"Sony's statement suggests that it was actually storing sensitive information in plain text format, which defies belief. The only other explanation is that hackers only got access to the hashes and may have compromised a small minority of passwords by running this data through something like a dictionary look-up. However, from the tone of Sony's apology this does not appear to be the case." Good god; they're certainly transmitted as plaintext to PSN - according to the IRC log referenced in this article - so the incompetence required to store them as plaintext is already evident. Appalling.

Excellent summary of what happened on the Yaroze - and a quest to track down all the released Yaroze titles.

"Sony acts like a character in a Charlotte Brontë novel--they seem to think they have an entire lifetime to seize the moment."

"We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?" It's good to see that Sony can still afford their weekly supply of crazy pills. Locking up potential inside a monkeypuzzle is a _good_ thing? "Official" leadership? What the hell, Kaz?

Oh wow; it's like a developer network for LittleBigPlanet. Smashing.

"Basically WipEout HD is the first game I've come across that seems to be operating with a dynamic framebuffer. Resolution can alter on a frame-by-frame basis. Rather than introduce dropped frames, slow down or other unsavoury effects, the number of pixels being rendered drops and the PS3's horizontal hardware scaler is invoked to make up the difference." Interesting - and technically fascinating - post on Wipeout HD's dynamic framebuffer, used to keep the framerate at a rock-solid 60fps at the expense of horizontal resolution

"Over the weekend, students from NYC's Parsons School worked for twenty four hours continuously with LittleBigPlanet. Their challenge? To create a level from scratch using early copies of the PS3-exclusive.. one level stood out as the single best level -- one created by Team Sportsmanship. We've lovingly dubbed the level "Shadow of the LittleBigColossus." Watch the video and see why." Amazing. Intensive, over-difficult, but still impressive.

"At GDC 2006 Sony’s Lead Programmer – Tim Moss had talk titled “God of War: How the Left and Right Brain Learned to Love One Another”. I read it, remembered mainly that it was interesting they had used Maya as main tool and kinda forgot about it. Only recently I’ve found out that recording from this session has been made available (for free) as well. You can download it here. Combined together they’re really interesting and I recommend everyone to spend few minutes and listen to it while reading slides." Some interesting stuff - God of War pre-scripts a lot of things that other people might want to do in real time, and as such, makes some stuff simpler, and makes controlling the players' experience easier.

"Nintendo makes money with the hardware alone, which may be a superior business model." What, making profit on units rather than selling them at colossal loss is a *superior* business model? Who would have thought it!

"[Sony]... lost USD 2.16 billion on PS3 in 2007, and a further USD 1.16 billion this year... the company has warned investors that ... 'the large-scale investment...may not be fully recovered'" This isn't sustainable, guys.

|The news last week that Sony has dropped the game for European release, forcing gamers to import the multiregional US version, is sad. This is exactly the kind of title the system needs to be promoting..." You're telling me. What are Sony smoking?

"Nintendo hasn’t truly gone backwards technologically. It has simply innovated in a different way." Good Forbes piece pulling together the usual threads on what Sony's really up against.