Sony Blames 'External Intrusion' For Lengthy PSN Outage 321
Several readers have noted that outages on Sony's PlayStation Network have prevented online play for the past few days. The company has now blamed an 'external intrusion' for the trouble, saying they took down the network to "conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward." Some suspect an attack by Anonymous, who declared war on Sony earlier this month, but Anonymous has disavowed knowledge of such an attack. Meanwhile, others are asking whether Sony should compensate users for the inability to play PS3 multiplayer modes, and even single-player modes on a few downloadable games.
Right... (Score:4, Funny)
"Meanwhile, others are asking whether Sony should compensate users..."
Right, and while we're there I'd like some world peace too.
Re:Right... (Score:4)
Slashdot thread [slashdot.org]
Re:Right... (Score:4, Funny)
I am, in principle, not against Finland conquering the globe. They have a few nice things going, and the bit about Rome and the aqueducts from "Life of Brian" comes to mind.
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100 Euros seems a bit steep... that seems like a fairly high percentage of the retail cost, given that Other OS isn't the major function of the box.
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I know there are a lot of analogies floating around out there, but to me the fact of the matter is it doesn't matter how big the functionality was, it was an advertised feature. What if it was blueray playing functionality that they decided t
Re:Right... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I bet I could learn to speak British, Aussie, Kiwi, and other similar languages fine, though. Heck, one day I might learn Canadian, eh? I already speak American and Redneck, after all. Oh, that's it, I'll learn Hawaiian.
All ten or so of the above jokes are in your imagination. I didn't write them until after I read my pos
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So... multiple aboriginal dialects, Maori, French and whatever those grass-skirt wearing folk in Hawaii speak? Good luck with that, shouldn't take more than a few years... :)
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Supposedly, for an English speaker Finnish is one of the world's most difficult languages to acquire.
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Meh, an 80 year old in my town just got her first third level degree. The human mind is capable of absolutely stunnng feats on a routine basis.
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Finland is somewhat-kindof Scandinavian, and those folks tend to be rather welcoming and friendly. Other than that, I don't know.
All I can say is that, as far as smaller European countries go, you'd be disappointed by the Netherlands. We're slowly but steadily incorporating more and more of the bad things you mentioned about American law and government, courtesy of the conservatives.
Though, on an interpersonal scale, I would agree that most Europeans I've met are less selfish and rude than the Americans you
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You think most Americans aren't fat? Look at the obesity stats sometime and compare them to anywhere in western Europe.
A higher rate of obesity in America does not necessarily make most Americans fat. Where'd you learn logic, America?
You think most Americans aren't stupid? Look at what they tolerate from their own gov't and TSA and megacorps.
How apropos. I was just calling Americans stupid. But look at what Chinese, French, Brits, Australians, hell, the entire rest of the world tolerate from their governments. Looks like humans in general are stupid. Or rather, selfish ("what's in it for me"), and tribal-focused (family > township > city > state > nation > humanity), so they don't care what the "rules" are as lo
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A higher rate of obesity in America does not necessarily make most Americans fat. Where'd you learn logic, America?
Correct in the Spock sense, not in the Joe Friday [wikipedia.org] sense:
Q: How many adults age 20 and older are overweight or obese (Body Mass Index, or BMI, > 25)?
A: Over two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese.[4]
All adults: 68 percent
Women: 64.1 percent
Men: 72.3 percent
That's from an NIH page [nih.gov], and it references an AMA paper [ama-assn.org]. I guess the fat vs. overweight distinction can be argued.
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Not to pick nits... but remember the BMI is not the best way of measuring obesity (the sole measure, I would say.) Because BMI becomes irrelevant with muscular builds and so forth. That is not to say we have quite a few fat people. :) More than other comparably sized countries? Dunno... I'd have to google it.
But for the OP who wants to "get out while the gettin's good".... The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. :)
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The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. :)
In response to this I thought about making a Portal cartoon of a meadow with portals on either side to illustrate the sillyness of this (the sillyness of the human tendency to think this way, not of you relating it). I did not do this because a) I've never played Portal and b) I'm lazy ;)
Re:Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why liberals have mostly been in charge since the 1960s.
Yeah, don't let a little thing like 30 years of Republican presidents vs 15 years of Democrats since 1960 get in the way of your "facts".
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And last I checked Republicans are not automatically conservatives ( which you can further divide into fiscal and social ) and Democrats are not automatically liberal. I would agree in recent years the correlation of party affiliation and degree of liberalism has become stronger, but in the 1960's it was not reliable at all. Goldwater was an entirely new bread within the Republican party at that time, which if anything was by mainstream Republican party standards of today very liberal.
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sorry but he speaks the truth
In some European countries like France, Germany or UK they have a problem with fast growing population of muslims who don't intend to assimilate at all but are first to suck to social system dry. I have absolutely no sympathy for parasitic kind of muslims.
I have only one thing to say to such people: "You don't like us and our rules? Start to work and respect OUR rules or gtfo to your desert you came from, you can have any rules you want there and you won't have to use our infide
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I want Sony to compensate me for not being able to play multiplayer for the past several months. I haven't updated my PS3 since they removed OtherOS and decided they'd change the EULA to say they had the right to install and execute programs on my PS3 without my knowledge or consent. I'm also unable to get updates and DLC for the games I've legally purchased because of this. I doubt I'll ever get just recompense.
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Compare and contrast with Sony's phone division: They're actively aiding people in unlocking the bootloaders of their Android handsets; thus allowing people to install customised versions of Android, or if anyone bothers porting them, entirely different OSs.
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"Meanwhile, others are asking whether Sony should compensate users..."
Right, and while we're there I'd like some world peace too.
Microsoft usually gives out a free game or something for extended (non-scheduled) outages. Of course, you're explicitly paying them for Live.
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In this case you get what you pay for and users do not have a leg to stand on because the online play is free. It is not like the Xbox where you have to pay a monthly fee to play online.
I'm a PS3 owner and this has irked me, but it's not the end of the world. It just meant that instead of playing Medal of Honor during my game play time, I went back to Fallout: New Vegas and am working on finishing it.
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If you're talking about WoW, they SHOULD compensate players because you pay for 30 days at a time, and if you can't play for a week, they effectivey "owe" that to you.. but PSN is free (plus subscribers not withstanding)..
if the do give players a freebie it will be for PR, not because they owe you anything.
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Latency is a pathetic excuse. (Score:2)
I'm on a 100Mbit connection, and so are many people. Latency is not the issue here.
Sure it can be a slight problem, but the original Starcraft did not have these region locks. Let the customer decide between dealing with potential latency issues or the region lock. I hate the concept of region locking, it makes no sense and defeats the purpose of internet gaming.
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Serialization delay.
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The OP said latency wasn't an issue because he was on a 100 Mbps link, obviously contrasting that with slower links.
Serialization delay for a max length Ethernet frame on a 10 Mbps link is over 1 ms, only a million times greater than you claim.
And of course, the other point is that bandwidth does have an effect on latency, despite your clueless statement implying otherwise.
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poor excuse, i am amazed that people fall for that. If they cared about user latency they would incorporate LAN which proved invaluable at various tournaments - battle.net drops people frequently during official games, happened at like 10 different high profile events, including blizzard's own (so much for e-sports angle that blizzard reportedly takes seriously)
most people would use the lowest latency server either way but online tournaments where the best of the best compete wouldn't be such a pain in the
Anonymous (Score:4, Informative)
I love the implication that Anonymous has a representative that can "disavow knowledge of such an attack."
Anonymous is not an organization! It's a bunch of jerks on the internet.
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anonymous was a team there http://hackus.org/blog/ [hackus.org]
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I love the implication that Anonymous has a representative that can "disavow knowledge of such an attack."
Anonymous is not an organization! It's a bunch of jerks on the internet.
Sony isn't a company that cares for it's customers, it's just a bunch of jerks in business suits.
Generalization is great, isn't it?
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"They" do not disavow knowledge of the attack, as stated in the OP, they are just claiming to be not responsible (which proves they do have knowledge of the attack).
It proves no such thing. All It says is that Anonymous do not write 2 paragraph press releases in legalese. They did acknowledge that some Anons may be responsible, but that seems a reasonable to think that the hackers who could pull this off would be also count themselves as members of an organization that has no formal membership process.
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"They" do not disavow knowledge of the attack, as stated in the OP, they are just claiming to be not responsible (which proves they do have knowledge of the attack). If you had read the statement is that they say some Anons might be behind it, but it's not AnonOps.
I have knowledge of the attack too, because I read a Slashdot story about it. Of course they have knowledge of the attacks. But if the entire group that committed the attack is 4chan, (let's say), does that make it an attack by 4chan? It's not like they have a leader who can disavow people who do things they disagree with.
Re:Anonymous represents something new (Score:4, Interesting)
Anonymous is not an Organization, anymore than the Internet is.
They are Collectives. Controls are only followed when consensually agreed to with no real external enforcement. Damage is routed around, and there is no real Central Authority so much as a collective of groups/individuals who sometimes happen to be moving in the same direction when the mood takes them.
Re:Anonymous represents something new (Score:5, Interesting)
A new kind of organization. I would say Anonymous is a cyber intelligence organization, not just a collection of jerks.
There are a few people associating themselves with Anonymous who have the expertise to become a "cyber intelligence organization", and a few thousand who are jerks. The question is whether those few people have the resources to make it happen, and nobody can really be certain until they manage to pull off a coup of some sort (HBGary is chump change compared to what I'm talking about) without being busted by the FBI, Interpol, etc.
But in the long term Anonymous is growing stronger at an exponential rate. Their only flaw at this moment in time is their relative inexperience and their silly tactics at times. They go from brilliant tactics at some points in time (such as hacking the email server at HBGaryFederal), to really dumb tactics like DDOSing Sony and taking down webpages.
This actually proves my point. The masses didn't do the HBGary hack. That was one or a few people who actually know what they're doing. The only reason Anonymous gets the credit is because the people responsible allowed the credit to go that way. The Sony, Amazon, and MasterCard DDoS attacks were performed by the masses, and they've all created varying levels of embarrassment for Anonymous due to their lack of success or the pointlessness of their targets.
Re:Anonymous represents something new (Score:4, Interesting)
Then you haven't been on the internet very long. [wikipedia.org]
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At the end of the day the great achievement of Anonymous will be to turn the tide of public opinion even more direct
Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
PSN has been down since Tuesday night, blowing the launches of Portal 2 (plus steam) and Mortal Kombat 30. The system is not still down for forensic or investigational issues, its down because they haven't figured out how to bring it back up. They are losing too much money and credibility having it down so long. My guess is they are poring though back up tapes right now. Some one owned them good.
Also, this didn't feel like a DDOS, with intermittent problem. PSN seems to have gone down hard. When Sony says "infiltrated," I think totally raped their systems.
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It's not just the US/North American PSN that's down. It's Europe, Japan, and probably the rest as well.
I doubt very much that an unsophisticated attack would be able to simultaneous take down or infect all three networks (to a point they are at least somewhat individual networks). I am inclined to believe Sony who has stated that they have taken the PSN down themselves. I would speculate that could mean there have either been security breaches with regard to PSN Store encryption or consumer credit card info
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I don't really agree it can't be because they don't know how to bring it back up.
If they feel all their systems are compromised, then they want to keep it down until it is completely deloused, otherwise they could risk an intruder turning every PS3 into a member of a botnet!
So they may be starting over from scratch or just having trouble finding a safe point to return to. This does show a level of incompetence (incomplete mastery of their own systems), but I don't really agree it has to be the full level of
That's ridiculous. (Score:3)
Sony has released absolutely no information blaming 4channers for this downtime or even for the downtime the 4channers took credit for.
You'd have to have a ridiculously high opinion of the 4chan vigilantes to think that Sony would take down their own network on a big release weekend just to smear them, especially when Sony isn't even bothering to make press releases smearing them.
How about this? We cannot put it past the 4channers to DDoS Sony again and just deny they are doing it because they don't like So
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Sony also knows that turning gamers against Anonymous is a strong tactical advantage in the war against Anonymous. It's probably the only card they have to play.
We cannot put it past Sony to deliberately shut down the network and pin the blame on Anonymous.
There's the problem? Is Sony "at war" with 4chan? What would Sony value more? Money (that they would make by having gamers play their games online) or killing Anonymous? Having their network operational is worth more to them than killing 4chan.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
The system is not still down for forensic or investigational issues, its down because they haven't figured out how to bring it back up.
Generally, the worst attacks are the ones when you can't figure out how much access people still have, what they did while they were there, and whether or not it is safe to bring the system back online. If someone got root on Sony's update servers, you'd better believe those are staying offline. A problem there could leave Sony on the hook for the cost of 50 million very expensive plastic bricks. Similarly, someone with deep PSN access might be able to leverage that into accessing Sony's other internal systems, which could include things like VAIO firmware, manufacturing robots, sony picture entertainment, and baseball fields full of money.
Keep 'em down for a few days to do your security homework, or suffer a bigger break later.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
If someone got root on Sony's update servers, you'd better believe those are staying offline.
Then feel secure that those aren't the problem.
I was playing a Demo recently and it informed me there was an update available. System downloaded the update and loaded it, even though PSN is still down and I still can't log in.
I heard a rumor that they found people circumventing the checkout/purchase system in some way. If that is true, then they may be keeping the system down while they fix that.
Two more plausible explanations:
1) someone used the fact that PS3s internal key has been exposed to try to craft code to go after the Login/Pay servers through the PS3 directly, on the idea that Sony programmed those interfaces on the assumption that they are secure, and only produced well formed code, leaving a chink in the armor. If that IS the case, then Sony may have shut down the whole system rather than letting it sit open and exposed once they detected the intrusion, in an effort to head off data theft (while they rewrite the interface?).
2) someone could have been performing a Denial of Service attack, again through internal PS3 calls which were expected to be well formed.
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Maybe those recent storms took out Sony's data center?
Anonymous as a force is likely not capable of such an act. Based on the duration and nature of the outage, it's not like a DDoS or some simple network issue but that there's some physical damage, somewhere between wiped or crashed drives to outright fried servers.
An individual with a vendetta I can see "infiltrating" into their server farm and taking it out, but Occam's Razor says that it's probably the weather.
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The system is not still down for forensic or investigational issues, its down because they haven't figured out how to bring it back up
It's down because they're trying to make sure PSN users credit card information wasn't compromised asshole. They could bring it up now if they wanted to, but first they're making sure the user accounts are safe.
This is why I don't like online (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it's great for the content providers and their DRM, but when I can't play a single player game because either their servers are down, or I don't happen to have a connection at the time is annoying and stupid. (I don't have a Playstation, but several single player games on Steam behave in the same, or similar, way; e.g. f1-2010 I can't save progress without the internet because apart from steam, which launches the game just fine, there is the crazy Live-Games for Windows (or whatever it's called). Why I can't save progress is beyond me as the save games appear to be local files, but that's just how it is.
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FWIW, I do own a PS3 and I haven't been prevented from playing single-player games nor watching Netflix. In fact, the Netflix application claims to require a PSN connection, but if you keep allowing the PSN authentication to fail you discover that the warning is more bark than bite.
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Not really, isn't the PSN requirement to download the app and for updates? At least that was my impression and the main reason why it annoyed me that they got rid of the disc.
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Game Updates are working fine now (don't know about earlier), even though PSN itself is still down and can't log in.
They might be related services, but they seem to be different servers.
Now, I'd LOVE to know why the Hulu+ program needs me to log in, when I also had to tie the PS3 to my Hulu+ account. Wish that worked the way the Netflix clients seem to be.
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You can play single player games, and in fact the entire system is not offline. I fired up Fallout: New Vegas and I have not played it in months. It told me that I needed to upgrade the game to the latest version, and I figured I was SOL. I clicked on OK and it downloaded the 22mb patch file just fine.
I'm miffed about the whole thing. I'm miffed about losing access to NetFlix. But there are not any problems playing single player games.
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That is not a failing of "online". That is a failing of the online model that Sony have chosen to employ. These sorts of problems don't plague "the old style" of online games, like your Counter-Strikes and your Quakes, which use a decentralised model that is resistant to failure. If servers go down, you just go to another server. If the master server list goes down, you just connect directly using an external game client. The only thing that might stop you playing is if the auth server is offline; I remembe
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Fair enough. But I think I do have the right to comment on the article because although I don't have a PS3 I have this other ability which allows me to read specifications and other people's experience. The fact that there is (according to you) no current games that require the PSN connection doesn't mean that this will not happen in the future. Additionally f1-2010 is the only Steam game that I have that does require a connection (to save progress); 6 months ago I'd have been saying "steam doesn't require
Best three days I've had with my son (Score:5, Interesting)
This has been the best time that my 15 year old son and I have had since the PlayStation arrived in December. With the network dead, we went bicycling and bowling (his top score was 134); he showed me how to solve the last layer (well the OLL) of the Rubik's Cube.
I deeply thank whoever did this, and I wish you only the best!
-CS in Berkeley
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Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Personal Data? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been looking at the comments on every post I see about this. At first I was hoping for an answer, and now I'm mostly just curious. This seems to be the very least of everyone's concerns.
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This is if they don't contact me for odd charges to begin with.
Another point of view... (Score:2)
Who's Sony been suing lately?
This might be named party's counter-offer.... ^_^
Sony and their Lawyers...
If you can't beat them.. DDoS'em! ^_~
It's Skynet! (Score:2)
First it came for our google. Now it has gone after Sony PS. Do you need more proof? Are we going to wait for it to attack something important like Facebook or Twitter?
I'm glad I have a dog as part of our family...
Glad it wasn't Sony being petty (Score:2)
At first I thought that it was Sony's revenge on me for this: http://slashdot.org/submission/1535196/Why-doesnt-SONY-like-Canadians [slashdot.org]
Then, when I realized that no one else could log in either I relaxed a bit.
I am still concerned about whether my Credit Card is safe.
Scapegoat (Score:5, Insightful)
Anonymous is fast becoming the preferred scapegoat when a large corporation have an outage.
--
Maybe I should have posted this as "Anonymous Coward"?
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When said corporation is said to be the target for a few weeks prior, I think it's more than scapegoating. It's a confirmation.
Anonymous was just DDoSing PSN, and stopped. While they've been involved in some "hacks", like the HBGary Federal mess, those were more social engineering attacks than sophisticated hacking. So it's unlikely that Anonymous is the culprit here, and even if they are, it means that Sony designed PSN so it's vulnerable to rather un-sophisticated social engineering attacks.
Although, given the epic screw up that is their public key crypto implementation on the PS3, maybe that wouldn't be too surprising.
In any c
Any relation to Steam? (Score:2)
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Anonymous proved this when they leaked the HBGaryFederal emails. This is a move we would have expected from Wikileaks. Anonymous is now in the leaking business.
Wikileaks publishes leaks. Anonymous, in this case, compromised someone's system(s) and accounts to get at documents which they then published. Wikileaks relies on others to commit crimes. The two are not as similar as you seem to think they are.
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"Wikileaks relies on others to commit crimes."
As if Anonymous isn't comprised entirely of 'others.'
Wikileaks doesn't make the claim that their leaks come from members of their organization.
You're very naive about this subject. Go newfag about it on 4chan and watch how fast you get eaten alive for your ignorance.
As if 4chan would offer any insight in to anything.
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How does a group with no centralized leadership do anything? Simple answer: It doesn't. Rather this is the guise of people doing something under a name. Beh I could get a group of people and call ourselves the Flying Monkey Butts of Uranus, and then start putting out inane blather.
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How does a group with no centralized leadership do anything? Simple answer: It doesn't.
Yeah the on going middle-eastern rebellions have something to say to you about that.
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Keep telling yourself that, there's always a centralized leader even in rebellions.
Anon hacked HBGaryFederal (Score:3, Interesting)
They hacked HBGaryFederal and they leaked gigs of emails. If they can do this then they are no longer an organization that can't do anything. They've done something.
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If Anonymous and Wikileaks don't represent cyberwarfare then there is no such thing as cyberwarfare.
I agree. There's no such thing as cyberwarfare.
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Humans are the vulnerability (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't work like that. Assuming both sides are highly competent, securing something is a fundamentally harder problem than breaking in. To break in, you only need to figure out one vulnerability. To secure something, you need to make sure every component - as big as a data center and as small as every single instruction sent to the CPUs - in your system, is invulnerable. Hiring hackers would only help if the engineering team is highly incompetent to start with (like, they aren't even aware of basic things like why strcpy() to a fixed buffer can be a very bad idea).
You are underestimating the power of social engineers. If you have someones dox, if you have their social security number for example, and this someone happens to be either an employee for a rival corporation, within your own corporation, or anywhere else, it's very easy to build an intelligence file to find all their human vulnerabilities. Now if you want to see how vulnerable an entire corporation is, who is in charge of protecting the secret information or passwords or whatever? How psychologically stable as those people? If you have an intelligence file on every important employee within an organization, and you know which ones happen to be psychologically unstable, vulnerable to certain kinds of social engineering, etc, then you can probe the network for human weaknesses.
Which ones are most likely to write their passwords down and throw them in the trash? Which ones are most likely to go to an online dating service and meet a girl or guy? Knowing who is single, knowing who has what psychological disorder, knowing who cheats on their wife or husband, knowing anything which can be leveraged to compromise them. It's no different than in politics where politicians get targeted and corrupted over time, when enough eyes are on an employee then its only a matter of time before the employee does something which can put them in a compromised blackmailable position.
Once in that position then they have to choose between losing their wife/husband or losing their job. Once again blackmail, extortion, or outright social engineering where they think the boss told them to give the password, is usually all that is required to hack human networks. If you are trying to always hack it by technical means then yeah you'll have to hope there is some bug in the system but if you want to guarantee success you have to hack through all means, technical and social.
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You are underestimating the power of social engineers. If you have someones dox, if you have their social security number for example, and this someone happens to be either an employee for a rival corporation, within your own corporation, or anywhere else, it's very easy to build an intelligence file to find all their human vulnerabilities. Now if you want to see how vulnerable an entire corporation is, who is in charge of protecting the secret information or passwords or whatever? How psychologically stable as those people? If you have an intelligence file on every important employee within an organization, and you know which ones happen to be psychologically unstable, vulnerable to certain kinds of social engineering, etc, then you can probe the network for human weaknesses.
Right. All from a social security number. Well that's it - intelligence agencies the world over are screwed. Or maybe it's all a bit tougher than that.
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PSN is required to play Netflix streaming service on a PS3. While the network is down, I'm limited to the disks I have on hand. Some folks pay for streaming only and are left with nothing.
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It isn't. Start netflix up, it will bring up a sign-on dialog. Pick sign-on, Netflix should start up, it will ask to sign-in again, attempt to sign-on again and you should be all set.
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Netflix is working even though PSN is down. When you start the Netflix app it prompts for a login about three times, but after that it works normally. I've used it a couple of times since the PSN troubles started. Just keep attempting to sign in and it'll eventually let you through.
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Netflix is working even though PSN is down. When you start the Netflix app it prompts for a login about three times, but after that it works normally. I've used it a couple of times since the PSN troubles started. Just keep attempting to sign in and it'll eventually let you through.
Wish the Hulu+ client did that. It seems like they are about to start hemorrhaging customers instead.
Netflix still works (Score:2)
I've heard that is actually isn't, although it can appear that way. It will give you a warning that PSN is down, but if you keep clicking through, then you can play it fine. See the discussion at ars [arstechnica.com].
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the price of PSN is folded into the cost of the console. there is no monthly fee, but it isn't free.
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I suspect they're speaking about the Plus subscribers... who do pay.
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Hrm...*scratching head*....never heard of Plus subscribers. Perhaps I spoke too soon :(
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NP. It's a gimmicky online fee for "exclusive beta access", some free premium themes, and discounts on PSN games... It's good for those who need it, but not necessary for PSN enjoyment (PS+ doesn't make regular access seem like Live Silver, I mean.)
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The cost of PSN is also paid by the games people purchase, and right now I can imagine a bit of noise in a lot of households, where newly purchased games can't play online.
The noise is likely to be proportional to the number of kids in the households over the Easter holidays, where parents may have counted on games to keep the kids busy.
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This would be more of an issue if it was free.
I remember when Xbox Live was down for something like 11 days, and I do not remember being compensated (maybe I was though, I really don't remember).
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You're doing it wrong. Netflix works fine without being logged into PSN...