Juha Saarinen: Sony hack rolls on

The Sony Pictures Entertainment hack that has focused attention on The Interview movie has hurting innocent people as well. Photo / AFP

The Sony Pictures Entertainment hack continues to roll on. Now, the alleged hackers (if it's them) are said to make new threats against the movie giant and have also released an archive thought to contain data related to SPE chief executive Michael Lynton.

Is it North Koreans furious over The Interview movie that features the assassination of the country's dictator Kim Jong Un? Who knows, but for SPE, the situation is getting worse with each leak of sensitive and embarrassing information.

No matter what you think of SPE as a company, it's important here to remember that the hack is hurting innocent people as well.

SPE employees have been threatened by the hackers who have also leaked people's personal information such as credit card and bank account details, medical records and more. Not just the employees, but their families' information as well.

Two former employees are now taking SPE to court saying the company didn't do enough to protect the purloined data. They also want compensation and importantly, credit monitoring and identity protection services for themselves and others whose financial and personal information might now be traded on the internet and used for fraud.

There is a definite dark side to the hack, and you have to wonder why SPE thought it was a good idea to store so much sensitive data on people.

At the same time, there's public interest material coming out of the SPE hack too. The Verge has sifted through some of the leaked information and found some startling stuff.

Take Google for instance: Hollywood really, really hates the search giant. So much so that it has set up Project Goliath through the Moving Pictures Association of America (MPAA) to go to war against Google.

In what sounds like a very dodgy plan, MPAA is trying to pressure United States federal attorney-generals into taking action against Google for "search engine piracy". The leaked documents mention a budget of US$500,000 a year to provide legal support for the US attorney-generals in their fight, which if correct should raise a few eyebrows in official quarters.

Beyond funding legal action, the leaked documents also point to forcing the introduction of site blocking by internet providers. That's happening in the UK for instance already, and it's not very effective.

To make site blocking work better, the MPAA is now thinking about targeting the Domain Name System or DNS, which translates between internet protocol addresses like 204.21.029.001 and names like nzherald.co.nz, the documents reveal.

Erase a domain that might have infringing material on it from the DNS and few users will be able to find it on the internet. This gets around the issue of sending masses of takedown notices to Google and other search engines and puts the onus on ISPs and DNS server operators to filter out offending sites.

The flipside of that though is that tinkering with the DNS would most likely break the internet but that kind of collateral damage doesn't seem to worry the MPAA.

Clearly such plans should be discussed and debated in detail and not unilaterally imposed on internet users without concern as to the damage they do. Without the SPE hack, we probably wouldn't have heard about Project Goliath or the DNS blocking until the last moment.

Gear: HP EliteBook Folio 1040 G1 Ultrabook

HP's Elitebook Folio 1040 G1 is awkwardly named, but it's a pretty good Windows laptop overall, slim and with clean design, light weight and good performance.

The model I was sent for review was kitted out with a fast dual-core 2.1GHz Intel Core i7 processor, a 14-inch touch screen with 1,920 by 1,080 pixel resolution, 8 gigabytes of memory and 256 gigabytes of very quick solid state storage - and it runs rather well, without getting hot.

There's docking station support, plenty of connectors and a SIM slot for 4G LTE cellular broadband - the Elitebook is aimed at mobile business people.

I tried out the Elitebook with the default Windows 7 Pro operating system and found that by now, I'm more used to Windows 8. If you don't hate the Windows 8.1 dual user interface, upgrading to it on the Elitebook 1040 G1 has a few bonuses like slight improvement in performance.

I also got up to an hour longer battery life with Windows 8.1, using HP's recommended power savings settings. Typically, I got five to six hours between charges.

Just to see if it would work, I also installed Linux Mint 17.1 on the Elitebook. Linux Mint 17.1 installs just fine on the Elitebook, with most of the hardware recognised (the fingerprint reader wasn't, along with the 4G LTE chip set, but that could probably be fixed manually.)

Battery life dropped to around four hours under Linux Mint 17.1 and the Elitebook ran noticeably warmer than under Windows. It's possible that that could be fixed too, but I didn't have time to figure it out.

The biggest drawback of the Elitebook 1040 G1 is the high price. It retails for around $3,200 in the configuration I had.

A Macbook Pro with 13.3-inch Retina screen, 3GHz dual-core i7 processor, 8GB RAM and 512GB of SSD storage goes for $2,819 including GST. The MacBook Pro can also run Windows and Apple promises nine hours of battery life, making the Folio Elitebook 1040 G1 look expensive in comparison.