Bits Blog: AT&T Aims $450 Credit at T-Mobile Customers

Sony Refunds Final Fantasy XIV Customers

Customers who purchased Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn on the PlayStation Network from August 27-28 are receiving a full refund from Sony.

Customers who did purchase the game through the PlayStation Network on August 27 or 28 will find a full refund, and the game will reappear in the PSN download list.

The refund comes as a result of unstable servers, a problem plaguing the MMO since its relaunch last week. Director Naoki Yoshida explained on developer Square Enix's forums why the servers have been problematic.

"Considering the outcome of our first launch, our sales estimates were decidedly conservative," he said, "as we believed that there would be a more gradual rise in users over the opening weeks and months.

"Instead, to our pleasant surprise, we experienced tremendous support from a great number of players who were eager to get into the game from day one."

Yoshida said that FF XIV was designed to support 5,000 simultaneous players in any given world at one time. However, high concentrations of players in the same three city states toward the beginning of the game led to crashes, followed by more when all of those players tried logging back in at once.

This follows the news that Sony will be allowing an extra week of free play to anyone who registers before September 9, because of the same server problems.

Yoshida said that, although these problems may fix themselves as players progress in their respective games, the development team is working to fix the current problems.

"As of this post, the servers have been acquired, the essential programs installed, and we are currently in the process of conducting our internal tests," he said. "The fact that we had to implement these restrictions is a direct result of my inaccurate sales and login estimates, and as producer, I must accept complete responsibility for this misstep. Each and every player who has been affected has my deepest apologies."

Source: GameSpot

Mike Mahardy is a freelance writer for various outlets. To hear his thoughts on The New York Giants, Tim Dorsey or white chocolate, follow him on Twitter. 

Bits Blog: LivingSocial Hack Exposes Data for 50 Million Customers

LivingSocial, the daily deals site, told its employees Friday that it had been breached, and said that data for 50 million users might have been compromised.

In a memo to employees, the company, based in Washington, said online criminals had gained access to user names, e-mail addresses and dates of birth for some users and encrypted passwords for 50 million people. The company’s databases that store user and merchant credit card and banking information were not compromised in the attack, it said.

livingsocial.com, via Associated Press The attack on Living Social is just the latest in a string of attacks on consumer Internet companies in recent months.

“We recently experienced a cyberattack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers,” the company told employees. “We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue.”

Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for LivingSocial, confirmed that the attack might have compromised 50 million of its users, and said the company was resetting passwords and would be alerting customers by e-mail. Mr. Weinstein said it would contact customers in all the countries LivingSocial operates with the exception of Thailand, Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines, where its systems were not compromised.

The attack on Living Social is just the latest in a string of attacks on consumer Internet companies in recent months. Twitter, Facebook and Apple all stepped forward in February to say they had been the victims of what they described as a “sophisticated attack.” Evernote, the notetaking app, said last month that it had reset passwords for 50 million users after it was compromised by hackers.

Living Social did say it “hashed” passwords — which involves mashing up users’ passwords with a mathematical algorithm — and “salted” them, meaning it appended random digits to the end of each hashed password to make it more difficult, but not impossible, for hackers to crack. Once cracked, passwords can be valuable on auctionlike black market sites where a single password can fetch $20.

Nokia Loss Widens as Customers Wait for Windows Phone 8

One analyst said the results had shaken his confidence that Nokia would be able to reverse its decline with Lumia, its line of Windows smartphones. The company said it sold 2.9 million Lumia smartphones in the quarter, down from four million in the second quarter, the first quarterly decline since the line was introduced in late 2011.

“This is probably the first time that I have started to doubt the Nokia comeback story,” said Pete Cunningham, an analyst at Canalys, a research firm in Reading, England. “These numbers were poor and worse than I expected.”

Nokia’s overall loss in the third quarter compared with a loss of 68 million euros in the period a year earlier. Revenue fell by 19 percent, to 7.2 billion euros in the three months through September, driven by declining sales of smartphones and its more basic cellphone line, which makes up the bulk of its sales. Company officials and analysts attributed the slowdown in Lumia sales to consumers waiting for handsets that run Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 software, which it plans to start selling this year.

The existing Lumia lineup runs on Windows 7.5 software, and the phones cannot be upgraded to Windows 8.

“It was not a surprise that the Lumia results in the third quarter demonstrated that people were delaying new purchases,” Nokia’s chief executive, Stephen Elop, said in an interview on Thursday.

Over the next year, Nokia plans to expand its lineup of Lumia smartphones to cover the complete range of buyers. The larger lineup, Mr. Elop said, will give retailers, including mobile phone network operators, a solid alternative to Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phones.

“Next year is going to be a very interesting year,” he said. “A number of operators around the world are increasingly frustrated with the two strong ecosystems in their shops today. As they see a full portfolio of products with Lumia from Nokia, this will represent for them a credible third alternative.”

Mr. Elop declined to say how many new Lumia handsets would be introduced, but he said they would cover a wider range of prices, including lower-priced devices.

Mr. Cunningham, the Canalys analyst, said Microsoft’s coming worldwide introduction of Windows Phone 8 had stopped Nokia’s initial momentum with Lumia.

“The Windows Phone 8 announcement was a massive kick in the teeth for Nokia’s high-end products,” Mr. Cunningham said.

Since January, Mr. Elop has announced plans to cut a third of Nokia’s work force, or 21,000 jobs, as part of the company’s transition away from its own operating system, Symbian.

Nokia has amassed more than four billion euros in losses since announcing its Microsoft alliance in February 2011, as demand has dried up for Symbian-based phones. Nearly two years into the transition, Symbian handsets still make up a majority of Nokia’s smartphone business. The company sold 3.4 million Symbian handsets in the third quarter, 54 percent of the 6.3 million smartphones it sold over all.

With Chinese manufacturers churning out low-cost phones for its competitors, Nokia will have to make inroads with the more lucrative smartphone segment to survive.

“The real problem for Nokia continues to be the smartphone segment,” Mr. Cunningham said. “If they lose there, they are going to end up trying to compete with Chinese vendors and have a slow death.”

Nokia’s shares closed up 1 percent in Helsinki after the company, based in Espoo, Finland, confirmed the turnaround in its Nokia Siemens Networks telecommunications equipment venture, which reported a second consecutive quarterly operating profit. The venture with Germany’s Siemens, which made up 48 percent of Nokia’s sales in the third quarter, has amassed 5.3 billion euros in combined operating losses since its creation in 2007.

“The good news at Nokia Siemens has outweighed the bad news in Nokia’s smartphone business,” said Ilkka Rauvola, an analyst at Danske Bank in Helsinki.

American investors were less optimistic, however. Shares of Nokia trading in New York fell 4.8 percent, to $2.80.

Cyberattacks on 6 American Banks Frustrate Customers

Frustrated customers of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and PNC, who could not get access to their accounts or pay bills online, were upset because the banks had not explained clearly what was going on.

“It was probably the least impressive corporate presentation of bad news I’ve ever seen,” said Paul Downs, a small-business owner in Bridgeport, Pa., and a contributor to The Times’s small-business blog, You’re the Boss. “This is extremely disconcerting.”

The banks suffered denial of service attacks, in which hackers barrage a Web site with traffic until it is overwhelmed and shuts down. Such attacks, while a nuisance, are not technically sophisticated and do not affect a company’s computer network — or, in this case, funds or customer bank accounts. But they are enough to upset customers.

A hacker group calling itself Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters — a reference to Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Muslim holy man who fought against European forces and Jewish settlers in the Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s — took credit for the attacks in online posts.

The group said it had attacked the banks in retaliation for an anti-Islam video that mocks the Prophet Muhammad. It also pledged to continue to attack American credit and financial institutions daily, and possibly institutions in France, Israel and Britain, until the video is taken offline. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq were also targeted.

On Friday, PNC became the latest bank to experience delays and fall offline. Customers said they had been unable to get access to PNC’s online banking site, and those that visited the bank’s physical locations were told it was because PNC, and many others, had been hacked.

Fred Solomon, a PNC spokesman, said Friday afternoon that the bank’s Web site was back online, but that it was still working to restore online bill payment. Asked why the bank was not better able to withstand such an attack, he said that while PNC had systems in place to prevent delays and disruption from hacker attacks, in this case “the volume of traffic was unprecedented.”

Representatives for other banks also confirmed that they had experienced slow Internet performance and intermittent downtime because of an unusually high volume of traffic.

Security researchers said the attack methods were too basic to have taken so many American bank sites offline. The hackers appeared to be enlisting volunteers for the attacks with messages on various sites. On one blog, they called on people to visit two Web addresses that would cause their computers to flood banks with hundreds of data requests a second. They asked volunteers to attack banks according to a timetable: Wells Fargo on Tuesday, U.S. Bancorp on Wednesday and PNC on Thursday.

But experts said it seemed implausible that this method would create an attack of this scale. “The number of users you need to break those targets is very high,” said Jaime Blasco, a security researcher at AlienVault who has been investigating the attacks. “They must have had help from other sources.”

Those sources, Mr. Blasco said, would have to be a group with money, like a nation, or botnets — networks of infected computers that do the bidding of criminals. Botnets can be rented through black market schemes that are common in the Internet underground, or lent out by criminals or governments.

Last week, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said in an interview on C-Span that he believed Iran’s government had sponsored the attacks in retaliation for Western economic sanctions. The hacker group rejected that claim. In an online post, it said the attacks had not been sponsored by a country and that its members “strongly reject the American officials’ insidious attempts to deceive public opinion.”

The hackers maintained that they were retaliating for the online video. “Insult to the prophet is not acceptable, especially when it is the last Prophet Muhammad,” they wrote.

It is very difficult to trace such attacks back to a particular country, security experts say, because they can be routed through different Internet addresses to mask their true origin.

But experts said they had seen an increase in such activity from Iran and in the number of so-called hacktivists, hackers who attack for political purposes rather than for profit, based in Iran.

“We absolutely have seen more activity from the Middle East, and in particular Iran has been increasingly active as they build up their cyber capabilities,” said George Kurtz, the president of CrowdStrike, a computer security company, and former chief technology officer at McAfee. “There is also a strong activist movement underfoot, which should be concerning to many large companies. The threat is real, and what we are seeing now is only the tip of the iceberg.”

James A. Lewis, a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that in this case, the attack methods used were “pretty basic” to have been state-sponsored. But he added that even if the attacks were not the work of Iran’s government, the state would be aware of them because Iran monitors its networks extensively.

For Mr. Downs, the small-business owner in Pennsylvania, such half explanations were of little consolation.

“A major bank has a problem and gives no indication of what’s happening, when it started or when it will stop,” he said. “That’s pretty freaky if it’s your own business’s money and you need to do things with it.”

Bits Blog: Rented Computers Captured Customers Having Sex, F.T.C. Says

If you rented a computer, you probably should not have been blogging without your shirt on.

On Tuesday, seven computer rental companies agreed to a settlement with the federal government after it was discovered that they were unlawfully capturing photos of customers by using illicit software that controlled a computer’s webcam.

The Federal Trade Commission said the seven companies involved had worked with DesignerWare, a Pennsylvania-based software maker, to create a program that secretly captured “webcam pictures of children, partially undressed individuals, and intimate activities at home.” This included people who while engaging in sexual activities in their homes were being recorded on their rental computers.

The webcam software, called PC Rental Agent, had been installed on approximately 420,000 computers worldwide, according to the F.T.C., and as of August 2011 it was being used by approximately 1,617 rent-to-own stores in the United States, Canada and Australia.

In a news release issued by the F.T.C., Jon Leibowitz, the agency’s chairman, said the software had also captured consumers’ private e-mails, bank account information and medical records. In some instances the software was able to capture Social Security numbers, medical records and doctor’s names. Most disturbing, the webcam captured pictures of children.

The reality that nearly half a million people were so intensely spied upon without their knowledge highlighted what some say is a need for more oversight by government officials for people who do not own their own computers. Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general, said: “There is no justification for spying on customers. These tactics are offensive invasions of personal privacy.”

The settlement agreed upon by the F.T.C. will ban the rent-to-own companies from using monitoring software of any kind and prohibit the companies from tracking a user’s location without that person’s knowledge or consent. All of the stores involved are also prohibited from using any of the information collected from the computers to collect outstanding debts.  The companies will also be monitored by the F.T.C. for the next 20 years.

The companies involved in the settlement include: Aspen Way Enterprises; the Watershed Development Corporation, which operates under the names Watershed and Aaron’s Sales & Lease Ownership; Showplace Rent-to-Own; J.A.G. Rents, operating under the name ColorTyme; B. Stamper Enterprises, which operated under the name Premier Rental Purchase; and C.A.L.M. Ventures, which also operates under the public name Premier Rental Purchase.