriocity services;
- Engaged an outside, recognized security firm to conduct a full and complete investigation into what happened; and
- Quickly taken steps to enhance security and strengthen our network infrastructure by re-building our system to provide you with greater protection of your personal information.
Fun with Segway at Spier wine estate
Posted on April 19, 2011A while back there was a special on at the group buying site Wicount* (signup code Justin-5h) for Segway tours of the Spier wine estate in Stellenbosch. For those who don’t know, the Segway was the gyroscopic based two wheeled personal transporter invented by Dean Karmen and introduced back in 2001. There was a huge amount of hype around the device and it was touted as being able to change the world. A huge expectation was built up around it and when the launch came it was a bit of damp squib. Read more on the history etc at Wikipedia.
I have seen the transporters around in South Africa, mainly used by security guards in shopping complexes and the like, and while it has always looked intriguing there hasn’t really been the opportunity to test one out.
Struggles in getting Garmin Live traffic activated
Posted on April 14, 2011Update (16 May):
Today I received another email from Garmin. The online activation is working, no really, this time it really is. And low and behold, a visit to the site shows that indeed the under construction banner is gone and you can do an on-line something. I can’t test it since mine was manually activated a while back. Glad it’s finally working, really poor show Garmin in taking so long to get it sorted, but glad its finally done.
Update (26 April) :
I received a mail today from Peter Smith at Garmin today in reply to my very first website request to them for activation. In the mail he suggests that the online activation is (finally) working. I went back to garmap.co.za/traffic and found the same link to the same in under construction page. I mailed him back, he mailed back and suggested I shouldn’t go to that link. “Please go to www.garmap.co.za since that link you have does not work anymore . The webpage was redesigned . Go to products , Live Traffic and follow the pages”. I tried this and end up with the same page, tried refreshing, different browser etc. Not sure where the problem is or why Garmin thinks their new site is live when it isn’t. Anyhow, seems it is perhaps a bit closer to being live, though why they would mail customers to say its live when it isn’t is beyond me. Did let Peter know, as well as suggest that if they are replacing the garmap.co.za/traffic page the least they can do is put an automatic redirect in place as this is the page referenced on the hard copy product documentation in the retail channel. We await further progress.
Original post :
I had a break-in back in November and after lots of disputes with ABSA they finally paid out. I used some of that payout to replace my GPS and with my dislike of traffic and being stuck in it opted to get a Garmin with Traffic adapter. After some further delays the company nominated by the insurance assessor delivered the goods to me. This was around 6 weeks ago.
I unboxed all the goodies and tried plugging it in. The traffic adaptor was recognised by the Garmin and it said it had a USA subscription that would be activated when it picked up the signal. I scanned a few times, no luck, time to read the instructions. Eventually found them and saw that South Africa has it’s own unique activation method. Ok.
Off to the website as instructed (http://www.garmap.co.za/traffic/), clicked on the traffic activation link, only to find this wonderfully helpful (not) graphic :
Garmap - Under Construction
Read up some more, nothing of use, other than having a minor wobbly when reading on the site that the service is only available in Johannesburg, despite it being sold to me in Durban. Google then showed up press releases saying it was now active in Durban, clearly it was just the official website that was out of date.
Quick thoughts and test: New version of Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) 1.4.3 (Updated 14/4/2011)
Posted on April 12, 2011As any regular reader of my blog knows, I am quite a fan of Microsoft Image Composite Editor and regularly use it to create panoramas and photosynths, and have quite a few synths hosted on www.photosynth.net.
A couple of days ago (7th April) a new version was released, 1.4.3. Get it here. There is also a nice demo video there.
Back last year there was some pre-release information around this new release, the most exciting was that it could now take video input and use it to create the panoramas and synths. I have been looking forward to this release every since so was quite excited at the news.
The new features (as taken from the website) are :
- Stitch directly from a video (only on Windows 7)
- Automatic lens vignette removal
- Improved blending engine
- Options dialog to control memory usage and scratch disk locations
I don’t know why the video option is Windows 7 only, however my laptop runs Windows 7 so I was very keen to try out this new feature. With limited time I just took my blackberry, made a quick (1 minute) low resolution (around 2 Meg) video (.3gp format). (Update : It works on Windows 7 only as it makes use of some new video API that is present only from Windows 7 onwards).
I chose the composite video option in MS ICE, selected the file and it in, asked about clipping the frame, which I declined to do. MS Ice then analysed the video and selected 66 images which it then stitched together. It created a final image 2560 pixels x 426, covering 360 degrees horizontally and 56 degrees vertically, just 1.09 megapixels. This was a little disappointing since I had tried to get at least 90 degrees vertically and large sections of the video appeared missing (you can see part of the roof and not others). The room was a little dark and the blackberry camera isn’t great in low light conditions, I guess I temper my expectations until I try this out properly with the Canon EOS 550D or the Ixus 210. They at least do HD (and full HD) video.
The end result can be seen below. Very dark and more than likely not doing justice to the new features (my fault I’m sure). I hope to upload more examples soon, but in the meantime check out the first attempt.
Update :
Tonight I took a similar video clip using the Canon Ixus 210 in HD (720p). The result looked much better onscreen and MS ICE also did a much better job with the source footage. Many more images were picked from the video (110 selected, 109 stitched) covering 360′ horizontally and a much better 130′ vertically. This produced a final image 6144 pixels by 2165, giving 13 megapixels. The end result as uploaded to Photosynth is much more pleasing then the Blackberry version and gives a much more complete view of the room.
This video option is definitely one I will play around with a whole lot more. Next time out the Canon Eos 550D to do some full HD (1020P) video.
Getting what’s due in terms of the Consumer Protection Act
Posted on April 06, 2011The new Consumer Protection Act came into effect from the 1st April 2011. To quote from the DTI website : “I know my rights. Do you know yours? you have rights as a consumer. understand them. enforce them.”
On the plane on Friday night I read in the paper (don’t remember which one, think it was one of the Cape local papers) that as consumers we now have the right to cancel an advance booking, and that the supplier may deduct a fee if we do so, but that they cannot refuse to provide a refund. Over the weekend I was looking at airline tickets and found that Travelstart have a policy which is in contravention of this. Simply put, unless you pay extra for a “Cancellation policy” you cannot get a refund for a ticket cancellation. This appears to me to be in contravention of the Act so I mailed them as below :
Keeping up with the local deals – bring on “Today’s Deals”
Posted on April 02, 2011There are now a number of collective buying sites (in the vein of Groupon) that are operating in South Africa. You can get some really good deals from them and I have bought quite a number of things from them over the last 3 months or so, ranging from dinners, sailing cruises, Blo-kart racing through to massages and other pamper sessions (yeah those were for the girlfriend, mostly 
Originally there was just Wicount and Twangoo (now bought by Groupon) that were of interest and doing good deals, but now there are more competitors in the space all providing good deals (across multiple cities) I am finding my email inbox is getting flooded and it is a pain to try and keep up with all the deal, and it is really easy to miss the good ones.
Bring on “Today’s Deals – all the deals in one place” recently started by Eve Dmochowska. This great site monitors the other deal sites for you and acts as a central hub to monitor them all. So far it includes:
- Collective Cow (www.collectivecow.com)
- One Day Only (www.onedayonly.co.za)
- Zappon (www.zappon.co.za)
- Dealio (www.dealio.co.za)
- Ubuntu Deal (www.ubuntudeal.co.za)
- Vuvu Plaza (www.vuvuplaza.com)
- 24 hours only (www.24hoursonly.co.za)
- Groupon MyCityDeal (www.mycitydeal.co.za)
- Wicount (www.wicount.co.za)
The only one that I watch that’s not on the list is Twangoo (www.twangoo.co.za) though with the takeover by Groupon it seems to have a lot of deals in common with MyCityDeal. Still worth watching that one by itself for now.
These deal sites now cover Johannesburg, Pretoria, Capetown, Durban and National Deals so there is something for everybody.
Add this site, Todays deals, to your daily watch list, subscribe by email or use the RSS feed and enjoy the bargains. Thanks for the great service Eve.
P.S. I have bought from Wicount, Twangoo and Zappon. All work very well, other than a few minor niggles. Zappon is the newsest on the block of those 3 and had the most problems, but their user support team was quick to resolve my issues in a friendly and efficient manner.
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