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By 27 May 2011 | Categories: news

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Hacking headaches continues for Sony
 
Sony is only now recovering from a spate of hacking attacks that crippled its PlayStation Network (PSN), and also affected its Qriocitiy services as well as Sony Online Entertainment. However, the hackers aren’t ceasing their attacks on the Japanese manufacturer. 
 
According to the BBC, the company has reported fresh hacking attacks on a number of its websites. Personal data (e-mails, passwords and phone numbers) of 2000 clients were stolen from a Sony Ericsson website in Canada, whilst details of another 8500 users were leaked on a Sony Music Entertainment website in Greece. 
 
Sony said that no credit card details were lost and that both of these websites were externally hosted by third parties and weren’t connected to its main network.
 
Yahoo! upgrades its email service
 
Yahoo! has kicked off a global overhaul to its free email service, in order to make the service faster and better integrated with popular social networking services the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Users will be able to link their Facebook and Twitter accounts in order to view feeds from these directly on their Yahoo! Mail pages, as well as be able to post updates from the Yahoo! Mail site. This updated version of Yahoo! Mail will be available as an upgrade in the coming weeks to all 284 million users.
 
 
Watching 3D movies on YouTube
 
Nvidia has announced that PC (desktop and notebook) users whose systems boast a 3D display and 3D glasses, as well as an Nvidia graphics processing unit (GPU) compatible with its 3D Vision software, are now able to watch 3D videos on YouTube for the first time. 
 
They will also only be able to view the stereoscopic 3D HTML5 videos via the latest version (4) of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. “We’re excited to introduce HTML5 and WebM support to the thousands of 3D videos available on YouTube,” said Jonathan Huang, 3D product manager at YouTube. 
 
Running your Android apps in Windows 
 
Ever wanted to use the apps on your Android-running smartphone on your PC? Well, a start-up company by the name of BlueStacks is aiming to make this possible. According to CNet, BlueStacks announced this week that it has received first-round investor funding of $7.6 million for its virtualization technology, which makes it possible for Google’s Android mobile operating system (OS) to run atop of Microsoft’s Windows PC OS.
 
Rosen Sharma, chief executive and co-founder of BlueStacks, stated that the idea for this software came about when the six year old daughter of another company’s co-founder was using his Android-powered smartphone. She was playing around with the apps on it and afterward, she was busy on a notebook and wanted to use the same apps that she was using on his smartphone.
 
 
 
Stronger and fewer friend connections is the Path forward 
 
In a book entitled, How many friends does one person need?, Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, concludes that 150 is the highest number of friends that the human mind is capable of handling. 
 
Dave Morin seems to agree with Dunbar, as the former Facebook employee has created an app-based social network service dubbed Path. Path is a more personal social network limiting the number of friend connections user can make to 50 or less. The goal being to promote more intimate as well as memorable communication, since users are much more likely to link up with their significant other, family and close friends only. It is available for download (4.8 MB) for free from the  Apple App Store, with BlackBerry and Android app version on the way. A video of the service is posted below.
 

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