Sony is trying to flip the switch back on for their PlayStation Network globally, and apparently North America, Europe, and Middle East had their services restored, although some hiccups are experienced during the process due to overwhelming network congestion from the password resetting emails.

However, things aren’t going very smoothly in Japan. The government has refused to allow Sony to reactivate its online service until they are very sure that all issues are sorted out. This may be due to reports that Anonymous and the previous group that attacked PSN in the first place (may or may not be Anonymous) are targeting PSN once they are restored.

“We met with Sony on May 6 and 13, and basically we want two things from them,” Kazushige Nobutani, director of the Media and Content Industry department at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, told Dow Jones Newswires.

“The first is preventative measures. As of May 13, Sony was incomplete in exercising measures that they said they will do on the May 1 press conference,” he said, adding that he could not provide details on the outstanding issues for security reasons.

The second was in how Sony hoped to regain consumer confidence over personal data such as credit card information.

“There were similar cases in the past that were caused by other firms, and we are asking Sony whether their measures are good enough when compared to countermeasures taken in the past,” he said.

The company’s promised counter-hacking measures announced on May 1st have not yet been fully reviewed by the government too. Also, the government wants even more preventive measures taken to ensure that users’ credit card numbers and other private data won’t be exposed through their use of Sony’s online services again.

As of current, Sony is still in talks with the authorities to make sure that the system is up to their expectations.

“We are still in talks with various authorities (in Japan and Asia),” Sony spokeswoman Kumie Tanaka said.” By receiving advice from the industry ministry, we would like to have the service in Japan ready.”

SOURCE via Dow Jones Newswires (Fox Business)

Who said people can’t have fun with electric vehicles? People have already prep-up a race-version of the Lexus CT200h hybrid race car, and now people are also throwing in electric bikes into the race circuits, and a very dirty one at that.

Trevor Doniak was racing in the AMA Mini Moto SX race in Las Vegas, and he was riding a Zero MX, which is an electric bike. His opponent is riding a new electric mini bike called the Brammo Encite, as well as another full-scale Brammo Engage dirt bike, which is running on an internal combustion. Well, the race had lots of overtaking to say the least.

Doniak suffered his fair share of falls during the quick race, including more than one tie-up with a Brammo rider. There’s even some buzz that he was intentionally trying to unseat Kris Keefer from his Brammo steed in order to ensure that a Zero machine held all three spots on the podium.

Well, we’ll just let the video do the talking.

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I’m not a person with lots of patient and have virtue etiquette as high as the blue-blue sky. But there are some people that have good manners. I’m not sure of the originality of the video below and which country it’s from, but apparently people in that country has good etiquette.

I’ve seen very crazy triple-parking and all sorts of stunts in a carpark, and I’ve personally moved people’s car that blocked me by the roadside, but having a very good patient to move people’s car slowly and steadily so that you could leave the carpark, this is a rare sight. If I were them, I’d just run through the curb and drive across the grass. But the funniest and coolest part is at the end of the video, which is embedded after the break. Seriously, some people are neat!

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There’s a new podcast from the Windows Phone Developers, and they mentioned a few new features that are apparently being integrated into the mobile OS of Microsoft that will be included in the upcoming “Mango” update.

That includes support for Facebook Chat and Office 365 (plus SkyDrive and SharePoint), as well as a revamped Games hub that suggests even more Xbox Live integration (including a rather interesting new “Automatic Sync” option).

Besides, the lock screen will apparently now show the album art if there is a song currently playing, and it seems there will be some new group messaging options as well, perhaps pulled in from the Live Messenger, or will we even see Skype integration being pushed rapidly into the platform?

Then again, all these are unconfirmed, including the screenshot above, so don’t put your hopes so high if you’re anticipating this new update for your WinMo smartphone.

SOURCE via Windows Phone Developer Podcast

I’ve seen plenty of cases that people got locked outside their cars as they left their car keys inside and somehow accidentally locked it. But I’ve never heard of someone getting locked in their cars due to a dead battery.

Have you heard of a door handler that won’t work if your battery runs out? Never have I, and General Motors ain’t that sort of a dumb company either. But then again, there are people that are dumb enough, making this world so entertaining at times.

Apparently an owner of the sixth-generation Chevrolet Corvette coupe got ‘trapped’ inside his ZR1 because he never read the manuals, which again proves that Southpark is correct!

When the battery dies on a C6 Corvette, the door-release buttons stop working. General Motors isn’t in the business of creating sports cars that turn into traps, so it installs (very obviously marked) levers on the floor that, when pulled, manually open the doors.

This ain’t no rocket science, but there are guys who aren’t really smart either to realize that (and they tend to be the perks that talked the most). But then again, when you do freak out, you tend to not notice things and sometimes lost your sanity and logic sense, and when your friends are kind enough to find it hilarious and videotape it, well, they are helping a lot. Watch the video after the jump.

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Thus far, almost all Honeycomb tablets shipped with Nvidia’s Tegra 2 hardware. There are also some Gingerbread smartphones that shipped with it too. While the Gingerbread smartphones powered by Tegra 2 received good response, the same could not be said with the Honeycomb tablets, which most, if not all, runs on Nvidia. And that made Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia disappointed. Well, the sales of these tablets affect directly the profit of Nvidia so we can see why.

Mr Jen-Hsun Huang says that the relative paucity of tablet-optimized Android apps is the weakness, while also expressing the belief that cheaper WiFi-only models should’ve been the standard shipping config rather than fully fledged 3G / 4G variants as Motorola has been pushing with the Xoom. We can see how Motorola Xoom didn’t perform nicely when Maxis is selling it at RM 2,499 while the cheapest Apple iPad 2 can be had for only RM 1,499, even the Queen approves it.

Oddly though, Mr Huang mentioned that all these major downsides have already been “largely addressed” by “a new wave” of Android tablets. He doesn’t specify the devices that constitute said wave, but his emphasis on thinness and lightness leads us to believe he’s talking up Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 8.9 models. Weird, we didn’t see any lately, and I doubt will be priced competitively with the iPad 2.

SOURCE via CNET

People says that Samsung is spear heading in technology so fast, that even other Korean companies and the market cannot keep up with them. Samsung has been frequently demonstrating some breakthrough in the advancement of display technology, like transparent AMOLED screen and scrollable AMOLED screen.

Now Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology has yet another prototype foldable display, which may or may not be the same reference design spotted at FPD 2008. Its two panels have a closing radius of only 1mm, meaning they practically touch when closed, yet show no visible crease when opened. In fact, the developers performed 100,000 folding-unfolding cycles to test the junction; the negligible 6% decrease in brightness was invisible to the human eye.

Commercially-available silicone rubbers are used to achieve that seamless look, and the prototype featured a protective glass cover which could also double as a touchscreen. Obviously there’s a market for touchscreens you can fold up and put in your pocket. However, the most important question of all is when we will actually see such innovation enters mass products.

SOURCE via Physorg

PSN was down for over two weeks, but finally Sony restored the online services of PSN yesterday gradually through the whole US, and also on the international market. Right now PSN should be up and running throughout the whole world already. There is, of course, the mandatory system update to v3.61, and will prompt you to change your PlayStation Network password. Read more…