It's fine. For now.

Oh dear.

And



To steal someone else's quote:

Playstation. It only does idiocy.

I read that yesterday and couldn't believe it! They run a multi-million dollar network and can't keep it updated. I run a dumb little blog and check it daily for updates!

While I kinda agree with you, I also see big problems with the amount of testing and so on needed when you roll something out to the kinds of servers that Sony runs. That's still no excuse though to not at least have their firewalls configured.

Usually a network like that would have a test lab where they would test updates before rolling them out to live machines. It would only require a few physical machines or a virtual environment to do it.

I've done web work for Sony Music. They had staging servers to work on to ensure everything worked right before pushing it live. Only it never did, because the live servers had completely different configurations, versions of everything and security settings. I would imagine this sort of fuckwittedness infects the whole of Sony (and other big corps. Things were exactly the same on EMI, VMG and Warner).

Wow! Yeah it wouldn't do much good to test something on a completely different machine! The dumb asses!

When you say "staging servers to work on" ... well, you don't work on staging, you test on staging. Sounds more like shared development servers, which also implies a lack of proper version control?

How can a tech company the size of Sony be *so* bad and survive this long? :S

Doesn't surprise me.

Reading more about the PSN debacle yesterday, and I came across an article (which I now can't find, of course) that revealed how developers could access the live PSN servers without any form of additional authentication beyond what was built into the PS3 dev-kits they bought from Sony.

This all sounds fine and dandy, using hardware as the authentication method. That is until some clever people work out that your random number generator you use for encryption isn't returning a random number at all and quickly realise how to put it to use to a) decrypt everything and b) turn a retail PS3 into a dev-kit.

Apparently this access included users account details including full names, addresses, etc. although not any payment details. I don't know if it's true, but from what you've said it certainly adds more weight to it being so.

<shrugs>

I called them what they called them.

I know but.. Sony..
Last place I used to work for had a dev environment synched daily from live more or l less - they had about 70 employees, so not exactly a big company, but having a good test environment was crucial.

 

Sony, eh?

Yeah, Sony is so good they don't need no stinking tests right!?

Everything they produce is almost a piece of God. Not.

 

Even Apple with their immeasurable arrogance test things pretty damn well (antenna fiasco aside), so Sony have no excuse.

100% agree. There is no excuse for a lack of security. It's one thing to get hit with a zero day. Quite another to be lax!

The PSN "Welcome back package" is now 2 free games from a list of 5.



They should have break-ins like this more often!

Depends on the list though:

1. Mong
2. Mong Mong
3. Mong III
4. Mong IV
5. Mong: Will It Never End?

PSN is back up here. Is it up for you now? I have been reading about a lot of people trading in their consoles and games. Did you do that yet?

If I can pick up a PS3 for £50, I'm getting one. Hehehe.

Me too. And that probably won't hit Sony that hard financially. If they end up with a fresh set of customers who have bought traded in PS3s it might even be good for them.