VidZone, the popular free PS3 music video service, will begin a full EU rollout this month, 5 months after it launched to much fanfare in the UK.
Starting on November 23rd, the service will be available in the Netherlands, Portugal and Austria and in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland on December 3.
Finally, on December 10th, users in Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and New Zealand will get access.
The service has exclusive video deals with many big record labels and is very popular in the UK. Users are reminded that when loading VidZone for the first time, that the service will take up to 15 minutes to completely load.
Result for: 15 minutes
Ben Creasey, VidZone’s head of production, has announced the update of the service, and the inclusion of a good number of improvements.
The full list of improvements, via the Europe PSN blog:
Pre-roll advertising will be shown no more than once every 15 minutes – No more adverts after every video, guaranteed!
16:9 support, true full screen display – This means that if the video is shot in widescreen, it will display in its full widescreen glory on your TV.
Virtual Keyboard is now supported in Search – Use your external or the standard PlayStation virtual keyboard to type instead of scrolling through each letter.
VidZone Search is faster and improved – Faster searching and you are now able to search for special characters (ie you can now search for P!nk etc)
Start up time is reduced – No more waiting about to get partying!
Audio volume on music videos can now be normalized – Each video will play at the same volume meaning no more volume control surfing
PlayStation Network presence now shows the music video being watched in VidZone on the XMB™ friends list – Your friends will now know what you are watching so no more secret Celine Dion video viewing sessions!
Support for PlayStation Store purchases in Download menu – Videos will link to equivelant RockBand track in the PlayStation Store with more game/product links coming soon.
Default settings are now saved – If you have turned the clicker off, it will remember it for the next time you open VidZone.
Cache has been increased – VidZone will store more of your last viewed videos on the PlayStation’s hard drive so you don’t have to stream so much data.
[More]>>
Result for: 15 minutes
Two researchers plan to provide details at next week’s PacSec 2008 conference in Tokyo on how Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is vulnerable to attack. Of course, this does not mean that WPA is as vulnerable to compromise in the same way that Wired-Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is, far from it in fact. The weakness in WPA is being reported by Martin Beck and Erik Tews, two graduate students in Germany. The attack could make it possible to compromise certain communications in less than 15 minutes.
The researchers found the weakness in the lesser of two WPA security protocol, Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP). Attackers can use the techniques to decrypt limited communications and can recover a special integrity checksum and send up to seven custom packets to clients on the network, according to SecurityFocus.
“The new attack on WPA is not a complete key recovery attack,” Tews said in an email to SecurityFocus. “It just allows you to decrypt packets and inject packets with custom content. But there is only a single short-term key recovered during the attack.”
