Slow measured applause towards Sony
I have to hand it to Sony sometimes. I love my Playstation 3, and I love the Playstation Network. I even side with them on the issue of people cheating in online games. It’s their ham-fisted approach to solving the problem that I hate.
Never mind that the kind of people who cheat in online games have all the maturity of a 3rd grader, but they’ve actually honed skills to allow them to cheat. What did you think was going to happen when you started to ban them? They were going to leave you alone?
Well, the PSN has been down now since about Thursday. Nobody’s come out to claim responsibility for the attack that took down the entire network. Big surprise there. Thankfully Sony is taking the opportunity to beef up security server-side to help protect them from an inevitable attack in the future. Only time will be able to tell if what they’re doing will be enough.
The big question is: how long will Sony take? With three big games out last week: Portal 2, Mortal Kombat and Socom 4, all of which use online multiplayer, Sony’s gotta be feeling the sting of angry basement dwellers the world over. My prediction: we’ll probably be waiting until Tuesday evening before the network comes back up. Sony generally releases updates, patches and, let’s not forget, new products to the online store on Tuesdays, so they would either be extremely silly or extremely hard hit if they go much longer past that.
In the meantime, I’m going to continue trying to play co-op mode in Portal 2 by myself.
Update (April 26th): Well, it seems like it’s not just an attack, but account information and credit card numbers have also been stolen, although Sony either doesn’t know or won’t say who or exactly what is affected. I’ve often complained about not being able to use my credit card on the Playstation Network, but now I’m kind of glad. At most, I’ll likely need to change my password. For those of you out there who need to call their credit card companies right now: I feel for you.
Tags: anonymous, cheaters, hackers, Mortal Kombat, network, outage, playstation 3, Portal, PSN, Socom 4, sony