So it turns out the reason the PSN has been down for a week is it is being rebuilt from the ground up as the result of a hacker attack which compromised the account details of some 77 million PSN users. Apparently, the intrusion revealed fundamental flaws in the infrastructure of Sony's network, such that it had to be completely brought offline and redesigned. Its an epic failure which caps a seemingly endless series of blunders for Sony's troubled console, which has finally been generating some profits after years of lagging far behind Microsoft and Nintendo's offerings.
This is all right on the heels of Nintendo announcing that their successor to the Wii was in the works and will be playable at E3 this year, and that it would boast significantly more power than any current offering. If Sony wants to take the lead back in the next generation of consoles, they need to start repairing their brand and their image immediately. To compete with Nintendo and Microsoft, Sony's next console needs to be smaller, cheaper, faster, better, and then even if the developers work miracles with it, Sony might find it hard to sell units after so many debacles this generation. PSN and the whole online experience for the Playstation has so much potential because of its open nature - unlike Microsoft's closed off Xbox Live (let alone Nintendo's half assed efforts) - but the speed, quality, and security of Sony's online service needs a major overhaul if it wants to compete over the next 5-10 years.
2 comments:
I wonder how many privacy laws they may have been breaking. Seemingly unencrypted passwords/credit cards and the whole kit and kaboodle.
Maybe the rumour that in trying to resolve it they'd accidentally wiped everyone's accounts so all purchases and trophies had been lost was put out by them to make this not seem as bad.
It's opened up the whole new concept to me of Identity Theft insurance. Wow. If you're insuring against that you better have hijack insurance for your Warthog and Portal insurance in case you lose the hand-held Portal device somewhere.
It is a stunning failure. Sony said CC numbers were encrypted but everything else wasn't. I wonder what it was encrypted with. Most algorithms can be beaten when you have access to this much predictable data.
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