Third quarter results for Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division show sales up 60 per cent from $1.21 billion to $1.94 billion.
During the three month period ended March 31, Microsoft sold 2.7 million Xbox 360 units, up from 1.5 million for the same period last year.
The Kinect peripheral sold 2.4 million units, with sales for the entire Xbox 360 platform up 69 per cent to $712 million.
The Entertainment and Devices Division - which also includes Windows Phone and Microsoft Games Studios - recorded operating income of $225 million, up from $150 million last year.
"Consumers are purchasing Office 2010, Xbox and Kinect at tremendous rates, and businesses of all sizes are purchasing Microsoft platforms and applications," commented Peter Klein, chief financial office at Microsoft.
Sales for the entire Microsoft business were $16.43 billion, with profits up 31 per cent for the quarter, to $5.23 billion.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...kinect-success
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The fallout from the PlayStation Network hack has caused a flurry of debate about the reliability of digital distribution.

What’s not yet clear is the extent to which developers will be hurt because of consumer mistrust.


CasualGaming.biz contacted several developers, who rely on digital distribution, to hear their take on the situation.
“We’re rooting for Sony to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. PSN is one of our primary channels for reaching console game fans, and it does feel as though Sony should compensate customers, if not developers, for the outage,” said a PopCap official.
Sony have promised compensation for developers. Some will undoubtedly feel the brunt of the outage more, however.
For instance, Creat Studios have a number of titles available on PlayStation Network, including Cuboid, Mushroom Wars and Digger HD.
“The PSN downtime has certainly reduced our visibility as a company as most of our titles are sold through PSN,” said PR and marketing coordinator Bill Fryer.
“We have been long time partners with Sony and I feel that they understand how an outage like this affects developers like us. We have been in constant contact with Sony through this time and they have been accommodating with the dates of sales and marketing assets so far.
“Most of our titles are being sold through the PSN, so any PSN user base lost will affect our sales. But we are confident that this extended maintenance will provide a secure user interface that will work to restore this loss of confidence.”
Restoring confidence won’t be easy after a mass outage like this, though.
“It just goes to show how fragile the business is at this point in the evolution of digital distribution,” said Mel Kirk, VP of marketing at Zen Studios.
Zen develops and publishes pinball games across PSN and Xbox Live. Kirk said they were due to release Sorcerer’s Lair for Zen Pinball on April 26, but have been delayed as a result of the outage.
“Zen Studios has felt the impact just as hard as any other digital publisher on the platform,” she said.
“The PSN outage really is a bummer for all parties - developers, publishers and gamers alike - and it shows the need for heightened security and preventative measures to keep a system like PSN from being hacked.”
The immediate loss of business is regrettable, though Kirk thinks the situation will be worse for those that published games just before the outage.
“In all honesty, it will probably be a lot tougher on the guys who released games last week, or the week before. You really need the first few weeks’ sales momentum to carry you into the post-launch hype loss, and it might be tough for those guys to get that back unless Sony steps in and provides some support for them. We hope they do! The loss of a week’s worth of sales will be felt by every publisher regardless of how great or small the revenue is.”http://www.casualgaming.biz/news/309...-affected-devs ...

Multi-GPU technology to be available more widely

Nvidia announced that that the firm's multi-GPU SLI technology is coming to AMD motherboards including those based on the 970, 990X and 99FX chipsets.
Nvidia spokesman Andrew Burnes said that while AMD's status among PC gamers "fell by the wayside" in recent years, the number of affordable high performance motherboards meant it was a "great time" to introduce SLI support.
"After all, we want to make sure that gamers can benefit from the new competitive CPU landscape and to ensure that their existing SLI setups can be utilised in all systems," Burnes wrote on the GeForce web site.
SLI support will appear in motherboards from the likes of Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock and MSI with one of the first to arrive the Asus Republic Of Gamers Crosshair V Formula AMD gaming motherboard.
Burnes couldn't resist taking some pot shots at arch graphics rival AMD, calling Nvidia's SLI the "highest performance, most stable" multi GPU technology and drawing attention to Valve's Steam hardware survey figures that show 93 per cent of multi-GPU systems were Nvidia based.http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/36241...D-motherboards

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News via http://streetskaterfu.blogspot.com/2...formation.html

The PSN is down, all accounts got dumped by an anonymous hacker and the community is cryin' for answers. 77 million accounts with password and sometimes CC info are worth a lot in several hack chans. This is a very huge case.

Now SONY engaged an external security company to discover the holes in SONY's system and find answers. As I was wondering if there may be some information about the actual case we can find out publically, I researched a bit myself.

One interesting point I found is a not secured access log of a PSN environment.
You will quickly notice the IP 214.1.211.251, which sends requests like a vulnerability scanner.
The IP points to the DoD Network Information Center, based in Ohio USA.

The first log entry of this IP is [03/Mar/2011:07:10:38 -0800]. As the DoD is knows as beeing easy to hack, the anonymous hacker could have used this as proxy.

Maybe SONY might want to take a look at this IP, I hope soon we get some news and details about the case...

- SKFU ...

News via http://wololo.net/wagic/2011/04/28/p...n-the-hackers/

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past days, you probably know that Sony announced they have been hacked, and our private information (potentially including credit card numbers) has been stolen from the PSN. This potentially impacts 77’000’000 customers.
I’ve received many emails/comments telling me “Wololo, you’re always in favor of CFW, and always on the side of the hackers, so what do you say now?”
Well, clearly I’m not happy that some people did that, I’m not happy that my information got stolen by these people. I want to point out that I never claimed that hacking into a corporation’s network was a good thing. Just like other people who are in favor of hacking and jailbreaking, I think customers should be able to enjoy their hardware the way they want, as long as they do not interfere with other people’s freedom. This makes things very clear: I’m not in favor of piracy, cheating online, identity theft, or anything like that.
This attack is unrelated to jailbreak

I’ve seen various comments on the net that this attack was performed “thanks” to some Custom firmware installed on some PS3s. This triggered new “anti jailbreak” comments from various people, including this guy who, despite making the efforts to do some research on the subject (and that’s good, because most people don’t do that), clearly should not be talking about stuff he doesn’t understand. I’m a computer engineer, I don’t talk about fashion. He’s a gamer and shouldn’t talk about security.
So, why do I claim that this has nothing to do with jailbreaks? Well, assuming the hack was performed “thanks” to a hacked PS3, it means Sony’s servers “trust” a PS3 accessing their system to not be hacked or modified. This is crazy, and this is security 101: the server should NEVER trust the client, end of story, NO exception. I trust Sony’s engineers to know this, so I believe this is not what happened. If I’m wrong, and if indeed there was some backdoor in the Sony system that allowed to trust a PS3 more than say, MediaGo running on a PC, then whoever designed such a backdoor in place is highly responsible for what happened. And Sony is guilty of believing that security through obscurity works. As I read somewhere, the good thing about open source software is that you can’t start to believe that your “opponent” won’t be able to read your code. So you design your security accordingly.
Now, my opinion is that a Jailbroken PS3 was not involved with this. Why would it be needed? You can connect to the PSN on a PC with MediaGo. It sounds fairly reasonable to me that somebody could investigate the code from that client and find some flaws in there, who knows? So for all we know, PS3 hardware wasn’t even involved in this attacks, making even a stronger point that this has nothing to do with jailbreaking a PS3. And if a PS3 was actually involved and you think it means jailbreak is related to this issue, then read the paragraph above.
As customers, Sony is the one responsible for our security, we can’t trust 6 billion people to play nice

Whatever you do, there will be people in the world trying to screw you, people not respecting the law. When these people attack you, you are free to hate them. As I said, I’m not happy some people stole my information, I don’t like these guys, but I know the world is made of people stealing your stuff, and it will always be the case.
Would you give your credit card number to me, or would you enter it on a form in my website? No. Because I’m a nobody, and there is no history of me not being a bad guy. I also have no way to be contacted easily in person. But you give your credit card information to Sony. Because it is a respected company, and you trust them to handle that kind of stuff correctly. By putting your trust in them, you implicitly ask them to be responsible, and by accepting your money and your credit card number, they accept to be responsible for your information’s security, even if their stupid PSN License says they can’t be responsible for a security breach.
Sony store the account information for 77’000’000 people. With such a big number of customers, I expect them to dedicate time and energy into securing their system. No system is perfect, but I expect them to apply the minimum security rules to their systems. First, the information retrieved by the hackers shouldn’t be usable in any way, because the information they stole should be encrypted, or hashed. Passwords should be hashed. It allows login systems to recognize that your password is correct without really knowing it. How comes Sony announced that our passwords were stolen then? How can they even be “unsure” if our credit card information was stolen? Our credit card information shouldn’t even be stored on their system, at worst it should be an encrypted version, and the rest should ...

As the PlayStation Network / Qriocity outage stretches into its second week, over on the PlayStation Blog rep Patrick Seybold has just posted an updated Q&A based on the inquiries of concerned users. Beyond the security of our personal information, the most important question is when service might be restored and he reiterates Sony expects to have "some services" up and running within a week from yesterday. When it comes to the most important personal information like credit card numbers, there are assurances that the credit card database was encrypted and there is no evidence anything was taken, but that's a possibility that still cannot be ruled out completely. To keep things secure, Gamasutrareports game developers are getting new SDKs with updated security features as well. When the service comes back up, expect a mandatory system update that requires a new password before getting back to your Mortal Kombat or Portal 2-related plans.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/27/s...s-up-and-runn/
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You're probably familiar with Microsoft's long running assault on Android but, as noticed by Groklaw, Barnes and Noble has fired backsaying, 'Microsoft has asserted patents that extend only to arbitrary, outmoded, or non-essential design features, but uses these patents to demand that every manufacturer of an Android-based mobile device take a license from Microsoft and pay exorbitant licensing fees or face protracted and expensive patent infringement litigation.' Barnes and Noble goes on to assert that Microsoft violates 'antitrust laws, threatens competition for mobile device operating systems and is further evidence of Microsoft's efforts to dominate and control Android and other open source operating systems.' The PDF of the filing from two days ago is rife with accusations including, 'Microsoft intends to utilize its patents to control the activities of and extract fees from the designers, developers, and manufacturers of devices, including tablets, eReaders, and other mobile devices, that employ the Android Operating System.' and 'Microsoft has falsely and without justification asserted that its patents somehow provide it with the right to prohibit device manufacturers from employing new versions of the Android Operating System, or third party software.' Barnes and Noble does not mince words when explaining Microsoft's FUD campaign to both the public and developers in its attempts to suppress Android. It's good to see PJ still digging through massive court briefs to bring us the details on IP court battles."http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/04/...s-Android-Suit ...