onsdag den 27. april 2011

playstation network hacked !

Sony has finally revealed the extent of the recent "external intrusion" to the PlayStation Network and it is bound to upset countless users. Millions of users's names, addresses, billing information, credit card details and more were all exposed to hackers in this wide scale hack. As everyone knows by now, Sony responded to the hacks by shutting down the PSN completely. Unfortunately, its come out that the hacks took place a whole three days before the Network was shut down. In addition to shutting down the PSN, Sony has also hired an external security firm to investigate the incident.




So what kind of condolences are the electronics giant offering it's customers? None at this time, but they are urging customers to "remain vigilant, to review your account statements and to monitor your credit reports." The advice is in preparation for the likely identity thefts that will stem from the PSN hacks.

US PS Blog:

Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve the current outage of PlayStation Network & Qriocity services. We are currently working to send a similar message to the one below via email to all of our registered account holders regarding a compromise of personal information as a result of an illegal intrusion on our systems. These malicious actions have also had an impact on your ability to enjoy the services provided by PlayStation Network and Qriocity including online gaming and online access to music, movies, sports and TV shows. We have a clear path to have PlayStation Network and Qriocity systems back online, and expect to restore some services within a week.


We’re working day and night to ensure it is done as quickly as possible. We appreciate your patience and feedback.


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:
  1. Temporarily turned off PlayStation Network and Qriocity services;
  2. Engaged an outside, recognized security firm to conduct a full and complete investigation into what happened; and
  3. 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.
We greatly appreciate your patience, understanding and goodwill as we do whatever it takes to resolve these issues as quickly and efficiently as practicable.


Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained.

For your security, we encourage you to be especially aware of email, telephone, and postal mail scams that ask for personal or sensitive information. Sony will not contact you in any way, including by email, asking for your credit card number, social security number or other personally identifiable information. If you are asked for this information, you can be confident Sony is not the entity asking. When the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services are fully restored, we strongly recommend that you log on and change your password. Additionally, if you use your PlayStation Network or Qriocity user name or password for other unrelated services or accounts, we strongly recommend that you change them, as well.


To protect against possible identity theft or other financial loss, we encourage you to remain vigilant, to review your account statements and to monitor your credit reports. We are providing the following information for those who wish to consider it:


U.S. residents are entitled under U.S. law to one free credit report annually from each of the three major credit bureaus. To order your free credit report, visit www.annualcreditreport.com or call toll-free (877) 322-8228.


We have also provided names and contact information for the three major U.S. credit bureaus below. At no charge, U.S. residents can have these credit bureaus place a “fraud alert” on your file that alerts creditors to take additional steps to verify your identity prior to granting credit in your name. This service can make it more difficult for someone to get credit in your name. Note, however, that because it tells creditors to follow certain procedures to protect you, it also may delay your ability to obtain credit while the agency verifies your identity. As soon as one credit bureau confirms your fraud alert, the others are notified to place fraud alerts on your file. Should you wish to place a fraud alert, or should you have any questions regarding your credit report, please contact any one of the agencies listed below.


Experian: 888-397-3742; www.experian.com; P.O. Box 9532, Allen, TX 75013

Equifax: 800-525-6285; www.equifax.com; P.O. Box 740241, Atlanta, GA 30374-0241

TransUnion: 800-680-7289; www.transunion.com; Fraud Victim Assistance Division, P.O. Box 6790, Fullerton, CA 92834-6790
You may wish to visit the web site of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission at www.consumer.gov/idtheft or reach the FTC at 1-877-382-4357 or 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20580 for further information about how to protect yourself from identity theft. Your state Attorney General may also have advice on preventing identity theft, and you should report instances of known or suspected identity theft to law enforcement, your State Attorney General, and the FTC. For North Carolina residents, the Attorney General can be contacted at 9001 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699-9001; telephone (877) 566-7226; or www.ncdoj.gov. For Maryland residents, the Attorney General can be contacted at 200 St. Paul Place, 16th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21202; telephone: (888) 743-0023; or www.oag.state.md.us.


We thank you for your patience as we complete our investigation of this incident, and we regret any inconvenience. Our teams are working around the clock on this, and services will be restored as soon as possible. Sony takes information protection very seriously and will continue to work to ensure that additional measures are taken to protect personally identifiable information. Providing quality and secure entertainment services to our customers is our utmost priority. Please contact us at 1-800-345-7669 should you have any additional questions.


Sincerely,
Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony Network Entertainment



EU PS Blog

Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve the current outage of PlayStation Network & Qriocity services. We don’t have an exact date to share at this moment as to when we will have the services turned on, but are working day and night to ensure it is as quickly as possible. We are currently working to send the following message via email to all of our registered account holders regarding a compromise of personal information as a result of this malicious attack on our servers, so please look for this information via email as well. Please note that we are as upset as you are regarding this attack and are going to proceed aggressively to track down those that are responsible.


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:


1) Temporarily turned off PlayStation Network and Qriocity services;
2) Engaged an outside, recognized security firm to conduct a full and complete investigation into what happened; and
3) 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.
We greatly appreciate your patience, understanding and goodwill as we do whatever it takes to resolve these issues as quickly and efficiently as practicable.


Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state/province, zip or postal code), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity passwords and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence that credit card data was taken at this time, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, to be on the safe side we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may also have been obtained.

For your security, we encourage you to be especially aware of email, telephone, and postal mail scams that ask for personal or sensitive information. Sony will not contact you in any way, including by email, asking for your credit card number, social security, tax identification or similar number or other personally identifiable information. If you are asked for this information, you can be confident Sony is not the entity asking. When the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services are fully restored, we strongly recommend that you log on and change your password. Additionally, if you use your PlayStation Network or Qriocity user name or password for other unrelated services or accounts, we strongly recommend that you change them, as well.


To protect against possible identity theft or other financial loss, we encourage you to remain vigilant to review your account statements and to monitor your credit or similar types of reports.


We thank you for your patience as we complete our investigation of this incident, and we regret any inconvenience. Our teams are working around the clock on this, and services will be restored as soon as possible. Sony takes information protection very seriously and will continue to work to ensure that additional measures are taken to protect personally identifiable information. Providing quality and secure entertainment services to our customers is our utmost priority. Please check www.eu.playstation.com/psnoutage should you have any additional questions.
Sincerely,


Sony Network Entertainment and Sony Computer Entertainment Teams
Sony Network Entertainment Europe Limited (formerly known as PlayStation Network Europe Limited) is a subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited the data controller for PlayStation Network/Qriocity personal data.


Follow us on Twitter @PlayStationEU for live updates and read the FAQ at eu.playstation.com/psnoutage for further information.
Thank you for your patience.





lørdag den 9. april 2011

Are you looking to customize your PS3 a bit to make it really stand out? Zembor0 has released a set of tutorials and apps to assist you in doing just that. He has released an easy to use Dynamic Theme Editor along with a tutorial. In addition he has described in detail how to create custom boot up logos in full color. Guide Dynamic Theme: Run Dynamic theme editor and select Price of Persia Select “open” under step 2. This will show you the folder of images that you can edit. In this guide I will edit “CircularSmoke_01.gtf_1” and “SOT_Theme_BackGround.gtf_1” and “TrilogyLogo.gtf_1”. Simple open photoshop, open each image in turn and copy and paste the provided images bellow into each dds file. You need to past it on the RGB layer and the alpha layer. TrilogyLogo.gtf_1 SOT_Theme_BackGround.gtf_1 CircularSmoke_01.gtf_1 If you want to change the icons in the xmb click the open button next to step 3. You can then edit the png files. Don’t change the resolution for format of the image. Now click the theme details button and change them as you like. Click the browser button and select where you want to save your theme. The Prince of Persia theme that we are editing has lots of other pictures that we have not edited, so we don’t want to show them. This is where we ick which effects we want to remove. Tick them as shown: Finally press start, you should see a black bock pop up at the bottom of that it will say “press enter”. So press enter when prompted. Now you should have your theme in you save destination. DOWNLOAD 32 Bit DOWNLOAD 64 Bit Source: PSX Scene Source: PS3Hax Create Colour Boot Logo’s: How to create a custom colour boot logo You will need: 1. Dynamic theme editor 2. Photoshop 3. Photoshop dds plugin NVIDIA Texture Tools for Adobe Photoshop | NVIDIA Developer Zone In this guide I will show you how to make this: Color Boot Logo Guide: First run Dynamic theme editor and select Angel Senki. Select “open” next to step 2. This will show you the dds files belonging to this theme. In this guide you only need to edit “AS_chara01.gtf_1.dds”. Open “AS_chara01.gtf_1.dds” in photoshop and paste the RGB version bellow , in photoshop. You now need to edit the alpha version and paste the alpha version bellow into photoshop. RGB Alpha Since we are not making a theme you do not need to edit the theme icons or set any theme details. So next click “browser” and select somewhere to save the theme file. For the design we are making you need to tick all the tick boxes apart from “AS_chara01.edge” Next click “start”, wait for a black box appears and what for it to say “Press enter”, then press enter. There should now be a theme file in the destination that you selected, we don’t need that, now click on the “open” button next to step 3. This will show you the theme files, scroll down in till you find the file called Anim_1.jpg Copy this file to a directory you will remember and rename it to “coldboot.raf”, you now have your coldboot.raf file to install. Credits: Zembor0 and eustolio Read more: PSGroove.com - Dynamic Theme Editor Released + Tutorial + Color Boot Animation Tutorial http://psgroove.com/content.php?972-Dynamic-Theme-Editor-Released-Tutorial-Color-Boot-Animation-Tutorial#ixzz1J4xyTieu

Are you looking to customize your PS3 a bit to make it really stand out? Zembor0 has released a set of tutorials and apps to assist you in doing just that. He has released an easy to use Dynamic Theme Editor along with a tutorial. In addition he has described in detail how to create custom boot up logos in full color.



Guide Dynamic Theme:

Run Dynamic theme editor and select Price of Persia



Select “open” under step 2. This will show you the folder of images that you can edit. In this guide I will edit “CircularSmoke_01.gtf_1” and “SOT_Theme_BackGround.gtf_1” and “TrilogyLogo.gtf_1”. Simple open photoshop, open each image in turn and copy and paste the provided images bellow into each dds file. You need to past it on the RGB layer and the alpha layer.

TrilogyLogo.gtf_1
SOT_Theme_BackGround.gtf_1
CircularSmoke_01.gtf_1



If you want to change the icons in the xmb click the open button next to step 3. You can then edit the png files. Don’t change the resolution for format of the image.



Now click the theme details button and change them as you like.



Click the browser button and select where you want to save your theme.
The Prince of Persia theme that we are editing has lots of other pictures that we have not edited, so we don’t want to show them. This is where we ick which effects we want to remove. Tick them as shown:



Finally press start, you should see a black bock pop up at the bottom of that it will say “press enter”. So press enter when prompted. Now you should have your theme in you save destination.

DOWNLOAD 32 Bit
DOWNLOAD 64 Bit

Source: PSX Scene
Source: PS3Hax



Create Colour Boot Logo’s:
How to create a custom colour boot logo
You will need:
1. Dynamic theme editor
2. Photoshop
3. Photoshop dds plugin NVIDIA Texture Tools for Adobe Photoshop | NVIDIA Developer Zone
In this guide I will show you how to make this:





Color Boot Logo Guide:
First run Dynamic theme editor and select Angel Senki.






Select “open” next to step 2. This will show you the dds files belonging to this theme. In this guide you only need to edit “AS_chara01.gtf_1.dds”. Open “AS_chara01.gtf_1.dds” in photoshop and paste the RGB version bellow , in photoshop. You now need to edit the alpha version and paste the alpha version bellow into photoshop.

RGB
Alpha






Since we are not making a theme you do not need to edit the theme icons or set any theme details. So next click “browser” and select somewhere to save the theme file.
For the design we are making you need to tick all the tick boxes apart from “AS_chara01.edge”






Next click “start”, wait for a black box appears and what for it to say “Press enter”, then press enter.






There should now be a theme file in the destination that you selected, we don’t need that, now click on the “open” button next to step 3. This will show you the theme files, scroll down in till you find the file called Anim_1.jpg






Copy this file to a directory you will remember and rename it to “coldboot.raf”, you now have your coldboot.raf file to install.
Credits:
Zembor0 and eustolio