Sony blames Anonymous for hack

Sony has blamed online vigilante group Anonymous for indirectly allowing the security breach that let a hacker gain access to the personal data of more than 100 million online gamers, writes the BBC.

In a letter to the US Congress, Sony said the breach came at the same time as it was fighting a denial-of-service attack from Anonymous.

Denial-of-service attacks take servers down by overwhelming them with traffic. The online vigilante group has denied being involved in the data theft.

The IT services sector will be buoyed by reports that global business spending on IT services increased by 3.1% since 2009 to reach $793 billion in 2010, according to Gartner, writes Computing.co.uk.

The IT service market saw a 5.1% revenue decline in 2009, but has bounced back in 2010, as the effects of the global recession of 2008 and 2009 begin to die down.

IBM remains the dominant force in the market, retaining its number-one market share position. The company's revenue increased by 2.6% to a total of $56.4 billion, amounting to a 7.1% market share.

Facebook and Google are reportedly pondering either an acquisition of Skype or a joint venture and strategically the two buyers couldn't be more different, reports Cnet.

Reuters reports that Facebook and Google are pondering some sort of deal with Skype, which delayed an initial public offering. Talks are very early so it's unclear what will happen, if anything.

Skype, of late, has been making a lot of nice business-to-business moves. It has a channel, key partnerships and an entry to small businesses as well as large ones.

Doctored photos purporting to show Osama bin Laden's corpse rocketed around the world on television, online via social media and in print almost as soon as his death was announced, writes the Associated Press.

The pictures have spread without regard for their origin or whether the images are real. Meanwhile, scammers have piggybacked on the popularity of the images and spiked supposed online links with computer viruses.

Newsrooms and the public have been left in the tough spot of deciding what to believe when software has made doctoring photographs easier than ever. And the hunger for visual evidence of Bin Laden's death may only grow now that President Barack Obama has said the government's photos will remain classified.