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Just as I was posting my last blog on Tuesday, Sony announced an “unauthorized person” was able to obtain user’s personal data, including login information and passwords, and possibly credit card information.  Users have been warned to be cautious of fradulant activity in their accounts, and to be on the lookout for scammers contacting them via email, telephone, or snail mail.

Unfortunately for me, I had previously used my primary debit card to purchase games via the PSN.  Admittedly, I have not canceled the account, but keep a very close eye on the activity daily.  I’m not sure if that is the best plan of action at the moment or not, but for now, I sense the hacker’s intention was to cause a disruption, rather than personally profit from this stunt.

On a positive note, I will be getting a 1 week credit on my Hulu Plus bill for the month.  $2 each back in the pockets of the good guys.  Tiny Victory.

Crisis in the gaming community continues.  Last Thursday, the PlayStation Network, the backbone of they PlayStation 3s online features, mysteriously went down, and has yet to return. Sony has been reluctant to admit that its network was hacked.  Saturday, Sony announced that during this extended outage, they have been “rebuilding our system to further strengthen our network infrastructure.”

The PSN outage has hit my home particularly hard.  My fiancé is an avid Unreal Tournament 3 player, and I myself depend on Hulu Plus through the PS3 for television content.  Thankfully it was a holiday weekend, so we had many other activities to fill our time.  However, as this disruption persists, I fear that we may actually need to become productive in our free time.

While the PSN outage is mostly a personal inconvenience, another network failure hit this week, causing ripples in the business community. AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing service, experienced a 4 day disruption, also starting Thursday.  Some web based business, such as Reddit, Quora, and Foursquare, had their operations crippled by this outage. 

Both of these high-profile events are a reminder to us all to proceed with caution as our lives become more and more dependant on network-based technologies.  Remember, we are depending on others to keep everything up and running, and it’s humbling to see how little control we all really have.

CNET Posts on why Blu-ray will Succeed:

Summarized:

1. Digital downloads will not eliminate the need for discs anytime soon.
2. Having one clear standard is a big advantage.
3. Blu-ray isn’t going to be replaced by another disc format anytime soon.
4. Prices for large-screen HDTVs will continue to drop.
5. Prices for Blu-ray players will continue to drop.
6. Prices for Blu-ray discs will drop to near DVD price levels.
7. Sony will sell lots of PlayStation 3 game consoles.
8. Sony can’t afford to have Blu-ray fail.
9. Sony and its partners will figure out a way to have Blu-ray resonate with the public.

Read the full article here.