Monday 25 April 2011

It's around about 99 hours and counting....

...that the Playstation network has been down. Unless you have your head buried in the sand, or you just don't play video games, you can't have missed that Sony are having a few "challenges" at the moment.

Last week, the Playstation network went down, and was at first thought to be scheduled maintenance on the service. After still being down for a couple of days, people started to ask questions...."is it Skynet?"....."maybe it's hackers?"...."maybe the people of Japan are still struggling after the tens of thousands that died in the Tsunami, and the countries infrastructure, while still in tatters, is taking a while to get back to normal operation levels....maybe that's why PSN is down?".

Regardless, Sony has finally announced that it indeed has been hacked. Who? Where? Why?...are the questions on peoples minds. Gamefreakblog reader cleft Palate has his ideas about why this happened, so pop along and check out what he has to say on his blog.

As with all of my reader contributions.....HIS THOUGHTS AND WORDS ARE HIS OWN OPINION. YOU HEARD, IT'S HIS OPINION. NOT MINE, NOT YOURS.....HIS WORDS!

You can find it right about here!!!


Your thoughts, as always, are appreciated.

*EDIT* I'm going all out to confirm this from a source, but i've just heard this;

"In case anyone was wondering, PSN HAS NOT be shut off due to an attack from anonymous.

What really happened was a custom firmware was released last week that allowed people to basically pirate games, add-on content, etc. from PSN. Once Sony caught wind of this, they shut the system down, and are now rebuilding with a new master key.

Still, the way they are handling it is a bit silly, but then again, it is a free service. They don't owe the majority of you anything."

As soon as I get any news, i'll add it to this post.

*EDIT* Some more details have come to light, regarding custom firmware and credit card details. Check out this link for some more details. I've fired off several emails now seeking details on some of the points raised. As always, as soon as I hear anything i'll post it back up here. Looks like certain concerns have been raised about the way Sony encrypts the data regarding your credit cards.


Look here for the updated news.
-s

8 comments:

  1. are you kidding? don't owe me anything? i pay for both hulu and netflix and can't access either of them from my PS3 without the PSN... A huge inconvenience as they are my only content providers to my living room.

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  2. What if your a paying playstation plus member, do they owe you something?

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  3. Once they provided the service, they made a commitment to support it so yes they owe something. This isn't a service that's managed by volunteers.

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  4. Hey hey guys, hold on...that's not me saying they don't owe you anything, that was a quote from the person that sent me the info, info he's yet to verify with a source. For people that pay for the services that you pay for of course they owe you for the downtime, and I think it would be a PR disaster for Sony if they didn't provide some sort of compensation for the loss that PSN users have suffered.

    I'm going to contact the guy that forwarded me that particular information. Until he is able to confirm what he says, consider it as rumour/heresay. I'm just posting it up there, not to generate talking points, but because if correct opens up a whole new can of worms.

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  5. I wrote a blog entry about the PSN outage as well:http://theconsuminator.blogspot.com/2011/04/playstation-network-outage-make-best-of.html

    It seems that Xbox Live fanboys have come running and are bashing the PSN in full force, forgetting that Xbox Live had an outage that lasted 11 days in 2007. Outages happen, and I'm glad they shut the system down if there was a chance that the service (not to mention my private information) could be further compromised. It sucks for gamers, but there are plenty of good single-player games they can enjoy during the PSN downtime. The world is not ending!

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  6. Very good article there my friend. And one I totally agree with. In this online age it doesn't take much for the online networks to throw a wobbly, and as you correctly say the whole fiasco when XBL was down seems to have been forgotten in all of this.

    Sony's PR have been pretty shit though, it has to be said. When Live was down at least there was constant updates, and they compensated everyone afterwards. So i'd expect Sony to do the same. I've just talked to a friend who was bitching about it being down...this coming from a man who has yet to complete Black ops or Red Dead single player. He sometimes goes for days without playing online, and now that it's down he's choosing to bitch. I told him to play his single player games and stop whining!

    No pleasing some people...he he

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  7. You can still use Netflix, hulu, the psn browser if you want. Netflix will pop up an error box a couple times, just say ok to it and it will load up normally. At least that was case for me last night. I agree with most of you here, stop bitching and play single player! Or PC game it on steam :-) Consoles can't touch TF2 or all the modded L4D2 maps out there. Or shit! GO OUTSIDE!

    That is all...

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  8. Thanks for the info Chris. I noted the browser was still running as normal.

    And yeah....GO OUT PEOPLE! At least go and look at games you can't play at the moment....he he. Or sit on Youtube with a pad in your hand, pretending you're brilliant at your chosen game...

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