CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

So it appears that Sony's PSN has gone down again. I guess it happened sometime yesterday afternoon since I had been happily watching Netflix on my PS3 during the morning. Now we're being told it could be another whole day or two before the service is back up. Now, I'm not mad at Sony about this since it is a free service they are providing and all, but I am starting to get a bit irked when it appears the issue is being caused by "outside forces," or better known as hackers.

Is any one else having problems with their PSN connectivity? Any other ideas on what this could be other than an Anon or other hacker group just taking a shot for Sony bringing the hammer down on them?

Yeah, that happens sometimes. My connection's been touch-and-go lately, too. :/ There's usually not much you can do about it. But like you said, it's a free service. You get what you pay for.

Yeah, I haven't been able to get on PSN for the past 15 hours or something. I am sad. I like being able to watch stuff on Netflix without having to hook my laptop up to the TV. :<

Ah, I don't have a PSP so I don't have this problem, but maybe take a little walk or just wait? I feel your pain---I've suffered YouTube on a slow internet connection. Enough said.
Edit: Oh, PS3. Mah bad.

LOL Yeah, so that explains why I can't connect right now. :/ I just started up my PS3 and it won't connect. Meh, so that's cool. Like you guys said, its a free service so we really can't complain. Good thing I haven't solved Portal 2 yet (the campaign doesn't require internet) otherwise I'd be screwed because thats pretty much all I do with Tron is PVP.
Hey, I didn't know there were so many PSN people here. So what do you all think of the Playstation@Home MMO... er, uh, thing?

SDG

I've never used it so I have no idea.

Ah! Yeah, I'm still discovering it. Its basically a free MMO, but you have to buy like furniture and cloths and stuff. Yeah, I bought some threads... >.> and an Anime Apartment... uh, er, besides all the neat useless stuff they sell you, there are a bunch of neat, free mini games like a shoot-em-up I play... you can actually play virtual chess with other players in the Mall... I thought that was pretty cool. There is a shooter and some other stuff. Its kinda fun but I'm intimidated to actually socialize thereon.

SDG

I tried Playstation Home a couple times, when it was first released. I found it annoying, stupid and pointless, and I haven't been on it in ages.

I havn't been on enough to find out how good/bad the problems are.

I found Playstation Home to be incredibly pointless after using it for a few days after it came out. I deleted it along with "Life with Playstation" shortly after downloading both.

Goodness. Playstation Home? Life with Playstation? Those really sound like desperate attempts at converting people into fanboys.




"Life with Playstation"? Really?

Midori (post: 1473651) wrote:Goodness. Playstation Home? Life with Playstation? Those really sound like desperate attempts at converting people into fanboys.




"Life with Playstation"? Really?

I'm not entirely sure what Life with Playstation is/was about, but it seemed like an overly graphic intensive world-wide news feed. I never understood it, I just get my news from BBC.co.uk

Meh, I'm only used 8 of my 50 gigs so far (don't judge me >.> I got it to support my PS2 games) I'm not too worried about the space. But I'll keep @home around mostly because $20 on my apartment and cyber punk outfit... but its kinda boring. Still, the mini games are free... er, for now. And they could alleviate boredom one day. Hey, do you all play multiplayer games on your PS3s? I mean like online? So far I just play Tron. I was thinking playing Armored Core online .Hack has permanently killed my interest in mech sims I think.

SDG

I play some. My PSN name is XenomanX.

Xeno (post: 1473648) wrote:I found Playstation Home to be incredibly pointless after using it for a few days after it came out. I deleted it along with "Life with Playstation" shortly after downloading both.

Life with playstation is a prettier face on "Folding @home" which is basically donating your PS3's processing cycles to discover cures for Alzheimers and other diseases based on protein misfolding. Oh, and Home (the free MMO thing) isn't called "@home", the "@home" series of computing projects are about using unused computing cycles to perform calculations on one thing or another. PS3 takes part in "Folding@home" and every PS3 owner should at least put 100 units into it, in my opinion. The type of workloads done on Cell are much broader than GPU workloads, and much faster than standard CPU workloads. PS3s outperformed PCs on the project soon after the program was brought to the PS3.

As for PSN going down... That sucks. It's how I hang out with some of my friends back home...

Bobtheduck... I have no idea what you just said... except that PS3 Roooocks!!! XD Which I totally agree with.

On a side note, PSN is still down.

SDG

PatrickEklektos (post: 1473797) wrote:Bobtheduck... I have no idea what you just said... except that PS3 Roooocks!!! XD Which I totally agree with.

On a side note, PSN is still down.

SDG

Life With Playstation is a cover for Folding@home. Sony (mistakenly) thought people would be more likely to take part in the Folding if they put some other stuff on it, like News. At its heart, however, it's a distributed computing project.

Your PS3 is used to calculate the ways that proteins fold, and how they sometimes misfold, which can lead to diseases like Alzheimers. When enough of these calculations come back, they are expected to put them all together, and come up with cures for these protein-misfolding based diseases. So, running Life With Playstation is actually using your PS3 to do disease research.

And, yeah, it's still down. Sucks. Life with Playstation, on the other hand, is NOT down. If you haven't deleted it ( -_- ) then go run it.

Also... Does anyone know if Steamworks runs THROUGH PSN, or is it independent? Can you still go online with Portal 2 right now? I don't have it yet, but I'm curious.

Also, it seems like I'm the only one outside of Seoul in Korea that's running this program... I'm the little dot south of Seoul, hahahah!

EDIT:

http://api.ning.com/files/gWaxiFoTZ*FzAgGzl-uIiFPoNdlczFxcbRGZ4hhSnf-aHOo-UkYWKTZAP1TS5vgmyPHhLf*y2OwbnrYsh1*pJQVOU26GGs8S/ps1.png
http://api.ning.com/files/SYDlZDy4twlR6RMtXO55uHhK8uGT*ar3tOg-VRXwYN9zRM0C262yCcDQWNz9esTpdSVVRvpeqLWELKYrejUn0YaDNRdLYYSv/ps2.png

I wonder if it's related to another earthquake that hit recently... Japan's been going through the ringer.

Xeno (post: 1473674) wrote:I play some. My PSN name is XenomanX.

Yeah man, I'll add ya. I just gotta figure out how to do it on my PS3.

SDG

PatrickEklektos (post: 1474316) wrote:Yeah man, I'll add ya. I just gotta figure out how to do it on my PS3.

SDG

1. Select Friends (on the system XMB) > Add a Friend.
A blank message that you can use to request to add a Friend is displayed.

2. Select the [To] field.
Enter the online ID of the person you want to add as a Friend.

3. Type a message, and then select [Send].
Your message is sent and the Friend's avatar is displayed under (Friends).

Could it just be that they don't really care about getting PSN back online? You'd think they would be trying a little harder than this. I'd be willing to pay a few bucks a month for the service if it meant something like this would never happen again.

I don't think its quite that. The impact on Sony's reputation with its customer base alone is costing them calculated high dollars not to mention the loss of revenue from the sell of games online and what not. So this is by no means a small thing to them. In that light, it concerns me how big this is. My dad and bro are in the tech industry and I've seen enough to know that a down like this from a company as large as Sony is huge a matter. Makes me wonder what really happened and what were the hackers' intentions?
Personally, I'm calling Microsoft out on this one... I'm just going to blame them because I feel like it... and I hate them. LOL

Xeno, I'll add you tomorrow when my PS3 has access to the internet.

SDG

The problem is Sony is absolutely screwing itself over in this whole debacle, and I don't think they have enough intelligent people working in PR to solve it.

First of all, if this happened to Microsoft and XBL went down like this, you can bet they'd make an announcement that they'd make amends for the people who were inconvenienced. Probably a free month of Silver membership for everyone, and definitely a free month of membership for anyone who had an XBL account. Will Sony give a free month to the PSN+ subscribers? It's too early to tell, but honestly I'd say don't hold your breath.

If it had been just a couple of days, I'd be on the side of people saying "Eh this stuff happens, just deal with it." But we're approaching a week now, and there's no announcement of any time this might be resolved. People are paying actual money for PSN+, and can't do anything with it.

Anyway, although this is pure speculation, I think I should link it:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/gx6o4/im_a_moderator_over_at_psxscenecom_the_real/

Basically the gist of the article is a custom firmware was released that would make PSN recognize your console as a developer console if you installed it, and the theory is people were using it as a kind of a back door to get free content from PSN (because apparently if you're a dev console, Sony trusts you and doesn't verify any info, meaning you can put in fake credit card numbers and essentially download stuff for free).

Again, pure speculation, none of it is proven. And obviously if people were using stuff like that, that's messed up...however, the blame does lie completely with Sony if this is true (and again, that's IF). The reason it lies completely with Sony is if their security system is just "Are you a developer console?" "Yes." "Then come on in!" then they're idiots.

Actually the place I saw this info from mentioned it reminded them of the Futurama episode where they're surfing the internet, and there's an adult chat room with a bouncer who only asks "Are you 18?" and an obvious kid says "Yes" and gets let in, then a younger kid says "Yes" and gets let in, and finally a baby spits out its pacifier and crawls in.

Either way, I have no sympathy for Sony. They can regain some of their image if they really make an effort to give reparations to people (especially PSN+ users) for this thing, but as I said, I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Nate (post: 1474522) wrote:long post

+1

I'm expecting a while longer for it to be down and nothing to be given back to the users. I'm a standard PSN user, so I guess I just have to deal with it. The PSN+ users are getting burned though.

Nate (post: 1474522) wrote:(because apparently if you're a dev console, Sony trusts you and doesn't verify any info, meaning you can put in fake credit card numbers and essentially download stuff for free).

I hope Sony isn't really THAT stupid.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/26/update-on-playstation-network-and-qriocity/

Awesome....

So Sony is, SIX DAYS after the incident, just now telling people their passwords and credit card information may have been compromised.

Six. Days.

I smell a class-action lawsuit against Sony for gross negligence. Seriously, is their company run by braindead morons or something? Why do they act like they have their heads up their rear-ends constantly?

Because I'm pretty sure that they do. Of course they're saying that they needed an external investigation firm to find out what had happened, but that raises the question of how did they even know there was something going on in the first place that would lead them to shut down the PSN?

I'm actually kind of amazed how Sony has actually managed to stay in business despite extreme amounts of idiocy on the part of every single person working there.

Nate (post: 1474647) wrote:So Sony is, SIX DAYS after the incident, just now telling people their passwords and credit card information may have been compromised.

Six. Days.

I smell a class-action lawsuit against Sony for gross negligence. Seriously, is their company run by braindead morons or something? Why do they act like they have their heads up their rear-ends constantly?

Well, they say they didn't know the severity of the invasion until Monday. I'm sure there will be a class-action suit, but I'm more **** about the people who actually hacked the system. There's no such thing as an unhackable system, and If this is a response to the Geohot crap, like the last attack was, then that's when those people deserve to get their faces beat in.

I would almost bet money on this being another revenge thing against Sony for Geohot. I'm in the vast minority, I'm sure.

a commenter on Kotaku had this to say:

I don't see why everyone is jumping to conclusions and saying Sony is lying. Besides basing it off the fact that they're a multi-national corporation, is it really so hard to believe that they had almost no idea what was going on? As someone said before, they can still be incompetent without being liars too.
I'm still angry at them, but I'm more angry at the hacker(s) that did this. I'll only be more angry at Sony if my credit card info has been stolen

and another one says

Sony aren't incompetent because they got attacked and wounded. You think they have some malicious plan to **** people off? Don't you think they'd have consulted banks of lawyers, security experts and all kinds of boffins to see how to approach this? How to check what has happened and at what point to release info? They're not sitting around chuckling at the chaos. They want it fixed more than anyone, y'know.

Incompetence would have been if they'd kept PSN on, said nothing, and carried on as normal. I'd like to think they've done what they could. Sure, I'm **** off a little that I can't play online for a bit, but LIFE GOES ON.

Why is the middle man always blamed when something like this happens? Is it simply because we can identify them?