Sony cuts price of PlayStation 3, intros thinner, lighter model

Sony on Tuesday announced a slimmed down, cheaper version of its PlayStation 3 (PS3) games console, while the price of the existing PS3 has been cut to try and stimulate sales.

The PlayStation 3 launched in 2006 to great fanfare, but has been less than the stellar success that Sony hoped for, hemmed in by the popularity of Microsoft's HD-gaming rival the Xbox 360, and the lower-spec Nintendo Wii. This week's move attempts to address that situation.

The cut-down PlayStation 3 will launch worldwide on September 1 and will cost 249 in the UK. It's expected that the price of the standard-sized models will drop at the same time. Sony yesterday announced that the 80GB model will drop to $299. Sony's heftier 160GB model will also see a drop in price, now costing $399. We don't have UK pricing at this point, but a cut will almost certainly follow.

Sony says the slim PS3 is roughly a third smaller and 36 percent lighter than the standard model. It has a 120GB hard disk, is a Blu-ray player and works as a media centre.

Speaking at the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Sony Computer Entertainment president Kazuo Hirai said: "In 2004 we launched a slim version of PlayStation 2, a defining moment for that console, helping us to expand the user base of PlayStation further. Today is that day for PlayStation 3."

After the slimmed-down PS2 launch and price cut, Sony added that more than 80 percent of PS2 sales. Around 23.7 million PlayStation 3s have been sold since launch.

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Apple Premium Reseller Store opens in Wimbledon Saturday

Apple Premium Reseller, Stormfront will open its latest, flagship store on Saturday 22 August from 10 am.

The new Apple Premium Reseller store in the heart of Wimbledon in the Centre Court shopping Centre in the latest in a long line of recent shop openings for the company.

The new Wimbledon store boasts a huge range of Mac, iPod and Apple accessories on display and ready for you to test drive.

Apple experts, including Stormfront’s In Store Technical Bar, will be on hand to guide customers and offer friendly jargon-free advice.

On what's billed as 'Super Apple Saturday,' the first 50 people to come into the Wimbledon store and buy an item over 30 will get a Golden Ticket, guaranteeing them a prize ranging from accessories to iPods and a Apple TV.

Stormfront says an iPod will be given away every hour the store is open on Saturday.

The first ten customers who buy a Mac will receive a free iPod nano 8GB model, while throughout the weekend purchase any iMac or MacBook and get 50.00 off, with up to 10.00 off iPods excluding shuffles promise Stormfront.

More details can be found here.

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Early Google phones running out of space for updates

Users of the first Android phone, the G1, may be unable to get significant future operating-system updates because the phone's internal flash is nearly full.

A Google developer who works on Android said recently that he's unsure if the G1 will be able to handle further updates.

"As much as I'm hoping that it'll be possible to somehow continue updating the G1, I can't promise anything," Jean-Baptiste Queru, a software engineer at Google, wrote on Twitter. "We knew that internal flash space was going to be very tight on the G1 and we kept the system partition tight on purpose," he also wrote.

G1 users got the so-called Cupcake update to the operating system earlier this year. Google is reportedly working on further updates to the software, including a version known as Donut. It has not published information beyond the first-quarter update on the Android road map page.

T-Mobile denies that the G1 will be unable to accept future updates. "We plan to continue working with Google to introduce future software updates to the T-Mobile G1. Reports to the contrary are inaccurate," it said in a statement.

But some observers wonder if T-Mobile will continue offering certain updates, like security patches and bug fixes, but not more substantial updates.

The issue raises questions about application compatibility in the future. If developers build applications to the latest software version but the G1 doesn't have that software, the applications may not work for G1 users.

Queru declined to comment further for this story, and Google did not respond to a request for comment.

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Lord Mandelson demands tougher penalties for online pirates

Labour peer and Business Secretary Lord Mandelson is calling for tougher penalties for illegal downloaders, including fining the parents of children caught illegally file sharing.

Mandelson heads the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which has taken over responsibility for implementing the schemes documented in the Digital Britain report earlier this year.

Mandelson is thought to have been instrumental in proposals set out in a consultation document that will form the basis of the Digital Economy Bill and run alongside the Digital Britain schemes.

The document calls for Ofcom to track and warn the owners of computers being used in illegal downloading activities. Those that continue to offend would have their internet access slowed or blocked, while some could face fines of up to 50,000.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills admitted the paper had been published in a bid to address concerns that the Digital Britain proposals would not help eradicate online piracy.

However, Mandelson may face competition from Pirate Party - a political party that hopes to legalise non-commercial file sharing. The party has already won a seat in Sweden, and hopes to gain supporters in the UK.

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Next version of Microsoft Office for Mac details revealed (Updated)

Microsoft has announced details about the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac.

Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) has said Outlook for Mac will replace Entourage for Mac as the company introduced Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition.

"Outlook for Mac will bring features our customers have long requested - such as Rights Management - that make working across platforms even easier," said said Eric Wilfrid, general manager for the MacBU at Microsoft.

"I think people will see that this move to Outlook for Mac is more than just a name change."

According to MacBU, Outlook for Mac will be built from the ground up using Cocoa providing users with improved integration with the Mac OS.

"We’re building on the most modern OS X frameworks to make Outlook beautiful, to make it high performance, and to make it well integrated with the OS," Wilfrid said.

A high-speed file-based database with support for backing up files with Time Machine and Spotlight searching will also be included in Outlook for Mac.

New Information Rights Management will help prevent sensitive information from being distributed to or read by people who do not have permission to access the content said MacBU.

Outlook for Mac will be included in the next version of Office for Mac, which Wilfrid said is "on track" for the holiday season in late 2010.

Microsoft previously announced that Visual Basic will return in that edition, after being removed from Office 2008, which was released in Janaury 2008.

The company also announced that for current Entourage users Microsoft Entourage 2008 for Mac, Web Services Edition, is available now to download, promising performance and reliability improvements and enabling users to sync Tasks, Notes and Categories.

"Today’s release of the Web Services Edition strengthens Exchange connectivity for Entourage customers and sets the stage for the move to the new application - Outlook for Mac," added Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of the Office product management group at Microsoft.

Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition will be available from 16 September, 2009 with a estimated retail price of 439.99 and 269.99 for those eligible for an upgrade.

Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition is still available and can be purchased for around 119.99.

The free Entourage 2008 for Mac, Web Services Edition can be downloaded here.

MacBU also announced a simplified SKU line-up to help make product selection more intuitive for customers.

(Additional reporting Jason Snell at Macworld US)

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Microsoft ships Entourage Web Services Edition

Microsoft may be looking ahead to next year with Thursday’s announcement of the next version of Microsoft Office for the Mac. But the software giant has plenty to focus on in the near-term with its existing productivity applications.

To that end, Microsoft launched the full version of its Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition that it had first announced back at this January’s Macworld Expo. The company notified Web Services Edition beta participants via email on Thursday that Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition is now available for download at Microsoft’s Web site.

As detailed by Microsoft in January, Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition means the Mac e-mail client will stop using the WebDAV protocol in favor of Exchange Web Services.

The switch means the Entourage 2008 client will connect to servers running Exchange 2007 SP1 with Update 4 or later faster and more reliably, according to Microsoft. That’s because tasks required up to six separate communications when using WebDAV; Exchange Web Services handles the same task with one command.

In addition to performance improvements, the updated Entourage offers an enhanced Autodiscover service for easily configuring accounts and keeping settings up to date. The update also allows notes, tasks, and categories to be synced between Entourage 2008 and Exchange Server.

An Enable Logging preference for logging all events that can be used as diagnostic information has been added, as has built-in logging with extensive reporting of diagnostic information. The update allows attachments in Entourage for Exchange calendar events.

Entourage for Exchange Web Services had been available as a public beta since January.

In June, Microsoft released an Office 2008 update that paved the way for the installation of the newly released Web Services Edition of Entourage.

Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition requires Mac OS X 10.4.9 or later.

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Hackers using Twitter used to manage botnet insists security expert

A security researcher has found that hackers are using Twitter as a means to distribute instructions to a network of compromised computers, known as a botnet.

The traditional way of managing botnets is using IRC, but botnet owners are continuously working on finding new ways of keeping their networks up and running, and Twitter seems to be the latest trick.

A now-suspended Twitter account was being used to post tweets that had links new commands or executables to download and run, which would then be used by the botnet code on infected machines, wrote Jose Nazario, manager of security research at Arbor Networks, on in a blog posting on Thursday.

"I spotted it because a bot uses the RSS feed to get the status updates," Nazario wrote.

The account, called "Upd4t3", is under investigation by Twitter's security team, according to Nazario. But the account is just one of what appear to be a handful of Twitter command and control accounts, Nazario wrote.

Botnets can, for example, be used to send spam or carry out distributed denial-of-service attacks, which Twitter itself became the victim of last week. The botnet Nazario found is "an infostealer operation," a type that can be used to steal sensitive information such as login credentials from infected computers.

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