It’s been a grim month for the cloud, Amazon EC2 crashed-and-burned in mid-April and late the month-of-Spring-flowers the PlayStation Network lost its buttered toast. While all of these companies are still scratching their heads, leaving numerous customers and websites in the dark, we wonder how this will reflect on trust in the cloud and on the Internet. Amazon’s EC2 debacle created a crash-sense (which had been handled better by Google when it happened to them) and the PSN failures include a credit-card theft of notable proportions.
PlayStation Network news brings us some weird insights into the thinking of Sony
- Data Loss from PlayStation Network (PSN) Extended to Sony Online Entertainment (SOE)—after a hacker breach of PSN, Sony temporarily took the entire set of services offline and on the eve of their apology and eventual restoration the gaming megacorporation discovered that SOE had also suffered losses to the tune of 12,700 non-U.S. customer credit cards and 10,700 debit records.
- Sony Still Under Investigation over PlayStation Network Breach—in a letter to Congress, Sony alleges that the hactivist non-organization of Anonymous must be implicated in the breaches against them due to a file left behind on their servers named “Anonymous” containing the text “We are legion.”
- What network technology does PlayStation Network run atop?—perhaps you could give us a hint?
Google and Apple and Location Tracking fears
- Memo Reveals How Important WiFi Location Services are for Google Android—a leaked memo from 2010 reveals that Google Android uses WiFi and GPS together not to track the location of consumers but to better pinpoint smartphone locations in order to provide phone services.
- Android WiFi Takes Blows in Tracking Class-Action Lawsuit and Tether-Wars—this comes on the heels of a lawsuit that spawned against Apple over the furtive iOS location tracking; the lawsuit has few angles, probably because users much opt-in to tracking.
- Google’s Location Services Trigger Raid on South Korean Offices—according to Google South Korea this is “business as usual.”
- Apple Addresses Location Tracking with iOS 4.3.3 Software Update—the patch reduces the size of the location cache (reports say it stored a year’s worth of tracking originally), the unencrypted location database is no longer synced to computers via iTunes, and causes the cache to be removed and tracking stops when Location Services is turned off.
Finally there’s a little bit about Twitter being a powerful tool for spreading the news, but it’s more or less like a vast grapevine with all of the pitfalls that come with that. As a result I posit that Twitter Doesn’t Compete with Broadcast Media, It Amplifies.
And, Nokia seems to be biding their time before they come to the market with a tablet. A lot of speculation is running rampant on what might end up on that tablet when it does appear. With Nokia Waiting for the Right Time to Enter Tablet Marketplace we hear from Stephen Elop that he wants any Nokia product to stand out in a wash of too-similar products as the iPad dominates the market.
Free-to-Play MMORPGs
Free MMORPGs have gotten a few new First Impressions to play around with,
- Realms Online First Impressions—a full-world PvP fiesta with three realms in conflict, a capture-the-flag concept that forces people to charge all the way across continents, and a golden dragon-god that grants wishes. What could go wrong?
- Prius Online First Impressions—sporting an interesting gameplay concept but otherwise mediocre graphics, the player not only gets their own character, but their own little-girl “pet” who casts support spells, and a transform that is a giant monstrosity.
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