The Columbus Dispatch reports that 23-year-old Todd M. Miller has been sentenced to one year of house arrest for his part in the 2008 security breach of Sony's PlayStation Network. Miller wasn't convicted on charges directly related to the hacking, but for destroying computers the FBI was interested in investigating related to the crime. Miller was sentenced last week.

Last July South Korea began enforcing a law that would keep teens under the age of 16 from playing games during a six hour block at night. The law was dubbed the "Shutdown Law" and promised strict enforcement and punishment for places where teens go to play online whether that be a cyber cafe or using online services such as the PlayStation Network or Xbox Live.

According to this Bloomberg report Sony executives have agreed to forgo salary bonuses for the second year in a row following another year of less than stellar profits from the electronics giant. According to a Sony spokesperson (speaking to Bloomberg), around 40 of the company's executives will return bonuses scheduled to be paid out following a general shareholders meeting this June.

An interesting story via the Huffington Post (based on this CBC report) details sexual predators in the United States using online games and consoles to talk to children in Canada. This particular report focuses on Winnipeg, but it's not far-fetched to imagine that if it's happening in one province, it's happening to some degree in other provinces as well.

Sony Computer Entertainment Japan and Sony Computer Entertainment Asia have been consolidated into one business unit operating within Sony, according to this press release - as uncovered by Kotaku. The combined operation will now be called Sony Computer Entertainment Japan Asia.

When Diablo 3 lands on the PS3 and PS4 it won't have some of the features or the requirements that its PC counterpart currently has. According to Polygon, a Blizzard official told them at PAX East this weekend that Diablo 3 will not require a constant internet connection in order to play.

Fans of Level-5's 2010 RPG White Knight Chronicles will be sad to hear that Sony is pulling the plug on online game servers June 18. A tweet about the same thing happening to White Knight Chronicles 2 online servers from the official PlayStation Twitter account was tweeted but has since disappeared.

The controversial God of War: Ascension trophy "Bros before Hos" will be renamed to "Bros Before Foes" via a day-one update, according to a statement sent to Joystiq by developer Sony Santa Monica. The trophy caused a bit of a controversy last week when Adam Sessler and other complained about its sexist nature.

Update: PlayStation Lifestyle has an extensive trophy list (may contain spoilers) that lists the "Bros before Hos" trophy being earned by escaping the "Fury ambush," and not by simply curb stomping a Fury.

CCP Games announced that its long-running subscription-based sci-fi MMO EVE Online has surpassed the 500,000 subscriber mark worldwide for the first time in the game’s history. The milestone is a major one in the game's ten years of operation and follows the December 4 release of EVE Online: Retribution, the game’s 18th free expansion. CCP says that this latest expansion is its most successful ever. Also in December, EVE Online relaunched in China with new partner Tiancity to bring the game to a massive new audience where it has been thriving ever since.

Diablo 3 for the PS3 and PS4 will not feature cross-platform play but it will include an offline mode for PS3 and PS4 players. PC players cannot play the game without being connected to Battle.net - even when playing single-player. The clarification on cross-platform play was made by the game's community manager Vaeflare on the Battle.net forums.

If you have ever left your PS3 untouched for a long period of time, chances are that the next time you turn it on you'll have to download and install a firmware update. The problem with this has always been that you can do nothing while this is happening - and if your connection is spotty at times - waiting for it to download can take what seems like an eternity.

Engadget is reporting that the new PlayStation 4 console from Sony will not allow you to transfer all of those PlayStation Network games you might have purchased on the PS3. Sony admitted last night that current-generation PSN titles won't be playable on the system because architecture of the Power-PC-based PS3 and x86-64 based AMD processor powering the PlayStation 4 are so different.

Tonight is the night that Sony will make some sort of announcement about the future of the PlayStation brand. Some speculate that it will be more details on their next system, commonly referred to as the "PS4." Hopefully there will be some other surprises like game announcements, new features for the technology they already have on the market now and - with any luck - a price cut to the North American and European versions of the PS Vita hand-held - which currently cost as much as a brand new PS3.

DealNews, a web site dedicated to bringing you all the latest news on all the hottest items past and present makes a pretty bold prediction: After Sony makes its big announcement (it is presumed) about the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation 3 will see a price drop of 64 percent at retail. They base this price drop percentage on historical retail data for the PS3 versus the PS2 and the Wii U versus the Wii. Here is the crux of the argument:

Earlier this week we reported that the Chinese government was considering lifting a 13-year ban on game consoles in the country. While there's plenty of black market devices and software for Chinese consumers, there's no way to legally buy a PS3, Xbox 360, or Nintendo device in the country. The story from a few days ago was based on a China Daily report that quoted an anonymous source inside the Ministry of Culture.

Sony has confirmed with IGN that PlayStation All-Stars developer SuperBot has laid off a number of its staff. An SCEA spokesperson told the publication that work would continue on PlayStation All-Stars DLC to be released in the next few months despite the smaller staff at the studio. Sony did not confirm just how much of the staff had been laid off.

Citing a government source, the 13-year-old ban of consoles in China may be coming to an end. According to sources cites by China Daily the seven Chinese government ministries that banned the sale of consoles in the country in 2000 are opening up discussions on allowing them to be sold to Chinese citizens.

The United Kingdom has levied a fine of £250,000 against Sony for the PlayStation Network security breach that occurred in 2011 that put the personal information of 77 million customers at risk, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) announced. The government's agency in charge of data protection called the Sony security breach a "serious breach of the Data Protection Act" and note that - if Sony's security had been up to date - the attack "could have been prevented."

Eurogamer reports that actor Jerry Lambert has settled a lawsuit with Sony over his part in a Bridgestone ad where he played an engineer playing a Wii video game. In 2012 Sony sued Bridgestone and the actor because they claimed that Lambert's engineer character in the ad was too much like its popular fictitious PS3 spokesperson Kevin Butler.

While many think that the Nintendo Wii has won the overall race in this current console cycle against Xbox 360 and PS3 in the United States, one research firm says that it will ultimately be Microsoft's console that sits at the top of the mountain. DFC Intelligence's new report predicts that more Xbox 360s will be sold in the US than Wiis by 2017. The research firm is forecasting that Xbox 360 will have sold over 46 million units in the US by 2017, while the Wii is estimated at just over 42 million. Sony's PS3 comes in at 33.5 million.

A number of Activision's James Bond games have disappeared from Valve software's Steam digital distribution platform, Xbox 360's Games on Demand service and Activision's own store, according to GameSpot.

The results are in, the votes have been tallied and the sole light in my mom's windowless, basement bathroom burnt out while I was taking a shower this morning.  It's time to reveal which of the current consoles GamePolitics poll participants think has the dumbest name!

A particularly light and fluffy question for this week's poll, GP faithful:

Which of the current crop of video game consoles do you think has the dumbest name?

Is it the Wii?  It's the Wii, isn't it?

Yeah, it's probably the Wii.

Gearbox Software has finally issued an update that deals with the bug that stripped some players of their "Badass tokens" in Borderlands 2. The update for the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game enables the game to analyze save games and detect Badass Rank that might have been lost due to the glitch. Players first reported issues with their Badass Tokens inexplicably disappearing.

Episode 5 of Telltale's horror adventure series The Walking Dead based on the popular comic series took the top spot on the PlayStation Store charts for the month of November, according to Sony. In fact all five episodes in the series managed to make the Top 20. Coming is second was Assassin's Creed 3, followed by Sonic Adventure 2, Okami HD, and PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.

The creative team behind Adult Swim's Robot Chicken animated show detail a special episode of the show on the PlayStation Blog. The special episode, airing tonight at 10 PM ET during the Adult Swim mature cartoon block on Cartoon Network - features an imaginative PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale skit. Apparently Sony approached the Robot Chicken folks to create this special episode:

In Episode 29 of the Super Podcast Action Committee hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight discuss the shaky launch of the Wii U console over the weekend, Sony perma-bans for PS3 'hackers,' and the good and bad side of Electronic Arts. It's a show to remember unless you stopped that Wii U firmware update - then it's a painful reminder that getting your brand new console 'bricked' kind of sucks! Download it now: SuperPAC Episode 29 (1 hour, 19 minutes) 73 MB.

Multi-platform TV and movie streaming service Crackle today unveiled a new PlayStation 3 application, making its full suite of ad-supported, full-length movies, television series and original programming more easily accessible to all PlayStation 3 users in the United States and Canada. Along with the PS3 App, Crackle recently re-launched on Sony Entertainment Network (SEN), offering a "premium user-experience" to those accessing Crackle from Sony Connected Devices such as BRAVIA TVs and Blu-ray players.

Sony has begun taking steps to secure the PlayStation Network to deal with the threat of the PS3 lv0 boot loader key leak and the ability for hacked consoles to play online alongside legitimate users.