Some thoughts

My partner and I took a bit of a break in the countryside and became engulfed in some other things, but hopefully normal posting will resume.
Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably know that the PlayStation Network is down and there's been a massive, colossal fuss.
The rumour-mongering is unending and there is far too much sensationalism in the way of any valuable information.

As far as I can grasp, this all goes back to bloomin' ages ago when George Hotz was sued by Sony for jailbreaking the PlayStation 3. A group called Anonymous were apparently outraged by this even though it made perfect sense. They seem to have gained some sort of reputation as hackers of Sony, even though what they actually did was a Distributed Denial of Service attack, which in basic terms, sends so many requests to a website that it is unable to load. They refer to Sony as an evil, greedy corporation.

Now, I'm not against hacking and such in principle because I believe there may be reasons to see what is going on inside the network of an unscrupulous company, without necessarily changing anything on it. I don't think Sony counts so much on the grand scale. I would consider nasty, greedy companies to be the ones who plunge villages into poverty, contaminate water sources and hire paramilitaries to murder workers (I'm looking at you, Coca-Cola..). I really don't think that Sony's actions of defending their products (against actions you agree not to perform by buying one) warrant that kind of attack.
People claiming to be members of Anonymous seem to be complaining a lot about corporate greed, but you have to live in a very strict manner to avoid participating in said corporate greed, which I doubt most of them are doing. In fact you'd have to live a lot like my parents did, growing your own food and making your own home goods.

"You call it piracy, we call it freedom". No, dude. Stealing from companies and breaking their TOS is just theft. This is a terrible analogy, but say for sake of argument, you steal fruit from the stall of the local green grocer, and then view the idea that you should have paid for it as some sort of infringement on your rights. That's nonsensical. They are providing a business service and in order to use that service, you have to abide by their terms, because it's theirs and not yours. You have every right not to use the service in the first place, but you can't expect services everywhere to bend to your will for fear of reprisal.
The fact that apparent Anonymous members have posed in V for Vendetta masks is just bizarre to me. They do not have torturous lives under a repressive government. They really don't. People in my hometown would gladly swap places with them. There is no grand moral justification for any of this stuff.

A representative of Sony allegedly said they would retrieve all of the IP addresses of everyone who ever visited George Hotz's website, or something like that, which was nonsensical in itself, as was, if true, the purported reply of Anonymous: "good luck, I have seven of them".
My IP address changes on a daily basis because of the provider I'm with. I visited his website once, and I don't care if Sony is ever given the address I had on that day. It takes a bit of tracing to find out where somebody is surfing from, and even if they did so, I still wouldn't care. I wouldn't care if someone at Sony knew where I was right now. They can't hold the fact that I looked at a website against me. This is all VERY SILLY.
Apparently it may have just been to demonstrate that George's jailbreak had been distributed. There's a lot of bollocks to wade through.
At the end of the day, Hotz broke what is currently the law; there's little point in throwing a tantrum when he is served with a court order accordingly. It doesn't matter whether it's "fair" or not, or what I, or you, personally think about said law(s), the fact remains that it is the law, and therefore that response was to be expected.

If you were to steal one of the games I made or do something illegal to them, responding to me with "you can't take my freedom!" just wouldn't fly.

So now, the PSN is down; some people claiming to be Anonymous members are saying it was nothing to do with them, others claiming to be Anonymous members are saying it was their work. Everything is hearsay because somebody on teh internets said it. If you believe the rumours, then 70,000 credit card numbers have been stolen in an attack on Sony, 12,000 of them illegally used so far. But, they were on a database from 2002 or 2007, depending on which site you read.


Obviously this fiasco isn't going to end for a while, especially not when people are so determined to generate hits by churning out rubbish.

We're still using the PlayStation 3 because, shockingly, games are still playable without the internet. I wasn't gaming online beforehand anyway. It's clear though that whoever truly is responsible for Sony's troubles has no real interest in or respect for the videogame industry, or any of its customers. They don't respect the money said customers have spent for the use of the PSN and they have no care for any joy it may have been bringing them. Let's just hope that hospitalised children using donated consoles are not losing out and that any gaming software used in training for patient treatment is not affected by the outages in some way.