
Sony Confirms PlayStation Network Outage Caused By ‘External Intrusion’ - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/23/hack-attack-sony-confirms-playstation-network-outage-caused-by-external-intrusion/
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vertice
I feel that there is something in the ps3 scene that might have triggered
this, that nobody is actually mentioning.

Recently a custom firmware (rebug) was released that allowed PS3's with hacked
firmware to connect to the developer only version of the PSN used for testing
and development.

Even more so, they have figured out how to trick the dev PSN to allow them to
'buy' PSN games. They also figured out how to break out of the sandbox with
certain games like the call of duty series, to allow patched games to play
with regular players.

I personally suspect that this is the intrusion that they are referring to,
and they are busy retooling the network to stop this from being possible.

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extension
Two days.. wow. We may have reached the tipping point where the threat of
black hat retaliation can influence even the most powerful corporations.

It's a shame it's come to that, but it's the predictable result of a legal
system that has utterly failed a large segment of the public. Corporations
write laws and use the civil courts as a weapon. Nobody can even afford to
defend themselves. For those who can't live with the injustice, there aren't
many options.

~~~
wladimir
Why would it be a shame? It's not pretty, agreed, but this might induce
corporations to start behaving less "evil", otherwise there is always the
threat that the hordes with their (digital) pitchforks will storm the castle.
It tilts the balance of power in the right way.

~~~
bradleyland
You've misinterpreted the target of shame. It's a shame that we, the public,
have no accessible, legitimate recourse against a corporation the size of
Sony. It is _not_ a shame that Sony is receiving a kidney punch.

~~~
wladimir
Indeed. Hopefully this kind of struggles will eventually result in accessible,
legitimate recourses. However, those hardly ever come into existence out of
thin air.

Given that one party overpowers another, the former will attempt to grab more
and more power. With an international entity such as corporations this is even
more true, as even governments are having increasing trouble controlling them.

Diplomacy-based recourses are usually a result of a balance between the power
of groups. For example, in the industrial revolution the workers unionized to
have more marketing power against their employers. It has some interesting
parallels (but also wild differences) with this.

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neuro_home
Color me not surprised. My email address had been registered on PSN and I got
emailed regularly about the activity of this account. My email is very unique
so they no doubt registered in an automated method with a database of farmed
email addresses. I cut a ticket to Sony and had the account closed. A buddy of
mine recently bought a PS3 and was unable to register with any of his email
addresses as they all already had been registered to other accounts! What the
hell is going on at Sony?

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dereg
I'm really tired of this. I don't care about anybody's arguments -- regardless
of the side -- I just want to be able to play my PS3 in peace.

~~~
cubicle67
serious question (I don't own a PS3 (or an XBOX)) - is it not still playable
offline, or is it like these new drm infested games I keep hearing about that
require you to be online even for single player games?

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meta
I mostly use my ps3 as a Netflix machine now-a-days (new baby) and have been
very frustrated with the PSN downtime since Netflix won't let you login to
their service unless you are logged into PSN (for some reason). To me that
means my TV has seen very little use and I get to watch shows on my 13" mac.
:(

Overall I am very disappointed in having the PSN be so key to the ps3
experience while the PSN, to me, is pretty worthless and poor even when it is
working.

~~~
joelackner
i'm able to still use netflix after getting 2 login failures on my end... it's
a hassle but it's not blocking me from using it entirely.

~~~
teamonkey
Yeah, just keep retrying the login. Once you see the 'cover' images of the
netflix titles you can cancel the login screen and use netflix with no
problems.

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thehodge
Sounds a bit silly but could Sony be hosting some of the elements of the PSN
on EC2 and this is just a PR story to pass the buck... the dates seem a little
too similar to me..

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chc
A PR story? Those are usually meant to give _good_ PR, not make your platform
look insecure and unstable. I don't see how it would be in Sony's interests to
pretend the widely publicized Amazon outage had nothing to to with its
problems and instead make up a story about how its security had been breached.

~~~
thehodge
We may see it differently, from my point of view its much easier for Sony to
blame this on anon as a) there is a known conflict already and its very simple
to point the finger b) it hides the fact that a critical part of there system
is on a 3rd party service with no contingency plan / backups..

I haven't read anywhere about security breached all I've seen is DDOS and
thats exactly what anon are known for.

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InclinedPlane
So Sony starts a war with hackers, we'll see how this plays out. Maybe I'll go
get some popcorn.

