It's now Monday, May 2nd. The PlayStation Network has been down since April 20th. Over the past twelve days and some odd hours (it was taken offline some time that Wednesday evening), some details have surfaced over what happened. It was determined that there was an external attack (hackers hacking) on Sony's online networking platforms (the PlayStation Network, their Qriocity music store, and recently, the Sony Online Entertainment...thing. Are they still calling it portal or hub?) There were some *ahem* liberties taken with the sparse information Sony has given the public and many conclusions were jumped to. This one I saw repeatedly: "Sony should burn because it in no way protected customer information at all and I'm going to sue them."
At the time, there was no evidence that the good folks at PlayStation hadn't protected customer's private information. From what Sony has said (and big companies never, ever mislead the public. Ever.), credit card data was/is encrypted and it does not appear that it was pulled in the "external attack." Then there came the reports that Sony's list of "77 million user's" credit card data was being sold off in chunks. Well, the problem with that statement (and the reason it's in quotes) is that only about 10 million users had active credit cards attached to their profiles. Also, on average, well over 25,000 people in the US alone are victims of identy theft daily. So the couple of people (and not saying it isn't related, but it could be a freaky coincidence) that have come forward with fraudulent charges being made around the time of the "external attack" very well could've had their credit card info nabbed in some other way.
And let's be real, if not for the credit card thing, what's on someone's profile that isn't, say, on Facebook or on one of a dozen data aggregate sites (once I found out that my cell number and home address was on these sites, I had it removed. It's a bit time consuming, but relatively easy.)?
Someone rudely accused me of defending big business, and that really isn't me. Rather than pointing fingers at Sony when there wasn't a whole lot of info to go on (there still isn't and we may never know just how beefy or not Sony's security was), I think that the gaming community would've been better served uniting in common desire to see justice served against the person(s) who hacked the system and caused such a lengthy blackout.
The only thing I really need the PSN for right now is to sync my trophies to my user profile so I can switch out hard drives (I purchased a much larger HDD without realizing that 1) the system was down and 2) that it required a connection at all), so the PSN being down isn't a big loss for me.
And I still blame this mess on that shmuck who thought it would be a good idea to release the PS3's root key online and didn't expect any retaliation in return. Yeah, you hacked the unhackable system, opened the floodgate for others to do with the system what they will, and you didn't expect anything bad to happen? Either to you (Sony has been accused of drawing the legal battle out in order to ramp up legal fees) or to your fellow gamers (who were the real victims in all this)? Good job there, guy. (And do you really think for one second this was just about Sony removing the ability to install another OS?)
And to those who say that Sony either should have had better security (still don't know how good it was) or that they deserve this, let me say this: If I were to break into your house, steal your wallet and computer, kick you in dangly bits, and run away, shouldn't I be the one getting the blame? This hypothetical you wouldn't say, "well, I guess the locks weren't good enough. I deserved to have all my stuff stolen and my dangly bits kicked in." No. That wouldn't happen.
To sum it up: I'm not pro-Sony (or big corporations), I'm pro-going after the person who perpetrated the attacks.
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