Anonymous group denies Sony data theft

Internet vigilante group Anonymous denied involvement on Thursday in the theft of personal information from over 100 million Sony PlayStation and Online Entertainment network accounts.Sony, in a letter to a US congressional committee released Wednesday, said hackers had planted a file named “Anonymous” on the servers of the Sony Online Entertainment network at around the time members of the group carried out denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Sony servers.

The Japanese electronics company stopped short of directly accusing Anonymous of carrying out the data theft but said it bore some responsibility. In a typical DDoS attack, a large number of computers are commanded to simultaneously visit a website, overwhelming its servers, slowing service or knocking it offline completely.

Anonymous, which carried out similar attacks last year against US companies which withdrew services to WikiLeaks, had vowed retribution against Sony for taking legal action against hackers who cracked PlayStation 3 (PS3) defenses to change console operating software. 

Shadow of the Colossus

Shadow of the Colossus was created and published by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Released for the PS2 in the year 2005, the game is made as a spiritual successor to Ico, also a blockbuster title. Considering the game garnered mostly positive feedback from the community, it’s worth a try sharing the work of art that is Shadow of the Colossus.

The game places the players in the role of Wander, a young man whom together with his trusted steed, Agro, venturesthevast and lonely expanse of a fantasy world in order to revive a dead maiden named Mono. Striking a deal with an entity named Dormin, Wander must now find and eliminate fourteen colossi scattered across the land in exchange for Mono’s revival. The story may look simple, but players would be surprised in the way the game portrays itself.

Taking advantage of the enormous landscape, the game plays in a third person view enabling the player to assess and plan each attack on the colossi. There are no other enemies in game, just sixteen boss battles with big bad colossi. In playing the game, players are subjected to a sequence of steps to accomplish the task at hand. First, Players navigate through walking or riding Agro to search for a colossus, players would often experience Wander tripping and stumbling, and Agro refusing to budge.

Making things simpler

The now almost unheard of word processor, Wordperfect, used to be the most popular word processor in the planet and one reason for this was it used a very clean screen (no menus) and it had a page preview featuring at most two pages at a time. That may seem like such a forgettable feature now but then, it was quite new since people were still using Wordstar and its very messy screen with all the codes shown on it. It’s distracting really to have all sorts of menu items surrounding your photos and that’s why programs like Photoshop have incorporated a viewing mode allowing a user to do away with everything that’s not the photo. This is quite useful and Aperture now has it as well.

We mentioned last week that photographers are actually used to putting their slides (positives instead of negatives) on a light table to look more closely at them. Aperture simulates this experience with the full screen view. Everything is black except the photos when you’re looking at your library. You can rearrange photos and do your usual library stuff when in this mode but things are so much cleaner so you can focus on the photos and not the menus.