[More from Mashable: The 4 Biggest Stories in Tech, Marketing & Social Media This Morning]

Evidence seems to suggest that the Anonymous members who left breadcrumbs of their exploit on PlayStation servers may have been operating as a small anti-Sony faction within the larger group. This would explain Anonymous’s very public denials.

“An individual or handful of supporters of Anonymous’ well-publicised operation to disrupt Sony services – dubbed OpSony – went further than the rest of the free-speech campaigners expected when they broke into the electronics company’s network and stole account details, according to one person within the group,” reads the account.

[More from Mashable: Sony Teases New Android Honeycomb Tablets [VIDEO]]

An Anonymous hacker going by the handle Kayla told the Financial Times, “If you say you are Anonymous, and do something as Anonymous, then Anonymous did it … Just because the rest of Anonymous might not agree with it, doesn’t mean Anonymous didn’t do it.”

Meanwhile, those responsible are said be preparing an another attack against Sony’s website. The attack could come as soon as this weekend, according to a CNET report, and may be more devastating than the last to victims. The hackers have indicated that they’ve already obtained access to Sony servers and intend to publish customer names, credit card numbers and addresses copied in the breach.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Tencent, which operates China's most popular instant messaging platform, QQ, reported the figure during an earnings call on Wednesday. The company also said that its microblog service had a total of 160 million registered users in April.

The figure puts its on track to possibly surpass the U.S.-based Twitter, which has about 200 million registered user accounts. Tencent's microblogging platform was launched last year, and is based in a country with 457 million Web users, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

Tencent's closest rival is a microblog service offered by Sina, the operator of a top Chinese Internet portal site. Sina reported in early March that it's microblogging service had passed the 100 million mark.

Domestic microblogging services took off in China in 2009 after the government censors in the country blocked Twitter. The service was blocked following the breakout of ethnic riots in China's western Xinjiang region.

While both Tencent's and Sina's microblogging platforms are gaining popularity in China, they still operate under the strict scrutiny of the authorities. In February, the services blocked users from searching for the term "Jasmine", in reference to an anonymous protest against the Chinese government.

In spite of the censorship, microblogging platforms are expected to rise to the top of China's social networking market, according to analysts. In terms of user numbers, they have already begun to surpass Chinese Facebook-like sites such as Renren, which debuted on the New York Stock Exchange last week. Renren has 31 million active monthly users. Tencent's own social networking site, called Pengyou, has 101 million active monthly users.

The PlayStation Network links gamers worldwide in live play and serves the company’s Qriocity movie and music services.

The Details

Sony says the ID theft protection will be free for 12 months after enrollment. The company says PlayStation Network and Qriocity account holders should expect an email in coming days with instructions on how to enroll in the AllClear ID Plus program by Debix Inc.

Those who enroll will receive monthly status reports and alerts if the program detects their personal information is being misused. The program also includes an insurance policy that provides up to $1 million in relief for covered costs for a year after an identity theft incident.

Customers will have until June 18 to sign up for the program.

Background

Sony shut down its PlayStation Network on April 20, a day after it said it began investigating unusual activity. The company later disclosed a data breach that it said resulted from a sophisticated criminal attack designed to steal personal and credit card information.

Without offering a specific timeline, the company signaled in a blog post Thursday that service on the PlayStation Network could be restored soon.

Sony is also enticing potentially wary customers with a “welcome back” program that includes complimentary entertainment downloads and a 30-day membership to its PlayStation Plus premium service.

[More from Mashable: Microsoft Acquires Skype for $8.5 Billion]

Currently, Mexico City employs an earthquake warning system with radio warnings and sirens that don’t always go off, and some citizens report they cannot hear them.

Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, a likely contender in the 2012 presidential election, likes the idea for its simplicity. “I think we will have it in place soon, because it is not too complex,” he said. His administration is talking to several service providers to put the alert system in place.

[More from Mashable: For Top News Sites, Facebook Drives More Traffic Than Twitter [STATS]]

Twitter has shown to be a valuable tool during disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis on numerous occasions. After the devastating tsunami that hit Japan in March, Twitter users shared the tsunami’s estimated times of arrival on U.S. shores before the government issued an official tsunami warning.

[via Reuters, AP]

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Indian Country Today put out the call to its Facebook and Twitter followers Thursday in response to the U.S. military’s use of Geronimo as a code name for Osama bin Laden.

It asks followers and others to use the photo for the next two days to “honor the true spirit” of the 19th century warrior.

Geronimo profile pictures started popping up at the beginning of the week, after details of the raid that killed bin Laden came to light. The code name also prompted statements of disapproval from tribes, a call for President Barack Obama to apologize and scores of angry comments on social network sites.

At a hearing Thursday, tribal leaders told Congress that comparing Geronimo to a terrorist tarnished the raid’s achievement.

About 9.5 million Facebook users in the United States still do not use any type of privacy controls on the site, about one out of every five active users in the country, according to the "2011 Consumer Reports State of the Net Survey." The data is surprising, considering Facebook attempted to make some changes last year to address privacy concerns.

Education May Be the Answer

Facebook's problem may be that some users don't realize that they can control what they share. Consumer Reports found that two-thirds of these users not using the privacy controls didn't even know they existed.

"The fact that so many other Facebook users are still in the dark about the controls is troubling," Consumer Reports technology editor Jeffrey Fox wrote in a blog post. "These findings suggest that Facebook needs to further step up its efforts to inform users about the controls and make it easier to access them."

Privacy education isn't the only thing Facebook should be worrying about. Researchers found that about 7.5 million users were under the age of 13, the minimum age to use the site.

Facebook screens users and will reject those under 13, but getting in is as simple as falsifying your birth date. Worse yet, researchers believed that a large number of these profiles were unsupervised by their parents. Is this a problem? You bet: About one million children were harassed or cyberbullied on the site last year alone.

Just "Friend" Your Kid

There's a simple way these parents could be monitoring their children–simply adding them as a "friend." But surprisingly enough, only 18 percent of parents were doing so for those under 10. For those between 13 and 18, it was much higher at 62 percent.

While we may like to think our children are innocent and angelic when they're little, leaving them unsupervised on the Internet is never a good idea. If you're a parent, take the time to ensure your child is safe on Facebook. A little effort could certainly go a long way.

For more tech news and commentary, follow Ed on Twitter at @edoswald and on Facebook.

To get a more in-depth look at how the Bin Laden news broke on Twitter, New York-based company SocialFlow conducted an extensive analysis of nearly 15 million tweets related to Osama bin Laden. With that information, they created this galactic flow chart (above) that shows how Keith Urbahn, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff — but a relatively a smaller player in the Twitterverse — came to be this week’s most influential news-maker.

“A full hour before the formal announcement of Bin-Laden’s death,” writes Social Flow in a blog post, “Keith Urbahn posted his speculation on the emergency presidential address. Little did he know that this Tweet would trigger an avalanche of reactions, Retweets and conversations that would beat mainstream media as well as the White House announcement.”

As Social Flow notes, Urbahn was not the first person to speculate that the impending news from the White House was the death of Bin Laden. A number of other tweeters, including Libertarian political commentator @commentkazi, @kerrioki and @speechboy71, a Senior Fellow at the American Security Project, who goes by Michael Cohen offline, speculated on Twitter that Osama bin Laden had been killed. But it was Urbahn’s 10:24pm EST tweet, “So I”m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn,” that took flight, and made the news official.

“The rate at which Keith’s message spread was staggering,” writes SocialFlow. “Within a minute, more than 80 people had already reposted the message, including the NYTimes reporter Brian Stelter. Within two minutes, over 300 reactions to the original post were spreading through the network. These numbers represent the people who either retweeted Keith’s original message, or posted a reaction to it. The actual number of impressions (people who saw Keith’s message in their stream but didn’t repost it) is substantially higher.”

In addition to Stelter, who has a 50,000-strong following on Twitter, other influential Twitter accounts added momentum to Urbahn’s scoop. Those accounts included @ObamaNews, Fox News personality @andylevy and popular website @LaughingSquid.
As SocialFlow concludes, the wildfire spread of Urbahn’s tweet was due to the “influence” of those who tweeted the news, the “trust” people had in the validity of the sources, and the sheer amount of people who were on Twitter, trying to discover what all the fuss was about.

“Keith Urbahn wasn’t the first to speculate Bin Laden’s death, but he was the one who gained the most trust from the network,” concludes SocialFlow. “And with that, the perfect situation unfolded, where timing, the right social-professional networked audience, along with a critically relevant piece of information led to an explosion of public affirmation of his trustworthiness.”

Click here for a full-resolution version of the SocialFlow Twitter chart.

There's no native iOS app for Amazon's Cloud Player, such as the one for Android smartphone owners, but instead, you can listen to your songs stored online via Safari, the built-in browser on iOS. And as TechCrunch and Engadget note, it works like a charm.

To get it working, you just have to point Safari on an iPhone or iPad to the Amazon Cloud Player site. A warning page will tell you that your browser is not supported, but you'll just have to ignore that. Once you're past the warning screen, you're in: you can see all your songs stored on Amazon's servers.

You then just have to select the song or playlist you want to play, and music will start streaming to your iOS device. It even works with the iOS multitasking and volume controls (play/pause/skip songs), so you can listen in the background while playing your favorite game. If a call or push notification comes through, music will pause, just like you would be listening from the native iPod app.

Using the Amazon Cloud Player Web interface from iOS has its caveats though: you can't do drag and drop to rearrange songs in playlists, and you can't upload files because it requires Flash. The latter shouldn't be a big problem, as probably most users of Amazon Cloud Player upload their songs via a regular computer. But this basic iOS compatibility should be enough for iPhone and iPad owners until Apple unveils its own cloud music service.

Follow Daniel Ionescu and Today @ PCWorld on Twitter

Available now in the App Store for purchase, Adobe Eazel, Nav, and Color Lava cost between $1.99 and $4.99 and require Adobe Photoshop CS5 (v12.0.4).

Until the release of Creative Suite 5.5, which added iPad support to Photoshop, Adobe customers haven't been able to take advantage of integration. All that changes today.

The most expensive app, Adobe Eazel ($4.99) lets customers paint with their fingertips, with support for both "wet" and "dry" paints. Users can send their iPad-based paintings to Photoshop CS5 for additional composting.

With Adobe Color Lava ($2.99), creative professionals can mix colors by hand to create custom swatches and themes—those, too, can be transferred back to Photoshop for desktop use.

Finally, customers can use their iPad as a wireless input surface using Adobe Nav ($1.99). This includes creating new files, opening existing files, and accessing (16) frequently used Photoshop tools. The prospect of using your iPad as second screen for Photoshop is sure to attract further developer attention.

Thanks to Adobe's new Photoshop Touch software development kit, which allows developers to create mobile apps that interoperate with Photoshop, these companion applications represent the first batch of apps with the promise of many more to come. While the first three products are iPad-exclusive, the development platform isn't limited to iOS. A new scripting engine, Adobe Photoshop Touch SDK, opens the platform to both Android and Blackberry tablets.

Market analysis firm IDC pas published its Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker data for the first quarter of 2011, and the results show consumers are jumping on the smartphone bandwagon like never before. According to IDC, worldwide sales of smartphones reached 99.6 million units during the first quarter of the year, a 79.7 percent increase over the 55.4 million units shipped in the same quarter a year ago. The reasons? Consumer demand, of course, fueled by both the availability of highly-anticipated new devices along with lower price points for older or basic smartphones that let users get their foot in the door.

“The rise of Android as a prominent mobile operating system has allowed several suppliers to gain share quickly,” adds IDC senior research analyst Kevin Restivo, in a statement. “Also, the relatively nascent state of smartphone adoption globally means there is ample room for several suppliers to comfortably co-exist, at least for the short term.”

IDC still pegs Nokia as the largest maker smartphones on the planet—this despite largely ignoring the North American market and still struggling to come up with a response to Apple’s industry-changing iPhone. According to IDC, Nokia still accounted for 24.3 percent of the global smartphone market in the first quarter of 2011—and while that figure represents a 12.6 increase over the company’s shipments a year ago, it’s well behind the overall growth rate of the smartphone market. IDC ranked Apple as the number-two smartphone vendor with an 18.7 percent share during the first quarter of the year; Canada’s Research in Motion came in third with a 14 percent share, Samsung managed fourth place with a 10.8 percent share, and HTC came in fifth with an 8.9 percent share.

Although Apple posted very strong growth for the quarter—moving within 6 million units of Nokia—the strongest growth was actually seen by Samsung, which saw a 350 percent year-on-year increase in smartphone shipments, riding the success of its high-end Galaxy S smartphone line along with Galaxy Ace and Galaxy Mini devices at lower price points. And, although it’s not available in the North American market, smartphones running Samsung’s Bada operating system continue to do good business.