Sony Shuts Down PlayStation Network Indefinitely(blogs.wsj.com) |
Sony Shuts Down PlayStation Network Indefinitely(blogs.wsj.com) |
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/gx6o4/im_a_moderator...
His take (and he admits it is speculation but it sounds quite plausible) was that a custom PS3 firmware called Rebug gave Playstations Developer-level access to the network, which allowed you to do a whole lot of things without much authentication (input from dev. consoles was trusted far too blindly). This firmware permitted all kinds of shenanigans, up to and including allowing credit cards without validation.
I haven't seen any official comment from Sony on the topic, but there is further speculation that a lot of stored information may have been compromised and that wholesale theft via unvalidated CCs has gone on. Quite a serious breach, and a very poor show on behalf of Sony to blindly trust user input like that from dev. consoles if this turns out to be true.
It's technically correct, but when you hear about something "shutting down indefinitely" you don't think "oh, that's all right, they'll be back up soon".
In the end, I think this is for the best, though. With the NGP releasing this year and with all the movement Sony's making towards Android + Playstation products, it just means more (potential) security risks as the network grows. Better to get it over with now before it becomes a bigger problem later.
Frustrated with this, I took a few hours and wrote http://isthepsndown.com/. Obviously it's pretty useless at the moment, PSN being down wholesale, but I am hoping in the future it would save a few clicks whenever PSN barfs again.
The complaint describes the December outages -- chronicled on blogs and elsewhere -- that kept people from "accessing online play for several weeks. ... Xbox Live continues to deny subscribers access and has even issued apologies for their failure to correct server problems."
Bring back the company that made the Walkman, a cheap, DRM-free, durable music player, and maybe I'll change my mind.
Compare to e.g. my mid-late '70s Sony turntable, which due to it being direct drive is still fine (the auto positioning and end of record removal mechanism failed long ago but that's hardly essential). Built on a solid cast aluminum base ... they just don't make 'em like that any more.
If anything will be the downfall of Sony I have to say that Sony/Columbia Music started it. With their ridiculous copybit protection on DAT. How a million dollar division (media) dictates a billion dollar division (electronics) to come up with these schemes is beyond my comprehension.
Here is the suit if you want to read it and do more research (PDF):
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/files/library/xboxlive01...
Now the next thing would be to figure out appropriate network metrics to monitor the PSN server. I suppose portscanning Sony would be considered a bad idea though.