A mighty fine mess

Well, its finals time, well a week early for me as life can't stop just because I'm in school. Otherwise I'm a stressing unit at the moment, as I have concurrent courses side by side to finish. Programming is all but finished except a pass by reference thing, and two pieces left for the math course. Quiz for chapter 5 section, which I might add is/was difficult, but not to hard to understand, just a lot of rules to practice in a very short period. Lastly, the finals test which I told the instructor I would be doing Saturday, or this weekend. I am as they say working my arse off to get down crucial pieces of the formulas so I can take this without stress. Well, that's a little more easier to say than put into action for me. I hate tests, I find them to be a bit of annoyance to the process, as I think fun is where it needs to be. Unfortunately, this isn't the case with grown ups, everything must be on the line.

This weeks news is about the Playstation Network going offline. During the week, I was having intermittent connection issues. The full frontal network collapse happened last Wedsenday. Sony hasn't been able to rectify this problem as of this writing. The (unnamed group) whom announced publicly after Sony's suing a user whom decrypted the Playstation 3 algorithm. (unnamed group) became livid when Sony announced they were suing the gent who reversed engineered the protocol. His jail breaking of the PS3 essentially put a large bulls eye on Sony and its various affiliates.

**Update: As of today April 26th, Sony announced they were indeed hacked. All personal information pertaining to the system, blog site, credit card info, where compromised. This leads me to conclude their public relations department wasn't going to say anything until it was too late, or in this case way outside of the fact.

This doesn't bode very well for the future of console systems as this very foundation of security of said systems can be compromised without any regard to the fact. Users whom depend upon their entertainment fix will have to resort to their competitors, where as I think no one system is ever full proof. The illusion of security is often a bad precedence even for these other competitor systems XBOX, and Nintendo. Welcome to the open online world.

I don't theoretically believe Sony will recover from this. I think in part is that most of their business model has stemmed in part to the older gaming crowd, and that to a lesser degree used to tailor their systems to the tinkerer crowd (me) the old Playstation 2, and for awhile the Playstation 3. Their systems were compatible with the Yellow Dog distro *Red Hat forking. In 2010, Sony basically said no to the Linux tinkering, and went about a very covert, and I must say sly way of cutting off the ability to install Yellow Dog. They were threatening that their systems were being used for pirated games, and transmission of pirated games.

Because of the cloak and secrecy of Sony's lack of information during this ordeal, their PR department hasn't really been all that forthright in my opinion in asking for the gaming community for support. Its a really weird situation to watch as the giant that is Sony try to rectify their botched handling of the hack. Take what you want from a large corporations lack of control, which led to speculation, bickering, and nasty forum postings about Sony's PR department.

Before today's announcement, they've been exclusively hidden about their network problem. Its my impression they've been combative, evasive, and terse in getting any type of real information out to the public. Sony figured the core base was going to be patient about the downtime, and well that didn't really work in favor of their big releases: Mortal Kombat, Portal 2, and SOCOM 4.

I think at this juncture is how the rights of the consumer (us) has in essence been twiddled down to corporately controlled, manipulated, EULA heavily worded code for their property leased Playstation 3 machines. We the public are in essence given no right whatsoever to do what we want to the hardware we've legally purchased. I'm not saying that its right to pirate, but when you give the impression of being a major dickhead, some folks are going to look at this as just fodder for doing so. It hasn't helped the RIAA very much, nor has it made the MPAA any friends. People want choices, not tightly, corporately controlled devices that track what we do, say, and share. To this endeavor I feel is very much Orwellian. But I digress, I really would like to see an open world where there are options that are fruitful, and can be expanded upon without need of corporate interference. I can dream right?