The subject of piracy has gotten a huge amount of attention lately thanks to SOPA, PIPA and the shutdown of MegaUpload. Rovio Chief Executive Mikael Hed took the time at Midem this week to speak on piracy as it relates to his company’s Angry Birds videogames and the supplemental products they help produce. Essentially, Rovio doesn’t more »

Heads up people, If you’re a PS3 or PSP owner with a PlayStation Network account, a suspicious email could be in your email account right now. The title is “Wallet Balance Update” and it looks quite different from the typical email from Sony. Don’t worry though, as it actually is an email from Sony, not hackers, and was just sent out by mistake.

Not every PSN member seemed to receive this Wallet Balance Update email, but if you did it’s quite distinctive…

Ahh Infinity Blade. It’s one heck of a game isn’t it? Not only does it look great (especially on retina displays), it also employs simple controls that are perfect for touch-based devices. Today, Infinity Blade 2 released in the Apple App Store for $6.99. Chair Entertainment has added a good number of new features such as dynamically changing environments, dual wielding and the ability to add power-up gems to your weapons and armor. iOS owners have a real treat on their hands, but what about Android owners? Where’s their Infinity Blade?

The street date for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has been broken in a sense. Instead of stores selling the game to customers early, some individual managed to swipe one disc from a Fresno, California warehouse. The thief only managed to obtain Disc 2 from the PC version of MW3.

Resistance 3 led the pack by being the first Sony-published game to feature PSN Pass. PSN Pass is the key to unlocking multiplayer content in applicable games. Over the weekend, we told you how Uncharted 3 will be the next game to use PSN Pass. We should just get used to it now because Sony isn’t going to stop using PSN Pass anytime soon. In fact, the publisher is going to implement it into more games going forward.

Ubisoft has a habit of implementing strict DRM regulations in its PC games. Some games have to be constantly connected to the internet in order to function. Ubisoft has done this with Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction in the past, and it will go down this path again with Driver: San Francisco. Ubisoft does this to cut down on piracy. Love it or hate it, Ubisoft says it’s working.

After long ride, the Sony vs. George Hotz case is over. The lawsuit was settled on March 31, 2011 with Hotz agreeing to a permanent injunction. All things considered, Hotz got off easy. Sony went to great lengths to wipe Hotz’s PS3 jailbreak instructions from the internet. Sony has the IP addresses of anyone (myself included) that visited Hotz’s website. Sony proved that it isn’t messing around when it comes to the PS3′s security. Now that this is behind us, I can lay into this case in a way that only a opinionated blogger can.

If you’ve tried to visit the official Sony or PlayStation websites, or perhaps even log onto the PlayStation Network, you may have encountered some troubles. That’s because Anonymous, the hacking group responsible for launching assaults on companies like Amazon and HBGary, has declared war on Sony. It’s the latest episode in the ongoing saga of Sony versus piracy that started when people, namely George “Geohot” Hotz, started hacking the PS3…

Why do people pirate various forms of media? Some would say these people just don’t care about how they’re hurting the industries they’re stealing from. Others may say the offending party is just too cheap to pay full price for the products they’re after. While both answers are true on some level, another theory has emerged. The Social Science Research Council conducted a study over three years trying to understand what drives piracy in countries such as India, Russia, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Bolivia. They found that piracy in these countries are more so the result of high prices driven by high income nations, rather than a lack of collective conscience from the pirates.

Here we go again. Sony’s latest firmware, 3.60 added online storage and a new layer of hacking protection. This firmware was believed to have solved the rampant hacking issues the PS3 has been having ever since its root key was exposed by George Hotz. PS3 super-hacker KaKaRoToKS examined the firmware briefly and believed any hacking attempts would have to start from scratch. Now a couple videos have appeared on YouTube of a user running custom code on a PS3.