http://www.joystiq.com/2011/04/06/plays ... -continue/Taking to the US and EU PlayStation Forums en masse, PlayStation 3 users continue to report connectivity issues with PlayStation Network today. Starting with the declaration of attack by hacker group "Anonymous" earlier this week, PSN has been experiencing sporadic issues over the past few days -- Sony characterized the outages as "intermittent" earlier this week, and promised that "engineers are working to restore and maintain the services." As of the time of publishing, we have been unable to connect to PSN today through several staff accounts.
According to a Sony EU forum moderator, a trio of error codes could be showing up for affected users (80710092, 80710D36 and 8071053D), though little else is offered in way of information. "We are currently looking into this and I will update the thread as more information becomes available," the post notes.
Additionally, PlayStation Lifestyle reports that a splinter group of Anonymous -- identified as "SonyRecon" -- is apparently going after specific Sony executives, seeking to reveal "names, phone numbers, pictures, home addresses, email, internet protocol address, family members and other data." CEO Sir Howard Stringer is said to be one of the group's targets, among others.
As previously detailed, Anonymous launched the attacks on Sony earlier this week as a sign of solidarity with hackers George "GeoHot" Hotz and Alexander "Graf_Chokolo" Egorenkov, both of whom are currently in litigation with Sony.
Thoughts? Personally, I think this is positively atrocious behavior on the hackers' part and I condemn it on every level. This really isn't going to cause any significant damage to Sony, while the common user loses access to their services. It's ironic that these hackers are standing against Sony for removing features from their customers, when that's exactly what they themselves are doing now.
I don't expect everyone to agree with me on this, but I personally think that hackers are the biggest enemies of Playstation owners. This can be traced back to when Geohotz released his linux hack. While that hack wasn't remarkably useful or damaging, it was cause and effect with Sony and thus they removed linux from PS3s. While I don't approve of Sony's heavy handed response either, if Geohotz had kept it in his pants we wouldn't be dealing with that loss right now. Hacking is great and has the potential for positive things, but all of this is just not the right way to go about it.

