Sony Announces New PlayStation 4 Console (But Doesn’t Show the Console)

It’s finally here: The next-generation console.

Except, well, you can’t see the console.

As expected, Sony tonight announced the PlayStation 4, the newest videogame console from the Japanese electronics maker.

However, no console was shown during the two-hour event. Sony instead appealed to its hard-core gaming audience with a string of new game titles.

We know the new PlayStation 4 includes an x86, 8-core AMD “Jaguar” CPU, an enhanced PC graphics processor and a secondary custom chip for background processing of digital titles. It comes with 8 gigabytes of internal memory. And its controller is a DualShock 4 controller with a touchpad and “3-D” camera-tracking.

Sony said the console has been in development for the past five years. But, aside from teasing that the console would be available in the 2013 holiday season, no additional details on price or availability were given.

There are some interesting new features to the PS4 system. It will offer the ability to “trim” portions of the game and share clips of the games with friends over social networks, in addition to sharing over the PlayStation network. And Sony, perhaps looking to revitalize its not-exactly-best-selling PS Vita, also showed how PS4 games can be played remotely on the handheld mobile device.

As expected, cloud gaming is also a part of the PS4 announcement: Gaikai co-founder and CEO Dave Perry appeared on stage to discuss how Gaikai, which Sony acquired last year, is being integrated to make game titles readily available in the cloud. Gamers will be allowed to try some titles before they buy.

PS4 games can be played remotely on the PS Vita.

The company kicked off the event stating that it marked a bold step forward for Sony as a company. “The living room is no longer the focal point of the PlayStation ecosystem,” said Sony’s president and CEO of Sony Computer entertainment Andrew House.

Despite that, Sony spent a good portion of its event on Tuesday showing off game trailers for exclusive console titles like Knack, Killzone Shadow Fall and Drive Club, showing more attention toward its hard-core gaming audience than video-streaming consumers or mobile game adopters. Executives from Capcom, Square Enix and Ubisoft also appeared on stage touting new game titles.

And Bungie, the game developer behind the popular Halo franchise, showed a new first-person shooter game called Destiny that will be available for PS4 and PS3.

The new PlayStation 4 console comes at a particularly perilous time for the traditional videogame industry. Gaming software sales, especially, have suffered due to the rise of cheap or free Web-based games, while Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have allowed several-year gaps in between new consoles, causing some to question the relevance of the console.

An image from Killzone Shadow Fall, one of the new games exclusive to PS4.

Sony to date has sold more than 70 million PlayStation 3 units worldwide, and claims more than 110 million members in its PlayStation Network. But about two years ago, the company suffered a setback when roughly 77 million user accounts were hacked, causing the company to temporarily shut down the network. Sony later said the hack cost the company $171 million that fiscal year.

In January the NPD Group, a research firm that tracks videogame hardware and software but not digital sales, reported that the Microsoft Xbox 360 had outsold the other home consoles for the 25th month in a row. But that was a mere silver lining: Software and hardware sales overall were still down 13 and 17 percent, respectively, when adjusted for a four-week month.

Microsoft is also widely expected to roll out its own new console, possibly named the Microsoft Xbox 720, this year.

Let’s hope Microsoft shows off the actual console at its event.

Square’s “Business in a Box” Offers a Digital Register for $300

It’s already pretty straightforward to set up a Square account, but the company wants to streamline the process of registering with its app even further.

Today, the company is launching “Business in a Box” — a package that includes a cash drawer, an iPad stand, card readers and an optional printer for printing receipts. It costs $299 for the readers and cash drawer, and $599 if you include the printer.

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Obama White House expands access to federally funded research

Campaigners herald boost for accessibility of scientific information and say Aaron Swartz case gave momentum

The White House has announced that is expanding public access to federally-funded research. The move was heralded as a “landmark” by open-access advocates.

A new directive issued on Friday states that federal agencies which spend more than $100m in research and development must develop a way to make the results of such federally-funded research publicly available within one year of publication. This is similar to the National Institute of Health’s policy, which requires its research to be publicly available a year after it is published.

“I think at the core of this executive order is a real understanding by the administration of the value of enhancing access to scientific information,” said Kenneth Crews, director of Columbia University’s copyright advisory office.

The government invests billions of dollars in research and Crews said the directive will have major benefits for researchers and regular citizens. “Most of the important research today in the US is the result of federal funding,” he said. “The taxpayers definitely have an interest in having access to it.”

Public support for open-access issues increased after the open-internet advocate Aaron Swartz killed himself in January. At the time of his death, Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison and a $1m fine, for downloading academic journal articles from the JSTOR database.

Open-access advocates have campaigned for legislation for nearly a decade. FASTR, a bill that would require federal agencies to make research public within six months of the publication date, was reintroduced in Congress last week.

“We’re happy to see the Obama administration take some direct action to move it forward more quickly than would have been feasible had it moved through the congressional process,” Crews said.

The White House said it has been looking into the issue for some time, and that an online petition on its We The People site was one of many factors that influenced the administration’s decision.

A White House statement said: “The final policy reflects substantial inputs from scientists and scientific organizations, publishers, members of Congress, and other members of the public – over 65 thousand of whom recently signed a We the People petition asking for expanded public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research.”

Nancy Sims, a copyright librarian at the University of Minnesota and a lawyer, has been hoping for a directive that applies to all federal agencies for several years. “This is definitely something that the University of Minnesota libraries, and I think a lot of research libraries, have been working towards for a long time and its great to see action at the White House level,” she said.

She said the Swartz case had added momentum to the open-access campaign. “I think that made the research-access question of greater interest to people who would not have been paying attention otherwise and to some politically active people who would not have been paying attention otherwise,” she said.

Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC, a group that works to broaden public access to scholarly research, said in a statement that the directive was a “watershed moment”.

“The directive will accelerate scientific discovery, improve education, and empower entrepreneurs to translate research into commercial ventures and jobs,” Joseph said. “It’s good for our nation, our economy, and our future.”

The Chromebook Pixel hides a Konami Code secret

Yesterday, Google revealed the rumored Chromebook Pixel to the world. Though the pseudo-netbook comes with the very hefty price tag of $1300, and you might not feel that what it packs under the hood is worth the price of a Surface Pro and iPad Mini combined, the device at least has something of a sense of humor. Like all good pieces of technology, it responds to the venerable Konami Code.

If you enter the code into the Pixel, up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right, then B followed by A, you’ll activate a little light show displayed on the Pixel’s LED strip, which is located on the cover. You won’t unlock more functionality that you might find justifies the $1300 price, but hey, it’s always great to see the Konami Code chugging along into 2013, appearing in mediums that don’t have anything to do with Konami, cheat codes, or even video games.

Wired captured the light show in GIF form, in which the Pixel’s LED strip jumps between various colors of light. We haven’t gotten our hands on a Pixel to try out the code just yet, but Wired reports that the code is simply entered using the keyboard’s directional keys. The report doesn’t say if the code takes priority, or if you can only enter it in specific apps.

If you look closely at the light show, it seems to actually play the Konami Code back at you. Clever stuff.

The two things everyone is mainly focusing on with regards to the Chromebook Pixel is the exorbitant price and that it hides a Konami Code easter egg. If that doesn’t sum up the public’s reaction to Google’s fancy new Chromebook, we don’t know what else does.

These quadcopters are juggling an inverted pendulum

We all know by now that quadcopters can do impressive things, such as be made out of Lego, be controlled with your mind, or be impervious to crashing, but did you know that they can be quite the entertainer, performing juggling stunts in midair? Some of the more impressive feats quadcopters can perform are juggling balls, and balancing an inverted pendulum. Now, Dario Brescianini, a student at ETH Zurich’s Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, and some of his colleagues have developed an algorithm that allows for the adorable little fliers to juggle an inverted pendulum.

An inverted pendulum, as the name suggests, is a pole reminiscent of a standard pendulum that you might find on a clock, but the center of mass is above the pivot point. This makes the inverted pendulum difficult to balance, and thus, even more difficult for a not-entirely-steady, flying robot to accurately throw toward another not-entirely-steady flying robot. In order to achieve that goal, Brescianini turned to a 2D mathematical model.

After the model detailed acceptable behavior for the quadcopters, the team tested it out in the real world, allowing two quadcopters to play catch with an inverted pendulum. Considering the quadcopters would catch and balance the pendulum on one end of the stick, rather than on the curved sides, the team needed to protect the quadcopter from potentially being impaled. So, the ends of the pendulum were wrapped in a balloon, which is filled with flour.

Though the 2D model paved the way for the quadcopter balancing act, it wasn’t perfect, as catching the pendulum proved difficult. To correct this issue, the team had to include a learning algorithm so the system could update its catching methods as it found out if they worked or not.

Brescianini and company have taught us an important life lesson today: If two individual tasks are difficult to perform on their own, combining them clearly makes performing them a lot easier.

San Jose Airport Searches for Google Boost

Mineta San Jose International Airport has been losing commercial traffic and carrying a heavy debt burden, but a potential new revenue stream from jets owned by top Google Inc. executives and others could give the city-owned facility a lift.

On Friday, San Jose officials will publicly review a plan, backed by airport management, for the construction of a private facility that would house jets belonging to Google Chief Executive Larry Page, his co-founder, Sergey Brin, and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. The city council is expected to vote on the project in the spring.

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Seven Questions for Sony’s Jack Tretton, Following the PlayStation 4 Event

In case you missed it last night, Sony announced — but didn’t exactly unveil — its latest videogame console, the PlayStation 4.

But while the gaming hardware was notably absent, consumers did get a glimpse of some key upcoming game titles, as well as Sony’s plans to offer cloud gaming, more integration with PS Vita, and even some concept games that use Sony’s motion-sensor device, the Move.

AllThingsD sat down with Jack Tretton, the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, to discuss the future of the gaming console — as well as why Sony didn’t show theirs last night — and Sony’s strategy of “doubling down” on its hardcore gaming audience.

I think it was Sony’s Andrew House who said right off the bat that the living room is no longer the focal point of gaming. Can you further explain this idea and how it relates to the future of the console?

My interpretation is that the living room used to be the only place that gaming lived. Now it’s the primary place, but it’s not the exclusive place. So I still think that sitting on the couch in front of the TV with a powerful console like PlayStation is the nerve center of the experience, but it doesn’t end there — it extends out into the world, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on smartphones and tablets and dedicated devices like Vita. It’s a little bit scary if you’re a core gamer, because you feel like if you go to sleep, you might miss something.

A good portion of tonight’s event was on game titles, not as much on cloud streaming, mobile or entertainment. Is Sony PlayStation doubling down on its position with hard-core gamers?

Well, I think the console has evolved beyond strictly gaming devices. People expect multimedia capabilities, and that’s certainly a given. But what we’re all about, in our DNA, is the gaming and the gamers. You buy [PlayStation] because you’re a gamer and you enjoy playing games, and you use it for other purposes, but we’re first and foremost about that core gamer that eats, sleeps and drinks the gaming.

I think there are more gamers today than there have been ever before, and the core is really strong, and loyal.

But at the same time, at least in the U.S. market, Microsoft has had the best-selling console for many months in a row now, and they’ve taken a media-heavy approach. What’s your thought on their strategy?

We look at the market in worldwide terms, and every market is extremely important to us. The facts are, we debuted the PlayStation 3 at $599, which was an extremely steep price barrier for a lot of consumers. And we debuted a year after Microsoft, but on a worldwide basis, we’ve sold the same, if not more, devices. I think we’re at 77 million sold right now — it’s basically splitting hairs. Despite all that, our message has been extremely well-received around the world.

Plus, if you look at multimedia services, we’re the No. 1 streaming device when it comes to Netflix, not Xbox. They’re trying to — I don’t really know what they’re trying to do. I’d rather not comment on their strategy. But we’re trying to say we’re all about the gamers and, by the way, there’s multimedia out there. I think the people who tuned in to see this live streaming event, from all around the world, were watching to see the gaming.

Will the new console cost $599 to start?

I certainly hope not. I think we’re very proud of what we delivered with the PlayStation 3 in terms of technology, and that we were able to enhance the features while still reducing the price to $249. But I think our goal with this is to debut at a more consumer-friendly price. But we haven’t made any final decisions about what the price will be at launch.

Why didn’t we see the new console today?

I guess when I think about the console, you open it up, you look at it, you certainly look at it when you insert a disc, but for most people, it’s behind a cabinet or on a shelf somewhere and you spend all your time looking at the screen. And we wanted to show people the screen. There will be multiple opportunities to share the look of the console between now and the launch. We just didn’t choose this first event as the time to show it.

But is it ready?

I mean, we’re certainly capable of showing playable game content, but we don’t have a mass-production box that we can bring out and pull out. That’s still in development in terms of final specs and design.

It wasn’t a big surprise today that there were some cloud-gaming announcements, given Sony’s acquisition of Gaikai. But cloud gaming, especially when it comes to graphics-heavy stuff, can suffer some technical difficulties. How does Sony plan to manage that?

I think that all credit goes to Gaikai, and all credit goes to Sony for recognizing the strength of Gaikai and acquiring them. We’ve cerainly had cloud storage, but Gaikai seemed to be well ahead of anybody else that we saw, and were doing things we didn’t think were possible. So I think the acquisition allows us to do things that are more in line with consumer expectations; allow them to play the games they expect.

And PS4 can play those games. I’ve certainly seen it done that every game we’ve ever published, up through PS3, is playable with no latency. I don’t know if we’re saying we’re at that stage yet, but we think we can get there in the near term.

Cyberwar With China Is Here, Like It or Not

“Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults.” Benjamin Franklin wrote that.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” The Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu wrote that.

Both come to mind as the world is waking up a newly disclosed body of evidence from the Internet security firm Mandiant, publicly illustrating, in the starkest terms yet, how wide, deep and pervasive computer hacking attacks from China have become. As reported on the front page of today’s New York Times, numerous attacks on American, Canadian and British companies, dating as far back as 2006, have been carried out by a single unit of the China’s People’s Liberation Army. Mandiant, a firm based in Alexandria, Va., has identified it as Unit 61398, operating out of a single building just walking distance from the point in outer Shanghai where the Huangpu and Yangtze Rivers meet.

The company maintains that the unit has compromised the networks of at least 141 companies or organizations, and probably more than that, spending an average of 356 days perusing their networks. In one case, the attackers had unfettered access to a target’s computers and networks for a grand total of four years and 10 months.

Who do they attack? None of the companies are named. But, if you think back, you can remember some names that have disclosed attacks blamed on China, that might fit the bill: Google and Intel have over the years complained in public of attacks carried out by China. The Times says the army unit was the one responsible for the attacks carried out in 2011 against RSA, the security unit of the technology company EMC, which were described at the time as “extremely sophisticated.”

More recently, a series of attacks against media organizations have been attributed to China: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal (which, like this website, is owned by News Corp.), Bloomberg News, the Washington Post and the Associated Press are among them.

Other targeted industries include information technology, defense and aerospace, energy, transportation, satellites and communications, navigation, chemicals, health care and mining, to name a few.

What do the attackers take? Here’s a list taken directly from Mandiant’s report:

• product development and use, including information on test results, system designs, product manuals, parts lists, and simulation technologies;
• manufacturing procedures, such as descriptions of proprietary processes, standards, and waste management processes;
• business plans, such as information on contract negotiation positions and product pricing, legal events, mergers, joint ventures, and acquisitions;
• policy positions and analysis, such as white papers, and agendas and minutes from meetings involving high-ranking personnel;
• emails of high-ranking employees; and user credentials and network architecture information.

Most of the time, the victim company doesn’t even know that its information has been stolen until it is far too late to do anything about it.

Who gets the information in the end? It’s unclear, exactly, and so Mandiant engages in educated conjecture and looks at the available evidence. In one case in 2008, a targeted company suffered an intrusion lasting two and a half years, during which emails and attachments of the CEO and general counsel were stolen. During the same time period, news reports showed that a Chinese company had managed to negotiate a significant increase in the price of a certain commodity component with an unnamed victim company. It may be a coincidence, Mandiant concedes, but then again, it may not.

How do they attack? Usually by sending innocent-looking attachments in email messages. An employee at the target company opens it, triggering software embedded within it that gives attackers remote access to that employee’s machine, which then serves as a beachhead for more attacks. You can see a short video showing some of the attacks actually taking place in the video below.

Certainly, suspicions about China and its intentions, capabilities and actions in this area have pervaded for months. Knowledge about all this has probably circulated within the classified community for years, and no doubt plays a part in the concern among lawmakers and U.S. federal government agencies about the growth of the Chinese networking company Huawei.

Mandiant points to another: Unit 61398, it says, carried out a series of attacks against a unit of a Canadian company called Schneider Electric. The incident was first reported by security blogger Brian Krebs, and was carried out when the unit was an independent company called Telvent. What does the company make? Remote access tools, basically software that lets you control one computer from another computer far away.

The part that should scare you is what kinds of computers this software is intended to control: They’re known generally as SCADA systems, or supervisory control and data acquisition systems. They’re the stripped-down machines that sit between large industrial machinery like generators or pumps, or any other kind of big, automated equipment, and regular computers.

In a series of letters to customers in September of last year, Telvent disclosed that attackers traced to China had installed malicious software on its network, and had stolen files related to a key product called OASyS SCADA, which is designed to connect older IT assets to certain “smart grid” systems running on electrical power networks.

Attacks on SCADA systems can be very effective, in part because the machines involved are older and have tended to be less well-secured. How effective? Remember Stuxnet? The malware attack carried out by American and Israeli intelligence agencies against the Iranian nuclear research program? In that attack, nuclear centrifuges were caused to spin out of control, and ultimately explode. That was an attack against SCADA systems. We already know how easily attacks like it might be carried out here.

Stealing intellectual property and trying to gain an edge in business negotiations is one thing. Penetrating the systems that run critical infrastructure is rather more serious, bordering on sabotage. Now that the government officially considers cyberspace a theater of warfare, similar to land, sea, and sky, this is starting to look serious.

Dish Network’s Charlie Ergen Gets Real: The Full Dive Into Media Interview

Last week, we hosted our second D: Dive Into Media conference in Dana Point, Calif. If you joined us in person, you got a day and a half to talk with and listen to the most interesting people in the media business as they spoke about the future of their industries. If you tuned in to our livestreams, you got a free, real-time sample of what that was like.

And if you missed the whole thing? Your loss!

But no worries: This week, we’ll start running complete videos of each of our onstage interviews and demos, so you can review them anytime you want. We’re kicking off today with Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen, who rarely speaks in public, but sat down with us for an hour.

We’re so glad he did, because he has got one of the most interesting perspectives on the way technology is reshaping the TV business — and the ways that the TV business is stubbornly and successfully resisting change.

Some of this stuff parallels thoughts you’ve heard from other people — but usually not those with this much skin in the game. Ergen is a billionaire with the third-largest pay-TV business in America. So getting this stuff right matters a whole lot to him.

There’s a lot of great stuff in here. Like:

• Ergen’s assessment of his odds as he tries to grab Clearwire’s spectrum out of Sprint’s clutches (low), and why he’s taking on CBS and every other broadcaster with his ad-skipping Hopper DVR (both for leverage and because his customers want it).
• His explanation of why he bought Blockbuster (real estate) and why he failed to challenge Netflix (too late, too timid).
• His take on cord-cutting, which you never hear pay-TV bosses say out loud. (Yep, it’s real. And cord-nevers — kids like his who don’t have pay TV and never had — are even real-er.)
• What he thought of the Bloomberg Businessweek piece that described Dish as “The Meanest Company in America,” and whether his company’s work culture will let it compete with the likes of Google and Facebook. (Dish is not going to be supplying private buses for its workers anytime soon).

And the nice thing is that you get to sample as much, or as little, as you like. Enjoy, and come back for more over the next few weeks:

[ See post to watch video ]

Qatar criticises EU over Syria arms embargo

Key supporter of Syrian rebels says decision to extend blanket arms embargo will only prolong war

Qatar, one of the principal supporters of the Syrian rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad, has criticised the EU’s decision to extend its blanket arms embargo on Syria and said it would only prolong the war.

Hamed bin Jassim Al Thani, prime minister and foreign minister of the Gulf state, told al-Jazeera TV that the decision was wrong and accused the Syrian government of seeking to buy time.

On Monday EU foreign ministers agreed to extend the arms embargo on Syria for a further three months, although they accepted a British proposal to allow the supply of “greater non-lethal support and technical assistance for the protection of civilians”.

After further discussions they may also permit military training and advice in areas that are under rebel control, diplomats said.

“I am astonished at this decision,” Bin Jassim said. “The rebels only want to be able to defend themselves. At the present time this is the wrong decision. It will only prolong the crisis.”

Qatar, along with Saudi Arabia, has supplied money and weapons to the anti-Assad forces but is understood to have been pressured by western governments to ease up because of growing concern that weapons are being funnelled to radical or jihadi groups that are not under the influence of the western-backed Syrian National Coalition. Rebel forces have complained that weapons and ammunition are drying up.

Public discussion of this issue is rare. Last month Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former spy chief and senior Saudi royal, said the rebels should be given anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to “level the playing field” and ensure that “extremist” groups did not dominate the opposition.

On Tuesday the New York Times reported that the US may reconsider its refusal to supply weapons to the rebels. Barack Obama rebuffed the advice of his senior security officials last autumn, but with conditions in Syria continuing to deteriorate the debate could be reopened. “This is not a closed decision,” a senior administration official told the paper. “As the situation evolves, as our confidence increases, we might revisit it.”

Obama’s decision not to provide arms was driven by his reluctance to get drawn into a proxy war and by his fear that the weapons would end up in unreliable hands, where they could be used against civilians or Israeli and US interests.

The state department has provided $50m of non-lethal assistance to the Syrian opposition, including satellite telephones, radios, broadcasting equipment, computers, survival equipment and related training. An FM radio network is to connect broadcasting operations in several Syrian cities in the next few days.

But the decision not to provide weapons has greatly limited the influence the US has with groups that are likely to control much of Syria if Assad is ousted. The new US secretary of state, John Kerry has said he plans to advance ideas on how to change the situation, including more co-operation with Russia, Syria’s closest ally on the UN security council.

In a related development, the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Mualim, is to visit Moscow next week, the Russian foreign ministry announced. But there is still no agreement on a visit by Moaz al-Khatib, leader of the Syrian National Coalition, dashing hopes for an early start to possible talks between the Assad regime and the opposition. Russia appeared to have hoped the two visits would coincide.

Russia also said on Tuesday that a call by UN investigators for suspected war criminals in Syria to face prosecution at the international criminal court was “untimely and unconstructive”.