Digital Trends
Despite Sony’s market position well behind Nintendo in both the home and portable console markets at the moment, the company had no problem drawing crowds at this year’s E3, where a full deck of high-profile titles made its booth one of the busiest at the show. We headed upstairs for a tour of the latest with developers on hand to explain.
If you don’t think cyber warfare could be a major problem in the future, then NATO would like to change your mind. At a conference in London last week,Suleyman Anil, the man charged with guarding NATO from cyber attacks, told the Guardian, "Cyber defense is now mentioned at the highest level along withmissile defence and energy security. We have seen more of these attacks and we don’t think this problem will disappear soon. Unless globally supported measures are taken, it can become a globalproblem." Anil told the E-Crime congress that it was costing less for hackers to mount attacks, while the amount of damage they could inflict wasincreasing. The biggest trend of recent years is cyber terrorism, as shown by the attacks on Estonian government sites last year. But there have been many attacks, including those on government sitesin Australian and Britain and on the Pentagon. American officials believe they’re the work of a Chinese-sponsored group which they’ve dubbed Titan Rain. Of course, identifying the shadowypeople behind the attacks is almost impossible. But people in power do understand how real the threat is – the US government has allocated $6 billion to strengthen systems against attack.
Last week NPD released their market share numbers and the nice thing about NPD’s numbers are that they report what is actually sold (granted they use a sampling method which means there are inherent inaccuracies). But most of the other numbers you see reported don’t take into account inventory and thus they inflate the positions of those that had manufacturing advantages; in other words, they do not report how many consumer purchased them, just how many were sold to stores. Another problem is these numbers only represent the lucrative US market and they, and this piece, don’t represent the rest of the world ( Japan is a major battleground).
In a telephone press conference, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said the Nintendo is working with video game retailer Gamestop on launching a "rain check" program for the company’s Wii video game console, offering shoppers a chance to reserve a Wii for delivery in January. The popular console has been in short supply since its introduction a year ago, and the shortages promise to make setting hands on a Wii during the holiday season quite a challenge.
According to a front page report in the Financial Times, the Pentagon claims to have found the source of a cyber attack in June that stole data and shut down thee-mail system of the Defense secretary. An anonymous source said the culprits were the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). According to the report, the attackers, working from anumber of locations, spend several months probing Pentagon defences before hacking in. The Pentagon was forced to take down its system for over a week. Officials called it the most successful attackon the Defense department. The US dubbed the attack Titan Rain, and some have said it’s just one of an increasing number coming from the countryand aimed at several government departments over the years.
The Chinese have vigorously denied the report.
The battle between competing HD DVD and Blu-ray high-definition disc formats has been quiet for a little while, but the Blu-ray camp has just fired things up again, announcing that as of July 1, consumers who buy a qualifying Blu-ray disc player will be eligible to receive five Blu-ray movies from a list of 20 popular Blu-ray titles—for free.
Plainly, some folks in the record biz think if they kiss this particular frog, it might just turn into Prince Charming. Not-yet-launched online music service SpiralFrog announced today that one of the world’s largest music distributors, EMI Music Publishing, will make its music catalog available for free, legal download via SpiralFrog’s forthcoming ad-supported music service. The news follows last week’s announcement that SpiralFrog had landed the catalog of another major label, Vivendi Universal.
Weather-related reception problems were ranked as the top reason satellite users would consider switching from satellite to cable TV, according to a new survey by Lyra Research’s DTV View group.Commonly called rain fade, rain or snow may interrupt satellite-TV reception. Viewing TV without rain fade is cited as the biggest inducement for subscribers to make the switch to cable-TV service(see figure). These findings are featured in the new report, Relishing the Dish: A Satellite-TV User Survey.
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