More than three years ago, a crippling internet attack brought down Sony's PlayStation Network and interrupted service for more than a month. Legal showdowns ensued and today, people in the US who used the company's online services can begin the process of getting their share of a $US15 million settlement. Here's how.
Todd Miller is one of the men accused of being behind the 2008 PlayStation Network hacks. Last week he was sentenced to 12 months house arrest, but here's the thing: authorities couldn't prove he was involved.
The law can be a strange beast sometimes. Take Sony and Australia, for example: earlier this year, when the PlayStation Network was hacked into, an investigation was launched targeting Sony, to see whether the company had broken Australian law.
Howard Stringer, the chief executive of Sony, said at a Berlin electronics show that the PlayStation Network has recovered from this spring's attack and 23-day outage by adding three million new users in the three months since.
While Sony's "Welcome Back" package smoothed over most people's concerns following the PlayStation network attacks in April and May, not everyone is won over. Some are taking Sony to court. And when I say some, I mean many.
Losing the entire PlayStation Network service for 23 days and its online marketplace for more than a month is not many people's idea of a good time. Nor is it Tim Schaff's, though the Sony Network Entertainment boss called it "a great experience," at a forum before, as the politicians say, he revised and extended his remarks.
The time to collect your PlayStation Network welcome-back freebies has come and gone — twice, even — but Sony has extended one component. Registration for identity-theft protection will run through July 31, the company's top spokesman said on PlayStation's official blog.
At the Sony shareholders meeting today, the company said that 90 per cent of PSN users have returned since the service was hacked. Have you?
At a shareholders' meeting in Tokyo today, Sony boss Sir Howard Stringer got up on stage and had to field questions about the recent PlayStation Network attacks, which resulted in one of the biggest thefts of personal details in the history of the internet.
In the throes of the 23-day PlayStation Network Outage, when people were vowing they'd sell their PS3s and go join Xbox Live, Microsoft's most provocative comment was a low-key prediction that it would see more traffic on its service. Yesterday, though, Xbox's senior executive finally said what's bad for the goose is bad for the gander.
According to a report from Kyodo News, citing official Japanese government documentation, Sony Computer Entertainment knowingly delayed telling the public about the extent of an attack on its PlayStation Network so as not to "bewilder" its customers.
As hacker collection Lulz Security claims it snagged Sony Computer Entertainment's Developer Network source code, newspaper The Epoch Times reports that one LulzSec member, Robert Cavanaugh, is believed to be in FBI custody.
PlayStation 3 and PSP owners in Europe and the US can now download the freebies Sony promised last month during the PSN outage. Keep in mind everyone trying to download inFamous at once is bound to cause some network congestion.
Sony just sent out a quick update letting customers know that "all PlayStation Network services" should be back up and running by the end of today, June 2. That's for everywhere except Japan, Hong Kong and Korea, that is.
