Sony suffers second data breach with theft of 25m more user details
By Charles Arthur and agencies
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The crisis at Sony deepened on Tuesday as it admitted that an extra 25 million customers who played games on its Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) PC games network have had their personal details stolen – and that they were taken before the theft of 77 million peoples' details on the PlayStation Network (PSN).
The electronics giant said the names, addresses, emails, birth dates, phone numbers and other information from PC games customers were stolen from its servers as well as an "outdated database" from 2007 which contained details of around 23,400 people outside the US. That includes 10,700 direct debit records for customers in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, Sony said.
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A Sony spokeswoman in Tokyo admitted that the company was unable to predict where or how or when the next attack would come. "They are hackers. We don't know where they're going to attack next," she said.
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Salty Solution for Energy Generation
By Phil McKenna
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The difference in salinity between freshwater and saltwater holds promise as a large source of renewable energy. Energy is required to desalinate water, and running the process in reverse can generate energy. Now a novel approach based on a conventional battery design that uses nanomaterials could provide a way to harvest that energy economically.
The new device, developed by researchers at Stanford University, consists of an electrode that attracts positive sodium ions and one that attracts negative chlorine ions. When the electrodes are immersed in saltwater, they draw sodium and chlorine ions from the water, and the movement of the ions creates an electrical current. The electrodes are recharged by draining the saltwater, replacing it with freshwater, and applying a relatively low-voltage electrical current, which draws the ions back out of the electrodes. When the freshwater is drained, the electrodes are ready to attract more ions from the next batch of saltwater.
"It is the opposite process of water desalination, where you put in energy and try to generate freshwater and more concentrated saltwater," says Yi Cui, a materials science and engineering professor at Stanford University and the study's lead author. "Here you start with freshwater and concentrated saltwater, and then you generate energy."
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Apps in emerging markets: one size doesn't fit all
By (BlueVia)
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Latin America has seen a significant recent rise in the number of people using the web, driven by investment in infrastructure and broadband technologies. There are an estimated 204,689,836 internet users in Latin America, representing 34.5% of the population and growing.
However, no other region has seen a greater increase in the proliferation of mobile devices than Latin America. According to eMarketer, Latin America has some of the highest adoption rates of mobile devices in the world and overall mobile phone user penetration of 55.4%. A study by Hunt Mobile Ads shows that there has been a 156% growth in mobile traffic in Latin America when comparing the first quarter of 2011 to the same period in 2010.
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As more countries from across the Telefonica group are integrated into BlueVia, it opens up vast opportunities and markets for developers. But they need to bear in mind that usage habits and preferences can vary country to country, so a one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to be as effective as a customised experience that will appeal to local communities and local differences, especially when marketing an app.
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Apple Drops Top iTunes App because It Might be Illegal
By Andrew Tarantola
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The grey-market app Any Music Downloader knocked Angry Birds from its perch atop iTunes' Tuesday. AMD would have allowed you to search for any MP3 on the web, download it to your iPhone drive, and then play it back on the AMD player. You even could have synced your newly-discovered tracks back into iTunes to play in the iPhone iPod Player. |
First Long-Term E-Reader Study Compares Textbooks with Kindle DX
By Tiffany Kaiser
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Researchers found that the Kindle DX is not ready to replace the use of paper or computers in a college environment
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Over a nine-month period beginning in the fall, Thayer and Lee found that students did most of their reading in fixed locations such as their homes (47 percent), school (25 percent), and coffee shops or offices (11 percent). They also found that the Kindle DX was more likely to replace paper-based reading rather than reading that was done on the internet.
By the spring semester in 2010, less than 40 percent of the students had quit using the Kindle DX for reading due to issues like its lack of support for note-taking and problems with looking up references, which was easier to do on the computer. In addition, the Kindle DX had negatively affected a study technique called cognitive mapping, which helps readers use physical cues they have seen on the pages to remember where to find a specific section of text. Also, 75 percent of students used paper to take notes as they read.
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2011 Flat Panel TV Growth to Plummet 50%
By Shane McGlaun
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DisplaySearch is predicting that growth in the TV market will slow to less than 4% year-over-year compared to 2010 when the market grew 18% year-over-year thanks to strong growth outside of America. Flat panel TV sales grew 32% in 2010 on a unit basis, but that growth will drop to 12% in 2011.
“As the household installed base for flat panel TVs increases above 50-60%, the growth rate slows, which is currently the situation in Japan, Western Europe, and North America. Emerging markets, however, are still ripe for sustained growth due to a low level of household flat panel TV penetration,” noted Paul Gagnon, Director of North America TV Research for DisplaySearch.
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The major areas driving growth in the segment are China, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. These regions are averaging 17% growth each year with Asia pacific being the strongest thanks to the India market.
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New York City picks Nissan minivan as next taxi cab
By (BBC)
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Japan's Nissan Motor has won a contract to provide the next generation of New York's famous yellow taxis.
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The van, which beat US carmaker Ford Motor and Turkish manufacturer Karsan Otomotiv for the 10-year contract, will be phased in starting in 2013.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg acknowledged the Nissan NV200's boxy form evokes suburbia, but he said the yellow paint would give it the iconic New York touch.
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"For the first time, we'll have a taxicab that wasn't 'off the rack', but rather custom-tailored to create the best fit for the drivers, owners and passengers of our city," Taxi and Limousine Commissioner David Yassky said.
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