Hi, I�m Molly Wood and welcome to the Buzz Report � the show about the tech news
that everyone is talking about.
This week, Sony and Apple come clean, but we all still
feel really dirty, YouTube runs into the movie rights wall, and we�re not talking to the
aliens anymore.
Let�s get right to the news, shall we?
Early this week, after a six day outage of the
PlayStation Network, Sony revealed that outage was actually a massive hacker attack,
and the culprit had stolen tons of personal data on the roughly 77 million people who use
the service.
So.
That was a bad day.
The company said the hacker stole names, complete addresses, e-mail addresses, birth
dates, your PSN password and login, and your online ID.
And MIGHT have also gotten
your entire profile information including your purchase history, your password security
answers, and even your credit card information.
Security analysts say the breach is one of the top five in history, identity theft is a
serious concern, and you should pretty much not trust any email you receive
from ANYONE for like, the rest of your life, especially after that whole Epsilon
thing a week or so back.
Oh, and no.
As usual?
There�s really nothing you can do here.
Except sue as
part of a massive class-action lawsuit, and then six years from now, you�ll get a
check for like, 3 dollars.
Sometimes the cloud kind of sucks.
In other news this week, the Apple location tracking scandal continued to grow, until
Apple finally responded.
The company insisted in a press release that Apple is not tracking your iPhone, your
iPhone is only collecting the locations of nearby WiFi hotspots and cell towers, the fact
that the unencrypted cache of location information is more than a year�s worth of data is
a bug, and so is the part where the phone collections location information even if the
location services are off.
The company promised to release iOS tweaks soon to fix those two bugs, and also to
encrypt any location data in a future major iOS update.
See?
It�s just a bug.
No biggie.
All better.
I feel better, don�t you?
No?
No, me neither.
Also, now, to be clear, Android phones also collect location information and send it back
to Google, and even Microsoft says it�s tracking location information with Windows
Phone phones, but they don�t store the data at all.
Wait, they don�t?
Microsoft?
All
rightie, Windows Phone 7 phones for all!
Facebook launched its daily Deals service in five cities this week.
It�s kind of like
Groupon or Living Social, but with a built-in user base of 500 million people.
So, that
ought to be moderately successful.
YouTube is set to launch a new on-demand movie rental service, and has Warner
Brothers, Universal, and Sony on board.
But Fox and Paramount won�t sign on, which is
apparently holding up the launch.
The two holdouts said they don�t want their movies on
YouTube because there�s still pirated material on YouTube, and you can still find pirate
sites on Google.
Yeah.
I think that continuing to prevent people from having legal
alternatives sounds like the smart way to handle that.
Friendster announced it will delete all its users profile data on May 31, so you should go
download whatever you�ve got in there before then.
Haha.
Most people initially assumed
that Friendster is killing the site off for good, but instead it�s pulling a MySpace -- going
more entertainment and using Facebook Connect.
So, yeah.
Killing the site off for good.
And finally, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is over.
At least for now.
The SETI
institute is powering down its array of 42 alien-hunting satellites because they just don�t
have the money to keep them up and running.
SETI researchers say it�s the worst
possible time, now that we�ve discovered more than a thousand new planets, some of
them potentially habitable.
Or, if you ask Stephen Hawking, he�ll tell you it�s the BEST
possible time, because have you seen Battle Los Angeles?
We do not want them to
know we�re here.
SHHHHHH.
And that�s the Buzz Report for this week, everyone.
I�m Molly Wood, and thank you for
watching.
