After three weeks of issue-skirting press releases and Call of Duty: Black Ops withdrawals, fanboys can now rejoice as the Playstation Network is now back online after three longs weeks of waiting. If you remember: a few months ago iPhone hacker GEOHot finally jailbroke the Playstation 3, after almost 5 years of release. When GEOHot went live with his information, Sony responded with a request in court for streaming giant Youtube to turn over any IP addresses of people who had viewed GEOHot’s “how-to-jailbreak-your-PS3” video. As Sony put the pressure on GEOHot, hacker group Anonymous issued a warning to Sony not to push the envelope too much, or there would be disastrous results.

A few weeks later, Sony’s Playstation Network was the victim of a massive hack, in which hackers stole millions of IDs from Sony’s Qriocity Music service. Sony promptly took the PSN offline, leaving many gamers in the lurch as a bulk of Sony’s games are multi-player.  As the days dragged on, Sony issued another press release stating that hackers had indeed infiltrated the accounts of millions of Playstation Network users, including areas where credit card numbers and identification are kept.

Sony was then called before congress to explain themselves and to find out why they took so long to issue a statement to users (In fact it took over a week for Sony to say a word about the incident). In the meantime, hacker group Anonymous has adamantly denied the hack, while Sony has definitely set it’s sights on them.

But what did Sony expect when they’re running 5 year old systems that support the PSN, and had barely any anti-intrusion software present at the time. Since the attack, however, Sony has employed protection giant Norton (by Symantec) to not only help them secure the Playstation Network for the future, but to investigate why and how this happened in the first place.

When I was finished downloading an update to a brilliant little piece of freeware call PS3 Media Server tonight, I found that my PS3 was prompting me to update… my heart skipped a beat when I realized what that meant. That I could scoop almost everyone with this story! To quote the mighty Wayne’s World “GAME ON!”