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Indian's Capital City has reacted to news of an alleged sexual assault on a woman by an Uber driver by banning the service from operating in the city.

Uber India has been operating illegally in New Delhi, according to Special Commissioner of Delhi Transport Department, Satish Mathur. He told the Economic Times that the victim in this case was provided an All India Permit Taxi which is not allowed to ferry customers from point to point in the city.

"We will also be issuing a public notice saying Uber is not authorised to provide any taxi services in the capital so that customers are aware which are the authorised radio Cab services," he said.

"Uber is not a authorised radio cab service and has been operating illegally."

The service is now active in more than 250 cities in 50 countries, and has aggressive expansion plans for the coming year. It recently raised $1.2 billion in a financing round, valuing the firm at a whopping $41 billion. The extra resources will be used partially toward investing in the Asia Pacific region.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is so confident in Uber's ability to grow that he predicts it will generate more than 1 million jobs in cities all over the world in 2015.

Sony's PlayStation Network and Store are having problems on Monday as a group called Lizard Squad takes credit for their downtime.

The same group took credit for an Xbox Live outage last week. While there are reports that PSN is up and working for some users again, at this time visiting the PlayStation Store still returns an error reading: "Page Not Found! It's not you. It's the internet's fault."

UPDATE 1: Sony is continuing to work on getting its services back to normal this morning, and has urged anybody who has experienced difficulties with PSN to try it again. We will update with any further information. Original article continues below.

The group Lizard Squad, which has a website based in Russia, tweeted this following in reference to the outages:

PSN Login #offline #LizardSquad

-- Lizard Squad (@LizardPatrol) December 8, 2014

PSN update: we are aware of the issues some users are experiencing, and are working to address them. We'll keep you updated.

-- PlayStation (@PlayStation) December 8, 2014

James Franco was the host of this week's 'Saturday Night Live' sketch show, and the actor tried to make light of the recent Sony Pictures hack in which the entire company's network was taken down and terabytes of data was stolen including contracts, social security numbers, addresses, internal passwords and full-length screeners of movies like 'Annie' and 'Fury.'

Joking, Franco said: "Something pretty crazy happened this week. I have this movie called 'The Interview' coming out at Sony and this week Sony Studios got all their computers hacked. This is true. These hackers have leaked real personal information about everybody that works at Sony. Social security numbers, emails, and I know eventually they're going to start leaking out stuff about me. So before you hear it from someone else, I thought it would be better if you hear it from me."

"Soon you'll know that my email is CuterThanDaveFranco@AOL.com. My password is LittleJamesyCutiePie -- and this is all just a real violation of my personal life."

'Interview' co-star Seth Rogen then joined Franco and made a few more jokes. As part of the leaked documents, the world learned that Rogen was paid $8.5 million for the movie, and Franco was paid $6.5 million. The film is about two journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jung-un. North Korea publicly denounced the film.

Video sharing site Dailymotion has been fined €1.3 million after a court ruling by the Paris Court of Appeal confirmed copyright infringement.

The site had been accused by infringing copyrights of the private national French TV channel TF1 and the news service LCI.

Legal action was brought against Dailymotion in 2007, and TF1 initially won in 2012, but with a much lower judgement. The new fine is five times higher than the previous.

In its ruling, the court found that the video sharing site did not take any action against users that TF1 identified as unauthorized posters of their content.

Square Enix has managed to piss off an entire fan base this weekend, announcing that a port of 'Final Fantasy VII' is headed exclusively to the PlayStation 4 next year.

Gamers had been eagerly awaiting the announcement of an HD-remastered version, but it looks like the game will be exactly like the PC version, just released to have gamers pay again for the same thing on a different console.

Enix says the game will be available starting in March, but did not reveal pricing. The PC version costs $11.99.

See the gameplay "experience" video here:

'God of War' fans (myself included) were delighted to learn this weekend that Sony is actively working on the next title in the series.

Sony's Santa Monica Studio has confirmed the game is under development but also noted it is in early stages.

Creative Director Cory Barlog says the company will introduce more of the game in "the next year or two," suggesting PS4 owners will have to wait up to three years before they can get to killing mythical beasts and gods of legend.

Barlog also would not answer if Kratos would remain the protagonist of the new game, having starred in all the others to date.

The crowdfunded Jolla Tablet has reached its latest milestone, their $1.5 million stretch goal.

Based on the Sailfish OS, the Jolla Tablet has a 7.85-inch display with 2048x1536 resolution, a 64-bit quad-core processor clocked at 1.8GHz, 2GB RAM, dual 5MP/2MP cameras, 32GB internal storage (expandable via microSD) and a small-ish 4300mAh battery.

By reaching the stretch goal, Jolla will add 128GB mciroSDHC support. As the page reads: "Once we reach the first goal, every Jolla Tablet will be upgraded to support microSDHC cards up to 128GB! You'll never have to worry about running out of space again. Currently Jolla Tablet supports cards up to 32GB, besides having 32GB internal storage."

The next stretch goal is set at $1.75 million, which will add Split Screen capabilities to Sailfish. Says Jolla: "Split screen allows you to view and use two apps simultaneously, enhancing Sailfish OS' multitasking capabilities even further. Split screen is the most wanted Jolla Tablet software feature by our community at together.jolla.com, and we're thrilled to offer it to you as one of the goals! Split screen will be available to you as a software update during Q3/2015."

It is good to see the success of the tablet, as the open-source device has some interesting features.

An Egyptian security researcher has scooped the top payout for security bugs from PayPal for discovering a massive security flaw that exposed the accounts of over 150 million users.

Yasser Ali was able to get around PayPal's CSRF Prevention System and capture an authentication token that could be used to effect a customer's PayPal account. You could add, remove or confirm e-mail addresses, add fully privileged users to a business account, change security questions, billing info, shipping info, payment methods and so on.

He disclosed the bug to PayPal and received the firms top award incentive for bug hunters, pocketing $10,000 for his work.

He also detailed how he beat PayPal's security systems on his blog, and provided this proof of concept video.

A security firm has taken a look at offers of free codes for PlayStation Network and Steam spreading online to see what's really going on.

Nothing in the world is really free, and that applies as much to codes for PSN, Steam and other services as it does to any physical product. How many times did you see those "Get a free iPAD today!" or similar claims just browsing the web, or social media, or in your e-mail in recent years? It sounds so wonderful doesn't it? Just fill out some surveys and then recruit your friends to do the same and you get a free iPad, or some other seemingly incredible promotion.

(Image Credit: AVAST Blog)

As anybody over a certain age can testify from life experience, if something seems too good to be true it usually is. People are still going to be attracted to promotions and offers though, and sometimes we allow our critical thinking faculties to be numbed by emotion - we are human after all.

Avast decided to take a look at websites that claim to offer free codes for PSN and Steam to find out what really happens to those caught in the trap. The value of the codes being promised ranges from $20 to $50, and all you have to do is follow some steps to qualify.

An increase in the share of web traffic from Apple's iOS devices is likely down to the successful launch of the iPhone 6, while at the same time Android web traffic decreases.

Apple now claims a slightly larger piece of the mobile web traffic pie, increasing to a 61.4 percent share compared to 60.6 percent. The increase has been observed over the nine weeks since the launch of the iPhone 6 smartphone, and is at the expense of the share enjoyed by the Android mobile OS which decreased to 37.5 percent from 38.4 percent in the same time period.

The statistics were reported by Gene Munster, analyst at Piper Jaffray.

Munster identifies the popularity of the iPad as the likely reason why Android's dominance in hardware is not reflected in its share of web traffic. Additionally, the iPhone 6 threw Apple into the competition for larger screen smartphones, a space which had been dominated by Android devices previously.


Sources and Recommended Reading:
Apple's iOS outshines Android in US mobile Web traffic: www.cnet.com/news

As the investigation into the massive breach at Sony Pictures proceeds, North Korea is sticking to a claim of innocence but that hasn't stopped it from applauding the attack against the entertainment company.

Over 11TB of data was allegedly stolen by the hackers who crippled Sony Pictures' systems, and later on hoards of personal information of employees was spread online. High quality copies of several movies, including Fury, leaked onto the Internet too and were downloaded hundreds of thousands of times in a matter of days.

On Friday, it emerged that the FBI was looking into threats that had been made against Sony Pictures employees and their families too.

Amid the public humiliation of Sony Pictures, some experts started to point the finger at the mysterious state of North Korea - or the People's Democratic Republic of Korea - as a major suspect. Potential evidence that has been disclosed is really based on similarities between the Sony Pictures attack, and attacks against South Korean entities in 2013. Additionally, some clues were found in an analysis of malware used in the attack. You can read more details about it here.

Cox Communications was sued last week by two music publishers for not terminating customer accounts when they are declared repeat offenders by Rightscorp.

At the core of the lawsuit filed by BMG and Round Hill is the assertion that Cox has no protection under the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. The DMCA's safe harbor provisions protect intermediaries from some copyright litigation as long as procedures are followed to qualify for them.

From BMG and Round Hill's perspective, Cox is not following the procedures and therefore is not entitled to use the safe harbor provisions as protection.

What is Cox Communication's failure according to the lawsuit? It alleges that Cox has failed to terminate customers' accounts when Rightscorp accuses them of being repeat infringers of copyright. That, it alleges, makes Cox liable for copyright penalties and it wants a federal court to declare as much.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has analysed the lawsuit and finds it lacking merit, to say the least. DMCA safe harbor provisions do not require that ISPs terminate users based on a mere accusation of infringement, or indeed even many accusations, according to the EFF. Rightscorp, it said, does not provide any evidence of the customer being a repeat infringer of copyright, and it doesn't disclose the means by which it identified the user.

Clothing retailer Bebe is the latest company to confirm a data breach of sensitive customer information.

Bebe says attackers managed to steal customer names, card numbers, expiration dates and verification codes for cards swiped in stores between Novembr 8th and November 26th of this year in the U.S. and U.S. Virgin Islands.

Online, mobile and international orders were not affected, at least, added the company. Bebe has 174 retail stores and an additional 35 outlet stores.

Security expert Brian Krebs was first to note the hack, and says the hackers likely exploited vulnerabilities in the cash register system and installed malware to steal mag stripe data from millions of cards.

"Our relationship with our customers is of the highest importance," said Bebe CEO Jim Wiggett. "We moved quickly to block this attack and have taken steps to further enhance our security measures."

In the past year, personal data on over 200 million Americans has been compromised thanks to lax security within retailer's systems.

Source:
Krebs

The YouTube for Android app has been updated to include the Material Design interface overhaul of Android 5.0 Lollipop.

With the update, YouTube adds a white background, a full navigation drawer and a tabbed toolbar in bright red.

YouTube's launch icon has been updated as well with more vibrant colors that match Google's other new updates.

On the technical side, the app has added support for "advanced search," a welcome relief for heavy YouTube users.

Source:
AndroidPolice

The US Marshals Service has confirmed that only 11 bidders took part in their second Bitcoin auction for the currency seized from illegal online marketplace Silk Road.

In the first auction, 45 bidders took part in the auction, with a total of 63 bids. The latest auction may have reflected a lack of enthusiasm or an investor exhaustion, with only 27 total bids for the 50,000 coins with a dollar value of $19 million. The first auction was for 30,000 Bitcoins.

Last June, when the first auction concluded, there was only one winner: Thomas Draper, a venture capitalist. Draper is assumed to have paid above market price in order to win all the available coins, which at the time was $570. Draper has taken a wash in his investment so far, with prices down at about $370 as of writing.

In total, there were 173,991 Bitcoins seized from the Silk Road raid and from its alleged operator, Ross Ulbricht.

Source:
NYT