Massive hype, no disappointment: PSP Mania Begins

The huge media circus surrounding the launch of Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) has been followed by record sales in Japan, USA and Europe with PSP's running out of stores within hours of launch.

The reviews and analysis of Sony's new wonder are also very good. Everyone seems to agree that the device is well worth the $300 or so it is selling for, and the games that have accompanied its launch have been well received by reviewers. But the real value of the PSP is as a multi-purpose device. In that regard, it's an amazing piece of technology.

You can play games, watch movies, listen to music and view .photos. Add to that a WiFi capability to wirelessly play games with friends, exchange files with your PC or camera, plus additional storage ability with the Sony Memory Stick port. So much technology, crammed into such a small unit.

The processing power of two MIPS processors both running at 333MHz, and a very wide and crystal clear screen, plus excellent sound and graphic capabilities make the PSP a far cry from the beginning of handheld gaming a decade ago, and although Nintendo's GameBoy Advance and the recent GameBoy Dual Screen (DS) are providing impressive sound and graphics, there is a lack of the total consumer-electronics approach that Sony has adopted.

In fact, just as Sony's PlayStation signaled the beginning of a decline in Nintendo's home console business, the PSP will probably have that kind of affect on the GameBoy series. Already, in Japan, the PSP is selling double the quantity of the GameBoy DS. In Europe, the huge hype surrounding the PSP launch this week has made the GameBoy DS introduction last month seem small in comparison.

One of the obvious parallels can be seen in Sony’s choice of storage media for the games, using a new mini-CD format called the UMD, unlike the cartridge format used by Nintendo’s GameBoy. The UMD is cheaper to produce and could have the same effect the CD driven PlayStation had on the cartridge-based Ninentendo 64.

So, is this the next big thing since the Sony Walkman in the eighties? It's debatable that the Apple iPod is actually the gadget with the biggest influence so far this decade. Devices that cause 'cultural revolutions' worldwide will keep on coming, and the Sony PSP could be a candidate to join that elite list of devices, but it remains to be seen how well it will be received following this initial rush.

For now, Sony has not announced an official launch date for the Middle East, but you can expect to see over-priced units popping up in electronics stores. It will be difficult though to find them, and maybe you're better off ordering one from abroad or just asking a traveling friend to get you one from Europe.

Finding games and accessories in the Middle East will be equally difficult for a while, so make sure you get a couple of them from abroad too.

If you do indeed manage to get hold of a PSP, consider yourself lucky, let the rest of us know what it's like and enjoy.
zeid@maktoob.com

First ‘phishing’, now ‘pharming’

The new terms just keep on coming in the Internet age. Regrettably, most of these latest terms nowadays refer to a form of fraud!

First we had 'phishing' which is when online thieves try to steal your personal information which they can profit from like credit card or bank account numbers; so, they would basically be fishing for info that's not theirs, hence the name.

Now, things just got a worse with 'pharming'. It’s pronounced like the word 'farming', and its more dangerous than phishing.

The 'technical definition' of pharming says that it's a case of a "DNS cache hack invisibly redirecting victims to spoofed web sites."This means a Trojan or a virus finds its way into your PC, then is activated once you're connected to the Internet, taking to you to a fake site of a bank or financial organization, which will ask you for your credit card or bank account numbers.

Whereas in phishing you receive a fake email that asks you to visit a fake site, pharming will take you to the site directly, and is dangerous because it may use information gained from your browsing habits to figure out your real bank, then send you to a replica website, that looks and works exactly like it, and steal your money!

This is achieved by matching domain names with IP addresses at web hosts, and the redirection is triggered by the Trojan in your system!

Quite smart, and very worrying as Trojan change their characteristics fast, enabling them to exploit ‘holes’ and vulnerabilities in Windows and even in firewalls protecting those systems, with Symantec admitting it has found such vulnerabilities recently.The key to the success of pharming is cleaning up the local DNS servers, most of which are in the US, but connected to the whole world!

For example, a group of local DNS servers have been discovered recently which send requests for Google.com, eBay.com and Weather.com to three hacker sites (7sir7.com, 123xxl.com and abx4.com) that attempted to install spyware on visitors' computers.So far, the success rate of pharming, also being called DNS poisoning, is rare; but sometimes it’s enough to just poison the cache memory of DNS servers, even for a limited time, to get the re-direction going.

So, at the moment, security experts are sounding the alarm about this rising danger, which can be stopped by server and IT staff, but it’s crucial that end users are educated enough not to fall for ‘spoof tactics’ they will be exposed to while surfing the web.

The Internet, regrettably, is becoming a dangerous place. Like any city, their are neighborhoods you shouldn’t go to. The ones that look familiar, could be the most the most dangerous. Vigilance is required. So add another new threat to your list of viruses, trojans and Internet scams to watch out for.

zeid@maktoob.com