Sony

What began with the hacking of Sony Corp.’s Playstation Network back in April has now snowballed into a full-on hackers open season, as a whole raft of websites have fallen to the group calling themselves LulzSec. The collective have now turned their hive-mind on the government, with high-profile hacks of both the Senate and CIA sites in less than 24 hours.

Back when Sony announced their Playstation Network and Qriocity services had been hacked, unleashed 77 million users’ personal details in the process, everybody knew it was bad. However, nobody realised that more than six weeks later Sony’s evidently laughable security would still be falling victim to marauding groups of hackers.

Here at RCR Wireless we often find ourselves listening in on some especially interesting rumors and saucy speculation. While we can’t absolutely vouch for their accuracy, some are still interesting enough to explore in terms of possibility, and the following is one that meets that mark.

As far as tarnished reputations go, Sony is currently in rare air. The initial hacking furore of mid-April, which resulting in the company’s PSN gaming network and Qriocity media service being shut down for three weeks, is far from over.

Over the weekend Sony’s ailing Playstation Network was finally resuscitated and brought back online, to the delight of its long-suffering users. The network had been offline for over three weeks after Sony took it down and was forced to rebuild it from the ground up in response to a massive security breach, which saw the personal details of over 100 million users lifted by hackers.

The world’s tech press, fickle bunch that they are, have moved on from bashing Sony over the continued outage of the company’s Playstation Network and Qriocity services, and are currently drooling over Google’s latest and greatest at the I/O 2011 conference in San Francisco.

Sony’s beleaguered online services (specifically the Playstation Network, media download and streaming service Qriocity, and PC gaming network Sony Online Entertainment) have entered their third week offline, with Sony yesterday missing their promised restoration date and begging for forgiveness from their increasingly weary and irritated customers.

It would seem that Sony wasn’t content with losing only 77 million users’ details, and has now smashed the 100 million mark with another leak of personal information, this time through Sony Online Entertainment, a game development house specialising in online RPGs such as EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies.

As we mentioned last week, things just keep getting worse for Sony. Hackers gained access to their Playstation Network’s backend on April 19th, and the service (along with on-demand service Qriocity) has been offline since a few days after the attack.

Last week we brought you news that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) had crashed, taking with it popular services like FourSquare and Reddit. Just a few hours later Sony’s Playstation Network (PSN) was taken offline in response to an “external intrusion”.

Following the spectacular failure of Amazon.com Inc.’s Elastic Cloud Compute service last Thursday, another giant Web service, Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Network, has crashed and is showing no signs of coming back up soon. The network, boasting about 70 million users worldwide, has apparently been floored by an “external intrusion” and has been offline since around the same time Amazon.com’s service went down.

Sony CEO Howard Stringer has announced his firm will be releasing a tablet by the end of this summer.

Sony Corp.’s legal team must be a busy bunch at the moment. On the one hand they’re battling LG Electronics Co. Ltd. in a Blu-Ray patent dispute that has seen European Union Playstation imports impounded in Holland, and on the other hand they’re fighting an increasingly vitriolic battle against renowned hacker George “GeoHot” Hotz, who is in hot water for cracking open the security on the companies popular console.

News reaches us this afternoon of a small legal storm brewing in Europe between Japanese electronics giant Sony and even-more-giant Korean rival LG, centred around Sony’s apparent use of patented Blu-Ray playback technology inside the Playstation 3.

HTC Corp. announced today that it will be investing in Saffron Digital, a London-based firm that operates a mobile multimedia delivery platform. The company, which has proprietary technologies to support …