Geohot makes a break for it!

(Ubergizmo) – Famed iPhone hacker turned PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz a.k.a Geohot, has reportedly fled to South America from his New Jersey home in an attempt to escape Sony in their ongoing court battle over hacking the video game console.

According to VGHQ, Hotz has not been complying with Sony’s requests to hand over hardware related to his PS3 hacking. Devices such as his computer hard drives were supposed to be forked over to Sony for inspection untouched, with all potential hacking tools in tact. In Sony’s defense, it wanted to search for any names and contacts of any co-hackers that worked with Hotz to break the system’s security and allow unsigned code to run on the machine.

Since then, Sony has apparently learned that Hotz had deleted “integral components??? from his hard drives and that the hacker lied to the Court about not having a PlayStation Network account.

[Full article at Ubergizmo.com]

Amy Adams for Elena Fisher? We vote yes.

Amy Adams possible pick for the role of journalist/love interest Elena Fisher in big-screen adaptation

(Gamespot) – David O. Russell’s The Fighter has been nominated for seven Oscars, but the Hollywood man isn’t just talking about his boxing film. In an interview with Empire Online, Russell discussed his next project, the big-screen adaptation of Naughty Dog’s action adventure Uncharted. He said he is currently mulling over ideas for the character of journalist/love interest Elena Fisher, who first appeared in the original Uncharted title.

“Ah, Elena. I’ve cultivated her quite a bit, and I think I’ve added a lot of dimension to her so that’s all I’m going to say,” he said. “I love the women characters and the more robust they are, the more robust the movie.”

Russell was also posed a question concerning his interest in having Amy Adams (Enchanted, Julie & Julia), the female lead of The Fighter, play Elena in the Uncharted film.

“Oh I would love that too; I love Amy [Adams],” he said. “I also love Scarlett Johansson (The Prestige, The Island); there’s a lot of great actors I think might suit. Hopefully, we’ll see how it works out with everybody who are being scoped to do that role.”

[Full article at Gamespot.com]

Playstation Phone for 2011?

Engadget has photos of what it says is a prototype Sony Ericsson slide-out phone with PlayStation-PSP–style gaming controls. The phone has a multitouch trackpad and purportedly will appear sometime next year running Android 3.0.

Rumors of an Android 3 PlayStation Phone first emerged in August, and according to Engadget, the phone’s screen is “in the range of 3.7 to 4.1 inches??? — they have photos, but not a copy of the phone itself.

The phone is also reported to have a 1-GHz Qualcomm processor, 512 MB of RAM and 1 GB of ROM.

Engadget also claims there will be a special Sony Marketplace offering Android apps for the device. Custom Android app stores for custom Android devices seem to be the thing to do: Barnes & Noble is getting ready to do just that for its new Nook Color.

Kotaku reported earlier this week that Sony executives were showing off a slide-out widescreen gaming device that the company was calling the PSP2. The Wall Street Journal reported this summer that Sony was working on adding 3G networking to its gaming devices, and on handheld devices offering wireless communication, gaming and e-reading.

Sony’s European division stated that the leaked photos are fakes, but then changed its official response to “no comment.???

[Source]

Too much PlayStation may cause painful lumps

LONDON (Reuters) – Gamers beware: Keeping too tight a grip on the console and furiously pushing the buttons can cause a newly identified skin disorder marked by painful lumps on the palms, Swiss scientists said on Tuesday.

Called “PlayStation palmar hidradentitis” by the scientists, the skin disorder can cause painful lesions on the palms similar to patches found on the soles of children’s feet after taking part in heavy physical activity, they said.

“The tight and continuous grasping of the hand-grips together with repeated pushing of the buttons produce minor but continuous trauma to the (palm) surfaces,” Vincent Piguet and colleagues at University Hospitals and Medical School of Geneva reported in the British Journal of Dermatology.

A spokesman for Sony Corp, which makes the PlayStation, noted the study involved one person and said the company had sold hundreds of millions of the consoles since the product was introduced in 1995.

“As with any leisure pursuit there are possible consequences of not following common sense, health advice and guidelines, as can be found within our instruction manuals,” Sony spokesman David Wilson said.

“We would not wish to belittle this research and we will study the findings with interest, but this is the first time we have ever heard of a complaint of this nature.”

Excessive gaming is already seen as a public health issue, sparking addictive behavior that can lead to a range of psychological problems, the researchers said.

Other researchers have identified acute tendonitis from playing too much of Nintendo Co Ltd’s Wii, and now a disorder related to the PlayStation can be added to the list, the team said.

Their study described the case of a 12-year-old girl who attended the Geneva hospital with intensely painful lesions on her hands, which she had developed four weeks earlier. She had no other lesions anywhere else on her body.

After questioning, the doctors discovered that several days prior to the appearance of the lesions the girl had started to play a game on her PlayStation for several hours each day.

The researchers suspected that grasping the console’s hand-grips together with repeated pushing of the buttons produced minor but prolonged injury to the palm of the girl’s hands, which can be made worse by sweating during a tense game.

The doctors recommended the girl stop playing and she recovered fully after 10 days, the researchers said.

“If you’re worried about soreness on your hands when playing a games console, it might be sensible to give your hands a break from time to time, and don’t play excessively if your hands are prone to sweating,” Nina Goad of the British Association of Dermatologists said in a statement.