Sony's big announcement is today's worst kept secret on the Internet.

Sony Needs to Work On Keeping Secrets Although Sony is still only referring to it as the, "future of Playstation," everyone knows that tonight's press conference at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City will be for the reveal of Sony's Playstation 4, codenamed Orbis. An image of the next generation system's controller was leaked last week, and rumors of cloud and smartphone integration have been making the rounds. The traditional video game market--and Sony in particular--have been struggling financially (more on that below). Industry experts are hoping that a new gaming arms race between Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft can reinvigorate game sales. The PS4 is rumored to have a November release date.

Because GIFs Need to Be More Complicated Vimeo is getting into the GIF making business, or at least the GIF-video making business, after buying mobile app Echograph last week. Echograph, created in 2011, takes a frame from a 5-second video on your phone or tablet and animates certain sections of the image to make a partially moving picture (think of it as a cross between Vine and GIFs). The app, which previously cost $2.99, will now be free as Vimeo takes over Clear-Media, the company which created Echograph, and moves its employees into their mobile division.

Changing The Game (Market) In another sign that people would rather play Angry Birds than World of Warcraft, Super Data released their first public figures on the digital games market, and to no one's surprise, the market is doing pretty well, albeit in a very different way. Since January of last year, sales have increased 39 percent, or $960 million, but that figure doesn't reveal the major changes that overtook the market in 2012. Whereas console, social media, and MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) games previously lead the way, mobile and downloadable games are now at the forefront, with sales more than double their totals from last year.

Promoted Tweets Are Going to Get a Little More Personal As if you didn't already hate those personalized ads on your Facebook, get ready for a similar experience on Twitter. The social media giant is releasing their advertising API today to specific clients and advertisers so that they can send more personalized and focused tweets to the over 200 million active users of Twitter. The move makes sense, considering the success of Promoted Tweets since its release in 2010, although this new API could face backlash from users in the same way that Facebook users retaliated when that site first began hyper-personalized advertising.

Outer Space Needs An App NASA will be hosting a meet-and-greet February 25 at AlleyNYC (500 Seventh Ave., 13th Floor) to discuss potential ideas for the space program's April 20th International Space Apps Challenge, "a two-day technology development event during which citizens from around the world will work together to address current challenges relevant to both space exploration and social need." The event is open to the public, so if you're in the New York area and think your idea for an app would only really work in a zero-gravity environment, check it out.

Progress in Polyamory Valentine's Day may already be far in your rearview mirror, but that doesn't mean the flood of dating apps is anywhere near stopping, and one of the newest app's in the dating sphere is Martini. A self-touted improvement of Grouper, Martini, which was released last year, "gives users more control over the group meetup experience. Instead of forcing groups on blind dates, we allow our users to make the very important decisions of who and where to meetup." So if you and your friends were holding off on group dating because you thought you would all go for the same guy/girl, you now have no excuse.

Welcome to The Fiternet In a move that seems a little ironic, Pintrest will be posting workout and diet tips from the reality show The Biggest Loser during its weekly broadcasts, in the hopes that users will subsequently leave their computers and work on their physical health instead. During the work out and health segments of the show, pop ups will appear on screen directing viewers to check out the Pintrest page, which will give more direct instruction on what is seen on the show. We suppose this offets all the cupcake porn.

Michael Jackson

Eventually, everything will be hacked. That feels like the takeaway from the revelation that enterprising hackers have ganked late music superstar Michael Jackson's back catalog--over 50,000 files. It appears to be the hacking equivalent of a major bank heist if you factor in the amount paid to Jackson's estate when the catalogue was purchased 2 years ago:

Record company bosses paid $250 million (£156 million) to Jackson's estate in 2010 for the catalogue, including unheard material from studio sessions when the superstar recorded Off The Wall, Thriller and Bad.

According to a report in the U.K. Sunday Times, Sony found "a breach" in their system that revealed the loss. Contact Music reports songs include Jackson performing with the likes of Freddie Mercury and will.i.am. Sony has been aware of the loss for almost a year but only acknowledged it yesterday.

Silicon Valley startup Nicira, which raised $50 million last year, opened to the public today and announces impressive customer list including AT&T, Fidelity and eBay [Business Insider]

Ten-thousand tweets per second in the final three minutes of the Super Bowl [TechCrunch]

Sony and Panasonic expect heavy losses [Business Week]

Surprise, surprise, Facebook still has deleted photos on its servers after three years [Ars Technica]

Ouhhhhhh, burn. People in SOPA-supporting Hollywood giants should stop throwing stones. Using a new site called You Have Downloaded, a Russian-based service that says it tracks about 20 percent of all public BitTorrent downloads, the fine folks at TorrentFreak took a look at IP addresses at entertainment conglomerates likes Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fox Entertainment and NBC Universal to see "whether these companies hold themselves to the same standards they demand of others."

As you might expect, that's a giant negative.

Using the IP ranges of those studios, TorrentFreak found evidence of music, movies, and TV shows downloaded via BitTorrent—and that's just the visible 20 percent.

And then there are the fine upstanding people at Fox Entertainment checking out the work of a competing studio. Perhaps downloading ‘Super 8′ can be branded as “market research,” but in this instance actually paying for the DVD might be more appropriate.

After all, when Fox notices that one of their own movies has leaked online they quickly contact the FBI to get the offender jailed. Ouch.

Yesterday, a Dutch blog called Geenstijl performed a similar stunt on Buma/Stemra, a local music royalty collecting agency that downloaded the video game Battlefied 3 and episodes of "Entourage." Buma/Stemra quickly claimed their IP addresses were spoofed. TorrentFreak calls bullshit, but welcomes the scam, writing, "After all, if it’s so easy to spoof an IP-address, then accused file-sharers can use this same defense against copyright holders."

Betabeat is more concerned with why anyone would risk making their employer look like a big fat internet-destroying hypocrite (which, they are) for the 2011 version of "Conan the Barbarian." It was in 3D, for chrissakes!

"Citigroup joins Google and Sony in victims club," says the headline in the International Business Times. We have a Citibank card. Can we be in the victim's club too?

Javiar Soriano - AFP/Getty

When there is a group of hackers who call themselves Anonymous and have no centralized membership criteria other than remaining anonymous, it is tempting to try to blame a massive security breach on them.

It is even more tempting when they took responsibility for an earlier security breach that made massive amounts of customer information. Oh, and when they admitted to attack your web site, a few weeks prior to the criminal hack.

But when you are the CEO of Sony and are already under fire for not telling people about the breach until a week after it happened, you may be forced to admit that basically, you have no idea what happened.

Sony declined to attend a hearing hosted by the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade called "The Threat of Data Theft to American Consumers,” but did respond to a letter they had received from the subcommittee. They also posted the letter on their website. Had they read the letter they were responding to more carefully, they might have known that blog-posting does not go over well with the subcommittee.

“In Sony’s case, company officials first revealed information about the data breach on their blog. That’s right. A blog. I hate to pile on, but—in essence—Sony put the burden on consumers to "search" for information, instead of accepting the burden of notifying them. If I have anything to do with it, that kind of half-hearted, half-baked response is not going to fly in the future,” wrote committee chairperson Rep. Mary Bono Mack.

The last week and a half has pushed the issue of data management to the front of the national consciousness. The "discovery" that Apple's iPhone was "tracking" users location raised the biggest outcry, probably because it was simple to understand and affected a wide swath of Americans.

The Sony hack, on the other hand, is more troubling in many ways, but has attracted far less attention outside the gaming community. The company was under attack for six weeks before they announced it to the public, claiming they weren't certain if any customer data had been obtained as well.

When they finally came clean, with the generous offer of a month of free service, it was only 24 hours before Sony was forced to cop to another breach, this time of their Sony Online Entertainment platform, which hosts popular role playing games like Everquest. Turns out this attack actually came first, Sony just discovered it second.